After the Ivory Tower Falls by Will Bunch

Author:Will Bunch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

A College Debt Crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Rise of a New New Left

The ghosts of American college, past, didn’t matter much to Sean Kitchen as he grew up in Philadelphia’s working-class, abandoned-factory neighborhood of Juniata Park—watching his dad become increasingly embittered as he lost his good-paying union job when the Acme supermarket chain closed an outdated Philly warehouse in 1999, only to see his next factory job after that outsourced to Mexico.

It was a future without college that haunted him. There was an idea that stayed with Sean for his first twenty-one years, even after he got a weak score on the SAT, even as only one college—Kutztown University—offered him acceptance for the fall after he graduated from his Catholic high school, even after his family’s college debt started rising toward the $40,000 mark, and even after he ate nothing but pasta with butter and garlic for a couple of weeks when his money supply ended before one semester did.

“I feel like college was forced on us,” Kitchen, now in his early thirties, told me in 2021. Nonstop through high school, he recalled, “they said you have to go to college to be a success, or else you’ll be a construction worker or a tradesman”—ironic, since the couple of classmates Kitchen knows who got into a trade union are actually doing pretty well these days.

Until one day in 2011 when Kitchen—who was doing okay at Kutztown but struggling to get enough credits after switching majors—finally decided he’d had enough.

Drawn to progressive politics after a grade-school teacher’s lecture against the Iraq War, Kitchen spent much of the year watching videos of the Arab Spring uprisings and the state-worker revolt in Wisconsin—and then the world’s political turmoil came to Kutztown. When Pennsylvania’s Republican governor Tom Corbett proposed a 50 percent cut in state aid to universities, Kitchen placed flyers in support of a campus protest on any door he could find.

Kitchen saw connections between the globalization that took away his dad’s latest job and the privatization of his own college education—and then he started noticing something else: A Twitter hashtag for a big open-ended protest against the abuses of capitalism that would be called #OccupyWallStreet. Hooked now on the live streams coming from Zuccotti Park—the protest’s epicenter—in lower Manhattan, Kitchen was watching on October 1, 2011, when New York cops trapped and busted hundreds of protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge. “I was watching that Saturday,” he said, and I said, ‘Screw it, I’m making a Facebook page.’”

In just twenty-four hours, Kitchen had signed up about two thousand people for his idea—an Occupy protest encampment in the heart of his native city, Philadelphia. He was far from alone. Before the end of that October, tens of thousands of progressive protesters—in roughly 2,300 cities and towns around the world—had left the comforts of their home to sleep by night in chilly tents, often on hard concrete, and march by day against the banks who’d crashed the global economy or the cops who’d attacked them with pepper spray and tear gas.

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