Last Monday, 48,000 teaching assistants, researchers, and graders across all campuses at the University of California went on strike to demand higher wages and expanded paid parental leave. Grad workers’ current average salary of $24,000 does not address cost of living in the nation’s most expensive state. Adding insult to injury, the UC Board of Regents approved over $800,000 on salary raises for all UC chancellors this year, while grad workers experienced a 5% real wage decrease. The university’s refusal to provide adequate living wages for academic workers exemplifies how the UC system’s increasing privatization and profit motives undermine its role as an educational institution.
The top-heavy growth of university administrative positions compared to tenured faculty rates and undergraduate enrollment epitomize the University of California’s ballooning bureaucratization over the last 20 years. Michael Burawoy contextualizes this bureaucratic expansion in the sweeping privatization of higher education nationwide, where universities “increasingly emulate private businesses, importing executives with corporate salaries whose task is to subject the university to severe budget constraints.” While Burawoy and others identify internal hierarchies and power struggles that mold the UC’s semblance to a private, for-profit institution, administrative bloating is not the disease but a symptom of entrenched alliances with lucrative external institutions.
CODEPINK outlines the agents and loyalties that have created an incongruence between student demands and University interests, identifying the military-industrial complex as a key institution shaping the elite capture of the UC system. Tensions between profit and education have evolved at UC Santa Barbara over the past 50 years, as tuition increased systemwide and alliances with military-industrial corporations leashed the university to elite concerns.
UCSB made national headlines 52 years ago when university students burned a Bank of America building in protest of its loaning hundreds of millions of dollars to arms manufacturers, military supplies transporters, and defense contractors during the Vietnam War. In the aftermath, UCSB and local authorities co-established the Isla Vista Foot Patrol to monitor the revolutionary student population. Since the incident, relations between the university and defense contractors have flowered. UCSB currently receives $40 million per year from the Department of Defense, according to their Office of Research, and co-sponsors K-through-12 DoD science programs “to groom students for war and surveillance jobs upon graduation from high school.” Since 2016, UCSB has signed over 400 military contracts, and saves companies such as Raytheon’s Vision Systems millions of dollars on equipment purchases and maintenance, facilities and staff time in developing sensors and materials for infrared imaging. CODEPINK notes that Raytheon “supplies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with laser-guided bombs for a war on Yemen that has killed 233,000 people and left the country in ruins.” Funding from companies that develop weapons technologies also incentivises faculty to create curriculums specifically aligned with skills that military contractors are seeking. Such a partnership has enshrined UCSB as “THE source of engineering talent… for any infrared company.” The weapons technology developed in UCSB laboratories demonstrates the administration’s compliance with the institution of war, and reveals how the University has become a site of incestuous relationships with elite donors.
The elite capture of educational institutions is also consequential at lower levels of education, where student political-consciousness is typically less developed. At public high schools, local elites — often parents of students — leverage their social capital to reshape department curriculums according to their interests. Los Altos High School, a public high school cozied in the heart of Silicon Valley, offers a case study of how a codependent relationship with local tech elites reproduces dominant cultural and labor values in departments across the board.
Many Los Altos High parents are executives at nearby tech headquarters, and accordingly support expanding STEM and engineering curriculums. These parents have extensive social capital, and often lobby the school through private donations. Each year, Los Altos engineering clubs and classes receive thousands of dollars in specialized technical equipment that does not show up on the school balance sheet. Additionally, some school clubs partner directly with local tech companies. The Los Altos High Robotics team, Eaglestrike, is sponsored by Google, Facebook/Meta and Lockheed Martin. While private donations and sponsorships are a great way for students to capitalize on local resources, the nature of this corporate-educational partnership mutes a genuine two-way discussion about what a progressive tech-focused education should look like. The massive resources allocated to the hard skills of engineering intuitively warrant a counterweight curriculum built around critical perspectives on how technology works to reinforce social inequality. Yet notably absent from Los Altos High’s course offerings are classes centering human rights abuses in materials extraction and product fabrication, the use of surveillance and weapons technology against minority populations, and barriers to technology access that reproduce class inequality. Lacking academic weight and emphasis, these topics become watered-down appendages to Los Altos High’s robust offerings in design, prototyping, and coding.
The partnership between engineering programs and local elites encourages chronically underfunded departments to realign their curriculums with STEM-oriented departments. This is especially salient in the art department, where teachers have struggled in past years against bureaucracy and skewed funding systems to earn basic resources for their students. A curriculum shift over the past 5 years has brought more digital mediums and technologically-integrated classes to the department. The transition has mostly passed as inter-departmental collaboration, but this narrative masks how new technology-based learning methods in the arts has been driven by massive discrepancies in funding. One standout example was a $100,000 Career and Technical Education grant approved for the Academy of Engineering and Design in 2018. No grant of this scale is available for the arts, and a local student newspaper noted that the district is expected to pick up the tab after the grant is up. The exclusive grant, which will be sustained past expiration using public funds, encapsulates how elite individuals and organizations reproduce overconcentrations of funding in sectors that incorporate local market values. In turn, budgets are gerrymandered to accommodate overwhelming demand for engineering curriculums, and department chairs and school boards are encouraged to align their interests with the elites who provide the majority of non-district funding. Through external avenues of grants and donations, Silicon Valley high school social spaces and curriculums are saturated with narratives, educational priorities, and cultural values held by local elites.
Perhaps because these high schools lack a class of underpaid, overworked and politically radical graduate workers, discussions around elite capture remain largely confined to university campuses and academia. Nevertheless, the UC graduate strike and Los Altos High together demonstrate that department funding discrepancies, the exploitation of graduate workers, and the restructuring of public school curriculums are not isolated, magical, or irreversible. Despite the threats and structural impacts of corporate capture, the strike is a flashing display of resurgence against the elite interests in educational institutions. Today, the graduate student union stands in opposition to many of the same institutional abuses as the Bank of America burning in 1970, and it seems that UCSB remains fertile ground for social movements that hold the institution accountable to its student body. Most excitingly, because the explosive sentiment is well-organized and union-backed, it has the potential to make long-term changes that will realign the university with the needs of its student educators. Above all, the strike reminds us that it is students who must criticize, disrupt, and sever the corporate loyalties of our educational institutions.