Throughout the world, the universities are in trouble. Students are rioting against arbitrary exams in Sri Lanka and France, the replacement of government grants with loans in Australia, repressive university administrations and governments in Nigeria, Korea, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Brazil, China and Palestine to name a few. They’re marching and taking over buildings and entire campuses to protest higher tuition and fees and cutbacks in Canada, Mexico, England, Italy, and even the US. But while students have been on the move, so have coalition of business, international development agencies, local state and national governments, and entrepreneurs in efforts to raise the campuses from their abyss of inefficiency, low productivity, and declining usefulness to the accumulation of capital. Embattled from all sides and from within by a multitude of conflicting and contradictory forces and demands, the universities are increasingly the site of crisis and conflict.
Like in many other countries, the rebellious 1960s brought about many still ongoing conflictual and deep-rooted changes for US-based universities. The student and faculty uprisings of the 1960-70s were followed by the widespread growth of ethnic and women’s studies programs and the entry of many progressive and radically minded persons into the faculty, foundations and campus administrations. Alongside these widespread reforms began a process of austerity as business, the federal and state governments began to enact austeric policies to get higher education back on track into serving the demands of business and the market. Since the early 1980s, this process of cutbacks and reorganization began to take particular “pro-active” forms developing incentives for universities to profit directly from the products of research and education.
This dissertation is an attempt to flesh out the current reorganization of the universities into businesses in response to the creation of free spaces within the university created and defended by students, faculty and community groups. As a result, I do not intend to examine the spaces themselves, but the details of the counterattack so that those of us coexisting within the interstices of the corporate university may know what we’re up against, “the nature of the beast” so to speak, that threaten to collapse the very spaces in which we flourish. To do so, I examine the two complex processes of entrepreneurial reorganization and student struggle in the universities in the US and the further complexities of their overlapping relationships.
Although the crisis of higher education in the US has brought much attention over the past decade with the scandalous overcharging of overhead costs for federally funded research projects, scientific fraud, sexual harassment, racist violence and especially the growth of the multicultural reform movement and the manufactured “Politically Correct” backlash, little critical analysis is forthcoming. Rather, throughout the campuses, critically minded academics have remained awfully quiet, if not silent, about what is to many intuitive knowledge. The universities are changing, pushed by a manufactured financial crisis and the influence of business, reforming its operating logic so that it mirrors the ideal of a business: the subordination of all activities to the pursuit of profit.
If academics have publicly said little outside departmental meetings concerning these entrepreneurial pressures, students have not been as reserved. Although infrequent and sporadically organized, students have begun to employ what Boyd Littrell calls “adversarial methods” to investigate and expose the reorganization of the universities into multinational corporations. Through campus and “alternative” student newspapers, regional activist networks, campus environmental assessments, and student direct action groups, students have begun to investigate, expose and resist what I call the “entrepreneurialization” of the universities, that is, their reorganization into overt profit-making multinational corporations. In section I, chapter 1, Research Methods, Developing an Adversarial Methodology, I analyze the development of my own use of adversarial methods to investigate a massive public but closed institution of higher education, the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), before delving into the specifics of entrepreneurialization and multiculturalism. I found over the course of my 7 years of investigative study of higher education in the US and UT-Austin that for individual researchers working alone without a power basis from which to draw support and pressure, it is difficult if not impossible to gain access to the necessary data for a thorough and critical analysis.
An investigation of the crisis of higher education requires a magnitude of complexity beyond that of a single investigator. Often, those investigating issues of militarization, austerity, development projects, and research contracts have had to enter into alliances with other groups concerned about these issues from other vantage points. Often these alliances stretched beyond university systems, states, regions and even national borders. The increasing accessibility of telecommunications such as fax machines and the internet have facilitated communications between students in US-based universities with those fighting development schemes engineered by partnerships of US based multinational corporations and universities, such as happened between UT-Austin students and residents of West Papua. In turn, this has begun to evolve into international organizations such as ASEED that bring together student activists from dozens of countries from many regions of earth concerned with the effects of international development projects, the IMF, World Bank and regional business pacts such as NAFTA.
To offer a complete picture of the global restructuring of higher education is currently beyond my capabilities. However, in order to demonstrate the global context in which entrepreneurialization is occurring I have chosen to concentrate on my own terrain of conflict, UT-Austin, which I have attended for 10 years. By offering a case study of the beginnings of entrepreneurialization of UT-Austin, I hope to be able to articulate in detail what is occurring in many universities.
Section II, Case Studies of Entrepreneurialization and Multiculturalism at UT-Austin, examines UT-Austin as a case study of the ongoing conflict between efforts to further subsume the university to the interests of business and profit and those who seek to carve out new spaces or maintain those that already exist. Chapter two, A Case Study of Entrepreneurialization and Austerity at UT-Austin, offers a summary case study of the process of entrepreneurialization that is intensifying at UT-Austin. Entrepreneurialization is only in its early stages and is far from completely successful, as we’ll see.
Although this chapter details the context and motivating incentives promoting entrepreneurialization, chapter three, Multiculturalism and “Political Correctness” at UT: the Making of the Nationwide Counterattack, demonstrates only one source of opposition coming from “ethnic” and women’s studies advocates who are working to further “multiculturalize” all areas of the university. When not limited to formal institutional reforms, multiculturalism can serve as an antagonistic disruption of entrepreneurialization. The complex terrain of this conflict can be seen in the struggle over the meaning of multiculturalism. Is multiculturalism to be understood as a service to business to learn how to better manage a diverse workforce or is it a resource for those who seek to learn more about their own class and oppressed histories of resistance and struggle? This conflict shapes the struggle over the meaning of the university itself: whether to serve to business, government, and the “market” or the needs of diverse and oppressed social groups can be seen in the corporate backed “politically correct” backlash that perceives such reforms as subverting the very ideological foundation of capitalism.
In no way, does my analysis of entrepreneurialization presume a monolithic university completely subservient to the interests of capital. In fact, entrepreneurialization is only the most recent counterattack by business to reseize full control over the universities.
It must also be emphasized that I do not assume that multiculturalism is inherently subversive. Rather, efforts to add a standardized “multicultural course requirement” to an already standardized curriculum forces the question as to whether the ideology of multiculturalism is inherently reformist? Or is the limited extent of the movement a result of the repression of the more fundamental reorganization advocated by some to subsume the university to the interests of diverse resistance movements? In some cases, such as the repression of an effort to consider certain already required courses as “multicultural” at UT-Austin, multiculturalism can be accused of neither subversion nor cooptation. The fundamental restructuring of UT-Austin advocated by many groups of students, faculty and community groups became watered down into a harmless formal change in the required courseload that was perceived by the right as potentially opening up space for further more deeply rooted reforms.
In this way, I perceive neither entrepreneurialization nor multiculturalism as either concrete or complete. Rather, they are struggles-in-progress, subjected to changing balances of power between various organizations both within and across classes. Neither are they processes in themselves, but only contemporary signposts of the larger historical context of class struggle that characterizes the organization of the university like any other organization or institution in capitalist society.
For example, this is evident in the case of multiculturalism. Among the ruling class, in which I include managers and campus administrators, there are conflicts as to how they should relate to multiculturalism. As the demand for multicultural reorganization has been made from below, self-identified “sympathetic” university administrators and businesspeople have responded by attempting to put limited aspects of “multiculturalism” to use to reduce conflict by learning more about different groups of people. This is done with the intentions of better managing a diverse and antagonistic student population and waged workforce. To the extent that such people “endorse” multiculturalism, their take on this struggle is to coopt limited aspects of the movement to their own advantage. Of course, the different official responses between universities such as Stanford and UT-Austin demonstrate the continuing conflict pitting the “smart” against the “stupid” capitalist, the latter relying on brute force rather than finesse and cooptation. Such a conflict also exists at the grassroots level as well between students and faculty who advocate “multiculturalism” only to the extent that it shores up their own professional potential by expanding faculty and administrative positions for certain groups and larger corporate and foundation money for their “research”. A similar conflict began to develop in the late 1960s (and continues today) as universities began to cave into student demands for Chicano/a, Black/African-American and Women’s studies programs and centers. These new spaces were soon subsumed to the academic rationality of scholarly legitimacy, budgets, hiring, research and careers rather than maintaining spaces for further struggle to radically transform the universities and all of society.[1]
Although my case study applies first to US-based universities, there are many international parallels to draw since even US universities do not exist in a global vacuum. Under pressure to restructure their higher educational systems by multinationals, the IMF and World Bank, other countries are beginning to use the restructuring of US-based universities as their models just as they were used for the expansion of public higher education in the 1950-60s.
In Section III, The University and Students in Capitalism, I analyze the theoretical work pertaining to the university and student struggle in capitalism. Chapter four, A Theory of the Entrepreneurialization of the Universities, follows the case study of entrepreneurialization with an historically grounded theoretical discussion. In it, I ask whether the entrepreneurialization of the universities into overt multinational businesses should allow us to consider universities as fundamental institution of capitalism rather than “unproductive” and “marginal” as it is commonly acknowledged on the US left. Current research into the university as a corporation limit their analysis of universities within a particular state or country, such as the US, Mexico or Canada. The beginnings of entrepreneurialization signal the expansion of the university not only into an overt business but a multinational corporation.
The question of the impact of entrepreneurialization on theories of higher education is further examined in my analysis of students: does the process of entrepreneurialization strengthen the case for perceiving students as unwaged workers? This is the focus of chapter five, Marginal No More: Student Resistance to Entrepreneurialization as Class Conflict, in which I survey theoretical examinations of student struggle during and since the 1960s uprisings. The extent to which students resist the unwaged labor of discipline and obedience points to not only to frequent everyday forms of resistance occurring at times when commentators and student radicals themselves only saw apathy. If students consistently engage in everyday forms of refusal to be students does this not also locate the class struggle in the universities, in education?
It is insufficient to locate students within the theoretical construct of class conflict if class conflict is limited to an understanding of resistance as a reaction to something. The crisis of higher education is rooted in a multitude of efforts to reorganize the universities into spaces in which its resources could be used to transform the way we live. Could these forms of resistance be more than simply reactions to but attempts to reorganize life and the university along to serve their diverse needs? Could not this suggest the very source for the continuing crisis of the university rooted in the very class struggle between the interests of business and the diverse interests of the majority of the population?
These are some of the questions I ask in the conclusion, chapter 6, Turning Resistance into Rebellion. My hope is that by recognizing the complementary relationship between these two types of student struggle, we can transcend resistance as something against into the transformation of the universities into increasingly larger free spaces in which to pursue our own autonomous projects.
In my research I have often been tempted to see these huge multinational corporations as monolithic and hegemonic empires untainted by resistance. Reminded of the numerous students and academic theorists who take such a perspective I have sought evidence of a university in crisis not because of structural causes or diversions due to outside influence but because of the day to day explicit and subtle struggles of students and those who reside and work within them. As Henry Giroux reminds us, such analyses of the educational process as monolithic are already too commonplace and self-defeating:
There are, on the one hand, radical educators who collapse human agency and struggle into a celebration of human will, cultural experience, or the construction of “happy” classroom social relations. On the other hand, there are radical views of pedagogy that cling to notions of structure and domination. Such views not only argue that history is made behind the backs of human beings, but also imply that within such a context of domination human agency virtually disappears. The notion that human beings produce history – including its constraints – is subsumed in a discourse that often portrays schools as prisons, factories, and administrative machines functioning smoothly to produce the interests of domination and inequality. The result has often been modes of analysis that collapse into an arid functionalism or equally disabling pessimism.[2]
This is not the case with this dissertation. Born out of nearly ten years of participation in varying student activist movements and everyday forms of resistance, the analysis that follows is a tribute to the power of students to fatally disrupt the service of the university to a dying socio-political system of capitalism.
Bibliography
[1] Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth. Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989. p. 161-165. Munoz argues that Chicano Studies lacked a critique of capitalism, leaving itself unprepared to face the counterattack against radical efforts to restructure the university. Ironically, he denounces “multiculturalism” as inherently reformist although some of its most radical proponents have such an analysis.
[2]Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, Bergin & Garvey Publishers: Mass., 1983, p. 4.