As anyone in higher education knows, universities have more and more come to resemble large corporations, and less and less the laboratories of learning and understanding that drew us to the profession in the first place. It is both sad and telling that
Mario Savio's famous outrage at the university's claim to be a kind of corporate machine for knowledge looks rather quaint these days. The machine whose gears he wanted to stop has won out in the end.
For proof and a fantastic overview of how the modern corporate university functions, look no further than sociologist
Gaye Tuchman's recent work Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University. In this ethnography she goes into great depths describing how the administration at an unnamed public university worked mightily to increase its ranking. Based on her descriptions, as well as her own affiliation with the university in question, most informed readers believe she is describing the University of Connecticut.
There are three key insights and concepts in Tuchman's work that I found to be highly insightful: dechurching, the culture of the audit, and corporatized leadership. By "dechurching," Tuchman means that academia has lost its privileges and has become just like any other "industry." Professors are no longer scholars, they are employees, and university administrators have shit all over the notion of shared governance and replaced it with a top-down, corporate model. This is all to be expected in our hyper-capitalist system,
if we remember Karl Marx: "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers." Now we can add professors to that list. Students see themselves as customers, and for many of them we are a glorified version of the people who serve them burgers at McDonalds.
While that particular truth has become more apparent to those of us in the trenches, Tuchman goes deeper with her discussion of the "culture of audit" that now reigns at universities. Everything academics do is constantly being tracked and audited by their employers, all in the name of greater efficiency. (Of course, tenured faculty often opt out of this system, leading younger scholars to bear the burdens of audit culture.) The audits have become systematized and tend to limit freedom of action. Just his week I had to fill out an inanely complex online set of forms in order to send in my yearly progress report. This is something faculty used to due in narrative form, now I need to somehow provide the exact dates of every single thing I did that could be construed as development or service. Truth be told, it was a waste of my time, but it certainly helps the university build power over me through a system of bureaucratized surveillance. (Tuchman could have gone further in her analysis to include this Foucauldian angle.)
The culture of auditing is getting most intense in the classroom, however. Tuchman points to the ever-growing "assessment" regimes popping up in higher education that are intended to create certain "outcomes." In my experience the emphasis on assessment has made my teaching less creative, dumbed it down, and has made my job less fulfilling for me personally. In one class that I recently taught I ended up structuring the class around the necessity to meet the extensive assessment guidelines for the course. Trust me, neither me nor my students benefited from it. But that doesn't really matter. The university can better streamline its product and promise its "customers" a proven commodity with this regime. Since most students don't actually care about learning and being challenged, this state of affairs is much more profitable and tranfers even more power to administration.
Tuchman's best observations come with her analysis of the corporatized leadership structure at modern universities. As is well known, university administrators, like corporate CEOs, have been paying themselves ridiculous amounts of money, whether they show results or not. Like their corporate brethren, administrators no longer stay at a particular school for their entire careers, but hop from job to job on the climb up the greasy pole of success. As Tuchman demonstrates, this job market pushes administrators to make lots of short-term changes that burnish their resumes. These changes often cause confusion, waste resources, and ultimately do little for the long term health of academic institutions.
Essentially academia has become like every other business, with different "corporations" involved in a cut-throat battle to slash labor costs (hiring grads and adjuncts,) gain more customers (the ridiculous amounts of money spent on student centers, gymnasiums, and modernized dorms), and produce an efficient, systematized product (assessment and even restrictions on what textbooks faculty can use.) Like the corporate world at large, those who ultimately win out are the administrative overlords, who are never themselves assessed, evaluated, or audited.
There are some solutions, I think. First and foremost, faculty need to use their institutions to wrest back some control over their universities and to have the administrators working for them, rather than the other way around. Without that, American academia will continue to be a race to the bottom disguised as a competitive battle for educational "excellence," a word whose meaning may soon by completely sapped by its overuse by unimaginative university bureaucrats looking for a fig leaf to cover their naked power grab.
This trend is much older than the oughties, but it seems to have become much more brazen and common in recent years. I don't know how many times I've had to see the underwear of my students in the last year, either from saggin' or unbelted low rise jeans (see #6); it ain't pleasant.
Memo to flip-flop wearers: I don't want to see your calluses, corns, and ingrown toenails, or hear you fwapp-fwapping up the sidewalk. These are to be worn in the shower, not in public, 'nuff said.
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