Remaking the American University: Market-Smart and Mission-Centered

A Survival Manual for Higher Ed

Reviewed by Ken Kempner

Robert Zemsky, Gregory Wegner, and William Massy.
Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005

Remaking the American University is a perplexing book to read and review. The argument advanced by the authors appears more a manual for survival than an enlightened agenda in a new age of higher education. Robert Zemsky, Gregory Wegner, and William Massy explain that they are “in search of a touchstone to make sense of what was happening in American higher education and why.” Their goal is to “convey a better understanding of how the interplay of markets, strategies, and purpose are remaking American colleges and universities.” The authors succeed in their conveyance of some issues remaking U.S. colleges and universities to a minimal extent, but the search for a “touchstone” eludes them.

Their argument is based primarily on a bewildering array of catchphrases: zoomers, amblers, bloomers, academic ratchets, and the administrative lattice. For the authors, being “market-smart,"  “mission-centered,” and “politically savvy” constitutes the basic element and solution of their argument. In seeking to provide “an articulated understanding of how this emerging system of pathways actually worked,” the book considers a critical array of issues: admissions, access, equity, athletics, teaching, publishing, financing, and funding. All of these issues are relevant concerns for higher education, but each is a complex social issue in need of a deeper exposition than is found in this book.

The authors take us into well-charted territory yet ignore a wealth of contemporary scholarship on higher education and the market. The audience for this book, presumably central administrators, will find little remarkable advice to guide their institutions. Chief executives at research-intensive universities will find minimal help in this book, while executives at regional institutions will barely recognize themselves. In general, faculty members are portrayed as simply another problem to be solved. Since practitioners are not well served here, who the audience is, what the book seeks to accomplish, and what the solutions are never quite seem clear. Even the parochial nature of the book’s title begs for clarification: which “America” are the authors remaking?

The intent of the book is admirable, as the authors pose relevant questions for those in higher education. “Can universities at this date still choose to be places of public purpose?” they ask. Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy appear equally troubled over issues of access and equity for the dispossessed in American society. But outside of posing these questions, the book falls short in its assessment of problems, the social analysis of root causes, and actions that should be taken. For example, the authors are particularly remiss for ignoring the considerable amount of literature on higher education and the market, particularly the work of higher education researchers Sheila Slaughter, Gary Rhoades, and Larry Leslie regarding academic capitalism. The authors also fail to consider a significant group of scholars, among them Derek Bok and James Duderstadt, former university presidents, who provide a more balanced and indepth critique of the market and higher education. Readers who seek a deeper understanding of markets, governance, and restructuring of higher education are better served by the works of Robert Birnbaum,David Breneman and Brian Pusser, Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, Stanley Aronowitz, and Imanol Ordorika. Reading such works also broadens one’s understanding of “American” universities, including those institutions in Central and Latin America. Not one of these authors is mentioned.

While the text is not insensitive to the failures of the market, the authors are far too accepting of and accommodating to its dangers for the public and private good. In seeking solutions to the crucial problems in American higher education, Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy agree that public underwriting of institutions in pursuit of public purpose is necessary. Regrettably, they are overly willing to accept the market as inevitable and are seemingly ready to abandon higher education to the market by offering up our young (á la Jonathan Swift). Such concerted effort by neoconservatives to privatize the state agenda, although troubling to the authors, is not a concept developed in the book. This shift from the public good to the market is at the center of the international debate among higher education scholars and policy makers, but only tepidly advanced here. Similar to criminologists who only study the thieves who get caught, Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy are overly invested in their enthusiasm to redefine the current system in an image of ratchets and lattices. That the “grand pooh-bahs” of higher education they extol are complicit in the crisis seems unproblematic for the authors.

Fresh perspectives on the larger social issues facing higher education and what new actions can be taken are also absent. The authors’ assessment of higher education is reminiscent of the time then-President George H. W. Bush vomited in the lap of the Japanese prime minister. The purpose of Bush’s 1992 visit was to convince Japan to buy oversized U.S. cars and out-of-date durable goods. Getting sick on the prime minister was the perfect metaphor for the unresponsiveness of the U.S. economy in the age of globalization. The United States had nothing to offer. Similarly, Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy encourage capitulation by becoming “market-smart” and “mission-centered,” but propose little more in terms of how such concepts can be enacted.

For this reason, scholars will benefit little from this book. The text lacks a critical review of the field, with virtually no reference to the contemporary social thought that illuminates the effects of globalization on education and social policy. Similarly, legislators and policy makers will find only modest explanations to help them understand the neoconservative rationale for privatizing education. Higher education administrators, as well, are not challenged to recognize their collusion in supporting the rush to the market. Faculty members, too, are largely ignored, particularly their role in shared decision making and governance. Even proponents of neoliberalism will fail to find the usual comfort offered by Keynes and Hayek to justify markets.

The conclusion that this book ultimately fails to reach—but one promoted by other scholars—is that we have done irreparable damage to our international preeminence in higher education and to our students by abandoning them to the market. Perhaps the authors are not quite ready to let the market eat our young, but they fail to identify or resolve the neoliberal responsibility for the consequences of academic capitalism. Proposing that “American” higher education should become “market-smart” and “mission-centered” is a simplistic, unconvincing, and possibly hazardous solution.

Ken Kempner is professor of education and international studies and former dean of Social Sciences at Southern Oregon University. He can be reached by e-mail at kempner@sou.edu.

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