Yesterday (April 20) Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket blew up 20 miles above the Gulf of Texas, and today financial experts are explaining why this is just part of his strategy of “successful failure.”  Better to test something a lot during development than pay salaries to people for years trying to get something perfect before you test it, they say. Lifting people to the moon and Mars will happen sooner now than it would have happened a few hours ago, according to an advisor to Musk (Garrett Riesman, a professor at USC) after the explosion (Reuters). His “successful failure” is just a step on the way to his vision. Sure, it cost a lot of money, but what really costs a lot of money is labor costs. 

Blowing up higher ed is equally not a problem for the right-wing governors like Gregg Abbot and Ron DeSantis. Blowing it up is just a test. When tenure goes down in Florida and Texas and academic freedom blinks out, is that just another “successful failure’ on the road to some kind of tax-payer funded, totally vocationalized, profit-generating, gatekeeping way to keep young people busy by offering them three choices after high school: higher ed, the army or prison?

Blowing up higher ed is a problem for us, but we have to be on top of what we are trying to develop — or, to put it in our terms, what the next transition looks like.  Are we clear enough about it in our vision statement? Can we see the next transition foreshadowed in  the organizing and strike waves that have been sweeping through higher ed since COVID?  Are they the kind of “stress test” that Jane McAlevey describes?  Test of what, though? What are we doing during our organizing and our strikes that tests our vision? Where does HELU fit in – through its vision statement? Are our “solidarity asks” a nascent version of a national movement?

I attended yesterdays’ HELU Free College/HIgher Ed for All zoom event and was totally impressed by the energy and variety of presenters. It looks to me as if there were over 70 people participating. It was great! Thanks to Ariana for her high-energy MC’ing. I’m not sure which committee put this together — Political Advocacy? Policy Development?  To bad it overlapped with the Decolonizing Economics program that Nicola organized for HELU through the CFA in the CSUs.  But this is the glorious turmoil that one can only hope for in a rising movement.