'Edupreneurs,' Corporate Universities and Pluralism in Economics

I posted recently on the increasing influence of corporate money in academia, specifically the new Marriner Eccles center funded by the Koch brothers at the University of Utah. The piece by David V. Johnson in the Baffler on this subject is worth reading. As he notes, the new breed of private money goes beyond what they used to do in the past, trying to directly influence what kind of research, the curriculum and what ideas should be disseminated, and, indirectly who should be hired and retained. This is all the more problematic in the context of the retreat of public funding and the rise of the the corporate university, which implies that increasingly money equals voice in academia.

Johnson says that:

private funding that burrows within the very body of public institutions, the better to influence related departments and curricula across the university.

In other words, the edupreneurs sell academic acceptability and prestige for ideas that might have a more difficult time entering the curricula, and getting people published and tenured. The change started in the 80s, but it has accelerated, and the Kochs are a good example of that. As he noted:

All told, the Charles Koch Foundation has invested some $200 million in higher education activities since 1980, with more than $140 million of that money allocated since 2005, funding over fifty free-market research centers and institutes at universities. And these beachheads of private campus cash have become lush islands of ideological purity

One of the examples discussed is a center that is an offshoot, in a sense, of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which was at the heart of the discussion of James Buchanan and the Kochs in Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains (reviewed here by Heather Boushey). I'm not particularly interested in the details, but what I think is relevant is that the push for free market fundamentalism is seen as a quest for "spreading what he called 'diversity of thought' at universities across the land." You would think that Economics Departments in the US are dominated by Marxists or other types of Radicals. In all fairness, there are only four graduate heterodox programs in the US and a few Liberal Arts Schools that still have heterodox economists.

If anything it seems that it's more likely that studying economics, in US universities, would make you more conservative (The New York Times said Republican citing the same study) and favorable to free markets. And others suggest that it can make you more selfish. Don't get me wrong, I'm for diversity of views, pluralism if you prefer the term, but pro-market views are well represented in academia.

More on the War on Tenure

From Inside Higher Ed:

It’s been a tumultuous year for faculty members within the University of Wisconsin System, from threats to the Wisconsin Idea to a proposed $300 million budget cut to Governor Scott Walker’s suggestion that professors do more work to compensate for the slash. But many professors and other observers said the roller coaster hit a new low Friday afternoon when the state Legislature's powerful Joint Finance Committee approved, by a vote of 12-4, the elimination of tenure from state statute, along with adding new limits to the faculty role in shared governance and procedures for eliminating faculty members in good standing outside of financial exigency.

Read rest here.

Noam Chomsky on the Corporatization and ‘Death’ of American Universities

The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:

The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

Read rest here.

Noam Chomsky on The Death of American Universities

 

By Noam Chomsky

When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line.

The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities.

In the past thirty or forty years, there’s been a very sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up.

There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, which describes in detail the business style of massive administration and levels of administration — and of course, very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model.

But using cheap and vulnerable labor is a business practice that goes as far back as you can trace private enterprise, and unions emerged in response. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students. Graduate students are even more vulnerable, for obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education.

The costs, of course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn into these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a business-run society to transfer costs to the people. In fact, economists tacitly cooperate in this. So, for example, suppose you find a mistake in your checking account and you call the bank to try to fix it. Well, you know what happens. You call them up, and you get a recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.” Maybe the menu has what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to find the right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your business,” and so on.

Read rest here.

A classic text concerning this erosion of higher education is Thorstein Veblen's (1918) The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on The Conduct of Universities by Business Men