Yardain:
One night in October 2016, a student was attacked by a mob of his peers in his dorm at Jawharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi. At some point the next morning he disappeared, never to be seen again. His name was—is—Najeeb Ahmed. He was 27 at the time. A first-generation college student. A momma’s boy. From a rural village in the neighbouring state. By all accounts, shy and still trying to settle in and make friends. Also, Muslim. And many of his peers suspected he had been targeted deliberately, especially, and for no other reason than because he was Muslim. Protests—like this one—erupted across the country. #WhereIsNajeeb became a bitter slogan of a movement.

Umar Khalid:
That Najeeb was beaten up by a group of, a large number of people, of whom there are multiple witnesses of who went and deposed…And the way he was beaten up the previous night, and the fact that he disappeared the next morning, these two are not unconnected events. From the first day onwards, if one listens to those people who were present on that day, the lines on which he was being abused while he was being beaten up, talking about how he is a Muslim; there is this one thing that is sort of used as an abuse by people in the RSS against Muslims — in Hindi, ‘Katuwah hai, katuwah hai’—which translates into ‘The circumcised one’, which is what they call the Muslims. That’s what they were saying. They were saying that they will send you to 72 virgins, which is what they said, that in heaven, there would be 72 virgins for you. So basically, we are going to kill you. And then they, in front of everyone, even told the warden there, that you leave him for the night, we’ll settle him for the night, you don’t need to intervene. And that’s eventually what they did, they settled him.

Yardain:
This is Umar Khalid. He’s a PhD candidate at JNU. A prominent student activist. Also, Muslim. And at the start of 2016, he’d been arrested under a colonial era sedition law for allegedly chanting anti-national slogans. He spent 10 days in jail and came out with a target on his head. I met him one evening in April 2017 in his barebones dorm room. And when we spoke, Umar was intent on making it clear that Najeeb was no aberration. He was just the latest victim in a long line of state-sponsored violence.

Umar Khalid:
You see, in India what’s been unfolding over the past couple of years, ever since the new government led by Narendra Modi as a prime minister came in 2014, headed by the Hindu Nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—what has unfolded is a series of attacks.

Yardain:
On the one hand these attacks have targeted land and labour, Umar said. You might have heard about the most recent example: A handful of corporate-friendly agriculture reforms the BJP tried to sneak through parliament last summer. A move that backfired and instead has catalysed perhaps the biggest farmers protests in the country’s history.

Umar Khalid:
On the other hand, there has also been a very communal agenda, which has been the core defining principle of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, of which BJP is affiliated to, of creating India into a Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu nation, where Dalits, minorities, women, will be reduced to second-class citizen status.

Yardain:
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS is a paramilitary volunteer organization that runs the largest private school network in the country, if not the world. Some 12,000 schools teach some three and half million students a curriculum rooted in an ideology of racial purity inspired, only half-abashedly, by the Nazis.

Umar Khalid:
So, these kinds of campaigns started, and alongside that what also started was an attack, a very concerted attack, on universities…This attack was also because this government has also a very distinct project for higher education in India. I mean at one level, there is an entire market where this government would want to just sell off higher education to. About a couple of years back, Narendra Modi went to the WTO meeting and actually made education into a tradeable commodity…

Yardain:
We’ll come back to this privatization project—and the protest movement it sparked—in a bit…

Umar Khalid:
At another level, because this is a very ideologically-motivated government…which follows the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as I said, whose core defining principle is to convert India into a Hindu nation, a Hindu Rashtra as they call it, they also realize that they have to control young minds. And this is where young minds think, and they do research, and they are going to write books, and write opinion pieces which are going to shape opinions in the future, so it’s very important to capture this space. And one thing that is very synonymous with the BJP government whenever it comes to power, it goes about saffronizing education. It goes about re-writing history books.

Yardain:
Saffron is the sacred colour of Hinduism.

Umar Khalid:
It goes about severely expunging certain texts and certain readings from syllabus that are taught in schools, and colleges, and universities as to what can be taught and what cannot be taught to push through this agenda to convert India into a Hindu Rashtra.

Yardain:
Rewriting history is, forgive me, a textbook strategy of state power—across the political spectrum. In India, as Umar says, the project is being pursued by the Right. In the United States, the Left has been pushing for instance, the 1619 Project into school curricula in an effort to re-interpret the country’s founding through a lens of structural racism. An effort which has, by the way, catalysed a whole host of reactionary legislation from conservatives. And as a Jew who grew up attending an orthodox Yeshiva, I can tell you that the history of the Nakba—when, in 1948, some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land by Jewish Zionists—is a history deliberately erased from much Jewish curricula. The examples are pretty much endless but the point is clear: education is deeply politicized, from how history is remembered, to understanding education as a tradable good. And this politicization is not just the stuff of conversation. It has real-world, uneven consequences. Umar’s point, as I hear it, is that to understand Najeeb’s disappearance—to accurately analyse how second-class citizens are made—to grasp what has happened to education over the past half century—we have to connect the racial project to the economic project, the ideological violence to the physical violence.

Umar Khalid:
I remember the night that I met Najeeb’s mother, the day after he disappeared. She was in tears, she was uncontrollable, and she was repeatedly saying one thing — that I told him not to go to JNU, I told him not to go to JNU, it’s not safe for Muslims to study in JNU, and the day I find my son back, I’m going to make sure that he does not pursue his studies here because I’m concerned for his safety. Now you do that to one Najeeb, and you send a message to a lot of other people. That there is a sense of insecurity amongst a sizeable section of Muslim students that what happened to Najeeb might happen to us tomorrow and nothing will be done. The university administration will simply take its hands off, and say that we are not responsible. That is what the university administration told Najeeb’s family, that whatever happened in any part of the university, that is not the university administration’s responsibility. Contrast this with what they were saying back in February 2016. In February 2016, what were the allegations against us? that we raised anti-national slogans, we raised slogans against the country.

Yardain:
In the year-long investigation that followed, the government was unable to prove whether these slogans were actually said, nor if they were, who actually said them.

Umar Khalid:
But these were still slogans. No one was actually harmed, no one was physically harmed. But still the university administration acted so promptly that without giving us any time, or any opportunity to defend ourselves, we rusticated from the university within 24 hours. We were suspended and then rusticated from the university. Now, some student has been beaten up, and he disappears in the university, and the university administration says that whatever happens in some part of the university is not our responsibility. So, you can see how the university administration, the police is being used by the ruling party today in the center to pursue its agenda within the university spaces, which is a very exclusionary agenda, which is a very discriminatory agenda. And they are trying to sort of shoot many birds with the same shot, to sort of sell over our universities, impose their Brahminical world view in the university, saffronize university campuses, and to ensure that there are no voices of dissent.

Yardain:
I left the interview with Umar shaken. I spent months on campus; at protests outside the Central Bureau of Investigations, or CBI; at the high court at campus. And yet, eventually, the protests fizzled out. The CBI investigation concluded without charges. The #JusticeForNajeeb posters were papered over around campus. And I too gave up and tabled the story. Despite the fact that he went missing in broad daylight, to this day, what happened to Najeeb remains a secret. Those who might know something are understandably scared to speak out. Most believe he’s dead. This is not another true crime story though.

In 2019, Modi won a second term with a loud democratic mandate. This predictably emboldened the BJP and its supporters. Last year, Umar was almost murdered by a Hindutva follower who tried to assassinate him outside the Indian Press Club. By a stroke of luck, the gun jammed. And then, in February 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning, the government charged him with conspiracy to incite the Delhi riots, which left some dozens of Muslims and Hindus (50 Muslims and 20 Hindus) dead. As if to confirm the spectacle intended for the case, the police presented him and his lawyers with—I kid you not—over one million pages of evidence. Umar turned 34 this month. September will mark a year behind bars.

~~~~

Yardain:
The day after I interviewed Umar in his dorm at JNU—9,000 miles away at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR)—another student activist was charged by the government for participating in a protest.

Veronica FH:
Um, I will just say that I am Veronica Figuero Huertas, I’m just a 26-year-old girl, and that I’m trying to figure out what I’m wanting to do right now with my life.

Yardain:
For the past three years though, Veronica’s life has mostly been on hold.

Yardain:
How often do you have to go to court?

Veronica:
Oh, you know like, every month since May, 2017.

Yardain:
So, every month now for three years?

Veronica FH:
Yes—A lot of, I don’t know, it was really awful, horrible, horrible. I hate that process…and it’s not the first time that the university administration cooperates…as I said, in 2010 and 2011, they expelled students for being part of the student movement. And it’s different but the impact it has in your life…I am not going to say that it is worse because every situation needs to be measured by what it is. But it is really violent because I have plans of going outside Puerto Rico to study other things you know, and my other friends do. And I can’t do that for 20 years, I have to stop every plan because I am a poor person…

Yardain:
This wasn’t the future Veronica had envisioned for herself when she first decided she wanted to go to UPR. That was around the end of 2010, when a massive student strike forced 10 of the 11 UPR campuses to close for close to three months. Students were protesting severe budget cuts and layoffs at the university and other public institutions. Veronica was in high school at the time. She remembers she would come home from school and her mom would tell her about the latest updates from the strike that she’d read in the newspaper.

Veronica FH:
So, I was receiving a lot of information about the University of Puerto Rico and at that moment, I want to be exactly as those students of 2010. I wanted to be an activist. I want to fight for the education because my mom always, something that my mom always said is that: you can lose everything but you can’t lose what you learn. The government or anyone can steal everything from you but they can’t steal what you know. So, the most important thing for everyone is their education. So that is really important to me. It’s like a mantra. So, I want to be like those people and then I became one of those people.

Yardain:
And so, when she got to campus in 2013, that’s exactly what she did. She became one of those people. Her mom tried to dissuade her. Five student leaders from the 2011 strike had been expelled.

Veronica FH:
She was like, “You need to be careful. You are in a university for only four or five years. This is you know, like, like, part of the university life, and you’re not gonna think like that. you’re gonna change. Those people are going to leave you alone”. Those kinds of things. She, thinks that it was really like a phase at the university. And I was totally frustrated, because you know, like, “Mom this is not a phase”. You know, like, you teach me to think like this. You encouraged me to be critical, and you encourage me to, you know, to fight for the things that you believe in, what you want. So, I want public education that is accessible to everyone.

Yardain:
Veronica couldn’t yet see the dangers that her mom could see looming. By 2017, she was a senior and leader in the student movement. The 2011 strike had left the movement in shambles but Veronica had helped rebuild organizing capacity. And then in January, a fiscal board was created to manage Puerto Rico’s worsening debt burden. The board was filled with US bureaucrats. And its quote unquote first “recommendation” was for the Puerto Rican government to cut UPR’s budget in half; to raise tuition; and to close five of its 11 campuses.

Veronica FH:
At the beginning, a lot of people in Puerto Rico, including my Mom, and my Dad, and my family, they were you know, their opinion about the fiscal board was that the fiscal board was coming to Puerto Rico to clean the house. To clean the house, and to put everything in order, and to control our financial planning because our government is incapable to do that.

Yardain:
Puerto Ricans, of course, have reason to point a finger at corruption. Recently, the governor was forced to resign after leaked messages exposed nepotistic contracts for relief work related to Hurricane Mariah.  But despite its seriousness, corruption is also a sneaky scapegoat. A symptom trafficking as a root cause. It doesn’t materialise out of thin air. Veronica and her comrades had been studying Puerto Rico’s political economy, and had come to understand the structural conditions underlying the debt crisis.

Veronica FH:
For me, it’s really simple at this point of my life, and that, I like to say that I was born in debt… Because, you know, I can read in the newspapers that Puerto Rico has a debt. But that doesn’t explain how my life is being impacted by the debt…And I think that is easier to understand, if you are poor, and if you live in bad conditions, because you have been, you know, crushing to a wall every day of your life… because you have people in the university that don’t give a fuck about the tuition being more expensive every year.

Yardain:
Right

Veronica FH:
Because, you know, my dad is going to pay for that and I have a bank account that doesn’t go low…So talking with other people and asking a lot of questions. And it’s really, you know, it takes time. It is a job.

~~~~

Yardain: I met Veronica through a webinar organized by the Debt Collective, an organization that was formed out of Occupy Wall Street. Hannah Appel, an activist and professor of Anthropology at UCLA is one of its co-founders.

Hannah Appel:
And so, we’re all at this bar somewhere in New York, and I had really gotten there and didn’t know what was happening. And David was like, oh, you know I did this crazy thing the other day, like we were down at Wall Street and I don’t know what’s going to come of it and blah blah blah, so talking about the very first day. And then like four days after we got together, #OccupyWallStreet protesters were kettled on the Brooklyn Bridge and it just erupted all over the news media.

Yardain:
David is David Graeber, a renowned anthropologist who wrote one of the definitive histories of debt. Perhaps too obvious to say, but #Occupy was a life changing experience for Appel. She approached the space as an activist scholar, and used her skills as an anthropologist to document the movement.

Hannah Appel:
So, there was all of this rhetoric and quite rightly so but hand-wringing and panic around financialization, right and very often, of course in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis which is the precise wake that #Occupy takes place in…

Yardain:
You know, opaque financial technologies like collateralized debt obligations and structured finance loans…

Hannah Appel:
Right but it seems like it’s this world that is sort of like completely detached from the so-called real economy. Right? We all know we can all kind of rehearse that. But the connection that people in #Occupy are making is to say—and that David says in the interview—like: One person’s finance is another person’s debt.

Yardain:
“One person’s finance is another person’s debt.” Notably, the phrase has been mostly buried under the success of Graeber’s other more famous coinage: “We are the 99%.” But “One person’s finance is another person’s debt” is like this little skeleton key hiding in plain sight. And the longer you sit with it, the farther back you trace the history of debt, the more likely you’ll be forced to reckon with some fundamental unexamined premises underlying your world view. For example: Why must one pay one’s debts? Here is Graeber in a 2012 interview on a show Uprising, about his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

David Graeber:
I was trying to figure out what is debt, I mean, the basic definition of the concept is unclear. It is not any kind of moral obligation, although people try to extend the notion in that way. A debt is just one type of promise, a promise that I like to say, is corrupted by math and violence. That point about violence is critical. When you have debts between equals, they really are just a promise, and a promise can, of course, be re-negotiated when circumstances change. Rich people can be incredibly kind, generous, and understanding when dealing with other rich people. I even called it ‘the communism of the rich’ at one point. Of course, it’s from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, we’ll work something out. And that’s what we saw in 2008 where they made trillions of dollars’ worth of debt vanish through the waving of various complicated magic wands of one sort or another.

Now, when it’s a debt that you owe them on the other hand, suddenly it’s sacred. It’s a question of very basic morality, you should be ashamed of yourself for even suggesting. How could you say that…it is amazing and this has been true constantly. Think about it—most people who have ever lived have been told they are debtors. How can that be the case? Debt has allowed us to create this morality which is perverse if you think about it because the last thing we need in this world right now is people to work even more. People are working way too much, it’s destroying the ecosystem, the growth levels that are demanded by our current economic system are clearly unsustainable.

Yardain:
In other words, Wall Street financiers—capitalists—do not conjure their money out of thin air (at least not exactly). They make it off the backs of others. And for Appel, one of the critical points here is that these backs are not colourless. This isn’t just an economic story. Race and class intersect—like Umar was saying about the BJP’s privatization and saffronization project. Capitalism, as some scholars argue, makes profit by creating, exploiting and ultimately accumulating difference. And all identities are fair game.

Hannah Appel:
But when you actually look right now at the systematic nature of these forms of indebtedness, which is to say sort of staggering totals of household debt and you disaggregate them, what you see in this country—we can talk about it beyond this country too—but what you see in the United States is that African-American households hold this debt out of all proportion. So radically disproportionately to their demographics in the population. Same with LatinX families. Same with Native families, right? And in order to understand those forms of disproportionate burden, we have to go way back before Reagan and Thatcher, right? So then, we’re talking about intergenerational white wealth transfer. Why it is that me as a white person—it is not that there aren’t poor white folks, of course there are—but we white people are more likely, statistically speaking, to have one relative, maybe two relatives, maybe an aunt, maybe a grandma. If my parents couldn’t pay, I could reach out to somebody else and say, ‘hey, can you lend me that?’ Right, because of the forms of intergenerational labour theft, land theft, racism, workplace discrimination, right, that all of these groups have faced. And for that you were going back to settler colonialism, right? We’re going back to the theft of land from Indigenous people. We’re going back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade to understand their intergenerational endurance into the present.

Yardain:
Today, the Debt Collective has been organizing to get all 1.2 trillion dollars in federal student debt cancelled. President Biden has the executive power to do it with a single signature. But so far, he has resisted the pressure and reneged even on his own promise to cancel a paltry $10,000 for some students. Either way, cancelling all the debt—literally bringing back the ancient custom of the ‘rolling jubilee’, when Kings would cancel peasants’ debts every seven years—is just the beginning. To make the change lasting, we also have to change the systemic conditions that got us into this mess in the first place.

Hannah Appel:
So, if students’ debt is cancelled, which we are closer to it than we ever have been in this particular struggle, all of it, and there still is no such thing as public college anymore, what the fuck does it matter? What we need is a public option in education. The University of Michigan system, the University of California system, the University of New Mexico system, the CUNY system, the SUNY system…All of these state systems, all of these city college systems, they have to be fucking free. They have to be tuition free. And it’s like, ‘oh, look at, listen to that radical hope person’. No, that is what public college used to mean. This is historical amnesia. I send my kid to the public school right across the street. He is in second grade. What do we know that means? That means that I don’t have to pay but if I sent him to a private school, I would have to pay. It is like people forget that that’s what public college meant. That is what it meant.

~~~~

Yardain:
Students aren’t taking the privatization of education sitting down though. In the wake of #Occupy, itself in the wake of the Arab Spring, students have been rising up to resist the enclosure of education. There was the UPR strikes in 2010 and 2011. The Quebec strikes in 2012, when half a million students across the province protested against steep tuition hikes. There was the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa in 2015. I could go on. A year before Najeeb was disappeared in 2015, the Occupy University Grants Commission movement, or Occupy UGC, took off at JNU. Similar to budget cuts at UPR, at JNU, the Modi government slashed the already paltry funding for graduate research scholarships. Umar had laid out the stakes clearly…

Umar Khalid:
Now where will the students who want to pursue research go? The ones who can afford 5 or 10 lakhs a year, which is a lot of money, will shift to private universities which are mushrooming across the country, or will go abroad if they can afford that. The ones who cannot afford that, which is the vast majority of Indian people, and which is the vast majority of people who come to JNU to study, they will be condemned to do what they are doing. If you are a carpenter’s son, you will be a carpenter. If you are a cobbler’s son, you will be a cobbler. Don’t think of pursuing higher education. If a university like JNU― which affords the opportunity for students to pursue good quality research at a very minimal rate, just 100 rupees or 120 rupees for six months, which is absolutely nothing ―that subsidized education is going to end. And the entire ideological campaign right now is to say that subsidies are a waste. Which, I am sure it will resonate with people in Europe and in America as well, how subsidies from the social sector is being withdrawn. The ones who are going to be the most affected by this are the people coming from the poor backgrounds.

Aparajitha Raja:
So, the student community rose in opposition to this completely atrocious and anti-student policy…

Yardain:
This is Aparajitha Raja, or Apu, another student-activist pursuing a PhD at JNU.

Aparajitha Raja:
First, it began with the universities in Delhi, we occupied the University Grants Commission building. We barged into this building, the government building, and we squatted over there. We had a sitting over there, and the sitting continued for more than three months.

Yardain:
It was peak Delhi winter. Modi had just given a speech at the Summit of the World Trade Organization in Nairobi, laying out a plan to privatize higher education…

Aparajitha Raja:
It would just become like any other commodity in the market that can be bought and sold. And so, by and by this movement, which began with the universities based out of Delhi, we managed to create a joint-action committee which involved universities across the country.

Yardain:
And as the movement grew in size, it also grew in scope. They brought in a structural agenda…

Aparajitha Raja:
The fundamental issue of the right to education, that education cannot be a commodity, and there needs to be more ease in access to education. And it is the question of how education and access to education has a specific class system, casteist, and a gendered idea to it, and that has to be addressed and redressed.

Yardain:
In other words, Apu, Umar, and their comrades saw the push to privatize education as not just a threat to some abstract ideal we’ve dubbed ‘the Right to Education’. The threat of limiting access, of installing a toll booth at the front gate, and entrenching a new normal built on loans and debt, is a violent act that perpetuates more violence. For Apu, Occupy UGC was a watershed moment for her own activism because the movement forced the students into conversation with the outside world. The threat of debt was not just a threat for students.

Aparajitha Raja:
Because of our sitting in over there, a lot of roads had been blocked, which is affecting the small shopkeepers in the neighbourhood—the small roadside eateries, the cigarette shops, the bookshops, small small small shops that are getting affected. So, then we sat down and put our heads together, and we decided that we need to talk to these people…

Yardain:
They asked the shopkeepers about their own struggles. They listened to stories about slogging through just to make ends meet. They shared their own stories and soon realized their struggles were interconnected.

Aparajitha Raja:
And, you know, it was so interesting that they got on board with us, they were convinced with us. Like hell, they gave us food on credit…The small cigarette shop (Baia) over there used to give students on credit and everyday he would inquire: Did the officials say anything? Did they respond to your memorandum? So, there was a constant dialogue.

Yardain:
There was a bus-stop outside the UGC office. And Apu and a few fellow occupiers started riding for a few stops, while people headed to and from work…

Aparajitha Raja:
We had a pamphlet, written and prepared, which was addressed to the citizens of Delhi. So, we would explain to people like who we are, why we are sitting, what is the issue we are raising, and we used to seek their solidarity and support in our movement…

Yardain:
The passengers would take Apu and her comrades’ pamphlet back home, or to work, and as she imagines it, conversations would ensue.

Aparajitha Raja:
It is not about convincing them completely or taking them like our allies, or they are comrades now or something like that. It’s just that at least we’ve initiated a conversation, put some seeds over there, which might not reflect right now currently, but probably, you know, after a few years of some time when things become more difficult. You know, these things tend to come back.

Yardain:
Eventually, the Indian government did back down from scrapping the fellowships altogether—but it rejected all the students’ bigger demands.

Aparajitha Raja:
But the fact remains, that despite all of that, I find that movement to be a successful movement. Because a lot of people gained first-hand experience of, you know, being part of a large collectivity, which is articulating for rights, political rights. And that moment also generated a whole bunch of new activists, people who have never been engaged in any form of organized politics. But that movement gave an opportunity for people to embrace the identity of an activist in that sense. And that has gone in a long way forward. So, a lot of people who got initiated through this movement, went back to their universities, wherever they were studying, and, you know, they organized their fellow students into student organizations and groups, independent groups, which then negotiated with the administration over there. And also, this particular movement, because it was a sitting, a long, elongated movement of sitting, this also gave us opportunity to have conversations amongst us.

Yardain:
Apu’s experience reminded me of something Veronica said about her own experience during the 2017 occupation at UPR…

Veronica:
The strike process gave everyone the opportunity to take a pause from the things that, you know, being like they should be, and to have—like a tester when you go to Sephora, or you go to a restaurant, and they can give you like a sample of the meat—so, the strike will give you that opportunity to experience and to create different conditions of living, because it is the kind of try that you stay in at a place, at the campus in this case, and you’re not at your home, if you are a trans person, and you don’t have the support of your family, and you are not in a secure place for you to be, and the university is on strike, you can go to the strike at the university, and you can stay in there for the time that the strike stay on, and you can live by yourself. You can experience that kind of freedom. And it’s really beautiful.

~~~~

Yardain:
There’s a memorable little moment in The West Wing when Rob Lowe’s character goes off on a little soliloquy about education. I would play it for you, but copyright laws privatize such creative collaboration so I will be Rob Lowe for a second:

“Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes. We need gigantic monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six figure salaries. School should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defence. That’s my position, I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.”

Yardain:
This is many liberals’ fantasy in a nutshell. Education as panacea…The solution to every societal problem that plagues us—from inequality, to racism, to gender discrimination, to environmental exploitation. If the ‘problem’ at the end of the day is ‘population,’ as conversations I have sometimes boil down to, the solution I’m told at the end of the day— is ‘education.’ But the absurdity of Sorkin’s metaphor speaks to the delusion of the argument. Schools should not be palaces. We do not need more princes and princesses. More fancy things and football games. In fact, palaces are exactly what higher education has been. At least in the West, universities are by and large, exclusive, expensive bubbles for the elite, these days filled with ever-newer dorms, and dining halls, and gyms. If anything, schools should be streets. Open, kinetic spaces of entangled communal action that can, as one scholar put it, “burst the bounds of the lecture hall.” And I don’t mean the bullshit paper “community” invoked by a legion of administrators and diversity equity and inclusion officers. And I also don’t just mean teachers and students. I mean everyone.

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