Austerity Undermines Every Effort at Equity and Justice

Abstract

Austerity poses one of the most pernicious threats to the ability of new, developing, and established scholars to engage fully and freely in their intellectual environments. Ongoing cuts to all types of high-income and wealth taxes, as well as ambivalence about tracking and collecting such taxes, have led to a shrinking of public revenues and relentless reductions in state and federal appropriations for services. This situation has pushed higher education—especially the most accessible public institutions created to foster democracy and equity—into a fragile condition. As a nontraditional (that is, old) PhD candidate in history and single woman with an unconventional career path now working as a university graduate assistant and adjunct professor at a community college, the consequences of austerity are very tangible to me. They manifest in my weekly budgeting for groceries, in the fact my clothing and kitchen items come from Savers and Salvation Army shops, in the fiddling maintenance of my fifteenyear-old car to get through another annual inspection, in the lack of full-time job postings as I begin my search, in the weekly panic at both institutions about “student numbers” and legislative budgets, in the elimination of course sections at the community college. The cutting and cutting of government funding for public higher education means that any drop in enrollment, even if cyclical or temporary, causes high-impact financial losses at a campus. A heightened sense of precariousness occurred when a distressing family problem, related to another national catastrophe, arose two years ago. I could balance all my scholarly, teaching, financial, and household responsibilities