U of M’s Deep State: A Retrospective on COVID-19 Necropolitics
As a student, I am often reminded of the limitations of my autonomy under the university system. Since orientation, we are told in many ways that the student's role is one of a customer, a receiver of some service. We trade our time, labor, and more likely than not someone else’s financial investment in exchange for increased access to economic and social capital. It’s important to imagine how the provider of this function, our de facto state, coordinates on behalf of its material interests, as it has done the past year during the pandemic. We’ll start where it seemingly began a little over a year ago: the decision to bring students back to campus in fall 2020.
To suggest students had the choice to either return to campus or stay home amid the pandemic is rather laughable, but far grimmer under further inquiry. Not only were students and parents reassured of the efficacy of the university’s pandemic response, but they were promised a “public health-informed, in-[person] fall semester” by one of the most well-funded public research institutions in the world. But there simply was not substantial research on COVID-19 and nothing could predict the extent to which off-campus housing would prove a major role in sustained waves of cases throughout the semester. Nonetheless, incoming students were promised a next to “normal” semester, with dorms open at reduced capacity and with the sanctuary of the university’s otherwise massive stake in the nation’s health industry. How could such a rich school not be able to get out of the pandemic unscathed?
The factors that led students back to campus are innumerable, but the problem remains evident: the university as an institution took its place as a political actor, driven by material interests in its decision to relocate its students into what would become one of the larger vectors of community spread in the state of Michigan outside the Detroit metropolitan area. HAIL TO THE VECTORS! But more, let’s take a walk down memory lane as the University of Michigan continued to operate as a political actor, one with its very own “deep state.”
The False Narrative: The University is Hemorrhaging Money
Since our tuition was raised across each campus (Flint, Dearborn, and Ann Arbor), the university has presented a very illusory predicament of financial insecurity regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. You may think that there certainly were more costs running the school, given the increase in testing, vaccine rollout, massive investments in online instruction, et cetera. Now there were costs, admittedly, but you may also remember a dramatic series of cuts and last ditch revenue schemes made during the summer as well, whether it was a massive furlough of Flint lecturers, universal salary freezes, reentry of collegiate sports, or perhaps the 1.9% tuition hike and COVID fee for the Ann Arbor campus. If these could not more than make up for expected deficits, surely there would be some money lying around. People familiar with University finances more often than not turn to the endowment, the absolute biggest cash flow for the university being donor support. The endowment, now estimated at $12.48 billion, did not come from nowhere. Many, like myself, have to wonder why this massive fund remained virtually untouched, spending around 3% during one of the most financially uncertain times during the pandemic.
Perhaps many people reading this already recognize this dynamic, but I will of course return to it as an important keystone in placing the University’s approach. Any budgetary administrator will always tell you the endowment is “not a rainy day fund.” That it is to exist in perpetuity and to grow over time with inflation. This frames the position of the University quite well: the only goal is continued growth, and because we must preserve institutional austerity, student and community lives are always secondary. The money in question is to sit and appreciate, not to touch. This is all to mystify and reframe the University’s finances as significantly more dire. The money that we can actually spend is running low, and that’s what’s important for justifying “x”. This will continue to be a tool in the arsenal of the University’s communications whenever these crises emerge. What they will not tell you is that the University is doing just fine, showing “strong finances” and will continue to do so for years to come. What they also will not tell you are the multitude of other explanations, directly tied to specific relationships to business interests that have informed the reopening decision, having nothing to do with any “uncertainty” regarding the pandemic.
The University’s Stake in Ann Arbor
People fondly remember visiting one of the largest stadiums in the world, the Big House, in Ann Arbor each home game day in the fall. Moreover, this is an economic steroid for virtually any business in town. With less and less chance at the beginning of the year for fans to come in and stimulate Ann Arbor’s local economy, the community’s life-blood would inevitably be drained. To subsist at all, however, the area does need one prominent element as a college town: students. Students are recognized as a universal cash cow across the United States and abroad, international students more so. If any of the businesses in town were going to survive a year of the pandemic, students were absolutely necessary. We can see then how the University was put in a position of some authority here, met with a decision to preserve as best it could public health or to act for the economic survival of the community. Though they presented that they could do both, it is clear that the latter option would necessarily be upheld.
But more critically, if there was pressure put on university officials to reopen their campus for students, who possibly would have the biggest sway? The answer to me is all too obvious: landlords. Landlords derive some of the most benefit from the annual influx of students in the fall and typically, considering the bigger proprietors, have significant connections within the University to make sure their interests are heard. One might ask me then, who would have such connections? I’ll offer Ron Weiser, who happens to be one of the University’s regents, acting chair of the Michigan GOP, and founder of McKinley Associates Inc., a prominent real estate company in the area with special expertise in “Institutional Real Estate.” Weiser had quite publicly pushed the decision to reopen in the summer. Despite this, he simply couldn’t have had a stake in “student housing,” some might argue, considering that the company has no property on central or north campus. Perhaps it is unsubstantiated of me to say that Ron Weiser has a direct stake in “student housing,” it is not however groundless to see that his relationship as a landlord within the area derives some material benefit from the University being reopened and that, in turn, has directly come into conflict with the health of the student body.
But to isolate Weiser as the particular force which drove the university to reopen is selective attention. The regents have authority, certainly, but more often than not they rubber stamp whatever is given to them by lower administration and do not have any real discretion as to the actual day-to-day operations of the institution. Weiser or his staff may very well have made calls during the process, threatening to withhold donations, but the actual decision to reopen comes to President Schlissel and Provost Collins, who received pressure from virtually every direction throughout the summer. They are, in turn, informed by the deans of each college, the directors of Environment, Health and Safety, the Faculty Senate, and all too many angry parents. What’s of interest in my power mapping is just how much discretion is at the top of this system and how much students were left out of the process. Never once were students asked if they thought the University should decide to reopen campus, at least not outright. Instead, the many surveys done of students were all directed towards if students felt safe with in-person instruction. Asking for risk assessment from students with purposefully asymmetric information, however, was certainly not a way of soliciting input on university-wide policy nor was it intended to be. The goal of such questions was not to gauge the intended policy in itself, but rather, to ascertain its consequences. The reopening was presumed, taken for granted, and they simply wanted the numbers on how many students to expect.
The Deep State Emerges
It is not as if the community was not openly voicing its concerns one way or another about whether students should come back, I can attest to this quite personally. It’s apparent then that our officials, rather than look towards this input or the will of any public majority, favored the path of least resistance and coordinated quite well to do so. Given the option of potentially preventing community spread which was uncertain with the economic consequences of telling students to stay outside of Ann Arbor which were very certain, the University knew what it was going to do long before June of last year. To what extent this was actually discussed or argued by anyone in power is largely irrelevant: their hands were tied, students were coming back regardless, it was simply a matter of how they would sell this image to incoming freshmen and transfer students. How they coordinated this image and remained stalwart in their commitment to keeping students in the dorms throughout the fall is something worthy of further consideration.
Out of this material need to keep students on campus and its conflicting situation with the understood public health directive of staying in one place during a pandemic, we are met with a unique crisis that is only navigable through deep state coordination, otherwise expressed in administration acting unilaterally on behalf of the community. If you were to ask the Washtenaw County Health Department, which the University has had many public stand-offs with over the past year, you might very well be told that the University’s actions were not very “public-health informed,” and at multiple stages the University’s interests collided with what was good for the county. Despite this, they continue the institutional theater of regular “COVID Town Halls” to gauge community thoughts, all of these comments monitored and fielded days in advance. This is to give another illusion of participation while circumventing any actual public coordination. Such as any crisis of capital emerging from COVID-19, we can see how institutional leaders may supersede health authorities and their own community to uphold their stake as the preeminent political and economic institution within the region.
Understanding these dynamics opens up many more dimensions of critique and avenues for positive and transformative approaches to change. The deep state in question isn’t some secret agency; it is a pure bureaucratic milieu that coordinates on its economic behalf as is necessary during a crisis. As banal as this system is, its complicity in institutional violence against students during the pandemic was simply a byproduct of a fundamental evil within any anti-democratic, capitalist institution. In imagining radically different forms of institutional authority, horizontal or otherwise, we may better ascertain how to affect that change and eradicate the foundations of our University’s economic-driven biopower. We may consider how to truly achieve autonomy within such archaic institutions.
I will continue to explore the University’s role as a political actor in the state of Michigan as well as its relationship with COVID-19 necropolitics, its ability to control the lives and bodily functions of its constituents, particularly on its students during an ongoing pandemic. I plan to release a more in-depth research article surrounding the University’s deep state and how the current framework for my school and many research institutions of its kind are organized hierarchically and anti-democratically. That, in turn, has produced its own consequences for community health as it affects the lives of students, faculty, and the current relationship academia holds with the larger public. Moreover, I envision a liberatory model of queer anarchist theory which may guide us toward a more participatory, ardently democratic approach in organizing public health collective actions. More to come, but for now, continue the struggle, hold back no critique of authority, and fuck Ron Weiser. In Solidarity, Trent.
