Beyond Corporatism: Why the Business Model is Wrong for the Academy

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, June, 2000 by Christopher R.L. Blake

It is required thinking in the administrative culture of today's American university that we supplicate ourselves at the altar of modern corporate practices and values. The litany of customer-service, strategic planning, value-added, and other economy-bound ideas provides the rhetorical framework for academic self-worth.

Indeed, the corporate business imperative is so strong that the growth of for-profit and Web-based universities, and their assumed status as the "way of the future," has revealed a disturbing absence of critical thought about such developments and their implications.

"It's about the economy, stupid" rings as true for the academy as for any business or political group. And so the academy sleepwalks toward a corporate nirvana. Now before this sounds like an argument for modern day Luddism or, worse still, a romantic notion of yesteryear's ivory tower, let us fully acknowledge the economic realities and possibilities confronting the academy.

For sure, economic prudence and business acumen is a given for any university leadership, since limited funding, exponential demands on resources, and fierce competition from distance-learning technologies demand entrepreneurial skills. Indeed, this entrepreneurship reflects the same utilitarian motive that drives many who seek a university credential, particularly at the undergraduate level.

Learning as Credential

Students, or customers in the politically correct idiom, tend toward a product-oriented view of learning (a credential) and its relevance in terms of employment and income-generation. And why shouldn't they? They see the affluence of the booming economy and the riches available to those surfing the crest of the technology wave.

The university, if it is wise to the possibility, can become the conduit, the means to the end, of such a goal. Such students also reflect the same vocational dimension of educational theory that has always drawn attention to the connection between educational institutions and their socioeconomic context.

But there, of course, is the limitation of the business model. It speaks to one side of the equation only, to the pragmatic and empirical needs of learning, but does not begin to appropriate alternative modes of human growth. Issues of supreme importance to our development that lie beyond rational-technicist thinking, are as necessary for educational inquiry as the skills for future economic leadership and organizational management.

Packaged Learning

Why, then, cannot the business model provide a model for these broader opportunities as well? After all, could we not package all learning experiences, applied or otherwise, as curriculum products, ready for purchase and delivery to our student/ clients, in the same way that we deliver, very effectively, sets of competencies and skills for economic leadership in a high-tech world?

The answer is negative, and the reason for this lies somewhere in the differences that we should sustain between the business culture and the university culture. Those differences translate into different sets of values, which govern the cultural identities of institutions. Universities and businesses need to commit to comprehensive and selective values respectively, and to build their organizational identity around them.

How are those comprehensive and selective values different? For a start, each values different kinds of knowledge. For the business world that appropriation of knowledge should be convergent, approachable, convenient, customer-friendly, and ultimately practical. For the university it should be divergent, disquieting, inquiring, subversive, and open-ended.

From that springs a different sense of identity. A successful business needs a unified corporate identity. There is no reason a university should necessarily emulate this. The public image of a university may tend toward a unified corporate image--for Harvard, the academic elite, for my university, Towson, the comprehensive metropolitan, and so on--but it is dangerous for that to be the driving idea behind the organic growth of the institution. It is, after all, only an image. It runs the risk of leaving the university ill-equipped to connect academically to the multiplicities of living in the modern pluralist world.

But most important, the corporate business model necessarily predicates an understanding of time, and the change processes within time, that ill-fit the university. For the commercial model necessarily sees the need for measurable short-term results, whereas the academy needs both those and other longer-term goals of a less measurable character.

Utilitarian Needs

This is why there is an emerging need for utilitarian undergraduate programs, equipping citizens for productive economic life, and longer-sighted graduate programs that meet broader-based developmental needs. John Dewey, the great American educator, knew the results of education could only be viewed in this kind of emerging society across generations. That is a tall order for any business strategic plan.