The Rise of the University of Phoenix and For-Profit Education—and Why It Will Fail Us All

Ana Marie Cox

The Rise of the Corporate University

The 1960s stand as the last decade when big questions were raised about the modern university. Students who were starting to congeal into the New Left protested the university’s collusion with government and defense corporations as the Vietnam War raged on. Intellectuals like Paul Goodman defended the free-speech movement (FSM) at the University of California- Berkeley, arguing for a renewal of the medieval conception of the university as a “community of scholars” capable of governing itself and resisting outside forces. As a key leader of and spokesperson for the FSM, Mario Savio famously strode onto the top of a policeman’s car to give a ringing protest speech against the “multiversity.” As Savio saw it, the vision of the university most fervently advocated by Clark Kerr, the president of California’s entire university system, represented “the greatest problem of our nation— depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy.” Its enormous size, its conformity, its tendency to churn out students like products on a factory line—all these features of the modern university symbolized how America was “becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment.”1

Savio’s speech captured the sensibility behind so much of the New Left’s earlier protest against the university. The complaint centered on conformity and boredom, attempting to renew an existential vision of politics as resistance and rebellion. The business world that awaited students after leaving the university was dull and complacent. As Savio explained, “The university is well-structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off.”2 Students were learning the routines of the “organization man”—the term William Whyte had used during the 1950s to describe corporate employees who worked for the large, faceless, bureaucratic corporations that came to dominate the American economy. Kerr himself, as one historian points out, was a “man of liberal, mildly social democratic views” who had wanted to make the university serve society.3 He was no reactionary but rather a prominent labor economist and a liberal. Nonetheless, as New Left activists saw it, he had made his pact with the large bureaucratic structures in the American economy. Savio, in attacking Kerr, helped codify for the baby boom generation the problem of the “multiversity” and the nature of corporate work—bureaucratic, boring, stifling, dull.

Much has changed since that time, not the least the nature of corporate life. The organization man is now a thing of the past. Business isn’t interested in stability or long-term careers.4 Flexibility, mobility, empowerment, dynamic change—these are the terms that management theorists speak of today. It is with good reason that Daniel Pink opens his book, Free Agent Nation, with a section titled “Bye, Bye, Organization Guy.” At the high end of the corporate world, people speak of consultancies; at the low end, of temping. What both have in common is an end to stability. The man in the gray flannel suit training it home at 5 P.M. every day has been replaced by the superhip consultant chatting on her cell phone while stuck in traffic at 8 P.M. The world of the baby boomers has disappeared, replaced by the world of Generation X—perhaps better termed the “contingent labor generation.”

Universities have changed with this world. They no longer collude with big business; they have become increasingly identical to business. The wall between the two has grown thin. Universities have always been a party to job training—from the turn-of-the century demand for managerial professionals to the desire for safe “organization men” in Savio’s time and the Internet wizards of our own time. But now corporations want to run the show themselves, or at least have more direct say in the matter. As Ana Marie Cox explains in chapter 1, many want “just-in-time knowledge”—that is, the skills necessary for the job at hand, rather than basic underlying skills. Take the example of Digipen Institute of Technology. Licensed by the state of Washington to grant a baccalaureate of science in “Real Time Interactive Simulation,” this new higher education institution is run by Nintendo Corporation. A journalist points out, “Students take no humanities or social science courses whatsoever.”5 That’s because those things are superfluous for the needs of the Nintendo Corporation. What’s necessary is what’s good for the bottom line—that is, education for the immediate tasks at hand.

What is new about today’s university is not only that it serves the corporation—for it always has done that—but that it emulates it. This is the most essential feature of the new university that the authors discuss here. Universities now see the potential for profit; they import managerial techniques from corporations; they use new technologies by which administrators assume more control over professors’ labor; they “temp” their workforce. Perhaps the only thing that the university hasn’t done that the corporation has is move all over the globe. After all, many universities are rooted in a specific city or town. Needless to say, via new computer technologies, they have scrambled across the globe in search of new students, all the while driven by the search for more profits.

What the authors in this section make clear is just how deeply these developments have already reshaped the contemporary university. The first stories heard about Phoenix University made it sound quirky and odd: a university without any campus that traded on the stock market. What Ana Marie Cox shows here is just how advanced the for-profit sector in higher education has become, as witnessed in massive growth and a mimic pattern among nonprofit universities. David Noble points out just how quickly numerous universities have taken up the questionable practice of distance education. Denise Tanguay shows that even at universities with faculty unions, merit pay and other corporate work schemes have skyrocketed. And Benjamin Johnson shows that most attempts to measure the amount of teaching done by underpaid graduate students, adjuncts, and postdocs have vastly underestimated the extent and effects of such teaching.

What shapes these authors’ understanding of the problems they discuss is firsthand experience—Cox from her years as a journalist, Noble in his struggles against distance learning at numerous universities, Tanguay in her work for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and Johnson in his work to organize Yale graduate students. Though they are dispassionate—in the best sense of that term—they are also committed to working on the issues they document and discuss.

Like the New Left before them, the authors here also want to initiate a debate about the broader purposes of higher education. They aren’t content simply to document the rise of corporate practices but want to ask a bigger question: What exactly is the purpose of education? Underlying their essays is a major assumption about education in today’s society: It should be democratic in the deepest and richest sense of that term. In this day and age, that makes them conservative to large extent (which might sound slightly odd, since all of them support unionization). For instance, they all imply that education should be wedded to a classical view of citizenship—that is, the cultivation of a well-rounded individual not only capable of the private pursuit of well-being but also capable of “culture” (thinking critically and appreciating works of imagination) and such skills of democracy as debating and contributing to public decision making. None of them cites him, but there seems almost a harkening back to Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of democratic education. What worries these authors is that by adopting corporate practices and looking only at the short term, we will shed the democratic promise of education: to educate citizens for the responsibilities of selfgovernment.

By showing how the democratic ideal of education is threatened, these authors make clear the need for spheres of life that are not subservient to market pressures. Education must be allowed to flourish without the bottom line entering into each and every decision. The relationship between students and teachers—the give-and-take of dialogue and learning—cannot be commodified without losing something. By making this clear, the authors in this section push the debate about the future of higher education a step forward.

STEAL THIS UNIVERSITY: THE RISE OF THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY AND THE ACADEMIC LABOR MOVEMENT

Edited by Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson

CHAPTER 1

None of Your Business

The Rise of the University of Phoenix and For-Profit Education—and Why It Will Fail Us All

Ana Marie Cox

Most discussions of for-profit higher education rely on the simple shock value of presenting education as a business to get readers’ attention. Calling students “customers,” not bothering with the humanities, skipping the physical accoutrements that make college the ivy-walled American dream—these are the characteristics editorial writers and reporters focus on when they want to throw harsh light onto the dark specter of higher education as a growth industry. Lost in that showman’s spotlight, however, is an even scarier fact: the specter is getting closer. In the past twenty years, more than 500 new for-profit colleges and universities have opened their doors—at the four- year level, for-profits have increased their numbers from 18 to 192.1 A quarter of the $750 billion spent each year on higher education stems from private, proprietary investment.2 Analysts predict this segment will grow by about 20 percent a year, until it finally displaces nonprofit education—or what for-profit educators call the “last remaining government monopoly in the world.”3 Today, forty for-profit education ventures trade publicly, up from one decade ago. We’ve moved beyond the moment when the idea of selling stock in a university was a laughable exception to the rule.

No other company epitomizes this exponential growth like the University of Phoenix and its parent company, the Apollo Group. Perhaps one of the most dramatic success stories of the ’90s “long boom,” and certainly one of the only success stories not interrupted by the dot.bomb implosion, Phoenix recently outpaced New York University to become the largest private university in the country. From its start in 1975 as a small, single-campus operation offering only a degree in business, Phoenix now grants bachelor’s, master’s, and even doctorates in such high-demand fields as nursing, teaching, and managing of information systems. It has grown to enroll more than one hundred thousand students on 116 campuses and “learning centers” in twenty-two states and around the world; an additional thirtyseven thousand students participate in its online component, touted as a highly efficient “computerized educational delivery system.”4 John Sperling, the founder of the University of Phoenix, told the Financial Times that his school was “the Cadillac of higher education.”5 At the same time, Peter Sperling, son of John, told the Independent, “McDonald’s has not aspired to be Maxim’s, but you know you’re going to get a good, healthy meal.”6 One could quibble with the aptness of the specific analogies, but the general metaphor is dead- on: Phoenix has done more than almost any other education enterprise to shift the meaning of college from that of a process one goes through to a product one buys.

In Higher Ed, Inc., former DeVry Institute administrator Steve Ruch lays out the recipe for the success of his own leading institution as well as Phoenix and most other for-profits:

Imagine a regionally accredited university with a tightly focused mission of preparing students for the world of work. Imagine that this institution offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs only in fields for which there is high marketplace demand. In fields for which there is little or no market demand, by either stud ents or employers, degree programs are not offered. Imagine also that this university runs year-round, fully utilizing its facilities during the day, evening, and weekends throughout the whole year. The fulltime faculty do not have tenure, and 90 percent of them are fully deployed to teach. The energy of this institution…is focused primarily on the success and satisfaction of its students.7

One might also imagine that this institution doesn’t have a library, insurance plans, dormitories, student groups, or liberal arts majors as is the case with most for-profits. To this efficient mix, Phoenix adds some specific innovations. The company owns no property whatsoever (its classes—scheduled mostly in the evening—are often held in the empty rooms of nearby traditional schools).

Phoenix avoids the traditional high default rate on student loans that has traditionally plagued many proprietary institutions by enrolling only working students 23 or older, most of whose employers gen erally subsidize the tuition. Phoenix ensures employers’ continued support by allowing companies to tailor these students’ curricula to their needs. And in order to optimize its access to government money, Phoenix has until recently identified online students as residential students in applications for federal student aid. The school has also structured schedules so that up to half of any given course’s class time may proceed without an instructor present.

These last two techniques aren’t legal (Phoenix was fined more than $6 million by the Department of Education in 1999 and ordered to return the aid it received through false reports), but all of them have been very lucrative.8 The Apollo Group’s gross annual earnings have almost doubled in just the past three years, climbing from $384 million in 1998 to $769 million in 2001.9 Even in the current, rather dim economic environment, industry insiders have pegged Phoenix and the Apollo Group as the “fastestgrowing, high-quality companies in the sector.”10 This kind of momentum demonstrates that we can no longer wonder “what if” for-profits steal students from traditional schools. The question today is “What now?”

Phoenix Ascending

John Sperling is a former professor at the University of California at San Jose and a graduate of Reed College (a leading liberal arts college) and Cambridge University. Sperling’s academic background, full of the kind of stuffiness and name-brand cachet associated with traditional educators, does not suggest the man he has become. The man who would go to the helm of the largest university in the country without a tenure system, much less any form of collective bargaining, was once a union organizer, president of his local American Federation of Teachers (AFT) branch and a member of its national board. Sperling has written hymns of praise about his graduate student days at the University of the California at Berkeley, where “we honed our academic skills by expounding and arguing theory, fact, and fiction—it was a moveable intellectual feast.”11 At the same time, he has created an approach to education centered exclusively on the development of “employability,” tailoring his courses to the demands of companies who pay for their workforce’s schooling. And the man who developed the prototype of Phoenix using hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal research grants is now one of the most vocal proponents for holding nonprofit colleges “accountable” for meeting specific “educational outcomes” and accuses traditional institutions of wasting taxpayer dollars.

Since founding the University of Phoenix, Sperling has put much of his considerable personal fortune (which now stands at more than $1 billion) toward pet projects that range from the mildly amusing to the outright heretical. For years, Sperling has been the primary investor in Seafire International, a company he founded to develop saltwater agriculture. In the late 1990s, Sperling teamed up with fellow multimillionaire George Soros in a campaign to legalize marijuana, a project that continues to this day. An interest in “life extension” prompted the formation of the Kronos Group, a New Age medical center dedicated to “Clinical Age Management.” Sperling’s most infamous investment outside Phoenix, however, is his single- handed support of Genetics Savings and Clone, a company that will allow individuals to “bank” their own (or anyone else’s) genetic material for later use, and Texas A&M University’s pet-cloning project. Sperling told Fortune that his cloning support stemmed originally from his interest in preserving his dog, Missy.12

In his autobiography, Sperling explains away such reversals and escapades: he’s not a hypocrite; he’s a rebel. As Thomas Frank has pointed out, businessmen of the past few decades have used such disassembling as a powerful weapon in their battle for public approval: “The real object of the ‘revolutionary’ management theory…[is] not efficiency or excellence or even empowerment, but a far more abstract goal: the political and social legitimacy of the corporation.”13 Talk of rebellion by billionaires requires the belief that business for profit is some underground affair, and not the default way of life for most of the world. If anything, Sperling’s role in turning the production of knowledge into the production of profit is less that of a lone rebel in hostile territory than that of a general leading a conquering army toward the last enclave of stubborn holdouts against the new regime.

And just as the enthusiasts of the “long boom” investment charade used the language of dissent to disguise—or rehabilitate—greed and self-promotion, Sperling’s rebel stance conceals a more conventional explanation for his roundabout journey from traditional scholar and union activist to corporate CEO. Upon examination, Sperling’s seemingly inexplicable shift from AFT officer to union buster stems more from petty revenge than from freethinking: He admits that being “voted out of the presidency of a faculty union…cured me of my socialist sentiments in favor of nonprofits.”14 Sperling’s rejection of the liberal arts and his decision to root out of his enterprise anything remotely resembling his glorious Berkeley days could be a rebellion against traditional academe, but it also happens to be the very foundation of Phoenix’s massive growth. The institution’s relentless focus on employability makes Phoenix classes appealing to the corporations that subsidize their employees’ classes and streamlines Phoenix’s operation. If you don’t teach liberal arts, you don’t need a library. If you don’t care about the learning that takes place outside of classrooms, you don’t need student unions or student publications. Forty years after finishing his “moveable feast,” Sperling is happy to serve fast food: “This is a corporation, not a social entity,” Sperling told one interviewer. “Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop their value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’ bullshit.”15

His hammering on “accountability” after Phoenix’s infant years of suckling at the federal teat is more rhetoric than reality. Though supporters of for-profits often point to their “market-enforced” efficiency, few for-profit institutions could afford to exist without Title IV monies. In 1999–2000, proprietary institutions made up a whopping 35.4 percent of all institutions participating in the Federal Pell Grant Program, and received about $945 million in Pell monies.16 Phoenix and other proprietary schools have spent millions in the past few years in lobbying both Congress and legislatures to keep those floodgates open, primarily by manipulating the accreditation procedures that determine an institution’s eligibility for federal loan programs. Phoenix is particularly motivated to loosen loan regulations: the Education Department audit of the $339 million in loans and $9 million in Pell Grants distributed by Phoenix in the mid-’90s found that the school did not provide enough instructional time to qualify for much of the money it had received in federal loans and grants. In addition, the university illegally included cost of living when calculating need for students in correspondence courses. In total, the department estimated that the university disbursed about $54 million more than what students were entitled to receive. (In its response, Phoenix officials asserted that their practices were “good for [the university’s] students, for American business, for America’s educational system, and for the global economy.”)17

Historically, proprietary institutions have met with resistance from what they call “the higher education establishment” regarding accreditation. Thus, Phoenix focuses its energy (and finances) on political influence as well as economic growth, with no apologies from Sperling: “Yes, we use money to get their attention—our American system of campaign finance gives us no other alternative.”18 Thanks to this, Sperling claims, the Apollo Group and Phoenix are “better known on the Hill than all but the state universities and the nationally-known private institutions.”19 According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in the 2000 election cycle alone the Apollo Group made campaign contributions of more than $178,000 (a top contributor, just behind the University of California, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton). In addition, the Career Colleges Association (a largely for-profit higher education political action committee) donated more than $123,000, and other for-profit higher education political action committee (PACs) forked over around $190,000. Another comparison: Combined, the Apollo Group and Career College Association PACs last year contributed more than twice as much ($161,000) as the largest nonprofit donor, the American Association of University Women, which gave its entire $66,000 to the marginally less deregulation-happy Democrats.20 Compared with the multimillion- dollar bundles brought in by defense contractors and drug companies, the for-profit education sector is wading in the kiddie pool of political payoff, but it’s getting a bargain.

In March, the Senate confirmed Sally Stroup, the Apollo Group’s top lobbyist and a former congressional advisor on federal loan programs, as the chief higher education policymaker in the Department of Education. Stroup advised the chair of the Post-Secondary Education Committee from 1993 to 2001 and was instrumental in helping to draft the 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The 1998 reauthorization reversed many of the harsher restrictions on for-profit schools (making it easier for them to appeal penalization on loan defaults), eliminated some of the more grueling aspects of the accreditation process (making surprise visits optional, and no longer requiring inspectors to visit every branch of a campus), redefined “institutions of higher education” to include for-profit schools rather than defining them as a separate category, and created a special proprietary schools liaison with the Education Department, a privilege previously reserved for historically black universities and community colleges.21

Secretary of Education Ronald Paige made a less high-profile but more influential appointment in 2001 when he gave Laura Palmer Noone, the president of the University of Phoenix, a place on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. This committee makes recommendations to the secretary regarding changes in regional and national accreditation policies and standards, including those regulations that determine an institution’s eligibility for Title IV programs. The Higher Education Act is due for its next review and reauthorization in 2003.

Given his success in manipulating the system to his advantage, Sperling’s rebel stance is in fact the squarest behavior imaginable, fitting quite comfortably into the paneled club-room atmosphere of big business. Still, as amusing as his contradictions are, John Sperling would be of no interest at all if his tactics and bloviations had no effect or if Phoenix were just a roadside oddity. But it’s not. The success of Phoenix has transformed the maverick oddball into an influential model. Nonprofits are increasingly looking to for-profits for clues as to how to run their own institutions.

The Creeping For-Profit Ethos:

From Phoenix to the World

Clearly, nonprofits aren’t trying to become profitable, but administrators at traditional institutions have now turned to the corporate model as a solution to the age-old and tax-status-independent problems of budgets and cash flow. Things have changed since the University of Chicago dropped its football team or an administration approached wealthy alumni for a generous donation. The difference is twofold: when it comes to making cuts, athletics are less likely to be on the chopping block than departments and programs. In 1998, for example, the Board of Higher Education in Massachusetts suggested “establishing a program productivity review that requires campuses to eliminate, or provide a compelling reason for retaining, academic programs that have fewer than a minimum threshold of graduates per year for a period of three years.” As the authors of the report explained, “This will reduce expenditures.”22 The group also “urged a reduction in ‘public service’ projects that have little to do with students or teaching”—a sweeping definition that could mean anything from limiting student volunteer efforts to reducing community studies not financed by outside donors.23 (It should be noted that these sorts of programs are intended to develop young people’s civic sensibilities over their predilection toward self-interest.) And when it comes to bringing more revenue in, administrators are willing to sell more than just the name of a gymnasium—they’ll trade a college’s resources and reputation. In 1997, the University of Wisconsin began a joint, for-profit venture with the software firm Lotus to sell Wisconsin degrees worldwide.24 The always inventive Massachusetts Board of Higher Education touted its “collaborations with business and industry,” noting that “[a]ll campuses have developed alliances with local and regional business and industry to provide employee training and development opportunities, as well as research support.” 25 A harbinger of this coziness emerged in the late 1980s, when the University of Rochester caved to the demands of a major donor, Eastman Kodak Co., to rescind its acceptance of a graduate student employed by Fuji Photo Film, Inc., a major competitor of Kodak.26

Other specific instances of nonprofits appropriating for-profit techniques abound. Take, for instance, Ohio State University’s “selective investment” program, in which departments compete for million-dollar “prizes” by way of U.S. News and World Report rankings.27 More commonly, schools simply demand that teachers offer “blockbuster” or “heavy draw” courses like those related to professional sports or other “entertaining” subjects. Such moves resemble the financial discipline that governs Phoenix’s policy of developing courses only for which there is high demand. Numerous universities have started using their control over course content to license and then sell courseware to for-profit online entities. This sort of arrangement is a familiar pattern at Phoenix, where tightly structured, centrally developed lesson plans allow Phoenix’s administration to dictate how a professor spends time, right down to fifteen-minute intervals, and where copyrights keep hostage what knowledge those plans may hold. What’s more, streamlined courses are easier to shop out to low-paid adjunct professors.

There are dozens of more familiar ways that nonprofits have come to resemble for-profits, including the hiring of private companies to manage such capital-intensive areas as cafeteria service, campus housing, and college bookstores. At least the University of Phoenix has specific, logical reasons for pursuing such schemes: They centralize course development to take advantage of mass production. They direct funds to popular programs because no one goes to Phoenix to learn linguistics or art history, anyway. And collaborating with corporations makes sense because corporations are, for all intents and purposes, their real customers. Why have nonprofits picked up these habits? Why, for instance, did the Colorado higher education system decide in 1999 that “instead of the university deciding what ought to be taught, professors and chancellors will listen to what the chief executive officers say,” and require “every college in the state” to compile “a list of technology courses it offers”? These will be “given to company executives, who will tell the educators where they fall short.”28 Why has Tulane University president Scott S. Cowen spent the last few years hammering away at shared governance, lamenting that it “stand[s] in the way of quick, effective decision-making”?29

To be sure, part of the motivation to be more like for-profits is simply about the bottom line: adjuncts are cheaper, and centralized courses—and not having to pay professors to develop them—are cheaper, too. The sad news is that many students seem to want it that way. Indeed, research such as the annual freshman survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles provides sobering evidence that whether or not students actually attend for-profit institutions, they seem to share the same values. In response to the 2001 survey, students ranked their “life goals”: more than 75 percent said “being very well-off financially” was “very important.” Toward the bottom of the list: “influencing the political structure” (16 percent) and “writing original works” (13 percent).30 Everywhere young people turn in today’s culture, they get the message that money is the true measure of a life. Russell Jacoby, in Dogmatic Wisdom, cites a classic example: Students who apply for credit cards with “humanities” listed as their area of interest are turned down; when they reapply with “finance” as their interest, they get the card.31 What they do with the card suggests that it is not the making of money that concerns them, but the spending of it: UCLA’s survey revealed that 21.4 percent had overspent their budgets and 16.7 percent had what they termed “excessive credit card debt”—this at a time when the average credit debt of American college students is $2,748.32 “Financially rewarding” or “career oriented” do not sound like hallmarks of a good education to a traditional academic’s ear. But today’s students operate from the profit motive, and it makes sense for their schools to do so as well. DeVry’s Ruch explains, “The more traditional, abstract notion of learning for its own sake and the idea of cultivating knowledge that appears to lack utilitarian value does not resonate with a growing number of today’s students and their families.”33 Never mind that few college freshmen are equipped to decide what may or may not lack utilitarian value; for-profits simply give students what the students think they need. As Sperling has said, “Academia simply doesn’t understand this. They call it McEducation. What we do is every bit as much education as the Greek system that served as the model for the modern university. Greek educators prepared people for life. We prepare people for a life of work.”34

And in the terrible symmetry of the market, the loop is completed: what the students want, well, for-profits will do almost anything to maintain the illusion that that’s what they’re providing. We all know how well the consumer approach has maintained high-quality standards in, say, financial markets. In a sense, for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix are the Enrons of higher education: built on a bubble of good feeling, sustained by a siphoning off of public goods and monies. It is possible to move too quickly in response to demand, and therefore teach badly but “efficiently.” Proprietary institutions call this “pleasing the customer” and, next to the flipped-collar nonchalance of the for-profit rebel, it’s the most common explanation put forward by their fans for the success of places like Phoenix. Catering to the practical needs of students undoubtedly appeals to the working adults that make up the overwhelming majority of Phoenix students, and it’s unlikely that it actively harms their education: You can learn as well at 8 P.M. as at 9 A.M. The assumed sensibilities of the sacred customer justify the more ideological decisions of for-profits as well. As DeVry’s Ruch sees it, he is simply empowering students: “It is ultimately the students who set the standard for what is appropriate and acceptable in terms of freedom of expression.” Why? “This philosophy is grounded in the standard customer-service orientation of any successful for-profit venture.”35 Phoenix in particular takes pride in dismissing professors who score poorly on student evaluations. As Phoenix administrators see it, pleasing students should determine the “eligibility [emphasis added] of faculty members to provide instruction.”36 For-profits rush new courses to market, eliminate old ones, employ part-time professionals as teachers, and accept credit for “life experiences,” including divorce—all for the sake of the customer.37

The “Costs” of For-Profit Education

These policies probably do please customers. Whether or not they add up to an education worth the investment is another matter. (Professors, for example, often report that their own sense of pedagogic mission gets steadily diluted as crowd-pleasing curricula create subordinate pressures to “get in the sandbox” with their eager-to-be-entertained charges, padding syllabi with movies, rock criticism, and various dogmatic interpretations of pop- cult transgression.) To define academic success as what the student is happy with risks not so much a low-quality education (though that is a possibility) but rather a narrow education, one focused on the here and now, “applicable skills,” and conventional wisdom. But treating the student as a consumer necessarily turns education into a product—something consumable with benefits that are immediate and gratifying: a soda, a movie, a pornographic website. Defenders of the for-profit faith say that giving students what they want ensures a good education, but what they actually mean is that students “get what they came for, and the institution is assured continued growth, ongoing market demand, and profitability.”38 Imagine running a government this way. It would lack revenues because citizen-consumers will have demanded an end to all taxation. (A not-toodistant possibility, really.) This kind of thinking is reminiscent of the student council candidate whose platform consisted of “longer lunch periods” and “a better prom.” And just as a longer lunch period won’t get students any closer to understanding algebra, so offering high-demand degrees doesn’t get students closer to actually understanding and participating in their world.

One of the hardest lessons to learn is knowledge isn’t necessarily what you want to know—in the sense that, well, we’d be happier not knowing about Rwandan genocide or the Dresden firebombing or the Nixon administration. Education as a product means, essentially, teaching only what students want to hear, whether that’s how to program in C++ or that everything is just fine, don’t worry your pretty little head, nothing needs to change. A degree in Microsoft network administration may get you a job, but when we talk of the “utility” of an education, it must mean something beyond that: it must mean gaining hard-won understanding; it must mean the ability to question the world around you. It must mean hearing things you don’t agree with and knowing things that upset you.

Yet nonprofits have already accepted at least the language of customer satisfaction. In addition to the rampant grade inflation that is a hallmark of for- and nonprofits alike, nonprofits pay attention to the desires of students when they trumpet graduate salaries and point to students’ “return on educational investment.”39 Once fluent in this dialect, it can only become easier for traditional schools to accept for-profits’ logic of education-ascommodity and to fully embrace the techniques they’ve taken tentative steps toward. Freemarketers would welcome this and all the “enforced efficiency” that would follow, but in this race to the bottom, existing for-profits will always win. Yes, they do have a head start—but they’re also cheating.

Why Not-For-Profits Will Fail, or the Underbelly of Market Logic

Of course, they’re cheating the customer—both in a moral and a fiduciary sense that might alarm even today’s business-savvy student. For-profits’ proponents often point to their respect for their student/consumers as a benefit that nonprofits are not in a position to offer. Professors at traditional schools, they say, “fear…the loss of traditional authority, as well as the growing demand for greater accountability in their work as teachers” that would come with a customer focus. All this talk of customer service, however, is belied by one simple fact: The customer is being ripped off.

On the for-profit side, administrators say their students choose the stripped- down, sped-up, frill-free education they offer because students don’t want to pay for the cafeterias, dorm rooms, and sports teams that drive up the cost of tuition at other schools. But those students aren’t saving their own money; they’re allowing proprietary schools to charge them for amenities the schools aren’t providing. Traditional education is expensive, and in part that’s because of the frills, student groups and insurance coverage and the like, but students at traditional schools are rarely charged for those frills. As educational economist Gordon C.Winston has shown, a combination of scholarships, grants, and simple discounting allows the average nonprofit to subsidize students to the tune of about $8,800 a year. That is, an education that costs (on average) $12,500 to produce is being sold to students for $3,700. Breaking the nonprofit group into private and public institutions doesn’t dilute the subsidy much, though the end price to the student differs.40

Phoenix, on the other hand, offers no such discount—neither do most other for-profits—because charging at least as much as the education costs to produce is what makes them who they are: Price-cost=profit. Traditional institutions operate at a loss: public universities sell a $10,150 education for $1,230; private schools sell a $15,310 education for $6,640.41 By contrast, the University of Phoenix generates a net return of $101 per student annually.42 And when one considers that the cost of a Phoenix education— $8,000—is about the same as tuition at a private institution with comparable programs, it all becomes clear: Students get much less than they pay for, and that’s not even considering the quality of education they get.43

Overcharging like this works because of the intimate relationships proprietary schools (especially Phoenix) enjoy with their clients, the employers of their students. These partnerships are so intertwined that the institutions basically become the exclusive providers of job training. In fact, Phoenix has created several business partnerships in which employees can take classes at a corporate training center and then apply those toward a University of Phoenix degree. Some nonprofit institutions have made similar deals, but not with the enthusiasm of Phoenix, which will accept corporate training as credit for up to 15 percent of a student’s degree.44 John Sears, Apollo’s vice president, argues that such a deal is a natural fit for employers concerned with getting the quickest education possible for their students. In such a situation, he told one reporter, “Which model makes more sense: the traditional four-year university, which is essentially a model of inefficiency? Or a virtual education machine like the University of Phoenix, which brings a total quality management discipline to academic cost control?”45

Such cooperation with employers raises some obvious concerns. For one: Is job training really education? The president and chief executive officer of the Apollo Group, Jorge Klor de Alva, says simply that “the lines between education and training are blurring.” But it would seem that one distinction remains clear: Mere training—especially training that’s designed so that you can, as de Alva says, “take what you learn and apply it to work immediately”— is poor preparation for the inevitable moment when the technology improves, methods change, and your training becomes out of date.46

By providing just-in-time education that’s designed to exact specification of what employers need right now, Phoenix has put the finishing touches on its model of education-as-consumer-product. Phoenix has built planned obsolescence into knowledge, and made an education as disposable as paper plates and Ikea furniture. This works brilliantly as a business plan. What are you going to do when your training becomes out of date? Well, go out and buy some more, of course. If you don’t, your employer can simply buy a new worker, with more cutting-edge content.

This market logic also works to discipline students as they pursue their training—all to the detriment of free speech and thought. Already, Sperling justifies the absence of liberal arts courses at Phoenix by saying the employers who subsidize students “won’t support Greeks and Romans.”47 There are surely other subjects that employers would rather keep their staff from studying: Would ExxonMobil want its people studying the effect of greenhouse gases? Would IBM want a programmer to learn about his company’s ties to the Nazis?

Considering these rather problematic possibilities, it’s unlikely that nonprofits will take the exact same steps as for-profits, but it’s worth exploring what might happen if they did. Could a nonprofit become as cost-effective as the University of Phoenix, wiping out residential features, libraries, and such? It seems impossible at a large state school, but what about a small private commuter college? Or a community college? These two types of institutions are Phoenix’s real competitors and are schools that stand to lose the most students when Phoenix or a company like it moves into town. They also have the fewest campus amenities to begin with. But should they go the cost- cutting route, they’d be faced with a problem that proprietary schools always escape: once you cut student services, who provides them? This is the secret of for-profit education. While Phoenix relies upon the federal government much more than its leaders would ever admit, it also gets a free ride on the backs of nonprofit institutions.

A huge chunk of the University of Phoenix’s savings, for instance, comes out of its insistence that a “virtual library”—a collection of nine thousand or so electronic journals—is a reasonable substitute for the real thing. The head of Phoenix’s “learning research center” has said that books are “far less critical than they were 30 years ago when I was in college.”48 Of course, books are just as central as they’ve ever been, but they’re also about as expensive. Last year, Harvard spent $22 million on its library of 14 million volumes; at the low end, tiny McMaster Divinity College spent $854,000 on its 1.8 million volume library. The average university research library contains 3.6 million volumes and costs about $1.9 million a year.49 When the University of Phoenix negotiated its way into New Jersey—where strict accreditation standards had stalled it—the school overcame the state’s provision that all institutions of higher education have a library of at least fifty thousand volumes by purchasing access to New Jersey City University’s 245,000 volume library in exchange for five computers and shared access to a suite of business databases—a deal worth about $25,000 to the public university.50

Places such as Phoenix can get away with eliminating libraries in most cases because their students can use public ones, sometimes the libraries of the very institutions that have lost students to for-profits. Jacqueline Raphel and Shelia Tobias have reported that “Phoenix frequently piggybacks on the ‘competition.’” According to Raphel and Tobias, students from Phoenix’s Santa Teresa campus in New Mexico, located immediately across the border from the University of Texas at El Paso, use the public school’s library resources to such an extent that “reference librarians sometimes have to ask the Phoenix students to step aside so that the UTEP students’ needs can be accommodated.”51

This leeching off public resources extends the for-profit labor model, as well. Phoenix’s practice of hiring only part-time professors who are actively working in the field they teach allows it to take advantage of human capital investment made elsewhere: at the universities that support full-time teachers who train the next generation of scholars. This generous transfer-credit policy allows it to do the same with students—essentially inflating its graduation and enrollment statistics without actually having to educate every student. Traditional schools remain caught in an unyielding conundrum: There has to be a first place where people learn—where, for example, students can get the M.A. that’s the only requirement to teach at Phoenix. A traditional college literally can’t afford to save money the way Phoenix does.

What the Future Holds

This longer range view shows that pursuing corporate models could be the end of higher education as we know it rather than, as some insist, the next step forward. However, even the oldest universities sometimes don’t look much past tomorrow, and at its present pace, the for-profit approach seems destined to triumph. It may not be that the University of Phoenix is, as Sperling has said, in commissar-like fashion, “moving inexorably eastward,” but the sleight-of-hand policy changes that inch nonprofits evercloser to a corporate form may mean that most traditional schools become for-profit in everything but tax status.

The myth of social mobility notwithstanding, American higher education has always been poised to split in two: on the one hand, expensive, elite private schools for those who can afford them (and the handful of gentrifying “public ivies” like Michigan and Berkeley); on the other, resource-strapped, poorly funded public institutions for everyone else. The rise of the for- profit has merely exacerbated this divide, precisely because in the for- profit future, only the richest private universities may thrive. The social capital afforded by an Ivy League diploma is worth protecting (why dilute the brand with branch campuses of Yale™?), and selling at a premium. The humanities will become (some might argue they’ll simply continue to be) an affluent affectation, like $600 Prada bike messenger bags. The less well off schools will be forced to compete against the elites, and will either run themselves into the ground doing so, or will adopt all the for-profit tactics that they can, perhaps even chucking libraries, dorms, departments (what’s the percentage in a classics department?). Another strategy would take them to for-profit status by half measures: they’ll charge more for “low-demand” courses, offer discounts to students who give up their library privileges, create an airline-esque class system in which “first class” students get more comfortable chairs and better computers in exchange for a premium tuition. And then who knows? If an institution acts like a corporation, it becomes a corporation.

Those who wish to see higher education maintain its relative freedom and accessibility can’t rely on the incongruity of education being treated as a consumer product to make their case, or use traditional institutions’ moral superiority to attract students. With continuing education becoming something of a political jackpot (like helping children or the elderly, who could possibly be against continuing education?), for-profit lobbyists are positioned to push their clients as the ideal providers of continuing education, and therefore the likely recipients of whatever federal or state aid is available. And with state aid will come more acceptance of proprietary institutions. Greater acceptance, in turn, will accelerate the continued erosion of regional and national accreditation standards.

As mentioned above, for-profit lobbyists are already busy negotiating changes to the regional and national accreditation systems, making it easier for them to compete with traditional schools. Lobbyists go state by state to check the power of state legislatures over regional accrediting bodies. Regional accrediting standards are often flexible, but state laws can toughen—or weaken—them. That is, especially if unions and organizations like the American Association of University Professors exert pressure on them. Even against counterpressure, the for-profit logic is bulldozing ahead.

One proposal would guarantee accreditation to any school that is able to prove that a certain percentage of its graduates had obtained jobs. Clearly, proprietary schools, with their close corporate relationships, would be the institutions to benefit from this. Another change would allow for-profits to hire less-qualified and thus cheaper instructors. Traditional institutions must have a minimum number of professors with Ph.D.’s in order to grant degrees in any particular field. For-profit lobbyists would like to reduce this minimum number for their clients.

For-profits would also love to dip their fingers into the pot of state loans and grants that until now local legislatures have been reluctant to give them. Proprietary administrators argue, as the executive vice president of ITT Technical Institutes has said, “If we’re good enough to pass state standards, to meet the bar where states raised it, then our students should have fair standing to access taxpayer dollars to finance their education.”52 Critics point out that this would essentially amount to corporate welfare. As with federal grants and loans, the students who receive such scholarships would simply be the conduits for the money going from taxpayers to institutional profits.

There are changes that are more seriously afoot at the national level, where the Education Department creates guidelines for all regional accreditation and sets up the requirement for federal loan eligibility. For- profits would like to eliminate a federal loan eligibility requirement that students receive at least twelve hours of in-class instruction a week to be considered full time. They also want to abolish a federal law that prohibits colleges from providing bonuses or other incentive payments to admissions officers or financial-aid administrators for enrolling students. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, lobbyists for for-profits say “the law does not allow employees to be financially rewarded for exceptional performance.” That is sort of the point, though, as the regulation was created in response to recruiters from diploma mills, who earned such bonuses by enrolling clearly unqualified students out of unemployment centers. The students, who generally flunked out, were simply a means by which proprietary schools received federal loans. But the most important of the for-profit initiatives is the push to revise Education Department rules stipulating that at least 10 percent of a forprofit’s income must come from sources other than federal aid. Once this restriction is lifted, the proprietary schools are in a position to siphon off a much larger portion of the aid available to all schools—another blow to the viability of resource-poor colleges. Phoenix and its cohorts are in essence pushing for the deregulation of higher education, and it could have the same disastrous results that followed the deregulation of savings and loans, telecom businesses, and airlines. The best response, then, is to push to maintain and strengthen higher education regulation at the local, state, and federal levels. Ideally, one could put an end to federal and state student aid for students at for-profits, perhaps legislate a definition of what a college degree is, including a minimum number of credits in various disciplines. One could argue that such a policy is akin to the national standardized tests that are being proposed at the K-12 level. Still, imagine how outraged the happily consumerist students who responded to the UCLA survey would be if they were suddenly held accountable for their educations. Then again, realism enters the picture: these young people don’t vote. (The UCLA study also found this class to have the least interest in politics in years.)53 Imagine, as well, the response of capitalist- friendly courts to a restraint-of-trade challenge that for-profits would inevitably bring in response to any harsh regulations actually enacted. So what looks on paper to be the most promising path to curbing for-profits’ growth is also the steepest one. In any event, legislation will not stanch what is essentially a seismic cultural shift. To counter the predominance of for-profit education, nonprofit schools need to assert the autonomy of their mission—while also introducing important changes in their own institutional culture.

Traditional universities could stop competing with for-profits by trying to be like them and instead look at why proprietary schools appeal to students. Understanding this appeal doesn’t mandate mimicking the for- profit mantra of pursuing customer satisfaction at every level. Schools could compete with the practical advantages of for-profits: year-round campuses, schedules convenient to nontraditional students (who are, statistically speaking, actually very traditional). There are ways to moderately accelerate programs without losing their spirit.

More radically, faculty at traditional schools could make a preemptive strike at tenure. Already decreasing at an alarming rate, the number of tenured positions is heading toward zero—not because tenure as an institution is being abolished, but because it’s eroding. Universities replace tenure- track jobs with full-time adjuncts, and tenured professors continue to see academic freedom as a reward rather than as a right. For faculties to take the initiative and actively seek a replacement for tenure through collective bargaining would benefit professors at traditional schools by strengthening their power to maintain the standards of liberal education. A contract that protected academic freedom could also extend that right to adjuncts, librarians, teaching assistants, and faculty at for-profit schools, for whom tenure has rarely existed. The power of an entire academic community would be something to reckon with. The bond that would be formed between teachers at for-profits and nonprofits could strengthen both their positions at their respective institutions, and break down the stereotypes (of being elitist and condescending, of being poorly educated and unqualified) that currently keep them apart.

Still, a realist might ask, what about the students who just want jobs? What about the students’ parents, who think academics exist in ivory towers and come down only to indoctrinate their children into communism, feminism, and same-sex romance? What about the policymakers who look at universities and see nothing but the red ink flowing out of them? These are obstacles that can be addressed only by deep cultural shifts. We need changes in our political culture that articulate wider civic needs over shortterm benefits. For instance, what about a wider discussion about universal military service—the sort that would draft all young people, no matter their income or connections, and that would induce a much more realistic debate about the use of armed forces abroad? What about requiring, as some of the original advocates for AmeriCorps proposed, mandatory community service as a means of educating young people for the responsibilities of active citizenship? We need to have political discussions in this country that challenge us to become something more than just self-interested individuals. In this case, we need a higher education policy that emphasizes the need for wellrounded, thoughtful citizens.

ජෝකර්ලා උපකුලපතීන් වූ විට

Gad Fly Zone, 05/12/2011

රජරට විශ්වවිද්‍යාලයේ වෛද්‍ය පීඨ සිසුන් තම අධ්‍යාපන කටයුතු සඳහා මහාචාර්ය ඒකකයක් දෙන මෙන් ඉල්ලා කරන සටන තුල පසුගිය සතියේදී සිසුන් හය දෙනෙකුට පංති තහනම් විය.ඒ එහි උපකුලපති මහාචාර්ය නන්දසේන ප්‍රාණ ඇපයට ගත්තා යැයි කියමිනි.
ඇත්තෙන්ම සිසුන් එසේ කලා නම් වැරදිය. වැ‍රැදි දෙයට වැ‍රැදි යැයි කීමට අප පසු බට නොවමු. මහාචාර්ය නන්දසේන ප්‍රාණ ඇපයට ගෙන හෝ නොගෙන ඔහුගෙන් මහාචාර්ය ඒකක හෝ වෙන යම් දෙයක් හෝ ඉල්ලීම වැරදිය.ඔහුගෙන් යමක් ඉල්ලීම ඉබ්බන්ගෙන් පිහා‍ටු ඉල්ලීමක් බඳුය. ඉබ්බන්ගෙන් පිහා‍ටු ඉල්ලීම වැ‍රැද්දක් පමණක් නොව ජෝක් එකක්ද වෙයි.
පේරාදෙණිය කෘෂිවිද්‍යා පීඨයේ ගුරුවරයෙකු වන මහාචාර්ය නන්දසේන රජරට උපකුලපති ධූරය ලබා ගන්නේ ඉහලම තැන සිට පහලම තැන දක්වා වූ දේශපාලකයින් රොත්තක් පසුපස බඩගා යමින් ,ඔවුනගේ පා ලෙව කමින්, ඔවුනට සකලවිධ දාසකම් කරමිනි.ඔහු මේ දේශපාලකයින්ට පමණක් නොව ඔවුන්ගේ ඈතින් නෑයනට, හිතමිත්‍රාදින්ට , නිවෙස්වල මෙහෙකරුවන්ට පවා තෑගි බෝග පිදුවේය. බෝජන සංග්‍රහ පැවත්වුයේය. ඔහු තනතුර ලබා ගත්තේ එලෙසය.
එසේ කඹුරා උපකුලපති තනතුර ලබා ගත් දා සිට උග්‍ර රාජපක්ෂ වාදියෙක් විය,සුවච කීකරු සේවකයෙක් විය. රයන්නක් දු‍ටුවත් අසුනෙන් නැගිට වැඳ වැටෙන තරම් රාජපක්ෂ බැතිමතෙක් විය. ඔහු නිරන්තරයෙන්ම කල්පනා කරන්නේ තම හාම්පුතුන් සතු‍ටු කරන්නේ කෙසේද යන්නයි.ඒ නීතියට බාහිරව වැඩිපුර මාස කිහිපයක් හෝ තනතුරේ ‍රැඳී සිටීම සඳහා ය.
රාජපක්ෂ රෙජිමය තම පසුගිය අයවැයෙන් රටේ අධ්‍යාපනයට වෙන් කර තිබූ මුදල තව දුරටත් කප්පාදු කලේය. ඔවුනට විශ්වවිද්‍යාල අධ්‍යාපනය නගා සි‍ටුවීම සඳහා ඇම්මක් නැත. ආණ්ඩුවේ සියලු පිඹුරු පත් සැකසෙන්නේ අධ්‍යාපනය විකිණීම වෙනුවෙනි. එහෙව් වූ ආණ්ඩුවකට රජරට වෛද්‍ය ශිෂ්‍ය්‍යයන්ට මහාචාර්ය ඒකක දීමට තදියමක් නැත. දුන්නත් නමට මහාචාර්ය ඒකකයක් මිස වෛද්‍ය අධ්‍යාපනයේ ප්‍රමිතියට ගැලපෙන අංග සම්පූර්ණ එකක් නම් නොවේ.
ඒ නිසා ආණ්ඩුවට අවශ්‍ය සිසුන්ගේ ඉල්ලීමසපුරන, ඒවා සිසුන් හා එක්ව තමන්ට ඉද්‍රිරිපත් කරමින් කරදර කරන සරසවි පාලකයින් නොව ,එම ඉල්ලීම ගෙන එන සිසුන් දංගෙඩියට දක්කන නිවටයින්ය. තම තනතුරු ‍රැක ගැනීමට නම් ආණ්ඩුව කියන පරිදි කටයුතු කළ යුතු බව ඔවුන් දනී. එසේ නොකළහොත් සිසුන් සමග තම බෙල්ලත් දංගෙඩියට තැබීමට සිදු වන බවත් ඔවුන් හොඳාකාරවම දනී.අනික් අතට නන්දසේනලා බඳු මිනිසුන් සිසුන් වෙනුවෙන් එවැනි කැප කිරීම් කරනු ඇතයි සිතීමද විහිලුවකි.
තම ඉල්ලීම් මහාචාර්ය නන්දසේනලා වෙතින් දිනා ගත හැකි වේ යැයි සිතීම ඉබ්බන්ගෙන් පිහා‍ටු ඉල්ලීමක් බඳු යැයි අප කියන්නේ එබැවිනි.

The Budget, Populist Politics and the Neoliberal Economy

The Island, December 3, 2011, 5:42 pm


by Ahilan Kadirgamar

The Budget for 2012 was more or less as expected. The Rs 1.6 trillion (US$ 14.5 billion) Budget, a 14% increase on the previous Budget, represents approximately one-fifth of Sri Lanka’s expected GDP. The substance of the Budget for the most part continues from last year; it outlines the incomes of some 1.1 million public sector employees and lays out the allocations for services including health, education, poverty alleviation and other benefits for targeted constituencies. The Budget also builds on the major shift last year on tax, banking and finance reform. As with the Rajapaksa government’s emphasis since 2006, government expenditure is heavily weighted towards infrastructure development.


What does this Budget mean for the economic welfare of the larger population? Is there a neoliberal logic reflected in the Budget? Can the economy withstand the volatile global financial markets?


Ideological Moves and the Confluence of Finance, Security and Development


President Rajapaksa’s Budget Speech was characterized by skilful rhetoric and populist measures that masked the neoliberal logic at work in shaping Sri Lanka’s economic future. First, there was lip service towards the Left, claiming his lineage from Left leaders of the post-Independence era including Philip Gunawardena, S A Wickramsinghe, N M Perera and Colvin R De Silva. He went further in attributing Sri Lanka’s misery: "This nation was placed on to a very destructive path from 1977. The path was overshadowed by neo liberal economic policies on the one hand and separatist terrorist activities, on the other." While the President has consistently mentioned the destruction brought on by the war and the LTTE, this explicit reference to neoliberalism is unique. Perhaps this anti-neoliberal assertion is made to pre-empt any class critique of the Government’s economic policies—despite the strengthening of the regime’s relationship with neoliberal institutions such as the IMF and World Bank after the war.


The President stated in the Budget Speech, that his first term vision was "to ensure a rural centric development strategy." His election manifesto for the second term was presented "to place the country on a path of rapid economic development." Some critics of the Government, including myself, have maintained that the current economic policies are a continuation of the major shift inaugurated by the neoliberal policies of the Jayewardene regime in 1977. The post-war years, coinciding with the President’s second term, have seen the acceleration of neoliberal policies centred on financialization. Thus "rapid economic development" has in effect meant a second wave of neoliberal policies, beginning in 2010, with a distinct shift towards urbanization with an emphasis on the tourist industry.


Beneath such political claims, the Budget ultimately is about allocation of state resources. Here, the Rajapaksa regime, including the President, his brother the Minister of Economic Development and his other brother the Defence Secretary, control the following ministries: Finance and Planning, Ports and Highways, Civil Aviation, Economic Development, and Defence and Urban Development. The total allocation for these ministries is over a third of the Budget (39%). Furthermore, given the considerable centralization of policy making around the central actors of this regime, their control over most other ministries and a lion’s share of the Budget is a reality. The point here is that any political economic analysis of the current regime needs to grasp the confluence of finance, security and infrastructure development, which consist of the portfolios chosen by central actors of this regime. Indeed, the Rajapaksa regime, while claiming to champion the rural masses has only made measly allocations for agriculture and rural development, and the large allocation for the ministries they directly control including urban development betray their neoliberal biases.


Incomes, Inequalities and Exclusion


There has been criticism in the media about Budget allocation towards Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, amounting to a staggering Rs 230 billion. The limitation of such criticism is that the bulk of this allocation - as stated in the Budget - is for salaries and expenses of security forces personnel. Rather, what steps can be taken to reduce the size of the security forces and in parallel create jobs to absorb them in the civilian labour force? Furthermore, the more serious problem is the continuing militarization of state and society, including the merging of defence and urban development and increasing military encroachment into civil administration.


Others have been critical of populist handouts such as a Rs 100,000 grant to security forces personnel who have a third child. While such a handout to the security forces is ideologically problematic, there are also other populist measures targeting particular constituencies. The relatively large fertilizer subsidy amounting to Rs 40 billion to appease the Government’s rural political base through a network of patronage may further expand the black market in fertilizers instead of the requisite productivity increases in agriculture. Furthermore, who benefits from the 37,000 hectares of unproductive plantation land to be taken over and distributed as two acre plots for small holders? On the other hand, the subsidy for the poor in the form of Samurdhi of Rs 32 billion continues to be small despite the few hundred rupee increase this year. Such populist measures for targeted constituencies instead of change in agrarian policies, land reform or a robust process of poverty alleviation are characteristic of neoliberal regimes that appease their political base even as they dispossesses the larger citizenry of entitlements.


The Budget claims that the national economy is booming with 8% GDP growth and per capita GDP at US$ 2,800, with expectations of per capita GDP of US$ 4,000 and a GDP of US$ 100 billion by 2016. With heavy investment in infrastructure there is bound to be GDP growth. However, will such investments made with considerably high interest loans lead to sustainable growth, or will it lead to further debt and a future crisis? Next, there is no magic to the per capita GDP number; it is merely the GDP in US dollars divided by the population, which in rupee terms is Rs 308,000 per year or Rs 25,700 per month. Clearly, this means little for the larger population. The average income in 2010, according to a Census Department report, was Rs 9,104 per month. If one looks at the median income, to avoid averaging the extremes of wealth inequalities, it was lower at Rs 5,803. If one looks at the median income disaggregated by sector, those in the rural or estate sectors were even lower. The Samurdhi grant in the Budget for a small family is Rs 750. Thus the per capita GDP the Government boasts of is in fact reflective of the vast inequalities of a neoliberal economy.


There are major disparities in wealth and access to jobs along class lines, across the urban-rural divide and between the Western Province and other Provinces. However, the Budget has no program to address such inequalities and uneven development. After major increases in investment in infrastructures, including allocation for the national road network alone amounting to Rs 123 billion, there is a Rs 20 billion allocation "over the next three years with World Bank loan assistance, to execute urban and semi urban development activities." Compare these figures to the 6,000 School Development Project of Rs 2.5 billion and Thousand Hospital Development Project of Rs 1 billion.


Looking at public investment which is to benefit society in the future, the allocation is Rs 498 billion (6.6% of the GDP). Of this allocation only 9% of it is towards health and education, the rest of the 91% is mainly towards infrastructure development. Furthermore, the current policy trajectory is towards privatization of health and education; tax holidays have been extended to health and education to encourage private investment. While incomes have been historically low in Sri Lanka, the "quality of life" has been high due to universal health and education. Although there are clear benefits to the larger population with public investment in health and education, the same does not necessarily hold for investment in large scale infrastructure whether it is highways, ports or airports. Such infrastructure and the related services only benefit the upper classes and the tourists – after all who uses toll expressways and airports – reflecting the exclusion of the broader society with a neoliberal economy.


The Brutal Logic of Neoliberalism


Beyond the foreign remittances that accrue from migrant labour and the exploitative sectors of tea and textiles, the Government is mainly counting on the tourism sector to boost the economy. Indeed, the Budget provides duty free imports for vehicles for tourist services and multi-year tax holidays for large investments, which for the most part will be dominated by the tourist industry. Expectations of growth in tourism have become the rational for floating more debt in the form of sovereign bonds, the boom in the stock market and speculative real estate investment particularly in hotels. Thus the promotion of the tourist industry in recent years is linked to financialization central to a neoliberal economy.


The 2012 Budget continues to build on the 2011 Budget which initiated major tax reform and deregulation of the finance and banking sector. Domestic banks are encouraged to capitalize on foreign financing. The integration of domestic banking with global finance is meant to augment the inflow of global capital already characterized by foreign investment in real estate on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars and the opening up of capital markets including sovereign bonds and stock market capitalization on the order of billions of dollars. In many developing countries, labelled as "emerging markets", financial flows and real estate bubbles do go hand in hand, as global investors are assured of quick returns on their financial investment through real estate speculation. Over the last two years, Sri Lanka had the further advantage of being branded as a post-war economy, which added to the euphoria and drew more of the capital flowing to the "emerging markets" from the West affected by the economic crisis of 2008.


This was the context for the rapid rise of the Colombo Stock Exchange All Shares Index (CSE), which in May 2009 when the war ended was at 2000 and by February this year had reached 7500, almost quadrupling the value of assets with the inflow of global finance capital. However, in recent weeks it is has dipped below 6000, a fall of 20% to levels not seen since September 2010. While volatility in the stock market is hard to predict, there are some structural factors that can be analyzed. One, the boost in the stock market as a one-time post-war boom has now probably run its course.Second, there is fair amount of correlation between the fall of the CSE and capital flight from "emerging markets", reflecting how much Sri Lanka is susceptible to global forces.


The great risk of financialization is that capital can also flow out of the national economy triggered by many factors including the sudden fall in confidence of global investors. This is evident from the recent history of stock market crashes and severe economic crises in many "emerging markets." Another balance of payments problem for Sri Lanka, particularly if foreign reserves collapse with such capital flight, would probably mean bail out by the IMF with further conditions of austerity and cuts in social welfare. Such financial problems can also spread through the liberalized domestic banking sector down to the households and affect their savings. Ultimately, the consequences of the neoliberal economy will be borne by the people who neither had a say in it nor benefitted from it. That is the general worry about the current regime’s economic policies emphasizing large scale infrastructure development, tourism and investment in real estate, and the liberalization of the financial sector. In most countries, where this brutal logic of neoliberalism has played out, a strong security sector has been instrumental in repressing social forces that resist and struggle for social change. Indeed, that is the nexus of finance, security and development central to the current neoliberal regime in Sri Lanka.

Savitri sums up

The Island, November 12, 2011, 4:33 pm
I always read Dayan Jayatilekes newspaper articles with interest. I sometimes agree with his views, and sometimes I don’t. I am sorry that he thinks that my use of quotation marks for the word paramilitary created a wrong impression, and was an unfair distortion of his views. I did not take this word from his article. He has given a full text of the relevant passages in his response, and the reader can decide whether I distorted his views.
Rajiva Wijesinha is entitled to his views on what is right about the current university system, as I am entitled to mine. I would like to clarify that I was not in the university system at the time of the referendum of 1982, when he says he resigned from his post. I joined the Open University in August 1983.We had just returned after six years working overseas, and we had means of our own. My husband is a professional, and I did not need, as he suggests a university salary for family survival. My rationale for employment in a university, like for many others, was a matter of personal choice.


Working in a university at this time was a challenge. The horrendous violence I described in my article occurred in Peradeniya when I was Dean of a Faculty in the Open University (OUSL). We as university academics and administrators received death threats in anonymous individual telephone calls, and or written documents of "sannadda"(armed) groups. And yet some of us, including the late Rajini Thiranagama could meet as members of University Teachers For Human Rights (UTHR) on our own OUSL campus. The Vice Chancellor and the Chairman UGC at this time respected our right and our freedom to do so. We worked together as a team, with the academic community, to keep the University functioning, and this I believe contributed to our collective survival.


I do not wish to respond to the flourishes of Rajiva Wijesinha’s poison pen, his personal invective, and his misrepresentation of a casual conversation five or six years ago. Ironically this was a time when I as Chairperson, and he as a member of a Committee of the National Commission on Education, worked together with other colleagues on a draft of a new University’s Act which gave more rather than less autonomy to State Universities!

Savitri Goonesekere

“We need people we can abuse, exploit and then turn loose.” —Dean Ann Marcus,NYU, on how to hire adjunct professors in the School of Education*

*From a captured e-mail used for evidence in the case ofJoel Westheimer.

(Sent to uteachers.sl by AFTA)

STEAL THIS UNIVERSIT: 
THE RISE OF THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY
AND THE ACADEMIC LABOR MOVEMENT

Edited by Benjamin Johnson,
Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson

Not Your Parents’ University or
Labor Movement Any Longer

Myths and stereotypes die hard. So it is with academia—aworld that seems
so populated by stereotypes and myths as if to be literallyunreal. The images
are easy to conjure up: pipe-smoking, absentminded, tweedyprofessors
giving rambling lectures that echo within ivy-coveredbuildings secluded from
the rest of the world. For much of the public, theuniversity is disembodied,
abstract thought divorced from the lives of normal peopletrying to make a
living. The “community of scholars” is insular, protected,safe from all else.
The walls around it are both literal and metaphorical.University leaders—
seemingly stuck in the genteel values of the past—look downupon the world
of mammon and disdain efficiency in favor of older,classical values. Students
pursue questions soon forgotten as they assume the responsibilitiesand
demands of jobs in what so many call the “real world.”

The culture wars of the 1990s added to the pool of academicstereotypes.
Listen to conservative cultural critics and you imagine themodern
university a haven for left-wing wackos, snobbishly out oftouch with the
beliefs of most Americans. Academics are the type that theright-wing populist
George Wallace complained about during the late1960s—“pointy headed
intellectuals who can’t park their bikes straight.” It’sjust that now these
pointy heads are searching out the politically incorrectthoughts of their
students. Or they blather on about deconstruction, feminism,or Marxism
in a language that few care to understand. The humanists mayhave been
displaced by politicos, but still academic conversationsstay behind ivy-
covered walls. They have nothing to do with the realities ofAmerican
society, we are told. Academics care only about the realmsof culture and
language—those abstract realms that they themselves inhabit.

Certainly these stereotypes exist in reality; there reallyare absentminded
professors and politically correct ones to boot. But tofocus on them would
be to overlook the enormous sea changes that have takenplace in academia
over the past twenty years. We now live in a time when thewalls between
the “real world” and academia have fallen down. Professorsare no longer
comfortable or tweedy (in the deeper sense of that term);they increasingly
take the form of underpaid graduate students or part-timeadjuncts rushing
from one university to the next. The professoriate is not a“community of
scholars” that governs itself; rather its work is reviewedby administrators
who chant “accountability” while throwing merit pay rewardsat those lucky
enough to have full-time jobs. University leaders don’tsneer at the profit
seekers at their gates; rather they welcome them with openarms, cutting
deals and pioneering high-tech schemes that put coursesonline, packaged
cheaply for worldwide consumption. Welcome to academia,twenty-firstcentury
style.

Of course, some might argue that the business imperative hasalways
invaded the hallowed halls of academia. Toward the end ofthe nineteenth
century, social critic Thorstein Veblen noted that those whogave their
dollars to the universities—the Gilded Age wealthy whosought out new
forms of conspicuous consumption—did so in order to build uptheir
reputations. They wanted their names on buildings, theirreputations
bolstered by being connected to genteel institutions ofhigher learning. If
some professor espoused radical politics, the pressure mightbe turned on,
and said professor would hit the pavement. Trustees calledthe shots, no
doubt, making clear that wealth spoke clearly and audibly inthe hallowed
halls of academia even a century ago.

Today, business leaders have gone one step further. Theywant to assert
not just influence but much more control over theeducational processes
themselves, and understanding this transition is crucial.Our au courant
jetsetting business types concern themselves not just withconspicuous
consumption but with direct management of education on theirown terms:
They don’t want ivory-covered buildings with their names onthem but
rather training camps for their workforce. They probablydon’t even care
all that much if nutty left-wing profs shoot their mouthsoff. They’ve got
more important things on their minds, namely what the newmanagerial
theorists call “just in time” knowledge. Corporate leaderswant their
employees to gain knowledge now, immediately, not on theplodding terms
set by the ivory tower of yesteryear but the terms set bycorporations,
providing only enough knowledge for their employees to gettheir jobs
done, not to ask fundamental questions about the society inwhich they
live. If need be, corporations will do the educatingthemselves (but, for
obvious reasons, still prefer others to float the costs). Inhis Free Agent Nation,
a manifesto for today’s new economy, Daniel Pink glorifiesthe radiant
promises of distance learning—the selling of courses onlineby for-profit
educational institutions. “More free agent teachers and morefree agent
students,” he writes, “will create tremendous liquidity inthe learning market—
with the Internet serving as the matchmaker and market makerfor this
marketplace of learning.”1 The use of the term “market”three times in a
single sentence tells us something about the demands thatthe new economy
is putting on higher education. The message is clear: Solong, ivy-covered
walls, tweedy professors, and genteel universitypresidents—hello to markets,
profits, and computers.

If you want to get a better sense of this, just read aboutJohn Sperling,
CEO of the Apollo Group, the parent company of theUniversity of Phoenix.
He’s no Rockefeller who hands out money to the University ofChicago
and then sits back and waits for the prestige to rise; thisis a man who
wants to call the shots—down to ensuring that his temporaryteachers make
next to nothing and have no say in course content as theyconduct job
training that is shamefacedly called higher education.Sperling is not someone
who hopes to lift up his name by attaching it to aninstitution of genteel
culture; this is a man who would probably like to dynamitethe universities
that still exist physically (those like Rockefeller’sUniversity of Chicago)
and replace them with for-profit entities. Sperlingsymbolizes the
revolutionary power of market thinking in terms of the worldof higher
education.

This love affair between the market and higher education hashelped
prompt some within academia to rethink their status aslaborers and their
relation to labor unions. Once again, noticing historicalchanges that have
taken place is crucial. Sure, there have been professionalassociations and
faculty unions since the early twentieth century, butthey’ve often been old
boy networks, looking out for the academic freedom of aselect few.
Historically, organizations like the American Association ofUniversity
Professors (AAUP) stepped into occasional politicaldisputes, sanctioning
schools for threatening the professoriate’s civil libertiesin time of war, for
instance. Today, academic unions might still be concernedwith academic
freedom, but the terms have changed. The threat is no longeran occasional
war or political crisis, but the ever present pressures ofcorporatization.
Now unions are fighting for academic freedom, plus some muchmore
basic needs—pay that can put food on the table, health-carebenefits. You
will read in this collection how graduate students organizedthemselves into
unions precisely because they stopped thinking of themselvesas teaching
apprentices taking their first step into a community ofscholars. Rather,
they think of them selves as employees—recognizing theeconomic imperatives
that recent academic reforms have made brutally clear. Theworld of tweedy
profs and culture wars seems to have faded.

This book explores this sea change in academia—the rise ofthe corporate
university and an academic labor movement. For readersinterested in
learning more about academia—that is, readers not part ofthis world—this
book can highlight significant changes; it can tell yousomething about the
reality of contemporary academic life, breaking through themyths that
have dominated so much current debate. For those concernedwith the
future of progressive politics, this book offers a new lookat how some
within academia are thinking about this future (and it maysurprise some to
find an emphasis on Old Left concerns with socioeconomicinequalities, not
just cultural problems). For those working within academia,we are certain
that this book will strike a chord but that it may alsochallenge you to see
things differently. For those who have faced the brunt ofthese changes—
especially graduate students doing the bulk of teaching atmany institutions
or those adjuncts paid next to nothing for their travails(and travels)—we
hope this book inspires you to think about ways to improveyour situation.
But be warned: We are not cheerleaders. We don’t just tellhow the good
guys always win. Since they don’t, we talk about academiclabor’s defeats
as well as its victories. We make clear that organizingwithin the corporate
university is an uphill battle.

To appeal to this wide range of readers, we have organizedthis anthology
as follows. We open with a section on the changing world ofacademia,
stressing the importation of corporate practices into theuniversity. We
then move onto a section documenting how these changesaffect those who
work here and close with descriptions of labor conflictsthat have erupted.
Section 1 tries to make clear just how much the ethic ofprofit has invaded
the university. It opens with Ana Marie Cox’s essay aboutthe rise of for-
profit universities that increasingly turn educationprocesses into
commodities bought and sold on the market. Cox’s essay is aprime example
of an older style of journalism that seems waningtoday—namely,
muckraking. She digs up the ways in which for-profiteducation leaders
have wielded influence in Washington to get what they wantand how, in
the process, they have degraded our conception of highereducation. After
introducing the reader to the literal meaning of thecorporate university, we
then reprint an essay that has become something of a classicamong academic
labor activists—David Noble’s “Digital Diploma Mills,” whichdiscusses the
perils of distance learning. Noble shows that by puttingcourses online,
administrators can easily commodify teaching and manageteaching (the
way the University of Phoenix has). The next two essaysextend from
Noble’s critique of the de-skilling of the professoriate andthe evisceration
of faculty control over their own labor. Denise Tanguaydissects the rise of
merit pay systems, showing how they increase managerialcontrol over
faculty members. Benjamin Johnson then makes clear just howfar the
“part timing” of America’s teaching force has gone. As hesuggests, the full-
time tweedy professor is now truly a thing of the past,replaced by a pool
of underpaid contingent laborers with little, if any,benefits and no job
security.

The essays in section 1 use historical and sociologicalapproaches to
understand changes wrought in academia. But this is only apart of the
story. Historical changes affect real, living people, associal historians have
been telling us for years.2 So it is with the restructuringof academia. This
is, of course, partially obvious. When full-time jobs arereplaced by part-
time jobs, for instance, some people cannot find work. Butmuch more
happens. There’s the scramble to make ends meet, doing whatcan be done
to put food on the table, as Alexis Moore documents sopainstakingly. The
lives of adjunct professors are structured around the needto accept the
terms of those doling out bit jobs. This is no victory for“free agents” as
Daniel Pink would have it; it is a hard life of travelingfrom one teaching
gig to the next, patching together a meager salary andexpending a great
deal of personal energy and gas doing so. When this happens,one’s
consciousness changes. In academia today, a new generationof young scholars
are not just finding it harder to locate decent work, theyare changing the
way they think about themselves. It might once have beeneasy for professors
to see themselves as different from the rest of America’sworking population,
as white collar and privileged, as the sort who work withtheir heads rather
than their hands. But for someone like Kevin Mattson, thisdistinction
makes little sense today. The changing circumstances of workin the modern
academy are such that academics see themselves increasinglyas workers.
This change in consciousness—felt, lived, experienced ineveryday life—goes
a long way in explaining the energy and anger that sustainthe new academic
labor movement.

This anger has generated conflicts among those who workwithin
academia. Perhaps most explicitly, it has destroyed theideal of teaching
apprentices learning from their mentors. Nothing makes thisclearer than
the story Corey Robin tells. As he points out in his essayon the drive
among Yale graduate students to get a union, the terms offull-time teaching
can implicate people in unfair systems that prompt theirworst behavior.
Robin shows how full-time faculty often turned on the verysame people
they were supposed to be mentoring, even writing letters ofrecommendation
for prospective employers that chastised their students. Aworse fate can
await those who have the courage to side with their graduatestudents.
Witness the story of Joel Westheimer. Testifying on behalfof graduate
students organizing at New York University (NYU), Westheimerfound
himself fired—denied tenure by the very same people who justmonths
before his testifying were singing his praises.

Westheimer’s story makes for a nice transition into section3, which
tries to show how people caught within this new academicsystem can in
fact do something about it. Westheimer’s story shows thestakes of these
struggles, as do the opening essays in section 3. LisaJessup documents the
long and hard struggle to win rights for NYU’s graduatestudents—the
struggle Westheimer was supporting. She makes clear thatuniversity leaders
have clued into what’s happening and have garnered hiredguns willing to
crush union drives, precisely the sort of highly paidorganizations that
helped quash a struggle at the University of Minnesota.Telling this story,
Michael Brown and his colleagues explain just how difficultorganizing can
be, even in the seemingly free and open world of academia ina state with
a strong presence of organized labor.

The union drives at NYU and Minnesota sought to organizegraduate
student teaching assistants at individual institutions. Manyacademic labor
activists are starting to move beyond this approach in orderto find wider
forums in which to make their case. Cary Nelson argues thatdisciplinary
associations need to become places where full-timeprofessors can articulate
the need to confront the problems of academicunderemployment. Of
course, this relies upon struggle, debate, contention, and,ultimately,
negotiation and making what were once simply “networking”and
professional associations into voices of criticism. But whatNelson’s argument
makes clear is the widening perspective of academic labor activists,as does
the struggle documented by Barbara Gottfried and Gary Zabelin their
discussion of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor(COCAL). These
activists try to expand beyond isolated drives on differentcampuses (and
even among different types of employees) within the Bostonarea. In other
words, they are trying to put the word “movement” back intothe labor
movement by building broad popular support for what mightotherwise
become localized struggles. Because a more just system at oneuniversity
doesn’t entail justice at another, a network and coalitionapproach is utterly
necessary. We end this section with a discussion of theCalifornia Faculty
Association, a union representing a broad coalition ofemployees in the
nation’s largest state university system. Susan Meisenheldermakes clear
that the union has not only struggled to better theconditions of its members
but has also tried to change the terms of debate about thefuture of higher
education in this country.

And that is the purpose of this book: to make a new entryinto the
debate about the future of higher education in America andwhat role the
academic labor movement has in shaping this debate. Anycritical reader of
these essays will notice that the authors carry on a debateamong themselves.
We have collected a diverse set of writers; all of themspeak from experience
with the conditions they describe rather than as “experts”in some theory
of education or administration. Some, like Cox, are journalistswho have
covered the world of academia for a variety of magazines;others are fulltime
or part-time academics trying to get along in this oftenstrange world; and
some are organizers working within unions and professionalassociations to
win a voice for those who have been screwed over by thesystem. Beyond
this diversity, our authors come to differing conclusionsabout the problems
addressed. For instance, Ana Marie Cox argues for professorsto stop
clinging to tenure as a solution—one of the most well-knownand controversial
higher education practices—so as to embrace more fullycollective bargaining.
But Benjamin Johnson sees tenure as defensible and as partof a larger
attempt to defend not just academic freedom but jobsecurity. Though
they may disagree, they both want to look beyond tenure fornew ways to
confront the problems at hand.

Another tension is with the ways in which authorscharacterize how far
corporatization has gone—that is, how much room is left forstruggle. At
times, David Noble suggests that de-skilling has almostfully transformed
the university, yet he documents how faculty havesuccessfully fought it.
Ana Marie Cox argues that the for-profit spirit has capturednumerous
institutions and has spread far beyond what it was fiveyears ago, but she
too believes that something can be done about it. If youlook at the cold
hard numbers that Benjamin Johnson presents—60 percent ofthe teaching
is now done by contingent teachers—the struggle to improveacademic labor
conditions would seem hopeless. Still, while presentinggloomy prognoses,
the authors resist talking about academia as if it were some“one-dimensional
society,” to use Herbert Marcuse’s term. In fact, most ofthem recover a
vision of education that stresses democratic processes andcritical self-insight.
Though this vision may have been suppressed, none of usthinks it useless
to resuscitate it in protest against what’s happening today.Just how much
can be done with it, of course, is still open to debate.

There are other tensions throughout this book, but there’sno need to
spell them out here. A diversity of viewpoints is a centralindicator that a
social movement has reached a certain level of maturity.That seems to be
the case with the academic labor movement. Disagreement anddebate
need to be aired, if only to show that the movement ishealthy and vibrant.
So long as those debates help a wider public think morecritically about the
future of higher education, then the movement has obtainedthe first step
in a longterm strategy.

If the academic labor movement has something to teach usabout the
future of higher education, we also believe it needs tolearn from and teach
the wider labor movement. After all, the academic labormovement emerged
at an opportune moment in organized labor’s history. Sincethe 1970s,
labor unions have been losing members and influence. Whatlabor historians
call “business unionism” provided services for thoseorganized in certain
industries (automobile manufacturing, steel production,mining, etc.), but
those industries have become less and less important to theoverall economy
as service sector work has replaced America’s industrialbase. One result of
all this is that unions became stereotyped as things of thepast, relics of an
industrial era gone by. Steelworkers may have needed unions,but fast-food
fry chefs and computer programmers don’t—or so the reasoningwent.

The academic labor movement shows this up for what it is:ideological
reasoning. Sure, unions haven’t scored too many victories inthe service
sector. But this is not the same thing as saying thatemployees are banishing
unions from the public consciousness (social researchersconstantly point
out that when polled, many Americans openly embraceunionization).
The terrain has shifted, as “flexibility” and “contingency”have made
things harder. But gradually the union movement is startingto think
more creatively about these changes in order to find newways to inject
some equality back into the picture. Some activists arereturning to older
models of craft unionism—such things as “hiring halls andemployment
bureaus,” as one author describes them. Instead of focusingon individual
firms through which contingent employees are moving in andout faster
and faster, labor activists are trying to create a “unionismemphasizing
cross-firm structures and occupational identity.”3 This newdirection—one
that can truly grapple with increased contingency—is seenevocatively in
the COCAL example discussed in section 3. Academic laboractivists are
pioneering some new ways of organizing, and they are showingthat white-
collar employees—and those with advanced degrees at that—donot see
unions as dinosaurs or things of the past. For thesereasons, academic
labor activists have a lot to learn from the labor movement,both in
historical and contemporary terms—including a sense thatunions can
emerge where you least expect them.

In identifying with white-collar unionization, the editorsof this anthology
(if not necessarily all its writers) identify with a broadertradition of activism
among middle-class citizens. Historically, it’s been fairlyeasy for social critics
to assume that the middle class is stupid, self-interested,complacent, and
conformist. This tendency has created some provocativesocial criticism,
but it has also allowed us to forget that the middle classesoften face some
of the worst aspects of socioeconomic change. For instance,deskilling, loss
of control over one’s work life, job insecurity—these arethings that all
workers in America face today, white collar and otherwise.As this anthology
makes clear, white-collar employees face them in distinctways that can
prod us to think more critically about their ramifications.Additionally, the
problems of the professoriate are linked to the problems ofdoctors struggling
against the bottom-line mentality of HMOs and the problemsof writers
struggling to negotiate a world in which the Internet hastransformed
traditional meanings of intellectual property rights. Thoughwhite-collar
employees feel the brunt of these changes in peculiar ways,this is no excuse
for them to separate themselves from the plight of otherworkers. Indeed,
if a Ph.D. can no longer save you from mistreatment andabuse, then it is
time for the idea of middle-class exceptionalism to betossed into the dustbin
of historical clichés. The academic labor movement makesthis clear.

Very often, middle-class activists focus on problems faraway from home.
Some might argue this is a legacy of the student movementagainst the
Vietnam War, a movement that centered on universities.Middle-class student
activists today are very worried about the plight of thosewithin the Third
World. Who could deny the importance of struggles againstThird World
poverty or child labor? Nonetheless, sometimes protestingconditions halfway
across the world becomes abstract; worse yet, sometimes itleads middle-
class people to forget the injustices that exist right infront of their noses.
Confronting practices closer to home is often harder thanprotesting
problems across the globe. At the same time, the strugglesto improve the
global relations of universities—how they act as consumersof goods—is
clearly connected to how they treat their own employees.

As this final note makes clear, this is a book about thestrange world of
academia and how it has shaped the lives of those who workwithin it. It is
a book by and about a movement trying to shape the future ofthis peculiar
world. Recognizing the peculiarity of this world is crucial,but it can also
become limiting. After all, we believe that the universityholds an enormous
promise—the promise of facilitating the processes ofdemocratic education,
critical thinking, self-examination, and debate. A goodeducation ensures
that citizens will have the skills necessary to governthemselves, to participate
in making their world a better one. If we don’t protecthigher education
from becoming job training in the narrowest sense of thatterm, if we don’t
ensure that citizens have access to full-time qualityteaching, if we don’t
carve out spheres of life safe from the pressures of profitand money, we
cheat our democracy of its future. As we believe thisanthology makes
clear, nothing less than the link between democracy andeducation is at
stake in the struggle between the academic labor movementand the
corporate university.