Education as capital accumulation

Part I: Austerity

In Northern California, the existential threat to Women and Gender Studies departments has been primarily budgetary, not ideological. California’s Democratic political majority forwards a platform that, on its face, supports public education. ¹ Yet public funding to the California State University (CSU) system has been regularly diminishing since the 1990s when a series of state propositions limiting taxation changed the budgetary landscape for public university education (Kersey, 2012). Since then, we have experienced an uneven, but ongoing system-wide budget crisis, which has put the future of many women, gender, and sexuality studies departments and programs in jeopardy. In recent years, the budget crisis in the CSU system has been explained by decreasing enrollment that is anticipated to continue, due to a “demographic cliff” caused by a lower birthrate in California. Rather than manage the budget to weather enrollment fluctuations, many CSU campuses are now making “forever cuts.”

In January 2025, in the wake of a US$24 budget deficit, Sonoma State University shuttered its Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) department, laying off all tenure/tenure track faculty members. ² As reported by public media,

After Sonoma State announced the cuts, it received $90 million dollars in emergency funding from California. But, the university is planning on using a lot of that money to build a new data science center and to expand their nursing program. (Kurnick, 2026)

On its face the closure of WGS at Sonoma State seemingly has nothing to do with the Trump administration, yet it coincides with increased scrutiny of, and pressure on, gender studies and diversity initiatives. In fact, the Trump administration uses the same logic of declining enrollment and job training as justification for forcing the closure of gender studies departments:

Institutions are reinvesting funding into workforce-oriented and high-need programs while consolidating low-value programs that do not justify high costs spent in pursuit of that degree. Universities are closing their women’s and gender studies programs due to increasing employer concerns about the lack of workforce-benefiting skills. (US Department of Education, 2026)

We are interested in highlighting the continuity between neoliberal management and Trump’s attacks on gender studies and DEI.

Like many gender studies professors, we simultaneously recognize that universities serve establishment interests and believe in the radical potential of feminist pedagogy and knowledge projects. Working in universities that serve underrepresented, under-resourced students, we have witnessed the power of gender studies classrooms to overturn norms, cultivate a politics of the “otherwise,” and enable self-reflection, growth and lifelong relationships. There are few institutions left that allow for the focused, rigorous commitment to engaging research, knowledge, and ideas for a sustained period, and in relation to others committed to that same engagement. This is the value of gender studies, liberal arts education, and public universities; they provide an imperative to think critically, self-reflect, and do so in community. When the content and pedagogy are intersectional and feminist, then gender studies poses a threat to the status quo. However, protecting the radical mission of these programs has often been at odds with the profit motives of the university itself.

The marketing of the moral and civic good of higher education for upward mobility has always been at odds with the reality of public divestment from public higher education, a tension that scholars of critical university studies have long pointed out. Writing during the first Trump administration, Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell (2018) describe the inherent contradiction between the vision of “the university as a public good” (p. 443) and the fact that “there is no history of the university that is not also a history of capital accumulation and capital expropriation” (p. 452). For Boggs and Mitchell, this contradiction makes it seem like there is always a crisis – a crisis wherein the “good” work of the public university is being diminished via its corporatization. In fact, Boggs and Mitchell point out, the fundamental reality of the (private, elite, and for-profit) university “demand[s] higher education be regarded as ‘a moral good . . . only insofar as it serves market interests’” (Cottom qtd in Boggs and Mitchell, 2018: 454). In other words, there is no real crisis, only a crisis in mentality between the ideal of the university as a space of “good” pitted against the realities of the university as an institution in the service of, and enabling capitalism – most evident in the private and for-profit university. Critical university studies scholarship has shown that this results in working-class students serving as economically exploitable populations, whose enrollment enriches the university, while simultaneously producing massive student debt.

The university as a capitalist institution naturalizes cost–benefit, value-added frameworks for measuring the effectiveness of the endeavor. Here “learning” can produce (or be the product consumed by) “good” citizens who work for capital. The accumulation potential (i.e. lifetime earnings impact) for students (long-marketed as the main benefit of university education) nonetheless often conflicts with the accumulation potential of the university itself (which, often because of its non-profit tax designation, can hold vast amounts of privatized wealth). ³ For the university to profit, it must sell both the idea of lifetime, private capital accumulation for individuals even as it creates a lifelong debt structure from which students often never find relief. This paradigm makes arguments for “economic mobility” and “job preparedness” seem like common sense “learning outcomes” that are then baked into how universities manage budgets and revenues. This has a very specific impact on fields like gender studies, which emerged out of social movements, student protest, and political unrest around how knowledge itself enables exploitation.

Gender studies, like ethnic studies, is an interdisciplinary field, which is seen to contribute to a liberal arts education rather than a specific professionalization-into-work field (like engineering or nursing). Liberal arts education thus also loses purchase in this framing, and the value of education is reduced to the ability of a degree to pay for itself. At the same time, enrollment decline is often used to explain program and college closures, framed as institutional mismanagement. Here (neo)liberal arguments for economic efficiency and good self-management converge with the antiliberal conservative mandates to shutter DEI; this is accumulation-by-education in consolidated form. ⁴ What we lose in this, Charlene Tung, WGS Professor at Sonoma State, explains as “the long activist history of bringing WGS [Women’s and Gender Studies] into being. You know, that to me is such a tragic loss, that activist history of people creating the curriculum itself” (Kurnick, 2026).

Part II: Private sector tech contracts

Together with austerity, recent contracts with AI (artificial intelligence) companies to provide generative AI chatbots on campuses demonstrate the continuity between neoliberal and neo-authoritarian threats to working-class education. In February 2025, less than 1 month after the cuts at Sonoma State, the CSU system entered into a US$17 million contract with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu to all faculty, staff, and students on its 22 campuses. The CSU uses neoliberal logics to justify this contract, claiming that offering students access to ChatGPT Edu will “provide the highly educated workforce that will drive California’s future AI-driven economy.” ⁵ Under the guise of readying students for jobs, this contract actually offers up our students to AI firms as customers-for- life (Singer, 2025). This contract also reveals the manufactured nature of austerity – why is there money for OpenAI and not money for WGS at Sonoma State?

Contracts like this one steal from the public coffers to enrich the new “tech oligarchy” (Cohen, 2025) at the expense of historically marginalized students. Silicon Valley CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai, who had, until recently presented themselves as politically liberal, lined up to take photos with Donald Trump at his 2025 inauguration and have since shuttered their own diversity initiatives. While this seemed like an about-face to many commentators, it may more accurately be considered a continuation of business-as-usual, lining up with whatever administration can best facilitate their unbridled acquisition of capital. Thus, while tech oligarchs may thrive under the corrupt Trump administration, they were already well-positioned under previous neoliberal administrations stretching from Reagan to Biden.

As the corporate university touts OpenAI as a “partner” and frames the contract as a “huge branding opportunity,” ⁶ it plays into the Trump administration’s ideological hand, giving control of education to Big Tech CEOs who “actively oppose higher education, imagine education to be largely automatable, conceive of human learning primarily as the acquisition of monetizable skills, and regard students and teachers as founts of free training data” (Conrad, 2024). At the same time, these contracts deskill academic labor by framing professors’ duties as replaceable, erode the conditions of teaching and learning, and introduce new forms of bias and discrimination on campus (Kenney and Lincoln, 2026). While the CSU uses the neoliberal language of “transparency, ethical use and responsible regulation” ⁷ of generative AI to preempt critique, ChatGPT is inextricable from environmental extractivism, exploitative labor, intellectual property theft, and militarism via OpenAI’s recent contract with the Department of War (Hao, 2025).

Our students see through these university/AI partnerships and are calling for “student and faculty control over the AI budget” (SFSU Student Union, 2026). ⁸ Like the 1968 student movement that led to the founding of Ethnic Studies (and later Women’s Studies) at San Francisco State University and recent movements for universities to divest from fossil fuels and from Israel, with AI, radical change is likely not to come from administrators but students.

Conclusion

Critical reading, writing, and listening skills are fundamental for a society where people act in relation to, and with respect for others. These skills are under threat from both (neo)liberal calls for austerity and conservative calls to make university education “less elite” and “radical.” How to consider perspective, difference, and relationality are at the core of gender and ethnic studies education. In fact, this is what Boggs and Mitchell describe as the distinguishing feature of “interdisciplinary identity knowledges;” they “do not inhabit the university . . . in the same way that other disciplines and fields do” (Boggs and Mitchell, 2018: 456). And this difference exists precisely because these fields draw on situated histories and perspectives to enact a critical engagement with the production of knowledge itself.

Part of the struggle of gender and ethnic studies in the United States (post-Civil Rights Movement knowledge formations) has always been the inevitability of capture. On the one hand, universities provide the space for counter-institutional and counter-normative knowledge formations; on the other hand, “these phenomena are deployed by notably non-leftist political imaginaries” (Boggs and Mitchell, 2018: 436). For example, students’ radical demands for antiracist and anticolonial education have been turned into corporatized DEI initiatives that emphasize implicit bias training rather than structural change. Despite this capture, Boggs and Mitchell find hope in the “ruptural possibilities” that make formations like gender studies “in but not of” the university (Boggs and Mitchell, 2018: 458). ⁹ If gender studies is a space where we value the questioning of norms and value the critical interrogation and questioning of knowledge-as-instrumentalized (a thing to be acquired, mastered and even automated), then it is always a threat to establishment forces/interests. This is what we see as the value of gender, sexuality, and women’s and ethnic studies – the ability to rethink and reshape the idea of knowledge itself.

If we want to defend gender studies in Trump’s America, we can’t indulge in nostalgia for the “good old days” under (neo)liberalism. Neoliberal austerity has been devastating to the unfinished projects of gender studies and ethnic studies. To support students and academic workers in these contested fields, we must refuse to conform to capitalist logics and multiply the ruptural possibilities of fugitive knowledge.

Two possible futures lie before us.

In the first, higher education continues along its current trajectory favoring perceived financial efficiency and market imperatives over its educational mandate; this university, which is amenable to private sector and authoritarian control, is largely automated and the education it provides is predictable, synthesized, and dehumanized – devoid of social, political, and personal contexts. Intensifying the two-tier system of labor under adjunctifcation, in this future, there are no longer tenure-track professors who are paid a living wage for their expert knowledge, only contingent, low-paid AI babysitters. Corey Doctorow (2025) refers to this labor arrangement as the “reverse centaur” model, where generative AI constitutes the head and the human is the low-paid rear end of the centaur. A human-centered liberal arts education will only be available to those who can afford it; everyone else will settle for a second-tier education as a job credential, while taking on lifelong debt. Private enterprises will continue to “feast on the decaying corpse of publicly-funded higher education” until there is nothing left (McCarthy, 2026).

But, as activists and speculative fiction authors have always insisted, another world is possible. The AI-powered university is not inevitable. There is a second future, where protests, labor organizing, and visionary action radically remake the university. The administration is abolished in favor of democratic self-governance (Missé and Martel, 2024). Tuition is free; students do not go into debt. All faculty have job security and are paid a living wage. While this future might seem naïve or utopian to some, elements of this future already exist in many places in the world and have existed in California in recent memory (Kersey, 2012). If this is the future we want for California public education, we must divest from education as capital accumulation and build universities around the needs and values of the faculty, staff, and students who make up the institution.