Social Science Research Council

As many administrators and faculty have told us, few decisions are made by law schools without considering their potential effect on rankings. Two important and complementary mechanisms induce rankings discipline. First, rankings provide a means for constituents to coerce or pressure law schools as they learn to use and manipulate rankings; second, rankings, by reordering of status relations among law schools, become aspirational and alluring, and are internalized by the parties involved, even those who consider rankings poor or illegitimate measures. Understanding both of these catalysts of rankings discipline is important for appreciating why rankings are so popular and transformative.

The massive fortification of intellectual property is one of the stunning success stories of the neoliberal project. It has been the primary method deployed to transmute the marketplace of ideas from a dream scenario into quotidian reality. The dogma that no one would think, or at least convey their thoughts to others, unless they somehow received market recompense for their labors, is a tremendous slander on the history of science and culture, but nevertheless has carried the day to become folk wisdom in the neoteric order. Students have to be taught not to ‘steal’ digital music files, even though within their lifetimes making copies of music had been treated as fair use under copyright law. Likewise, students have to be taught not to ‘steal’ research that they may have carried out themselves, unless they have secured permissions from everyone from their thesis advisor to their university technology transfer office. Since the marketplace is the greatest information processor known to humankind, there is no way that a few extra property rights imposed here and there might actually throttle the further production of knowledge and culture.

There have been some interesting analyses of what has been happening to higher education emanating from the beleaguered departments of education, themselves caught in the cross-hairs of the business consultants hired to slim down and streamline the modern university. By sharp contrast with the economists, these analysts approach what has been happening to science and higher education as a subset of larger political movement, one which seeks to re-engineer democracy by privatizing one of the largest sectors of state expenditure, namely, the provision of education. In short, universities are being exhorted to become more like corporations – to regard their products as “information” and “human capital”, to treat their students more like consumers – as a prelude for the state to withdraw from responsibility for the provision of education.

Of all the trends that impinge upon Viridiana’s day-to-day activities, this is the one that is treated as obvious by all her peers. The percentage of national R&D expenditure provided by the Federal government in the US has been falling since roughly 1967, while that emanating from private industry has been rising. Federal dollar expenditures for R&D have been more or less flat over the last 15 years. Science policy experts know this wasn’t only a matter of tight budgets, but that it involves a dramatic reversal of principles which had become ingrained in the political psyche in the years just after WWII.

The globalization of corporate R&D is one of the characteristic hallmarks of the new regime of knowledge production. Of course, multinational companies headquartered in smaller countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland have long internationalized their R&D activities essentially from their inception; but the more striking trend is the sharp rise in international outsourcing of research across the board since the 1980s.

Where teaching and research were still, until recently, “crafts” indissolubly attached to the person performing them, scholars are now regarded as a “bundle” of functions that can and should be “unbundled,” desubjectivized, and broken down into as many discrete tasks that can be fulfilled more efficiently, and on demand, by interchangeable operators – a development made possible by the pervasive introduction of ICTs as instruments of coordination.

The drive to capture all manner of intellectual artifacts, subjecting them to finely-specified formal contractual relations and market discipline is the culmination of all the previous trends covered so far: the creeping objectification of information, fallout from the mechanization of thought by the computer and low-cost instantaneous forms of communication such as the Internet, the collapse of socialism and hence an ideologically bipolar world where politically sensitive areas were kept fenced off, the de-industrialization of the West, and the conviction that economic growth derives from scientific research and development.

This last week I attended a talk by Professor Paul Duguid of the UC Berkeley I-School. Prof. Duguid teaches on the topic of information quality, and recently has begun research on the history and development of trademarks and branding. As with his previous work, his talk raised issues that question the embrace of the current popular culture of open web based systems, and his commentaries are well worth sharing.

As universities are increasingly exposed to the rough justice of the market, their institutional life is distinguished more by the rate of change than by the observance of custom and tradition. Few examples illustrate this better than the rush, in recent years, to establish overseas programs and branch campuses. Since 9/11, the pace of offshoring has surged and is being pursued across the entire spectrum of institutions that populate the higher education landscape, from the ballooning for-profit sectors and online diploma mills to land grant universities to the most elite, ivied colleges. No single organization has attained the operational status of a global university, after the model of the global corporation, but it may only be a matter of time before we see the current infants of that species take their first, unaided steps.

There are many fine histories of the postwar development of the computer and the construction of the Internet, such that it might appear almost superfluous to mention them as a prime determinant in the transformation of our understanding of the production and distribution of information. Their joint impact upon global communications and the control and storage of information conventionally makes reference to two principles said to be inscribed in the very technological trajectory of their development: Moore’s Law, which guaranteed that the per-unit cost of a calculation and/or memory unit was destined to fall exponentially over the horizon of its relevance; and the so-called “end-to-end” principle in the packet-switching architecture of the Internet, where ‘all’ the coordination and control functions were supposedly relegated to the edges of the network, and the internal nodes of the Internet were deemed neutral with regard to simple routing functions.