On March 11, 2014, at around 5:30am, students installed three sets of banners about student debt around the UC Davis campus. Three hours later, one set of banners was taken down, and two hours after that, another set had disappeared. The students, eager to retrieve the banners they worked many hours to design and create, asked around, only to be answered with a wall of smoke and mirrors from an administration that in short can be described as a complicated, top-heavy structure of managers, marketers and messengers of all sorts. The students pressed their case, and the banners were found in the possession of Grounds and Landscaping Services. The removal of the banners was ordered after a complaint from someone in the Administration: why some, but not all of the banners were taken down remains a mystery.
The location and motivation for the installation of the banners were not a mystery. Part of an assignment for an art history course on curatorial methods that I teach at UC Davis, the banners were part of an exhibition on the student debt crisis. AHI 401 introduces students to exhibition-making. The course, in addition to provoking thought about how an exhibition functions as a space and relation, engages students’ interest in a growing and intellectually demanding field by challenging them to take the lead in producing and displaying not only objects but also visual information. The final assignment for the course is to curate an exhibition either at the Richard L. Nelson gallery or somewhere else on the UCD campus. This quarter, one group of students curated an exhibition, Art as Translation, that included prints and lithographs drawn from the University’s art collection.
The other group curated an exhibition on student debt, which required them to construct both the frame and its contents.
The primary stated aim of One University One Debt was to create awareness about the trillion dollar student debt crisis—what it means for students to be in debt and in default—in addition to serving as a platform that could complicate and invite discussion about and possible solutions to this growing crisis.