Coming Due: Accounting for Debt, Counting on Crisis

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between skyrocketing levels of student debt and the student movement against university tuition increases. In particular, it argues that the tactics and discourse of the student-worker movement that mobilized in fall 2009 at the University of California presented a radical challenge not only to the UC administration's rhetoric of sacrifice and shared pain, but also to debt's logic of deferred inevitability. It closes by suggesting new forms that organizing might take at the UC and nationally, if we are to confront the crisis of rising student debt.