WP Management Professor Ali Mir Receives ‘Bright Idea’ Award for Research on the Racialized Nature of Student Debt

William Paterson University Professor of Management Ali Mir has been selected to receive the Bright Idea Award, sponsored by the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University.

The Stillman School recently compiled its twenty-first annual volume of Publications of New Jersey’s Business Faculty, a collection of research works published in 2021. Mir’s manuscript was identified as one of the top 10 from 144 publications submitted, according to Joyce Strawser, Dean of the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University.

Mir, who teaches at William Paterson’s Cotsakos College of Business, was the lead author of a paper titled “Racial Capitalism and Student Debt in the U.S.” that was published in Organization, a highly rated journal in the discipline of management.

In that paper, Mir and his co-researcher, Saadia Toor of City University of New York, examine the manifesto of the Black Lives Matter movement and its call for the cancelation of student debt as part of its demand for reparations. Using the concept of racial capitalism, Mir and his coauthor look at the nature of student debt and its consequences for Black borrowers, analyze the structural reasons behind the disproportionate debt burden borne by Black students, offer a critique of what Mir calls “the debt regime,” and suggest ways of organizing against it.

01/09/23