How We Can Resist Corporatization
The United States needs a huge continuing-education effort to remind us all that behind higher education is a contract between the country at large and its colleges and universities.
By James G. Andrews
Just about everyone with a stake in the long-term success of U.S. higher education worries about the growing influence of free-market business practices on the operation of colleges and universities. Most faculty, in particular, see the increasing reliance on corporate models as destructive to the mission of higher education. Surprisingly, however, faculty members have not yet acted together through professional associations such as the AAUP to take an informed and persuasive position condemning the influence of corporatization on higher education. Nor have they suggested a reasonable approach to resist and reduce its spread.
Different circumstances led institutions to increase their reliance on corporate practices over the past several decades. A prolonged downturn in the U.S. economy decreased public and private financial support for higher education, forcing institutions to look elsewhere for funding, and negative public perceptions of higher education did not help. Many people in the larger society came to feel, for example, that colleges and universities no longer serve the public interest but instead cater to the private interests of the favored few who are accepted for admission. Such thinking led to a sense that these favored individuals, not the public, should pay a greater portion of college costs through tuition.
Others asserted that professors have abused tenure and argued that First Amendment free speech protections make it unnecessary anyway. Most recently, a vocal group of critics has complained that higher education is dominated by “liberal” faculty who promote their ideological orthodoxy in the classroom. These critics, drawing on conservative activist David Horowitz’s “academic bill of rights,” have tried to persuade legislators to adopt laws governing faculty hiring practices and what faculty members can say and do in their classrooms.
Other contributors to university corporatization include the domination of institutional governing boards by successful business leaders who favor the application of free-market business practices to higher education and who appoint like-minded presidents and academic administrators. Their influence feeds an increased sense among the public that higher education should be more profit-oriented. Those who feel this way argue that university research is a potential source of institutional income. They believe that faculty members should bill clients for professional services and compete for externally funded research grants and contracts. Similarly, they want administrators to eliminate academic programs with low enrollments and downsize their faculties to focus on developing new and potentially popular programs staffed by contingent faculty.
Corporate models for operating colleges and universities value short-term profits over long-term investment in education, and they regard students not only as products but also as customers. Professors are commodities to be exploited and traded, and academic administrators are managers whose decisions make shared governance and due process inefficient and unnecessary.
In searching for ways to curb the influence of corporate practices on higher education, it seems reasonable to look toward the faculty. Other groups associated with colleges and universities—governing boards, administrators, staff, students, and alumni—have for different reasons less motivation and potential for developing and implementing solutions. Faculty, especially those who are tenured or on the tenure track, are regarded as “officers” of their institutions in the same sense that lawyers who have passed the bar exam are regarded as officers of the court. Faculty are therefore entrusted with significant institutional responsibilities in shared governance and are expected to play the primary role in decisions concerning instruction, research, and faculty status.
Moreover, faculty are implicated in a credibility crisis now facing higher education. The crisis stems from a genuine problem with public image in that colleges and universities have failed to mount an effective campaign to respond to public misperceptions about higher education, including those noted above. No group is more culpable for this failure than the faculty.
So what to do? Neil W. Hamilton, in his 2002 book, Academic Ethics: Problems and Materials on Professional Conduct and Shared Governance, refers to the unwritten agreement between faculty members at colleges and universities and the society these institutions serve. Hamilton’s description of this agreement, or social compact, suggests a promising approach to resolving the corporatization problem.
A Different Model
In his preface, Hamilton notes higher education’s similarity to the other “learned professions,” all of which engage in an unwritten agreement with the public through which “members of the profession agree to restrain self-interest, to promote ideals of public service and professional excellence, and to maintain minimum standards of performance within the peer group.” In turn, the public “grants the profession both substantial power over a critical area essential for society’s well-being and substantial autonomy to regulate itself through peer review.” Hamilton notes that this social compact does not perpetuate itself—practitioners must remind society, generation after generation, of the agreement’s purpose and demonstrate how the profession serves the common good.
“If, in a market economy, a profession does not renew the social compact through continuing education, money and economic efficiency will eventually sweep the field to define all professional relationships as simply economic transactions between consumers and service providers for profit,” Hamilton writes. This kind of continuing education, he indicates, will keep higher education in the public eye. It will also encourage professors to hold themselves and each other to strict standards through peer review instead of permitting others who have more economically motivated standards to assess professors’ work. Hamilton makes explicit reference to the serious negative consequences that will occur if the academic profession, in a market economy, fails to renew the social compact in each succeeding generation.
Focus on Faculty
Hamilton’s proposed solution to university corporatization is an appealing one and worth examining in closer detail. He suggests that faculty should, with assistance from other groups, lead the continuing-education effort, offering ideas about how such an effort might be organized and implemented. But the leadership should be the faculty’s.
Professors should drive the effort on their own campuses and through their professional organizations. A national faculty umbrella organization such as the AAUP is particularly well placed to take the lead by soliciting the suggestions of faculty members, appropriate administrators, its own elected officers, and those of other faculty organizations.
Faculty efforts to reduce corporatization will inevitably encounter considerable local and national opposition. Profit-oriented business practices have been influencing campus culture for some time now, and faculty have not actively resisted their expansion. Faculty reward systems at major research universities, for example, are now skewed to favor externally funded research and to de-emphasize the value of unfunded research, teaching, and service.
Under the social compact Hamilton describes, society ensures the environment and resources needed for professors to fulfill their responsibilities in exchange for the high-quality educational opportunities that faculty provide. That is, society agrees to subsidize an educational environment in which faculty can pursue teaching, scholarship or creative work, and service free from pressure to raise funds. Traditionally, this environment has been characterized by academic freedom, tenured appointments, shared governance, and due process protections. This explicit identification of society’s fundamental responsibility to support higher education may eventually lead to a resolution of the corporatization problem.
A prolonged period of financial austerity has slowly starved higher education of society’s financial support, forcing institutions to reduce expenses and aggressively search for new sources of income just to maintain existing programs and activities. At the same time, critics of higher education have accused faculty members of multiple failures.
They say faculty members no longer restrain their self-interest or promote ideals of public service and professional excellence. Nor do they maintain minimum standards of performance within their peer group. Critics rebuke faculty for not embracing post-tenure review and for supporting the principle of academic freedom in cases perceived by the public as insupportable (that of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, for example).
We need a better understanding, on the part of the public and the professoriate, of the mutual responsibilities of each. Under the current structure, faculty are rewarded not for public service but for institutional fund raising—for running “for profit” short courses, workshops, and accelerated non-degree programs for full-time employees of business enterprises and for obtaining competitive research grants and contracts from external funding agencies. Such a reward system is inconsistent with the best interests of the public in the long term.
To provide for the common good, the social compact places responsibility for supplying the resources necessary to support higher education squarely on the shoulders of the society colleges and universities were established to serve. Attempts to shift that financial responsibility onto the faculty have caused faculty members to focus on fund raising rather than on the tasks for which they are trained.
Continuing Education
In their efforts to resist corporatization, faculty members must persuade not only their colleagues and the public, but also university and college administrators and members of governing boards. Faculty would also be wise to target the staff, students, and alumni of their institutions in their continuing-education campaign.
The AAUP can support this endeavor by documenting the problem of corporatization and leading a national continuing-education program. The Association should solicit advice from all potentially affected individuals and organizations and should consider hosting workshops and conferences to prepare individual faculty members to lead local continuing-education efforts.
Such efforts would help faculty members identify and resist free-market business practices on campuses. One such practice involves the establishment of nontenured, full-time, renewable-term contingent faculty positions (for example, “clinical professor” and “research professor” appointments) that have significant responsibilities in only one or two of the three traditional areas of faculty activity (that is, teaching, research, and service).1 Institutions establish these contingent faculty positions mostly to reduce expenses and increase flexibility. Because these positions involve few institutional responsibilities, the individuals appointed have limited roles in faculty governance, thereby dividing and weakening the faculty voice.
The number of these contingent and specialist appointments needs to be reduced and eventually eliminated. A continuing-education program targeted toward such a change could highlight the work and findings of the AAUP’s commit- tee on contingent faculty and the profession.2 Publicizing such work beyond the higher education community itself is crucial.
Also on the local level, faculty senates must insist on participating in discussions about all newly proposed faculty positions and institutional operating principles and practices on their campuses, including debates about proposals to establish contingent faculty positions and implement faculty salary incentive plans that give bonus payments to faculty who compete successfully for externally funded research grants and contracts.
The proliferation of inappropriate business practices in academe is truly alarming, and the time for faculty action is long overdue. No group is better suited to plan and implement a continuing-education effort, nor does anyone have more at stake in its success, than our nation’s faculty. And there is no better time to get started than now. ¨
Notes
1. The threats to academic freedom and tenure that have occurred in many medical schools as a result of such profit-oriented entrepreneurial business practices led the AAUP to issue two reports in 1999 addressing the serious negative impact of the erosion of these critically important concepts on the quality of medical education and care. Back to text.
2. See Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession. Back to text.
James Andrews is emeritus professor at the University of Iowa who held an adjunct appointment in medicine, a secondary appointment in liberal arts and sciences, and a primary appointment in engineering. He remains active in the AAUP at the local, state, and national levels.
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