Corporatization
of the Academy
“We have made great strides these past
few years in becoming a leaner, more efficiently operated institution. I
promise that we will continue to look closely at administrative expenditures
and find ways to economize and reduce costs even further” – Ana Mari Cause
Provost of the University of Washington
Lean and
efficient are not words one would usually associate with a premiere academic
institution, yet as higher education attempts to recover from budget cuts these
corporate terms are becoming ubiquitous. They are one way in which the
corporate world has influenced higher education and its practices. This
corporate influence, or corporatization, worries many professors,
administrators, and students.
Corporatization of the academy is a broad term that is used
to explain different trends in Universities. It encompasses how the influence
of outside corporations is growing inside the academy, the implementation of
many common corporate models on University administration, and the growing use
of corporate terms and language. The amount of scholarly research on this trend
is astounding and marks how passionate many professors and administrators are
about what many see as a negative trend. In many of these scholarly articles
and opinion pieces, the professors talk about how corporatization is affecting
students in a negative way, yet they do not give an undergraduate or graduate
students perspective on how these new policies are affecting them. I will
examine how corporatization has affected the teacher student dynamic, the
implementation of metrics, and what a college degree consists of from an
undergraduate perspective.
Investing in a college degree
A college education is often advertised as an investment
rather than a growth experience. High school advisors and college recruiters do
not advertise how much one’s critical reading will improve, they do not
advertise how college will advance one’s social perspectives of race and
identity. Advisors and college marketers advertise the fact that one’s lifetime
earnings will increase by over one million dollars. Over time, a college degree
has strayed away from its traditional educational goals and has become an
investment.
In many public institutions throughout the United States a
college degree is no longer about gaining a quality education, it is rather a
testament that an individual is competent/hard-working/smart enough to graduate
and they possess a designated amount of knowledge and skills in their
respective field. A college degree is no longer about continuing one’s
educational growth, but it is rather an investment for one’s future livelihood
for many college students. It has stemmed away from a holistic educational
experience because many “elective” classes are, for a better word, jokes.
Students are wary of their GPA and see no benefit in broadening their
experience. People do not take Scandinavian studies because the are fascinated
by Sweden, rather they take the class because everyone knows you can get a 4.0
by only spending 20 hours per quarter
on the class (also see rocks for jocks, pow wow 101, psych 101…). Competition
is strong in the academy and students are quick to gain a competitive edge and
thus are quick to jump on an easy 4.0 so they can focus on the classes that
matter in their degree.
My mother always likes to remind me that each hour of class
costs approximately 30 dollars. This is a huge sum of money for one hour worth
of course work, yet still people skip class everyday. Why? In my perspective
they skip because they are not paying for the education but are rather paying
for the degree. Students often go to college because it is a requirement to
enter their aspiring field and to the American middle and upper classes. In
order to gain a holistic educational experience one must invest $50,000 dollars
a year to enter a smaller liberal arts college (if you have the GPA and test
scores to get accepted). This is worrying as a student, because it could to
lead to a less culturally aware and educated society.
Student Consumerism:
Student, Customer, or Product
One of the most commonly cited effects of corporatization is
the effect on the student teacher relationship. Many professors and
administrators fear that students have gained too much power in this delicate
relationship and that this is greatly harming the educational system. One of
the major ways that students have gained power is through the implementation of
student evaluations and the effect that these evaluations have on professor’s
personnel decisions. The influence of corporatization has established students
as customers, and with this classification many of the privileges of American
consumerism where the customer is always right. Recent budget cuts have only
extended this power dynamic as more and more of the Universities revenue is a
stem from undergraduate tuition, particularly out of state. University
administration puts pressure on professors to put as many students through the
University as possible and frown on teachers failing students. Administration
also uses student evaluations as a metric to measure a professor’s performance
as a teacher. Professors, wary of bad student evaluations that may affect their
academic careers, often decrease their expectations of students and make
receiving a quality grade easier. This is particularly prevalent for many TA’s
and research-oriented professors.
"I tell my
students to consider me their academic personal trainer. You wouldn't want a
personal trainer who lets you sit on your butt and eat doughnuts, because
you're not going to really reap the benefits that way. My job is to kick their
academic butts." - Tracy E. Zinn, PhD, James Madison University
I find the decrease in professor expectations as one of the
most disappointing side effects of the corporatization of the academy. I want a
teacher that will inspire and set high expectations that I can strive to reach.
There can be very little critical thinking or discussion if the professors
don’t expect you to read the material. A professor that does not expect
students to do excellent work sets the tone for the entire class. It is very
difficult to motivate oneself to read or find real world connections to a
subject when there is no medium to express these connections in class. When the
ceiling is set so low, it is easy to be complacent and do just enough work to
get a good grade.
Metrics & Research
One of the biggest areas corporatizations have affected is
research and the use of metrics in academic programs. A metric an expected
tangible result in which a program’s success may be measured by. In “Teaching
And Learning Across Borders”, Julia Harrison and Anne Meneley talk about how
professors involved in an initiative aimed to, “foster innovative thinking and
pedagogical practices to cope with ‘transnational flows’ of people, cultures,
and commodities,” were constantly trying to find tangible results:
“Participants
also took stock of the “outcomes” of the project, to consider to what use the
Ford Foundation funds had been put. The issue of “outcomes” was to prove
central. In our interviews we hear considerable anxious talk about the relative
paucity of material evidence of scholarly productively resulting from the grant
[…] the material outcome of knowledge production in the form of scholarly publication
has increasingly—for better or worse—becomes signs of our scholarly work,”
(82).
These professors are anxious that the academic research they
are conducting will have enough tangible results that it may continue and
positively affect their academic careers. The professors perceived pressure
from the non-profit Ford Foundation. Imagine the pressure for results;
academics must be under when they enter into partnerships and research
agreements with for-profit firms.
As Universities
attempt to find new cash flows to replace lost public funds, one of the first
places administrations look are corporations willing to fund research that
benefits their industry. It is the fastest growing source of money and it is
particularly prevalent in economics, medicine, engineering, chemistry and other
fields where the returns are easy to value. This adds uncertainty to the
findings of a university if its findings support the sponsoring corporation.
Researchers are pressured to produce results and the funding can simply stop,
if the project does not show enough promise or if the academy has received
enough data. This relationship also leads to a tenuous relationship between
firm and researcher. In “The Corporatization of Higher Education”, by Rebecca
Clay, Clay brings up the case of Nancy Olivieri, a researcher who discovered a
life-threatening side effect in a drug she was testing. She was fired because
her university was reluctant to jeopardize a large donation from the
corporation. In another case a Penn State patient died in a gene-transfer study.
There was a local public outcry that medical companies were pressuring the
study to find results quickly and take unnecessary risks.
So What?
"When I hear
faculty saying, 'Isn't it awful that the university is becoming corporatized,'
I'm thinking, 'Awful compared to what? Awful compared to going out of
business?'" -anonymous
When discussing the 16% increase in tuition at the
University of Washington it is easy to bring up the possible negative
implications: poorer students may not be able to afford college, it will add to
the already growing student debt
,
it will lengthen the socioeconomic gap in education. Yet, it is much more
difficult to come up with viable alternatives that will not affect the quality
of the institution. One may ask for more funding from the government, but their
budget situation is far worse than the University of Washington. Look at Washington state’s
budget. What cuts
would you make?
The reality of the situation is that there is not as much
money for higher education as there has been in the past. Universities have
responded by increasing tuition, becoming leaner and more efficient (often
adopting corporate models and the use of metrics to distribute funds to
programs who are best able to use them), and by becoming more affable to
corporate funds and corporate research agreements. How much of a tuition
increase are you willing to stomach in order to avoid some of the negative aspects of corporatizatioin?
