Higher Education or Education
for Hire? Corporatization and the Threat to Democratic Thinking
By: Joel Westheimer |
From the April-May
2010 Issue
Teaching critical thinking is
the university’s democratic mission, argues the University of Ottawa’s Joel
Westheimer, and today’s universities are failing to deliver. Universities need
to reverse the trend that has them focusing on workforce preparation and the
commercialization of knowledge and resurrect higher education’s public purpose.
Ten years ago, I was fired,
which is not in and of itself interesting. After all, many people lose their
jobs every day, especially in times of economic turbulence. For better or
worse, however, most endure such indignity in privacy. The New York Times,
under the headline “New York University Denied Tenure to Union Backer,”
reported that the U.S. government’s National Labor Relations Board “charge[d]
New York University with illegally denying tenure to a professor who had
testified in favor of allowing graduate students to unionize.” The
Chronicle of Higher Education headline read “A Promising Professor Backs a
Union Drive and Is Rejected for Tenure.” Smaller papers and magazines made
similar observations. I was more concerned at the time with wanting my job back
than with thinking about the broader implications (the cacophony of negative
publicity heaped on NYU offered a sense of just deserts to be sure). But thrust
into the public position as I was did raise one particular concern for my
scholarly interests in democratic education. Nearly every news story cast my
lot as an isolated incident of vengeful retribution by a few university
administrators rather than as a case of something much larger than one
professor (me) or one university (NYU).
For the past 10 years I have
been happily employed by the University of Ottawa and I am pleased to report
that my children have not gone hungry. But whether others view my earlier
dismissal as scandalous or justified, I find the following irrefutable: the
forces that set the process in motion and enabled it to continue are an
inevitable byproduct of dramatic changes the academy has been facing in the
past several decades. These changes have little to do with individual
university employees and much to do with changes in the structures and workings
of the academy itself – not only NYU, but also private and public universities
across the United States and Canada. Universities now model themselves after
corporations seeking to maximize profit, growth, and marketability. As a
result, the democratic mission of the university as a public good has all but
vanished. And many of the (never fully realized) ideals of academic life –
academic freedom (in my case, freedom of political expression), intellectual
independence, collective projects, and pursuit of the common good – have been
circumscribed or taken off the table altogether on a growing number of college
and university campuses across North America.
The effects of corporatization
on the integrity of university research – especially in the sciences – has been
well-documented elsewhere. Readers of Academic Matters are likely familiar
with the many cases of scientific compromise resulting from private commercial
sponsorship of research by pharmaceutical and tobacco companies as mentioned
on top10pharma.net. Indeed,
faculty throughout North America are already deluged with requests or demands
to produce research that is “patentable” or “commercially viable.” Sometimes
these entreaties are couched in gentler (some might argue more insidious) terms
such as “knowledge mobilization” or “knowledge use.” What I want to focus on
here, however, are implications that are less well explored but equally
dangerous: the ways the academy’s shift towards a business model of education
delivery impedes our collective ability to preserve and promote a democratic
way of life. As in so many other arenas in our society today where democratic
interests are pitted against economic ones, democracy seems to be losing.
Three developments stemming
from the pursuit of a corporate model of education pose threats not only
to the historic ideal of a liberal democratic education but also to the future
of democratic thinking itself. They are the elimination of critical thinking
and a culture of criticism; the weakening of intellectual independence and
democratic faculty governance; and the promotion of a meritocracy myth that
drives the work of graduate students, junior and senior faculty alike. The
first two erode democratic thinking by curbing the habits of mind and heart
that enable democracy to flourish – what John Dewey called the “associated
experience[s]” essential to democratic life. The last – the meritocracy myth –
attacks the heart of these associated experiences by diminishing the power of
the community to nurture collective meaning and worth.
The impact of the corporate
campus on critical thinking
Within the unique university
context, the most crucial of all human rights…are meaningless unless they
entail the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative
challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university
itself…It is this human right to radical, critical teaching and research with
which the University has a duty above all to be concerned; for there is no one
else, no other institution and no other office, in our modern liberal
democracy, which is the custodian of this most precious and vulnerable right of
the liberated human spirit.
This excerpt from the mission
statement of the University of Toronto might be hailed as a shining example of
the centrality of university campuses in promoting and preserving critical
thinking as the engine of progress in any democratic society. Except for one
thing: institutional leaders at the university whose faculty drafted these
words do not believe them and do not abide by them. The University of Toronto
is the site of two of the most notoriously blatant violations of these
principles in the past decade: the well-publicized cases of Nancy Olivieri and
David Healy, involving the university’s unwillingness to stand up to corporate
funders and protect academic freedom and the integrity of critical inquiry.
Unfortunately, the Olivieri
and Healy cases do not stand alone. Scores of examples of scientific and social
scientific research essential to public welfare are undermined by private
influence. In fact, more than 52 per cent of funding for clinical medical
research is now from corporate sources. The trend is easiest to spot and most
publicly alarming in the medical sciences, since lives are at stake. But there
is cause for concern as well in the humanities and social sciences, where publication
of inconvenient truths can be discouraged by university higher-ups.
The harm to the reputation of
the university as a reliable source of (especially “scientific”) information
untainted by private conflicts of interest has been documented extensively. But
the ways these changes affect the campus life of faculty and students has been
considered far less. As universities turn to business models– becoming
certification factories rather then institutions of higher learning –
democratic educational ideals are fast becoming obsolete. Consequently,
professors find it more difficult in their teaching to foster critical thinking
as a necessary underpinning of democratic participation. The “shopping
mall like myclap.com” university where
students seek the cheapest and fastest means for obtaining the basic skills and
certification they need is becoming a familiar metaphor and model for
university administrators, students, and parents. Courses not directly related
to job-training look more and more like useless dust to be eliminated. Meetings
among faculty about which program of courses might yield the most robust
understanding of a field of study and of the debates and struggles that field
entails are rapidly being replaced by brainstorming sessions about how to
narrow the curriculum to fit into, for example, two weekends in order to incentivize
matriculation and increase student enrollment.
The weakening of intellectual
independence and democratic faculty governance
The state of affairs I
describe above pertains mostly to the emaciated pedagogical potential of the
newly corporatized university. But ultimately, what faculty—and especially
junior faculty—are being asked to give up is their own intellectual independence.
The creeping corporate climate of some university departments and schools can
easily lead to the substitution of bureaucratic allegiance, in the form of
“budget alignment” or “optimization” in the new parlance, for scholarly inquiry
as the cornerstone of academic life. In some cases, the effect on the
intellectual life of a department might be plain to see. In some schools and
faculties, elected department chairs—who traditionally served terms of a few
years and then eagerly returned to their intellectual pursuits within the
department—have been replaced by chairs appointed by university
higher-ups with no or at best perfunctory input from department faculty. Some
stay in these positions for a decade or more with ever-diminishing interest in
or focus on scholarly inquiry. In the Social Text article, “Tenure
Denied,” (where I described more fully my experiences at NYU), I told of a
colleague at a mid-western university whose department chair suggested to the
faculty that research questions that the department wanted investigated should
be agreed on by a committee (of senior faculty and administrators) and posted
on a Web site—and that faculty should align their research with one of those
questions. Requiring research to be streamlined according to central criteria
(doubtless related to funding opportunities) makes perfect sense if one treats
an academic department as a profit center. But it turns scholarly life into
something less than we all hope it to be.
At times, the mere fact that
departmental faculty are pursuing an active, diverse and uncontrolled set of
research agendas may be perceived negatively by school administrators. While
such departments continue to recruit promising scholars on the basis of their
research production, the departmental leadership is caught in a bind. They need
such scholars for the department’s reputation and grant-getting ability, but
once there, these scholars may pose some threat to the order of business within
the department (and to the security of the chair who has likely already traded
the kind of professional security earned from scholarly inquiry and production
for the kind won by allegiance and loyalty to university higher-ups).
Appointed chairs can slowly
and steadily shift faculty focus from scholarly pursuits that advance a field
to those that advance the chair, a possibility especially troubling to junior
faculty seeking tenure. Much as external pressures on the corporate university
constrain and refocus academic research, so too do internal incentives on the
departmental level. As in much of university politics, junior faculty are the
most vulnerable. Faculty governance in departments that have remade themselves
along corporate culture lines can become little more than a parody of
pseudo-democratic (or simply non-democratic) governance, in which faculty
simply (and always) endorse administrative positions. Faculty managers’ and
department chairs’ only convictions are those that do not ruffle administrative
feathers of those higher up. And the chill that blankets departments in which
power has been centralized results in the further entrenchment of
anti-democratic tendencies.
Under these conditions, the
university starts to look less like a place of free exchange of ideas and more
like a Hobbesian Leviathan, a place that boasts, as former SUNY New Paltz
president Roger Bowen warns, “a settled, conforming, obedient citizenry—not
dissenters who challenge convention.” In these departments, junior faculty
either conform or withdraw from departmental life after being tenured. The
bottom line is raised to the top. Research that promotes the financial and
hierarchical health of the administration is rewarded while independent
scholarly thought is punished. Institutions of higher education become ones of
education for hire. Undue administrative influence over research agendas,
appointed department chairs and the further erosion of democratic governance,
and the hiring of part-time and clinical faculty with no time for scholarly
inquiry and little job security are all threats to both critical inquiry and
university democracy.
Before moving on to my final
point, I want to point out that these conditions are created not only by
university administration but also by a complicit faculty who would rather not
sacrifice research time to engage in something as time-consuming as democratic
governance. In other words, a repressive hierarchy is not required for
non-democratic decision-making to flourish. Were university administrators to
honour democratic faculty governance fully, would faculty step up to the plate?
Under a corporate model of governance, appointed department chairs may stay in
their positions for a decade or more. A democratic model, however, would
require those deeply engaged in scholarship and research to be willing (or
required) to take on leadership positions in administration, in addition to
their roles as teacher and scholar. Countering an increasingly hierarchical and
corporatized model of university governance requires commitments of time and
energy that many faculty now shun but that a just workplace requires.
The corporate benefits of the
meritocracy myth
One final characteristic of
the newly corporatized campus I want to address is the complicity of the
professorial (and graduate student) culture. The pervasive culture of increasing
individualism results in a story we tell ourselves that goes something like
this: “We work in a merit-based system. If I do my job correctly — if I’m
a good graduate student or a good professor and I’m smart and I do my work well
— I will be rewarded with a plum teaching assignment, and I will be part of the
academic elite and get a job.” This is an unfortunate state of affairs for two
reasons. The first is economic and concerns the entrenched system of academic
labour. The simple reality is that for the majority of disciplines, the claim
that the system is merit-based is just not true. There are vastly more
qualified, hardworking individuals than there are tenure-track and tenured
academic positions for them to fill. At a certain level of proficiency, it
becomes the luck of the draw.
But the second cost of an
emphasis on individualism in the form of the meritocracy myth might be more
insidious. Faculty focused only on individualized measures of professional
success miss out on the collective action that has an extensive history in
democratic societies and that has sustained and driven countless scholars,
artists, scientists, and activists: working together towards a common end.
Merit-based rewards encourages faculty to work behind office doors, estranged
from colleagues. As Marc Bousquet points out in his book, How the
University Works, believing in the fantasy of merit results in a great loss to
everyone, including those dubbed meritorious.
The corporate university, on
the other hand, advances and benefits from the illusion that each of us will
attain rock-star status in the academy. Some readers might recall the episode
of the television show West Wing when fictional President Jeb
Bartlett explains why Americans seem to vote against their own interests by
protecting a tax system that benefits only the super rich. “It doesn’t matter
if most voters don’t benefit,” he explains, “They all believe that someday they
will. That’s the problem with the American dream. It makes everyone concerned
for the day they’re going to be rich.” And so it goes for the star system in
the academy. The more graduate students and professors believe that their hopes
for professional satisfaction lies in superstar recognition for their
individual work rather than in collective meaning-making and action, the easier
it is for democratic life in the university to be compromised.
Conclusion
The language of individual
entrepreneurship has become all-pervasive across many sectors of society.
It has, therefore, become increasingly difficult for faculty,
administrators, students, and public officials even to talk about the public
role of universities in a democratic society. This was not always the case.
Universities in Canada, as elsewhere, were founded on ideals of knowledge and
service in the public interest. Universities had a noble mission – if not
always fulfilled – to create knowledge and foster learning that would serve the
public good and contribute to the social welfare. Academic workers at all
levels and of all kinds need to fight to regain this central mission. What is
the role of the university in fostering civic leadership, civic engagement, and
social cohesion? How can education re-invigorate democratic participation? How
can colleges and universities strengthen our communities and our connections to
one another?
I sometimes ask my education
students to consider how schools in a democratic society should differ from
those in a totalitarian nation. It seems plausible that a good lesson in
chemistry or a foreign language might seem equally at home in many parts of the
world. Every nation wants its educational institutions to prepare students for
active participation in the workforce. So what would be different about
teaching and learning in a Canadian classroom than in a classroom in a country
governed by a one-ruling-party dictatorship? Most of us would like to believe
that schools in a democratic nation would foster the skills and dispositions
needed to participate fully in democratic life; namely, the ability to think
critically and carefully about social policies, cultural assumptions and,
especially, relations of power. Many schoolteachers and university professors,
however, are concerned that students are learning more about how to please
authority and secure a job than how to develop democratic convictions and stand
up for them.
There are many powerful ways
to teach young adults to think critically about social policy issues,
participate in authentic debate over matters of importance, and understand that
people of good will can have different opinions. Indeed democratic progress
depends on these differences. If universities hope to strengthen democratic
society, they must resist focusing curriculum and research on
skills-training, workforce preparation, and the commercialization of knowledge
to the benefit of private industry. They must instead participate in the
rebuilding of a public purpose for education. How to do so is a matter of
professorial imagination.
