Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan has become familiar as the epicentre of the American protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. But when demonstrators left the site in November, their destination was not the financial district, City Hall or the neighbourhoods where the city’s wealthy “1 percent” (the protesters call themselves “the 99 percent”) live in buildings guarded by doormen.
The marchers headed instead to the City University of New York’s Baruch College campus, pledging on the way to stop repaying their student loans, and trying to interrupt a hearing at which the university’s trustees were considering yet another tuition fee rise. Forcibly evicted from the public parks it had occupied for weeks in cities from Boston to Oakland, California, the boisterous Occupy movement shifted suddenly and dramatically on to university and college campuses. At the same time, it added to its many grievances the skyrocketing cost of higher education, complaining about everything from student-loan debt to lofty presidential salaries and benefits. This shift of focus, physical and ideological, has not been welcomed.
Students at the University of California, Berkeley, long synonymous with the free-speech movement of the 1960s, were jabbed with batons by police in riot gear when they tried to set up an Occupy encampment. At the University of California, Davis, a campus police officer doused seated protesters with pepper spray in an incident caught on video that instantly went viral, inciting international outrage and calls for the chancellor’s resignation. At Harvard University, campus and specially hired security guards locked the gates of Harvard Yard to avoid people joining a demonstration there, shutting out even Harvard students. At Baruch, hundreds of protesters were forcibly pushed outside, and 15 arrested, after trying to get into the public hearing and refusing to leave.
Even hard-pressed city mayors gave the protesters more latitude than the universities. And organisers, whose message has received a huge media boost as a result, could not be happier. “We saw the violence that happened in Berkeley, and that coupled with the tearing-down (of protesters’ tents) in Zuccotti Park is what really energised the college movement,” says Natalia Abrams, a co-founder in Los Angeles of a new national organisation called Occupy Colleges. “The silver lining is that we must be hitting a nerve.”
The shift of attention to university and college campuses — more than 120 had Occupy chapters at the last count — is also simply because, once protesters were evicted from city parks and plazas, “university spaces became a natural new place for them to, for lack of a better word, occupy,” says Robert Self, an associate professor of history at Brown University who studies politics and social movements. Another factor is that many of the Occupy protesters, from the outset, have been students.
But there is also a broader reason why universities are the new targets, according to Prof. Self. “There are probably a handful of institutions in the United States where what I would call the neoliberal shift — as a larger term for a move away from social welfare democracy to a greater kind of free-market structure — is evident and dramatic. One of them is Wall Street. Another is higher education.”
City University of New York (CUNY), for example, was free until 1975, and most public universities remained very inexpensive until states began to cut their allocations and more and more of their costs were shifted on to students in the form of higher tuition fees. This has shut out some low-income students, and forced two-thirds of the rest to take out loans — average graduate debt is now $25,250 (Rs.13.3 lakh) — in a cycle that has grown much worse since the start of the economic crash in 2008.
The New York protesters are demanding that CUNY scrap tuition fees, and are calling for students nationwide to stop repaying their loans once a critical mass of a million people has agreed to do so. University administrators “deep down know that what’s going on is wrong”. “They know that our quality of education is getting worse while we’re paying so much more. Maybe they looked at the 1960s, when millions of students sat down and stopped going to class. There’s this fear (among administrators) that students are discovering that they have a lot more power than they realised,” says Abrams.
Harvard B-school introduces FIELD
Young mums shopping in the Copley Mall in downtown Boston in November found themselves being questioned about their use of soap by students from Harvard Business School (HBS). The students were not doing odd jobs to earn beer money. They were preparing to help a firm in Brazil launch an anti-bacterial cleanser.
Fieldwork — i.e going out and talking to people — is a big change for HBS. Its students used to sit in a classroom and discuss case studies written by professors. Now they may also work in a developing country and launch a start-up. “Learning by doing” will become the norm, if a radical overhaul of the MBA curriculum succeeds.
The 900 students arriving in Boston this summer for their two-year course were told they would be guinea pigs. The new practical addition to HBS’ curriculum is known as FIELD (field immersion experiences for leadership development). Not all the staff and students are overjoyed to be experimented on. But the man responsible, India-born Nitin Nohria, who became dean of HBS in July 2010, says that “if it works, the FIELD method could become an equal partner to the case method”.
Long before he became dean, Nohria lamented the failure of B-schools to fulfil their mission of turning management into a profession similar to law or medicine. Asked what should be expected from someone with an MBA, he replies that “obviously, they should master a body of knowledge. But we should also expect them to apply that knowledge with some measure of judgement”. MBA students have long been sent on summer internships with prospective employers, but HBS, like most business schools, did little else to help them with the practical application of management studies.
It is unclear how much the one-week working assignments will achieve. Pankaj Ghemawat, a management guru, says “the literature suggests that an immersion experience needs to be at least 2-3 weeks and be backed up with time in the classroom.” The HBS students’ classroom preparation will have to be pretty thorough, then, to make up for the brevity of their field trips.
Privately, some faculty members are sceptical that all this change will be worthwhile. In January, the vote in favour of trying the field method was “as enthusiastic as you could get from a faculty,” says Nohria, wryly. He wisely ensured that ownership of the idea was widely spread by delegating design of the new curriculum to several faculty committees. The vote gave the go-ahead to run a “delicate experiment for 3-5 years to see if we can move the needle”, he says, compared with the 13 years it took to develop the case method into more or less what it is today.
The experiment doesn’t come cheap, adding 10-15 percent to the course’s cost (students pay at least $84,000 (Rs.44 lakh) per year), which HBS will bear while it figures out what works. A lot is at stake. For where Harvard leads, other universities may follow.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist, Times Higher Education)