Disaster Capitalism Feeds Where Care Abandons: A Provocation on the Case of U.S. Higher Education after COVID

Disaster Capitalism Feeds Where Care Abandons:A Provocation on the Case of U.S. Higher Education after COVID Tressie McMillan Cottom (bio) The original intent for this provocation was to distill the forces of capitalism's interconnected pandemonia into a descriptive analysis of its fundamental crisis. That is, that our social institutions never intended to reckon with the profound cost of care, and we find ourselves with few mechanisms left to outsource social reproduction. The argument, as I imagined it, would be controlled and precise. After I accepted the editors' invitation to join this special issue, it became clear that I did not account for the cost of my own care. My own body and mind exist in the thing I work to analyze. I forget. Or, I would rather not know sometimes. Unfortunately, the body not only keeps the score; it also controls the state of play. I survived the pandemic, its ensuing crises, political destabilization, and the quotidian changes of middle-class life only to be felled by one too many meetings. Sick, disoriented, and still working, I am performing as myself even as it is clear that I am not at all myself. The accretion of disasters that led to my dissociation mirrors the disaster capitalism that defines U.S. education, K–20. Controlled precision is too feeble for the pandemonium. On an idyllic fall day, a graduate student (he would eventually be declared incompetent to stand trial) shot and murdered his graduate studies advisor in a campus building half a mile from my university office. As dozens of law enforcement performed outside our windows, colleagues and students shut themselves in classrooms, basements, and dorms. On television later, I watched students climb from the window of a second-floor classroom building, dropping five hundred feet to the ground to escape. Their movements are calm, unhurried, controlled. A journalist asks one of End Page 371 these students how they managed to keep their heads. She says that they have been doing shooter drills all of their lives. When America's addiction to semiautomatic guns consumed children in schools, we turned a clear-cut solution into an opportunity for disaster capitalism. No gun-control measures. Instead, we created an industry for school shooter drills, curricula, and paranoia. The guns still exist. The crisis is now a market. The market has matured with its victims. The local paper reports on a survey taken after the shooting. The majority of those surveyed want more protocols like those perfected on elementary school children to be implemented on our college campus. Pandemonium, when embodied, can make chaos look rational. I work at a large public flagship with enviable rankings. Conservative interests have marked such institutions for political takeover. In 2023 the board of trustees that oversees the state's public colleges appointed two Republican political consultants. The board thinks the chancellor is too liberal, the faculty too empowered, and the students too amenable to liberal indoctrination. The board creates a new school for conservative thought on campus. They override faculty governance on a tenure case. They end state-funded endowed professorships for non-STEM faculty. The chancellor leaves. An interim chancellor has no academic experience. It is the same political strategy that remade public higher education in Wisconsin. The same political strategy is being refined in Florida. The same political strategy is being retrofitted for state systems across the country. Pandemonium is pathogenic. A second live shooter event shuts down the campus a mere two weeks after the shooting that killed a professor. No one dies. Somehow, this lock-down is more traumatic. I was in a faculty lounge for an hour, maybe two. When the all-clear was issued, I walked toward my department building. Colleagues were pouring from where they had locked down. After the first live shooting event of the semester, we had anxiously checked on each other: "How are your kids?" "Is everyone okay?" What will you do now?" This time, our gazes slid by one another. Shoulders tried to shrug but seemed unable to commit. Half-shrugging, eyes averted just shy of each other's faces, we mostly sighed and said, "Well." Well. It is the one thing...