Every semester, I teach a research writing class at California State University. We focus around issues of higher education. I teach chapters from monographs that give a general sense of what the issues are. Then I teach Jane Smiley’s novel Moo. And every time I teach it, a catastrophe at the fictional Moo University aligns with a current problem in the CSU. The catastrophes change, but the underlying problem that catalyzes them remains the same.
As the spring 2024 semester approached, I prepared both to teach my classes and to go on strike. I’d assumed, as I had before over the course of my time at CSU, that after a couple of midnight extensions, a contract would be agreed upon before anyone stood outside university grounds with signs and songs. The faculty union’s contract proposal was very reasonable. I’d even call it unambitious. The CSU had enough money to comfortably accept our proposal and feel like they got off easy. Surely, I thought, I should plan to enter the first week of the semester in the classroom.
But the semester did begin with a labor stoppage, and I was part of the largest strike in higher education history. All of the CSU’s 23 individual campuses—which employ around 29,000 faculty members combined—kicked off the spring with picket lines instead of classes.
Luckily, after a one-day strike, the CSU accepted almost all of the union’s reasonable, unambitious proposal. Classes were back in action on Tuesday. Some of my colleagues complained that the strike seemed pointless, that, if the CSU was willing to accept our proposals, they shouldn’t have made us strike. I see that point. For me, though, the strike had an extra advantage. It made my research writing class incredibly relevant. The students genuinely wanted to know what the battle had been about. The readings I’d already selected laid out the issue.
The conflict in higher education has been the same for decades. It comes down to this: neoliberals in power have been gradually defunding higher education since the beginning of Reagan’s first term. About 15 years ago, those neoliberals discovered that deeper cuts also cut out the services that universities provide: an educated workforce, the scientific foundation for technological and medical advances, a civic-minded citizenry who vote and volunteer, a population that understands the basics of nutrition and how to live a healthy life, etc. Neoliberals need all of those things. They’ve tried other avenues to provide them like for-profit universities, certificates instead of degrees, and massive, open, online classes. While these disruptions have made a few people a lot of money, they fail to provide the services that universities traditionally render.
This fact of higher education’s enduring list toward austerity is why I teach Smiley’s novel. Rather than have students apply what they learned from the monographs to a society as big and complex as our own, I ask them to focus on Moo, a self-contained world full of all of higher ed’s problems. Moo, released in 1995, takes place during the 1989–90 school year, which started 35 years ago.
Moo tells the story of various students, professors, and administrators at a midwestern university who are doing the things that students, professors, and administrators do. Students try to make friends with the strangers they’ve been assigned to live with, they fall in love and/or into bed with people who are equally clueless about how to have an adult relationship, and they struggle in classes that are suddenly far more complex and demanding than anything they faced in high school. Professors go to parties that are more work obligations than social events, they fall in love and/or into bed with people who still seem clueless about having an adult relationship, and they fight burnout in the face of a university that largely doesn’t value or support them. Administrators wring their hands and try to convince themselves that they’re good people even though they’re forced to do awful things. They leave all the real work of running the university to the secretaries, who are typically more competent, anyway.
But Moo differs from most representations of higher education in two significant ways. It takes place at a regional teaching university and it focuses on the types of students whose college experience is mostly encompassed by working and studying. Moo is unconcerned with elite private institutions, with big-time athletics, and with fraternities and sororities. All of that stuff is on the fringes, removed from the common experience. In other words, Smiley examines the type of school that most Americans who go to college go to and the type of experiences that most students, professors, and administrators have. Even though the world features different technology—no smartphones or social media, memos instead of emails, computer labs instead of laptops—it looks very much like their own. Both my students and the students in Moo work jobs while they go to school. They deal with the tension of a boss who expects the student to prioritize that minimum-wage position over her future. They struggle with families who don’t really understand what a university is or does. Both my students and the students in Moo will gradually become more educated than their parents, learn to negotiate that gap, and move on to middle-class jobs in education, health care, computer technology, and the like.
In Moo, the problems begin with the character of Governor Orville T. Early. Early never appears directly in the novel. We only meet him through his carefully worded quotes in state newspapers. In a chapter sardonically titled “Trickle-Down Economics,” Governor Early explains his proposal to make massive cuts to the state budget, including cutting somewhere between seven and 10 million from Moo University specifically. Early explains that these cuts are like being on a diet. Sometimes, you have to make the healthier choices and cut out the doughnuts and hot fudge sundaes. His message to public services like state universities is clear: “No more hot fudge sundaes!”
When the budget shortfalls are first mentioned, the provost of Moo looks to programs he can cut. He settles on things like women’s studies, journalism, and nuclear engineering. Almost invariably, this angers my contemporary students. They regularly make eloquent arguments for the importance of these programs. They contend that, since most college students now are women, and since our society is still restrictively sexist, women’s studies is vital. When most of our paid reporting through news sources is performed by journalists who had the privilege of attending an elite private university, state schools like Moo should be producing journalists who are more representative of most Americans. I agree with my students when they make these points. Then I ask them how they feel about the women’s studies and journalism departments at our school. This realization, that we don’t have those programs, helps them understand that their education is one of diminished opportunities because some neoliberal politician like Governor Early sabotaged public education years before they were born.
The other cuts at Moo U are less dramatic. They’re things that everyone at universities knows about: deferred maintenance, increased workloads for faculty and staff with no increase in pay, and larger classes and higher tuition for students. But again, these are not hot fudge sundaes. If we’re using Governor Early’s diet metaphor, politicians and administrators of his ilk are not putting universities on a healthy diet. They’re enforcing anorexia.
Early’s enforced anorexia is the catastrophe that aligns so well with the strike that began at CSU last spring. Moo University is not spending recklessly. Neither was the CSU. In the buildup to the strike, the faculty union sent out a link to the CSU’s self-reported budget that showed an investment account of $8.6 billion at the time of the strike. An independent report commissioned by the CFA and using data from Moody’s Analytics found an additional $3.1 billion cash surplus in the system. Combined, this shows that the university doesn’t spend billions of dollars that California allocates to it. The CSU has run at a budget surplus averaging over $783 million per year for the past eight years. On top of all this, the board of trustees raised tuition. Beginning with the 2024–25 academic year, it will go up 6 percent a year for five years. If it were a corporation, Wall Street would celebrate its annual profit in the high hundreds of millions of dollars. But it’s not a corporation. It’s a public service. It’s a public service that raises student tuition when it doesn’t have to. It’s a public service that would rather endure a strike than pay starting full-time faculty members a living wage. Most importantly, it’s a public service that gives billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street instead of spending that money on its mission.
As I’ve mentioned, the faculty union’s contract proposals were modest. When journalists referred to our proposals as “demands,” they were really stretching the meaning of the word. A proposal in which faculty in a well-funded university system agrees to work too much and for less pay than they’re worth isn’t a demand. It’s a concession. Still, the chancellor’s office dug in and forced negotiations to a strike—the main sticking point of negotiations being pay for lecturers—faculty members who work full-time at the university and teach the overwhelming majority of courses and whose starting pay was unsustainably low.
If it were a corporation, Wall Street would celebrate CSU’s annual profit in the high hundreds of millions of dollars. But it’s not a corporation. It’s a public service. It’s a public service that raises student tuition when it doesn’t have to.
For the first day of class, professors stood in the rain, holding signs and singing songs. That night, the chancellor’s office agreed to almost everything in the union’s original proposal. Since my first class was on a Tuesday, I didn’t even miss class.
The end result of the contract saw starting lecturers making just above the living wage for a single person with no children. This wage level for full-time university faculty—the one that the chancellor’s office wouldn’t grant without a strike—was still hundreds of dollars less than a starting K–12 teacher holding a bachelor’s and a credential in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The K–12 teacher, however, can look forward to significant raises every year. The lecturer can’t.
Faculty pay and workload illustrates one of the biggest differences I see between Moo University and the CSU. As an example, one of the professors in Moo is a novelist named Tim Monahan. Tim is not the best guy, so on my first reading, I overlooked what a good teacher he is. One of his students, Gary, is writing an awful, unpublishable story. Tim works with Gary through several revisions, partly to help Gary write a better story and partly to help Gary develop a less-sexist worldview. I admire this in Tim. I wish I had the kind of time to dedicate to students that Tim has. Tim teaches two classes a semester and has a light service load. This has afforded him enough time to publish two novels in his 11 years there. Every time I read this, I feel so envious. Like Tim, I’m a tenured professor. Unlike Tim, I teach four classes a semester, I have a heavy service load, and, in the same amount of time, I’ve published twice as many books as him. In other words, I’m two Tims. The CSU is getting me for the cost of one, and the students are getting a professor who can spend half as much time engaging, advising, and mentoring them as he could’ve 35 years ago. To put this in further perspective, I should point out that I have the best position available to CSU faculty. The half-as-much time I can give to students is way more than my adjunct, lecturer, and assistant professor colleagues have to spare.
For this, students are paying more than triple what they would have during the Moo years. And the CSU, for their part, are sitting on $11.8 billion that they were allocated and didn’t spend on education.
This is the point where you stop reading this article if you don’t want me to give away the ending of Moo.
While everything is falling apart at Moo University, a local farmer is revolutionizing agriculture. The farmer is a deep believer in public higher education. He sees Moo as his university. He recognizes that his ability to farm so effectively is predicated on the knowledge developed at agricultural schools like Moo. In a chapter whimsically called “Deus Ex Machina,” the farmer gives Moo the patent to the incredibly lucrative agricultural machine that he invented. The money this patent generates saves Moo.
The deus ex machina in Moo is a way of recognizing that universities are a public good, that the students who graduate from universities are our teachers, our computer programmers, our nurses, our doctors, our engineers, the creative forces behind our TV shows and movies and novels, and so on. The farmer shows us the ideological shift we need to make away from a neoliberal university and back toward a public one.
The austerity universities have been dealing with over the last 35-plus years is not inevitable. In Moo, it’s clear that Governor Early isn’t facing difficult economic times. He’s just shifting the priorities of state funding. The same is happening in California. While this state is better about funding universities than most states—California accounted for about 46 percent of the CSU budget last year while most states account for about 17 percent of state university budgets—we’re still way behind what we are capable of doing. California is the fifth largest economy in the world. A lot of that is powered by the 130,000 or so students who graduate from the CSU system every year. California had enough money for tuition-free higher education in the 1960s, when it was much less wealthy. This austerity is not an issue of money. It’s an issue of priorities and ideologies.
American prosperity was built on the technologies developed at state universities and on the workforce educated there. Rather than raising tuition and squeezing faculty with less-than-living wages, we need to return to funding universities like the crucial part of our society that they are. The enforced anorexia of Governor Early becomes a more apt metaphor when we consider that no economic disaster caused universities to be defunded. The money was available then and it’s available now. University budget cuts strictly are ideological, and universities are starving with full plates of food in front of them. 
Featured image: Kendall Hall, California State University at Chico (2012). Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith / Wikimedia Commons