Section III. The University and Students in a Capitalist Society
There are two primary strategies currently in use for restoring the manageability of US universities in the face of the two decade long crisis of higher education. A manufactured fiscal austerity (including increased costs, cutbacks, and disinvestment) is joined by a comprehensive reorganization of the very nature of the universities – which I call entrepreneurialization – that has been in the works since the early 1980s. Entrepreneurialization is the process of reorganizing the universities into overt businesses whose primary mission is to profit directly from the intellectual activities taking place on campus. Austerity is a key aspect to the transition process because money is rechanneled into profit-oriented projects and ventures. Each aspect of the university is put under pressure by austerity to generate its own operating funds. As a result, those areas resistant to or unable to generate revenues through adapting its mission to making and selling new products undergo rampant austerity. Over time, commercially promising programs and activities come to dominate the operation of the university.
Entrepreneurialization is the latest stage of reorganization of the universities following their industrialization into businesses from 1894-1928 and their integration as part of the military-industrial-academic complex beginning with WWI but formalized during WWII.[1] Industrialization proceeded through standardization of the activities of each campus in order to analyze them in terms of productivity and investment potential, their final product being ideological control and disciplined intellectual labor power.[2]
Such standardization has facilitated entrepreneurialization by providing information that has come to guide academic policy-making to the point where, short of resistance, “unprofitable” activities are disinvested from in favor of profitable high tech areas. However, entrepreneurialization is more than a change in investment but a fundamental shift in the organizational impetus of the university itself. The university is increasingly being organized around the commercialization and marketing of profitable activities while cutting and discontinuing those areas that do not successfully begin to commercialize or are antagonistic to commercialization. During the process of industrialization, the university was subordinate to business and the state which applied and profited from their research, few universities doing so themselves due to federal restrictions and limited capital. With entrepreneurialization the university no longer only serves to discipline labor power but also to use that labor power in the production of new commodities and the direct accumulation of capital. As we saw in chapters 2-3, universities are beginning to privately patent and commercialize publicly funded research, knowledge and technology as products. These products of the university “enterprise” are then marketed by university- and faculty-owned “spin-off” companies germinated in university owned business parks and small business incubators, and coordinated by university-owned foundations posing as non-profit institutions. That only small aspects of each university have been entrepreneurialize since the reorganization began in 1980 can be attributed to overt and everyday forms of resistance by faculty, staff students, and neighboring communities who have stood in the way.
This chapter briefly examines the industrialization of the universities beginning during the late 1900s in order to demonstrate that the deindustrialization of the universities – like the economy as a whole – came about as a response to class struggle within the universities which took the form of the student revolts of the l960-70s. My focus, however, is on analyzing how this reorganization has come about both on the day-to-day organizational level of the university and its role in capitalism. Taking the form of entrepreneurialization, the universities, like capital as a whole, are now focused on the development of high tech development and commercialization in order to reduce their dependency on unpredictable human labor. In response to their inability to discipline uncontrollable students into docile workers, the universities too have become capital intensive, developing new high tech tools for automating production, war, and even biological reproduction. While still serving to generate new workers, the universities have a new primary focus – selling directly for profit what they create. This very reorientation makes it clear for the first time that the universities are not only a part of capitalist accumulation but central to it.
Inversion of Class Perspective
Taking the starting point that the universities are a productive part of capital, Clyde Barrow attempts to understand the process of industrialization and the reorganization of the universities into businesses as part of the class struggle. Unlike Noble in America By Design, Barrow recognizes that the impetus for reorganization sterns from periods of class conflict both within and without the university that took place not only from 1894 to 1928 but also from 1929 to 1962 and continues today. “Contemporary concepts of modernization and rationalization,” he explains “are ideological euphemisms concealing the class conflicts which shaped and still structure American universities” (p. 251).
Such a class analysis is useful for re-reading the voluminous materials generated to facilitate and plan industrialization and attempts to entrepreneurialize the universities. Since little critical analyses exist it is necessary make use of these materials to understand not only what capital (“composition of capital”) is doing but the “political class recomposition” which gave impetus to restructuring. Once we understand the composition of capital, “we can…reverse our perspective and examine the phenomenon from the point of view of the people whose productive activities are being subordinated.”[3]
This dissertation is an effort to carry out the two tiered task of examining the current conflict over the composition of capitalist power in the universities (chapters 2 and 4) and analyzing the recomposition of the working class as it specifically deals with student struggle (chapters 3, 5 and 6). Cleaver makes clear the distinction and the interrelationship of the composition of capital and the recomposition of the working class:
While it can be said that capital seeks a ‘class composition,’ i.e., a particular structure of inter- and intra-class power which gives it sufficient control over the working class to guarantee accumulation, it is also true that workers’ struggles repeatedly undermine such control and thus rupture the efficacy (from capital’s point of view) of such a class composition. Such a rupture occurs only to the degree that workers are able to recompose the structures and distribution of power among themselves in such a way as to achieve a change in their own relations of power to their class enemy. Thus the struggles which achieve such changes bring about a ‘political recomposition’ of the class relations – ‘recomposition’ of the intra-class structures of power and ‘political’ because that in turn changes the inter-class relations.[4]
While they are abstract concepts, the composition of capital and the political recomposition of the working class are an attempt to view empirical day-to-day interplays of antagonisms. During periods of class insurgency, new means are devised to restore control by putting people back to work. If these new methods of control are successful, they rarely last long as new eruptions of class struggle disrupt their operation leading again to new efforts of organization control.[5] Since the turn of the century, the universities have become a fundamental means for restoring control by helping to devise new means of social organization. As we’ll see, during a period of world revolution, the industrialization of the universities provided efficient means for producing more disciplined workers and a new technological means of production that Concurrently became the organizational principle of higher education. Likewise, entrepreneurialization follows another period of international student rebellion that ruptured human capital management of higher education.
“The concept of political recomposition theoretically articulates the central role of working class struggle at the heart of technological change and the concepts of class composition and decomposition provide vehicles for rethinking issues of technological domination in terms of capital’s efforts to cope with an autonomously active, and opposed, historical subject” (Cleaver, p. 5). Such an inversion of class perspective allows us to understand how the industrialization and entrepreneurialization of the universities are fundamental technological responses to class struggle. Such an approach guides the work of others investigating higher education besides Barrow. Noble views technological change as a social process for organizing society although overlooking any existence of resistance;[6] Sinclair offered a strategic analysis of students and faculty as part of the class struggle through their struggles for academic democracy during industrialization; and Aboites, Slaughter, Newson and Buchbinder all recognize current restructuring as rooted in the political crisis that began in the 1960s and still characterized by conflict.[7]
Ironically, as factories, the universities are producing new technologies of automated production (better known as CAD/CAM or Computer Aided Design) for responding to working class re-organization. From biotechnology to automation, assembly lines of university researchers are designing the means for continuing production and warmaking but without human workers. Describing the University of Michigan’s Center on Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing (CRIM), John Schloerb points out that automated technologies “can perform a variety of manufacturing tasks with more precision – and less chance of striking – than volatile human workers.”[8] At the same time, these technologies also become the means for automating the university through interactive CDROM and televised classrooms for example. As discussed further in the conclusion, the university is not simply “participating in the creation of the ‘factory of the future’ or ‘the automated factory’,” as Slaughter found many university presidents acknowledging the role of the universities, but is itself a proto-type (p. 124). Such research is not only the socialized cost of the reorganization of reproduction due to class conflict but is the impetus for the reorganization of the universities motivated by internal conflicts as well.
The Industrialization of the Universities
The industrialization of the universities was preceded by the establishment of “land-grant colleges” through the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 and finalized in 1887 by the Hatch Act. These acts established the purpose of what are known as “land-grant colleges and universities” to serve in the development of agriculture and manual training. Although some publicly funded universities already existed, the land-grant universities marked the federal government’s first intervention into higher education in a three-fold effort to train workers, expand colonization and develop new agricultural technologies. From the very beginning of the land-grant universities, the role of the universities in organizing society around work – “practical studies” – was clear: “The founders of the land-grant colleges, in keeping with historical thought and experience, acknowledged the essential importance of work, as they dedicated their institutions to helping the industrial or working classes better their lot in life.”[9]
Although land-grant campuses were created throughout the country (37 states authorized campuses within the first eight years), their establishment in the western half of the country coincided with the long running “Indian Wars.” Likewise, the Morrill Act passed on its second attempt while in the midst of a failing Union Army eight months into the Civil War by requiring military cadet training. Since land-grant campuses were required to offer cadet military training programs[10] and existed mostly in regions of the country that had not been completely colonized, they went hand in hand with the militarization of the west where few government institutions other than Army forts existed.
These military responsibilities point to the militarization of the universities beginning largely before WWI as is commonly assumed.[11] In the big picture, the universities were one of a number of tools crafted for the purposes of colonization. The same month the Morrill Act was passed, Congress also passed the Homestead Act which granted 234 million acres to encourage rapid settlement and colonization and provided 181 million acres to the railroads to make their way across the country.[12] As colonists drove Native Americans and Mexicans off their lands with Army assistance and federal recognition of their homestead claims, the land grant universities were looked upon to provide not only trained cadets but also the workers and technological know – how for agriculturally exploiting it. From their very inception public universities were a primary force of primitive accumulation, aiding in the subduing of resistant Native American tribes, removing them from access to their traditional means of subsistence and placing them at the mercy of the US government. The creation of militarized universities and colonization went hand in hand. The universities’ early role in the process of primitive accumulation, that is reducing Native Americans from autonomous communities to people who were forced to work to survive, was their first contribution to capital accumulation – by helping to create a class of people reduced to workers.[13]
At the same time, the land-grant universities became a significant terrain of struggle between independent farmers, so-called “white” subsistence farmers, and large growers and, by the 20th century, large industrial capitalists, for control. This conflict mirrors the university’s role in primitive accumulation. University extension agents and experiment stations, which were mandated by the 1887 Hatch Act in response to the National Grange, Farmer’s Alliance and Populist investigations and criticisms, soon fell into service to agri-business in developing new technologies that undermined subsistence farming and served to place tighter control over farm laborers, many of whom would increasingly become waged workers after losing their land.
But the Morrill Act’s influence was not limited primarily to agriculture. Its passage led to a rapid increase in engineering programs in the l870s and eventually engineering stations by the turn of the century although they received one-twentieth the funding of agricultural stations even in 1925 (Madsen, p. 44). As Barrow, Veblen and Sinclair note, university governing boards became overwhelmingly dominated first by large growers and then industrial capitalists, displacing the clergy as the predominant group from which trustees were chosen.[14] The transition of formal control from first the clergy and then from agri-business to industrialists corresponds with the changing class relations of the universities and their integration into industrial capital.[15]
Although university professors began conducting research in coordinated efforts with corporations in the telephone, electrical, and chemical industries, for example, and private contracting began in 1910, it was another decade until the universities became fully integrated into the industrial structure (Noble, p. 128). These efforts were far from federally supported or organized policies. Aside from the creation of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) in 1906 and the Rockefeller Foundation/General Education Board in 1903, there was little coordinated effort to carry out this integration. It was the founding of the National Research Council during WWI to organize university resources for the war effort that signaled the first federal effort to consolidate a coherent relationship between the universities and industrial production, its primary focus after the war (Noble, p. 154). In effect, the industrialization of the universities is inseparable from their militarization.
Although the extent of industrialization was not limited to simply formal relationships and service between universities and business, it signals the existence of a more substantive reorganization of the universities. For Noble, this reflected not simply the socialization of the costs of private corporate research, a common critique of commercialization even today,[16] but the transformation and subordination of all of science to the needs of capital (p. 147).[17]
The substantive transformation of the universities into a sector of industrial capital came about as a result of more than simply the creation of corporate foundations and corporate control over boards of trustees and research projects. Such connections were not without resistance, as was agri-business’ previous domination, and a number of well documented critiques were made of industrialization, a few American Federation of Teachers locals formed, and the AAUP created in 1915 to defend tenure.[18] The heart of the transformation of the
universities into a central component of industrial production came about as a result of the application of business principles to their everyday operation, more specifically, the rationalization of academia.
As with entrepreneurialization, industrialization was a process of reorganization that mirrored the contested class relations of the time period. As Barrow notes:
The modernization of American universities, as well as the emergence of the professional academic intellectual, coincided with the industrial revolution in America. The structural patterns associated with capitalist development reappear in a series of quite similar events that also revolutionized the American college and labor process. The transformation of the traditional American college into the modern university followed the same pattern of institutional change: concentration of the means of mental production, centralization and bureaucratization of administrative control, the construction of national academic markets, and the rationalization of market relations between competing institutions. (p. 31)
Barrow provides intricate detail of one of the fundamental means of industrialization: the application of quantitative surveys to higher education to evaluate productivity and efficiency. Following his observation that the university is coming to “more and more conform in its administration to the methods of the business corporation,” the Carnegie Foundation’s first president Henry Pritchett contacted Frederick Taylor in 1909 to conduct “an economic study of education.”[19] Taylor put Pritchett in contact with his disciple Morris Cooke who a year later completed his groundbreaking analysis, which was published by the Carnegie Foundation. The power of Cooke’s study was that he “translated the ideals of corporate capitalism into a practical strategy for educational reform” (Barrow, p. 74).
Cooke went about this by applying principles of business to a strategy for managing the universities. He attempted to reorganize the various activities of the universities so that they could be compared in terms of their so-called productivity and efficiency. In an effort to standardize these operations, Cooke recommended numerous structural reorganizations and measurement tools that are not only still with us as today but taken for granted as indicators of learning. He suggested the creation of academic departments, budgetary cost-benefit accounting of expenses, line item budgeting, annual financial reports, centralized management of facilities and physical plant, and clearer hierarchic distinctions between faculty and the administration. At the time, few universities had separate departments, faculty could teach in nearly any area they chose, and faculty dominated most day-to-day decision-making. Many presidents still even taught classes. A more distinct hierarchy or division of labor was required in order to make this analysis. Once departments were created, they could be compared with the use of standardized statistical methods.
While management had to be differentiated and analyzed, so did the workers. Various means were suggested and implemented to measure the productivity and efficiency of faculty by measuring the same of students. In order to compare the productivity of departments and faculty, Cooke suggested the creation of student-hours and an analysis costs per student hour. The CFAT’s Mann Report later recommended standardizing the engineering student workload like that of waged workers, restricting it to eighteen hours or less per week.[20] The logic behind these measures was to manage the labor of faculty who Cooke explicitly recognized faculty as workers, overlooking students as workers.[21] Although the measure of student workloads was central in evaluating faculty labor, Barrow focused on the proletarianization of professors. He summizes that “The theoretical effect of this new measurement was to focus attention on professors as mental workers for the first time in their history. If the university was conceptualized as an economic unit of production, the role of the professor as its chief producer was altered as well” (p. 70).
Cooke emphasized a need to transform the labor of professors by suggesting an attack on the guild organization that preserved faculty power through inbreeding and tenure and advocated national searches and competition among candidates. Criteria for appointments and wages were changed to emphasize specialization, efficiency, and productivity. Today, these are measured at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) by annual reports and other departmental requirements that faculty report their number of published articles, books, grants, and awards in order to demonstrate their productivity and qualification for tenure, promotion or raises. Specialization was conceived by Cooke as a means for standardizing and making the labor of professors interchangeable. Specialization and Cooke’s “elective system” idea worked hand in hand to make courses “standardized, interchangeable parts with precise and predetermined specifications with which students could be assembled” (Barrow, p. 72). His suggestion that standardized lecture files be created is today a fundamental means by which introductory courses are taught by constantly changing graduate students and part-time faculty. Cooke devised the means for measuring faculty time use and other techniques for measuring faculty productivity.
Cooke’s reforms carried with it the power of the corporate foundations. Since there was little federal and state financial support for higher education, the foundations were able to use access to their endowments and faculty pension funds to impose a new industrial order. “By linking the availability of increased financial resources for higher education to the adoption of a corporate reform program, the foundations could use material pressures to reinforce the appeal of their proposed policies” (Barrow, p. 75). Access to Carnegie pension funds was mediated by the requirement that the university follow the procedures laid out in its Standard Forms for Financial Reports, and the Rockefeller General Education Board sent out “field representatives” to assist the campuses in their reorganization and published a manual for standardizing fiscal management (Barrow, p. 77). Combined, CFAT and the GEB’s pension fund and endowment totaled 26% of the existing college and university endowments. That most of the money went to only a few handful of about 1000 institutions indicates that existing resistance to industrialization and the influence of the foundations in implementing it may have caused problems in implementing these reforms.
A number of additional standardization processes came about as a result of WWI. In 1917, 20% of the universities switched to a quarter system to speed up the graduation of students into the military. The ROTC was created in 1916 under another title, the first selective service law was also passed that year and the draft changed to allow technical students to allow to finish school first (Barrow, p. 128). Techniques used to sort and manage soldiers were applied to the universities in the form of placement, guidance, honors programs, tracking, and entrance tests based on IQ tests given to draftees (Noble, p. 233). For Barrow, the “the nationalization and standardization of university administration was one of the war’s [WWI] most obvious results. The necessity of conducting constant inventories of personnel and plant for national agencies hastened the diffusion of standardized measurements developed by the educational engineers. It promoted internal reorganization as an adaption to national directives” (p. 146).
It was no accident that a number of top ranking CFAT and GEB administrators were instrumental in government war preparation commissions that consolidated and organized the universities’ participation in the war. Sam Capen of CFAT, who conducted the first survey of universities based on Cooke’s study, served on a commission to expand ROTC and an academic militarization commission during WWI, became the first director of the American Council on Education which was formed to centralize the role of the universities in manpower training and industrial research according to national policy (Barrow, p. 147). WWI provided the impetus for widespread adoption of standardization that the foundations and surveys alone could not accomplish.[22]
Higher education became the focus of the foundations not simply for intellectual resources but for disciplining of new labor power, that is, the creation of new workers, as well. Behaviorist psychological methods created in the universities and first used during WWI, became the basis of what Noble called the “the science of education.” The same “manpower” techniques applied to the utilization of college students as soldiers became fundamental to the organization of students as waged workers. “The conceptual lens through which this proud new breed of ‘scientific’ educators viewed the ‘process of education’ was identical to the one through which the personnel directors of the science-based industrial corporations viewed it earlier in the century: education was one side of the corporate ‘personnel problem'” (Noble, p. 253).
The “personnel problem” was studied and researched by the NRC, GEB and ACE who devised new sorting mechanisms such as distinguishing “gifted students” who were tracked into “honors programs” based on ability, sifting them out through exams, vocational placement and career counseling.[23] The introduction of labor planning to students, as measures of productivity and efficiency were applied to faculty labor, implies an implicit recognition of students’ unwaged labor contribution to future profits. Today, in Australia for example, standardization takes place in the form of a focus on “competency” in education “in which the outcomes of education are defined in terms of transparent, observable, and measurable qualities of an individual.” “The reorganization of education to produce competence is the latest and most effective of a long line of policies designed to ensure that the kind of people produced in education are centered on work.”[24]
For advocates of “progressive education,” questions of reform became questions of how to better discipline new workers. In 1923, Harvard professor George Mirick explained that “the power of the machine is determined…by measuring the amount of work it can do, and this amount can be stated in what are called foot-pounds or horse-power. It is in this direct way that mental abilities are measured. A human being is a machine. This machine is moved by nervous energy… As in the case of an electric or steam machine, the quantity of the human energy and the quality of the human machine can be perceived the quantity and quality of the work that it does.”[25] Rationalization of higher education was merely the latest means by which to churn out productive human workers.
President Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich recognizes standardization as analogous to organizing the schools as assembly lines. Since “the only prerequisites for most jobs were an ability to comprehend simple oral and written directives and sufficient self-control to implement them,” Reich explains, US public schools mirrored mass production.[26] “Children moved from grade to grade through a preplanned sequence of standard events, as if on factory conveyor belts. At each stage, certain facts were poured into their heads.” From there the children were sorted according to productivity and discipline. “Children with the greatest capacity to absorb the facts, and with the most submissive demeanor, were placed on a rapid track through the sequence: those with the least capacity for fact retention and self-discipline, on the slowest.” Eventually, “standardized tests were routinely administered at certain checkpoints in order to measure how many of the facts had stuck in the small heads, and ‘product defects’ were taken off the line and returned for retooling. As in the mass-production system, discipline and order were emphasized above all else.” A similar process of standardized production was also applied to teaching.
It was 1930s education theorist Elwood Cubberly who draws Reich’s analysis to its ultimate conclusion: “Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw materials are to be shaped and fashioned…and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications laid down.”[27]
For Noble, standardization of education did not passively reflect “outside” industrial organization but was part of a process through which it stimulated social reorganization; it meant militarization, industrialization and education were interlinked for the first time and incorporated into national planning. “Fresh from their Army experience in personnel classification and officer training, the educational reformers in the engineering schools had begun to envision cooperation on a grand scale: industry as a whole would furnish the job specifications and employment requirements the schools demanded, and the schools would provide the complementary testing, training, selection, and distribution of manpower for industry,” Noble explains (p. 234-5).
Standardization and managerial reorganization was required for not only running the university like a corporation but in order to integrate it into the industrial process. By reframing academic activities in terms of efficiency, productivity, labor use, outputs and inputs, the foundations could better understand how to utilize the universities. As Barrow explains for CFAT, “the initial absence of standardization between institutions had presented an immediate investment dilemma” (p. 83). This process reflected the underlying class tensions at work within the university:
The accumulation of capital as a purely quantitative measure of academic efficiency was closely related to administrative anxieties about a school’s prestige. Social efficiency – or the functional integration of institutional roles under the leadership of a managerial expert – was measured by the relative peacefulness of industrial relations within the university. A good administrator, therefore, ‘made determined efforts to keep the peace within his own institution, since if it appeared disunited it would lose prestige and influence’ and, ultimately, the capacity to attract additional capital. Thus, new texts on university administration generally advised ‘that quarrelsome debate, including that based upon conflicts among academic ideals, must be minimized or suppressed whenever it became threateningly serious.’[28]
Internal class conflict over the changing nature of the university coincided with the rising class antagonisms throughout not only the US but internationally. Carnegie and Rockefeller founded CFAT and the GEB as part of an effort to devise new technological responses to the widespread class upheaval occurring at the time. Marietta Baba identifies the industrialization of the universities as the first of four periods during which new university-business relationships were created. “Each of the four invention clusters occurred during periods of intensive international competition and/or crisis, and during times noted for pronounced technological change.”[29] The second period occurred during the depression (1929-1933), during and after WWII (1943-1954) and from 1967-1985.
If we understand technology, as Noble suggests, as more than simply machines but a social process for organizing society, the application of “manpower” planning from the military and business to the universities and the extension of university-industry cooperation is a reflection of capital’s attempt to deal with class struggle. Each of these periods of reorganization took place during times of intense class conflict during which time new means of technology were sought to respond to the effects of insurgency and regain control. As Richard Lyman, former Stanford president put it, “Our traditional method of handling both graduate education and research has been to provide a burst of support in reaction to a national crisis – to the Cold War, to the health crisis, to Sputnik, to the environmental crisis…”[30]
That Baba identifies 1967-1985 as the most recent period is indicative of the role of entrepreneurialization as a strategic response to class antagonisms at work inside the universities and throughout society. Her chart listing “university/industry linkage models” demonstrates a fundamental change in the nature of these models over the four periods from consulting and research contracts, to incubation, research parks and eventually “direct” (e.g. spin-off companies owned by the universities themselves) and “indirect investment” (e.g. venture capital funds) (p. 200).
The differences between the forces surrounding industrialization and entrepreneurialization reflect the class relations of the time period in which they took place. Whereas industrialization was initiated as a response to class antagonisms outside the universities in order to integrate them into production, entrepreneurialization was a response to class struggle from within by students, a struggle which disrupted the human capital investment strategy of the 1950- 60s.[31]
That the universities were a business and a productive part of the capital accumulation process was without question during industrialization. Not only did Cooke’s study assume the businesslike organization of the universities, the foundations conceive of them as businesses for investment, and the faculty recognized as laborers on an assembly line, but Henry Pritchett was already publicly asking “shall the university become a business corporation?” in an article published by that title in Atlantic Monthly in 1905.[32] Not only were critics like Sinclair and Veblen calling and analyzing the universities as businesses, but so were those attempting to reshape them into businesses and running them.[33] Samuel Chapen possibly put it more succinctly than anyone since during his inauguration as chancellor of the University of Buffalo:
The people of the United States have a great national industry which is never mentioned in the summaries of the productive enterprises of the country. It is the industry of building universities. The industry has absorbed an extraordinary amount of creative energy…It now represents an invested capital of $1,250,000,000. In cash it has never paid a penny on the investment, which accounts for its common omission from the record of those productive undertakings that add visibly to the wealth of the nation. But indirectly what has been the return? Scientific discoveries and the application of scientific knowledge to manufacturing, to commerce, to agriculture, to engineering processes, to the prevention and cure of diseases which are responsible for a large part of the actual profits of the nation’s business. Wipe out the contributions made by the universities during the last fifty years and the industrial life of the nation would shrivel up to insignificant dimensions.[34]
The Strategy of Entrepreneurialization
The student rebellion of the 1960-70s not only undermined the human capital strategy of investing in the reproduction of labor power in order to increase productivity and profits, but it set off a crisis of control and management that still reverberates today.[35] Disinvestment was soon recognized as a temporary response to the disruptions caused by the rebellions. New efforts to retool the universities so that they could contribute to restoring manageability and profits in the economy as a whole led to efforts to reorganize the universities themselves to deal with their own internal problems. Using austerity to weed out academic programs that served needs irrelevant or antagonistic to business forced administrators to devise new means of raising operating funds to cover shortfalls. Facilitated by changes in federal intellectual property laws regulating expensive publicly funded research, the universities began looking internally at their own activities as sources of profits. As federal and state funding for all but commercially oriented high tech research shrinks, these activities have come to dominate not only the operation but the very nature of the universities.
The entrepreneurialization of the university takes places on two levels: formal campus decision-making comes to be dominated by commercially oriented forces within the university and the overriding function of the university becomes transformed from disciplining labor power to using that labor power in the pursuit of direct profit. This is not as simple as saying outsiders come to dominate the organization of the university. In fact, long existing activities inside the university, research geared towards capital accumulation, come to not only determine but reshape the campus as a whole. Both aspects are inseparable and cannot be understood chronologically but as interactive and in-process.
Potentially profitable activities within the university gain priority by being separate from the formal decision making structures of the universities. After two decades or more of intensified efforts to strengthen university collaboration with business, entire new separate administrative infrastructures are created. Offices for technology transfer, research grants and support, intellectual property, business relations and development exist in many universities as high as vice president, chancellor and advisors to trustees. Actual research infrastructures such as spin-off companies, university foundations, research parks and centers and commercialization think-tanks have come to carry much of the informal decision-making power of the universities. We’ve seen this demonstrated in the case study of UT-Austin in chapter 2. In their extensive studies of the reorganization of Canadian universities into businesses, Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder find these new sources of power not only parasitic but an emerging transformative force changing the very nature of the universities.
For Newson, these infrastructures are not simply “‘parasitic’ off the universities which host them, insofar as they draw on the resources of the university to accomplish their activities without being subject to these practices in their own operations.” These have a much more substantial impact:
these new structures also provide the political means for transforming both the practices and the programmes and goals of their host institutions. Limited resources are increasingly allocated to these new structures and to the academic work that is carried out within them, through procedures other than those governed by academic fora like senates, faculty councils and local departments. Moreover, these structures initiate new programmes and insert them into the university’s agenda, again without following established academic procedures.[36]
Whether these new structures may come into being for matters of expediency (formal collegial structures are too “rigid” and “slow” or occur on a departmental level through personal contacts with a funding agent, for example) or in secrecy, in the context of austeric pressures to find new sources of funds, they not only reproduce themselves but grow in influence. However they may come about, these structures “have separate boards and are not accountable for their actions or initiatives to the collegial decision-making bodies of the host university. The creation of centers and similar special units undermines accountability to academic peers and the wider academic community, while permitting the needs of corporate partners to define research goals – all without any form of public scrutiny.”[37]
Newson and Buchbinder do not delude themselves with the idea of somehow “preserving” the non-existing self-managed “academic community” from the threat of intrusion[38] but attempt to demonstrate how far from that ideal the universities have become. They are also not simply decrying business influence over the universities. For them, the focus is on the changing social relations of the university as the context in which the “service university” – which serves only the interests of capital – is being realized. Simple business influences, “although having considerable bearing on certain aspects of academic functioning, did not generally affect the kind of knowledge that was developed and taught nor the process of its development and dissemination. The kind of corporate linkages that have been advocated as part of ‘the service university’ over the past decade directly intervene in the knowledge-seeking and knowledge-sharing process” (Newson, 1992, p. 7).
The production of knowledge is characterized by the relations of production. These relations change as the university becomes governed by efforts to directly profit through immediate integration into production. The source of change is not simply from one type of business to another but how they do business, using student, faculty and staff labor directly. “Universities, like industrial companies, are corporations that require labor and capital to operate,” Leonard Minsky proposed. But until now they have had no tangible product. This has all been changed by a new patenting law that essentially makes business the university’s business.”[39] Minsky is partially correct in saying they have had no “tangible product” because the universities have long produced disciplined workers although they were not sold directly for a profit. As emphasis is now placed on biotech and computer technologies, for example, the university becomes the site of production and sale using the very labor it disciplines, not simply an adjunct to another corporation that transfers ideas into production and new products.[40] The site of creation, production and sale, the university’s mystified role in capital accumulation is stripped away once and for all.
On a day to day level, academic work becomes increasingly subordinated to an administrative apparatus that perceives of intellectual labor as a commodity to be bought or sold. All aspects of the university become rationalized in terms of whether they can contribute a return on investment. “Individual academic units, and even the individual member of the units, are treated as mini-cost centers,” write Buchbinder and Newson. “The university can not only monitor their expenditures against the income they generate, but can also require them to break even or produce a profit. Academic units are thus made dependent on targeting their activities to a clientele that will generate enough income – either directly or through government support – to sustain their activities” (1992, p. 15). With the rapidly predominance of part-time teaching staff and the attack on tenure, faculty become interchangeable workers hired or fired based on their contribution to the university enterprise. For those that are more difficult to remove, a hierarchy forms within the university between the “haves” (the commercially viable) and the “have nots” (the resistant or irrelevant). The former not only receive the bulk of operational funds, equipment and physical plant but establish the guidelines by which the latter are to be evaluated.
Even the business activities of the universities are transformed. Henry Morgan shows how real estate is now being strategically used “as an investment in income producing property” by the creation of research parks. This is combined with the use of endowments and university foundations transforming the university into “a venture capital investor in its own right” as he describes Boston University’s Community Technology Foundation, and the transformation of intellectual property into income producing products.[41] His analysis offers a view of the university as a prototype of capital itself using the very labor power it generates to create profits that it reinvests to continue the process. While the university has long been a business, until recently it engaged in a number of diverse business activities which may not have been central to its function.
Likewise, the “haves” are even under pressures to demonstrate commercial applicability of their research and academic work. Exploratory (e.g. basic) research becomes subsumed by commercial pressures engendered by profit driven administrators and funding agents. The size and skills of one’s research staff is directly related to levels of funding. The more contracts or licensing income the more staff and graduate student researchers are assigned, creating mini-assembly lines generating commercially viable technologies that can be patented, licensed or even marketed by already existing companies or new ones created by the universities called “spin-offs”. Since few universities have actually generated large direct profits from entrepreneurialization in the form of royalties or sales, income is often calculated indirectly through overhead costs, grants or contracts revenues. However, as we saw in the case study of UT- Austin, there really are not any profits.[42] Returns on entrepreneurial projects hardly measure up to publicly funded resources expended on them, amounting to a socialization of costs.[43] It is a misnomer to call this process “privatization” since only the profits are “privatized” while the costs are “socialized”, that is, borne by society. In addition, privatization refers only to the change in formal ownership. Instead, I devised the term “entrepreneurial-ization” to reflect the process in which knowledge undergoes in becoming a product; the suffix hopefully making it clear that we are dealing with a process and not an absolute.
Perhaps David Noble has done the most to document and oppose this process by offering a number of case studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an example of the reorganization of US universities. Reflecting on MIT’s Industrial Liason Program, that enlists 300 corporate partners full access to any of the intellectual and physical resources of the Institute for an annual fee, Noble finds that
ILP activities reflect the unprecedented commoditization of science which has occurred in recent years, in the wake of the so-called ‘knowledge-based’ high tech multinational gold rush. What is for sale here is not simply the products of research but the research itself, reflecting the transformation of the intellectual endeavor into intellectual capital. Despite high-sounding rhetoric about the free exchange of scientific ideas, what is going on here is the buying and selling of goods, the proprietary control over which has all but put an end to the free exchange of scientific ideas…The Program is designed to serve neither the needs of the scientific community nor the end of public enlightenment; it is a closed consortium of corporate clients whose sole purpose is to secure exclusive control over the precious new commodity, intellectual capital.[44]
Such a process underlines a more fundamental transformation of the character of the university. “Once intellectual endeavor becomes intellectual capital, it soon becomes also intellectual property, and government policies of the last decade – well reflected in ILP activities in patent licensing – have guaranteed that such property will fall into private hands,” Noble warns, reiterating the implications of the Patent and Trademark Act of l980 (p. 22). Rapidly becoming a central force of capitalist production, the universities are concurrently becoming an active part of multinational capital. As Noble explains, “Over the last decade, these institutions have once again undergone a structural transformation. Now the ‘oil wells’ of ‘intellectual capital,’ central to the new multinational high-tech political economy, they have become integrated as never before within the multinational corporate structure: multinational universities serving global but still narrow, ends” (p. 17).
For more than a decade, Noble’s emphasis has been on demonstrating the socialized costs and privatized profits of the commercialization of the universities. Like my work on UT-Austin, Noble demonstrates how tuition and fees have served to fund entrepreneurialization and has helped document the “conflict of interest” between public subsidization of private profitmaking ventures.[45]
Unfortunately, like the other critical analyses of commercialization reviewed above, Noble’s analysis is limited to an expression of a so-called “conflict of interest” between the socialization of costs and the privatization of profits. If we acknowledge the university’s role in capital accumulation, there can be no conflict of interest: the universities are intended to serve capital. The conflict they do overlook is that between those who wish to subordinate the universities to the needs of business or other needs of social movements perhaps. In fact, Noble does not recognize the existence of such conflict in America By Design until page 321 of 334 pages of text.
The socialization of costs is characterized through the implementation of austerity as standard operating procedure. Funds and resources are rechanneled from resistant or irrelevant academic areas to income producing ones. Although funding continues to rise, in the case of UT-Austin, the declining percentage of public sources of funding becomes a justification for selective austerity by passing the costs of commercialization onto faculty and staff through increases in workloads and decreases in real wages and onto students through increases in workloads (overcrowded classes) and increased share of the costs through higher tuition and fees. Ironically, these increased costs do not actually go to “general appropriations” but are used to bankroll entrepreneurialization.
Because entrepreneurial projects are funded outside traditional decision- making structures, university administrations are able to cry poverty without actually being broke. There is no public oversight over entrepreneurial activities and since few are even aware that they exist let alone understand how they operate, austeric measures are often not only implemented without much resistance but genuinely accepted as part of the “collegial responsibility” by students and faculty who sometimes actively participate in localizing their implementation.
Bracero Graduate Students
The globalization of the university is not limited to simply the international activities of particular institutions but also their student composition. Universities are training more than the future elite of other countries, but a sizable part of the US and international professional workforce. With slowly rising student resistance to the imposition of austerity, such as the resurgence of graduate student unionization and strikes in North America since the late 1980s, universities have looked increasingly abroad for graduate students. Since the threat of deportation to their home country with the possibility of imprisonment for their activism, international students serve the universities as supposedly “docile,” “cheap” labor. The university’s corporate partners also receive high quality research at a fraction of the costs of hiring a highly educated engineer or researcher or hire them later as temporary workers at a fraction of the cost. According to Harvard lecturer Dorothy Zinberg, “The majority of foreign students study science and engineering. They remain in the United States filling junior positions, particularly in engineering departments that without them would have to close and jobs in industries that until the most recent economic downturn would have been crippled without them.”[46]
Since graduate students often serve as inexpensive teaching and research staff, the gradual increase of international graduate students has served to subvert graduate student demands for higher pay, less work, better working conditions, and abusive faculty-student relationships. International graduate students have become a covert pool of scab labor used against the demands of other graduate students and professional researchers currently being laid off in droves by the computer and defense industries. The use of this divide and conquer strategy leaves international students highly vulnerable to exploitation.
This is borne out by the numerical growth of international students in US universities. In 1989-90, the number of international students grew 5.6% to 386,000, the largest increase in seven years. It was also the third consecutive years in a row that Asian students composed more than half of all international students, increasing 9% to 208,110. In fact, eight of the top ten countries of origin were in Asia, with China at the top of the list.[47] By 1991-92, the total had increased to 419,585, with 59% coming from Asian countries, a 7% increase in one year. Ten of the top 12 countries of origin were Asian, with China leading again.[48] Not surprisingly, most international students are concentrated in large research universities in business, engineering and the hard sciences. In 1991-92, 56% were in these areas alone, 72% of the total focused on research and 68.8% received support from universities most likely in the form of employment.[49]
UT-Austin ranked very high in the number of international students during both years. In 1989-90, UT-Austin was ranked third in 1991 and first in 1992.[50] In fact, as undergraduate enrollment is being pushed down and graduate enrollment pushed up, the number of international graduate students is rising. In 1982, 15.9% (1,675) of UT-Austin graduate students were international, increasing to 21% (2,717) in 1991 although for all students these figures rose from 6.1% (2,934) to only 8.3% (4,137).[51] These percentage figures are deceptive though because the actual increase in the total number of international students is much greater. In 1991, seven of the ten largest source countries are in Asia accounting for 63% of all international students, rising from 41% in 1981. 73% are concentrated in business, engineering and natural science. International students are congregated in engineering and the hard sciences where they work long hours with little pay and intellectual recognition (such as patents or co-authorship of articles). As UT-Austin explicitly attempts to reduce undergraduate enrollment while increasing graduate to become strictly a “research university” international graduate students have become their primary source of cheap labor.
International students are part of the international working class, seeking better working conditions and pay while fleeing repression. Like any multinational corporation, universities profit from the use of students fleeing repressive political conditions, since such repression reinforces their exploitation in university labs. International students live under the constant fear of the university and US government rescinding their job and visa for their political activity resulting in their deportation and possible punishment back home. This makes it easier for universities to overwork and underpay international students in isolated, dangerous high tech research labs and low quality, overcrowded married student housing.
There is another, more positive side to this labor flow. International students bring with them the knowledge and experience of struggles from home that they circulate to american students. The Korean student rebellion, which received much media attention in the mid to late 1980s, heavily influenced the anti-apartheid and anti-CIA student movements in the US. Unfortunately, this is often muted by politically motivated divisions between international and american students such university quotas and “English Only” requirements for teaching assistants and assistant instructors. These divisions have yet to be successfully overcome by graduate student unionization efforts or other student organizers.
Im-mobile Campuses
Universities have not simply increased recruitment of international students to attend US based campuses, but have invested abroad to directly train students in their home countries. Like multinational corporations, a few universities are beginning to flee the US where their investments are realizing low returns by disinvesting from all or select parts of their home campuses and investing abroad. In effect, just as corporations flee well organized workers and unsympathetic political conditions, so are universities beginning to flee so-called unproductive students (i.e. those who resist schoolwork which is discussed further in chapter 6) and now with NAFTA, overpaid academics.
It is no accident that a common analogy is made between the amount of work done by students in the US and Japan. Business attempts to pit American against overworked Japanese students in order to make American students work more both in school and in waged work. At the same time that they impose austerity in their US based campuses, some universities are opening campuses in Japan, where like any business, they expect more work at less cost from their students. Currently, twenty three universities and colleges including Texas A&M, SUNY, CUNY and Boston University have campuses in Japan.
But do universities have the mobility of multinational corporations? Following David Noble, Jack Trumpbour notes a fundamental limitation of the entrepreneurial university: “Universities may have made one serious miscalculation in their newfound eagerness to replicate capitalist enterprise. While capital is notoriously mobile, able to pick up stakes and flee entire nations, universities are inherently immobile and, still heavily dependent on public funding, unable to take flight in the midst of sustained political challenge.”[52]
This limitation is inherent only as far as universities are understood mainly as physical structures rather than social relationships. Universities are capable to responding to turmoil with flight even though those means are much more limited than those at the disposal of corporations. A few have opened up branches in other countries and increasingly financially unstable campuses are being shut down, merged, or sold. Some universities are even closing entire departments and colleges such as at the University of Michigan, University of California, Yale and Washington University. Universities are just beginning to develop means of mobility so we cannot assume it is impossible. It may take different forms than we realize such as internal mobility by re-channeling capital away from unprofitable to profitable programs and/or building separate campuses for research (from Liberal Arts to the Balcones Research Center at UT for example) which is happening on a wide scale. Computerized and televised extension courses are another form mobility is taking, totally transforming what we have come to accept as a university from a physical structure to analog or digital space. And even then we should not overestimate the power of either corporations or universities to flee unhindered from conflict. The next few years of struggles over tuition and commercialization may demonstrate the power of students to block such financial mobility.
Yet another possible form of mobility is beginning to be realized as a result of NAFTA. As we saw above in the case of UT-Austin and Monterrey Tech’s collaboration, universities are just beginning to take advantage of highly educated and skilled Mexican academics and businesspeople at a fraction of the cost of doing so at home.[53] Through joint research, exchange and training programs, universities are developing a new way out of relying on inflexible and well paid researchers in US universities. While the more commercial areas of the campus are being spun off into independent units, as the Solomons explain, in the event of renewed campus upheaval, these ventures may potentially even be moved abroad or supplemented by what is perceived to be a more manageable intellectual workforce.
Ivory Tower or Overt Business?
The idea that the universities are a productive part of capital is hardly new theoretically, Veblen and Sinclair having made the argument more than 70 years ago. The antiquity of this question raises serious questions as to the continuing debates regarding the role of the university in capital and strategic organizing questions such as the relationship of students and faculty to the rest of the working class. Nonetheless, in 1918 Veblen was already critiquing the emerging “new practicality” as C. Wright Mills came to call it,[54] businesslike operation and organization of the universities. “By force of the same businesslike bias the boards unavoidably incline to apportion the funds assigned for current expenses in such as way as to favor those ‘practical’ or quasi-practical lines of instruction and academic propaganda that are presumed to heighten the business acumen of the students or to yield immediate returns in the way of a credible publicity” (p. 59). To make this transition, he demonstrated the infusion of a new principle of rationalization in which the pursuit of knowledge and academic work were perceived as standardized and measurable quantities (p. 163). Seeing the university as a space for the free pursuit of knowledge, Veblen saw the pursuit of profitable activities inconsistent with that mission. But he not only pointed out inconsistencies with that ideal but articulated the conflicts that began to arise as a result of faculty resistance to such pressures. [55]
Like Sinclair, Barrow’s study informs his strategic thinking. He refutes the myth that professors are classless and autonomous individuals in pursuit of knowledge and argues that they are not only workers but part of the class struggle, an analysis that can also be applied to an understanding of students. While explaining how the university is a part of capital and a terrain of class conflict, Barrow fails to demonstrate exactly how professors contribute to the accumulation of capital and are part of the working class.
There are a few other useful though less thorough analyses of aspects of the reorganization of the universities. Sheila Slaughter has found that as the result of the fiscal crisis stemming from the rebellions of the 1960s, the universities have begun to be reorganized through the military to emphasize entrepreneurial activities that can produce profits.[56] Even Arthur Stinchcombe did a study of the utilization of research space and teaching loads based on the analogy of the university to banks since “both banks and universities are fiduciary institutions.”[57]
As students begin to confront the effects of the fiscal crisis and resist their being passed along to them, some have engaged in in-depth investigations. At least two other case studies and a number of shorter analyses of entrepreneurialization of US universities have been done. Charles Betz’ case study of entrepreneurialization at the University of Minnesota outlines the reorganization of the campus through austerity (enrollment cuts, disinvestment from disciplines not useful to business, tuition increases, and cutbacks) and how most of the plan was defeated by students, faculty, farmers and parents.[58] Austerity is central to the reorganization since it allowed resources to be rechanneled to where the largest, most profitable return could be gained.[59] In analyzing this attempt to transform UM into a “global academy”, Betz found a conflict between the university’s traditional mission for producing new labor power and the new emphasis on high tech development. Entrepreneurialization evolved out of plans developed by a “tripartite” coalition of elites (from the university, business and government) and characterized by structural contradictions rather than a socio-political crisis. While the university plays a productive role in the international capitalist economy, students appear more incidental than as subjects of conflict within the universities.
The University of Massachusetts was the subject of Marc Kenen’s analysis, finding a connection between increasing responsibility of the states for financing higher education and pressures to commercialize.[60] Kenen identifies a coalition of businessmen opposed increases in taxes for higher education in order to pressure the universities to generate their own revenue through increased commercial activity. As a result, by 1989, non-state funding surpassed state funding for higher education for the first time, resulting in widespread tuition and fee increases, attacks on non-traditional and multicultural programs and childcare. Kenen’s research proved useful to widespread student and faculty resistance to austerity and military research, including a successful strike by graduate students in 1991.
A few others have examined the effects of entrepreneurialization, offering case studies of the commercialization of particular academic disciplines such as the medical and biological sciences and even sociology. Unfortunately, some of them fail to develop a substantive theoretical analysis of what is happening and simply provide documentation. Martin Kenney offers a meticulously detailed study of the commercialization of medical, biological and chemical research in the universities.[61] He shows how the rise of university based biotechnology depended on access to university funding and resources and low paid graduate student workers. The universities’ use of venture capital funds to commercial their faculties’ biomedical research is also the focus of Jaron Bourke and Robert Weissman study of Harvard and Washington University’s activities.[62] Jonathan Feldman analyzed the role of the universities and their multinational chemical company partners in the war in Central America and the dependence of agriculture on bio-engineered seeds and pesticides.[63] The reemergence of the military in the universities since the late 1970s is also detailed.
Writing without mention of any specific university or particular event, Robert (a UT-Austin philosophy professor) and Jon Solomon, offer their critique of the corporate university. Borrowing the theme of the no longer existing alternative student newspaper, The Polemicist, the Solomons view the university as a huge profit-making corporation:
In the present scheme of things, the university is clearly not administered for the benefit of undergraduate education. It has become a multimillion-dollar corporation that thrives on much, much more than receiving tuition and issuing baccalaureate degrees. In addition to tuition, the university requires hundreds of millions of state tax dollars, but this still feeds only part of its voracious appetite. The university survives only by attracting more hundreds of millions of state dollars from the federal government, private donors, the local pizza parlor, Fortune 500 companies, and anywhere else it can. It demands one fee after another from students, solicits donations from faculty, shamelessly sells its logo on T-shirts and shot glasses. It sends fund raisers overseas to court foreign capital, markets it research products, and solicits huge sums for investment purposes. No university, it seems, ever has enough buildings, and many universities now seems to be in the real estate business.
Seeing through these myriad of business activities, the Solomons hone in on the most fundamental function of the university: the disciplining of new workers.
Because the university mission has become so business oriented, the university views students as part of its business, the purpose of which is to supply the corporations as well as the state and federal governments with a commodity – trained employees. Education, accordingly, becomes training. It is the process of providing skilled, disciplined, narrowly knowledgeable technicians, managers, and professionals. (p. 16)
In addition to the disciplining of new workers, the universities are themselves beginning to operate as overt businesses. “Many universities, like some of our largest and most successful corporations, have overextended themselves, gone into debt unnecessarily, and gotten into ventures they should have never undertaken.” When real estate investments, research and building projects go bad, the “universities, like some corporations, have spun off their most profitable divisions, putting them into the hands of those who are quite indifferent to or unsympathetic with the aims of education, like newly merged corporations, have insisted on keeping the unhappy halves of a hostile merger together, with all the consequences of a bad marriage” (p. 33-34).
Recognizing that the university’s entrepreneurial activities may cause financial ruin, the Solomons accurately recognize that in the end, it is the students that pay, either through the sacrifice of learning, creativity and personal growth as well as resources.
When the university turns out to be an expense instead of a profitable investment, the corporations and communities that find themselves facing shortfalls try to soak the university and its students for immediate gains, through increased student taxation and tuition, reduced academic services (e.g. fewer tutorials, remedial classes, and other aids for weak or disadvantaged students), and by way of renewed corporate favors and financial deals. (p. 17)
Unfortunately, the Solomons’ analysis of the university becomes derailed into solipsistic game-playing and reactionary proposals that only reinforce the current entrepreneurialization of the university. For example, suggesting it will contribute to “student control”, they advocate hiring undergraduates for $6/hour as tutors, a measure endorsed by the UT Students’ Association and Dean of Students as cheap replacements for better paid graduate teaching assistants at the very time graduate students were actively engaged in two unionization efforts. In addition, they denounce multiculturalism as “silly” (p. 184), advocate the abolition of tenure and replacement with short-term contracts (p. 243), and endorse increased hierarchy of campuses that reflect the productivity of students (p. 78). Ironically, each of these measures, rather than “Re-Creating Higher Education in America” as the subtitle of their book would suggest only reinforces various efforts to downsize various areas of the campus in order to undermine the limited strength of faculty, graduate students, and student activists. Rather than allying themselves with active efforts to resist the reorganization of their campuses into overt businesses, their book is no more than a thinly veiled endorsement of that very reorganization – such as UT-Austin into a business.
Their critique is consistently vague, never mentioning a university, administrator, or event by name. Most disheartening is their refutation of the myth that entrepreneurial projects actually cost the university more money than they make. Ignoring the very research by the Polemicist – which they thank in their acknowledgements – that uncovered the costs of entrepreneurialization, the Solomons plead for the university administration to open their books because “we do not have either the accounting skills or access to the numbers” (p. 283). The Solomons critique abdicates responsibility to the truth by refusing to provide the very empirical common knowledge about at least one of the very universities that employ them!
Although sociology has been one of the first disciplines under attack for its general failure to contribute profitably to the university enterprise, the attack is motivated by its continued irrelevance to business even under the regime of the natural science method and subservience to business and the state.[64] The dominance of the natural science model during WWII meant the adoption of quantitative methods and the emergence of large scale survey research projects funded by corporations, the military, the state and foundations. As a result of the reorganization of the universities to focus on profits and their integration into the structures of transnational capital, sociology became dominated by the “new practicality.” Today, sociologists find themselves mostly irrelevant to capital and incapable of investigating and learning about capital’s global organization. It has become nearly useless to those who manage and to those who resist.
Promoting Entrepreneurialization
While these case studies remain marginally known to those engaged in active resistance to one aspect or another of entrepreneurialization, the most compelling evidence of the university’s reorganization into a profit-making business comes from those carrying it out.
There has been much written as to the so-called “positive” aspects of the process.[65] Ironically, while some critics continue to debate whether or not the university is a productive part of capital, business is articulating a strategy for using the universities to transform the basis of the economy to high tech and biotech and restore accumulation. The transformation of the university into a vital sector of capital is put quite directly by James Fairweather. He explains that federal and state technology transfer programs “clearly demonstrates an expectation for colleges and universities to do more than indirectly affect economic development through training the work force and through basic research. Colleges and universities are beginning to affect industry and the populace actively and directly in the development of new work habits, new technologies, and new industries.”[66]
IC2, the driving force behind the entrepreneurialization of UT which is discussed in more detail in chapter 3, advocates a theory of the “technopolis” in which cities would be reorganized around a particular high tech industry, generated by the universities, government, and other local institutions.[67] At the heart of this technopolis, of which Austin is a “developing technopolis”, is the commercialization of publicly funded university research. As we saw in chapter 3, IC2 founder George Kozmetsky recognizes the integral relationship between the development of disciplined intellectual labor and entrepreneurialization lies in the formers’ development of commercializable research.[68] Gibson and Smilor, two top officers of the institute, explain in their book University Spin-Off Companies[69], the role of the universities:
The research university plays a key role in the fostering of research-and- development activities, the attraction of key scholars and talented graduate students, the spin-off of new companies, and the attraction of major technology- based firms; it serves as a magnet for federal and private-sector funding and as a general source of ideas, employees, and consultants for high technology and infrastructure companies. (p. 36-7)
They also pinpoint the fundamental business activities characterizing entrepreneurialization:
Universities also team with developers, or become developers themselves, in undertaking projects to provide industrial or commercial space and incubator facilities. Some universities have established affiliates directly or by joint venture to conduct research and to provide specialized services to industry. These may have the effect of accelerating innovation while reducing the costs to companies supporting the research program. It also creates revenues and develops properties – such as research parks – adjacent to the universities. (p. 37)
IC2, a UT funded think-tank, could very well be the most articulate advocate for the entrepreneurialization of the universities in the US although they have little direct with few campuses other than UT. They have held many conferences and published volumes of reports and books demonstrating the central role of the universities in high tech development. In the process, they outline the process for commercializing the universities themselves through “technology transfer” of publicly funded research, the creation of “spin-off companies” to commercialize this technology, and the various interdependencies of multinational high tech corporations and the universities. Since much of the federally funded research money originates from the Department of Defense, such entrepreneurialization is inseparable from the remilitarization of the campuses. This is made explicit in early IC2 research focusing on the commercialization of military technology in the universities, especially SDI. In fact, IC2‘s founder and director George Kozmetsky made his fortune by founding the multinational weapons corporation Teledyne.[70]
There are numerous reports and studies funded or carried out by business organizations, corporations, universities, foundations, and government agencies extolling the virtues of what is often described as “stronger ties between business and the universities.” While many go as far as to examine commercialization of the university, few do so in detail or with originality. Many are no more than position papers detailing numerous useful examples of commercialization involving specific universities, state and federal programs and policies, and corporations to justify its continuation. This is evident in the majority of IC2‘s publications and articles.[71]
There are some unusually well done studies too. Nicolas Wade’s study, commissioned by a business backed Twentieth Century Fund whose board disagreed with his sparse analysis, argues that “science” and the university are endangered by commercialization through biotech. His conclusion, while mildly critical turns on adherence to science and the university as somehow separate and objective, threatened by outside forces.[72]
The most unique of such analyses is offered by Richard Anderson who while recognizing the reorganization of the university into an overt business is taking place, endorses rather than resists it. Anderson explains, as well as Newson and Buchbinder do, that there “is the belief that colleges and universities can relieve financial stress by acting more businesslike – with ‘businesslike’ being defined in entrepreneurial terms. As a consequence, colleges and universities have become real estate developers, venture capitalists, and even impresarios.” “The pursuit of commercial activities is a fundamental strategy change and must be considered in that way,” Anderson explains overtly as capital’s new tact in responding to the crisis created and continued by student demands. However, he concludes not by opposing entrepreneurialization but endorsing it cautiously so as to be successful without generating opposition. One has to wonder why he’s writing for the American Association of University Professors, a faculty union magazine?[73]
UT-Austin Law School Dean Mark Yudof has also expressed concern with the privatization of state universities at the same time he was a candidate for UT president.[74] He recognizes a growing gap between the corporate funded “haves” and the “have nots” that is resulting in the creation of “two universities, one reasonably financed and the other starving for funds” and undermining the “historical mission” of public universities. Contradicting himself, he writes that “I am not troubled that markets influence educational priorities within public universities” and advocates austerity – one of the key aspects of entrepreneurialization – and a return to increased state funding.
Ironically, such positive analyses of the commercial potential of the universities make a stronger case for understanding the productive relationship of the universities to other institutions of capitalism than do most critical and even radical analyses. One of the least subtle ironies is that while students and the universities are understood to be “marginal” to capitalism by radical theorists as we’ll see in chapter 5 – an analysis widely adopted among students themselves, especially among student activists – they are recognized as a productive nexus of capitalism by those attempting to reorganize them into overt multinational businesses.
University Inc.
The combined strategies of manufactured austerity and entrepreneurialization are beginning to indicate fundamental changes in the organization of US based universities on the levels of institutional organization, resource allocation, and research and teaching agendas. As each of these areas are affected by pressures to commercialize, the university as a whole gradually comes to operate increasingly as a business in which each activity is evaluated and undertaken for its potential profitability.
Just as policies encouraging entrepreneurialization do not come from one source, the implementation of campus-wide reforms do not originate merely from the shadowy confines of the administration. As we’ve seen in the case of UT-Austin, such reforms are being devised and implemented by combined coalitions of multinational corporations, local businessmen, entrepreneurial faculty, UT regents, IC2, the Executive Vice President and Provost’s office, the Center for Technological Venturing, technological transfer professional organization and lobbies, the state legislature, state agencies, federal agencies, and international business demands. In effect, these various coalitions have had the effect of strengthening certain areas of the UT-Austin administration such as the Executive Vice President and Provost, Vice President for Development, the Vice President for Business Affairs and the Vice President for Research over traditional academic governance structures such as the University Council and Faculty Senate.
Separate offices are being created and certain existing offices strengthened within the universities that operate outside the traditional academic process to restructure the campus according to the dictates of the market, On many campuses there exist an “Office of Technology Transfer” (the equivalent at UT- Austin would be the Vice Provost) that maintain records of faculty and staff research funding, consultancy work, patents, licensing, revenues from licenses and marketing, faculty start-up companies and provide this information not only to the administration but to outside business to encourage collaborations. Such offices not only retain information but actually evaluate campus research for
marketable potential, assess industry markets, evaluate and file for patents, and negotiate licenses and joint ventures.
Such offices wield tremendous power at a time when all areas of academia face pressures to “serve the needs of the market.” Marketability is rapidly becoming a central standard for evaluating efficiency and productivity of faculty, departments, colleges and even graduate students. They are replacing existing calculations of teacher-student ratios, faculty rank, publications, and even grades – all of which rely on the static assumption that teaching (or the disciplining of labor power) is the primary activity of the university. As the primary evaluators of campus efficiency, these shadowy, informal bases of power are indirectly controlling increasingly more areas of the universities such as finding allocation and with it teaching and curriculum priorities.
One does have to look far to see this formalization taking place in the curriculum: IC2 has been able to gain approval for the creation of a Ph.D. concentration in Technology Transfer, MBA concentration in Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship,[75] and a new master’s degree and Department of Commercialization of Science and Technology for whom Kozmetsky will conveniently be the graduate advisor.
During a time of manufactured austerity, such activities are being pointed to as avenues for reversing declining real wages, budget cuts, and even a resource for supporting graduate students. In turn, many faculty and academic departments and colleges, unaware of the questionable data presented to them demonstrating the need for austerity, are reevaluating their priorities and shifting their research and teaching agendas to serve business.
Meanwhile, the informal decision-making power of these groups within the university go unchecked and unhindered by faculty and students in the Faculty Senate, Students’ Association and University Council consumed by trivial and narrow issues of curricula. The informal power of these offices and groups promoting entrepreneurialization has eclipsed the decision-making power of faculty over the campus. Faced with assumed financial hardship, faculty are two versions of the same choice – how to accept cutbacks and reach out to business to offset them.
Across the campus and within colleges and departments, two tiers of the “have” and “have nots” are becoming increasingly entrenched. As we’ve seen at UT- Austin, across the campus, fields such as engineering are faring increasingly better than liberal arts (not to mention traditionally commercially viable areas such as business and law) in faculty hiring, endowed chairs, research money, and administrative financial support. Just by entering any engineering building on campus, the reason becomes clear. Many class rooms have engraved signs indicating corporate sponsorship of that space. However, the reasons are much more fundamental. Funding flows increasingly to academic areas more successful and willing to submit and reprioritize their activities to serve the needs of business. For example, many of the older buildings composing the main campus that mostly serve the liberal arts and natural sciences continue to carry asbestos while tens of millions of dollars are spent to construct new state of art facilities for the College of Engineering.
Campus priorities reflect the commercial viability of particular academic programs. This is increasingly becoming the case even within departments. In the Department of Sociology, for example, the Population Research Center, which conducts mostly quantitative demographic studies, is heralded for its successful collaborations with government agencies, research funding, and support of graduate students as research assistants. As a result, a split is being engineered in the department between the “demographers” and the “theorists,” the later whom are called upon to behave more like the former. As a result, the department is increasingly finding itself under pressure to further subject its research and teaching to the needs of business. For example, those faculty and students lacking outside or UT research support end up subsidizing necessities of their work such as photocopying, faxes and 800 WATS line use from their own salaries.
Since the mid-1980s many students have openly criticized UT-Austin for putting too much emphasis on “research” rather than “teaching”. Such a criticism overlooks that both are integrally related in the university’s mission to deliver well-trained and disciplined skilled workers. In fact, this cry could be interpreted as the complaints of those who want to be trained that they are being ignored. Perhaps the critique is not as simple. As the university becomes to operate more and more as a business, those areas of teaching and research receiving adequate administrative support are those that best demonstrate their commercial potential. Such potential is not limited only to the development of new technologies but also in the transferring of basic skills such as statistics and writing necessary for training as a researcher. The Sociology Department, although it has very few undergraduates, receives much of its funding based on outside undergraduate enrollment in statistics courses taught by demography faculty. As a result, the department is financially rewarded for its service to more commercial academic programs.
The key trend is departments, colleges and research centers engaging in the training of students with skills desired by companies and research leading to the development of new profitable products do not face financial hardship. Those programs that do not successfully serve their interests or outright resist serving them face the brunt of a manufactured austerity that restricts their flow of funding and research support. As a result, many of these areas reprioritize their teaching to create classes that pass along basic work-related skills rather than abstract critical thinking or the examination of scientific issues or technologies useful so other sectors of society. Again, this is the case in the Sociology Department which requires all Ph.D program students to take two courses in quantitative methods whether studying it or not and has a larger abundance of faculty concentrating on those areas than others.
Those faculty and students engaged in research and study in commercially profitable areas are rewarded with not only funding, but smaller and accessible classes, research money, and employment. On the other hand, students and faculty continuing to pursue knowledge for their own curiosity face budget cuts, tuition and fee increases, overcrowded classes, and increased workloads – not to mention decreasing power to affect how the university is being run.
Yet, these changes reflect only the effects of entrepreneurialization at the institutional structural level. The picture is incomplete. When we take into account the historical context of global socio-political conflict that gave rise the crisis of control over the universities and the continuing struggles of students to also reorganize the universities to serve their multiple needs, entrepreneurialization appears to be a process of change characterized by conflict, antagonism and struggle.
From Analysis to Resistance
As we saw in chapter 3, the most significant vulnerability of student resistance movement has been not simply their inability to recognize the university as a productive part of capitalist social relations but to fight it as such.[76] Offering an a-historical critique of university collaboration with business and the military cannot help us to understand what is happening all about us. The point is also not to ensure that everyone reaches the same level of “consciousness” about what is happening, only understand better what we are facing and fighting and that we are not alone on any given campus or even inside arbitrary national borders.
This analysis of entrepreneurialization is not to simply decry the soiling of the university by capital but to demonstrate that it long been an important part of capital. By studying the current reorganization we can understand how the university’s relationships to other institutions of capital are transformed because of the class struggle. Unfortunately, many of these analyses of the commercialization process never make it this far but “call for the displacement of the master by the slave, the slave or student who the university was ‘originally meant for.’ Insofar as the university was originally ‘meant for’ the students, rather than the corporations.”[77] The question at hand is to understand the role of the university in reproducing capitalist social relationships and how they are and can be disrupted and further destabilized not simply changing those who control it. For example, if in the process of entrepreneurialization, US universities are blocked from fully participating in the global economy by militant student and faculty protest movements, these universities will lose or default on billions of dollars of investments causing a financial collapse on the level of at least the S&L banking crisis.
Perhaps Alain Touraine best perceived the inseparability of the entrepreneurializing university and the changing relationship of the student movement in class struggle, asking: “If it is true that knowledge and technical progress are the motors of the new society, as the accumulation of capital was the motor of the preceding (industrial) society, does not the university then occupy the same place as the great capitalist enterprise formerly did? Thus, is not the student movement, in principle at least, of the same importance as the labour movement of the past?”[78]
I disagree that the university and the student movement are somehow displacing the “great capitalist enterprise” and the traditionally conceived labour movement but rather recognize the need to reevaluate their ever-changing relationship. US based universities are going through the beginning of what may fundamentally transform their relationship to other sectors of society. While these relationships change so do the relationships of those affected by them. As the universities become overt businesses, students, faculty and researchers will need to be reevaluated not only to understand the extent to which what they do is productive labor but also to recognize the ways in which they resist further subordination to work and the market brought about by entrepreneurialization. For this reason, chapters 5-6 is an intervention into this ongoing theoretical discussion by attempting to reevaluate the conflicting relationship of students within the universities.
Bibliography
[1] For industrialization see: Barrow, 1990; Upton Sinclair, The Goose Step: A Study of Higher Education, Pasadena Ca.: self-published, 1922; David Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, NY: Knopf, 1977; and Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, NY: Sagamore Press, 1918, 1957. For militarization see Committee for Non-Violent Research, Going for Broke: The University and the Military-Industrial Complex, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982; Noble, 1977; Howard Ehrlich, “The University-Military Connection,” Social Anarchism: A Journal of Practice and Theory, nos. 8&9, 1985, p. 3-21; Robert Krinsky, “Swords Into Sheepskins,” Science for the People, Jan/Feb, 1988, p. 2-5; David Wilson (volume editor), The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “Universities and the Military,” Newbury Park: Sage, Vol. 502, March 1989; Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State University of New York, 1990; and Barrow, 1990.
[2] Barrow, p. 82-83.
[3] Harry Cleaver, “Marxian Theory and the Inversion of Class Perspective in its Concepts: Two Case Studies,” draft paper, April, 1989, p. 6.
[4] Cleaver, p. 5.
[5] Cleaver writes: “The introduction of new technologies, of new organizations of machinery and workers, if successful, results in the undermining of workers’ struggles and their reduction, once more, to the status of labor power. But whatever new ‘class composition’ is achieved, it only becomes the basis for further conflicts because the class antagonism can only be managed, it cannot be done away with. Thus, these three new concepts, one static and two dynamic, provide guides to the analysis of what have come to be called ‘cycles of class struggle,’ wherein the upswing in such a cycle involves a period of political recomposition by workers and the downswing, however much the workers win or lose, a process of class decomposition through which capital reestablishes sufficient control to continue its overall management of society.” p. 5.
[6] Noble, 1977, P. xxii: “An essentially human phenomenon, technology is thus a social process; it does not simply stimulate social development from outside but, rather, constitutes fundamental social development in itself: the preparation, mobilization, and habituation of people for new types of productive activity, the reorientation of the pattern of social investment, the restructuring of social institutions, and, potentially, the redefinition of social relationships.”
[7] Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State University of New York, 1990; Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder, The University Means Business, Toronto: Garamond, 1988; and V. Hugo Aboites, “Economic Globalization and the Transformation of the Mexican University,” undated manuscript.
[8] John Schloerb, “Which Way CRIM? The Military, Industry and Academic Enquiry,” in Committee for Non-Violent Research, Going for Broke: The University and the Military Industrial Complex, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982, p. 11.
[9] David Madsen, “The Land-Grant University: Myth and Reality,” chapter 3 in G. Lester Anderson (ed.), Land-Grant Universities and Their Continuing Challenge, Michigan State Univ. Press, 1976, p. 24, 34-35
[10] Barrow, p. 134.
[11] See Barrow, 1990; and Noble, 1977.
[12] Richard Abrams, “The US Military and Higher Education: A Brief History,” in David Wilson, 1989, p. 16; and David Madsen, p. 32.
[13] The concept of primitive accumulation is discussed by Karl Marx in the last chapter of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, NY: Vintage, 1977. Carey Eskridge and I are currently exploring this argument in our research.
[14] Barrow documents that agri-business composed between 43-50% of the membership of midwestern land grant university boards of trustees until the early 1900s. (p. 56) Their domination was often challenged by the Grange, Farmers’ Alliance and Populist Party movements who actively resisted their control and ran opposition candidates, at one point actually composing 29% of these boards during the period 1881-1900. (p. 58)
[15] Bow argues that “This shift constituted an opening through which businessmen acquired an institutional capacity to reconstitute dramatically the intellectual labor process with modernizing policies.” (p. 60)
[16] Slaughter offers this interpretation. Corporate executives “development strategy turns on ‘privatization,’ or socializing the costs of development, maintaining profits, and hoping that prosperity will expand to include the majority of the citizenry. The public is asked to spend increasing amounts of tax dollars to underwrite university-industry agreements.” (p. 46-7)
[17] This process has occurred much later in Mexico, for example. Aboites argues that the current reorganization of Mexican universities is an attempt to undermine the use of the universities for those in areas of society other than business. (p. 22)
[18] Lightner Witmer, The Nearing Case, NY: B.W. Huebsch, 1915; Veblen, 1918; Scott Nearing, “Who’s Who Among College Trustees?” School and Society 6, September 8, 1917; Faculty of Colorado College, Report on College and University Administration, General Series no. 94, Colorado Springs: Colorado College Publications, 1917; J.A. Leighton, “Report of Committee T on the Place and Function of Faculties in University Government Administration,” Bulletin of the AAUP 6, March 1920, p. 17-47; Sinclair, 1922, p. 454-459; and Barrow, 1990, p. 88-94 and 180-182. A good example of such resistance occurred with the defeat of a corporate initiated bill to establish engineering experiment stations modeled after agricultural stations because of opposition to public subsidization of industry. (Noble, p. 136) From its very inception the AAUP, however, accepted the corporate control and organization of the university and attempted to work within it to defend tenure while also participating in their militarization. (Barrow, p. 130-131, 171-173 and 255).
[19] Henry Pritchett, “Shall the University Become a Business Corporation?” Atlantic Monthly 96, September 1905, p. 289-99; and Pritchett quoted in Kenneth Trombley, The Life and Times of a Happy Liberal: A Biography of Moris Llewellyn Cooke, NY: Harper, 1954, p. 6-11. (Cited in Barrow, p. 66-67)
[20] C.R. Mann, “A study of Engineering Education,” Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bulletin No. 11, 1918, in Otis Lancaster, “The Future of Engineering Education in Land-grant Universities, ch. 6 in G. Lester Anderson (ed.), Land-Grant Universities and Their Continuing Challenge, Michigan State Univ. Press, 1976, p. 110-111.
[21] Morris Cooke, “Academic and Industrial Efficiency,” CFAT Bulletin no. 5, Boston: Merrymount Press, 1910, p. 21.
[22] Although much attention has been focused on the effects of WWII on the universities, they can be seen as simply extensions of the developments that took place during and after WWI. Contrary to prevailing historical accounts, the subordination of the universities to the state, national policy-making and planning did not begin with WWII but was deepened by it.
[23] Noble, p. 233; and Veblen , p. 73-77.
[24] Simon Marginson, “Competent for What?,” Arena Magazine, date unavailable, reprinted in Processed World, no. 31, Summer-Fall, 1993, p. 48-49. This is an analysis of educational reforms in Australia.
[25] George Mirick, Progressive Education, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1923, p. 202, 306. See also John Trumpbour, “Blinding Them with Science: Scientific Ideologies in the Ruling of the Modern World,” in John Trumpbour (ed.), How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, p. 231. Trumpbour documents numerous Harvard professors promotion of Taylorism with the strange claim that universities resisted the implementation of scientific management for fifty years.
[26] Robert Reich, The Work of Nations, NY: Vintage, 1991, p. 59-60.
[27] Cited in Reich, p. 60.
[28] Barrow, p. 79. Quotes from Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1965, p. 308.
[29] Marietta Baba, “University Innovation to Promote Economic Growth and University/Industry Relations,” chapter 11 in Pier Abetti, Christopher LeMaistre, Raymond Smilor and William Wallace (eds.) Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: The Roles of Industry, Small Business Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and the Universities, Austin: IC2, no date, p. 201.
[30] Richard Lyman, witness to US Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor, Special Subcommittee on Education, “Student Financial Assistance/Graduate Programs, State Programs and Grants,” 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, June 4, 1974, p. 17
[31] See testimonies of two university presidents concerning the crisis of higher education and the student revolt A. Bartlett Giametti, witness, US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Labor and Human Resources, Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities, “Basic Skills, 1979,” 96th Congress, 1st Session (February 13, 1979), from document attached, Giametti, “Sentimentality,’ Yale Alumni Magazine, (January 1976), pgs. 39 and 40; and Wesley W. Posvar, witness, US Congress, Senate Committee on Human Resources, Subcommittee on Health and Science Research, “National Science Foundation Authorization Legislation,” 95th Congress, 1st Session (March 3, 1977), p. 147.
[32] Henry Pritchett, “Shall the University Become a Business Corporation?”, Atlantic Monthly September 1905, p. 289-99.
[33] Noble, quotes Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler in 1916 and University of Buffalo chancellor Samuel Chapen in 1922 who were quite explicit about the university being a business. (p. 145-6)
[34] Samuel Capen “Inaugural Address,” October 28, 1922, Capen Papers, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives.
[35] The human capital investment strategy will be more fully examined in chapter four.
[36] Janice Newson, “The University of the 1990s: Harbinger of the Post-Industrial State,” presented at the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association Meetings, May-June 1992, at the University of Prince Edward Island, p. 21. See also Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder, The University Means Business, Toronto: Garamond, 1988, P. 81 and 85; and Howard Buchbinder and Janice Newson, “Corporate-university linkages in Canada: transforming a public institution,” Higher Education, 1990, n. 20, p. 368-69.
[37] Howard Buchbinder and Janice Newson, “The Service University and Market Forces,” Academe, July-August, 1992, p. 14.
[38] This is the extent of Derek Bok’s critique. Liz McMillen, “Quest for Profits May Damage Basic Values of Universities, Harvard’s Bok Warns,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 24, 1991, p. Al-31.
[39] Leonard Minsky, “Greed in the Groves: Part Two,” Thought & Action, Fall 1984, vol. 1, n. 1, p. 46.
[40] Former Stanford president Donald Kennedy explained that with “the commercialization of gene splicing…the value added part of the process has somehow shifted from the applied phase, usually conducted in an industrial setting, into the university laboratory.” We could also add, the applied phase occurs within the cell itself which has become a biological factory. (Quoted in Nicholas Wade, “Gold Pipettes Make for Tight Lips,” Science, vol. 212, no. 19, 1981, p. 1368.)
[41] Henry Morgan, “Pickled in Brine: The Possible Costs of Speculation,” Academe, September-October, 1990, P. 22-26. Surprisingly, Morgan is dean emeritus of BU’s School of Management.
[42] For further detail refer to my unpublished MA thesis: UT Inc.: Austerity and Entrepreneurialization at the University of Texas at Austin, unpublished master’s thesis, 1992.
[43] For more on the socialization of costs see David Noble, “Higher education takes the low road,” Newsday, October 8, 1989, P. 7; and Slaughter, p. 46-7.
[44] David Noble, “The Multinational University,” Zeta Magazine, April 1989, p. 22. This article retains less of a nationalistic bent than his earlier work. In this article, his warnings of US-Japanese corporate collaboration is retorted with warnings to academics in Japanese universities undergoing similar pressures to submit to pressures of commercialization.
[45] David Noble, “The Selling of the University,” The Nation, February 6, 1982, p. 1, 143-48; Noble and Nancy Pfund, “The Plastic Tower: Business Goes Back to College,” The Nation, September 20, 1980, p. 246-252; David Noble, “Science for Sale,” Thought & Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, Fall, 1984, p. 25-40. Agreeing with David Noble, Elliot Negin found rising tuition funding corporate research projects fueling the commercialization of the university. (Elliot Negin, “Why College Tuitions are So High,” The Atlantic, March, 1993, p. 32-34, 43-44.)
[46] Dorothy Zinberg, “Don’t Tie Foreign Students to Black Ph.D. Drop,” letter to editor, The New York Times, May 12, 1992.
[47] Robin Wilson, “Foreign Students in US Reach a Record 386,000,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 1990, p. Al.
[48] Beverly Watkins, “Foreign Enrollment in US Colleges and Universities Totaled 419,585 in 1991-92, an All-Time High,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 25, 1992, p. A28.
[49] Watkins; and Anthony DePalma, “As Black Ph.D.’s Taper Off, Aid for Foreigners is Assailed,” The New York Times, April 21, 1992. In comparison, 41.8% “american” students received support from universities.
[50] Watkins.
[51] UT-Austin, Office of Institutional Studies, Statistical Handbook, 1991-1992, p. 10, 13-14, and 33-34.
[52] Jack Trumpbour, “How Harvard rules,” Z, November 1989, p. 54.
[53] Hugo Aboites, “Integracion Economica y Educacion Superior. TLC y Educacion Superior en Estados Unidos y Mexico,” draft manuscript, Octubre, 1993, discusses other efforts by Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley as well.
[54] C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, P. 95-6.
[55] Strangely enough, Veblen’s study can also be used as a case example of the repression inflicted on critics of academic industrialization documented by Barrow. Not once does Veblen ever mention a specific university or person by name.
[56] Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State University of New York, 1990.
[57] Arthur Stinchcombe, “University Administration of Research Space and Teaching Loads: Managers Who Do Not Know What Their Workers Are Doing,” chapter 9 in Information and Organizations, Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1990.
[58] Charles Beta, Restructuring the University, unpublished BA Thesis, University of Minnesota, 1991.
[59] Charles Beta and Kurt Errickson, “A Question of Focus: The University of Minnesota Has Big Plans for the Future – But They Have More To D With Courting Business and Government Research Contracts Than Educating People,” City Pages, August, 1991, reprinted in War Research Information Service, No. 2, August-September 1991, p. 32-4.
[60] Marc Kenen, UMassachusetts in Crisis: Budget Cuts, Military Spending and the Privatization of a Public Research University, 1990.
[61] Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex, New Haven: Yale University, 1986.
[62] Jaron Bourke and Robert Weissman, “Academics at Risk: The Temptations of Profit,” Academe, September-October 1990, P. 15-21.
[63] Jonathan Feldman, Universities in the Business of Repression: The Academic-Military-Industrial Complex and Central America, Boston: South End Press, 1989.
[64] Ted Vaughan, “The Crisis in Contemporary American Sociology: A Critique of the Discipline’s Dominant Paradigm,” and Gideon Sjoberg and Ted Vaughan, “The Bureaucratization of Sociology: Its Impact on Theory and Research,” chapters 1 and 2 in Ted Vaughan, Gideon Sjoberg and Larry Reynolds (eds.), A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology, NY: General Hall, 1993.
[65] Nicholas Wade, The Science Business: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Commercialization of Scientific Research, New York: Priority Press, 1984; and Robert Johnston and Christopher Edwards, Entrepreneurial Science: New Links Between Corporations, Universities and Government, New York: Quorum Books, 1987. For a critical assessment of documents produced by the Business-Higher Education Forum see Slaughter, ch. 6-7.
[66] James Fairweather, “The University’s Role in Economic Development: Lessons for Academic Leaders,” SRA Journal, Winter, 1990, p. 5.
[67] David Gibson, George Kozmetsky, Everett Rogers, and Raymond Smilor, The Technopolis Phenomenon, Austin: IC2, 1990.
[68] George Kozmetsky, “Comment,” Discovery: Research and Scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin, vol. 13, no. 1, 1993, p. 2.
[69] David Gibson and Raymond Smilor, “The Role of the Research University in Creating and Sustaining the US Technopolis,” p. 31-70, in Alistair Brett, David Gibson, and Raymond Smilor, University Spin-Off Companies: Economic Development, Faculty Entrepreneurs, and Technology Transfer, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
[70] Commercializing SD! Technologies, ed. by Stewart Nozette and Robert Kuhn, NY: Praeger, 1987; and Commercializing Defense Related Technology, ed. by Robert Kuhn, NY: Praeger, 1987. They are collections of presentations from IC2 sponsored conferences.
[71] A few examples of how much useful detail is available although lacking any substantive analysis: Robert Johnston and Christopher Edwards, Entrepreneurial Science: New Links Between Corporations, Universities and Government, NY: Quorum Books, 1987; Stephen Szygenda and Meg Wilson, “Technology Transfer Commercializing University Research,” Proceedings of the 1987 Fall Joint Computer Conference, 1987, p. 696-700; Meg Wilson and Stephen Szygenda, “Promoting University Spin-Offs Through Equity Participation,” undated manuscript; Stephen Szygenda and Clint Murchison, “Technology Commercialization: A Model,” College of Engineering, UT-Austin, manuscript, December 1987; and Meg Wilson, ‘The University Role in Commercializing Technology: Building New Relationships,” manuscript, Center for Technology Development and Transfer, UT-Austin, date unavailable.
[72] Nicolas Wade, The Science Business: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Commercialization of Scientific Research, NY: Priority Press, 1984.
[73] Richard Anderson, “The Advantage and Risks of Entrepreneurship,” Academe, September-October 1990, p. 9-14.
[74] Mark Yudof, “The Burgeoning Privatization of State Universities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 1992, p. A48.
[75] Kozmetsky, p. 6.
[76] I do not intend to exclude others inside the university but to focus on that which I know best as a student and participant of student movements. I wish to contribute to Barrow, Newson, Buchbinder, and Aboites’ excellent complementary analyses by understanding the relationship of students in the process.
[77] Matt Feuer, “Sell Out? Or the Production of the Student,” Coup De Tete, September 1993, 9-10. Feuer is responding to this very type of critique of commercialization that advocates student control and restoration of the ideal university.
[78] Alain Touraine, “Naissance d’un Mouvement Etudiant,” Le Monde, March 7 and 8, 1968, translated and quoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Meaning of the Student Revolt,” Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn, Baltimore: Penguin and London: New Left Review, 1969, p. 26. Although Jones acknowledges that “student radicalism may be a new social movement at the core of the new forces of production,” he denounces Touraine’s thesis as “scientifically incorrect and politically reactionary.” (p. 27)