I’d like to say a little more about what I meant last week when I advocated for free public higher education, and I’d like to say it in the form of a series of annotations to a joke tee shirt.

A few months back I tweeted that education should be “Free as in speech, free as in beer, and free as in Huey.” A couple of days later I expanded on the sentiment:

“Free as in speech. Free as in beer. Free as in Huey. Free as in love. Free as in bird. No MOOCs, is what I’m saying.”

Folks seemed to like that, and when I noodled around with the idea in an airport bar a while later, the idea of turning it into a tee shirt was born. (The shirts are currently on sale as a fundraiser for this site. The sale ends tomorrow, on the evening of Wednesday, December 4.)

Folks are buying and liking the shirts, so that’s cool. But what, exactly, does it mean? Turns out that’s a little complicated. So let’s break it down, clause by clause.

Free as in speech.

The speech/beer/Huey tweet that started this whole thing was a riff on a phrase coined by activist Richard Stallman to describe the Free Software movement: “Think free as in free speech, not free beer.”

What Stallman meant was that free software is a matter of, as he puts it, “liberty, not price.” The goal of the movement is to create software that can be shared, modified, and adapted, rather than just software you don’t have to pay for.

So when I say that education should be free as in speech and free as in beer, I’m saying I embrace the liberty goals expressed in  Stallman’s slogan while rejecting the idea that access to education should be constrained by your ability to pay.

Free speech is, of course, often put forward as a core value of the educational project — the freedom demanded in the phrase “academic freedom” is freedom of inquiry and expression. That freedom has come increasingly under attack in recent years with the erosion of tenure, professorial independence, and faculty governance, and it’s a freedom that’s worth defending. So: Free as in speech.

And it’s a freedom that’s worth expanding too, particularly with regard to students’ rights. Academic freedom is often framed as a faculty right, but a campus where students do not have the right to speak and write and organize without restraint is also an unfree campus — and that applies in high school and grade school as much as in college.

Free as in beer.

When I wrote about free public higher ed last week, I was speaking primarily in terms of the degree’s actual, material, dollars-and-cents pricetag. Free-as-in-beer public higher ed used to be common in America, and that’s a project worth reviving.

Seen in a certain light, in fact, the idea of paid public higher education is a historical anomaly. Today more than 30% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree. Before World War II fewer than 30% of Americans had high school diplomas. But while free, public, universal high school is a political and cultural given in the United States, not a single state makes even community college accessible under the same conditions as high school.

If a college education is as essential today as a high school education was in 1940 — and it is — then it seems to me that college should reasonably be as free today as high school was then.

So yes, education should be free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer. But that’s just the beginning.

Free as in Huey.

Huey Newton was, with Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party in the mid-sixties. In October 1967, at the height of police harassment of the Panthers, two Oakland cops rolled up on Newton and a friend while they were returning from a party. Soon one officer was dead and Newton critically wounded. Testimony about what happened that night was muddled at best, but despite indications that the officer might have been accidentally shot by his partner, Newton was placed on trial for first degree murder.

The subsequent prosecution was a mess, exposing police misconduct, bias in the court system, and strong evidence of a frame-up. After three trials, Newton was vindicated and freed. “Free Huey” was the rallying cry of Newton’s supporters during the 22 months he spent in jail and the two years of legal wrangling that followed.

So what does all that have to do with education? A lot. Free education is liberatory education, education that stands opposed to bigotry and institutional oppression. The campus should be an incubator not just of ideas but of organizing as well. (Not every member of the community will share the same values, of course, but that diversity of opinion is itself a strength of the campus environment. The campus should be an incubator of all kinds of ideas, and all kinds of organizing.)

And as Jacob Remes pointed out on Twitter after I first published this essay earlier today, there’s another way in which education should be made “Free as in Huey” — it needs to be let out of jail. The ever-escalating police presence on campus and in schools needs to be reversed, as does the ever-increasing criminalization of protest and other unsanctioned behavior.

Also: It’s not often remembered today, but Huey Newton and his Panther co-founder Bobby Seale met through the Afro American Association at Merritt College. Merritt is a community college in Oakland, and it was, until 1984, tuition-free. The Black Panthers would likely not have existed if California hadn’t then offered its residents free-as-in-beer public higher education.

Free as in lunch.

At first glance, “free as in lunch” reads as reiteration of “free as in beer,” and it is, up to a point. The idea that public education shouldn’t carry a price tag is important enough to mention twice.

But there’s more to it as well. The phrase “free as in lunch” is also a rebuke to the expression “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” (often acronymized to TANSTAAFL) popularized by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein and conservative economist Milton Friedman in the middle of the 20th century.

The premise of TANSTAAFL is that nothing is truly free. If a bar is offering a free lunch, they’re doing it because somebody’s buying drinks to pay for it. If a service is offered to the public without charge, it’s being underwritten by taxes or some other hidden mechanism. If a system is putting out energy, it has to be getting that energy from somewhere.

All this is true, up to a point. Someone has to pay the professors and the RAs and the janitors even in a free university. Perpetual motion machines are, strictly defined, a hoax. And yet the hard-nosed “realism” of the phrase masks other equally compelling truths — truths about voluntarism, and communal effort, and the social benefits that accrue to all from investment in public goods.

The universe may be a zero-sum game on the level of physics, but the world of human endeavor is not. There is such a thing as a free lunch, and we shouldn’t be afraid to demand one.

Free as in bird.

People request Freebird at concerts because it is awesome and preposterous.

Education should be awesome and preposterous.

Free as in love.

I am, of course, tempted to quote Che Guevara at this point, but instead I’ll reach back further to an earlier, more flamboyant, and ultimately more revolutionary thinker — the 19th century feminist Victoria Woodhull:

“Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it.”

I’ve always been enamored of the phrase “free love,” which was first coined a few decades before Woodhull adopted it. Simultaneously archaic and modern, it packs a tremendous amount of meaning into each of its two short words. As articulated by Woodhull here it also has the virtue of audacity, a characteristic that every education activist requires.

Yes, I am a Free Lover. Yes, I am a Free Speecher. Yes, I am a Free Beerer. Yes, I am a Free Hueyer. Yes, I am a Free Luncher. Yes, I am a Free Birder. Yes, I believe in speech and beer and Huey and lunch and bird and love.

Yes, I believe in free education for all.

The last couple of weeks have seen students launch occupations of campus spaces in at least three British universities in the lead-up to a national strike of campus personnel slated for tomorrow.

This morning several dozen students at the University of Edinburgh stormed the offices of the university’s finance director demanding an increase in staff wages and a cap of high-ranking administrators’ salaries at ten times the pay of the university’s lowest-paid employees.

Last Tuesday students occupied a building at the University of Sussex in a protest against higher education privatization, particularly the outsourcing of food,  maintenance, and security services on campus and the impending privatization of student loans in Britain. Students occupied the same building for two months earlier this year before being forcibly evicted. That occupation is ongoing, though the university will appear in court tomorrow seeking permission to roust the students.

And on Thursday administrators at the University of Birmingham sent police to break up a week-long campus occupation in support of democracy in campus governance and opposition to high fees, low wages, and student loan privatization. The Birmingham administration is seeking a court injunction banning protest on campus for the next twelve months.

I’ve been saying for years that we need to have a national debate about whether we want to have a public higher education system in this country, and that our failure to have that debate is killing public higher ed. I believe that to be true. With taxpayer support for many public colleges sliding toward single-digit percentages, with out-of-state tuition at some public universities approaching Harvard’s, with in-state applicants losing seats to make room for those out-of-state revenue streams in students’ clothing, we’re abandoning the idea of public higher education without giving that idea the respect of saying so.

And yet something curious is happening as a result. Slowly, haltingly, but with growing confidence, voices are beginning to rise in support of the concept of a higher education that is not merely public, but actually free. Economist Jeffrey Sachs claimed in a 2011 book that we could eliminate tuition at public colleges and universities nationwide for an investment of little as $15 billion a year, and since then the idea has been popping up more and more frequently in public discussion.

It’s not a new idea, of course. As a delegate to the US Student Association’s congresses in the early 1990s I remember ritually endorsing an end to tuition in resolutions every summer. But in those days the idea felt more than a little pro forma. Of course college should be free, we’d say, and then we’d go back to fighting tuition hikes and lobbying against Pell Grant cuts.

Back then, however, tuition was close enough to free that keeping prices down, or rolling them back a bit, seemed like a reasonable enough compromise. When I graduated, the average annual tuition at a four-year college in the United States — in 2013 dollars — was $3,614. (Ten years earlier it’d been just $2,318.) Today it stands at $8,893.

When the status quo becomes unbearable, the quixotic can start to feel prudent.

The latest commentator to make an extended case for free public higher education is Aaron Bady, who published an essay on Al Jazeera America this week arguing that public education that isn’t free isn’t actually “public” at all. “A university that thinks and behaves like a private-sector corporation,” he writes, “charging its consumers what the market will bear, cutting costs wherever it can and using competition with its peers as its measure of success … is a public university in name only.”

Bady framed his argument as a brief for public higher education as a public good. But some have risen to claim that such a vision is elitism in disguise, a giveaway for the wealthy masquerading as public-spiritedness. The most vociferous of these is Matt Bruenig, who argued yesterday (at his site and on Twitter) that eliminating tuition at public colleges would have no effect on the class composition of the American student body, and would in fact “overwhelmingly benefit rich kids.”

Bruenig is right that the lowest income quartile has seen smaller increases in college costs than the rest of the student body in recent decades (though his data only take us up to 2007, well before the current recession’s massive  tuition hikes). There’s a sad irony to the fact that public higher ed pricing was less regressive, in relative terms, a generation ago than it is today. But Bruenig’s own charts show that even the poorest students have seen their costs rise since the 1990s, and that increases in costs for the middle class have been steep.

There are other problems with Bruenig’s analysis. He leaves independent students out of his calculations, and as Jordan Weissmann writes at The Atlantic this morning, those students represent a huge, growing, and disproportionately poor segment of the student body. He neglects the changing mission of the American college, and the effect that college costs may be having on perpetuating a skewed status quo. He ignores the fact that a dollar “spent” on college via the accumulation of debt has a different impact on a student’s prospects than a dollar spent out of savings. He has a disturbing tendency to conflate the struggling middle class with “the rich.”

The core of Bruenig’s complaint with free public higher ed, however, is that it isn’t primarily a social welfare program for the poor. And though Bruenig’s eagerness to prove that point leads him to overstate it, the fact is that he’s right. Universal free public higher education, in the short run, would provide a greater economic boost, in raw numbers, to the middle class and the rich than it would to those in poverty.

But so do libraries. So do roads. So do fire departments. So do high schools. The argument for free public higher education isn’t that it’s a targeted income redistribution program, it’s that it’s a universal, communal project, a powerful concrete statement of our values and priorities as a society.

By happy coincidence, as Bady was posting his essay I was putting the finishing touches on the design of the tee shirt you see above. The ideal of “free education” expressed in that shirt is broader than that expressed in Bady’s piece, just as SDS’s 1960s slogan “A Free University in a Free Society” was. But the core of each argument is, I think, the same — that the mission of the public university, the mission of the truly public university, has profound merit.

This is kind of incredible.

You’ll recall that back in the summer the Cooper Union administration negotiated the end to a student occupation of the college president’s office by agreeing, among other things, to place an elected student on Cooper’s board of trustees. In October the trustees revealed the framework under which that student trustee would be chosen, and the process has been moving forward since then.

Today it was announced that the winner of the campus-wide election to select the student trustee will not be seated as previously agreed. No student, in fact, will be seated on the board until at least March. Why? Mostly because the process the students followed to select their representative was too democratic.

I should probably back up.

The process for choosing the student trustee that was announced in October was pretty complicated. In it, the student body would elect a pool of three candidates from which the trustees’ membership committee would choose a winner. Despite the fact that this setup violated the trustees’ summer agreement to establish a mechanism “for the election of a student representative,” the Joint Student Council, which had been given responsibility for implementing the procedure, chose not to boycott. They took nominations, validated candidacies, held candidate forums, and — just last week — conducted an election.

But this afternoon, immediately before the results of that election were due to be announced, the trustees pulled the plug on the whole thing. Here’s their explanation as to why:

“It has …come to the Board’s attention that the process implemented by the JSC to select candidates for the Student Representative position only resulted in two candidates even running for the position, and that the Joint Student Council has since voted only to submit to the Committee on Trustees the one candidate with the highest number of votes.”

Because there were only two candidates, and because the JSC only intended to submit one candidate’s name to the board, the process has been declared void. Only if the JSC starts again from scratch will the trustees consider selecting a student to fill the trustee seat, and even then not before the March 2014 trustee meeting.

This is quite simply flabbergasting, for several reasons.

First, let’s address the charge that the JSC “voted only to submit to the Committee on Trustees the one candidate with the highest number of votes.” Although I haven’t yet seen the language that the Council voted on, a JSC representative said on the Save Cooper Union Facebook page earlier today that the two candidates told the Council, prior to the election, that whoever lost the straw poll would withdraw voluntarily.

The idea of voluntary withdrawal is one that I suggested last month as a way that the students could ensure that the results of their election were respected by the trustees. It’s my understanding that the concept was publicly embraced by each of the candidates and that the JSC vote at issue was simply an acknowledgment of this reality — a statement that they intended to send the name of the winner to the trustees because it was their understanding that the runner-up would by then no longer be a candidate.

Even if what I have been told is incorrect, however, and the JSC intended to submit only the single highest vote-getter to the trustees regardless of the wishes of the runner-up, that’s hardly a compelling reason to burn the trustee selection process to the ground. The names of the candidates weren’t a secret — if the trustees wanted to defy the students’ will and install the losing candidate, the failure of the JSC to formally provide that student’s name wouldn’t have prevented them from doing so. To leave such an important position unfilled because of a student government’s symbolic gesture of democratic solidarity is almost unimaginably petty.

And the trustees’ other rationale for rejecting the results of the election — that the process “only resulted in two candidates even running for the position” is even more bizarre. As it turns out, there were initially four candidates for the trustee seat. According to a Cooper student who replied to a query of mine on Facebook earlier today, one of those candidates was unable to gather the required number of signatures in support of his or her nomination, while the other was disqualified because he was on academic probation.

Each of these barriers to candidacy was established by the board of trustees.

That’s right. There were four students ready and willing to run for the seat, but policies established by the trustees resulted in the disqualification of two of them. And because those disqualifications only left two students remaining, the trustees are refusing to fill the seat at all.

My October suggestion that student candidates consider withdrawing after the election was grounded in what I now realize was a fatally flawed assumption — that when the trustees declared that “the Joint Student Council will oversee an election process that will result in three candidates being presented to the Committee,” they meant that the JSC would be tasked with winnowing the field to three candidates if more than three candidates stepped forward.

Instead — and I have to admit that I can’t quite believe that I’m typing this — the trustees now assert that they meant that the JSC had an obligation to ensure that at least three candidates would step forward, collect sufficient signatures to be placed on the ballot, survive the relevant eligibility hurdles, and remain in contention until the end of the process. If at any point the number of remaining candidates dropped below three, the entire process would be abandoned.

I apologize for all the sputtering adjectives I’m using here, but this is really quite preposterous. A body that’s overseeing an election can’t force candidates to run. It can’t demand that students gather signatures in support of their candidacies. It can’t refuse to allow candidates to withdraw if they choose to withdraw. It doesn’t have the power to do any of those things, and it would be absurd for it to attempt to assert such power.

All a body like the JSC can reasonably be expected to do in a situation like this — all it has the ability to do — is establish procedures for facilitating nominations, oversee the selection process, and announce the results. It carried out the first two of these obligations, and it appears to have been preparing to carry out the third this week. But now, in a truly bizarre fit of pique, the Cooper Union trustees have chosen to toss aside all the work and effort and good faith the students of the college have expended on the process for reasons that — well, you’ve heard the adjectives already.

And there’s one more thing to remember. This is all happening in the midst of the most serious crisis in Cooper Union’s history, at a time when the college is on the verge of implementing a tuition policy which many students, faculty, staff, and alumni vehemently oppose.

One would think that at such a moment the college’s trustees would have an interest in placating those communities, in demonstrating their levelheadedness, temperance, and wisdom. One would think they would be inclined to keep things calm. Instead, they’re going to war. And why? To prevent the students of the college from filling a single non-voting, unelected seat on the board of trustees with a representative of their choosing.

It really is kind of incredible.

Tuesday Update | It’s the next morning, and I’m still trying to figure out what the Cooper Union trustees’ plan is. They’re on the verge of imposing tuition, their student adversaries are demoralized, the student seat on the trustees is non-voting, everything’s going according to plan. And then, weeks before the tuition fight comes to a head, they … reject the students’ choice for the trustee seat for preposterous, petty, ginned-up reasons?

I’ve got folks on Twitter telling me that this is a master plan to crush the student movement at Cooper, but it seems like the opposite to me. AND it’s the kind of interference with governance that faculty are going to hate. AND it looks ugly and stupid to alumni.

I try to always assume that folks I don’t agree with know what they’re doing, but in this case I’m truly stumped.

December Update | The JSC satisfied the letter of the board’s demand for three candidates by forwarding the names of both of the students who participated in the election and one of the ones who was disqualified. The board chose the candidate who lost the election as student trustee.

Yesterday The Nation hosted an online roundtable about an incident at Brown University in which New York police chief Ray Kelly, the public face of that city’s racist, unconstitutional stop and frisk program, was heckled so severely at the start of a scheduled speech that he and the college cancelled the event.

I can see where both sides of the Nation debate are coming from, up to a point. On the one hand, I’m mostly a big fan of the idea that the cure for bad speech is more speech, and heckling is clearly a tactic that will turn a not-insignificant number of people off. On the other hand, there’s no question that it makes a powerful impression — Jesse Myerson is right to reject the idea that setting rhetorical traps for someone like Kelly in the Q&A period is likely to garner more publicity for your cause.

But I think that it’s a mistake to frame this discussion purely as a matter of organizing strategy. Because here’s the thing: Ray Kelly was not harmed in any material way by the students’ action. He hasn’t lost his job, hasn’t lost a paycheck, hasn’t lost a public platform. He hasn’t lost anything. The students who heckled him, on the other hand, are in danger of losing a lot.

Just yesterday, Brown’s president announced that the university is considering taking disciplinary action against “individuals or organizations involved” in the disruption. At UC Irvine three years ago, students who heckled an Israeli official were arrested. Ten were ultimately convicted of misdemeanors, and the Irvine Muslim Student Union’s charter and funding were temporarily revoked.

Even where such protests don’t result in criminal charges or loss of group recognition, moreover, disciplinary action has a chilling effect on campus activism. It has become common practice in recent years for administrators to use such charges to constrain students’ future organizing — holding the most serious punishments in abeyance with the threat of reinstating them if a student violates any university policy in the future. Given the ambiguity of typical campus disciplinary rules and the arbitrariness with which they are so often applied, such a threat can effectively sideline prominent activists for the remainder of their time on campus.

And that, ultimately, is the real civil liberties issue here.

In the Nation roundtable the students’ critics raised the specter of the tactic coming back around to be used against the left. But as someone who speaks on on college campuses with some regularity, I can say without hesitation that the prospect of being heckled — even heckled off the stage — doesn’t scare me. It doesn’t make me angry. What does scare me, and what does make me angry, is the thought that administrators might have such students arrested, might shut their funding down, might make it impossible for them to keep organizing on campus in the future.

Student hecklers don’t have the power to silence me, not really. I can engage them, or I can wait them out, or I can meet with interested students informally, or I can reschedule my speech, or I can give my talk online, or I can post its text here on my blog. I can get my word out, and if someone tries to shout me down, I expect I’ll wind up getting more attention — both supportive and critical — than I would have otherwise. But the administration does have the power to silence them.

That’s why those of us who occupy positions of relative prominence and security have a responsibility to be careful about how we describe these incidents. Not to hold back, necessarily — if you believe that the students who heckled Ray Kelly should be brought up on campus charges, or even arrested, by all means make your case. But if you don’t believe that, if you’re criticizing their failure to measure up to your standards of productive tactics or polite behavior, you should say so, clearly.

Unfortunately, a lot of the language that’s been used by the critics of the Brown students in the last few days has been anything but temperate. On Twitter, Katha Pollitt accused the students of bullying Kelly, while Richard Yeselson described their tactics as authoritarian. At the Daily Beast, Peter Beinart called them totalitarians. This kind of overheated rhetoric can only serve to demonize the students, and to pave the way for the use of punitive measures against them.

At the close of her contribution to the Nation roundtable, Pollitt said that the “abstract right to free expression” is “the best protection going for the left.” But too often these days campus activists who engage in rowdy, rambunctious speech are denied that protection. It’s not Ray Kelly’s right to free speech that’s in danger, it’s theirs.

And the threat is anything but theoretical.