When critics decry the “corporatization” of the university, they are referring to a number of trends that have transformed the character of higher education in recent years. Outsourcing a variety of nonacademic jobs that were once performed by university employees to large, external companies; forging entangling relationships with the corporate world; encouraging the growing presence of corporations to run bookstores, food services, etc. on campus; providing salaries for college officials that mirror those of corporate executives; imposing work speedups that exploit adjunct instructors and other low-paid employees; downsizing staffs; busting trade unions (including those designed to protect graduate students)—all those developments point to the overt application of marketplace logic to the practice of higher learning.
The fact that the culture of corporations has steadily leached into the veins of academe should come as no surprise. The university has always been, in part, a business. At the very least, colleges and universities in the West have long played a critical role in rationalizing and legitimizing the expropriation of the world’s human and mineral wealth for the private profit of the elites who sponsor such institutions in the first place. The Western university has always relied upon bureaucratic management to fulfill its bourgeois aims. It has always produced more reactionaries than revolutionaries. Of course, the university has also generated some of the most trenchant critics of the social order.
What has happened in recent years is the dissolution of the innate tension between the university as the bastion of reaction and the cradle of dissidence. In place of that tension has arisen an institution that has enthusiastically dedicated itself to the orthodoxy of neoliberalism—the idea that the essential task of the state and of all social authorities is to smooth the path of transnational corporations.
That orthodoxy has long since come to Dartmouth College, where I teach. Its leadership has slimmed down the campus work force in the name of urgent financial necessity. (In a move that set adrift some of the most financially vulnerable employees on campus, Dartmouth officials recently completed several rounds of layoffs, mostly of hourly staff members, to cover part of a two-year, $100-million budget shortfall.) A modest cadre of students and faculty and staff members (including a circle of earnest undergraduates organized as Dartmouth Students Stand with Staff) have found in the reductions an offensive breach of democratic ideals, and they have campaigned for a more humanistic approach to institutional belt-tightening.
If Students Stand with Staff is to enjoy any success in raising fundamental questions about community, class, and social justice here at Dartmouth, however, then what we must all first confront is not so much the corporatization of the college, but the corporatization of our lives.
I wish to suggest that we—students, professors, all of us within and outside academe—have so internalized market values that we are no longer aware of their control over our psyches, our personalities, our day-to-day existences. We have so utterly absorbed the ethic of individualism, competition, materialism, and private accumulation that we now regard the dogged pursuit of those qualities as inevitable and essential—like breathing. Our collective consciousness has itself been privatized to such an extent that we now struggle to find meaning in human activity whose commercial purpose is not immediately apparent. Some undergraduate members of Students Stand with Staff, for example, complain that the mercenary ethos engulfs the intellectual and social lives of many of their peers, some of whom dedicate so much energy to propelling themselves toward elite business schools or Wall Street firms that they appear to judge their own human worth largely in terms of future earning power.
A partial solution may lie in shifting our identities and basic loyalties from that of inert consumers to that of citizen-producers. That revaluation, an inner change that some members of Students Stand with Staff begin to exhibit as they question the dominance of market values over social relations, might well be accomplished through participation in struggles for fair and dignified labor conditions for hourly and other workers on our campuses and in society at large. That struggle may finally humanize students and professors, and in so doing, may even help redeem the American university, to say nothing of the American democratic experiment.
The idea of the classroom experience as a kind of market exchange has helped drain our lives and intellectual labor of a robust sense of social purpose and responsibility. The consumer model encourages students to approach the enterprise of learning as clients or customers who browse and buy, acquiring knowledge capital that will enable us to maximize personal wealth. We even use the language of the market. Students say, “I’m shopping for classes.” Colleges and universities increasingly promote themselves as brands, and pupils understand entitlement and privilege as part of the product they purchase at enrollment. We faculty members are complicit—our silence or scholarly detachment amid daily assaults on workers, immigrants, and the poor tacitly assures our students that private accumulation is the ultimate purpose of higher learning.
In a society where everything is commodified, this mind-set seems natural, unavoidable. But higher education is not a bazaar. Knowledge is not chattel.
If the university has become a marketplace, then we must face the possibility that we are its merchandise. When we accept the privilege of indifference, the right of apathy, we sell ourselves cheaply. When we accept the prevailing rationales for inequality—the farce of meritocracy, the artificial division of mind-labor and body-labor, the belief that working people are disposable—we participate in our own commodification. We become hirelings for the status quo.
We do so at our own considerable peril. Under the thrall of market values, students and professors alike will grow estranged from the intellectual work in which they are engaged. Sacrificing the best values of the liberal-arts education for the worst values of the market degrades all our labor performed, because all labor—both the production of knowledge and physical labor—has a moral component, an intellectual component, a personal component, a collective component.
So what is—or should be—the purpose of the university? At its finest, it is a crucible of democracy. Education is the act of liberation, the practice of freedom. To become educated means to expose oneself to the din of suffering, to peel away hypocrisy.
True knowledge, therefore, is never esoteric or barren. True knowledge is catalytic; it causes us to overturn ourselves. True knowledge is never merely consumed; it must be produced through experience and service. Those members of our campus community who produce food, energy, safety, cleanliness, and comfort—they help sustain a moral economy that preserves human and humanist values. If Dartmouth students and professors wish to practice values not solely or primarily dictated by the market, we must also struggle every day to produce something that enhances human life in ways both material and spiritual.
That is the practice of enlightened citizenship. And enlightened citizenship requires debate, dissent, critical thought, political independence. Rather than continuing our spree of private consumption, both within and beyond the classroom, let us strive instead to revive the values of collectivism, cooperation, humanism.
