195 DANIEL / “A DEBT IS JUST THE PERVERSION OF A PROMISE” CCC 70:2 / DECEMBER 2018 James Rushing Daniel “A Debt Is Just the Perversion of a Promise”: Composition and the Student Loan While scholars of writing have increasingly turned toward economic issues, the role of debt has remained largely absent from composition scholarship. This article takes stock of the material and ideological magnitude of student debt in the age of neoliberalism and proposes bringing the subject into the writing classroom. What is a debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point we can’t even say. It’s more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that jour- ney, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe. —David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years