Corporatization of the Academy

            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[1], 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?

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