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Fomenting Dissent on Campus
It’s about time we demonstrated to our students that educated critique is better than brand loyalty.
By Terri A. Hasseler
Many of my colleagues say they are frustrated by their students’ failure to “get involved,” take a stand on an issue, or protest. I hear this lament not only at my own institution, a private school known mostly for business education, but also from colleagues at private liberal arts schools, community colleges, and state universities. But how often do we as faculty members demonstrate how to dissent? Do we teach students to disagree with dominant positions and to use their political franchise? Do we speak openly about problems at our institutions? Too often, we fear that we will be seen as insubordinate or disloyal to our colleges or universities, and thus we neither model nor teach the importance of dissent.
September 11, 2001, gave rise to a nervous citizenry, and not everyone agrees that dissent is a good idea. How do we create a system that allows for a healthy exchange of competing ideas? First, we need to consider some of the obstacles to creating (or re-creating) an engaged academic community in a culture in which corporate, commercial, and capitalistic practices have been naturalized into the university structure. The new corporate academy relies on a highly managed workforce and a clearly defined clientele. Anna Marie Cox, in her study of the rise of the corporate university, quotes John Sperling, the chief executive of the University Phoenix: “This is a corporation, not a social entity. Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop [students’] value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’ bullshit.” What he dismisses as nonsense, however, is the stuff that allows for dissent as opposed to docility, control, and uniformity.
The Corporate University
As U.S. universities rely increasingly on corporate models of institutional management, faculty are expected to perform as employees first—indeed, employees in need of firm management—and educators second. A recent selection of articles in the journal Radical Teacher highlights how this new arrangement has affected the shape of the academy. English professor Larry Hanley notes the replacement of a stable cohort of tenured faculty with casual, temporary employees—a replication of practices in the corporate sector, which profits from an unprotected and easily replaceable labor force. American studies scholar Joseph Entin argues that with the increased presence of a temporary workforce, tenure is understood as a “privilege,” not as a “right or even an expectation.” With the erosion of tenure, faculty find it much more difficult to dissent openly. As English professor Michael Bérubé has argued, dissent in education has been relegated to an extremist position—nutty leftist professors, far outside “mainstream” thought.
Faculty have, to some degree, accepted this transformation as inevitable. They have often consented to changes furthering university corporatization, although they might express dissent in moments of contract negotiations, in the formation of graduate student unions, and in periodic revisions to academic freedom clauses in contracts. Perhaps department chairs, who hold quasi-administrative positions, are the most visible consenters to changes within the system. Chairs, as Hanley and Entin note, are responsible for managing the large contingent labor forces. As education professor Joel Westheimer argues, chairs are increasingly seen as administrative appointees loyal to the administration, which often places them at odds with the faculty.
Once we agree that departments must compete with one another for limited resources, or that enrollment numbers justify everything, we have accepted a corporate model. As faculty labor unions lose power while corporate structures grow, faculty performance becomes increasingly subject to surveillance by human resources offices rather than by faculty governance processes. Human resource offices, no matter how wonderfully staffed and run, are ultimately an arm of the administration. Faculty concerns should be protected and voiced through faculty governance in unions or senates.
Student as Consumer
Not long ago, I asked students in a first-year class to write an essay applying principles of the new urbanism we had been discussing to buildings on campus. Recent construction has made my campus attractive and greatly improved the environment. I wanted to see if students could analyze whether the institution had responded to a particular ideological approach to urban planning. I thought the essay topic would give them a chance to apply some critical-thinking skills. Most, if not all of the students, however, ignored the instructions and came back with what I can only characterize as promotional statements for the campus; they seemed to think that was what I wanted.
Perhaps I did a poor job in preparing them for this exercise, but what struck me very hard, even after classroom discussion, was their hesitancy to critique the campus in any way. They saw criticism as disloyalty and tried to convince me that nothing needed improvement. The essays echoed what they had heard on campus tours. These newly admitted students were heavily invested in the brand name of what they had purchased. Such investment made it difficult for them to accept or to engage in critique.
Universities that come late to the principles of brand affiliation are at a competitive disadvantage. Public policy professor David L. Kirp in his 2003 book, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line, shows how colleges begin marketing themselves to students as early as their sophomore year of high school to persuade students to identify with particular colleges. Doing so establishes the college as the “pioneer brand” against which other institutions will be compared. Incoming students are so wedded to the marketing picture of the institution that they find it difficult to be critical. Or perhaps these students have merely checked out of participating in critical dialogue because dissent has been made essentially impossible.
Students have a hard time considering how their choices might be flawed and developing skills that draw their attention to problems. Universities should teach students to be the future whistle-blowers—the ones who can point to the elephant in the room and name it as such. Many faculty members are invested in their institutions as well. But even faculty members who have been at their universities for a long time are less devoted to the institutions’ images than the most newly appointed trustees, with their devotion to the bottom line.
If faculty are seen primarily as employees, they cannot be “stakeholders”—that role belongs to presidents and trustees, who measure faculty investment in terms of loyalty to the institutional brand, including appearance at college events, participation in the marketing of the institution to incoming students, and so on. Because of the competitive education market, bad press affects the choices of students (and, more important, parents). This fact makes it difficult for faculty members to discuss campus problems in public, whether in a meeting or the checkout line at the grocery store. Not only do we fear turning away prospective students or putting a bad slant on the institution, but we also worry about potential retribution—even if it merely involves being made to feel like a “troublemaker.”
The business paradigm demands that employees be clear about their place within the structure; behavior that steps outside of that position is not validated. Even in popular culture—in television shows such as The Apprentice, for example—it is not the flamboyant or more interesting characters who make it to the end, but the uninteresting and bland ones—the perfectly obsequious rule-bound people who can “manage” others. A cult of celebrity surrounds such people, who often make their way into the campus speech circuit, where they spread their worship of corporate power structures. You, too, can be a corporate groupie and live in comfort, they tell students. The esteem given to such people reveals something fairly deep about our continued commitment to the creation of the “obedient citizenry” that AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen has spoken about and the degree to which we have naturalized business practices within academic settings.
The Capitalist Contract
Recently, in an introductory class on cultural studies, I asked my students to consider musicians who have used their art as a form of political dissent. I dug up a Web discussion of a recording of a Saturday Night Live performance by singersongwriter Sinead O’Connor from 1992. In this performance, O’Connor sang Bob Marley’s song War a capella on national television. At the end, she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II to protest problems she saw within the Catholic church. Many students were familiar with this event, although it occurred when most were toddlers.
Almost immediately, in class discussion, the language of the “contract” surfaced. O’Connor was there to “entertain” and to “perform,” students said. She was under contract with the television network and failed to live up to her obligations as an employee. A heated discussion followed about the role of artists in presidential elections. Students argued that they were tired of artists using their concerts as a platform to tell people how to vote; they pointed to Bruce Springsteen and others and asserted that the artist should just sing and entertain. Many of these students allowed the business paradigm to govern their opinions; it had become so naturalized into their thinking that they could not imagine stepping outside of the structure of the contract to consider the role of the artist in another light.
With the infusion of corporate practices into all aspects of contemporary life, even dissent can get co-opted. The language of the consumer is often the first language students use to voice their dissent: those same students who bought the campus promotional pitch may, in time, slip into the role of dissatisfied consumer. They may say that they are paying good money to attend a university and should get x, y, or z instead of developing more educationally and ethically sound reasons for change.
So how do we foster a community that allows for healthy forms of dissent? How do we teach our students to engage in dissent when many of us censor ourselves so that we have become complicit within a system that demands obedience? The simplest way to model dissent is by insisting that disagreement be an accepted part of the institutional culture, both in classrooms and meetings. Faculty should make it a habit to point out at the beginning of each meeting how inadequate institutions are at creating spaces that allow for disagreement and yet how vital to the health of an institution disagreement is. If faculty adopt this position, it becomes a shared institutional commitment to articulate the problem and to rectify it. When we call attention to the problem, everyone is compelled to allow for disagreement or make a case against it.
Faculty should also actively question and draw attention to the language of the corporation whenever it is used. The business paradigm has become so ingrained that administrators immediately assume that a corporate practice can solve every problem. Faculty in the humanities, in particular, must stop hiding behind theory and embrace political action. Yes, students need to learn a range of theoretical positions. But the important dialogue between theory and activism has been stifled in contemporary academic culture. Once-controversial theories such as feminism have been effectively depoliticized so that feminist theory no longer has necessary ties to feminist political action. Many political movements have started out with an activist agenda and slowly become consumed by the more theoretical and academic elements of the movement. As historian Donald Earl Collins pointed out in the September–October 2005 issue of Academe, the scholar-activist is a much rarer commodity than we think.
These ideas only touch on effective ways to model dissent; further discussions must occur. Now more than ever, faculty have a responsibility to empower students to critique the positions for which they are being trained. We must help students acquire the tools to analyze the social and economic structures into which they will graduate. We must help them to step outside the business paradigm. To do that, we must learn to step outside it ourselves.
Terri Hasseler is associate professor and chair of the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University.
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