Today on the Prospect Weekly Roundup, David Dayen begins the show by discussing what’s been going on at college campuses across the country. On multiple fronts, college students have been taking action after being failed by the state despite facing severe repression. This week, over 300,000 former students of the for-profit Art Institutes won their yearslong fight to get their fraudulent student debt canceled, while their counterparts at more elite colleges have faced militarized police forces and violent counterprotests to demand divestment from Israel.
Elite universities like Columbia and Harvard, where many of the Gaza solidarity encampments are, have massive, multibillion-dollar endowments invested to amass greater and greater institutional wealth. The protesters’ demands for divestment should make us all wonder why universities function as hedge funds first and sites of learning second, and why university administrators appear to be more accountable to the ultra-wealthy donors that finance those investments than the students whose care they are entrusted with.
In the second half of the show, Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project joined the show to discuss the closing arguments of the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google and how the search giant is desperately trying to avoid accountability for its default agreements with Apple and other operating systems, as well as American oil companies colluding with OPEC.
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