Week 4 - Presentation (Jiaqi Huang, Thao-Nhi Vu)

Jiaqi Huang

Thao-Nhi Vu

A02

Week 4: Corporatization of the University

“I wish that committed student activists would realize that administrators who run their universities, no matter how convenient a recipient of their appeals, are not their friends.”

With the above line, Purdue graduate Fredrik deBoer highlights the danger of neoliberalism — liberalism that seeks to align itself with free-market capitalism — in today’s society. Neoliberalism leads students to believe that the best way of thwarting the system is to work within it, and paints a false sense of “progress” atop more malicious activities. A growing issue involving neoliberalism is the corporatization of the university. The university has very carefully cultivated a progressive, welcoming front to students and media while its bureaucracy works behind closed doors to maximize profits, even if it counteracts projected ideals. The readings for this week unpack this idea of corporate university, from the conflicts between projected and actual interests to the silencing of “whistleblowers” speaking out against corruption.

We draw our opening quote from the first reading, Why We Should Fear University, Inc by Fredrik deBoer. deBoer’s article highlights how universities present themselves as being on the side of students while in actuality protecting its image and financial interests. Take, for example, the sanitization of education. deBoer argues that the academic censorship of professors and classes:

1. Perpetuates the idea that professors are servants, and students are customers;
2. Does not allow for academic inquiry and expression of opposing ideas;
3. Portrays student activists as oversensitive and needing “safe spaces” and trigger warnings;

And, most dangerously of all — the cycle of student activists → appeals → “higher-ups” → change falls perfectly within the system of corporate university, and does nothing to actually challenge bigotry on campuses. This superficial “progress” protects the image of the university but does little else. As deBoer writes, “corporate entities serve corporate interests”. He cites the example of corporate sexual harassment campaigns and compares them to Title IX falling into the hands of bureaucrats who use it to put up a front of caring about sexual harassment and awareness. However, both only seek to preserve the image of the institutions who wield it.

The current atmosphere of the corporate university also polarized communities on campus and prevents them from working together against the actual enemy — administrators in power. Like a corporation, the university keeps its students working in the system by cultivating an environment of unrest. deBoer notes that the majority of student activism is no longer able to be solved in compromise; rather, each issue is sensationalized and students believe they should complain to higher-ups rather than work with different  communities to solve issues.

The corporate university also seeks to punish educators and staffers who try and speak out against the system. As Amy Block Joy writes in Whistleblower, those who expose the crimes of the university are often subject to workplace harassment, isolation by coworkers, scapegoating and eventually firing. In deBoer’s article we see a similar situation happen to Laura Kipnis who, after commenting on the “sexual paranoia” being spread by universities to their campuses, was herself subject to investigation under Title IX complaints. While this is primarily blamed on overzealous student activists, the university also played a role in attempting to keep her from disruption.

Such is also the case with Amy Block Joy, who found herself silenced by her superiors when raising concerns of embezzlement in the university. Block Joy initially complied with the pressures of her superiors, believing that speaking out would be “the kiss of death” for her career. She touches upon this in her other article of the week,  Ethics and “Breaking Bad”: Developing and practicing ethical skills. In this, Block Joy writes that fear is the primary roadblock to speaking out against corruption. The second is the faculty belief that the university will do nothing. When compared to students’ naive optimism in the system working for them, we truly see the facade the university has constructed. Block Joy does forget the students either — she encourages an environment where faculty trust in the university to deal with issues, but also one where “students practice articulating their opinions in a safe environment”. She does not champion a traditional, soundproof “safe space”; instead, she pushes for a nonthreatening atmosphere so that students are not afraid of speaking out. That, she argues, is true ethics: cooperation towards the moral goal, not obsessive image control.

Since the development of public university in the late twentieth century, its original visionary goal has been neglected or perhaps forgotten as Christopher Newfield discusses in Unmaking the Public University. Continuing from his last work (Ivy and Industry), Newfield frames the similarity between economic development and culture wars’ timeline. Contrary to the public reasoning, He shows how the conservative fears is essential when explaining the culture war, by emphasizing the direct effect of using economic decline against higher education.

In the beginning, the public university’s intent was the first of its kind. In America’s tiered education system, private universities who seem to have unlimited budgets were places where students could demand more from and for their education; in other words, social wealth determined education and then social class. In the midst of this hierarchy, public university sought the creation of a well educated, politically entitled, cultural and socially inclusive society that honored “various forms of humanism”, no doubt this ideal collided with modern economies. That generation of college educated citizens includes the “Chicano hunger strikers, the children of blue-collar and service workers, of low-income shopkeepers”, which is dubbed the true “middle-class” by Newfield as it aligns with the reality of American society.

Already by the 1980s, the shadows of “economic development” have began to infiltrate the university’s internals. The three principles central to public institution were filtered:

1. Social Egalitarianism (e.g. Chicano hunger strikes for equal emphasis in Latino culture studies…)
2. Research
3. Educational resources dictate budget (e.g. 1990s: California solved “revenue shortfalls with program cuts”)

America has developed immensely since the founding fathers. Although it’s far from a stable economy (or anything) or social equality, the country has to acknowledge public universities cannot continue to serve the original public which it was intended for any longer, if it continues upon the policy of: “economic development lead to human development, and the latter should be available to everyone”. Conservatives i.e. established continue to make decisions through business for government funded university, the “middle class” that we strived for will be undone. In the process of predicting economical trends, the university became a market tool, leaving its faculty, students, and mission to pay the consequences. The “New economy” would be fulfilled by battered “visionaries”.

As in most cases with universities, the UC system is slowly increasing their tuitions over time and a large percentage of students are finding ways to resist something that could end their education. However, their effort may go to waste as exemplified by UC Davis’ 2011 occupy movement. Unlike UC Berkeley students who received a comprehending response after the event, Davis students received guilt-intended messages, “service employees put in a total of 63 hours [to clean up]”. The tuition spike is worrisome enough, but this difference in treatment has questioned the mission of UC staff and institution. Mentioned before, Newfield’s idea of economic and cultural war, plays a role in this story. The presence of student protest proves the disappearance of the public university’s original mission, and the agenda of conservatism has worked to many “cut” possible middle class members. It seems there is not enough room in the 1% tier.

References:

1. J., Borden. (2005, April 11). University, Inc. [Cartoon]. Retrieved April 23, 2017, from http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1206
2. Joy, A. (2010). Whistleblower. Point Richmond, CA: Bay Tree Pub.
3. A. B., Joy. (2014). Ethics and "Breaking Bad": Developing and practicing ethical skills. Compliance & Ethics Professional. Retrieved April 23, 2017.
4. Newfield, C. (2011). Unmaking the public university : The forty-year assault on the middle class (1st Harvard University press paperback ed.). Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
5. A. B., Joy. (2015). Ethics and "Breaking Bad": Developing and practicing ethical skills. Compliance & Ethics Professional. Retrieved April 23, 2017.
6. A., Markow. (2011, December 19). A Tale of Two Campuses: Berkeley and Davis respond to Occupy movements. IVN.