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Corporatization and What We Can Do About It
Leon Fink
University of Illinois at Chicago
| 'CORPORATIZATION,' etymologically, likens developments in higher education to those of the business world. Like shooting fish in a barrel, however, merely identifying the multiplying examples of for-profit extrusions, managerial models, let alone ideological legitimations of capitalist logic on university campuses hardly constitutes an honest sport. Rather, I take it as the useful purview of this roundable to seize on what is truly distinctive about the current moment, and perhaps even more importantly, to assess how historians, acting within our own institutions or through larger auspices like the AHA, might best respond to the contemporary challenge. |
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First, we should acknowledge that what we are experiencing now is just the latest stage of an extended process—and one which has continually drawn the ire of academic and intellectual critics, especially since the rise of the research universities at the beginning of the twentieth century. Progressive Era critics like labor attorney Frank Walsh feared the corruption of corporate finance and called for public funding of all research. In more sweeping fashion, Thorstein Veblen's 1918 Higher Learning in America assailed business domination of campuses with regard to buildings, bureaucracy, athletics, and vocational courses. Veblen feared a subordination of intellectual inquiry to a focus on output and crude utilitarianism, symbolized by the inter-institutional scramble for prestige, competitive advantage, and power. In a similar vein, Upton Sinclair's 1923 treatment of the same subject was entitled, The Goose-step: A Study of American Education. To a considerable degree, David Noble would retrospectively sustain the Progressive-Era critique of university corporatization in his America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1979). |
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Of course, the 1960s and 1970s triggered new critiques of educational corporatization—this time centered on the loss of the autonomy of the individual student amidst the massification and bureaucratization of what Clark Kerr would fairly call the 'multiversity.' It was Kerr, as Christopher J. Lucas has noted, who effectively linked the "new knowledge" generated in the university to the nation's economic growth. But Kerr's 'knowledge industry' triggered its own backlash. The students, protested Mario Savio, had become a mere "product" of the "machine," the "knowledge factory." Social scientists like Christopher Jencks, David Riesman, and Robert Paul Wolff similarly questioned the equation of knowledge-as-commodity "packaged for consumption in tidy little bundles called credit units, hours, and courses."1 |
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So, how have the patterns of 'corporatization' changed since the early 1970s? As faculty (particularly those of us in public institutions), we are likely most sensitive to the partial de-funding of public universities, across the country, especially since 1980. Even as students have faced skyrocketing tuition increases, faculty have seen their institutions increasingly 'privatized'—or expected to generate substantial revenue streams—in ways that have transformed the internal hierarchies and decision-making processes of the research universities. The gradual erosion of full-time tenured hires in favor of contingent faculty is likely the most dramatic and alarming sign of the change, but there are certainly others as well. In a 2003 survey, Derek Bok expressed concern at the growing commercialization evidenced in big-time college sports, entrepreneurship in research (especially the applied sciences), and the expansion of adult education and extension schools into 'alternate,' for-profit systems organized around Internet courses. "Looked at as a whole," offered the usually-sanguine former (and later acting) Harvard President, "the costs of increased commercialization seem considerably larger than the benefits... At a time when cynicism is so prevalent and the need for reliable information is so important," any damage to the reputation of universities, and to the integrity and objectivity of their scholars, weakens not only the academy but the functioning of our democratic, self-governing society."2 |
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Yet, more worrisome than the specific 'commercial' adventures of which Bok complains is a larger shift towards administrative direction of most colleges and universities without a clear educational purpose. As Stanley Aronowitz notes in The Knowledge Factory (2000), "Lacking a unified national culture into which to socialize students and in any case lacking an educational philosophy capable of steering an independent course, the academic system as a whole is caught in a market logic that demands students be job-ready upon graduation." (By 1995, 60 percent of baccalaureate degrees were awarded in pre-professional or technical fields.3) With the marketplace as its chief referrent (whether to be primed by the research faculty's 'new knowledge' or 'student products' as job-seekers), there is little wonder that today's university gives only grudging respect to history and other liberal arts disciplines. In most colleges, general education requirements—originally attacked and dismantled for their intellectual narrowness in the late 1960s—have never been effectively reasserted. As Bill Readings noted in his powerful critique of the mid-1990s, an empty, self-referential discourse of excellence has replaced an ideology of national culture and citizenship as a source of university self-evaluation. Without a content to call its own, excellence, as Readings discovered, can as easily apply to university parking, class size, or library holdings.4 Under such imperatives, concludes Aronowitz, "colleges and universities are unable to implement an educational program that prepares students for a world of great complexity."5 |
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In a nation (and world-economy) defined by the example of the corporation, a competitive model of marketplace excellence now dominates administrative moves up and down the university food-chain. Former Dean of Harvard College, Harry Lewis, thus argues in a recent commentary, "The greater the university, the more intent it is on competitive success in the marketplace of faculty, students, and research money."6 A university's course list, Lewis suggests, may be "richer than ever, but it is no longer wrapped around any identifiable ideals."7 While most of us, I suspect, would deplore the recent efforts of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to use the process of college accreditation to measure and report on student learning outcomes—effectively an attempt to incorporate higher education into the sorry regulatory regime of no-child-left-behind reductionism—we cannot afford to ignore public calls for accountability as to the purpose and function of our institutions.8 Given the combination of university claims to marketplace 'excellence,' a consumerist, anything-goes curriculum, and increasingly desperate popular reliance on the college degree as security against obsolescence in the globalized economy, we might well expect further calls for proof of just what 'value' has been added by the university experience. |
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While the nature of the problem is complex, I suggest that there are two areas that beckon for our initiative in the current situation. One is the largely defensive self-protection of unionization. As administrations have moved to adopt the principles of 'lean production,' with zero-based budgeting geared to flexibility in faculty hiring, faculty (whether through collective bargaining or strong professional associations) should adopt the collective insurance of unionization to protect professional norms—maximizing tenured slots, but also demanding health insurance and benefits for all instructional hires. Given recent, debilitating court decisions, faculties (as well as graduate students) at public research universities in the 'blue' states likely have the best chance to assert themselves, but with or without collective bargaining, unionization offers the strongest hedge against administrative misrule. |
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The other arena—open to action at both individual campuses and to professional associations like the AHA—is to reassert standards for liberal arts education, including a strong history core. Preparation for national citizenship was, of course, a fundamental rationale for history education since the creation of the American public school system. While the standards of citizenship education as well as the very concept of a national culture have changed dramatically over the years, student understanding of local, national, and now global affairs likely remains the strongest claim we, as history educators, have on the internal allocation of educational resources. In a similar spirit, Carnegie Corporation President, Vartan Gregorian, appealed in 2005 for a re-invigoration of the liberal arts enterprise: "We must remind ourselves that the value of a liberal arts education and education in general is to enhance people's powers of rational analysis, intellectual precision, independent judgment, and mental adaptability.... Education must help us understand the sweep of our culture, the achievements, the problems, the solutions, and the failures that mark our history. This kind of education is critical to our understanding of who and what we are."9 |
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Yet, I am familiar with very few initiatives over the past years by historians and other liberal arts disciplinary bodies to truly contest for the hearts and minds (let alone pocketbooks) of our students and their tax-paying parents. In this light, it is worth commending Harvard's recent proposal strengthening of general education. A panel co-chaired by literary critic, Louis Menand, proposed a core curriculum focused on: reason and faith, the ethical life, cultural traditions and cultural change; the U.S.: historical and global perspectives; societies of the world: historical and global perspectives; life science and physical science. "If we're looking to help students prepare themselves to be ethical citizens for democracy and a global society," explained Menand, "these are areas we want to make sure they have an understanding of." Thematically sound as Harvard's proposed revisions appear to be, they remain open to the question plaguing undergraduate coursework around the country: do they add up to an education? How, in short, do themes and categories connect to skills and reasoning abilities and has the student, by graduation, appreciably advanced along some curve of mastery? |
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Alongside the surveys and reports of U.S. News and World Report and Spelling's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, it is perhaps time for the AHA and other disciplinary bodies to set our own standard of what constitutes educational excellence. When students matriculate without a substantive curriculum or one that is sorely lacking in the core subjects of history, literature, philosophy, and the sciences, should accreditation (or at least public prestige) of the offending institution not be put in question? At the very least might we not imagine a best practices list or a positive singling out of institutions and departments that are grappling creatively with historical and larger liberal arts training? Are we condemned to watch, ever frustrated, on the sidelines as corporatization takes ever-more debilitating form, or are we prepared, ourselves, to step forward as caring stewards of a democratic yet intellectually defensible program of study? |
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Notes
1. Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (New York, 2006), 290.
2. Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton, 2003), 118.
3. Vartan Gregorian, "Six Challenges to the American University," in Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, Declining By Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (New York, 2005), 80.
4. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 24–25.
5. Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston, 2000), 158.
6. Harry R. Lewis, Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (New York, 2006), xii.
7. Ibid.
8. Perspectives, Oct. 2006.
9. Gregorian, 80–81.
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