Uther Henderson, Co-Chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America at Ball State, wrote this Op-Ed. Op-Eds can be submitted to The CI as a Google Docs link, either via email to newsroom@CIMuncie.org or via Instagram DM to @cimuncie.
MUNCIE, Ind. - The default state of existence for the modern American is discontent. Prices are high, unemployment is surging, and our entire economy is built on debt. Meanwhile, our government of senile pedophiles continues to send billions of dollars abroad to massacre innocent men, women, and children in Palestine, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Indiana, our votes are muffled by the scourge of gerrymandering, and our state’s government is slave to the interests of wealthy businessmen.
In many ways, America’s civic crisis is replicated on a miniature scale on the campus of Ball State University. The Academy, once the pride of our civilization, is slowly hollowed and corporatized, geared towards the creation of feckless professionals rather than advancing the intellectual achievements of our species. Our professors sit idle, careful not to rock the boat, lest they be thrown into the bottomless pit that is the academic job market. All this as students scrape by on meager wages and predatory “meal-swipes,” damning themselves to lives of debt for jobs which may not even exist when they graduate. Under the noses of these dispossessed workers and students, the damnable Board of Trustees (aptly nicknamed the “Board of Butchers” by the organization Students for Justice in Palestine,) spread their inky tentacles all over the city, taking control of the school system and grabbing handfuls of real-estate like a jealous and ambitious colonist. Among these Butchers sit Brian Gallagher, who resigned from his post as President of non-profit United Way for suppressing the voices of women who had been facing sexual harassment in the workplace, and Mark Hardwick, the C.E.O. of First Merchant’s Bank, an institution which has a history of red-lining: the practice of denying home loans to black and brown families to stop them from living in predominantly white neighborhoods. Ah, but these men need not worry! They shall never be brought before the students to answer for their crimes. After all, they’ve hired Geoffrey Mearns, their pretty marionette-puppet, whose sole occupation is to dance and distract.
Is there any recourse for the students? Any channel for reform? Well, there is the Student Government Association, who have so courageously supplied our campus with glass sheds to wait for buses under and shoddy good-for-nothing charging stations in Bracken Library and Woodworth Hall. Yes indeed, these careerists who parade around as “Senators” and “Secretaries” and “Presidents” pride themselves on their little achievements, all while ignoring the big issues on campus, refraining even from public comment. I do not blame them, though. After all, even if they wanted to resist the civic rot, all dissent would be immediately voted down by the Board of Butchers.
Truly, we live under a half-dead Kleptocracy parading around as an accredited university. All power of the students, whose money makes this institution run, and all power of the workers, whose labor makes this institution run, is dampened and contained, a raging flame made small by lack of oxygen. But it need not be this way!
What we must demand is a democratic-socialist university, an institution run by and for the students and the workers, free from the shackles of the kleptocrats who presently rule over us. In the pursuit of a wholly democratic academy, held in common by the people who maintain it, it becomes necessary for the students and the workers to organize into a broad front which can adequately address not only the rot of our university, but the immediate crises that rot creates. We must unite as a class to demand divestment from the State of Israel, for non-compliance with immigration enforcement, for the maintenance of programs in the humanities and the arts, and for the re-establishment of diversity and equity programs which make our community a safe place to learn and to grow.
We have heard much from the present administration about “beneficence.” It is our motto, the creed by which students and workers are called to live by. It is the civic nature we must embody to create a truly great academic community. I find no issue in this word, and indeed I take pride in it, and it is disheartening to see the people who are first to preach it are the last to live by it. If we wish to have a beneficent community, it must be the rank-and-file who control the coinpurse. It must be the workers and the students who govern this university. A beneficent university is a democratic-socialist university, because beneficence is democratic-socialism.
This is my call to the students and the workers: Organize. If you are a student, join the Young Democratic Socialists of America and help us in our fight against I.C.E., or otherwise join the Students for Justice in Palestine in their fight for divestment from Israel. If you are a worker, speak to your co-workers about unionization and get in contact with a national workers’ union to fight for better pay and better working conditions. If you are a professor, join the American Association of University Professors, and work to unite against cuts to your departments. Do not let beneficence sit idle! The future is in our hands!