Academic capitalism in the new university

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2005 by Larry Hanley

In this essay I will present an overview of ongoing changes within and pressures upon U.S. higher education, as filtered through its familiar hierarchy of colleges and universities.

What do I mean by "academic capitalism"? I borrow the term from the work of Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades. Slaughter defines academic capitalism as "institutional and professional market or market-like efforts to secure external moneys" (Academic Capitalism 8). She and Rhoades have recently broadened and sharpened this definition to point to a "knowledge/ learning/consumption regime" shaped by higher education institutions' efforts to "generate revenue from their core educational, research, and service functions, ranging from the production of knowledge created by faculty to the faculty's curriculum and instruction" (Rhoades and Slaughter, "Academic Capitalism" 37). As the boundaries between university and market become increasingly permeable, universities act more and more like profit-seeking organizations in a knowledge market. Thus, to bend Rhoades and Slaughter a bit further, academic capitalism, while driven by the demands to generate revenue, also describes the increasing authority of market-like practices, roles, and ideologies within the academy. This is of course a particular incarnation of the more general dynamic of neo-liberalization.

Like other instances, academic capitalism depends first on a material and ideological restructuring of the "public" and the "private." Indeed, over the past decade, federal and state politicians have essentially rewritten the historic compact forged between the public, higher education, and the state. Last year, for instance, state appropriations for higher education declined by 2 %. These decreases in direct state support to public higher education were even greater for the nation's "megastates," states which account for the bulk of higher ed enrollments. Last year, the California state budget for higher education shrank by 5.9 %; New York State allocated 4.5 % less money for higher education; Michigan lost 3.3 %, and Pennsylvania 3.2 %. This decline belongs to a longer, secular trend of declining state support. In 1980, public higher education garnered 44 % of its operating budget from state governments; in 2002, only 32 %. Once, public colleges and universities were state-supported; today they are state-assisted. Indeed, this trend may mark the end of the "state period" in American higher education.

Sectors and institutions can respond to change in different ways. Here, I want to map three important forces encouraged and accelerated by the new fiscal realities of American higher education. These include: competition, commercialization, and casualization. With different tempos and variable success, each of these forces is helping to transform American higher education from a public good to a private commodity.

Fiscal scarcity has encouraged new competitive practices and ideologies both within and among American universities. Within American universities, for instance, administrators have experimented with a variety of new management programs and techniques. These include: "strategic planning," "benchmarking," "Total Quality Management," and "Business Process Reengineering." As the last name implies, most of these have been borrowed from the corporate world, and the key principle in each has been, first, to measure inputs and outputs, and then to encourage greater efficiencies through an internal competition over resources. As critics have pointed out, these management techniques reward disciplines like biomedicine and computer science that lie closest to external markets. Indeed, these techniques have generally helped to tilt the core of the American university away from its old anchor in the humanities and toward business and technoscience disciplines.

When internal resources shrink, universities compete more actively for external resources--grants, corporate funding, and student tuition. Indeed, as direct state funding of institutions has decreased, universities and colleges have engaged in a radical privatizing of higher education by shifting the budget burden to students. Over the decade from 1993 to 2003, tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities rose by 47% in constant dollars; tuition and fees at private four-year institutions rose by 42.4%, or $5,835. Most of this increase has been concentrated in the last several years, and the real brunt of tuition increases has been borne by public colleges and universities, whose costs for students are thus catching up with those at private institutions. For 2003-4, resident undergraduate tuition and fees at public colleges rose on average by 13.9%; more than half the states saw tuition and tees rise at least 10% that same year. Some states have boosted tuition at vertiginous rates. The cost of attending the State University of New York rose by 27 % last year. The University of Maryland at College Park raised tuition by 14.6 %, Oklahoma State University by 23.9 %.