Yesterday, we examined Jamie Brownlee’s claim that government’s were engaging in “austerity” in order to ensure that universities became “corporatized”. The conclusion was that you have to use some pretty idiosyncratic definitions of austerity to make the term stick even half-way; and even then, it’s impossible to make the charge stick after about 1995. But what about the more general charge of universities becoming “corporatized”? Does that have any traction?
The main problem with examining this claim is that the word “corporatization” – much like the term “neoliberal” – can mean pretty much anything one wants it to mean. I went and checked Brownlee’s PhD thesis for this (available here); in the course of the first few pages, he offers up a number of quite different definitions, without really remarking either on how different they are, or on their implications.
For instance, he says: “corporatization” (refers) to the process and resulting outcomes of the ascendance of business interests in the university system.” Which is fine I suppose, though it depends quite a bit on how one defines “business interests”.
But there are loopier definitions referenced, too: “Corporatization in the university context involves providing businesses with the means to socialize the risks and costs of research while privatizing the benefits, and to accrue advantages through the transfer of technology to the private sector. It subsidizes the retraining of the corporate workforce through a vocational and technically-oriented curriculum, at the same time as increasing marketing opportunities for corporations and bolstering the perception of business legitimacy in higher education”.
So here, the notion of research externalities simply goes out the window. How about the idea that some basic research should be publicly-funded because there are types of research that the private sector will not undertake, as it cannot efficiently capture all its benefits? That’s now twisted into some kind of corrupting evil because the resulting transfer of technology can be described as a “subsidy” to the private sector. Also, in a description that will amaze engineering faculties worldwide, simply having a technically-oriented curriculum is now a form of corporatization.
Here’s another gem of a definition, which describes a corporatized university as: “an institution that is characterized by processes, decisional criteria, expectations, organizational culture, and operating practices that are taken from, and have their origins in, the modern business corporation. It is characterized by the entry of the university into marketplace relationships and by the use of market strategies in university decision making”.
The first part of that sentence is magnificent in its scope. Virtually anything could be described as an “operating practice”, which has its origin in the modern business corporation. “Making biweekly payroll”, for instance. Or, “actively finding efficient ways to run things”, or the dreaded “finding out if people are doing their jobs and rewarding them accordingly”. How terrible. How neo-liberal.
(An aside: I hear lots of cheap talk about “neo-liberal universities”, but nothing about “neo-liberal hospitals”, which are far more advanced than universities at using management techniques that find their origins in the modern corporation. Why is that?)
The second half, the bit about market relationships, is in some ways even better than the first. Now the mere existence of tuition fees, or even the notion of student choice, can be used as evidence of “corporatization” because anywhere where money changes hands obviously implies corporatization. In fact, even a no-tuition system where institutions are paid on some kind of enrolment-basis might be described as “corporatized” or “neo-liberal”, because there would be (horrors) an incentive for universities to enrol more students, and that might lead them to use “marketing techniques” to persuade students to come – which of course is prima facie evidence of corporatization!
(Another aside: I recently saw someone on twitter claim that the increasing numbers of bureaucrats in universities was due to rankings, league tables, and other forms of neo-liberal control. This is perhaps the first time in recorded history that neo-liberalism has been charged with the crime of increasing public-sector employment.)
So, are Canadian universities “becoming more corporatized”? Well, if you define corporatization as, effectively, “taking any steps at all to ensure revenue and expenditure balance”, then yes, they are becoming more corporate all the time. And a good thing, too: because in the real world the alternative to so-called “neo-liberal” universities are either bankrupt universities or much smaller, more access-restricted universities. Which one would you pick?
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There has been a lot of theory and articles concernig the so called Public management for hospitals in the 80’s in Europe and its adapation to neo-liberalism, quite a lot of resistance as well coming from the trade unions and some intellectuals specialised or not in public health. A very good book of Michel Foucault, “Naissance de la biopolitique, cours du collège de France 1978-1979, explains the logics and the birth of the “ordo-liberalism” in Germany in the 20’s of the last century. Interesting to read to take some distance and accept that the evolution of the public sector all over the world is as idelologics as the conception of the welfare state after the second world war or libre échange and totally integrated in a more neo-liberal conception of this sector than a marxist one for instance !
“…in the real world the alternative to so-called ‘neo-liberal’ universities are either bankrupt universities or much smaller, more access-restricted universities. Which one would you pick?”
Definitely smaller, more access-restricted universities, though it must be kept in mind that whether access is restricted is less important than whether the restriction is fair. Furthermore, all universities in Canada are ipso facto bankrupt in the sense of needing to be permanently subsidized by government. The ideal, for me, would be the descriptions I’ve heard of Cooper Union, before the administration decided to expand, got into debt, introduced tuition, and just generally screwed up.
One might call this failure “corporatist” — the administrators acted like they were running a car company, seeing expansion as an end in itself — but it was actually a rather bad business decision, as the debt would indicate. Which brings us to the difference between “acting like a corporation” in the sense of trying to make money, or at least break even, and “acting like a corporation” in the sense of seeing expansion as an end in itself.
In fact, we seem to use “corporatist” in three different, and in some ways conflicting, manners:
1. What resembles a corporation, or the practices of life in a corporation, in general. My office-mate used to refer to my tie as “corporate.” Who dresses like a businessman on campus? That guy’s corporate.
2. The desire to be profitable, which, for corporations, is their overt raison d’être.
3. What is heavily managed, top-down, driven by Taylorite concerns for “efficiency,” etc. This might be true of not-for-profits, as well, or Communist regimes.
The really appalling thing about the corporate university (in the last sense) is how much it resembles the communist university: top-down, driven by needs alien to its own purpose, enslaved to metrics. The people who want to check who’s “doing their jobs” might be compared to managers, or shareholders, or (more darkly) the geniuses at Gosplan. All measure the wrong things and handicap the pursuit of knowledge.
The problem with the contemporary university is the assumption that it exists either to make money or to be managed, rather than that it exists to pursue knowledge. The protest at “corporate universities” is a protest at the notion that universities ought to be managed, ought to pursue profit or the profits of corporations or even those of society as ends in themselves, rather than pursuing learning as an end in itself.
That said, I do agree that there’s a lot of confusion in the use of the term. Above, I didn’t even list “corporatism” as an interwar European political movement of the right, heavily associated with Catholicism, which is another meaning. Peter Drucker pointed out that the best corporations don’t see themselves as making profits, but as making products, which rather contradicts definition #2, above. For that matter, we could see corporations not as organizations to make money, nor as organizations to make products, but as conspiracies to fleece shareholders and workers, creating a new class of handsomely-remunerated humbugs in corner offices. Or we might see “the corporate university” not as acting like a corporation, but acting in the interest of corporations, as Dr. Brownlee seems to.
For the life of me I can’t understand why, Alex, you are so dismissive when it comes to perspectives that don’t align with your own. As Sean Lawrence notes above, the fundamental question is why universities exist. Is their primary purpose primarily to produce commodities (knowledge and workers), or to educate citizens? That is a pretty big, and pretty fair question for debate, yet you consistently write as if there is no debate. Perhaps it is in the best interests of your consultancy not to give a fair hearing to faculty, or to engage in any real dialogue that might admit that the purpose of the university is contestable.
As for the above, you must be perfectly aware of the problems that arise out of “corporatization,” (define it as you will), including conflicts of interest and corruption in peer reviewed publishing, institutions priced out of purchasing peer reviewed research, and all of the moral hazards that erupt when universities start marketing to put “bums in seats.”
I have a lot more time for a “what kind of universities shall we have” debate than I do for ones involving emotive, inaccurate and inconsistent terms like “corporatization” and “neo-liberalism” (and I would not here that what you seem to think of as the definition of corporatization is very different again from those I critiqued – to me, evidence that the term is so imprecise as to be meaningless). At least we set the terms of the debate accurately and talk seriously about trade-offs.