The university weaponizes necropolitical forms of discourse in the form of instrumental resolutional debate, justified as disguising and neutral pretenses of “fairness” and “clash,” in order to extract “foreign capital” and value from Asian labor, further creating divisions that forward the racialized and genocidal war machine. This debate is a question of how we utilize our social locations in order to be parasitic upon whiteness, flipping the script that it has prescribed to us.

This premise of public education as offering a better life has been challenged by critical race legal scholars such as Cheryl Harris and Devon Carbado, who suggest that the desire to make college more accessible to all citizens deploys the language of progress, neutrality, and merit to mask our public educational system’s massive failure to boost social mobility and diversity in general.28 In the aftermath of Proposition 209 there remains a “new racial preference” for certain minority groups (e.g., Asian Americans) able to capitalize on the university’s demands for a diverse pool of talent targeted not because of their race but because of their skills. In this manner Asian Americans, as a desirable or worthy minority group, are rewarded with education. 29 This new preference ironically favors upwardly mobile Asian global elites, a phenomenon that ends up negatively impacting native-born Asian Americans who need the University of California as a less expensive alterna- tive to private schools. According to the scholar-activist Don Nakanishi, “the University of California has been the major vehicle for social mobility for the Asian-American community,” which values an affordable, high-quality public education.30 The complex relationship between Asians and Asian Americans, which for decades has gone unnoticed due to the lumping of all Asians into one group, has now reached a turning point. While the number of U.S.-born Asian students in the uc system has reached critical mass and plateaued after decades of explosive growth, the number of foreign students from Asia has skyrocketed, particularly in the 2000s, due to increased allotment of spaces for them over in-state residents as a means of getting more outside sources of revenue. In 2009 the administrators at the San Diego campus reduced its number of in-state freshmen by five hundred and filled those spots with out-of- state and international students. As a result close to two hundred freshmen from China enrolled in the school, a twelvefold increase from just barely sixteen individuals the year before, while the number of Asian American California freshmen fell by almost 30 percent. 31 Asian American students must now fight against rising tuition prices and systematic efforts to push them out from the very place they helped build into prominence.32 That the university is a conduit for life-restricting forces and projects can be seen in a range of issues, such as the institution’s ongoing diminishment of organized labor union rights, the erosion of indigenous tribal sovereignty and land rights, the restriction of student dissent and free speech protest on campuses, and the administration’s resistance to calls for divestment of university capital funds in corporations operating in countries with a history of human rights abuses.33 The battle over life-and- death matters can be discerned in the balancing act between state funding for prisons and schools. California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made this obvious when he publicly stated his interest in outsourcing the care and housing of inmates in California’s overcrowded prisons to Mexico to pay for the state’s insolvent college system. He hoped to restore the University of California to its former rightful place as the number-one public school system in the world lest it slip into obsolescence and face its own demise.34 Such overtures to institutional martyrdom, sacrifice, and survival gesture to what Mbembe calls the “state of siege” characteristic of our everyday realities in late capitalist society. Recognizing the necropolitical logics inherent in such neoliberal rationales serves to explain necropolitics at a broader level, which disavows certain undesirable populations to save the most productive and privileged groups in society. As state investment in public schools decreases every year, the ballooning funding deficit in California’s prison system siphons precious monies and resources away from poorer schools, which in term further reduce the chances of marginalized youth and poor communities to get a basic education. (In 2010 state funding for education was 7.5 percent of California’s total budget, with prisons receiving 11 percent, but ten years earlier universities received close to 10 percent and only 3 percent went to the penitentiary system.)35 The interrelationship between state prisons and public schools is a moral crisis not addressed by many educational advocates, who focus only on the bureaucratic problems of schooling. That the steadily gaining numbers of Asian-identified students who make up more than 40 percent of the total uc undergraduate population might also speak to the growing incarceration of black, brown and indigenous youth (as well as Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians) who make up the supermajority of the state’s jails and prisons is a teachable moment that needs to be deconstructed. Left alone, we become blind [ignorant] to what Dylan Rodriguez describes as the “genocidal logics” buttressing the push toward a multicultural liberal society.36 Schwarzenegger’s wish to “terminate” California’s responsibilities to its prisoners for the sake of assisting the college-bound pits those already consigned to “social death” against those with better life opportunities, enabling certain educated subjects prejudged as having the right to life, liberty, and happiness to receive more state entitlements and protection than criminalized people of color deemed undeserving in their “rightlessness” as nonwhite racialized subjects.37 Racialization of Asians is concealed, even though their overrepresentation at the University of California makes them powerful cultural liaisons (or potential disruptive spies) between the American university and Asian nations at a crucial time, when cash-strapped public universities with dwindling state financial support seek to magnify their outreach and partnerships in the East (e.g., ucla-National University of Singapore). Coincident with the greater demand for more math and science education to bolster national security, there is increasing stress at the University of California on stem fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), where students of Asian descent can be found in disproportionate numbers.38 Asian minds and bodies, perceived as easily assimilated into neoliberal and neocolonial ideas of educational competitiveness, embody the type of modular (post) racial subjects able to fill the globalizing necropolitical economies of a multitiered U.S. college system skewed to match the competitive talents of graduates from Asia. This is not to suggest a direct causal relationship between the corporatization, militarization, and globalization of the university and the enlarging of the Asian presence in college, but there exists a connection between what the research university represents as the “best and brightest” and what particular racial groups appear to fit its high standards of excellence. The boundary between Asians’ reliance on the life force of education and their inadvertent contribution to the military-academic industry is a testy relationship; as the activist Helen Zia notes, Asian Americans are “part of the problem [as] collaborators in our own oppressions.”39 Asians are not simply another minority easily lumped together with other nonwhite groups, since their de facto status as an institutional model majority essentially deminoritizes them in a state apparatus that wants to exploit them as racialized human capital but does not consider them racially marked in some way.40 Within the blurred lines of academic life and death, one finds that higher education can be the pathway to our salvation or to our destruction. Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Life and Death If we view college education only as an exalted public domain for improving quality of life, this limited perspective misses out on a larger critique that implicates us all profoundly. According to the Chicana scholar Rosaura Sanchez, “The discourse of ethnic power, opportunity, and pluralism led to an unrealistic assessment of the extent of struggle possible at the institutional level and masked our incapacity to avoid serving privilege and class domination within academia.”41 Sanchez says the pressure to address educational social justice through ethnic empowerment is unsustainable once administrative concessions are made toward students, staff, and faculty. Identifying the institutional absorption of Asians and Asian Americans within the academic-industrial complex helps undercut the myth of educational meritocracy but makes noticeable the necropolitical forces through which the university derives its broad powers. Critical attention must be paid here to the defunding of the arts and humanities (fields often critical of institutional power schemes)—a revamping of the traditional liberal arts curriculum that relates to Asian Americans because their stunning success in vaunted niche science industries has augmented the university’s desire to extract more foreign capital and value from Asian labor while diminishing the cultural capital of ethnic studies and Asian American studies in their longtime advocacy for the oppressed. Perhaps owing to the field’s emphasis on professionalization, many ethnic studies scholars have argued that Asian Americans are not model minorities, for although many have been successful, many still face racism and some, such as Southeast Asians, have not found success. There is a flaw to this pedagogical-political strategy since it fails to critique the institution beyond not doing a good job for its clients, as students are called these days by school administrators. Acknowledging the crucial role that Asians and Asian Americans play in the necropolitics of higher education serves to redefine the vague parameters of ethnic studies to forge new philosophies, ethics, and forms of consciousness raising. This chapter touched upon the ambiguous and thorny place of Asians and Asian Americans in higher education. It demonstrates how our sense of moral crisis regarding the public university as an endangered public good might relate to the specter of death that lurks within the dark corridors of learning. If Asians are the new preferential subjects within the neoliberal “postracial” university, how do ethnic studies scholars, students, and activists promote antiracist politics and educational policies beyond prima facie concerns with minority discrimination and representation? How might we better teach critical ethnic studies by drawing attention to the shifting demographic composition and reconfiguration of our classes produced as a historical byproduct of the American war machine and U.S. geopolitical relations in Asia? How do we advocate for improving education without dealing with the uncomfortable fact that our educational system participates in lethal practices and processes? To even attempt to answer these hard questions there needs to be a reeducation in the meaning of ethnic studies to launch a radical critique enabling new lessons in matters of both life and death.