The cover of the October 22, 2010, issue of The Chronicle Review proclaimed in large, bold, black type, against a stark white background, “The Making of Corporate U.” The academy’s passionate insistence that it is “not a business” has been upgraded to a new complaint that the university is being “corporatized.” Eight articles consider what it is that corporatizes a university.
What emerges from the essays is a vision of what colleges and universities were and should be—a fantasy of what has never been and will never be—places of peace and tranquillity, noncompetitive, offering learning for learning’s sake, nonbureaucratic, with small classes, devoted students, and committed faculties sharing fully and equally in governance.
You will hear the terms “not a business” and “corporatization” on a campus when administrators, a board of trustees, or a legislature demand an accounting of how money is spent or personnel assigned. Keepers of the imagined academic faith believe that financial considerations should not affect academic decisions because, it is alleged, teaching, learning, and research are not subject to profit-and-loss analysis or such commercial concepts as efficiency, productivity, managerial authority, and customer satisfaction.
These beliefs astonish political leaders and governing boards, who expect accountability for funds spent, students served, learning achieved, and research produced. They look for results in terms of students graduated, jobs secured, and public benefits earned. A startled and resistant academy’s cries of “we are not a business!” are deafening and predictable. Some academics take refuge in the nonprofit status of most universities, but while nonprofits do not issue stock or pay dividends, they do try to get as much money as they can and are not bashful about encouraging huge student (customer) debt to secure the universities’ services.
University behavior may be rooted in the search for prestige, not money for money’s sake, but an administrator or board that ignores the financial aspects of its responsibility for providing goods and services in exchange for money is seriously at risk, as are all within that community.
So what are the elements of the corporate university? The common thread that runs through the eight articles is a reluctance to accept the realities of the enormous growth in numbers, sizes, and types of colleges and universities. Before World War II, colleges were mainly small, elite, rural, private, religious undertakings, graduating a combined total of 160,000 students each year, mostly affluent white males, 18 to 22 years old, and educated in the liberal arts. After World War II, the GI Bill of 1944 stimulated growth in enrollments. But it was not until the late 1950s and 1960s that huge, publicly supported, urban, multicultural institutions emerged to serve the progeny of World War II veterans.
The burgeoning professoriate of those years perceived its role as an extension of what it had imagined in earlier days or in graduate school, and this vision has been passed down to contemporary faculties. About 73 percent of higher-education enrollments are now in public colleges and universities, and almost all so-called private colleges and universities are equally dependent on governmental largess. Is it any wonder that legislative monitoring of educational and managerial practices in colleges and universities is steadily increasing? Today, more than 19 million students of astonishing diversity are enrolled, with more than three million graduating each year with varying undergraduate and graduate degrees. A vital consequence of this enormous participation in higher education is that the academy has lost its mystery as a distinct and almost romantic cultural enclave open to only a few, an idea still held by many faculty members.
What are some of the elements of corporate higher education as seen by the Review essayists?
Foremost is the increasing accountability mind-set, followed by a marketing ethos. Colleges compete to peddle their products to potential consumers, thereby diminishing the intellectual life. Other things mentioned are the erosion of shared governance, outsourcing of nonacademic jobs, formal relationships with the corporate world, high salaries for executives, exploitation of faculty and loss of job security, hostility to unions, playing the “free agency” game, with faculty members trading institutional loyalty to play the star market, commercial dominance of libraries via technology, offshore operations, student debt, variable discount pricing, distribution of academic resources to commercial fields of study, and thinking of degrees as a commodity.
One contributor summed it up: “Besotted with rituals that are characteristic of the corporate world, higher education has inaugurated an accountability regime—a politics of surveillance, control, and market management that disguises itself as value-neutral and scientific administration.” Another writer, less comfortable with the corporate analogy, does suggest the need to recognize the university as “subject to more than one gravitational force.”
Does this litany really resemble corporatization, or merely realistic adjustments to societal change? The business and corporate analogies appear designed to deflect the American academy’s attention from its role as a player in a worldwide educational competition. Are we expected to return to fantasized pre-World War II patterns of higher education? Indeed, an argument can be made that contemporary faculty enjoy many more prerogatives than the post-World War II faculty of dramatically new and changing institutions (of which I was one), when autocratic leadership was not uncommon, when faculty senates were nonexistent, and when search committees were still in the distant future.
Many practices seen as corporate have long existed, including marketing, outsourcing, corporate affiliations, salary differentiation, free-agency practices, and offshore activities. The GI Bill precipitated pursuit of a degree as a commodity for employment, resulting inevitably in the accountability regime. What is the practical alternative if we want to have both public and private support for universal access to higher education? Accountability demands results, not a process highly honed for passive resistance.
Why do these contrasting beliefs matter? How we perceive of ourselves as a profession conditions our behavior and that of those seeking the services we render. Persistent claims that we are not a business and not susceptible to market forces or historical change will be seen as a Luddite fantasy.