My problem with his problem with Occupy

Perhaps if you had used your “trusty Internet machine” more effectively, you would know that unilateralism has become synonymous with idiocy and corruption since being used to describe the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Your recent article was matched in its arrogance only by its short-sightedness.

The Board of Trustees approves IU’s budget. They could also reject it. No one should be comfortable with nine people making decisions that affect the entire IU community.

Even those comfortable with such a concentration of power must concede that the state — which provides less than a fifth of IU’s funding — should not have the power to appoint two-thirds of the trustees.

Universities are a space for higher learning. Those who participate in that learning ought to control it, not corporate executives hand-picked by Mitch Daniels, the governor who doesn’t acknowledge the existence of “have-nots.” The Board of Trustees is unaccountable, and it acts as such.

Tuition increases are but the most tangible, widely felt symptom of neoliberal education — a disease characterized by decreased state funding, more administrators, more students, bigger classes, higher costs, more debt, fewer tenured faculty and less diversity and academic freedom.

Our anger is multi-faceted.

Only from a corporate perspective could “irreproachable” describe IU’s management, and that is precisely the problem. The University is run as a business, and students are treated as consumers first and then products.

Scathing reproach is deserved for massive tuition and fee increases, staff raises that don’t keep up with inflation, administrative bloat and salary increases, the threat to close the Office for Women’s Affairs, gross injustice toward undocumented students, the effective closing of the School of Continuing Studies, endemic sexual assault on campus, wasteful construction and student powerlessness.

This isn’t an isolated problem. In Ohio, California, Chile and Quebec, students are deeply engaged in the same struggle.

Learning is not a commodity. It is a collaborative experience, and we should fight its reduction to a passive, consumerist activity.

If contentment with IU’s reduction to a factory for the production of obedient workers is sanity, then I stand with the insane.

We’ve got the funk.

­— ngreven@indiana.edu