Professional values and the allure of the market

Academe, Sep/Oct 2001 by Slaughter, Sheila

When college presidents become CEOs, professors act as free agents, and students turn into consumers, will the traditional values of higher education survive?

So the hallmark of the current form of global capitalism, the feature that sets it apart from earlier versions, is its pervasive success: the intensification of the profit motive and its penetration into areas . . previously governed by other considerations. Nonmonetary values used to play a larger role in people's lives; in particular, culture and the professions were supposed to be governed by cultural and professional values and not construed as business enterprises. To understand how the current global capitalist regime doers from previous regimes, we must recognize the growing role of money as intrinsic value. It is no exaggeration to say that money rules peoples' lives to a greater extent than ever before.

-George Soros,

The Crisis of Global Capitalism

At the close of the nineteenth century, when laissez-faire liberalism and industrial capitalism reigned, professors made it clear that they did not want to be part of cutthroat capitalism, nor to ally themselves with what they saw as the radical demands of organized labor. Instead, they tried to create a space between capital and labor where values such as objectivity, expertise, and knowledge could support a common intellectual project directed toward the public good. Although they may have romanticized the purity of their intentions, and their potential for objectivity, they nonetheless made important contributions in areas such as health, schooling, safety, agriculture, economic and industrial development, and modern warfare. Moreover, professors, speaking with the authority of science, often served as arbiters among competing groups in deciding public questions.

But as George Soros, one of the world's most successful finance capitalists, argues, times have changed. If professional values are indeed being overwhelmed by ,money as intrinsic value," what are the implications for universities and their administrators, professors, and students? To the extent that the intrinsic value of money has been internalized by university constituents, they are complicit in the corporatization of higher education, and their construing it as a hostile takeover from outside academe becomes much more complicated.

University Presidents As CEOs

With money as an intrinsic value, it becomes easier for the spokesperson for the university to mirror the spokesperson for corporations, the chief executive officer, or CEO. University presidents first began to refer to themselves as CEOs in the mid-1980s, as their exchanges with corporations increased. These new relationships came in the form of partnerships such as the Business-Higher Education Forum, a group formed by the National Alliance of Business and the American Council on Education; corporate board directorships for university presidents; pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities by universities as a means to profit from intellectual property; and greatly increased "institutional advancement," a euphemism for building up endowments through corporate and individual giving. University CEOs show their commitment to the intrinsic value of money by concentrating most of their energy on raising institutional revenues, often to applause by faculty and students.

The rise of the university president as CEO signaled a subde organizational shift. The president is no longer primus inter pares, a faculty peer first and a leader second. Instead, presidents are heads of ever more complex, increasingly differentiated organizations, concerning themselves with expanding and protecting their staff and managing their faculty, from whom they distance themselves. Administrators, who have become more like managers and less like faculty, represent the university both to the external world and to diverse and fragmented groups of faculty within the university.

Presidents and their staff, who constitute the administration, increasingly see faculty members as workers for whose performance they are responsible. Deans act increasingly like middle managers, and are loyal to the administration rather than to faculty members. Like presidents, they return less often to the faculty after their decanal service ends, instead using their deanships as a step upward in an administrative career.

Concerns about faculty productivity have increased. Administrators have raised class sizes so that professors teach more students. They expect faculty members to produce more research, especially funded research, and engage in more service, which is increasingly interpreted as economic development. Administrators have developed formulas-40 percent teaching, 40 percent research, 20 percent service, for example to guide faculty workloads. In addition, they now differentiate workloads, so, for example, faculty members who bring in prestigious external funds teach less while professors without external funds teach more. When faculty members complain or organize against the growing role of management, administrators claim to represent the institutional good and portray faculty as protecting special interests that undermine the wellbeing of the university.