Ivy and Industry, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, and Buying In or Selling Out?

Reviewed by Roger W. Bowen

Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980

Christopher Newfield. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education

Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Buying in or Selling Out? The Commercialization of the American Research University

Whether through Stein's overly casual, "Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't like to think of the university as just another service or commodity business" approach; Newfield's often confusing but at times enormously appealing account of the academy's gradual, hundred-year-long absorption into the "post-Fordist economy"; or Slaughter and Rhoades's dialectical analysis of the academy's incomplete change from "a public good knowledge/learning regime" into "an academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime," readers of any or all of these three books will conclude that laws, corporations, and members of the academy itself—including the faculty—have wittingly or unwittingly joined forces to remake the ivory tower into an entrepreneurial knowledge machine. In this machine, ideas are products to be sold, students are customers to be served, professors are commodities to be traded, and administrators are managers to be feared.

If this "news" depresses or angers you, then we must ask, what is to be done? And what conditions must be overcome in order to "fix" the system? Or, alternatively, what can be done to preserve what is best about the academy? Regrettably, answers to these questions will not be found in any of the three publications.

Inertia is a powerful force. The weight of historical momentum has moved the American academy into a state where its health depends mightily on the health of the national and state economies and the ideologically driven priorities of those who decide how to allocate public wealth or redistribute private lucre. Politicians have funding priorities that all too often are aligned with those of corporate America's, and donors to private institutions tend to be among the leaders of corporate America. Politicians have calculated that voting to decrease public support of education is not harmful to their careers because education is no longer seen as a public good, and private donors have championed higher education as a private interest. Starve the beast, or attach restrictive covenants to gifts, dollar-dispensers reason, and it will become stronger and more self-reliant and eventually even more amenable to political control and "accountability."

Over time, higher education has reconciled itself to the need to become more entrepreneurial, more enterprising, and more inventive in finding resources, a reconciliation that Slaughter and Rhoades characterize as not-for-profits looking for ways to make profits. As they necessarily operate within an economic system that rewards initiative and penalizes sloth, faculty-reward systems soon be-came geared toward generating saleable ideas, dismissing or downsizing those with the least marketable ideas, and creating a large reservoir of content providers who enjoy few benefits and no job security. This condition is described, in cold capitalist terms, as "efficient." And faculty, as Slaughter and Rhoades make clear, not only have come to accept this situation as "normal," but have helped to advance corporatization, especially if they themselves are the beneficiaries of it—for example, if they enjoy the job security of tenure or the income from research and intellectual property sales. Faculty, in brief, are helping to dig the grave for the profession, may it rest in peace.

If this analysis is accurate, how can we not be revanchist? Academicians, after all, need not declare their belief in the existence of the "hidden hand" of the market in order to realize that their pockets are being picked by a capitalist system whose central dynamic is inexorable expansion throughout all of civil society's main institutions. But academicians should understand, as the authors of our books under review clearly do, that capitalism may result in greater freedom for some (the sharks), but may also oppress others (the minnows). Market freedom has produced a low-paid, poorly supported army of contingent faculty, it has devalued teaching, effectively denied access to millions of low-income students, forced mountains of debt on middle-income students, introduced sky-high CEO-like executive compensation, spurred the growth of academic search firms, decreased health and re-tirement benefits for academic employees, fostered for-profit educational ventures, built big-time athletics programs that rob funds from education, contri-buted to scientific fraud, and nurtured the endless quest for external revenues to sate the insatiable appetite of institutions whose mission has become "grow or die," in mindless imitation of capitalism itself.

With the gross commercialization of higher education, as Derek Bok points out, the public's trust in the academy declines, and with that sad development, a sadder development still—"the risk of government intervention"—rises. But government has intervened, repeatedly, not only in starving higher education of public funding, and with barely a whimper of protest from the voters, but also in crafting policies, such as the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, that guarantee commercialization of the academy while aiming to benefit private industry. Government also intervenes when it intentionally politicizes the academy by appointing ideologues or political cronies to governing boards, endorses Orwellian policies like the Academic Bill of Rights, and legislates to impose morality (for example, through the Solomon Amendment, which punishes institutions that bar from campus recruitment programs employers, including the U.S. military, who do not comply with policies against sexual-orientation discrimination). Regrettably, none of the books under review comment on the relationship between commercialization and politicization: that is, whoever controls the wealth perforce has the power.

Nor do they discuss the fact that government interventions frequently violate academic freedom because, simply, they place economic or political concerns above the marketplace of ideas. What the academy needs is government acceptance that the academy should be free to govern itself because the academy is the best and truest path toward building a stronger democracy and a more civil society. If that were to happen, the reach of commercialism into the academy would not end, but its members would at least be free to pursue truth for the common good and not have to worry about the price tag for their efforts or the size of the revenue stream from their discoveries.

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