Approved by
Dissertation Committee:

Both Karen Palazzini and Tim Dunn, although he won't be around Austin to see this dissertation completed and turned in, gave me the support and inspiration to stick with my project and pursue my Ph.D. Without their support I would never had made it this far.

Over the past nine years my life as has swung back around as if following the spirals of a spring, if not to where I began then definitely still in sight of my starting point. Nine years ago, newly on my own, I enrolled in Professor Les Kurtz's "Nuclear Threat" course because I wanted to learn about something immediately relevant to my life that I was not getting in my required courses. Little did I realize until much later that this one course provided me with my original inspiration to do something about not only the world but this university. A few years ago I returned to Les to in desperation to seek his help as the chair of my dissertation committee, shocked to find that although we had only exchanged passing "hellos" in the halls over the years, he remembered me from that class - something you don't find very often at UT-Austin especially in a class of more than 100 people. Since then Les has given me the friendship, support, advice, insight, push and editing needed to complete the dissertation. Many thanks also to Professors Christine Williams, Anne Kane, David Montejano and Doug Foley for their encouragement and support as members of my dissertation committee, and to Doug Kellner for getting me out of a jam. Finally, I offer a gentle bow to Harry Cleaver for being my teacher, inspiration and friend.

Last but not least, I want to thank you for not only reading this but hopefully putting this information to use to transform or dismantle the universities as we know them.

Entrepreneurialization, the process by which universities are being restructured as overt profit-making multinational businesses, capitalizes upon the rationalization, industrialization and militarization of higher education. This case study focuses on the early stages of the entrepreneurialization of the University of Texas at Austin into a multinational corporation, a model for what is happening to universities throughout the US. This new stage of reorganization is a strategic response to the crisis of higher education in the US that resulted from the campus rebellions of the 1960-70s. While hardly complete, entrepreneurialization is in conflict with the "multiculturalism" movements, for example, that propose reforms that would further subordinate the universities to the needs and interests of diverse disempowered people. Entrepreneurialization has had an unintended side effect: as overt multinational businesses, we can better understand the central relationship of the universities in the international accumulation of capital and the importance of students in the class struggle. As the US model of entrepreneurialization spreads to universities in many other parts of the world as a result of global restructuring it also offers the possibility for fusing new transnational connections among student movements in different countries fighting common struggles.

The culmination of a unique development of "adversarial methods," this dissertation combines participant observation, journalistic investigative methods, archival research, Freedom of Information and Open Records requests, budgetary analyses, and social movement research and activism to investigate and analyze a newly emerging multinational institution.