Can This Campus be Bought? Commercial Influence in Unfamiliar Places

Corporations are changing student life, academic philanthropy, and institutional relationships with vendors. Will they also affect the educational mission?

By Jennifer L. Croissant

An editorial in the school newspaper quipped that one of the things we promised the corporation was a tattoo across the foreheads of the incoming class. Protests against the deals ranged from placid discussions between a Students Against Sweatshops group and university president Peter Likins, to peaceful sit-ins on the lawn, to organized labor symposia and students chaining themselves to the doors of the administration building. Despite these protests, the contracts were signed. While we don’t tattoo the first-year students, Nike apparel is ubiquitous, even to the extent of displacing prior contracts that varsity sports teams had had with other suppliers.

Image and Ethics

But other important dimensions of university activities have largely been overlooked. Student life, philanthropy, and vendor relationships are also changing because of commercialization. These features of the university, while perhaps not of central concern to faculty, are important parts of the image of an academic institution, and they are visible to students, the community, businesses, and other institutions.

Universities and their commercial activities are also part of a larger system of connections and images that contribute to the legitimacy of academic institutions as producers of reliable knowledge and sites of independent discourse. When students protest subcontractor wages for service employees at Harvard, they are making a statement about the university’s image and conduct.

Because of our increasing involvement with commercial activities, we need to make sure that the university does not betray its educational values and objectives. Commercial connections can help to establish an institution’s relevance and, especially for public colleges and universities, a kind of accountability. Having industrial advisory committees, corporate "partners," new philanthropic ventures, vendor contracts, and fairs in the quadrangle allows a university to display an image of being connected and responsive to outside interests. But connection can also mean interference and loss of autonomy, an erosion of core academic values.

We come packaged at Arizona as part of the Pacific-10 Conference. The "Pac-10" provides a league for intercollegiate competition, as well as a reference group for comparison among many other parameters, such as library size, enrollment, and faculty salaries. The conference maintains a Web site, coordinates television revenues and scheduling, and provides for corporate sponsorship of its activities.

In the section of the conference Web site titled "corporate partner opportunities," potential partners are promised "one-stop shopping" for the attention of "260,000 students, 2 million alumni, and 42 million people living in Pac-10 states." In addition to the Internet exposure they receive on the conference Web site, corporate partners get to use conference logos for their own promotional activities, including hospitality gatherings at conference championships and advertising in conference publications and on sports television networks. Independently, the University of Arizona has its own stable of corporate partners, representing national as well as local firms. Some of the Arizona partners, such as Pepsi, are in competition with the Pac-10 partners, such as 7-Up.

Student Life in the Marketplace

The larger problem is that these commercial relationships seem so natural to us now that it is difficult even to articulate grounds for critical thinking about corporate ties. Does it really matter to the conduct of academic affairs that our public space, "the mall," is perpetually covered with touring sideshows from Ford, Esprit, and Pepsi, as well as from craft vendors and credit-card hawkers? Those worried about student credit-card debt have protested the latter, but no one is particularly concerned about the other displays, aside from the clutter they create.

Such displays, however, point to the more subtle and important side of packaging campuses to vendors and sponsors. We, as faculty, have been lamenting the students-as-consumers model, where customer satisfaction is all too frequently taken as a surrogate for learning. The conflation of student and consumer (and citizen and consumer) is really the most insidious part of corporate relationships on campus. For many students, to be a citizen is to be a consumer, and nothing more. Freedom means freedom to purchase.

Freedom of speech is elided by freedom of consumption, but no one seems to notice that the choices for consumption are extremely constrained. The most publicly visible activity near the "speaker’s corner" set aside on the mall for public speaking is often the buying and selling of goods. Interesting civic activities, such as Holocaust memorial readings or rallies against relationship and sexual violence, are overwhelmed by inflatable climbing walls and Velcro-bungee games. Almost nowhere on campus, outside the academic classroom, seems exempt from commercial discourse (and classrooms, plastered in posters advertising cheap beer and Internet services, are not themselves totally exempt). This segregation makes classrooms and critiques of consumerism seem remote and irrelevant.

Philanthropy As Advertising

Corporations are not in the business of philanthropy for its own sake. Activities such as corporate-sponsored endowed chairs must produce economic benefits for their sponsors, even if the benefits are largely intangible. Philanthropy confers a kind of legitimacy on the donor, and it provides resources and the aura of being worthy of gifts to the recipient.

But even the traditional form of individual philanthropy should be examined for the multiple benefits and costs to the giving and the receiving parties. It has long been customary for alumni to support their majors and for business schools to be named in honor of wealthy alumni who give hefty gifts. Not too many of these alumni are, however, still alive, and also embroiled in legal conflict. But now we have the Eller School of Business and Public Administration at the University of Arizona, named for regional advertising executive Karl Eller, who made a substantial donation. The Eller Enterprises are wrangling with the city of Tucson and the county over billboard and lighting regulations meant to protect the skies from light pollution and the local population from billboard blight. To what extent should we be looking our gift horses in the mouths? Is Eller’s philanthropy an attempt to garner public support and perhaps influence, indirectly, city council action on billboard regulations? Does the gift help to signal the legitimacy of Eller Enterprises?

A big "gift" with no strings attached is, in theory, significantly different from a research contract with explicit performance goals. But today’s donor programs, many of which are sponsored by corporations rather than anonymous individuals, may challenge the gift-contract distinction. Unlike more traditional, individual philanthropic efforts that need not obey the calculus of profit, corporations do not just give money away.

Consequently, as relationships with corporate vendors and sponsors become increasingly important, we can expect subtle accommodations to the needs of industrial and commercial interests on campus. Explicit firings for critiques of corporate activities may not become widespread, but other forms of forced acquiescence in the status quo might be expected. Will departments or units heavily dependent on the largesse of one particular sponsor tolerate criticism of that sponsor by faculty members?

The example of the relationship between the Swiss-based corporation Novartis and the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is apt here. The multimillion dollar grant from the corporation surely enables the department to pursue an expanded research program. But it also puts subtle constraints on the scope of its program, affecting the faculty’s freedom to engage in other research relationships and students’ ability to determine the direction of their research. The corporation’s claim to the intellectual property rights to all research from the department also affects the choices made by it. Reward structures at research institutions generally favor those who bring in external funds in contracts and grants. Although censorship is far too strong a word for the constraints on imagination that can occur in conditions of resource dependency, we can expect some accommodations.

Vendor Relations

An interesting cycle seems to have emerged. Expectations regarding new technologies are present either in fact, in the prospective workplaces of our students, or in the imaginations of vendors selling supplies to universities. Students are exposed to specific systems, and not necessarily informed of the alternatives. They take their training to their future work sites, perhaps influencing purchasing decisions. The expectations are then presented back to the universities by alumni, employers, and vendors, requiring institutions to purchase and maintain new technology or expensive upgrades.

In the course of a project to upgrade its student information system, the University of Arizona somehow became an Oracle campus. At the same time that we are purchasing a system from this well-established software production firm that specializes in data management, Arizona’s staff is contributing to its development. It is expected that modifications to the software made by Arizona employees will fall under complex intellectual property agreements.

One of the possible capabilities of the system is an online grading function that faculty will use to keep course records. At a nearby community college, a similar system has made interim reporting of grades a requirement. So far, faculty have not discussed how the system will affect intellectual property rights, institutional policy, or workload. We have not questioned whether we may have to submit interim grades or develop grading practices compatible with the computer system, nor have we considered that software produced at the university for this project may belong to Oracle.

In a separate venture, AOL and Cisco Systems have combined forces with the university’s Center for Computing and Information Technology (CCIT). The CCIT is the nonacademic unit responsible for the university’s computer infrastructure, e-mail system, and software and hardware licensing. Three local high schools purchase hardware (switching equipment and cabling) at a "substantial discount," which is partly underwritten by AOL. As noted in the campus computing newsletter, the schools also pay a "yearly $500 fee to CCIT. . . although expenses are much higher than that." CCIT staff get free training in Cisco products, and the successful high school students get a Cisco Certified Network Associate certificate.

Three features of this relationship bear critical attention. First, a fair amount of money is changing hands, back and forth among schools, vendors, and the computer center. It seems that university resources subsidize the program to some extent, which would be an unusual transfer of public resources to the private sector. Second, this venture resembles distance-education initiatives in that it is largely independent of oversight by regularly appointed faculty members. CCIT employees, some of whom have Ph.D.’s, all have staff rather than faculty appointments and teach courses outside any disciplinary curricula.

The third issue has to do with providing vendor-specific training. It is hard to argue against the opportunities that Cisco training might offer the students, who come from some of the more disadvantaged high schools in the area (in a region with a lot of disadvantaged schools). Their Cisco certification can give them access to job opportunities in the telecommunications and information sector. Whether such employment is meant to be in lieu of, or a precursor to, a traditional university education is unclear. In addition, the training is in a specific vendor’s systems, rather than, say, in general principles of networking, which could provide wider employment horizons.

Consider that in other circumstances companies pay their employees to get advanced, firm-specific training. Under the Arizona-AOL-Cisco deal, the students are not compensated for learning a specific corporate system; instead, their schools (or the taxpayers, at least) pay for them to receive this training. In other words, a public institution is subsidizing training that corporations usually provide to their own workers. Even though this program is described as a "gift" from AOL, it seems to be a very expensive gift for the university to receive. Especially disturbing is the dearth of program oversight and the lack of much discussion about the partnership’s effectiveness and legitimacy.

Legitimacy

Thus we cannot argue for some untainted "ivory tower" or "golden age" of institutional independence. We need instead to articulate the values and goals that should direct a wide range of commercial ventures on campus.

What seem to be in tension are the values of connection and autonomy. Discourses about connection and accountability generally strengthen the power that the various constituencies of the university (the public, students, the administration, businesses, the state) have to intervene in university life. In these discourses, it is good to be connected to the outside world, to display multiple ties to multiple audiences, to exchange resources (both money and personnel), and to demonstrate relevance. The corporatization of university life brings a new model of connectedness and accountability to the forefront as a model of legitimacy. Connection and accountability become the markers of successful campus ventures, whether in research, teaching, or service.

Discourses about autonomy are usually based on disciplinary expertise. Faculty, for example, use academic-freedom arguments to preserve our control over syllabi, although at Arizona we are now required to point out that "objectionable material" may be present in certain kinds of courses. Academic institutions have, until recently, based much of their institutional legitimacy in the discourse about autonomy.

What happens to core values such as objectivity or neutrality under conditions in which business connections measure legitimacy? Biotechnology companies, for example, need the autonomy of university-based research to help maintain at least the image of objectivity in analyzing new drugs for distribution to the public. Ties that are too close undermine the public’s trust that the knowledge produced is unbiased and reliable. Ties that are too loose, such as unrestricted and anonymous philanthropy, provide too few of the benefits that corporations seek.

Some of the advantages for corporate sponsors are visible and measurable: the chance to direct research and solve specific technological or scientific problems. Such benefits often accrue in traditional corporate sponsorship of research. With the new relationships, however, some of the favorable effects are intangible and more difficult to quantify and critique. Corporations gain legitimacy, visibility, and access to markets. Universities get to seem "relevant" and connected, and they gain needed cash, perhaps at the expense of independence and autonomy.

At the same time that the development office at the University of Arizona cheers large donations, others get nervous that our public institution is intensifying a cycle of dependency on corporate finances. When the law school received the gift of a large endowment, state legislators got the idea that professional programs need not be funded by the state, because wealthy benefactors and eager students can foot the bills. The benefits that corporate "partners" provide in underwriting the athletic program, or that benefactors give to departments, come to be seen as replacements for base funding for routine operating expenses, increasing our dependency on and responsiveness to corporate connections. The point is not to make an argument for pure autonomy, expecting constituencies to hand us blank checks and trust that we will produce socially optimal knowledge and well-educated students. Too much administrative bloat, too many inefficiencies, and plenty of poor performance make it hard for people to see that as a likely outcome. But complete connection, especially through identification with corporate benefactors, erodes ideas about objectivity that are important to maintaining the legitimacy of universities as sites for unfettered, and reliable, inquiry. When it becomes clear that we are indeed "Nike-Pepsi U," it will be obvious, at least to me, that we have moved too far along the autonomy-connection continuum.

Jennifer Croissant is associate professor in the Program on Culture, Science, Technology, and Society in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Arizona.

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