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Whenever anyone asks me why I kept signing the promissory notes that eventually led to a student loan debt that was just short of $265k when it was forgiven—almost ten times the current average [1]—I refer to childhood memories of my maternal grandmother looking me in my eyes and saying, “Mark, they can take everything away from you—your house, your car, your wife can leave you, everything—but the one thing they can never take from you is your education and the person you become because of it.” When I tell this story, I am aware that I am constructing an educational origin story that sounds much more coherent and purposive than it really was. I am also advocating a philosophy of education that intoxicated me and drove me to a Ph.D. at the expense of the so-called American dream of homeownership, marriage with children, etc. Over time, I formulated an emancipatory and revolutionary ideal of liberal education that allowed me to eschew the pursuit of status and financial security. Now, as a teacher who employs critical pedagogy, I encourage my students to resist the neoliberal insistence that the purpose of higher education is to serve employers, and as a member of faculty leadership my resistance has placed me in direct conflict with my own administration.

This is an autotheoretical account of a life in debt, or an indebted life, and the unexpected issue of living post-debt. [2] Here in the United States, funding for higher education has shifted away from the state to individual students who must now seek the financial support of their parents, scholarships, jobs, and, increasingly, student loans to make ends meet. Student loans became a common feature of academic life in the late 1980s as colleges and universities also sought to attract more students from backgrounds that had traditionally been excluded, many more of whom rely on loans to pursue higher education. Since that time, student loan debt has overtaken credit card debt and car loan debt, leading to a student loan crisis that is almost certain to result in a fundamental restructuring in the next few years. [3]

For me, to be or not to be in debt was never the question. Rather, the question was to whom or to what would I owe the debt, what kind of debt it would be, and what it would cost me. In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber cites primordial-debt theorists who claim that “human existence itself is a form of debt.” [4] They argue that most if not all societies are based on the premise that it is a gift to be born, and that one comes into the world already in debt to those who made life possible from infancy, and to those who provide the resources to sustain life thereafter, including one’s parents, family, ancestors, gods, etc. Although Graeber rejects this as just another myth that justifies “structures of authority,” [5] I find it to be a helpful way to think about the feeling of indebtedness that preceded and survives my student loan debt. Having found that I could not meet the terms of the debt that I owed my mother, which was self-abnegating gratitude for having been born into whiteness, in an odd way student loans made it possible to affectively transfer that debt back to my grandmother’s dream for me. [6] With the loans I purchased the tools for self-mastery rather than the tools for employability, and the six digits on those monthly statements symbolized my own value to that ideal.

The student loans that made this all possible have now been forgiven, so I find myself living post-debt rather than debt-free. [7] To be debt-free the future beckons with a clean slate and a new life is possible. To be post-debt is to live with the effects and affects of debt through one’s life and career, whether an actual debt remains on an official ledger or not. [8] I have purloined the emancipatory education that I believe my grandmother wanted for me rather than one that binds me to the pursuit of status and things, and my financial future is not much more secure than it would have been if I had not pursued it. I didn’t start my tenure-track job until I was in my mid-40s, which is relatively late for someone who did not leave another career. I have earned tenure at an institution with almost three times as many faculty on contingent contracts than tenured or tenure-track, so it is a tenuous tenure at best. I have a decent salary and enough to (barely) cover the cost of living in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, New York. All things considered, I am in a better position than I expected to be at this point in my life, but I know that it is temporary. My savings are far below any benchmarks for a comfortable retirement, so I will have to work until I drop or return to something close to poverty later in life. This is fitting because from my earliest childhood I’ve always had the sense that my arrival on a scene was symptomatic of steep decline. [9]

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Unlike most of my colleagues who seem to have been preparing for careers in the professional-managerial class all their lives—often as professors—and seem to have been good students, my attitude toward formal education up to and including my first year of college was equivocal at best. From first to seventh grade, I went to public schools in Flint, Michigan, right as the city was completing its transition from a working-class enclave to the hellscape Michael Moore documented in Roger & Me. [10] As conditions in the city worsened due to the massive unemployment following the closure of several GM plants, people broke into our house on a weekly basis, sometimes while we were still at home. My mother fled with my sister and me to Lansing, Michigan, where we both graduated from the public schools with uneven academic records.

In addition to the toxic racial climate at the time, my mother was a single white woman raising two Black children from different fathers, and she resented her fall from middle-class white suburban respectability. When I first got to college, I struggled academically and socially as I tried to soothe the self-loathing by self-medicating with alcohol and other substances. That only made things worse, so soon I took up the general education requirements in the spirit of the liberal education I thought my grandmother wanted for me. [11] Inspired by the philosophies of education espoused by John Dewey and especially W. E. B. Du Bois, whose work became the focus of my dissertation, I understood liberal education to be an education that fights oppression in the interest of the kind of “human flourishing” that scholars like Martha Nussbaum advocate in their scholarship and teaching. [12]

As a young man in university through the ‘90s, I was shaped by the so-called “culture wars.” I was initially inspired by the so-called “great books” written by the dead white men of Western thought and literature defended by the likes of Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, and others. [13] Then I encountered critics of this tradition, including bell hooks, Lawrence Levine, Henry Giroux, and others, who demonstrated how these texts are often used to reproduce and reinforce race, gender, and other forms of domination and oppression, even when the texts themselves resist that kind of reading. [14] However, as scholars from Gerald Graff to Andrew Hartman and others have argued, the debate itself demonstrates how central these arguments are for our politics and culture. [15] Being a student became my core identity because it legitimized and provided an outlet for the intellectualization that had been my primary coping mechanism. It had all the hallmarks of a full-blown addiction: it alienated me from friends and family, it made me unsuitable for the kind of work I was expected to do, and it led me to borrow money I could never repay.

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Unlike back home where it seemed like everything I said and did was wrong and where loyalty was more important than honesty, fairness, or justice, the rules of academic engagement enabled me to weaponize my intellect and match wits with prominent scholars and classmates from privileged backgrounds who were on their way to futures I could not and did not even care to imagine. In the classroom there seemed to be no such thing as “thinking too much” or asking too many questions, so I felt like I had become what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call a “subversive intellectual” who found a refuge in the “undercommons.” [16]

My academic journey to the Ph.D. took 22 years to complete. Along the way I attended eight colleges and universities in six states, including two community colleges (Lansing Community, Atlanta Metropolitan), three state universities (Florida Atlantic, Georgia State, U. of Hawaii), one Catholic university (Loyola Marymount), and two private universities (U. of Southern California, U. of Chicago). Most of it was paid for through financial aid discounts, a Pell grant (for low-income students), some fellowships and scholarships, work/study, and a variety of jobs. But by taking out student loans I felt I was declaring a kind of independence.

While the Ph.D. itself signaled the end of my formal education, the student loan debt represented a relationship with my identity as a student that I thought would continue indefinitely, probably the rest of my life. The six figures, which grew each month even after I paid the amount due, were a visual reminder of the sense of autonomy I felt each time I signed for a loan. Neoliberalism encourages us to think of debt in purely economic and transactional terms, but scholars like Graeber explain how debt has always been much more than that. Each time I signed, I was aware that I was imposing more economic strain on my future. At the same time, I also felt that I was voluntarily signing myself out of the involuntary familial debt that had been imposed on my mother, my family, and me. My student loan debt bound me to the decision to be a student and to pursue a life of the mind on my own terms, come what may, rather than depend on my family and allow them and people like them to define me. I felt a contemptuous pride every time I signed away more of a future in the pursuit of status and things for what others considered to be a useless education. [17]

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Following Jeffrey J. Williams, some scholars have compared working and paying down student loan debt to indentured servitude, where one spends a certain number of years working for someone else to pay off a debt before being free to start a new life. But that implies the expectation that the debt will come to an end while one can still enjoy one’s freedom. [18] I knew that my debt was supposed to be cancelled after 20–25 years if all went well, but I would be in my 60s and who knew what would happen by then. [19] Therefore, sharecropping, where farmers rent rather than own the land on which they live and farm—and in the South Black farmers often went deeper in debt each year and could not leave as long as that was the case—seemed a better analogy. [20] My paternal grandfather was born into sharecropping in Mississippi before joining the Great Migration north to Detroit when he was 30 years old, so it may have had an ancestral resonance. [21]

But in 2007, two years before I completed my Ph.D., the Bush administration passed the College Cost Reduction and Access Act that created the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF), which promised to reduce the time to however long it took me to make 120 qualifying payments. [22] It seemed too good to be true. And for a time, it was. When the first batch of PSLF borrowers became eligible for forgiveness in 2017, it was reported that only around 1% of those who claimed to have met all requirements were discharged. [23] I was not surprised. I already had my own experiences with the thumbs on the scale of the program and I expected it to continue. [24] By the time the Trump administration suspended all student loan payments due to COVID-19 in March 2020, I was closing in on 120 payments, total. But many of my payments had been disqualified for a variety of reasons. For instance, some payments were disqualified because they were as little as five cents over what was due. I also learned that nearly two years of payments I made while I was on a Fulbright in Ukraine were disqualified because I had not been employed full time at a qualifying college or university, even though a student loan representative assured me that they would count before I left. [25]

Sometime in the late summer of 2021, my best friend, who also carried a massive student loan debt, informed me that people on social media were posting that their student loans had been forgiven. It appeared that the new Secretary of Education was delivering on President Biden’s campaign promise to address student loan debt. My friend described crying with sympathetic joy as she read one story after another. Her excitement was unequivocal, but I felt confused and disoriented, and maybe even a little sad.

In October of 2021, the administration also announced a temporary waiver that permitted borrowers to request FedLoans, the private company that the government had selected to oversee the program, to count payments that had previously been disqualified as “qualified.” [26] My friend applied and pushed me to apply for it, too. I felt that I was being greedy to ask, and perhaps I feared coming closer to the end. My expected date to qualify for forgiveness was still over two years away and I thought that would give me time to plan for a new, post-debt identity. I applied for the waiver, and even though my Fulbright payments still didn’t qualify, after my employer certified my last set of eligible payments the new total was enough to bring me to 120 qualified payments.

The official date of my loan forgiveness was September 26th, 2022, five days before my 54th birthday. It was over. I had taken out my first student loan one month before I turned 19, and my total debt on the date of forgiveness was just short of 265k and growing. [27] That leaves me to contemplate my post-debt future with whatever productive able-bodied time I have left.

I am convinced that I just happened to be one of the fortunate ones in the right situation at the right time. Not long after my own loans had been forgiven, President Biden issued an Executive Order forgiving the first $10k of debt for all federal student loan borrowers earning $125k or less. My wife, who owes just shy of $10k, qualified. But the Supreme Court struck it down. [28] Soon I expect that other forgiveness programs like the PSLF will face more scrutiny and limitations as well. Two weeks to the day after the Supreme Court decision, President Biden announced another plan to cancel student debt. [29] This time for over 800,000 people who had been paying on their student loans for 20 years or more. This action was spurred by a report on National Public Radio in April of 2022 that found that of approximately two million people who had been paying long enough to qualify for cancellation, only 32 had their loans cancelled. [30] This confirmed my sense that I was supposed to carry this debt to my grave.

5_

I was not driven to become a professor, so I didn’t expect to land a tenure-track job, let alone earn tenure. In the fall of 2012, I was in my second year as a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine, and my fourth year on the academic job market. I had already struck out with all but one application, and I counted myself out for that one, too. I had requested that my Fulbright be renewed for a third year. It seemed unlikely, but I didn’t have a plan if my request was denied. I was beginning to think about how I would scramble to find a place to live in the US and to find jobs as an adjunct professor or another full-time contingent position by the fall.

I’ve never been able to adopt the professional persona of academic writing—I’m too confessional, which is why I was drawn to autotheory—so I went on the job market without a strong publication record or agenda. [31] My dissertation focused on the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, charting how he imagined white supremacy grounded the anti-intellectual attacks on liberal education and intellectuals over the course of his long life and career. But I found that I could not muster the energy to revise my dissertation into a book. The best I could do was submit a chapter to be published as an article, but I couldn’t complete the requested revisions for that, either. I had other structural problems going against me as well. For instance, my Ph.D. was from a now-defunct committee that had existed only at the University of Chicago, and that made me a harder sell to discipline and field-specific departments like English. [32] In short, it was time to pay the consequences for my purloined education with a return to minimum wage service work.

Yet on April 25th, 2013, an email from Human Resources at the last remaining job prospect requested a Skype interview with the Vice President of Academic Affairs for the following day. In that meeting, the VPAA informed me that I had indeed landed a tenure-track job in an English department on Long Island, New York. I could hardly believe that in chasing an addiction I had inadvertently stumbled into a career. Therefore, I knew it had to be a career in decline.

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I didn’t know much about Long Island or anything at all about the institution, but I knew that that the job was located close to New York City, which was a highly desirable location for me. I didn’t need a lot of money, I had no interest in starting a family, and I didn’t have expensive hobbies, so the fact that the cost of living was much higher than the national average didn’t faze me. It was a Catholic college, and I am what demographers call a “None,” or someone who is skeptical of and avoids organized religions, so I had applied with some hesitation. [33] I decided to go ahead because the mission statement expressed a commitment to “a value-centered, holistic education in liberal arts.” From my cover letter through my interviews I advocated an emancipatory view of liberal education that challenges the status quo and refuses to be reduced to marketable skills, so I thought the institution was looking for the critical orientation that I offered.

I was mistaken. But I was not surprised that I was mistaken. I already knew that non-elite universities, particularly those looking to admit more students of color to meet enrollment goals as the traditional pipelines dry up, tend to focus on job skills, not an education that asks critical questions about society and culture. Some professors in the arts and humanities lean into this vocationalism and argue that our disciplines do a better job of teaching skills like “critical thinking,” which translates to the problem-solving skills that employers covet. The webpage for the School of Arts & Sciences tells prospective students (and reassure their anxious parents) that its “mission” is “to connect you to your future career.” [34] There seems to be little acknowledgement of the tension between making employability a student’s top priority and instilling the ethical leadership that is promised in the university’s mission statement. For example, what if our graduates find themselves in situations where taking a stand on principle might put their jobs at risk?

To be fair, the institution has had a vocational orientation from the beginning. It was founded by Catholic nuns in 1956, two years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision rendered de jure segregation unconstitutional (it’s not clear if there was any connection or if it was just a coincidence) with the aim of training young (white) women on Long Island to become nurses and teachers. Far from being the center of the intellectual experience on campus, courses in the humanities, arts, sciences, and social sciences served the professional disciplines. They ensured that future K-12 educators were familiar with the basic content that they would be teaching, and they provided the general education requirements for those in Nursing and other fields. The institutional commitment to service and teaching (we teach a 4/4, or four classes each semester) over scholarship and research helps explain traditional but outdated course offerings in departments like English. [35]

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According to the most recent information available, I am the only tenured professor on campus who identifies as a non-Hispanic Black man, and I may have been the first to be tenured here. [36] (There were two others on the tenure-track, but one of them left for a teaching position out-of-state at least in part because he did not feel respected enough here.) [37] Like many other faculty of color on the tenure track across the country, I was asked to perform what Sara Ahmed calls “diversity work” in my first few years by serving on several committees. This included serving as the required diversity representative on search committees, even for departments far from my area of expertise like Business and Nursing. [38] I also organized panels on current events like the growing conflict in Ukraine, the school-to-prison pipeline, undocumented students on Long Island, and others.

As someone who studies the history of higher education in the United States and because of my personal experience as a Black student and teacher in several predominantly white institutions of higher education, I knew from the beginning that I would have to either toe the line drawn by the administration or lean into the protections that tenure was intended to provide. [39] After I earned tenure, I became more of an activist. I did so in part because I believed it was important for me to use the protections tenure affords to do what I can to protect those who don’t have it, and to push back against efforts to weaken or eliminate tenure altogether. Because I never expected to get a tenure-track job or earn tenure, I felt obliged to take this stand.

Over the past four decades or so, there has been an explosion of what we call “contingent faculty” who teach part-time in positions like “Adjunct Professor” and “Graduate Student Instructor,” and/or full-time in positions that are not on the tenure track, such as “Visiting Assistant Professor” and “Professor of Practice.” These positions are more or less “at will,” meaning that the faculty members work from one short-term contract to another. The terms of the contracts typically range from one semester to three years. In the 1970’s, these positions were only about 25% of the teaching faculty, but today the ratio has flipped, and now contingent faculty constitute approximately three quarters of the teaching faculty. [40] As the ranks of tenured and tenure-line faculty shrink, those of us “lucky” enough to be placed in these “golden handcuffs” feel even less secure about speaking out. We become compliant and complacent. These conditions are an existential threat to the critical tradition that makes higher education a meaningful project in my view, so, as I said, I felt an obligation to fight against them at our own institution. [41]

So, immediately after earning tenure, I joined the executive committee of our advocacy chapter (it is not a union) of the American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT). Knowing that faculty of color are always on the front lines, especially those doing work that critically examines the norms and values of institution and society, I began pushing back against the top-down corporate ethos stifling academic freedom on campus. Since then, the executive committee and I have been able to protect other faculty members from administrative overreach, a disproportionate number of whom have been faculty of color, with some success. This has been challenging because the administration denigrates the AAUP in general and casts us as “troublemakers” on a relatively small campus that prides itself as being a place where everyone gets along “like family.”

Yet our advocacy apparently brought our chapter to the attention of the national office of the AAUP-AFT. Out of the blue, the President of the national association invited me to join the influential Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure in the summer of 2020. That role has given me the opportunity to discuss and debate the tensions between academic freedom and social justice with other members of the committee, and to participate in drafting statements and policies that impact our profession. The committee provides a sense of community with the other members and professors who share similar concerns, even as investigations conducted by the committee demonstrate to me just how widespread the attacks on the emancipatory potential of education have become.

My own university often serves as a case study for the points I try to make. It is more than 90% tuition-dependent, which means the administration feels even more pressure to recruit and retain as many students as possible, and by any means necessary. For example, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have become part of the corporate brand, assuring students from non-white backgrounds that they will feel welcome on campus. But the goal seems to be the recruitment and retention of students, not rooting out institutionalized oppression. When combined with the corporate ethos that treats students as consumers and faculty as service providers, initiatives purportedly intended to promote diversity, equality, and inclusion of those from marginalized communities seem to distract from rather than dismantle systemic oppression. Perhaps more pointedly, they have become tools that do more to undermine the protections of academic freedom, shared governance, and due process that faculty, especially faculty of color, must depend on to produce and disseminate new forms of knowledge that challenge and often contradict the corporate brand. [42]

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As the neoliberal university capitalizes on my labor and my representational significance while downplaying my value, I try to expose my students to the kind of emancipatory education that hooked me when I was one of them. Our students come from relatively modest backgrounds (99% are on financial aid), and they are increasingly students of color. [43] Most of them commute, and many of them juggle full-time jobs with their full-time class schedules. When asked, my students state that if they didn’t feel like they had to, they would not have pursued education beyond high school. They resent being forced to go into debt to take courses they suspect are unnecessary for the careers they believe they are being trained for. What I owe them, then, is an introduction to an education that they do not expect. Rather than explain how my pedagogy will make them more marketable, I conspire with them to learn about the counterstories that are not only explicitly forbidden in states like Florida and Texas, but increasingly suspect at our own university as well. [44]

And it is not hard to see why that is. The last thing a neoliberal university wants is for students like ours to think of education as anything other than a rite of passage on the way to becoming obedient employees and genial colleagues and coworkers. So, I look my students in the eyes and tell them that everything can be taken from them, including their jobs, but the one thing no one can take from them is their education and the people they will become because of it. At present, this is the future of my post-debt condition.

_How to Cite

Mark S. James. “Post-Debt: A Student Loan Retrospective.” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 15 (2023). <https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2023.1351>.