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. The problem remains that the existing universities cannot really wholeheartedly embrace complete conversion to the corporate model, for a raft of historical reasons. For instance, much of the accounting structure of existing universities is oriented around the legal presumption of their non-profit status; and over time, subsuming more for-profit activities has begun to undermine their tax-free status, their claim to special exemptions with regard to certain classes of IP (as in the very important case of Madey vs. Duke), and much else that renders them distinctive. And it’s not just the uneasy relationship to the government that comes under strain through imitation of the corporation. Many universities depend upon the prospect (and university presidents spend most of their waking hours driven by the fact) that their alumni will give generously to their alma mater; but who in their right mind leaves a bequest to Coca-Cola, or GE, or Microsoft? The more the university opts for corporate behavior, the more it relinquishes one of its most important (though certainly uneven) sources of sustenance.

But far from something that can easily be repressed, this transformation of education is indeed the goal of much Federal policy. One can trace it back to the decision in 1972 to give aid to individuals, and not directly to the institutions involved. Student grants were converted to student loans not simply to save money, but to hasten the redefinition of the student as consumer, so that the university might act more like a retailer. In the 1990s, many tax credits and federal programs for higher education were explicitly extended to for-profit universities; and that is when huge distance education diploma mills like the University of Phoenix, Colorado Technical University Online, and Universitas 21 Global sprang up across the landscape. Viewed dispassionately, the ultimate objective of US education policy is two-pronged: to preserve a few private legacy institutions like the Ivy League for the affluent seeking that boutique diploma, encouraging them to flirt with corporate behavior but never entirely renounce their special status; and for the great mass of the population, to convert most of the rest of opportunities to low-cost for-profit options. The great public state universities are being slowly phased out: appropriations cut except when the sports teams are doing well; permanent faculty replaced with contract labor; the top-down imposition of business models on academic units in the name of ‘accountability’; and the blurring of public/private identities.

In this configuration of the future of education, it has not gone unnoticed that there is very little room for an elaborate or extensive research capacity. The cheap for-profits providing distance education have explicitly renounced any such functions as not a part of the business plan; the state universities lose their ability to maintain a diversified base as tenured faculty are phased out; and the gold-plated private schools pour most of their own resources into areas of the natural sciences that are able to attract private money, while starving everything else. The net result can only be that, wherever research is to be conducted, it will only be supported under conditions of commercialized co-operation with external corporations.

And here we observe the individual trends described above begin to mesh together into a neoteric system. Everywhere you turn, things that used to be cheap (if not free), are now occasions for making a profit. In the New Knowledge Economy, a dollop of high-class human capital is an offer you cannot afford to refuse, so you are willing to pay dearly for it, including student loans that stretch out well into your working career. If you are not one of the fortunate few born with a silver spoon or a golden credit rating, then the Internet supplies a lower quality version of the commodity on the cheap in the form of distance education. Since education is no longer about the formation of citizenship or character, then all that really matters is that some bureaucratic entity sanctions that you purchased the stipulated commodity—one reason for the popularity of the MBA and the undergraduate business major. The worldwide strengthening of IP imposes this Knowledge Economy upon the entire globe, under the rubric of Free Trade, including the ability of areas newly devoid of manufacturing to apparently live off the tribute of far-off others. Since the whole idea of an academic peer group loses its rationale, and information shades off imperceptibly into infotainment, knowledge becomes defined in a circular manner as whatever the market will pay for. And just when the modern corporation seeks to outsource its R&D functions as part of its restructuring, voilà, universities everywhere are vying with each other to accept contract research. Since information can be digitally transferred, owned and controlled far outside the bounds of the nation state, the university as research provider finds it must compete with both non-academic and foreign academic units, imitating the prior global reach of the transnational corporation.

Is it just an accident that such far-flung phenomena come together into something that looks very much like an integrated political economy?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 6:45 am and is filed under Political economy of higher education, The Viridiana Jones chronicles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.