The current debate over the reform of higher education appears indifferent both to the historic function of American universities and to the broader ideological, economic, and political issues that have shaped it. Against the encroaching demands of a market driven logic, a number of progressive educators have argued forcefully that that higher education should be defended as both a public good and as an autonomous sphere for the development of a critical and productive democratic citizenry (1). Higher education, for many educators, represents a central site for keeping alive the tension between market values and those values representative of civil society that cannot be measured in narrow commercial terms but are crucial to a substantive democracy. Education must not be confused with training, suggesting all the more that educators resist allowing commercial values to shape the purpose and mission of higher education. Richard Hoftstadter understood the threat that corporate values posed to education and once argued that the best reason for supporting higher education "lies not in the services they perform….but in the values they represent" (2). For Hoftstadter it was the values of justice, freedom, equality, and the rights of citizens as equal and free human beings that were at the heart of what it meant for higher education to fulfill its role in educating students for the demands of leadership, social citizenship, and democratic public life.
The ascendancy of corporate culture in all facets of American life has tended to uproot the legacy of democratic concerns and rights that has historically defined the stated mission of higher education (3). Moreover, the growing influence of corporate culture on university life in the United States has served to largely undermine the distinction between higher education and business that educators such as Hoftstadter wanted to preserve. As universities become increasingly strapped for money, corporations are more than willing to provide the needed resources, but the costs are troubling and come with strings attached. Corporations increasingly dictate the very research they sponsor and in some universities such as the University of California at Berkeley, business representatives are actually appointed to sit on faculty committees that determine how research funds are to be spent and allocated. Equally disturbing is the emergence of a number of academics who either hold stocks or other financial incentives in the very companies sponsoring their research. As the boundaries between public values and commercial interests become blurred, many academics appear less as disinterested truth seekers than as operatives for multinational interests. But there is more at stake than academics selling out to the highest corporate bidder. In some cases, academic research is compromised and corporations routinely censor research results that are at odds with their commercial interests. For instance, Eval Press and Jennifer Washburn reported in a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly that "In a 1996 study published in the Annals of Internal medicine, [the author of the article] found that 98 percent of papers based on industry-sponsored research reflected favorably on the drugs being examined, as compared with 79 percent of papers based on research not funded by the industry." Press and Washburn also provide examples of companies that have censored corporate sponsored research papers by removing passages that highlighted unfavorable results or negative outcomes. It gets worse. As large amounts of corporate capital flow into the universities, those areas of study in the university that don't translate into substantial profits get either marginalized, underfunded or eliminated. Hence, we are witnessing both a downsizing in the humanities as well as the increasing refusal on the part of universities to fund research in areas of public health or science which place a high priority on public service, areas largely inhabited by people who can't pay for such services. The new corporate university appears to be indifferent to ideas, forms of learning, and modes of research that do not have any commercial value.
Within the neoliberal era of deregulation and the triumph of the market, many students and their families no longer believe that higher education is about higher learning but about gaining a better foothold in the job market. Colleges and universities are perceived– and perceive themselves– as training grounds for corporate berths. Corporate culture has also reformulated social issues as largely individual or economic considerations, as it cancels out democratic impulses by either devaluing them or absorbing such impulses within the imperatives of the marketplace. As the power of the institutions of civil society is reduced in their ability to make corporate power accountable, it becomes more difficult within the logic of the bottom-line to address pressing social and ethical issues. This suggests a dangerous turn in American society, one that threatens both our understanding of democracy as fundamental to our basic rights and freedoms, and the ways in which we can rethink and re-appropriate the meaning and purpose of higher education.
In the name of efficiency, educational consultants all over America advise their clients to act like corporations selling products and seek `market niches' to save themselves. Within this corporatized regime management models of decision making replace faculty governance. Once constrained by the concept of "shared" governance in the past decade administrations have taken more power and reduced faculty-controlled governance institutions to advisory status. Given the narrow nature of corporate concerns, it is not surprising that when matters of accountability become part of the language of school reform, they are divorced from broader considerations of social responsibility. As corporate culture and values shape university life, corporate planning replaces social planning, management becomes a substitute for leadership, and the private domain of individual achievement replaces the discourse of public politics and social responsibility.
One exemplar of the new corporate management style and its assessment of the purpose and meaning of higher education can be seen in the ongoing public pronouncements of James Carlin, the Commissioner of Higher Education in Massachusetts. In a recent "point of view" op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, he contends that higher education requires a model of management and leadership that places more power and authority in the hands of university presidents. Astonishingly, Carlin's ideal is John Silber, the former president of Boston University, who he claims represents "one of the few presidents who had real control over a college or university." What Carlin conveniently ignores, though it has become a matter of public record, is both Silber's demonstrated contempt for faculty and student governance, especially those structures that challenged his power and his disdain for the principles of academic freedom so fundamental to higher education in America. The subject of endless controversy, Silber's three decade rule at Boston University was punctuated by his ongoing attacks on scholarship produced by feminists, Marxists, multiculturalists, and others who did not pass his ideological litmus test. Moreover, as Silber's critics have pointed out, he did more than belittle such scholarship. He actually refused to grant tenure to many faculty who did not share his conservative views. Silber's presidency became synonymous in the popular imagination with a rigid, top-to-bottom management style that undermined the university as a democratic public sphere characterized by a range of scholarship, diverse forms of teaching, and vigorous debate and deliberation. In using Silber as his model of university leadership, the ex-CEO Carlin predictably celebrates the imperatives of the bottom line and tight management while selling out academic freedom and intellectual diversity.
Carlin believes that higher education, like the corporations, should be subject to reorganization and accountability schemes, a strategy that quickly translates into a series of flawed policies designed to cripple the intellectual and economic freedom of faculty. Shared governance is not on Carlin's reform agenda. Nor does Carlin exhibit anything but scorn for reforms that would improve opportunities for faculty to teach smaller classes, work within a time frame that allows for creative research, and improve classroom teaching as a result of reduced workloads. Carlin actually opposes all of these reforms. In his eagerness to rebuild universities in the mirror image of the mega-corporation, with faculty portrayed as hostile workers and students defined exclusively as consumers, Carlin argues for scrapping remediation programs for students, expanding the workload of professors to four three-credit courses a semester, increasing student-teacher ratios, abolishing tenure, eliminating `public service' projects, and eradicating teacher unions. In this discourse, the university becomes an adjunct of the corporation, and its historic function as an autonomous sphere for the development of a critical and productive democratic citizenry is vanquished.
It would be reassuring to view Carlin's approach to higher education as either an isolated or idiosyncratic example of an administrator who is outspoken, but largely ignorant of the problems and possibilities of higher education. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The current attacks against tenure, models of shared governance, critical scholarship, and equity related issues in higher education are more than an outgrowth of the one-dimensional conception of democracy and civil society that corporate culture supports. Carlin's position exemplifies the ever-expanding influence of corporate ideology on institutions of higher learning as well as the concerted effort on the part of conservative ideologues to dismantle the gains of the welfare state, eliminate public entitlements, and abolish all those public spheres that subordinate civic considerations and noncommercial values to the dictates of an allegedly `free' market.
Missing from much of the corporate discourse on schooling is an analysis of how power works in shaping knowledge, how the teaching of broader social values provides safeguards against turning citizen skills into training skills for the work place, or how schooling can help students reconcile the seemingly opposed needs of freedom and community in order to forge a new conception of democratic public life. In the corporate model knowledge becomes capital, a form of investment in the economy, but appears to have little value when linked to the power of self-definition or the capacities of individuals to expand and deepen the scope of freedom and democratic identities, rights, and social relations. Nor does such a language provide the pedagogical conditions for students to critically engage knowledge as deeply implicated in issues and struggles concerning the production of identities, culture, power, and history. Hence, it has no way of recognizing that education must be more than simply a form of training since it always presupposes an introduction to and preparation for particular forms of social life, a particular rendering of what community is, and what the future might hold.
The current debate about the university's mission is centered crucially around the curriculum. Since 1979 when Harvard's administration reimposed an attenuated core curriculum most colleges and universities have enacted a melange of similar reforms such as distribution requirements, "computer" literacy and quantitative reasoning. But higher education is in the throes of a second stage in curriculum "reform": education for what? Feminists and black, Asian and Latino educators responded to the imposition of core curricula that resuscitates the traditional literary canon as a site of privileged learning by insisting on the inclusion of global, post-colonial and otherwise marginalized literatures and philosophy. But the so-called multicultural or diversity curriculum only peripherally addresses the central problem that afflicts private as well as public universities: the command from executive authorities in and out of the institution that schools justify their existence by proving value to the larger society, in most cases read the business interests. In turn, consistent with one of the powerful strains in the history of higher education to subordinate the higher learning to practical interests, presidents and provosts are inclined to seek a "mission" which simultaneously translates as vocationalization, which entails leasing or selling huge portions of its curriculum and its research products directly to companies.
As a result the public and private research universities are dusting off one of former UC-Berkeley Chancellor Kerr's suggestions that undergraduates as well as graduate student should be recruited to participate in the research activities of the professoriate, especially in the sciences. Now, like sports, research demands a considerable time commitment from the practitioner. In some places, UC universities such as San Diego and Irvine are reducing the obligation of science and technology majors to the humanities and social sciences so they can more accurately mimic the practices of the great private technical universities. Which, of course, raises the question of whether the public universities as public goods should maintain their obligation to educate students to citizenship as well as to job skills. In this connection as a professor in UC Irvine's School of Social Sciences one of us can recall legislative hearings in the late 1970s conducted by the chair of the higher education committee of the California State Assembly. The chair and other committee members were concerned that faculty were avoiding undergraduate teaching in the service of their research and the state universities were slighting programs aimed at educating for citizenship. The university administration appeared to bow to the legislators' stern warning that if they did not alter the situation their budgets would feel heat. But as with all attempts by legislatures to micro manage education it did not take long for the administration and the faculty to regain lost ground. Today most UC campuses are monuments to technoscience and with few exceptions at the undergraduate level the humanities and social sciences are gradually being relegated to ornaments and service departments.
In the third tier schools, the forms of privatization and vocationalization are far more explicit. So, for example, the New York telephone company Bell Atlantic has developed relationships with public community and senior colleges throughout the state on condition that the school agree to enroll and train students for specific occupations needed by the company. While in most cases no money changes hands, the school benefits by additional enrollment and other gains. For instance, it shows the legislature and other politicians that it is playing a role increasing worker productivity and enhancing economic growth and for these reasons should be rewarded with funds. In addition the company gains when its employees learn occupational skills that often lead to upgrading and the company transfers the costs of training to the public.
The question at issue is whether schools should forge direct corporate partnerships and, in effect, sell their teaching staff let alone the curriculum to vocational ends. In the occupational programs we have examined the liberal arts, especially English and History play a service role; at Nassau Community College in Long Island students are required to take a course in labor history and their English requirement is confined to composition. Otherwise the remainder of the two year curriculum is devoted to technical subjects of direct applicability to the telephone industry. Put more broadly third tier public colleges and universities are under pressure to reduce their humanities and social sciences offerings to introductory and service courses to the technical and scientific curriculum. In effect, the prospective English or sociology major faces a huge obstacle to obtain a degree in their chosen discipline, because there are often not enough electives to fulfill the major's requirements. As a result we can observe the rush to mergers of social sciences departments in many third tier public schools.
But consolidation has not, in most places resulted in the resurgence of the liberal arts. For example, at Cameron State University in Lawton, Oklahoma the two philosophers on campus are now in the social science department, which includes the traditional disciplines and teach applied courses such as business ethics. In order to maintain viability, the department has a majors in occupational specializations of social welfare, a vocational sequence designed to train counselors and a program to produce low-level professionals in the criminal justice system, a thriving industry in the state. Lacking a social and a political theorist on the faculty, these required courses are taught by a criminologist. With almost five hundred majors, the eleven full-time members of the department each teach more than 120 students in four course loads a semester, in addition to academic and professional advisement of bachelor and master's students. Many courses are taught by adjuncts. Since the university has many business majors, a favorite of dozens of third tier schools, the humanities and social science departments are crucial for fulfilling the shriveling "breadth" requirements.
Economic pressures as much as the ideological assaults on the liberal arts account for the sea change in the curriculum that is in process in public higher education. The student and her family feels more cutely the urgency of getting a leg-up in the race for survival. The relative luxury of the liberal arts might be reserved for the few who are liberated from paid work during their college years. The consequence is that the human sciences are squeezed from the bottom as well as the top as students demand "relevance" in the curriculum and lose their thirst for reflection. It may be safely declared that only in the larger cities and then not uniformly have faculty and students successfully defended the liberal arts. At City University of New York(CUNY) a decade of determined faculty resistance has slowed, but not reversed the trend. As the new century dawns, CUNY administration is following other public and private universities preparing its version of distance learning, one of the more blatant efforts to end the traditional reliance on classroom learning in favor of a model that focuses on the use of technology to produce more standard packages of predigested knowledge. In addition it is an answer to the fiscal crisis suffered by many public schools because the style of learning reduces the number and proportion of expensive full-time faculty to adjuncts, transforms brick and mortar into cyberspace so that building and maintenance costs are reduced and through standardization eliminates the mediation of a critical intellectual to interpret transmitted knowledge. The latter saving does not refer as much to cost as to the centralization of political and social control.
The bare fact is that neither the discourse nor the practices of critical learning are abroad in public higher education, except as the rear guard protests of a much exhausted faculty and a fragment of the largely demobilized student body. And as recent changes at the University of Chicago attest, leading private schools are under pressure to dilute their offerings. Blind sighted by the 60s rebellions many educators went along with student demands for ending requirements and ended up with the marketplace in which demand-driven criteria determined curricular choices. In other words neoliberalism entered the academy through the back-door of student protest. Yet for progressive educators the task remains: to demand , not the flaccid "breadth" requirements of many who claim to offer a core, but a rigorous and coherent core curriculum in which the history of Western and Eastern knowledges are critically examined. As a requisite of any postsecondary credential, this is today a radical act. Profit making defines neither the meaning of democracy nor should the laws of the market define the essence of higher education. For higher education to capitulate to the "market", which arguably wants something else because it is in a panic about an uncertain future, not only means that training replaces education, it also suggests surrendering of the idea of higher education as a public good. A democratic as opposed to a commodified education would acknowledge that public institutions, largely paid for by working class and middle class people, should promote critical thinking, explore the meaning of citizenship in the new neoliberal era, and relentlessly pursue the project of democratic appropriation of both Western and Subaltern(marginal) traditions through attitudes of bold scepticism.
Perhaps it is too early to propose that public higher education be thoroughly decommodified, that all costs be paid by a tax system that must be reprogressivized. Perhaps the battle cry that at least in the first two years only science and math, philosophy, literature and history(understood in the context of social theory) be taught and learned and that academic and vocational specializations be confined to the last two years, are too controversial, even among critics of current trends. Yet if higher education is to become a public good in the double meaning of the term—as a decommodified resource for the people and as an ethically legitimate institution that does not submit to the business imperative-then beyond access we would have to promote a national debate about what is to be taught, and what is to be learned if citizenship and critical thought are to remain, even at the level of intention, the heart of the higher learning.
By Henry A. Giroux
Penn State University
NOTES
1. Some recent examples include: Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education Still Under Siege (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey Press, 1992); Randy Martin, Chalk Lines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Henry A. Giroux, Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2000).
2. Richard Hoftstadter cited in Eval Press and Jennifer Washburn, "The Kept University,' The Atlantic Monthly (March 20, 2000), p. 54. Hofstadter expands on these views in The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (with C. De Witt Hardy) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (with Walter P. Metzger) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955); Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).
3. See Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1997).
5. On this issue, see Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
6. James F. Carlin, "Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad," The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 5, 1999), p. A76.
7. James F. Carlin, "Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad," Ibid., p. A76.
8.It is interesting to note that student resistance to the corporatization of the university has taken place on a number of campuses across the United States, but receives almost no media coverage. See, Eval Press and Jennifer Washburn, "The Kept University,' The Atlantic Monthly (March 20, 2000), p. 51.
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