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Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement
Reviewed by Sheila Slaughter
Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement. Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, eds. New York: Routledge, 2003
Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement addresses, in three sections, the changing organization of universities and corresponding changes in academic work. The first section, "The Rise of the Corporate University," provides examples of the restructuring of universities along corporate lines, rather than offering explanations of why this is happening. "Laboring Within the University" presents rich narratives of what it is like to work as a graduate student, adjunct faculty member, or assistant professor in restructured universities where graduate students and adjuncts provide the lion's share of instruction.
"Organizing" consists of case studies of successful and unsuccessful organizing attempts, including efforts to organize adjunct faculty for collective bargaining and the formation of a politically effective graduate student caucus within the Modern Language Association.
Little of the volume's material on the rise of the corporate university breaks new ground. For-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix have received extensive attention in the press, and their inadequacy as substitutes for traditional colleges and universities has been much analyzed. David Noble's chapter, "Digital Diploma Mills," is taken from his wonderful book by that title. The statistics presented by several authors on increases in the use of contingent academic labor have been reviewed frequently by profession-wide faculty organizations including the AAUP, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers.
The most groundbreaking chapter in the first section is Denise Tanguay's critique of merit pay, which offers a fresh look at a pay system many academics take for granted because it is rooted in peer review. Tanguay points out that merit pay systems are very time-consuming and expensive to run if they are done with proper goal setting and feedback loops, and that merit pay usually discriminates against women. She notes that merit pay systems work well when faculty salaries are rising, but that they are often used to cut costs: academic stars are awarded merit pay, and no one else receives raises, a pattern that creates negativity and cynicism throughout the organization.
The stories told in the section on laboring in the corporate academy focus on lived experience and richly illustrate the tensions within the academy. Adjunct faculty organizing is opposed not only by university administrators, but also by many full-time faculty members and unions. When administrators at Yale University did not honor the results of a graduate assistants' union election, the assistants withheld grades and were blacklisted by their faculty members. A junior faculty member recounts how his support for graduate student unionization at New York University resulted in a denial of tenure, despite the fact that he had the unanimous support of his department and outside evaluators.
Despite these cautionary tales, the third section of the book suggests that the only way the corporatization of colleges and universities can be stopped is through committed organizing. The most original contributions are two articles on organizing adjuncts, one detailing efforts at the metropolitan level in Boston, a city whose many higher education institutions depend on casual intellectual labor, the other giving an account of union activists in the California State University system who are building a statewide organization as a way to resist the erosion of faculty rights. Both of these chapters insist that unless adjuncts are full members of collective bargaining units, greater numbers of faculty will become casualized, with the result that institutions of higher learning will increasingly offer training rather than true education. The imaginative tactics and fluid organizing strategies described in these chapters, as well as the importance of fighting for full academic citizenship for adjuncts, should be considered by all faculty interested in organizing.
As a whole, the volume has three problems. First, the various chapters provide accounts of very divided faculties, many of whom oppose organization and want to preserve the privileges of tenured faculty. Yet the chapters on organizing do not seriously address the divides within higher education, either between tenured faculty and other faculty, or between elite institutions, which overproduce graduate students, and the non-elite institutions where most faculty teach. From the Progressive Era forward, these divisions have undercut organizing attempts in higher education.
Second, the book's chapters are authored mainly by faculty and graduate students in the liberal arts who do not address the increasing divide within universities between liberal arts programs and professional programs. Professional schools, to which students are migrating in increasing numbers, may not regard a corporate university as a problem, and the omission of any consideration of this issue is a serious one.
Third, the authors fail to define "corporatization," and consistently cast administrators as its agents, although many faculty, often those drawn from professional schools close to the market, or from science and engineering, are also architects of and participants in university-industry partnerships. If we are to organize successfully, especially using regional and statewide strategies, these divisions among faculty must be analyzed and overcome.
Sheila Slaughter is professor of higher education at the University of Arizona.
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