Posted on February
7, 2017 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Some further
observations. First, the author neglects to mention the role of MBAs in the
reorientation of higher education institutions. When I went to school, the
administrative layer of universities was lean and not all that well paid. Those
roles were typically inhabited by alumni who enjoyed the prestige and being
able to hang around the campus. But the
growth of MBAs has meant they’ve all had to find jobs, and colonizing
not-for-profits like universities has helped keep them off the street.
Second, this post focuses on
non-elite universities, but the same general pattern is in play, although the
specific outcomes are different. Universities with large endowments are
increasingly hedge funds with an educational unit attached.
By Henry Heller, a professor
of history at the University of Manitoba, Canada and the author of The
Capitalist University. Cross posted from Alternet
The following is an excerpt
from the new book The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher
Education in the United States since 1945 by Henry Heller (Pluto Press,
December 2016):
The fact that today there are
over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States represents an
unparalleled educational, scientific, and cultural endowment. These
institutions occupy a central place in American economic and cultural life.
Certification from one of them is critical to the career hopes of most young people
in the United States. The research produced in these establishments is likewise
crucial to the economic and political future of the American state.
Institutions of higher learning are of course of varying quality, with only 600
offering master’s degrees and only 260 classified as research institutions. Of
these only 87 account for the majority of the 56,000 doctoral degrees granted
annually. Moreover, the number of really top-notch institutions based on the
quality of their faculty and the size of their endowments is no more than 20 or
30. But still, the existence of thousands of universities and colleges offering
humanistic, scientific, and vocational education, to say nothing of religious
training, represents a considerable achievement. Moreover, the breakthroughs in
research that have taken place during the last two generations in the
humanities and social sciences, not to speak of the natural sciences, have been
spectacular.
But the future of these
institutions is today imperiled. Except for a relatively few well-endowed
universities, most are in serious financial difficulty. A notable reason for
this has been the decline in public financial support for higher education
since the 1980s, a decline due to a crisis in federal and state finances but
also to the triumph of right-wing politics based on continuing austerity toward
public institutions. The response of most colleges and universities has been to
dramatically increase tuition fees, forcing students to take on heavy debt and
putting into question access to higher education for young people from low- and
middle-income families. This situation casts a shadow on the implicit post-war
contract between families and the state which promised upward mobility for
their children based on higher education. This impasse is but part of the
general predicament of the majority of the American population, which has seen
its income fall and its employment opportunities shrink since the Reagan era.
These problems have intensified since the financial collapse of 2008 and the
onset of depression or the start of a generalized capitalist crisis.
Mounting student debt and
fading job prospects are reflected in stagnating enrollments in higher
education, intensifying the financial difficulties of universities and indeed
exacerbating the overall economic malaise.[1] The growing cost of universities
has led recently to the emergence of Massive Online Open Courses whose upfront
costs to students are nil, which further puts into doubt the future of
traditional colleges and universities. These so-called MOOCs, delivered via the
internet, hold out the possibility, or embody the threat, of doing away with
much of the expensive labor and fixed capital costs embodied in existing
university campuses. Clearly the future of higher education hangs in the
balance with important implications for both American politics and economic
life.
The deteriorating situation of
the universities has its own internal logic as well. In response to the decline
in funding, but also to the prevalence of neoliberal ideology, universities—or
rather the presidents, administrators, and boards of trustees who control
them—are increasingly moving away from their ostensible mission of serving the
public good to that of becoming as far as possible like private enterprises. In
doing so, most of the teachers in these universities are being reduced to the
status of wage labor, and indeed precarious wage labor. The wages of the
non-tenured faculty who now constitute the majority of teachers in higher
education are low, they have no job security and receive few benefits. Although
salaried and historically enjoying a certain autonomy, tenured faculty are
losing the vestiges of their independence as well. Similarly, the influence of
students in university affairs—a result of concessions made by administrators
during the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—has effectively been neutered.
These changes reflect a decisive shift of power toward university managers
whose numbers and remuneration have expanded prodigiously. The objective of
these bureaucrats is to transform universities as much as possible to
approximate private and profit-making corporations, regarded as models of
efficient organization based on the discipline of the market. Indeed, scores of
universities, Phoenix University for example, have been created explicitly as
for-profit businesses and currently enroll millions of students.
Modern universities have
always had a close relationship with private business, but whereas in the past
faculty labor served capital by producing educated managers, highly skilled
workers, and new knowledge as a largely free good, strenuous efforts are now
underway to transform academic employment into directly productive, i.e.,
profitable, labor. The knowledge engendered by academic work is accordingly
being privatized as a commodity through patenting, licensing, and copyrighting
to the immediate benefit of universities and the private businesses to which
universities are increasingly linked. Meanwhile, through the imposition of
administrative standards laid down in accord with neoliberal principles,
faculty are being subjected to unprecedented scrutiny through continuous
quantified evaluation of teaching and research in which the ability to generate
outside funding has become the ultimate measure of scholarly worth. At the same
time, universities have become part of global ranking systems like the Shanghai
Index or the Times Higher Education World University Rankings in which their
standing in the hierarchy has become all important to their prestige and
funding.
Several intertwined questions
emerge from this state of affairs. In the first place, given the rising expense
and debt that attendance at university imposes and declining employment
prospects especially for young people, will there continue to be a mass market
for higher education? Is the model of the university or college traditionally
centered on the humanities and the sciences with a commitment to the pursuit of
truth compatible with the movement toward converting the universities into quasi-
or fully private business corporations? Finally, what are the implications of
changes in the neoliberal direction for the future production of objective
knowledge, not to speak of critical understanding?
Universities during the Cold
War produced an impressive amount of new positive knowledge, not only in the
sciences, engineering, and agriculture but also in the social sciences and
humanities. In the case of the humanities and social sciences such knowledge,
however real, was largely instrumental or tainted by ideological
rationalizations. It was not sufficiently critical in the sense of getting to
the root of the matter, especially on questions of social class or on the
motives of American foreign policy. Too much of it was used to control and
manipulate ordinary people within and without the United States in behalf of
the American state and the maintenance of the capitalist order. There were
scholars who continued to search for critical understanding even at the height
of the Cold War, but they largely labored in obscurity. This state of affairs
was disrupted in the 1960s with the sudden burgeoning of Marxist scholarship
made possible by the upsurge of campus radicalism attendant on the anti-war,
civil rights, and black liberation struggles. But the decline of radicalism in
the 1970s saw the onset of postmodernism, neoliberalism, and the cultural turn.
Postmodernism represented an unwarranted and untenable skepticism, while
neoliberal economics was a crude and overstated scientism. The cultural turn deserves
more respect, but whatever intellectual interest there may be in it there is
little doubt that the net effect of all three was to delink the humanities and
social sciences from the revolutionary politics that marked the 1960s. The
ongoing presence in many universities of radicals who took refuge in academe
under Nixon and Reagan ensured the survival of Marxist ideas if only in an
academic guise. Be that as it may, the crisis in American society and the
concomitant crisis of the universities has become extremely grave over the last
decade. It is a central contention of this work that, as a result of the
crisis, universities will likely prove to be a key location for ideological and
class struggle, signaled already by the growing interest in unionization of
faculty both tenured and non-tenured, the revival of Marxist scholarship, the
Occupy Movement, the growing importance of the Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions movement, and heightening conflicts over academic freedom and the
corporatization of university governance.
The approach of this work is
to examine the recent history of American universities from the perspective of
Marxism, a method which can be used to study these institutions critically as
part of the capitalist economic and political system. Despite ongoing
apologetics that view universities as sites for the pursuit of disinterested
truth, we contend that a critical perspective involving an understanding of
universities as institutions based on the contradictions of class inequality,
the ultimate unity of the disciplines rooted in the master narrative of
historical materialism, and a consciousness of history makes more sense as a
method of analysis. All the more so, this mode of investigation is justified by
the increasing and explicit promotion of academic capitalism by university
managers trying to turn universities into for-profit corporations. In response
to these policies scholars have in fact begun to move toward the reintegration
of political economy with the study of higher education. This represents a turn
away from the previous dominance in this field of postmodernism and cultural
studies and, indeed, represents a break from the hegemonic outlook of
neoliberalism.[2] On the other hand, most of this new scholarship is orientated
toward studying the effects of neoliberalism on the contemporary university,
whereas the present work takes a longer view. Marxist political economy demands
a historical perspective in which the present condition of universities emerged
from the crystallization of certain previous trends. It therefore looks at the
evolution of the university from the beginning of the twentieth century,
sketching its evolution from a preserve of the upper-middle class in which
research played almost no role into a site of mass education and burgeoning
research, and, by the 1960s, a vital element in the political economy of the
United States.
In contrast to their original
commitment to independence with respect to the state up to World War II, most
if by no means all universities and colleges defined their post-war goals in
terms of the pursuit of the public good and were partially absorbed into the
state apparatus by becoming financially dependent on government. But from start
to finish twentieth-century higher education also had an intimate and ongoing
relationship with private business. In the neoliberal period universities are
taking this a step further, aspiring to turn themselves into quasi- or actual
business corporations. But this represents the conclusion of a long-evolving process.
The encroachment of private business into the university is in fact but part of
the penetration of the state by private enterprise and the partial
privatization of the state. On the surface this invasion of the public sphere
by the market may appear beneficial to private business. We regard it, on the
contrary, as a symptom of economic weakness and a weakening of civil society.
The American system of higher
education, with its prestigious private institutions, great public
universities, private colleges and junior colleges, was a major achievement of
a triumphant American republic. It provided the U.S. state with the
intellectual, scientific, and technical means to strengthen significantly its
post-1945 power. The current neoliberal phase reflects an America struggling
economically and politically to adapt to the growing challenges to its global
dominance and to the crisis of capitalism itself. The shift of universities
toward the private corporate model is part of this struggle. Capitalism in its
strongest periods not only separated the state from the private sector, it kept
the private sector at arm’s length from the state. The role of the state in
ensuring a level playing field and providing support for the market was clearly
understood. The current attempt by universities to mimic the private sector is
a form of economic and ideological desperation on the part of short-sighted and
opportunistic university administrators as well as politicians and businessmen.
In our view, this aping of the private sector is misguided, full of
contradictions, and ultimately vain if not disastrous. Indeed, it is a symptom
of crisis and decline.
The current overwhelming
influence of private business on universities grew out of pre-existing
tendencies. There is already an existing corporate nature of university
governance both private and public, as well as an influence of business on
universities in the first part of the twentieth century. In reaction there
developed the concept of academic freedom as well as the establishment of the
system of tenure and the development of a rather timid faculty trade unionism.
This underscores the importance of private foundations in controlling the
development of the curriculum and research in both the sciences and humanities.
In their teaching, universities were mainly purveyors of the dominant
capitalist ideology. Humanities and social science professors imparted mainly
liberal ideology and taught laissez-faire economics which justified the
political and economic status quo. The development of specialized departments
reinforced the fragmentation of knowledge and discouraged the emergence of a
systemic overview and critique of American culture and society. There were, as
noted earlier, a few Marxist scholars, some of considerable distinction, who
became prominent particularly in the wake of the Depression, the development of
the influence of the Communist Party, and the brief period of Soviet-American
cooperation during World War II. But the teaching of Marxism was frowned upon
and attacked even prior to the Cold War.
The post-1945 university was a
creation of the Cold War. Its expansion, which sprang directly out of war, was
based on the idea of education as a vehicle of social mobility, which was seen
as an alternative to the equality and democracy promoted by the populism of the
New Deal. Its elitist and technocratic style of governance was patterned after
that of the large private corporation and the American federal state during the
1950s. Its enormously successful research programs were mainly underwritten by
appropriations from the military and the CIA. The CIA itself was largely
created by recruiting patriotic faculty from the universities. Much of the
research in the social sciences was directed at fighting Soviet and
revolutionary influence and advancing American imperialism abroad. Marxist
professors and teaching programs were purged from the campuses.
Dating from medieval times,
the curriculum of the universities was based on a common set of subjects
including language, philosophy, and natural science premised on the idea of a
unitary truth. Although the subject matter changed over the centuries higher
education continued to impart the hegemonic ideology of the times. Of course
the notion of unitary truth was fraying at the seams by the beginning of the
twentieth century with the development of departmental specialization and the
increasingly contested nature of truth, especially in the social sciences in
the face of growing class struggle in America. However, the notion of the idea
of the unity of knowledge as purveyed by the university was still ideologically
important as a rationale for the existence of universities. Moreover, as we
shall demonstrate, it was remarkable how similarly, despite differences in
subject matter and method, the main disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences responded to the challenge of Marxism during the Cold War. They all
developed paradigms which opposed or offered alternatives to Marxism while
rationalizing continued loyalty to liberalism and capitalism. As if on cue,
sociology, psychology, literature, political science, and anthropology all took
sides by explicitly rejecting Marxism and putting forward viewpoints opposed to
it. History itself stressed American exceptionalism, justified U.S. expansionism,
minimized class conflict, and warned against revolution. Indeed, this work will
focus on these disciplines because they defended the capitalist status quo at a
deeper cultural and intellectual level than the ubiquitous mass media. As Louis
Althusser pointed out, the teaching received by students from professors at
universities was the strategic focal point for the ideological defense of the
dominant class system. That was as true of the United States as it was of
France, where institutions of higher learning trained those who would later
train or manage labor. Criticizing the recent history of these disciplines is
thus an indispensable step to developing an alternative knowledge and indeed
culture that will help to undermine liberal capitalist hegemony.[3]
The approach of this work is
to critically analyze these core academic subjects from a perspective informed
by Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx. Bourdieu points out that the deep involvement
of the social sciences (and the humanities) with powerful social interests
makes it difficult to free their study from ideological presuppositions and
thereby achieve a truly socially and psychologically reflexive
understanding.[4] But such reflexive knowledge was precisely what Marx had in
mind more than a century earlier. Leaving a Germany still under the thrall of
feudalism and absolutism for Paris in 1843, the young Marx wrote to his friend
Arnold Ruge that
reason has always existed, but
not always in a reasonable form … but, if constructing the future and settling
everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we
have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that
exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it
arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the
powers that be.[5]
His task as he saw it was to
criticize the existing body of knowledge so as to make it as reasonable as
possible, i.e., to undermine its illusory and ideological character and substitute
knowledge which was both true and helped advance communism. Such a project
entailed deconstructing the existing body of knowledge through rational
criticism, exposing its ideological foundations and advancing an alternative
based on a sense of contradiction, social totality, and a historical and
materialist understanding. It is our ambition in surveying and studying the
humanities and social sciences in the period after 1945 to pursue our
investigation in the same spirit. Indeed, it is our view that a self-reflexive
approach to contemporary knowledge, while woefully lacking, is an indispensable
complement to the development of a serious ideological critique of the
crisis-ridden capitalist society of today.
Marxism is still regarded with
suspicion in the United States. As a matter of fact, anti-Marxism in American
universities was not merely a defensive response to McCarthyism as some allege.
Anti-communism was bred in the bone of many Americans and was one of the
strongest forces that affected U.S. society in the twentieth century, including
the faculty members of its universities. An idée fixe rather than an
articulated ideology, it was compounded out of deeply embedded albeit parochial
notions of Americanism, American exceptionalism and anti-radicalism.[6] The
latter was rooted in the bitter resistance of the still large American middle
or capitalist class to the industrial unrest which marked the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and which had a strong bed of support among the
immigrant working class. Nativism then was an important tool in the hands of
this class in fighting a militant if ethnically divided working class.
Moreover, the anti-intellectual prejudices of American society in general and
the provincialism of its universities were ideal terrain for fending off
subversive ideas from abroad like Marxism. Later, this anti-communism and
hostility to Marxism became the rationale for the extension of American
imperialism overseas particularly after 1945. The social origins of the professoriate
among the lower middle class, furthermore, and its role as indentured if
indirect servants of capital, strengthened its position as inimical to Marxism.
Just as careers could be lost for favoring Marxism, smart and adroit academics
could make careers by advancing some new intellectual angle in the fight
against Marxism. And this was not merely a passing feature of the height of the
Cold War: from the 1980s onward, postmodernism, identity politics, and the
cultural turn were invoked to disarm the revolutionary Marxist politics that
had developed in the 1960s. Whatever possible role identity politics and
culture might have in deepening an understanding of class their immediate
effect was to undermine a sense of class and strengthen a sense of liberal social
inclusiveness while stressing the cultural obstacles to the development of
revolutionary class consciousness.
This overall picture of
conformity and repression was, however, offset by the remarkable upsurge of
student radicalism that marked the 1960s, challenging the intellectual and
social orthodoxies of the Cold War. In reaction to racism and political and
social repression at home and the Vietnam War abroad, students rebelled against
the oppressive character of university governance and by extension the power
structure of American society. Overwhelmingly the ideology through which this
revolt was refracted was the foreign and until then largely un-American
doctrine of Marxism. Imported into the universities largely by students,
Marxism then inspired a new generation of radical and groundbreaking
scholarship. Meanwhile it is important to note that the student revolt itself
was largely initiated by the southern civil rights movement, an important
bastion of which were the historically black colleges of the South. It was from
the struggle of racially oppressed black students in the American South as well
as the growing understanding of the anti-colonial revolutionaries of Vietnam
that the protest movement in American colleges and universities was born. Equally
important was the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Indeed, it is the
contention of this work that the issues raised at Berkeley over democracy in
the universities and the free expression of ideas not only shaped the student
movement of that time but are still with us, and indeed are central to the
future of universities and intellectual life today.
At the heart of the Berkeley
protest lay a rejection of the idea of a university as a hierarchical
corporation producing exchange values including the production of trained
workers and ideas convertible into commodities. Instead the students asserted
the vision of a democratic university which produced knowledge as a use value
serving the common good. It is our view that this issue raised at Berkeley in the
1960s anticipated the class conflict that is increasingly coming to the fore
over so-called knowledge capitalism. Both within the increasingly corporate
neoliberal university and in business at large, the role of knowledge and
knowledge workers is becoming a key point of class struggle. This is especially
true on university campuses where the proletarianization of both teaching and
research staff is in process and where the imposition of neoliberal work rules
is increasingly experienced as tyrannical. The skilled work of these knowledge
producers, the necessarily interconnected nature of their work, and the
fundamentally contradictory notion of trying to privatize and commodify
knowledge, have the potential to develop into a fundamental challenge to capitalism.
Notes:
1. Paul Fain, “‘Nearing the
Bottom’: Inside Higher Education,” Inside Higher Education, May 15, 2014.
2. Raymond A. Morrow,
“Critical Theory and Higher Education: Political Economy and the Cul-de-Sac of
the Postmodernist Turn,” in The University, State and Market: The Political
Economy of Globalization in the Americas, ed. Robert A. Rhoads and Carlos
Alberto Torres, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. xvii‒xxxiii.
3. Perry Anderson, “Components
of the National Culture,” New Left Review, No. 50, July‒August, 1968, pp. 3–4.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field
of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993, pp. 86–7.
5. Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold
Ruge, Kreuznach, September 1843, Letters from the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm
6. Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism
in Twentieth-Century America, Santa Barbara: Clio, 2011, pp. 1–2, 12.
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