Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2005 by Greg Meyerson

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.