University, Inc: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2005 by Renate Bridenthal

Pressure to create a market model of the university also comes from trade agreements like the 1994 GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), which establishes guidelines governing international trade and investment in the service sector, including higher education. An ever-larger proportion of capital consists of intellectual property and intellectual skills. For regional trade agreements like NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement) and possibly a future CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) or FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), this process would lead to restructuring of higher education for primarily economic purposes by standardizing degrees, curricula, testing, and the role of government subsidies (or privatization). Barrow, et al., fear that such a trade-directed focus of international higher education "may accelerate an already overwhelming colonization of higher education by narrowly defined corporate and political interests that erode its broader egalitarian, democratic and humanitarian goals." [emphases mine] (170)

Here in New York, our state university has already fallen prey to this trend. The New York Times reported on March 24, 2005, that Governor Pataki has tied State University of New York fortunes to alliances with the business sector. This year, according to the report, New York provided an extra $89 million for SUNY as a match for $918 million in sponsored research. So-called "Centers of Excellence" at the Albany, Buffalo, and Stony Brook campuses are intended to be hubs for new partnerships with industry; Albany's center aims to specialize in nanotechnology, Buffalo's in bioinformatics, and Stony Brook's in wireless information.

At CUNY, there is also reason for concern. Jennifer Washburn writes that New York has steered $250 million into six Strategically Targeted Academic Research (STAR) centers, four of which have a strong bioscience focus. This may be what's behind the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center mentioned on page 33 of the CUNY Master Plan for 2004-2008. The Plan states that a new $198 million Center will be built on the City College campus, with a focus on biosensing, "a field that involves technologies that can be used for the identification, monitoring, and/or control of biologic phenomena." It has medical and defense applications. The Plan claims that the University has already attracted support from NASA ($3.6 million for design consultants) and the National Institutes of Health, and from private business and industry, including Raytheon, "an industry leader in defense, government and commercial electronics, space, information technology, technical services and business aviation and special mission aircraft." Raytheon has already committed funds to be used for research activities by faculty working in the field of remote sensing at City College. Other companies discussing collaborative efforts that will use the new facility are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, IBM, Xerox, JDS Uniphase [fiber optics], Newport Corporation [photonics], and Symbol Technologies [wireless].