Funding for CSCU per student has decreased 21 percent since 2008, leaving schools that have been severely underfunded for longer than a decade. In order to prevent two community colleges from being shut down, the Connecticut Board of Regents (BOR) decided to merge all the individual colleges into one mega-institution, despite a opposition petition signed by 1,400 members of the CSCU community and joint opposition statements from all five unions under the CSCU umbrella.

The members of the BOR — former CEOs, venture capitalists and union-busting lawyers with no backgrounds in education — are running the CSCU system like a failing business, and it is no surprise that students and teachers are being punished the most. Tuition for students will be raised thousands of dollars, and more than 650 full-time educators along with 3,500 part-time employees will lose their jobs. The ramifications of this will mean great increases in class sizes and the cutting of special education and mental health programs, along with extreme burdens placed on professors who won’t be compensated for their increased responsibilities.

Meanwhile, Connecticut lawmakers are planning to swell the state’s “rainy day fund” from $3.3 billion to $4 billion by 2025 — apparently bailing out the state’s failing education system is not worthy of emergency funding. 

Austerity measures are taken periodically, because the contradictions of capitalism inevitably lead to underpaid workers, those who produce the commodities, not being able to afford the excessive amount of products and services they collectively create. This is called underconsumption, which induces a period of economic decline, and austerity measures are taken by governments at all levels. They raise taxes and cut government spending to balance a budget deficit. They create a vicious cycle of poverty for the working class. As the most vulnerable members of our society, austerity measures deny public goods which should be free or affordable to poor citizens, worsening their financial insecurity.  

Another example of austerity measures burdening the working class is after the 2008 recession in the United States. Forty-three states cut higher education spending, 31 states cut health care services and 44 states cut employee compensation. According to a 2020 study from the Center of Law and Social Policy, quite a few states used the budget crisis and lack of federal aid to underfund social security nets and “actively implement anti-worker policies.” The study highlights the Florida unemployment insurance system, which “was essentially designed to limit benefits and deny claims.” It continues, “Nine other states cut the duration of unemployment insurance benefits after 2011, leaving their systems woefully underfunded and unprepared in today’s crisis.” The report goes on to emphasize that the states with the worst unemployment services had the highest concentrations of Black and Latinx workers in low-paying jobs. Austerity measures are one of the primary factors that maintain institutional racism.

In the case of CSCU schools, rising cost of living and stagnant wages make it difficult for students of working class families to pursue public higher education as tuition increases. With college enrollment declining, the schools run deficits to cover the cost of under-enrollment and pass these costs back on to the working class by cutting education spending and raising tuition. These measures inevitably force more students out of the public higher education pool and perpetuates the cycle. Even worse, the CSCU spending cuts are not unique to Connecticut public universities. There is a nationwide trend of slashing budgets for higher education. 

Although it is very unlikely that the ruling elite who control the BOR have a shred of sympathy for anyone outside their wealthy clique, these austerity measures are not taken because of their disdain for the students and teachers being affected by their policies. They are taken because the government is an organ of class control: it is run by capitalists to serve their interests against the interest of the workers. Such is the nature of the state under capitalism. While thousands of students and teachers have been kicked to the curb, Connecticut saw its defense spending increase by $3 billion in 2022 per the orders of the White House, so more weapons can be sent to fund imperialist wars and genocides.

A system that is incapable of educating its populace or increasing their standard of living is not fit to continue. Let’s be clear: the resources are available to cover this $140 million deficit. Simply pulling a fraction out of the “rainy day fund” or public expenditure on defense could cover the deficit easily. It is time to stop begging the capitalists for piecemeal reforms to problems they can easily solve. Instead, we ought to consider who decides where state funds are disubstituted: the capitalists or the people who have to foot the bill for the problems their system created?  

SEBASTIAN WARD is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at sebastian.ward@yale.edu.

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Public opinion of Dr. Carson amongst the Black community began to shift around 2015, when he ran for President under the Republican Party. Dr. Carson, a Black leader who is generally met with distrust from his own community, provides an important lesson which contradicts the identity politics-based assertion that “representation” is intrinsically good. Having the same skin color does not mean having the same political interests, so the Black community needs to make a more careful analysis regarding which leaders we lend our support to, and the most effective ways the struggle for racial emancipation should be oriented.

Dr. Carson ran for president under the Republican party in 2015, until he dropped out, endorsed Trump, and was appointed secretary of the office of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. He spent his political career passing austerity measures to sabotage the Black community, criticizing their movements and becoming a talking head for conservative politics. 

A particularly surprising tidbit I heard during the speech came after a student asked Dr. Carson on how the mental health crisis in America ought to be addressed. Dr. Carson began talking about mentally distressed unhoused people and how we really need to “take care of them,” but also believes we need to first “figure out” why they are homeless and “fix it” before giving them a house because “with housing first, 90 plus percent of those people end right back out on the street.” Dr. Carson does not provide a source for the figure or describe how anyone who was given a house could suddenly “end up back on the street,” but his desire to “take care” of vulnerable communities during the speech did not seem present while at HUD. During his time as HUD secretary, Dr. Carson made significant budget cuts to programs that help low-income and minority communities, and terminated programs intended to strengthen anti-discrimination measures and address racial segregation in housing. However, the purpose of this article is not to give a sweeping critique of Dr. Carson and his policies, nor the points he made in his speech, but to consider more deeply how Dr. Carson’s case challenges the assumption that shared racial identity translates to shared political interests. 

Proponents of identity politics and intersectionality focus on the oppression of specific minority groups, but do so in a way that alienates each struggle from the other. They argue that the struggle for women, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community or any minority groups have entirely separate demands from each other, and if you aren’t a member of a specific community, the most you can do is passively support as an “ally.” Some take this claim to the extreme, arguing in an abstract system of “penalty and privilege” derived from every minute detail of being, which can make one “an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed” based on context. This perspective implies that if one does not belong to an oppressed group, they are automatically categorized as an oppressor who benefits from perpetuating that oppression. This places the emphasis on the individual as the primary agent of oppression. 

But the primary instrument of oppression are systems and institutions, and believing otherwise only fragments the collective struggles of marginalized groups. In reality, there is no inherent motivation within any segment of the working class to uphold the subjugation of another. 

Many black “leaders” today, instead of orienting their fight against class society, benefit from it and perpetuate it, meanwhile receiving uncritical support from the Black community because they have the same skin color. Former president Barack Obama, for example, helped bail out the banks after the 2008 recession, deported more immigrants than any preceding president and indiscriminately drone-bombed areas where civilians resided while hunting for terrorists. One only needs to look at Vice President Kamala Harris’ history as Attorney General in California to see how much she has harmed Black people; she spent her career disproportionately prosecuting young black men for low-level drug offenses and arguing against releasing prisoners so California could maintain a source of cheap labor. These leaders refuse to recognize — unlike Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Fred Hampton — that racism is a direct product of class society. If we truly want to liberate the Black community, we cannot rely on leaders willing to betray us in such a fashion.

The capitalist class has employed race as an instrument to prevent the working classes from uniting for centuries, convincing more privileged workers that their interests align with the bosses simply because they are the same race, despite the bosses being the everyone’s  common exploiter. Although workers have overcome this tactic many times in history, it has often been successful in preventing unity in the workplace. But the challenges faced by oppressed minority groups in society stem from the inherent contradictions within capitalism rather than stemming from the amount of privilege each individual person has over another. The evidence is that discrimination mainly comes in the form of economic oppression, which is felt disproportionately by the black community, who have been relegated to second class citizens through centuries of oppression of an economic system that relies on discrimination to function. “You can’t have capitalism without racism,” Malcolm X points out.

Anticipating that incremental gains focused solely on race-related justice can rectify these issues while class-based exploitation persists is a frivolous, utopian notion. True liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the overarching structure of class-based society itself. Consequently, the selection of our leaders should not be contingent on factors like the color of their skin, but on their ability to effectively advance the interests of the marginalized and exploited.

SEBASTIAN WARD is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at sebastian.ward@yale.edu.

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With affirmative action deemed unconstitutional, many are decrying the practice of legacy admissions as far more unfair. Recognizing that the practice exists explicitly to disproportionately benefit white and wealthy applicants, the call to ban legacy admissions and allow affirmative action would seem like a step in the right direction. But despite any perceived, marginal improvements to racial inequality, a race-conscious admissions system is not the answer to education disparity, even without legacy preference. These proposals take the focus away from the true perpetrators of inequality: an unjust, class-based society that props up a system of elite universities to serve it.

 If we truly want our college system to be more equitable, the solution is nationalization. Stripping away the special privileges bestowed upon the elite universities and putting them all entirely under the democratic control of the people will provide the funding and resources necessary to guarantee every citizen a free and quality education. 

Arguing to simply “fix” the admissions process accepts the existence of elite universities with astronomically high costs — and a stratified class society where the lower classes are predominantly minority communities. Most importantly, it presumes that society’s ability to provide quality education is limited. Put simply, these proposals accept the limitations of capitalism. 

In reality, the alleged scarcity of  jobs, resources and educational opportunities is entirely artificial, as it is hoarded by the ruling classes. Jobs like CEOs and Congress members are disproportionately taken up by Ivy+ graduates. Yale’s top employers, besides Yale itself, are among the wealthiest corporations on the planet, like McKinsey & Company, Meta Platforms, Inc., Amazon, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock to name a few. All the opportunities with power, wealth and influence are given to the graduates of the most elite universities. The working class is handed a sliver of economic power as a token to give the facade of democracy, spurring them into an endless controversy on how to divvy out that sliver and whatever scraps remain. This recent affirmative action ruling merely plays into this larger culture war, where political conversations are focused on matters which are meant to divide and disorient the working class. Meanwhile, legislation is passed behind closed doors, and workers’ lives keep getting worse.  

Undeniably, racism is entrenched in the DNA of modern capitalism and remains a tool of the exploiting class to divide the working class and maintain their rule. However, neither affirmative action nor ending legacy admissions addresses the root cause of inequality: capitalism. Thus, neither policy would improve the material conditions for marginalized communities as a whole. Race-conscious admissions affect a very small portion of students. For academic or financial reasons, most students do not have elite and Ivy+ colleges on their radar, and either get a job immediately after graduation or attend the less selective schools that don’t take applicants’ race into account. A third of all undergraduates attend community colleges, which offer open enrollment. With less than 200 universities using race-conscious admission, only 10,000-15,000 students a year receive degrees who might not have been otherwise accepted. That is equivalent to about 2 percent of all Black, Hispanic or Native American students in four-year colleges. 

This does not take into account that only 37 percent of Black and Hispanic students even make it to college at all. It is clear that these policies bring no tangible differences to these communities other than uplifting the lives of a select few, some of whom go on to oppress the very communities they came from. Goals of “representation,” the idea that these are good policies because they allow underrepresented groups to have a hand in controlling society’s major institutions, concedes that the universities who would implement these policies are simply pipelines into positions of power: corporate executives, powerful elected officials and so on. And as long as this scheme of a university system remains in a stratified class society, the majority of seats will always go to the wealthy, who have inherent advantages. Meanwhile, some minorities are permitted to diversify a few seats at the table, while the exploitative capitalist system continues unaddressed. 

The only truly fair solution is a nationalized university system, which guarantees free, quality college education to all. Education is a human right, and with the resources at our disposal today in the richest country in the world, nobody should be deprived of it. But because people are not guaranteed all that is required to live, only guaranteeing access to education is still an inadequate measure. You cannot go to college if you cannot afford rent, healthcare, groceries or whatever financial repercussions your family may face without a steady income. But how likely is it that the ruling class, which has more than enough resources, will fund a system of free, quality education alongside jobs, housing and healthcare? With this in mind, it may be time to reconsider who ought to wield the reigns of society — the wealthy capitalist graduates of elite universities or the workers?

SEBASTIAN WARD is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at sebastian.ward@yale.edu.

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