(From Wendover Productions, which only lightly touches on the boom in administrators and the increasing popularity of college translating into less state government support per student, pointing at )
This week, I read about the increasing corporatization of education in our public universities. (The Amy Block Joy paper on ethics was lightly amusing to me, but I'll only say that 1) ethics should be taught more in academia and corporations, but 2) rather than just Breaking Bad season 5, a wide variety of pop cultures, when sufficiently analyzed and complemented with enough Classical and Enlightenment philosophical tracts, should be used in any single ethics course.)
The first work I'll address is the introduction to Unmaking the Public University by Christopher Newfield, as well as his 2011 Huffington Post article summarizing the book's arguments on the occasion of its paperback release. This is the work that intrigued and motivated me the most, seeing as it appeals to my love for the great egalitarian, publicly-funded projects that marked the post-Second World War economic consensus. The main argument Newfield makes is that the American New Right have undermined the egalitarian visionary projects that included expanded access to public higher education, by tying them to market-driven rather than abstract, intellectually-driven goals, and pitted middle-class voters against their working-class allies in order for the former to look the other way by withdrawing sustained support for the egalitarian ideal and abstract intellectual goals. The New Right obfuscated and distracted middle-class voters from this manipulation by 1) using deficit hawk rhetoric, beating their chests about the burgeoning national and state debt to justify across-the-board budget cuts for education, and 2) using the "culture wars" debate to create an exaggerated boogeyman of over-racialized student politics and radicalized faculty, alongside a larger attempt to discredit the value of public sector workers to the economy. In other words, the right got Big Business to meddle with public education and used the "culture wars" and alarmist rhetoric about race and the deficit to split the middle and working classes from their foreseen project to reshape the economy in the new millennium. Being pressed for time, I won't say anything more than I wholeheartedly agree with the premises of this work.
The other work I'll address is the New York Times Magazine article "Why We Should Fear University, Inc." by Frederik deBoer. In it, he argues that 1) university administrations are becoming increasingly more like corporations, in both outlook and organizational structure, 2) student activists are being "played for tools" by these cynical administrators, continually begging for the board's and alumni's adulation and trying to avert bad publicity by addressing or even colluding with said activists while controlling their speech, and 3) faculty are also prevented by administrations from protesting this arrangement through similar controls of speech as well as tenure denials and stoking interdepartmental resentments. DeBoer predicts that "the educational function of the university will become sanitized and smoothed over, while the spaces that have always resisted fair treatment of difference will continue to do so". He thereby examines the "culture wars" debate alluded to by Newfield and places it in the context of corporatization. Therefore, it seems, it is only up to me, the reader, to connect the New Right's retooling of public education to this corporatization.
I want to mention, though, that there are many, many, many sides to this issue. The Wendover Productions video above, from 2016, posits that the reason for the boom in administrators since 1980 is because more people are simply seeking a higher education. But as Newfield points out on page 4 of Unmaking, this increased drive (or, college's increasing popularity) may have been due to the influence of the New Right on white-collar workers, who used college degree attainment as a "dividing line" between those who would fail and those who would succeed in the economy of the new millennium.
Ultimately, what is to be done? Obviously, a return to the 1950-1970 order of intellectual priorities over market-based reforms, of education needs dictating budget and not the other way around, and giving more power to both students and faculty to confront administrators would be the ideal package.
Yet, we must also attack the root causes of this administration boom, by 1) rebuilding the middle and working class coalition of support for grand public works and public education, 2) easing demand for college by getting more high school graduates into the skilled trades through job training and apprenticeships, and 3) improving the supply of colleges, simply by having Congress charter more of them.
And 4) increasing state support per student, especially alongside improved outreach to the poor, as the UCs have pioneered:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/university-california-pell-graduation-enrollment/559325/
To conclude, I bring you this lecture from May by Emmanuel Saez, which analyzes many of the same issues in the context of intergenerational mobility and the effects of having alumni as parents:
Questions: What is the immediate future for public universities, as Newfield, deBoer, and Saez see it?
Bibliography:
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