You Can’t Trust the Businessmen on the Board of Trustees

Just over a century ago, the same year that the Spanish flu struck millions around the world, the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen diagnosed a malady of a different sort: the control of universities by businessmen. “Plato’s classic scheme of folly,” he wrote, “which would have the philosophers take over the management of affairs, has been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge. To anyone who will take a dispassionate look at this modern arrangement it looks foolish, of course — ingeniously foolish.”

It has become a truism to say the coronavirus pandemic will change everything about higher education. But few discuss who should shape this change. The faculty? The student body? The public? Or the business-executive trustees that Veblen believed were destroying the essential nature of academe?

Veblen was the first sociologist of academe to notice the enormous and pernicious power wielded by university trustees from the business world. Many criticize the inflated salaries and power of university administrators and presidents, but for the first time in recent history there is a growing recognition that universities should not be run by the corporate executives who sit on their boards of trustees. Many academics are perpetually shocked by the depredations of corporate boards — the defunding of university presses, the adjunctification of the faculty, and the evisceration of the liberal arts — but Veblen would not have been surprised. The thesis he defended in 1918 is still true today: Scientific and scholarly inquiry are incompatible with the business values of profit maximization, efficiency, and consumer satisfaction.

Today, Veblen is best remembered for his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), in which he coined the term “conspicuous consumption.” But we ought also to remember him for The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, his prescient study of American higher education, first published in 1918. He observed the destructive effects of many phenomena that could easily come from contemporary headlines: extravagant salaries for athletic coaches and presidents, efforts by administrators to privilege campus amenities and nonacademic diversions, increasing reliance on underpaid part-time instructors, the elimination of core requirements under the mantra of student choice, overreliance on dubious statistical measures of teaching and learning efficiency, a vast proliferation of bureaucratic administrators, and the substitution of careerism for the pursuit of knowledge.

When Veblen published The Higher Learning, wealthy industrial barons were funneling their fortunes into a new system of higher education, and the universities where Veblen worked — Cornell, the University of Chicago, Stanford — were all founded by the wealth of the new American Gilded Age. Ezra Cornell was a telegraph mogul, John D. Rockefeller an oil magnate, and Leland Stanford a railroad tycoon. The 20th-century American university was built by a new type of patron.

Veblen saw that the wealth of industrial capitalism promoted universities dedicated to advancing business interests. This led to an irresolvable contradiction between “the pursuit of learning and the work of preparation for the professions,” since “the training given by these two lines of endeavor — science and business — is wholly divergent.” While the pursuit of wealth seeks profit and prestige, the pursuit of knowledge seeks the fulfillment of curiosity.

This contradiction is what Richard F. Teichgraeber III, editor of the 2015 edition of The Higher Education, calls the “thesis of cultural incompatibility.” In Veblen’s time, this contradiction manifested itself in the university’s adoption of new managerial forms of training and evaluation. Letter grades and course-credits were introduced to provide precise calculations of intellectual inquiry; the current dominance of standardized and multiple-choice testing is largely an inheritance of the same early 20th-century “science” of management that nearly all universities now accept. Veblen protested the use of letter grades and statistical appraisals of knowledge or learning; he would randomly switch As to Cs and vice versa. “My grades are like lightning,” he once said. “They are liable to strike anywhere.”

While such protests might appear quixotic, they stem from Veblen’s decades-long study of the sociology of higher education. Veblen’s pedagogy, like his scholarship, takes a stand against the corporatization of the pursuit of knowledge. When boards of trustees are almost entirely composed of “bankers” and “businessmen,” business values control the very functioning of the university itself: its financial structure, the nature of campus life, and its ultimate purpose. Veblen believed the encroachment of these values must be fought on every front.

Such a sweeping critique of the university might sound anachronistic. But contemporary statistics tell an alarming story. Today, on the boards of trustees at the universities where Veblen worked, business professionals — almost exclusively corporate financiers and “businessmen,” with little to no experience in higher education — make up over 80 percent of governing boards. Faculty members make up less than 2 percent of the board of trustees at Yale, Cornell, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Corporate financiers and business professionals outnumber the faculty by a magnitude greater than 100 to 4. Boards of trustees still have almost complete authority to choose university presidents, determine budget allocations, and set the administrative structure of the university.

These trustees bring the managerial models of the business world, prioritizing growth, customer satisfaction, and optics. Thus colleges are transformed into vocational schools under the mantra of practicality; undergraduates are entertained with “scholastic accessories” that prepare them to live lives of conspicuous consumption; and the university — because it is modeled on the culture of business — becomes committed to the all-consuming manufacture of prestige, publicity, and the management of endowments.

Corporate influence also directly affects the nature of scholarly research. To take just one example, research on psychiatric medication is routinely funded and shaped by the corporations who sell these medications. As John P.A. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford’s School of Medicine, wrote in an article in 2011, “Much research is conducted for reasons other than the pursuit of truth. Conflicts of interest abound, and they influence outcomes. In health care, research is often performed at the behest of companies that have a large financial stake in the results. . . . This is an embarrassment. Increased investment in evidence-based clinical and population research, for instance, should be designed not by industry but by scientists free of material conflicts of interest.”

In a time of crisis, it’s tempting merely to identify the disparate symptoms of dysfunction without perceiving a fundamental cure or cause. Veblen, however, suggests that there is one principal disease at the heart of higher education — the businessmen who hold near complete power over the university. If we want to champion a democratic higher education, we must also democratize the composition of boards of trustees. They should include undergraduates, graduate students, community members, and professors from all departments. If universities want to preserve a distinctive identity based on the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of intellectual curiosity and freedom, the values of corporate America cannot be allowed to permeate the academy.

Otherwise, the postpandemic university will be shaped entirely in the image of the boards of trustees. Already, faculty, staff, and students across the country are being asked to bear the burden of drastic austerity measures which aim to further restructure higher education. Veblen teaches us that there is an unavoidable conflict between the interests of businessmen and the interests of knowledge. The pandemic will force us to choose which side we are on.