"Corporatization" of the university

Invisible Adjunct has great readers; they're constant commenters on her posts, including this one on the corporatization of the university, and whether it's a good or bad thing. I added one myself, which I expand on slightly here....

Having gone to college and graduate school at just the period when this issue was taking off, I've long been interested in it, and have had the vague sense that the encroachment of the marketplace-- and in particular, of the commercial culture of chain stores and logic of economic maximization-- didn't enhance my academic experience. But "corporatization" means a lot of different things-- outsourcing of non-core functions, the use of economies of scale, preference for flexible labor arrangements, and lots of other stuff. What we've seen in the university several overlapping kinds of corporatization, but I'd argue that the term doesn't apply so well to what's happened with academic jobs.

The purest examples of academic corporatization are things like the contracting of bookstores out to Barnes and Noble and Follets, or the contracting of food services to whoever is big in the food service industry, or outsoucing janitorial services. These are pretty straightforward money-saving measures, and can be defended on the grounds that they're not part of the university's core mission, and can be done better and more cheaply by companies that focus specifically on them.

More complex is the phenomenon of academic-industry partnerships that take the form of "lablets," the attempts by universities to monetize their patent portfolios, encourage faculty to do startups, etc.. Some of this behavior is entrepreneurial rather than corporate (an important distinction); some of it represents an attempt to leverage IP that would make any pharmaceutical company proud; and some of it is just a new version of age-old scramble for money.

What's happened with the academic job market, it seems to me, is something different. It's better thought of as a bad outcome of a conspiracy of the narrow interests of administrators and permanent faculty. Why do I say this? Look at the kinds of courses that are taught by adjuncts: introductory lecture courses, surveys, service-intensive courses like English comp. This isn't because administrators or department heads have tried to create a more rational market, or to match teaching supply and course demand more effectively, but one driven more by convenience and hierarchy: it's a way for administrators to cut costs, and for senior faculty to focus greater love and attention on their graduate students, enrich the collective intellectual life of their institutions, etc.

If you believed that this was happening because of a macroeconomic logic, you'd conclude that universities were operating under the assumption that it was impossible to know, semester to semester, whether there would be enough demand for Western Civ or differential calculus to have anyone permanently hired to teach it; but that it absolutely essential to have lifetime 24/7 access to specialists in [insert favorite absurd example of something]. What SHOULD be happening is the opposite. Since academic fashions change as quickly as any others, but the need for students who can write a decent paragraph and compute the area under a curve does not, universities should have spent the last two decades outsourcing their high-level, theoretical work, and investing resources in a permanent cadre of teachers.

If only....

Comments

[Gabriel]

My knowledge of US universities is limited to episodes of 'Dawson's Creek' (wherein most of the characters learnt to write a decent paragraph and compute the area under a curve at high school), but I think it's advisable for society to give scholars the security to go deeply into their area without having to show short-term results. Researchers into Arab youth culture would probably have been cut under what you propose if the decision had been made on September 10th 2001. If we cut Russian departments because of lack of student enrolment, what do we do when theres a military coup in Moscow?

Speaking of Russia, there seems to be an air of self-denunciation among the gloomy (ex)academic bloggers, aimed at "bourgeois specialists" who dont obey the Market. Even Hayek didnt agree with this: It is entirely in keeping with the whole spirit of totalitarianism that it condemns any human activity done for its own sake and without ulterior purpose.

[zizka]

I am interested in two obscure specialties: classical Chinese philosophy and literature and the history of the Mongol Empire. With almost no exceptions I am finding that when experts on these topics retire from Western universities, they are not replaced. So in the long run the market works.

There's an enormous and virtually unthought confusion abroad about the role of the university. Is it a factory producing products? A training school for workers? A way for people to educate themselves for better jobs? A source of knowledge which is not immediately useful, but which might be some day? A way of keeping people out of the job market and letting them have fun? A way of marking people as upper class?

You also have the old idealistic ideas about the university, which overlap slightly with a few of the above but are honored more in the breach than in the observance. I ended up deciding that I'm best off pursuing my interest outside the university, because the market for my kind of thing is very small.

[askpang]

In the long run the academic job market works as a market (there are more scientists than classicists in universities than there were a century ago; more computer scientists than there were fifty years ago). But I think it operates too slowly and irrationally to be explained in terms of "corporatization."

As for the observation that "You also have the old idealistic ideas about the university," I can only plead, guilty as charged. I can use phrases like "the life of the mind" with no irony whatsoever. Having grown up in the academic world (my dad is a professor, and some of my most vivid childhood memories are of Berkeley in the late 1960s, when he was a grad student there), I think I can't help but have a relationship with it that's deeply affectionate, despite knowledge of its faults.

[zizka]

I actually meant "you have" in the sense of "there are", but I'm glad that you do have them. Me too.

The worst thing about the university humanities for me is the push first to specialization
in the first place, followed by the push toward "methodologization" or "enforcing a paradigm". It's usually positivistic mimicry of misunderstood science, but enforced anti-positivist postmodernism or critical theory is just as bad.

[spam person]

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[extagen]

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