In this episode, Money on the Left shares audio from “The Black University & Community Currencies,” a public workshop convened by Professor Andrew J. Douglas at Morehouse College on April 25, 2025. This episode presents Part 1 of the workshop. It features an introduction by Professor Douglas and two panels. The first panel is titled “What is Public Money?” (Delman Coates, Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson. The second asks: “What is the Uni Currency Proposal?” (Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson). Money on the Left will release audio from Part 2 of the workshop within a few weeks’ time.
Description:
In the late 1960s, in the context of the Black Power movement and amid calls to develop Black Studies programs at many US colleges and universities, Black student activists and radical intellectuals sought to imagine a more revolutionary “Black University,” an institution or network of institutions dedicated entirely to Pan-African study and research. This workshop revisits the theory and vision of the Black University. It foregrounds questions of political economy—ranging from the theoretical critiques of capitalism and empire that inspired the Black University concept to more practical questions about financial viability and the “business model” of a revolutionary Black institution. And it considers how an emerging school of heterodox economic thinking—what has come to be known as Modern Money Theory—might inform a renewal of the Black University and its commitment to Black community building.
This comes at a time of great crisis in US higher education, especially at HBCUs. Students are unsustainably indebted, encouraged to think of their education as little more than a private economic transaction or “return on investment.” Schools, increasingly desperate for funding, are made to compete for private capital, often in ways that compromise their ability to serve even the nominally progressive aspects of their missions. Surrounding neighborhoods have become little more than sites of extraction, sources of low-wage labor and opportunities for land speculation, otherwise walled off from the very institutions they are made to sustain. More broadly, democratic questions about what kind of society the university is meant to serve or what kind of society we want an education for are rarely if ever addressed. Meanwhile, fascism’s dramatic resurgence is renewing questions about whether Black institutions can rely on even minimal support from white society. In many ways, we appear to face some of the very same conditions that inspired the vision of the Black University more than a half century ago.
What would it mean to renew the theory of the Black University? What are the challenges involved in building the Black University from within today’s HBCUs? How might we reimagine the financial architecture of the university and its commitment to surrounding communities? How might new thinking about public money and banking-heterodox ideas about credit creation, public investment, jobs programs and the mobilization of community resources inform such a reimagining? How might HBCUs experiment with the creation of complementary currencies? And does this new thinking go far enough, or does it reflect simply a recommitment to the structures of domination and exploitation imperial state projects, the logic of capital, the instruments of antiblack violence that the Black University concept was always meant to expose and challenge?
Below are artwork and “Credo” notes associated with the workshop, discussed by Professor Douglas during his introduction.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited for readability.
Andrew Douglas:
Good morning everyone. Welcome to our workshop on “The Black University and Community Currencies.” My name is Andrew Douglas. I’m a professor of Political Science. My department is one of the sponsors, as is the Andrew Young Center here at Morehouse. I want to thank the center’s lead director, Dr. Jann Adams, as well as the center’s administrative assistant, Ms. Kennedy Nash, without whom none of this would have been possible.
So you see the agenda here? We’ll move to our first panel shortly, and I will introduce speakers, as we work through the program. But I want to offer some general introductory remarks. In the late 1960s, in the context of the Black Power movement and amid calls to develop Black Studies programs at many U.S. colleges and universities, Black student activists and radical intellectuals sought to imagine a more revolutionary Black university.
They imagined an institution or network of institutions dedicated entirely to Pan-African research and community development. This workshop will revisit the theory and vision of the Black University. It will foreground questions of political economy, ranging from theoretical critiques of capitalism and empire that inspired the Black University Concept to more practical questions about financial viability and the business model of an independent black institution. And it will consider how an emerging school of economic thinking, what has come to be known as Modern Monetary Theory, might inform a renewal of the Black University and its commitment to Black community building.
This comes at a time of great crisis in US higher education. Students are unsustainably indebted, encouraged to think of their education as little more than a private economic transaction or return on investment. Schools, increasingly desperate for funding, are made to compete for private capital, often in ways that compromise their ability to serve even the nominally progressive aspects of their missions. Surrounding neighborhoods have become little more than sites of extraction. Sources of low wage labor and opportunities for land speculation, otherwise walled off from the very institutions they are made to sustain.
More broadly, democratic questions about what kind of society the university is meant to serve, or what kind of society we want in education for, are rarely, if ever, addressed. Meanwhile, Fascism’s dramatic resurgence is renewing questions about whether black institutions can rely on even minimal support from white society. In many ways, we appear to face some of the very same conditions that inspired the vision of the black university more than a half century ago.
What would it mean to renew the theory of the Black University? What are the challenges involved in building the Black University from within today’s HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges & Universities)? How might we reimagine the financial architecture of the university and its commitment to surrounding communities? How might new thinking about public money and banking, new ideas about credit creation, public investment, jobs, programs, and the mobilization of community resources inform such a reimagining?
How might HBCUs experiment with the creation of complementary recurrences? Does this new thinking go far enough? Or, does it reflect simply a recommitment to the structures of domination and exploitation, imperial state projects the logic of capital instruments of anti-Black violence that the Black University Concept was always meant to expose and challenge.
The background image you see on our promotional flier here is a 1935 drawing by the artist Hale Woodruff. This is the facade of Salle Hall. Here are two more images: drawings by Hale Woodruff of Atlanta University and Spelman College. I came across these in the AUC archive. They got me thinking about the gated character of the campus, literally and figuratively, the relationships that our schools do and do not have with surrounding neighborhoods. So much of this is shaped by political economy, funding, revenue, employment practices.
HBCUs are an example of what economists call “anchor institutions.” A 2024 study found that HBCUs generate $16.5 billion annually in direct economic impact nationally. Collectively, they employ over 136,000 people for every job created on an HBCU campus. Another one and a half jobs. Off campus jobs are sustained by spending related to the institution. Historically, HBCUs have stood as bulwarks against successive waves of economic dislocation within Black neighborhoods.
They could do a whole lot more with more. But we need to reimagine what it means to fund and provision black schools and the surrounding communities to which they belong. What could we be doing or what should we be doing? If only we had the money? And what if, instead of trying to find the money, what if instead of raising tuition or borrowing at high interest rates or kowtowing to corporate donors, what if instead of trying to find the money, we begin to create our own money, our own investment or credit creation vehicles as means of mobilizing real resources on and around campus?
As our first two panels will explain, this workshop explores the prospects of public or endogenous money creation. We’ll explain that term as an alternative financial paradigm for HBCUs. How might black campuses experiment with the creation of complementary currencies? What would it mean to design new monetary communities in this context? From the conditions of currency issuance to the circuits of receive ability, to the relationships of trust that sustain any viable currency’s day to day operations?
How might monetary experimentation draw the campus into novel pedagogical exercises, whereby student staff and university vendors are taught to think critically and creatively about what money is, where it comes from, and what purposes it serves. And what difference might any of this make in the lives of those who live, learn, and labor on and around HBCU campuses? Our first three panels will work through these questions.
Our fourth panel features several students who enrolled in my class on philosophies of money, and they will discuss a classroom currency that we introduced this spring: what we’re calling the “credo” currency. When we get to that panel a little later in the program, I’ll say a little bit about the imagery on these notes that you see here.
So that’s about it. By way of introduction, just a couple of housekeeping items. One is that we want this to be interactive throughout. So even though we have a series of panels, folks are going to talk. Please feel free to raise hands with questions, comments, and I will facilitate open conversation as we move through.
We know that folks are going to be coming and going, to classes and so forth. We do have a lunch scheduled for 11:30. There’s coffee over there now. So if you want coffee, feel free to get up at any point and go over there.
There are student sign-in sheets in the back. For those of you who are in my classes, or any class, you can put your name there and we’ll make sure your professors gets that. The other important component of this session is that it is being recorded. For a podcast called Money on the Left. So, if you have a question and don’t want to be identified, feel free to just ask anonymously. We can follow up with you afterwards if you have any concerns about any of your comments being recorded and published.
Without further ado, we will turn to our first panel, which features three guests. Let me briefly introduce them, and then I’ll turn over the floor. First is Dr. Reverend Delman Coates. He is a graduate of Morehouse College, Harvard Divinity School, and Columbia University. He has served as the senior pastor of Mount Ennon Baptist Church in Clinton, Maryland since 2004. Under Coates’ his leadership, the congregation has grown to almost 9000 members and is one of the fastest growing congregations in the United States. Pastor Coates is founder and board chair of the Black Church Center for Justice and Equality. He is a member of the Morehouse College Board of Trustees, and a member of the Board of directors of the National Action Network. Importantly for our purposes, he is the founder of the Our Money campaign, an issue-based advocacy campaign that seeks to mainstream the academic insights of Modern Monetary Theory. He has been featured in, among other places, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and Essence magazine. He was also featured in a recent documentary film called Finding the Money, which I strongly encourage everyone to see.
Scott Ferguson, seated in the center, is an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of South Florida. He is also a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He is a co-host of the Money on the Left podcast. Ferguson has published in, among other outlets, Screen, Boundary 2 Online, Qui Parle, CounterPunch. Liminalities. Naked capitalism, Dollars & Sense, Radical Political Economy, Flassback Economics International, Critical Inquiry, Rebellion, and Contexto y acción. His book, Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2018.
Last but not least, Benjamin Wilson is an associate professor of Political Economy and chair of the Economics Department at Suny Cortland. He is a research fellow with the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and an editor for Money on the Left. His authored and co-authored, writings have appeared in Forum for Social Economics, American Review of Political Economy, Money on the Left: History Theory, Practice, Willamette Law Review, Boundary 2 Online, Monthly Review Online, Public Seminar, and Academe. His edited volume, Care, Climate, and Debt: Transdisciplinary Problems and Possibilities, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.
Without further ado, we’ll turn it over to our first three guests to talk about “What is Public Money?”
Rev. Delman Coates:
Good morning. Thank you, Professor Douglas. I’m just so thrilled and honored to be with you today as an alumnus of the college, as a member of the Board of Trustees, certainly as a former chapel assistant here, and to have my mentor right here in the front row. Really delighted to be on this panel with Scott and Benjamin. I actually look forward to gleaning more insights from them. But I want to thank you, Professor Douglas, for inviting us to this important conversation.
I come to this conversation not as an economist, not as a political scientist, but as a historian of religion and a faith leader who started a campaign, out of our church called the Our Money Campaign, which is committed to mainstreaming the core insights of a school of economics known as Modern Monetary Theory. We’ve been going around the country mainstreaming these insights or sharing these insights with African-American faith and civil rights leaders, laypeople and the public.
People wonder: what’s the intersection between Modern Monetary Theory and your work as a pastor? Well, my commitment to this work is born out of my commitment to economic justice as a pastor and to my academic study and the moral philosophy of money and economics found in the major world religions that view the unjust manipulation of the money mechanism as a root cause of evil in the world.
There couldn’t be a more vital and important topic than the one that Professor Douglas has invited us to discuss today: public money. Because in the aftermath of the government’s response to the 2008 crisis, through the government’s intervention and response to the global public health pandemic, to the inability of Democrats under Biden–who held both chambers of Congress and the White House for the first time since the 60s and yet struggled to pass really meaningful, broad based, robust public policy–to the recent fiasco with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The public has seen firsthand the contradictions in the way that policymakers on both sides of the aisle minimize the role of government, public support, and public spending when it comes to priorities and infrastructure that would benefit the people. And yet, those same policymakers harnessed public support and public spending when it comes to bailouts and giving tax cuts to corporations and the rich.
So, I think the public is now poised and positioned for this conversation. It is essential now, so that well-informed actors in the Black faith and civil rights communities do not once again push the wrong answers to the right questions, which oftentimes tends to be some version of the neoliberal economic myth dipped in chocolate, which oftentimes, ends up exacerbating our challenges rather than helping them. I have in mind here some of the understandable protests against certain corporations.
What we need is a massive reeducation project about the role of government that reaffirms, legitimizes, and embraces robust, responsible public spending in ways that eliminate involuntary unemployment, provide free public health care, free public colleges, real affordable housing in this country, and the abolition of student loan debt.
Some of you will remember Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement from 1983. Not just a few of us in this room will remember this. She said, “Let us never forget this fundamental truth: the state has no source of money other than the money that people earn themselves.” She went on to say, “If the state wishes to spend more, it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more.” “There is no such thing as public money,” she ends. “There is only taxpayers’ money.” We must fight this presupposition because it is operative for both economic conservatives and liberals, and both sides are operating from this flawed point of departure. No one seems to challenge those who subscribe to this view.
Where exactly does the taxpayer get their money such that Thatcher could assert this as a fundamental truth? In reality, this so-called “fundamental truth” is a testament to the glaring blind spot in the public’s consciousness related to money creation. It seems obvious enough that in order for money to exist, someone must create it first. Surely Ms. Thatcher did not think it was taxpayers that create the money that they use to pay their taxes, as that would obviously be counterfeiting.
The irony is that we all know that money is key to the operations of our society, in our economy. Money makes the world go round. However, seldom do we think much about something as basic as “how is money created” and “what does this mean.”
Money’s historical association with gold has created this lingering sense that you’re not supposed to be able to create money, or else it debases the money. But this fails to recognize that money creation is a routine and ubiquitous feature of the normal functioning of our economy. Rarely does it cause excessive inflation. While we often think that money creation is limited to the operations of the central bank itself, a public institution, it is more accurate to think of all federal spending–and bank lending for that matter–as essentially forms of public money creation.
Because of this, we are ultimately exercising our public power whenever we engage in public money creation. The “taxpayer myth”–or, the taxpayer money frame that we commonly hear about today–obscures the basic reality that a currency issuing government of the people does not need to raise money in order to spend it, and it never needs to default on its debts, so long as they are denominated in its own currency.
The confusion conveyed by the conventional tax payer myth frame or the house. The household frame is how we end up with Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to our public programs and how we end up with Joe Manchin blocking the Democrats agenda a few years ago because they’re afraid we’re going to go bankrupt as a nation.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump plans another multi-trillion dollar tax cut to the richest Americans. To close, the fundamental truth is that money itself is an accounting system, a public infrastructure that facilitates economic activity the way that roads and bridges facilitate transportation. If we are going to build a better, more just and hospitable world, we must properly understand the tools at our disposal, and we must harness those tools responsibly for a broad systemic change.
The challenges that we face today in our Historically Black Colleges and Universities and in our society, the challenges we face today when it comes to closing things like the racial wealth gap were not created because of where and how Black people spend their discretionary dollars or where they shop. They were created by government policy. Discourses such as taxpayer money obscure the public nature of money itself and undermine the legitimacy of creating the people’s money on behalf of the people.
So we must not lose sight of that reality: our ability to create money is the crown jewel of our public power. And what could be more legitimate than exercising that public power on a public behalf? I look forward to our discussion today.
Scott Ferguson:
Hello, everybody. Thanks for inviting me. I’m really happy to be here. To start, I’ll extend Delman Coates’ reference to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the workings of Elon Musk and his band of white supremacist, misogynist, 20-something young people. I don’t know if everybody caught this part of the saga, but at a certain point, Elon Musk was in a podcast conversation with Ted Cruz and revealed the truth that he discovered when he was illegally, breaking into the offices of the Treasury and every other department that he wanted.
The big scandalous truth was that in the Treasury he found upwards of 12 to 13 computers that just create money out of thin air. On this view, this is an absolute scandal. But of course, for many of us in the Modern Monetary Theory world, we’re like, “yeah, uh we know this.” We we know this is how it works. This is no big scandal.
Now, for my remarks. I helped co-found an organization called the Money on the Left Editorial Collective. We produce several podcasts. We have a publishing vertical, kind of like a blog. We have a budding academic journal. We put on conferences and events. And we advocate for multiple federal and local political, economic and cultural programs.
For instance, we advocate for a Federal Job Guarantee in the spirit of the Civil Rights struggles and the Black radical tradition. We advocate for a Green New Deal, reparations for black Americans, affordable housing, abolition of student loan debt, health care debt, and the list goes on. We put Modern Monetary Theory–what we sometimes refer to as the “public money paradigm” at the heart of our project. We stand for economic justice that is abundant, democratic, intersectional, and anti-imperia.M
The Modern Monetary Theory paradigm has been developed since the 1990s, largely at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a few other places around the United States and, and elsewhere in the world–Australia and the UK as well. Our central gambit is that this paradigm, which has emerged as a more, I would say, focused and narrow economics discourse, has tremendous implications for not just politics, which the Modern Monetary Theorists themselves realize, but also for thinking everything else in the world–about culture, about esthetics, about art, about popular media, about social movements, about social values. We argue that the way that Modern Monetary Theory, the public money paradigm, flips the script on our standard ways of thinking about money really changes the way we have to think about everything.
As Dalman explained, the MMT paradigm says the private sector is not first. Entrepreneurs, whether they’re doing evil things or wonderful things, don’t come first. They don’t. They don’t spring up out of nature. It’s not that they simply have talent or a great idea, pitch it to the market, and then our economy blossoms into action. They do not engage in individual micro exchanges and transactions. And from there, we get a bubbling-up into a larger macro economy. The government does not sit on the side as a mere regulator, who that sometimes intervenes but sometimes doesn’t. Government is not broke, unable to afford to take care of the larger population.
Instead, money comes from and has always come from centralized governments. This is as true in ancient Mesopotamian societies as it was for societies in the Middle Ages around the world, as it is for our society today.
Money is a public utility, as Delman has suggested. It is not just something that comes from government and is created by government. It is also designed by government. It is a legal technology in addition to a governmental technology. And because money is something that is created as a function of institutional design, currency issuers like the United States, like Japan, like many other countries around the world cannot run out of money.
There’s always enough money. We can always create money. We are always creating money for different purposes. The question is not where are we going to get the money? How are we going to afford reparations for Black Americans? How are we going to pay for canceling student loan debt? The question, rather, is: how are we going to make it?
What institutions are going to make it? Who’s going to be responsible for making it? Who’s going to be responsible for the production and social relations that result from that creation? Who’s going to hold those people accountable? These are real political questions. These are real cultural questions. These are real aesthetic questions. And they matter tremendously.
But we need to get out of a zero sum paradigm in which we imagine that government doesn’t have any money. On the standard reasoning, in order for the government to attain money, it must tax from the private sector, where it supposedly is born. Or, it has to borrow from the private sector.
To combat such thinking, Money on the Left expands upon MMT’s potent argument that money is not a private zero sum game but rather a boundless public utility. We apply this claim to really everything that we research. Then we’re always reaching out to other people–like potentially yourselves–to join us with your own researches, whether it’s academic or artistic or political. Let’s start to think through this problem anew. What would this all mean to approach our problems, our needs, our desires, our systemic injustices, our long time hopes and aspirations for a just future? What would it mean to start thinking about those questions from a radically non-zero-sum perspective?
Now, this is not to say that we deny injustice. Injustice is everywhere. This is not to deny that monetary, political, economic, cultural, aesthetic institutions aren’t created according to zero sum principles. They are. And people and communities and institutions and organizations are forced into zero sum choices. And we think this is wildly unjust, as everyone else in this room I’m sure does. But our approach is to say the underlying conditions of possibility are not zero sum. We are getting reality wrong, we are cutting ourselves off at the feet, if we buy into the rhetoric and the imagination that says, “Well, we just couldn’t collect enough taxes this year. So, I guess the poor, the disenfranchised aren’t going to get enough help because we just couldn’t we couldn’t muster the votes to tax the rich to get their money back.”
We also point out the perversity of pursuing justice from within the standard private, finite, zero-sum money paradigm. You know, there have been all kinds of calls for many decades to tax the rich. Bernie Sanders is, you know, a cool guy, a fellow traveler, right? He had actually had a Modern Monetary Theorist as one of his top advisors, but he didn’t always follow what that advisor advised. In any case, Bernie Sanders for years would advocate for a Wall Street tax on speculative transactions. And that sounds great, right? Make those rich bastards pay who are speculating with all of this money that none of us have.
And every time you’re going to make money speculating, we’re going to take some. We’re going to take a cut of that and we’re going to fund our schools, and we’re going to create smooth sidewalks and fix rundown neighborhoods, and we’re going to do things for the people. That sounds really great. Until you come to such a proposal from the vantage of the public money paradigm. What you realize then is that not only do you not need that Wall Street money, but you’re actually incentivizing it, because now your smooth sidewalks and your cleaned up neighborhoods and your money for education needs Wall Street reckless, unethical speculation to fund itself.
Let’s not do that. Let’s tax the rich because having rich people, having billionaires in our society is bad for democracy. It’s bad for the horizon of equality. It is bad for the manipulation of our political system as we are seeing with DOGE. We don’t need the rich’s money to spend on the people.
Instead, we need to seize the means of spending. And that is public money. We need to design public money in such a way that is going to serve us all and serve our environments. I think I’ll stop there.
Benjamin Wilson:
Thanks, Scott. I think that was a nice place to pass it off to me. I studied at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, which is widely regarded as the founding school of MMT. Learning MMT 101, the focus of Modern Monetary Theory is generally macro and design. This typically entails Federal Reserve policy, the federal government, big programs like the Green New Deal and the Jobs Guarantee Act.
However, the question that was always raised for me and consistent with Scott’s perspective at the end there is: How do we know what these public jobs in the Job Guarantee program are going to be? How is this mobilized in communities? What is the work that people are going to do? How do we begin organizing the institutions anew such that this thing works? So, I started to investigate other forms of money creation, things like complementary and community currencies.
I discovered work by our Money on the left colleague, Jakob Feinig, titled Moral Economies of Money. Feinig studies the evolution of money creation in the United States from its origins as a settler colonial state. He traces how communities mobilized the production of their roads and their schools, while being dominated by the United Kingdom all the way through the evolution of the New Deal. Roosevelt’s move was to separate the communities from the knowledges and practices of money creation. His administration removed community understanding of money, insisting upon the logic that we have today that the state has to find money, the taxes, finance things. Feinig calls this process “monetary silencing.” To overcome monetary silencing, individuals really need to understand how and where money comes from.
I think it’s useful to look at where money is coming from in our everyday lives. Commercial enterprises are creating their own monetary systems on a daily basis. Every time you swipe a credit card and they’re giving you rewards points, or an airline is giving you airline miles, or if you’re playing video games and you’re getting monetary credits in a in a video game, that may be confined to being redeemed in that video game, but some of them now are being able to be used and distributed and turned into real resources in Microsoft Stores and places of this nature.
The commercial enterprises have been able to create monetary systems on their own to promote certain things, like loyalty to brand. And so what would similar sorts of monetary designs and micro levels look like to promote sustainable production? New energy systems and, reading programs for youth sports programs. Things that are of value, that are always underfunded and under-provisioned in our communities as a beginning space for creating that imagination and those institutions for what public money creation looks like–another space where this type of money creation and questions about how money mobilizes, production and things like research, I think is useful.
I think about grants. While grants are often provisioned by the state, sometimes by private money, the point of the grant is different from a loan. Your promise to produce is the knowledge, the information, the new products, etc. that advance a particular request. I think this is a particularly good model for thinking about how public money could mobilize much larger things–especially colleges and universities, because we’ve been practicing this sort of underwriting for decades.
So, those are the types of questions that I’m particularly interested in. And how does it start in our local communities and institutions, and how do we start to recap that, the logic and the democracy in, decision making and coordination around what our real resources are in our communities and how we take advantage of those given the responsibility of credit creation and the ability to make the promises to deliver those goods and services to each other. Yhank you.
Scott Ferguson:
I’m going to piggyback. You were promised a definition of “endogenous money.” So, I’m going to try to provide one. The public money framework first and foremost argues that money starts as a public utility. From there it can be doled out and privatized. One major macroeconomic channel through which money is created is congressional appropriation. When Congress gets the votes to pass a bill, they initiate an appropriations process and money is created out of thin air in order to meet the monetary demands that were spelled out in that bill. The other major channel through which money is created in our society is through a mechanism that some legal scholars have called the “finance franchise.” Essentially what this means is that the system of public banks in the United States has legal charters from the federal government. Some have state charters, either federal or state charters. Those charters legally give permission to banks to create money constantly, once again, from nothing out of thin air. And they do so in the form of credit.
Money is credit. When a person, company, or entrepreneur walks into a bank and asks for a loan, the loan officer will say, “Well, tell me your business plan. And that person will say: “You know, I’m thinking of opening this restaurant. It’s my second restaurant. I have one uptown, but I want one downtown. This is what I do at the first restaurant. This is why I think the second one is going to be successful.” Then the banker will say: “Yeah, this seems like you’re going to make money, and then you’re going to be able to pay off a loan from us. So, I’ll give you a line of credit.” When that bank officer gives the entrepreneur a line of credit, they don’t go into the bank vault and see what piles of money are there or if they’ve been depleted. They don’t jump around on the money like they’re Scrooge McDuck. All they do is they go to their computer, they go to their spreadsheets, and they type numbers on their computer into their spreadsheet. They literally just create dollars.
Banks don’t recycle finite private funds out in the world. They don’t recycle your deposits. They just create lines of credit because they are licensed to do so. Now, the idea that money is created internally is what we in the world call “endogenous money,” this idea that public money is created internally as a function of institutions, the institution of Congress and the institution of these private banks that have these public licenses.
Endogenous just means internal. It just means it’s a creation that comes from within. For this reason, another way that we describe our paradigm is a “public endogenous money paradigm.” Money is a boundless public utility, and it is created internally based on the institutions that have been designed to create those forms.
Building on what Ben has talked about, we are really committed to getting away from capitalist logics and capitalist monetary designs. Unlike other critical and leftist traditions, we do not equate money and capitalist exploitation. They are not the same. Capitalist exploitation uses money and designs money to do its evil. But money itself is not a capitalist expression. Capitalist logics are not simply monetary, for example, for–profit lending, the profit motive as such, or keeping what Marx and Engels called a “reserve army of the un- and underemployed, which typically, is, filled up the most by People of Color.”
The way you get around that is you start imagining and designing other kinds of monetary institutions. What Ben was talking about was an idea that we’ve been developing, which is creating monetary institutions that are based on the model of granting. We have we can have community members running these institutions and reaching out to other community members asking for their democratic participation regarding how money should be created and how it should be allocated.
And not just that. The money that is created can be simply grants, not necessarily loans. Grants that include obligations, but those obligations are not capitalist obligations. Rather than the demand to “pay back this quantity that you’ve gotten from the bank,” grants ask you to “meet your social, communal, ecological obligations that you promised to fulfill.”
To get such a grant, you promised, for example, to create a public restaurant that provides healthy, nutritious food and a social atmosphere within a food desert. That’s what you promised to do with this grant. Well, did you do it? If you did, you don’t have to pay anything back. What you’ve paid back your qualitative effort, along with the effort of all the people you’ve coordinated in doing that job.
So, for us at Money on the Left, money doesn’t have to be for profit. It doesn’t have to be for exploitation. It doesn’t have to be anti-democratic. It can be all of these things and more.
Rev. Delman Coates:
If I could jump in here, one of the things that I want to say is that the power of MMT is in the reframing. One of the contributions of Modern Monetary theory is that it helps us to reframe how we think about deficit spending. We haven’t talked about that, but one of the things that we confront, as I go around and talk to people about public money is that there is this common sense way of thinking about deficit spending that can create a hurdle for many people and ends up being exploited by policymakers–really on both sides of the aisle.
I think that the one incredibly powerful contribution of MMT is in the way in which it helps the public understand that it is through deficit spending that the federal government engages in public money creation, that deficit spending is not something that we should resist or reject, but it’s something that we should encourage. There is excess money left in circulation only when the federal government engages in this mechanism.
Now, we just want to make sure that that public money creation goes to benefit the public and not to benefit the elite and rich. The tagline of the Our Money campaign is: “Change money, change the world.” If we change the way we think about money, we can literally change the world. And what I want people to understand is that, for me, the question is not whether money will be created, but how it will be created and for whose benefit.
Take some of the big infrastructure debates and conversations, like the one we saw four years ago in Congress with President Biden’s infrastructure bill. There was this spiking of the football when they agreed to spend, I think, $1 trillion over ten years. We thought that was such a great achievement. What people fail to realize is that when the federal government does not engage in public money creation, that does not mean that money will not be created for infrastructure. It means that the buck will be passed down to states, municipalities, and to individuals in the form of bond issuances. So, people need to understand that the question is not whether money will be created. The question is whether the money will be created by the public or whether it will be created to the benefit of private interests.
I mentioned earlier that it has been a part of the historic critique of the major religions of the world to to critique the unjust manipulation of the money mechanism. Islam is probably the remaining world religion that has maintained its critique of riba, or what has been called “usury.” This is not just the charging of excessive interest. It is the unjust manipulation of the money mechanism, which I contend is why Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers during the last week of his life, according to the narratives of Scripture.
I really want to encourage students who are here today, the public who will hear this recording, to really take seriously the vast contributions offered and presented by the framework of Modern Monetary Theory. Modern Monetary theory is not, in my mind, an alternative economic system that doesn’t exist. MMT is a description of how our economy works. It is a reflection of how our economy is working today.
We just need to harness that power for the benefit of those in this room, the less fortunate. We cannot have the benefits of public supports and public money creation go solely to the top 1%.
Questions:
Student 1:
I’m a sophomore political science and journalism double major from Columbus, I’ve been studying the concept of MMT. We’ve been reading Jacob Feinig as well. So, this concept of “monetary silencing” is not new to many of my brothers in this room who are also in the class. My question is: this is something that we’ve all kind of been battling with? For us, this takes a lot of our conceptions of the economy and alters them, in my opinion, pretty significantly.
At times, it can be difficult to wrap your head around this idea. I guess my question is: because monetary silencing is so heavy right now–especially with the digitization of money–how do we know that MMT is what’s actually happening? Does that does that make sense?
Benjamin Wilson:
Yeah, I think that’s a terrific question. I actually think that digitization and Bitcoin have made it easier for me to talk about money being created. One of the fascinating things about Bitcoin, if you read the initial white paper, is that it’s essentially a technical description of how you would formulate the barter method of money using technology.
Scott Ferguson:
Do you want to talk about what the barter myth is? We haven’t talked about it yet.
Benjamin Wilson:
Sure, the butter myth is really where textbook economics says that money comes from. This is their attempt to obscure money and make it this finite thing. This repression is so intense that the intermediate microeconomics textbook that I teach doesn’t even index money. It’s just not a part of the story. But orthodox economics appeals to barter when it does show up their story, because it has to be a finite thing in order to fit into the model.
They tell a story: money arises when a community begins bartering and trading. They’re trading their watch for the phone and they’re trading the microphones for coffee [gestures to items on table]. And the problem with this barter is that if I want that phone, Scott has to want my coffee for that phone. Otherwise, I gotta go find somebody that wants that coffee that wants something that Scott wants.
There’s a terrific Curious George episode–a cartoon that I saw with my children not long ago–that’s about this mechanism. The idea is that finding barter partners for every good is really time consuming and expensive.They call this the “double coincidence of wants” and declare that it is a very hard problem to solve.
So, rather than continuing down this path, the society spontaneously comes to agree there’s something of value will be the medium of exchange, the “numeraire.” That’s usually some sort of metal, right? That’s why the school of thought is often called the metalist. And we’ve since started thinking about it as gold.
However, this is just a made-up fictional story. There is no society that did this. There is no record of this barter transaction. In fact, the anthropologist David Graeber demonstrates that credit and accounting come before coinage and before so-called barter. You really have to know how money works in order to “barter” effectively.
So, that whole mythology is what Bitcoin is trying to recreate, right? The myth is that money is created through the exchange process and has to be mined similar to gold. It’s using all these energy processes.
But is that how we want to design our money? Is that how we think that a digitally created monetary system is going to work more effectively? Or could we design it in a way that’s based on the model that we’re using currently? That includes the tax circuit and money creation from a public center where we’re democratically engaging in the process of deciding what it is we want to mobilize collectively.
The exchange story, individualism, the myth of the government is a household that must balance its budgets, etc.: all these things really confine and eliminate our ability to do things as collectives. So for me, the digital system has just opened up the possibility that this is designed and it is an experiment. It is that something that we can all engage in and we can do it differently.
Rather than burning tons of coal on China in order to create money, we could probably do it much more effectively, either through credos or other digital forms.
Student 2:
I’m also in Dr. Douglas’s class, I know a little bit about monetary silencing. I know also, if Dr. Douglas is to be trusted, that the only true limits on the government’s ability to create money are inflation and the real resources that are available to be mobilized. My question is: What would it look like for us to push past monetary silencing and push to the true limits of what the government’s ability to create money is? What would that allow us to do?
Benjamin Wilson:
A lot! Well, I mean, we could start with the World War II example. Before World War II, the United States was in a Depression, one of great magnitude. We had “no money.” And, forces of evil and global needs moved us into the biggest global world conflict ever. In doing so, the United States mobilized a whole new economy, production on a massive scale and zero unemployment. We mobilized the resources necessary to win that war. Then after the war, right as a whole new crop of people are returning from winning the war, we realized that we’re going to need new employment and housing and all of these things that weren’t there before as we were coming out of the Great Depression.
We mobilized a whole other set of material production systems to build the suburban American home, to build our national highway system, to build energy infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest through damming of rivers and electrification. We built many of our hospitals and our public schools, our national park system, many of our state parks. I come from New York State, and we have a number of beautiful state parks that are so well constructed. And there’s parks everywhere. Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps built those resources. So, we’ve done this.
We’ve effectively mobilized massive transformation. And in the pursuit of violence against other human beings. The question, I think, politically is can we mobilize resources similarly to fight and justify other value structures? I think the climate crisis is probably the most obvious crisis that we face as a collective. We require massive mobilization of our production system and our ways of thinking about what is valuable.
What is a Green New Deal house versus a New Deal house look like? The one that’s sustainable and embedded in the community and is affordable and available to many people. What are the utilities in your household going to look like that aren’t sucking up tons of carbon in a green infrastructure? All of these things need to be invented and created in order to build a better new world.
MMT allows us to think about those questions rather than the “finding the money” question and the politics of taking from some to give to others. You know, it’s just a much more complicated battle than saying, “Let’s go after climate change and let’s do something so that we’re building an economy that lasts not just for this generation, but for generations to come.”
Scott Ferguson:
And we have many, many tools at our disposal to control what is called “inflation.” The Money on the Left perspective is that inflation is actually a terrible word to describe a whole set of processes–political contestations, design choices and legal choices–that tends to be misleading.
Now a lot of people have this idea that, “Oh, well, Biden spent such and such trillions of dollars and made sure that some kids didn’t starve. And, you know, if only we had let the kids starve, then we wouldn’t have had this inflation.” Whereas heterodox economists, MMT economists and other heterodox economists will tell you: No, this ‘inflation’ was driven largely by corporate greed and by corporations using this opportunity to raise prices. Some of it was caused by supply chain issues during, during and after the pandemic.
But during World War II, for example, how is it that we controlled “inflation” when we were spending more money than the US had ever spent before? One of the ways was we introduced a whole set of price controls. In fact, those were around during the new Deal. But we also issued war bonds. Most Americans thought, and still think, that war bonds paid for the war.
I want to defeat fascism. So, I’m going to invest my hard earned money in the war bond so that we can afford to to spend: money for planes and bombs and all that kind of stuff.” Yet most heterodox economists would tell you, including John Maynard Keynes, that what those war bonds did is hold up spending at home because there weren’t a lot of consumer goods being manufactured. There weren’t a lot of consumer goods to buy, because the majority of US production was going into the war effort. So if you bought war bonds now and you earned a little bit interest, the promise was you’ll get a payout after we win after the war, and then we’ll have a robust consumer economy.
Then you can use your proceeds to spend during that time. So, there are all kinds of political fights, legal battles, monetary design issues–-tools like bonds that can be used to modulate or control what is typically called inflation.
Andrew Douglas:
I think we’re about done with this session. I’m reminded of Coretta Scott King’s famous remark that ‘We’ve never seriously dealt with the question of a peacetime economy.” We always seem willing and able to mobilize resources in wartime, but not so with peacetime mobilization efforts. In the 1970’s, Cortta Scott King was very involved as an activist around inflation politics, especially concerning its impact on Black men and women. If you’re not familiar with that history, I recommend you take a look at it.
All right, that was a great opening to the overarching question of public money.
*** Break ***
Andrew Douglas:
We’re going to shift now and I just want to talk a little bit about a proposal that both Ben and Scott have put forward for thinking about employing this view of money on college and university campuses. So kind of taking a step down, to some extent, from the federal government level to thinking about how colleges and universities, as centralized governing authorities within a certain kind of community, might assert themselves as currency issuing institutions.
Scott Ferguson:
So, as Professor Douglas said, we’ve been thinking about this public endogenous money framework for universities. And that’s where most of us hang out. That’s where most of us work. That’s where most of us teach and most of us learn. So we’re kind of, doing the…
Benjamin Wilson:
Multitasking
Scott Ferguson:
Yeah, multitasking, but also what the Marxist Antonio Gramsci would call being organic intellectuals, right? We’re inhabiting our space and we’re thinking about, in addition to advocating for a job guarantee – you know, I work on aesthetics and film, you know, and I study the Hollywood blockbuster – in addition to all that stuff, we’re also thinking about the institutions that we inhabit every day with, with community. And this all began in 2020, in probably April of 2020, which was the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic. And immediately we were hearing – in all the national newspapers – we were hearing that the, you know, the economy is shutting down and what this means for states is that tax receipts are going to plummet. And what that means is that state financing is going to take a huge hit. And all the state financing for universities – the place where we work – is going to go away. So there was this tremendous threat of immediate austerity. It did, the austerity was implemented at many institute sessions, people were fired, people were furloughed, departments were closed, even whole, whole institutions closed. Turns out those tax receipts didn’t actually plummet in the way that it was predicted to.
But in the meantime, we were thinking to ourselves, okay, we have these tools. We have this paradigm. What can we offer to our community? How are we going to finance these universities? And at that time we were thinking about a couple other threads. One was that we in the Money on the Left group have pushed beyond what we often refer to as Modern Monetary Theory 101 or MMT 101 or 1.0. We used both of these terms. And MMT 1.0 or 101 tends to privilege the federal government as a currency issuer, and MMT 101 then says the currency issuer can’t run out, but everybody else can run out, including all sub-federal governments: states and municipalities. But there’s a bit of a tension in MMT 101, because MMT 101 will also say all money is endogenous and created out of thin air all the time. So we were thinking about how okay, so why does MMT 101 say the federal government can make infinite money, but everybody else has to pretend that money is just a finite thing that gets recycled between individuals and organizations and firms and etc. etc.? Why? Because there’s something not true about – there’s not something true about this, even within MMT’s own argument. And it was the pandemic that I think really kicked – at least for me, I think you’ve been doing this for far longer – but for me, this really kicked that into high gear when I saw all of these threats of austerity to sub-federal governments.
At the same time, we were noticing the Federal Reserve of the United States, which, as Delman pointed out, is a publicly chartered institution that is a creature of Congress. It is not just a gang of private banks, as much as they want us to think that. The Federal Reserve of the United States was making – I mean, this is relatively speaking – they were making radical moves. They were making very, very, very experimental changes in the way they operated. And they were opening up a host of what they called lending facilities, in which they essentially open their doors and said any sector, especially private businesses and banks, that are hurting and that are going to, potentially collapse during this Covid 19 recession, if not depression, you can bring us your debt and we’ll buy it and we’ll make you whole. Just like that. They just opened up their balance sheets. How’d they do it? There’s no Scrooge McDuck. There’s no vault. They just use (probably) Excel. Although I haven’t been to the Fed or any of the Feds, but I’m sure they use Excel spreadsheets. So they just pushed numbers on a computer and they opened it up. And one of the things that they did is they opened up this new facility that they called the Municipal Lending Facility, the MLF. And the MLF was supposed to be for sub-federal governments and other public agencies to use the Fed’s lending facility as well, and to make them whole. Now, the terms of that lending facility for the public – surprise, surprise – were awful. Very few entities used it. I think the state of Illinois started the process. The public transit system in New York started the process. I don’t even know if it ever went through. Did they actually use it?
Benjamin Wilson:
They used it.
Scott Ferguson:
Okay. So two entities used it because the terms were so punishing. We, at the time, were thinking, you know, the universities should apply to the MLF to keep us whole, to keep us teaching, to keep our students learning, to keep our communities growing. Why wouldn’t we do that?
Benjamin Wilson:
And allow students to stay home.
Scott Ferguson:
Yeah, allow students to stay home.
Benjamin Wilson:
And learn at distance rather than forcing them back into closed dormitories and concentrated space…
Scott Ferguson:
That’s right. Because universities…
Benjamin Wilson:
… because they were being threatened without those incomes of closure and such. So, how do we do better public health under an austerity regime versus a public money understanding and the tools that could have been available to us? So there was exigency to this sort of process and concern. But there’s just an overwhelming desire to keep things going as they go.
Scott Ferguson:
Even if they’re going to take everyone down with them.
Benjamin Wilson:
That’s right. So let’s bring the students back and let’s collect our tuition and our dormitory fees, and let’s teach zoom classes while they’re sitting in their dorms, and those sorts of ideas were infinitely more tangible than the idea that we would try to leverage public money in a different way.
Scott Ferguson:
So then we start, okay, so I should say we call this the ”uni currency project”. We published on this, we advocated for this. We wrote papers: academic, journalistic. We had events about this project. And the name comes from a riff on the nickname for municipal bonds. So municipal bonds, if you’re in this world, are called “munis”. So one of our members said, you know, universities should issue instead of “munis” should issue “unis” and have the Fed buy them up, basically. So that stuck. So we’ve called these the “unis” or the “uni currency project”. And I have to say it is not a static, stable project. It is a kind of working space and a framework that we’ve been changing here and there, experimenting with. I wouldn’t even say it’s been getting better. I would just say times shift, new demands pop up, the political situation shifts. And so we’ve manipulated this construct with the shifting times and as we thought more about it. And the way that we’ve done so is essentially taking what is what we call both a top-down strategy and a bottom-up strategy.
The top-down strategy is politicizing large federal level public institutions – governments, the Federal Reserve, Congress – to give universities the powers of credit creation so that they can allocate what they need to allocate for themselves. Our argument is that universities are regional economic anchors, either as individual universities or as university systems or consortiums or collectives of universities. Universities are often one of the top, if not top, employers in regions. They are incredible – to use neoliberal jargon – economic engines, drivers of market activity. They are central. If all universities closed up tomorrow morning, our economy would go into a massive depression. That’s how important these economic anchors are. So our arguments from a top-down model is to say the federal government should be allocating the “finance franchise” – the capacity to create credit – to these economic anchors. Why give it to a bunch of private banks who don’t have our communities in mind and all they want to do is make a profit and then store the proceeds in some, you know, bank account, you know, off the Cayman Islands or something? Why don’t we give the finance franchise to universities?
A couple of years later, some friends of ours who are lawyers, and political advisers, and had been working with the Squad in Congress – people like Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley and AOC, Ilhan Omar, and others – they helped craft an Act, a bill that was never voted on, called the Public Banking Act. And it was essentially, a bill to create a series of public banks that would be, you know, not for profit and grounded in the public sector for the public purpose. So we started making the argument that the Public Banking Act should be extended to include universities as stewards of credit creation.
At the same time, we know damn well that the federal fight is a big one and, you know, who knows what’s going to happen there. So we also had a bottom-up grassroots strategy that we have argued you can pursue at the same time, and you can pursue at the most micro intimate level of a classroom, and you can build it up to multiple classes, to the campus, to the city, to the county. And these two directions of analysis and policy design and advocacy sort of meet up. And I think I’ll stop there and let you pick up the bottom-up strategies.
Benjamin Wilson:
So the bottom-up strategy really started at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. They ran a currency program called the Buckaroo, where students were paid buckaroos for effort in the community through nonprofit organizations. And they drove the demand for the buckaroo currency in their department by implementing a tax structure where you had to pay a certain number of buckaroos at the end of the semester in order to redeem a certain proportion of your class grade. And a graduate of theirs, Fadhel Kaboub, went to Denison College and he’s been running it there for a very long time. And he’s since gone on to some international institutions and has done some very amazing work internationally. But I’ve picked up the stick at Cortland and have been issuing what were originally called Benjamins, because I’m Benjamin and it’s all about the Benjamins. And, I started with this very MMT 101 framework where I was issuing it for just nonprofit activity in the community. They could go do whatever they wanted. But through that, I got to know a number of my community members, and I’ve since been a part of the development of what’s called the Cortland Food Project. And in that process, one of the issues with the job guarantee and doing this work through nonprofits that becomes evident is capacity, right? Those real resources. Right. There’s a certain number of people that a nonprofit can take on as volunteers before it starts to become cumbersome, that you’re spending all your time training and it’s taking you away from other activities and project development and those sorts of works.
So in the years since I’ve added the components of partnering with these organizations to help them meet the goals of their grant-funded projects. And the work that I do with my students is to help them think through how the grant’s objectives and goals are being met by creating surveys and other data collection measures that we can then share with the nonprofits so that they can use that information on future grant writing and programming. So the capacity is starting to build. And then this year I added another layer where they could now do their volunteer activity through the Student Government Association. So this started with a student that is the president of the finance club. And one of the reasons why I run the program through nonprofits is I want students to think about the value of work and labor outside of the profit motive and what that sort of work does. How it works differently than service sector jobs, that are for profit. How management is different. How the camaraderie and teamwork in those organizations is different. So to have unis being awarded to a club that is doing private money, investment strategies seemed a little bit strange to me at first, but the president has, been very open and thinking through alternative investment strategies and green technologies or triple bottom returns or some of these other ways that they can at least address these ideas through the club. And then the other clubs that have been doing it – we have a big event on campus that mobilizes hundreds of students for a build day. It’s like a habitat for humanity sort of activity where they build raised beds and they build houses and those sorts of things. So that’s sort of a big macro sort of investment that the uni could eventually help coordinate through SGA. But I like being a part of SGA and working with the SGA students, because they are part of an institutional governance structure that is diversified, that models as an institution, I think, a space where their vote and their desires for how unis would be implemented in a very robust way. A way that is much broader than just my classrooms from one semester over the next, voting on what they should be allowed to do and what they should receive the uni back in payment of taxes for.
I’ve also, you know, to get more people on campus aware of it – and, Doctor Douglas’s credos are much better looking than my homemade unis – but I’ve been handing them out at community events on campus like this. So, if my students were here, I would be paying them in unis for their attendance here, because it builds community and it builds scholarly curiosity and the desire to be involved in your community and it engages you. So I would be very visibly at the end handing out unis to people. And then other faculty ask me: “What are you doing?” And I say, “I’m paying my students, and you can pay your students too.” Because one of the things we struggle with is how do we get out of the Covid malaise and bring back that community sense and the understanding that these sorts of academic events are important and they are rewarding and you do get a lot out of it. And, you know, this is the reflection that is presented to me through the students’ reflection pieces that talk about, you know, design questions, how to make it more receivable. “What was the value of work outside of profit? How can I make it better?” sort of reactions. And many of them, when they go to things like book club readings are like “Wow, those students really read that book. Like, I wish I spent more time reading the books in this class, and I’m going to do more.” And, “I went to this event that you weren’t even paying me to go to the other day. Like it was really terrific.” And so, you know, it’s sort of an icebreaker, right? Once you start engaging in your community, you see how rich and powerful it really can become here.
And so that’s sort of the grassroots strategy and I’m so excited that Professor Douglas has been doing the credo. His money is beautiful. And I think the aesthetic of the money is really important. Who we’re celebrating. What we’re mobilizing. Right? The moral economies with their pictures of, like, waterworks systems on them. When people know what the money is used for and what it’s being used for I think is a very powerful thing. And, you know, the greenback era, one of the things that’s not, I think, analyzed closely enough was how people engaged with the greenback, which was directly created by the federal government in order to mobilize the Civil War. But they also changed the color of bank-issued money. So the bank-issued credits during the Civil War were called black backs, so people could tell whether or not they were using money that was helping to fight the war, or they were using private investments. So diversifying and having these sub governance strategies, I think, is an important way of differentiating what we can use money for and what its possibilities are. And that’s part of the pedagogy that it is hard. I mean, I think your anxieties and your understandings and your question of whether any of this is real is a sentiment that all of us go through, right? Especially when the news and the media is constantly telling us other stories about the government as a household. It’s just such an easy narrative to let your mind slip into. But when we are tasked with the responsibility of using the power of public money in our communities I think it is a galvanizing force, and it helps us to see how we are stronger together, rather than individually indebted individuals.
And you would get unis too for being the first brave questioner to ask.
Student 1:
So about the Suny Cortland Benjamin currency that you guys have. And we’ll talk about this more during our student panel, but one of the things that we encountered with the credo is we’re like, okay, we want to expand, but what does that mean? What does that look like? You mentioned SGA, at your university. So does this expand to other classes now? Other classes, have they also adopted the currency?
Benjamin Wilson:
Yeah. So I have one brave faculty member in sociology that is issuing it. And this is, I think, it was a really interesting conversation. And this is where faculty governance really has to own this and think about this, because, you know, what is it that we are using it to reward? What are we mobilizing? What is the value of it? You know, so one hour of volunteering at a nonprofit. One hour plus of engagement in a campus activity. He was having students go to particular types of film screenings that were consistent with the lectures and the materials in his class. How do we manage the value? And then if we are going to grow it and use it over time. And this is one of the limits of the classroom currency as a semester ends and what do you do next? Right. If there begins to be savings and it transitions from one semester to the next, right. Should I accept unis that he’s issued in his class in my class for the same value? And my argument is yes, right. I think this would liberate students to manage their time even more than they are currently able to. Right. One of the primary concerns that I have about uni issuance and the idea of the volunteer activity is that that can be a very time consuming act right, to go out and find the need and to build those relationships and do that volunteering and some of it is much easier than others. We have a Loaves and Fishes in Cortland that is always absorbing students and can feed the hungry almost always.
And this is a very important discussion that we have in the class too. But, you know, if you’re playing sports or you want to be more engaged in your club or you, you know, have a semester where you’re not feeling well, you should have the capacity to save and transfer this over time, right? Every once in a while, I have a student that’s a single mother or has a real job. Right. Those are. Those are considerations that I have the flexibility to absorb and think through. And then as a class at the end, we think about, you know, the fairness and the equity and whether or not, there should be different parameters set on that. And, as it grows across campus, these are things that faculty governance are going to have to get better at having those sorts of communications. And that, I think, benefits faculty in the way that we’re going to have to really know what we’re doing in each other’s classrooms, which allows us to reinforce major learning outcomes and things across the classrooms and strategize better grant activities with our community partners that expand the capacity of those efforts. So I really hope that, as it grows, it becomes a healthy communication driver rather than, oh, I don’t want to, I don’t want to do that because I want to make sure the students are doing what I’m doing in my classroom and not just doing it all in your classroom. Sort of like reductionist back-to-austerity sort of mindset that is definitely liable to creep in. So, yeah, it’s a struggle, right? Our classrooms are… We used all our time, right?
Andrew Douglas:
Yeah. Let’s take a lunch break. We’re going to come back to this discussion during the student panel that’s going to be about thinking about this uni idea in the context of Morehouse. And so wonderful. Thank you so much.
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* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Rob Hawkes & Scott Ferguson (transcription) & Robert Rusch (graphic art)