im not from the us but where i study and work its increasingly obvious that there has been a deliberate plan to rob these places from any of the revolutionary or emancipatory potential they once had. at some point the capitalists realized that when you put a whole bunch of young kids together and let them learn and live their lives with relative freedom from the economic realities, they’ll just always turn communist, so they had to put an end to that.

its such a shitshow with endless budget cuts, no money for infrastructure or teaching at all, no money for research so all research has to be funded through corporate grants (meaning the staff that has the best connections to those companies rise to the top, no matter the quality of the actual research), students live in terrible and way too expensive housing, the university itself is such an unwelcoming and uncomfortable place that you’d never want to spend any time there, the food is expensive and bad, everything that is not teaching gets outsourced, etc. etc.

if that wasn’t enough, it is clear to all the students that none of the stuff they learn will ever be relevant to what they actually end up doing, which is either boring ass bullshit office jobs or marketing, with basically nothing inbetween and that the value of a liberal arts education (or any education under capitalism for that matter) doesn’t actually amount to anything (as is clearly evident from the world around us). like the idea that educating people in all sorts of things would lead to better outcomes when these people take positions of power is nice, but it is clear that under capitalism that is just simply not true.