University in Chains by Henry A. Giroux

Author:Henry A. Giroux [Giroux, Henry A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317249818
Google: wtLOCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-23T02:49:37+00:00

The Academic Entrepreneur

As corporate culture and values shape university life, academic labor is increasingly being transformed into the image of a multinational conglomerate workforce. While corporate values such as efficiency and downsizing in higher education appear to have caught the public’s imagination at the moment, this belies the fact that such “reorganization” has been going on for some time. What is new is that the ever growing and “steady corporatization of American higher education has threatened to relegate faculty governance to the historical archive.”44 The modern university was once governed, however weakly, by faculty, with the faculty senate naming the university president. That era of faculty control is long gone, with presidents now being named by boards of trustees, and governing through hand-picked (and well-paid) bureaucrats rather than through faculty committees. John Silber, the former president of Boston University from 1971 to 1996, best exemplifies this trend. As a number of notable academics and public figures have pointed out, Silber often used his administrative power to weaken faculty governance, “punish his critics—sometimes by denial of tenure (against faculty recommendation), sometimes by refusing merit raises and leaves, sometimes by personal abuse (including a false charge of arson, later withdrawn, against a member of the faculty),” by engaging in “repeated violations of civil liberties,” and by promoting educational theories that by any progressive standard would have to be judged as reactionary.45 Faculty power once rested in the fact that most faculty were full-time and a large percentage of them had tenure, so they could confront administrators without fear of losing their jobs. One of the first steps taken by the newly corporatized university in the 1980s was to limit faculty power by hiring fewer full-time faculty, promoting fewer faculty to tenure, and instituting “post-tenure” reviews that threaten to take tenure away.

When full-time academic labor is outsourced to temporary or contract labor, the intellectual culture of the university declines as overworked graduate students and part-time faculty assume the role of undergraduate teaching with little or no portion of their time and pay allotted for research. Moreover, these contingent faculty are granted no role in the university governance process, are detached from the intellectual life of the university, rarely have time to engage in sustained scholarship, and appear largely as interchangeable instructors acting more like temporary visitors. In short, the hiring of part-time faculty to minimize costs maximizes managerial control not just over faculty but over the educational process itself. Power now resides in the hands of a new cadre of corporate-oriented trustees and administrators who proudly define themselves as entrepreneurs rather than as educational leaders. As democratic decision-making in the university dwindles, questions regarding the social responsibility of higher education disappear from public view and both the democratization of the university and “the democratization of society” are undermined.46

One possibility of what the future holds for the corporatizing of higher education can be seen in the example of Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona. The college is the second largest in the Maricopa County Community College District and has a total of 13,314 students.

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