Zombie mob speaks out about student debt

Zombie Debt, a collective of undergraduate and graduate students, marched into Levering Food Court yesterday to speak about student debt following a mini-lecture in the Gilman Atrium.

The movement, known as "Lunch of the Living Debt," featured individuals with zombie-painted faces who carried signs that read, "They owe us," and other slogans. Several members spoke into a megaphone to Levering Food Court, while others handed out fliers and walked around with boom boxes playing songs like "Thriller" by Michael Jackson.

Senior Nancy Hoffman was one of the speakers. "What is an education for?" she asked the crowd as she read from a script.

The group's grievances stem from how Hopkins addresses student concerns.

"Today the University treats our needs with hostility," Hoffman said. "We are met with brute force . . . We are taught to think critically, but not about debt."

Much like other Occupy protests, parts of her speech were punctuated with yelled responses from other members of Zombie Debt.

"At Johns Hopkins, the inflation-adjusted equivalent of a year's tuition from just a decade ago would barely cover a semester of classes today," Zombie Debt wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter.  "We borrow to pay tuition that has grown 4x faster than inflation since the 1970s. But no one pretends that education is getting more valuable."

Zombie Debt also feels that the University does not admit enough low-income students, and that those that are admitted only go into more debt.

"As levels of student debt and tuition skyrocket, higher education is increasingly inaccessible to working-class students and students of color. Here at Hopkins, supposed "need-blind" admission cashes out as a preference for the rich: less than a tenth of students qualify as ‘low-income' (with families making $60,000 or less)," Zombie Debt wrote.

"The trends are clear: There are fewer students with financial need attending Hopkins, and those that do manage to attend are saddled with more debt – triple what was borrowed a decade ago."

Junior David Widen does not agree that Hopkins only supports the well-off.

"There's this one line [by Zombie Debt] that ‘only the whitest and the most affluent survive,'" Widen said. "I'm a minority student [and] I'm on financial aid because my parents don't make any money and I think I'm surviving."

In their email, Zombie Debt states that when Hopkins gives financial aid, those students are forced to work for Hopkins without getting paid.

"The old-fashioned image of the industrious everyman working his way through school is nonsense," they said. "Even work-studies are displaced by unpaid internships – indentured labor, measured in academic credits and subsidized by personal credit."

Widen, however, feels that Hopkins is doing a great job to support the students that need help. "The school gives out a lot of financial aid considering its tiny endowment compared to a school like Harvard," he said. "They really help out the students that need help."

Junior Monika Lay, who was eating lunch in Levering when the protest started, wanted to know exactly how Zombie Debt wanted to change what the University currently does.

"[I don't really] know what their solution was," she said.

Sophomore Sheri Leonard agreed. "I'm not really sure what their demands were," she said.

However, Widen did think Zombie Debt went about the protest in an effective manner. "They got everyone's attention by yelling into megaphones while everyone was at lunch," he said.

Widen also appreciates that the protest occurred in the Levering Food Court. "The only thing that we can really complain about is that we have a food service provider who's for profit that tries to take as much money from us as possible, i.e. Aramark," he said. "But otherwise it's really not that bad."

Sophomore Dominic Thomas thought that the protest sounded just like Occupy Wall Street, where many aspects of society would have to be overhauled. "You would have to restructure America. How do you bring down a society that's been established for hundreds of years?" he said. "I definitely agree [with the protesters] but I'm not sure what I agree with."