September 2005
Zwi Reznik, Educational
Policies Committee 2004-05
Bob Grill, Chair, Technology
Committee 2004-05
Leon Marzillier, Area C
Representative
Recent concerns over
corporatization of education led to resolutions adopted by the Academic Senate
for California Community Colleges. Those resolutions called for more, in-depth
information about this issue. The process of developing a position paper
started with researching available literature in the field. In doing so, it
became apparent that much valuable work has already been done in that area,
particularly the recent publication Academic Values, Market Values: The
Shifting Balance (American Federation of Teachers [AFT], 2004). Rather
than reproducing the work already done, this article is intended to provide an
overview and point you in the direction of the substantial information
available.
Over the past few years, there
has been pressure to adopt corporate management structures due to the drop in
public support for institutions of higher education -note the drop in per fte
funding over the last several years when measured in real dollars.
Even if we put aside the need
for securing funding, what other motivations may there be for this trend to
corporatization? One of these is the idea, strongly disputed by many including
us, that the marketplace is more efficient. Governor Schwarzenegger's call for
merit pay is a recent example. Our salary structures are often attacked as
being unfair in that compensation is based only on seniority. The assumption
seems to be that there are clear quantitative measures that can be used to
provide compensation models. In the early 80s, during an oil boom, one of the
authors of this article was employed in oil and gas exploration and was
rewarded with company cars, minimally monitored expense accounts and bonuses.
Corporations had to decide how much individual professional employees should
receive as a bonus. The "bean-counters" who ran things felt that an
objective measure, such as how many barrels of oil reserves one had discovered,
would provide a useful measure. The exploration managers were able to point out
that no one individual could be given credit for major discoveries. In
addition, the most skilled exploration professionals would often be assigned to
previously unexplored frontier areas where there was the least likelihood of a
discovery. So the decision was made to determine the bonus amounts entirely on
the basis of total years of exploration experience-i.e., a seniority formula.
Just as where you explore for oil is as much a factor as one's skill as an
explorer, so it is in teaching: the backgrounds, motivations, and time on task
of one's students are as much factors in the successes of our students as are
the skills of the professoriate. Basing pay on seniority, provided that
instructors are regularly and meaningfully evaluated by their peers, is the
fairest method of compensation.
Legitimate community needs for
job training must also be taken into account. However, how do we deal with the
student, now being viewed as a customer, who comes to us for a specific product
-e.g., learning how to be a nurse, welder, auto technician or preparing for
transfer. How do you tell your customer that he/she does not merit the desired
"product"-the Degree, Diploma or Certificate. This is clearly a major
concern for us as the maintenance of academic rigor motivates us all.
In October 1997, Digital
Diploma Mills, Part I, The Automation of Higher Education by David F. Noble,
was widely disseminated over the internet and brought new attention to trends
that were brewing among academics and those connected with academia and politics.
Examples given illustrate partnerships between top university administrations
and private corporations resulting in requirements that faculty use technology
in one way or another. To quote noble, "universities are not simply
undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged
by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education. For here as
elsewhere technology is but a vehicle and a disarming disguise."
One trend was corporate and
political leaders recognizing the value of knowledge and
"knowledgebased" industries (space, electronics, computers,
materials, telecommunications, and bioengineering) with a focus upon
"intellectual capital."
As patent holders,
universities assume the characteristics of companies, and as such set about at
once to codify their intellectual property policies, develop the infrastructure
necessary to conduct commercially-viable research, cultivate their corporate
ties, and create the mechanisms for marketing their new commodities, including
exclusive licenses to their patents.
The result of this first phase
of university commoditization was a reallocation of university resources toward
research desired by the university administration's corporate partners.
Universities are educational institutions with two primary functions: research
and student instruction. Decisions about how an institution's budget is
allocated to these functions, and decisions about what is researched and what
is taught, should be made in an atmosphere of academic freedom, and not
dictated by outside entities, especially if they stand ultimately to gain from
whatever is decided.
The second trend toward the
commercialization of academia was the commoditization of instruction.
The initial champions of
computer-based instruction focused their attention on increasing the
efficiencies of already overextended teachers. Rather than focusing attention
on the content of our courses, these "champions" wanted to find ways
of disseminating the information more "efficiently," i.e. getting
instructors, without increased compensation, to service more and more students,
the presumed beneficiaries of "improved" education. These champions
are not really motivated to improve education at all. That's just the name of
this particular market.
Olivier Frayss, a professor of
american studies at the sorbonne in Paris, France, presented an address to the
California Federation of Teachers Convention March 10, 2001 in which he
presented five characteristics common among international assaults on higher
education:
1. Education is considered as
a market rather than a public duty, knowledge as a commodity rather than a
means to become more human, students as consumers rather than citizens or
future citizens.
2. Institutions try to
appropriate the intellectual property rights of faculty and plan to sell their
courses to other institutions, firms, and the public at large.
3. Huge investments of public
money are made to fund efforts to develop on-line education.
4. The promise of high-tech
education is used as an excuse to reject claims for the building of needed
schools and colleges and the hiring of new teachers and classified workers.
5. As in other "service
industries," technology is used by management to cut labor costs, deskill
a majority of workers, improve productivity and monitor compliance with
employer-made rules. The implication is that the "information age" is
different from the "industrial age" mainly in that industrial methods
are applied to the so-called "knowledge workers," which means us.
Yet, even today, major
corporations all over the world are planning to invest huge sums of money to
corner what they call the education market, and governments give them
encouragement in many ways that include inducing universities to behave like
corporations, which then enables government to cut public funding for higher
education as the institutions of higher learning are turned into profit
centers.
This is becoming increasingly
true of community colleges as well. In California, Governor Schwarzenegger
refuses to raise taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations while at the
same time robbing K-12 and community college education of $2-3 billion
"guaranteed" by Proposition 98, a proposition that was overwhelmingly
approved by the "people" that he is so fond of threatening to take
his policies to!
As public funding for
community colleges dries up, the colleges in turn must beat the bushes for
alternative funding. These alternative funds very rarely, if ever, come without
strings.
The history of health-care in
this country in the last ten years shows that such "knowledge
workers" including doctors and nurses are now experiencing vastly modified
working conditions as a result of the commoditization of medicine: the
high-tech, hyperwired, network-modeled way to cut expenditures on people's
healthcare and to increase corporate profits. If you do not believe that
commoditization can happen to us, ask your doctor if he diagnosed the
development of HMO's ten years ago.
Any discussion of
corporatization can quickly degenerate into a collection of dilbert like
anecdotes. While these visual aids may be useful for setting a mood, a more
substantive way of defining the discussion is needed. To that end the
introduction to the above noted AFT journal (Scheuerman and Kriger, 2004) offer
us two useful definitions in the introduction to the AFT Journal:
Exchange value
Companies produce goods and
services only as a means to an end. The purpose is to exchange them for money,
to make a profit-the only reason for a business to exist. Quality attracts
customers. In the marketplace circumstances may force a company to reduce costs
to a point where quality suffers. "When this occurs, as it frequently
does, the tension between the primary drive for profit and the secondary need
for quality is exposed as a contradiction inherent in the production of
exchange values." (p. 12),br> Use value
Idealized, the purpose of
higher education is to teach the values associated with the pursuit of
knowledge or the pursuit of truth.
This pursuit is intended to
encourage dissent and tolerance for other opinions. While this process
frequently results in objectively useful results it is the not the primary goal
of the institution. "Nevertheless, the fact remains-the goal of
higher education institutions is education. Or to say it another way,
educational institutions produce use values, intangible and abstract goods that
are ends in themselves." (p. 12)
This attitude is most obvious
in considering the substantial pressure to provide a larger proportion of a
college's offerings through distance education. If we evaluate distance
education in terms of its exchange or use values, we have a tool that separates
the appropriate use of an innovative delivery method, under the design and
control of the faculty, from the corporate model that treats the student as a
consumer, renames deans as vice presidents and presidents as CEO's and is
pushed as a productivity tool. When the faculty loses control, the result can
be educational Taylorism1-i.e., treating teaching the same way products
are manufactured on an assembly line-breaking down the process to a series of
lower skilled tasks and adding strict management control. The result may well
be: online institutions with no counseling, a small group of developers who
create a course and instructors hired to send out pre-packaged email and grade
submissions with no customization of content allowed!
Exchange value has its place
in a capital driven model.
Our problem is that teaching
is not about delivering a product. Education is not a commodity.
"Academic Institutions
exist for the transmission of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, the development
of students, and the general well-being of society," (American Association
of University Professors, 1992) not for profit.
These trends toward exchange
value were also seen in a report delivered several years ago at the annual
meeting of the California Conference of the american association of university
professors:
We now have CEOs and CFOs
drawn increasingly from management backgrounds of one sort or another, instead
of presidents or provosts promoted up from the faculty. As a corollary to this,
the pay of senior administrators has become almost entirely disentangled from
the pay of faculty and the cult of the Ceo has taken hold at many
not-for-profit institutions. We see institutions devoting inordinate staff fte
to public relations, fund raising, and patent management while professing to
have insufficient resources to fill desperately needed tenure lines.
The speaker went on to note
that studies conducted by a statewide bargaining unit showed that student
enrollment, full-time faculty hiring, and administrative costs are out of sync,
with administrative hiring and salaries far outpacing those of faculty. The
presentation also noted that work now done by highly paid administrators is
work that faculty could-and once did-produce under the auspices of
participatory governance.
While many of us have no
problem with the ideas inherent in the use of alternative means of delivery,
our "managers" are more focused on a product that can be sold.
Increasingly the managers of our institutions are concerned with securing the
copyrights to our work. This is one of the reasons our unions have become so
heavily involved in this discussion. Without contract language to address
intellectual property rights the "work for hire" doctrine inherent in
the Copyright Act of 1976 can be applied to anything we produce.
Potentially this doctrine can be extended to those items which have always been
considered yours-e.g., notes, exams etc.
It would be simple to condemn
the proponents of corporatization as lacking any understanding of what we do in
producing goods with "use value."
However, just as the
motivation for distance education includes faculty who are eager to teach
courses online, we must acknowledge that there are managers who view what they
are doing as being for the benefit of the institution. As examples consider how
college bookstores or cafeterias operate. Are they profit centers for our
colleges?
Technology can be a great aid
in the teaching/learning process, but it can never substitute entirely for
teachers and students coming together.
However, it is a fact that
80-90% of a community college's budget goes for the salary and benefits of its
faculty. That shouldn't be surprising, since it is in the classroom that the
central raison d'etre for the colleges resides. Since the passage of
AB 1725 and the strengthening of the role of academic senates, curriculum
decisions are firmly in the hands of community college faculty. We must be
careful that we are not seduced by that which has seduced some higher education
administrators, and use our control and influence to ensure that academia
remains a path to humanization, not corporatization.
References
American Association of
University Professors (1992). Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of
Students. Author: Washington, D.C.
Fraysee, O. (2001, March 10).
Address to California Teachers' Association Convention, Santa Monica, CA. Retrieved
February 21, 2005, from http://smccd.net/accounts/brenner/advo/frasse.html
Noble, D. (1997 October). Part
I: The Automation of Higher Education. Retrieved August 30, 2005, from http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl.
See also at that site by the same author:
Part II: The Coming Battle
Over Online Instruction, March, 1998
Part III: The Bloom Is Off The
Rose, November, 1998
Part IV: Rehearsal For The
Revolution, November, 1999.
Part V: Fool's Gold, March,
2001
Steck, H. (2003 January).
Corporatization of the University: Seeking Conceptual Clarity.
Annuals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 585, 66-83.
Vogel, M. (Ed.). (2004, June),
American Values, Market Values: The Shifting Balance, (1) 1. washington, DC:
American Federation of Teachers. Retrieved August 30, 2005, from http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_academic/issues/june04/index.htm
Recent Additional Resources:
Bowen, R. (2005 May-June).
Book reviews
Academe, Washington, DC:
American University of University Professors
Rhoades, G. (2005 May-June).
Capitalism, Academic Style and Shared Governance.
1. Frederick Taylor wrote the
principles of scientific management in 1911. Some of the principles of
taylorism include: develop a "science" for every job, including rules
motion, standardized work implements, and proper working conditions. Carefully
select workers with the right abilities for the job. Carefully train these
workers to do the job, and give them proper incentives to cooperate with the
job science. Support these workers by planning their work and by smoothing the
way as they go about their jobs.
The articles published in the
Rostrum do not necessarily represent the adopted positions of the academic
senate. For adopted positions and recommendations, please browse this website.
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