Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education.

UNIVERSITIES IN THE MARKETPLACE: THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

by Derek Bok. Princeton University Press, 2003.

As readers of Radical Teacher no doubt know, most criticisms of the corporate university have come from the left wing of the political spectrum. Derek Bok's book addresses corporatization from the vantage point of his former post as president of Harvard. He asserts that it can distort the purposes of the university, purposes that he defines as the search for truth and the pursuit of excellence. His concerns range from the commodification of college athletics and corporate influence on science to activities like distance education, when done for profit. While the book occasionally sounds like a jeremiad against encroaching commerce, it also sets itself apart from left wing jeremiads, in favor of moderation. Bok thinks that judicious university presidents, along with trustees, can foster elements of commercialization that promote basic academic values while avoiding those that promote secrecy and corruption. But while he wants to offer a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis of the modern university, what we get is a deeply incoherent work that rather startlingly points out the limits of bourgeois self-criticism.

Bok defines commercialization as "efforts within the university to make a profit from teaching, research and other campus activities." He explicitly divorces this meaning of the term from ideological concerns--the influence of the surrounding corporate culture, the accountability movement--and "economizing" concerns, which lead to hiring adjuncts and incorporating business methods (3).

In his analysis of commercializations roots, Bok discredits, or so he thinks, the leftist analysis. His centrist, cost-benefit rhetoric seeks to avoid the extremes--Marxist critique and unbridled market celebration. According to Bok, leftists think commercialization "simply" another attempt by businessmen and lawyers sitting on boards of trustees "to 'commodify' education and research, reduce the faculty to the status of employees and, ultimately, make the university serve the interests of corporate America," "the selfish interests of American business." (6, 8). But "it is one thing to note the effects of the economy on academic institutions but quite another to imagine a plot on the part of business leaders to bend universities to their corporate purposes." Few leftists, I think, would accept the idea of what Bok calls a "national corporate plot."

Having dismissed the radical interpretation in this way, Bok is then free to offer what is in his mind a complex, plural analysis of commercialization, though the analysis is also in a way "simple" in the sense of commonsensical and straightforward--no deep, dark national plots. His "benign explanation" of commercialization is exceedingly friendly to free markets and at one with the depoliticizing imperative of the book. He notes that commercialism can lead to deplorable behavior, behavior at odds with basic values; and one of his central worries is that commercialization can hurt the objectivity of research. As he notes, recipients of corporate funding (he's talking about pharmaceuticals) "vigorously deny" such charges, and most researchers believe that material considerations could not possibly influence their judgment, although a large body of evidence suggests otherwise. Bok himself notes rather straightforwardly that corporations wouldn't contribute so much money "to the education of physicians" unless they expected a "handsome reward" (86-7).

This admission opens up a can of worms. Why does he reject the ethic of professionalism among scientists, an ethic built on the assumption of professional autonomy and commitment to craft and to "basic values," but believe that trustees do not exert significant influence on universities because, among other reasons, they are civic minded? This oscillation between voluntarism and pressures that are strong enough to undermine it characterizes Bok's text.

He imagines the response of university presidents to his cautionary remarks about commercialization, and his call to resist such pressure in the name of "basic values":

   These cautionary remarks could
   provoke a tart response from enterprising
   university presidents who
   are working hard to move their
   institutions into the higher reaches
   of the academic hierarchy. "Such
   high-minded arguments," they
   may declare, "are all very well for a
   former president of a university
   accustomed to a
   secure place in the academic
   firmament and
   buffered from misfortune
   by an endowment that
   approaches 20 billion.
   But how can other institutions
   without these
   assets hope to achieve
   greater eminence unless
   they can pursue every available
   opportunity to gain the resources
   that excellence invariably requires."
   (104)

"This is a valid question," Bok tells us, for "the cards are stacked against any institution that lacks an established reputation and a lot of money." The excellent go to institutions that "already have strong facilities." Government and foundation money flow in the same direction. The graduates of these institutions carry the process forward, so that "the strongest universities tend to perpetuate themselves automatically. Success begets success, which helps to explain why the list of top-rated universities in 2000 looks remarkably like a similar list in 1950 or even 1900" (104).

This makes a mockery of voluntarism. The rich get richer, forcing the poor to commercialize excessively in order to compete, thus taking them down a dangerous road that threatens basic values. But if they don't take this road, they cannot be faithful to basic values like excellence. I would note that Bok's critique of high-mindedness bears a significant resemblance to the rhetoric of the for-profit university, where the traditional university is seen as elitist and as not meeting the needs of new customers, those historically deprived of access to higher education. Thus, their democratic mission requires universities to compete with the for-profits in order to parry the charge of elitism and racism. In fact, Bok sees no alternative to competing with the for-profits. If student needs are not met by traditional universities, they will be met by the University of Phoenix, "with even more blatant commercial results" (97). This argument dovetails nicely with Bok's obviously false statement that the process where by the rich get richer is "automatic."

The problem of voluntarism and fatalism is closely bound up with his schizophrenic view of competition. On the one hand, competition is what drives excellence and what drives competition is the sovereign consumer. Competition is based on free exchange and free exchange facilitates honesty and market transparency. On the other hand, "unhealthy competition" can lead to monopoly, to secrecy, to the refusal to share discoveries. And yet this same monopoly is what allows universities like Harvard to preserve educational values. Bok splits competition and monopoly from the dynamics of capitalism, and chooses the former against the latter: but the whole thing collapses, since competition leads to monopoly, and monopoly forces the weak to corrupt the "basic values" that are presumably competition's end result. Competition is also, for Bok, the secret of faculty autonomy, which defends against corporate domination. Faculty members, if not pleased by trustees, can walk across the street. But the same process of competition erodes faculty autonomy through the erosion of tenure and spread of cheap labor, and severely limits any faculty mobility in tight labor markets--the environment Bok assumes.

Central to his distortion of the radical point of view is his omission of class struggle. I have tried to show how a certain "leftism" (though couched almost entirely in a patrician dislike for the crudity of market excess) returns as competition's "bad" side. But class and the exploitation of casual academic labor are erased by Bok's free market assumptions. He sees the adjunct problem as resulting from "economizing concerns," and dismisses it on the grounds that such labor is chosen: "the instructors involved would rather take the work than seek alternative employment.... If the pay seems low, the root problem probably is that too many students have attempted to earn Ph.D.s" (96). But in fact the growth of cheap labor owes primarily to managerial choices, though management tries to chalk it up to contingency (it just kind of happened), or blame it on the autonomous faculty, who encourage the spread of cheap labor--in order to weaken themselves as a group??? But, chiefly, Bok thinks there can be no exploitation because the low wage academic work force chooses to take this work instead of seeking alternative employment. And for him the "over-production" of Ph.D.s is not a property of the capitalist division of labor determined almost entirely by management but is also caused by choices of students to go into overcrowded fields in the first place.

That Bok doesn't entirely believe what he's saying is plain if we turn to his chapter on college sports--i.e., the entertainment world--where straight talk about markets, competition, and exploitation seems permissible, since we're after all in the realm of the non-serious. When talking about athletes whose work, since it is entertaining, is not seen as labor, Bok doesn't hesitate to use the term "exploitation." But the athletes he so easily calls exploited (without choking on the word) have in fact far wider choices than adjuncts and grad students.

Bok dismisses the leftist critique with the Thatcherite response--"what's the alternative?"--both when there is an alternative (walk across the street), and when there is no alternative. Capitalism is justified as free choice; or, if not that, as inescapable. Still, there are schizophrenic moments, and we get another in the books final pages where Bok notes that with the continuing decline of basic values, "inequities and inequalities grow more pronounced and weaker groups feel impelled to organize collectively to protect themselves" (207). So when exploitation reappears it is caused by the "decline in basic values," which earlier was not the result but the cause of weakness. He then warns faculty and administrators to correct bad labor relations or have the government intervene. More about government in a minute.

An aside: I work at a historically black state university. The state system in North Carolina is underfunded. Universities in it that lack significant endowments must rely on outside funding. At my university, the search for such funding has taken two notable forms: contracts related to homeland security, and calls on faculty to make themselves entrepreneurs in search of grants. The first looks to be part of a general trend to wed the university to the Department of Defense and national security concerns; it manifests itself in diverse ways, from attacks on Title VI to the proliferation of homeland security centers of excellence, complete with impressive aid packages for struggling graduate students, all of this perhaps summed up by the new National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security "led by Ohio State University, which links more than 200 universities and colleges" (See William Martin, "Manufacturing the Homeland Security Campus and Cadre," forth-coming in the ACAS Bulletin, 70, Spring, 2005).

Bok thinks that budget cuts in traditional programs are not due to "malign business influence" but to "shortsighted government leaders." This distinction badly misstates the relation of business and government, and misses such sordid instances of commercialization as the alliance of homeland security and faculty entrepreneurship at the campus of North Carolina State where I teach. For Bok, what is not specifically corporate is split off from the reproduction of capital. Thus, he ultimately calls for government to regulate commercialization in the name of "basic value," a notion vague enough to include the national security concerns that may reshape the university of the future. Discussion of the corporate university, here and elsewhere, usually takes for granted that the non-corporate part of higher education has always created and taught knowledge for a broad public interest, not knowledge directly serving or compatible with the reproduction of capital.

This book reminds us, as a negative example, that if we wish to talk truly of commercialization, we need to talk straight about capitalism.

An earlier version of this essay appeared as part of a longer work entitled "Appalling," in Works & Days 4, Spring/Fall (2003): 71-102.