NOVEMBER 21, 2011
by STEVEN HIGGS
Peter Seybold traces the
pernicious influence corporatization has had on the American campus back almost
a decade before the Reagan Revolution of 1980, to a memo written by Richmond,
Va., attorney Lewis F. Powell Jr. to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in late
summer 1971.
Powell, who would be nominated
for Supreme Court justice by President Richard Nixon just two months later,
said American business had to take the offensive to counter the social
movements of the 1960s and early ’70s, said Seybold, a sociology professor at
Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI). Among the
institutions Powell said the business world had to recapture was the American
campus.
“Part of this was a cultural
and political attack on the university,” Seybold said.
Powell’s clarion call for the
eradication of the American Left on campus and throughout society is credited
with “inspiring the founding of many conservative think tanks, including the
Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Manhattan Institute,” according
to the PBS
website on the Supreme Court that republishes the memo.
Titled “Attack of American
Free Enterprise System,” the memo listed the university first on Powell’s list
of attack sources. “The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism
come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus,
the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and
sciences, and from politicians,” he wrote.
In addition to the right-wing
think tanks, the memo has inspired to action the former New Left radical David
Horowitz, among an army of others. The one-time editor of Ramparts magazine
“now is nicely funded by the right wing to do all these things like eradicating
the Left from the academy,” Seybold said.
***
Seybold is the former director
of the Indiana University division of labor studies, which, by the time he left
in 2001, had been decimated by the Right’s campus offensive. Fifteen years
after joining what is now the IU Labor Studies Program, the Bloomington
resident left and has served since as an associate professor at IUPUI in
downtown Indianapolis.
Since joining academia in
1978, Seybold has focused on “political sociology, inequality, sociology of
work and the labor movement” and explored the impact money has on higher
education since he did a study of the Ford Foundation early in his career.
“In 1984 I was asked to give a
talk at a university in Pennsylvania, and I titled the talk ‘Toward a Corporate
Service Station,'” the New Jersey native said.
“That was sort of the
beginnings of my interest in this subject, because even then I saw the
influence of money was changing the culture of the university.”
In recent years, Seybold has
been increasingly interested in how universities mimic the corporate world and
how they are adopting the corporate model for how they run themselves.
“I’m especially concerned
about what this means for the culture of the university and just generally the
degradation of the environment that faculty, staff, students and administrators
work in because of the onslaught of the corporate model,” he said.
***
Quality of scholarship, for
example, does not have nearly the importance on hiring in the corporate
university that it has historically, Seybold said. “Now most departments, when
they hire new professors, they look at how many grants they bring in and their
potential to bring in even bigger grants in the future. When I started out in
academe, grantsmanship was not a significant factor in hiring decisions.”
The results, he said, are
professors who teach as little as possible, who use grants to buy themselves
out of teaching and concentrate their research on ideas that potentially can be
turned into products.
“I describe this as the commodification
of the university,” he said. “And I would say this has effects on all aspects
of the culture of the university.”
Among those aspects are the
way students are treated, the number of adjuncts used as “basically part-time
labor to replace full-time faculty,” the now-franchised bookstores and food
service, and the outsourcing of work like campus maintenance, Seybold said.
“You can follow this logic
through all the parts of the university and see the way it is being
implemented,” he said.
For example, certain subject
areas and departments that are worthwhile and should be supported are unable to
make money, he said.
“It is fundamentally changing
the culture of the university,” he said.
***
The logic extends to what
should be the most significant part of the university experience – the
classroom – where the corporate model incentivizes bigger classrooms, online
education and a movement away from face-to-face teaching, Seybold said.
“Corporations readily provide
materials to be incorporated in courses,” he said.
The corporate model also
negatively impacts students’ lives, Seybold said. Many have instructors who
don’t have offices where they can discuss their work in private. And due to the
high costs of education, they take more classes and frequently work multiple
jobs, degrading their campus and classroom experiences.
At urban campuses like IUPUI,
where up to 75 percent or more of students work, the rising cost of tuition and
campus life has spawned a phenomenon called stopping out. “They go to
school for a year, leave for a year and try and make some money, and then they
come back and take six credits, and they keep working,” he said.
Consequently, students show
increasing interest in parts of university study that are directly connected to
business, Seybold said. And the debt they accumulate for college also shapes
their career options.
“Six months after they get out
they have to start paying back that $50,000 or $60,000 loan bill,” he said. “So
they aren’t as open to say AmeriCorps or the Peace Corps or working for the
labor movement or a community group because they need to make money.”
Another example is the rise of
service learning, where students get credit for working in the communities they
study in, Seybold said.
“I think it’s service learning
basically in support of the status quo,” he said. “We’re not training people to
be community organizers or labor organizers. We’re not training people to help
ameliorate some of the problems that have been caused by moving toward a more
free-market economy, unfettered capitalism.”
If he had to identify one
signpost as the tipping point in the corporatization of the American
university, Seybold said it would be the decline in public funding of
universities.
“Once you do this, once you
renege on the commitment of a public university through public tax money, then
you set forth this whole marketization and corporatization,” he said.
This means that corporations
can in effect almost buy certain programs and that the logic of business will
be transferred to the university, he said, so it becomes all about head counts
and departments making money.
Indiana University
institutionalized corporate logic early on in with responsibility-centered
budgeting, which sought to make each school and even departments separate business
units that have to support themselves by taxing other departments for their
services and things like that, Seybold said.
“Once you buy into this logic,
it’s hard to stop,” he said.
***
In the broader social sense,
the Right’s attack on university culture reflects the elites’ concerns about
the counterculture and the movements of the ’60s and efforts to repudiate them,
Seybold said.
“That includes rewriting the
’60s and convincing generations after that that a lot of our problems stem from
the ’60s,” he said, “and that the ’60s were not as good as people who lived
through it said they were.”
So Seybold and others who hold
onto the liberal ideals of university purpose and culture – “Because it is a
public university, we should be serving our students” – are looked at basically
as dinosaurs, holding onto realities that have been transformed.
Coming from the labor movement
and as a sociologist interested in the organization of work, Seybold sees the
corporate campus as an attack on the craft of being a professor.
“I consider being a professor
a craft occupation,” he said. “And I see my craft being attacked.”
***
Over the past five years or
so, Seybold said, he has seen growing awareness across the campus about the
influence corporations have on campus life.
“I think there are examples,”
he said, citing a successful organizing effort this year by food-service
workers at IUPUI as one. “There’s been more activism on the part of
organizations like the AAUP (American Association of University Professors). I
think there is heightened awareness among graduate students now that their job
prospects are very uncertain in this corporate university.”
But the upshot is today’s
universities train rather than educate, Seybold said, and the repercussions
negatively impact all aspects of university life.
“I describe it as a
degradation of the culture of the university,” he said. “It affects students,
the staff, the faculty and the administration when the institution increasingly
serves as a handmaiden to corporations.”
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