Harry Targ
Filmmaker Ken Burns graduated from small liberal
arts Hampshire College in 1971. The college announced its permanent closure
next fall. "Hampshire College is woven into the very fabric of who I
am," Burns said. "This is an incalculable loss, the reverberations of
which will be felt in ways none of us can imagine" (CBS
Boston, April 14, 2026)
While Hampshire College is a small liberal arts
college its demise, the warnings of the closing of other private universities (almost
a fourth of some 1,700 are expected to close within the next decade), and the
radical reconfigurations of major public universities, such as the state
universities in Indiana, suggest a fundamental crisis in higher education. This
crisis today is one in which narrow business and political interests replace hundreds
of years of the development of wholistic knowledge (science, technology,
philosophy, literature, and social science). The knowledge, wisdom, and value
systems of whole generations of young people will be lost as powerful economic
and political actors transform the worldwide valued resource of the United
States, its educational system.
Historical Analyses
According to Clyde Barrow, (Universities and the
Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American
Higher Education. 1894-1928, The University of Wisconsin Press,
1990) the modern university had its roots in the period of rising capitalism
after the Great Depression of the 1870s to the 1890. Mergers created an
economic system in which a few hundred corporations and banks came to dominate
the entire U.S. economy. Interlocking directorates of corporations and banks
created a system of financial speculation, concentrated wealth, and a
capitalist state. The capitalist state through pro-corporate and banking
regulations, the allocation of tax and other benefits for the wealthy and powerful,
and military mobilizations, such as President Cleveland’s use of the United
States army to crush workers during the Pullman strike of 1894, helped create
twentieth century monopoly capitalism.
Higher education, once dominated by theological
pursuits, was refashioned to serve the needs of modern capitalist society. The
need for scientific and technical skills coupled with a trained work force
stimulated the establishment of educational institutions that could produce
credentialed graduates who would serve the capitalist system. Also, theoretical
work and classroom education were required to educate the young to celebrate
the blessings of the economic system and the conduct of the government. Young
people learned about the desirability of market economies, the country’s long
tradition of democratic institutions, and the manifest destiny of the United
States as it conquered the North American continent and established a global
empire from the Philippine Islands to Cuba, to Central and South America.
Barrow provides data to show that members of
university Boards of Trustees, the key decision makers in these institutions,
came largely from big corporations, huge banks, and law firms which served big
business. Some universities from the Midwest and South were led by trustees who
represented regional manufacturing and finance capital, but their outlook and
interests paralleled those from the major universities of the Northeast and the
major state universities. There were never representatives of broader citizens
groups such as labor unions on these boards.
During the early twentieth century, Trustees worked to
establish an administrative class that could carry out the day-to-day
operations of the university and manage the faculty who were the producers of
the mental products the university was assigned to produce. Managerial
procedures were adopted to control mental labor in the classroom and the
laboratory. Metrics were institutionalized to evaluate the rates of
productivity of the faculty, from measuring enrollments, publications, and the
rankings of the university.
Federal and state governments and foundations funded the construction of a national university system that would serve the interests of twentieth century capitalism. Major foundations generated studies, did surveys, and made recommendations that found their way into institutions and policies of both public and private universities. During periods when domestic crises, such as depressions, and international ones, such as World War I, stimulated critical analyses from universities, faculty were disciplined or fired for challenging the economic system or state policy. The educational mission was to serve the interests of the capitalist elites and the state, not to provide a venue for critical thinking and debate about issues important to society.
Barrow summarized his findings about higher education:
“Individual institutions were developing
into centralized corporate bureaucracies administered according to nationally
standardized measurements of productivity and rates of return on investment.
The entire educational enterprise was being restructured within these standards
as a production process that was increasingly integrated into local or regional
markets for labor, information, research and professional expertise. The
process was more and more a planned undertaking directed by the federal government.
The construction of a national ideological state apparatus oriented toward
solving the problems of capitalist infrastructure, capital accumulation, and
political leadership within a capitalist democracy was well under way.” (123)
The Crisis of Higher Education
If we continue the narrative from the period Barrow
studies, we can identify the growth in higher education in the post-war United
States economy, sometimes referred to as the “golden age.” After World War II
economic priorities shifted to stimulating manufacturing, mass production and
consumption, creating consumer and military demand, the expansion of education,
and the provisioning of opportunities for higher education.
Higher education became affordable for middle class
Americans. War veterans had access to education via the GI Bill. Whole
educational systems were constructed in big states like New York and
California. Systems of community colleges were established to provide
opportunities for poorer and part-time students. The size of faculties
increased dramatically. Professional associations and journals increased to
facilitate credentialing of new generations of faculty.
And in response to uprisings in the 1960s over war,
racism, and student rights, universities expanded educational programs to
overcome traditional “canons” of scholarship and education that left out the
examination of the experiences of masses of people (particularly native people,
people of color, women, workers, immigrants). The post-war economy boomed and
so did higher education.
However, economic stagnation (nationally and globally) began in the 1970s. Rates of profit declined. Consumption could not match production. Governments no longer could allocate sufficient resources to fund public programs (a political problem) and those who were critics of modern social democracies marshalled their wealth and political muscle to challenge the vary premises of public policy.
By the late 1970s, Democrats as well as Republicans
began to endorse government policies (internationally and domestically) that
called for declining government support for social programs; deregulating
finance, manufacturing, and markets; the privatization of public institutions
and programs and reducing support for higher education and tuition costs. The
policy agenda and this latest phase of capitalism was called neoliberalism.
Some commentators refer to the economic policies adopted in the era of
neoliberalism as “austerity.”
Below the political radar the billionaire Koch
Brothers established The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the
early 1970s to support client state legislators, create “expert” think tanks on
various policy issues, write model legislation on subjects as varied as health
care, labor issues, creating charter schools, and transforming higher
education. The neoliberal agenda, as was said, was endorsed to varying degrees
by both political parties, and was most effectively institutionalized in state governments.
(Sometime in the late 1980s I heard Rush Limbaugh
celebrate on his radio show the neoliberal victories that had been achieved but
he declared that the one institution “we” had not been able to shape and
control was the university. And that has been the project endorsed by ALEC,
state legislators, rightwing advocacy groups, and university administrators all
across the nation).
As an essay by Anthony Paul Farley in an
issue of Academe suggests:
“Recent struggles over higher education
have taken place on the terrain of austerity, where a new ‘business’ model of
higher education has called for the dramatic reduction of labor costs through
such means as the elimination of tenure and the replacement of full-time
academics with adjuncts. The idea of higher education as a public good has, it
seems, very little purchase in the discourse of austerity.
Everything that can be measured is measured. Money becomes the measure of all things. This metaphysics of austerity has consequences for things not measurable in monetary terms. If the value of academic discipline cannot be measured in such terms, then it does not exist.” (https://www.aaup.org/article/austerity-and-academic-freedom).
Starving the Beast: Cutting Support for
Higher Education
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, argued that
during periods of economic or political crisis, changes have been introduced to
weaken government and the maintenance of public services. The Center for Budget
and Policy Priorities documented years ago that the deep recession of 2008-2011 was an
occasion for ALEC and the politicians and educators they support to reduce
resources available for higher education. Despite the long history of
government support for higher education, public schools from kindergarten
through high school, libraries, roads, and police and fire-fighting services,
the recession offered the occasion for influential and wealthy elites to
pressure for policies that reduced state financial support for public services
and a shift toward their privatization.
In addition, universities became even more dependent
on big corporations, banks, and the military. Finally, tuition
increased and students had to pay a higher share of the cost of their
education. The austerity programs supported by both parties which began in the
1970s, were expanded in the 1980s and 90s (both Reagan and Clinton eras), and
have deepened dramatically in the era of Trump and his allies in state governments
today.
This brief history contradicts the articulated history of public education, including higher education. Traditionally education has been deemed a public good. The land grant system of public higher education was instituted in 1862. From then until the recent recession, public colleges and universities educated large percentages of the young and generated much of the scientific and technical knowledge that stimulated the U.S. economy, based on substantial public support and low student tuition. Without a return to affordable publicly supported higher education, large proportions of young, intellectually curious, and talented students may be deterred from pursuing higher education which will have negative consequences for the entire society.
Impacts on Faculty
Along with putting roadblocks in place for faculty to
form unions, there has been a growing attack on the tenure system. Tenure means
job security. Tenure means that faculty cannot be arbitrarily fired. Tenure
means that after going through a period of performance and rigorous review,
faculty have some job protection. And tenure means that faculty, in a work
setting in which the free flow of ideas is vital, are protected from
controversy in their teaching and research. Abolishing tenure is a high
priority in higher education. The attack on the tenure system is both an attack
on job security and on the academic freedom of instructors to teach materials
they regard as relevant to their fields, irrespective of how controversial the materials
appear to politicians and pressure groups.
And, of course, there has been a qualitative decline
in the percentage of college and university classes taught by tenure or
tenure-track faculty and a concomitant rise in courses taught by graduate
students and adjuncts. As state legislatures reduce financial allocations of
resources, universities hire low paid adjuncts, often on a course-by-course
basis at extraordinary savings. Of course, if an adjunct gets to teach four
courses at more than one university, her/his time is spent traveling with
little time to keep up with relevant literature and do research which in the
long run reduces the chance for securing tenure-track employment.
On the Substance of Education. Discourse
and Contradiction in Higher Education: The University as “Contested Terrain”
It would be a mistake to leave the impression that all
that the university does is diabolical, even as it is shaped by and serves the
dominant economic and political interests in society. Within the confines
of what Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
(1962) called "normal science," researchers and educators have made
enormous contributions to society. But even this is not the whole story.
There emerged over the centuries and decades a view that this institution, the university, should have a special place in society. It should be, in a term Christopher Lasch used to refer to the family, "a haven in a heartless world." Through its seclusion, professors could reflect critically on their society and develop knowledge that could be productively used by society to solve human puzzles and problems. This view of higher education conflicts with the reality described above.
Historically, Galileo was punished by the Catholic
Church for communicating his knowledge to the broader citizenry of his day.
Hundreds of years later, scholars such as Scott Nearing who was fired for opposing
World War I, and over the years hundreds more were fired or censured for being
communists, eccentrics, radicals of one sort or another, or for challenging
accepted professional paradigms. Of particular virulence have been periods of
"red scares," when faculty who taught and/or engaged in activism
outside some mainstreams were labeled "communists," which by
definition meant they were traitors to the United States.
In response to the ideal of the free-thinking scholar
who must have the freedom to pursue her/his work, professional organizations
and unions embraced and defended the idea of "academic
freedom." Academic freedom proclaimed that researchers and teachers
had the right to pursue and disseminate knowledge in their field unencumbered
by political constraints and various efforts to silence them and their
work. To encourage young scholars to embrace occupations in higher
education and to encourage diversity of views, most universities in the United
States gave lip service to academic freedom and in the main have sought to
protect the principle in the face of attacks on the university in general and
controversial scholars in particular.
During periods of controversy and conflict in society at large, universities become "contested terrain." That is, external pressures on universities lead administrators to act in ways to stifle controversy and dissent. The targets of that dissent and their supporters, and students and colleagues at large, raise their voices to protest efforts to squelch it. Interestingly enough, the university, which on the one hand serves outside interests, on the other hand, prizes independence from outside interests
What Next?
In a 2010 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus made a series of proposals to address some of the crises of higher education today. Among the proposals these authors made were the following:
-Institute free higher education for all who seek it.
-Maintain course requirements that lead to knowledge in history, the arts,
sciences, and reasoned discourse.
-Provide secure full-time teaching jobs for every classroom. Eliminate the
system of staffing classrooms with graduate students and temporary adjuncts who
receive one-sixth the pay of the regular faculty.
-Pay presidents and other administrators salaries commensurate with public
employees, not CEOs of Wall Street banks and corporations.
In addition, with enduring economic stagnation coupled with rising gaps in the
distribution of income and wealth, education is offered as an escape route from
poverty. We need to broaden public discussion about our assumptions concerning
higher education, assessing its costs, accessibility, educational quality, and
workplace security. And we should raise our voices against the increasing
control of higher education by CEOs of huge corporations and banks, and
politicians.
And for faculty the task is to organize effective
political/lobby groups to defend the ideal of the university. In every college
and university setting discussion should be organized about the strengths and
weaknesses of the neoliberalism policy agenda, with particular emphasis upon
its consequences for higher education.
The University in the 21st Century
If the university is conceptualized as the site of “contested terrain,” as a place where ideas are debated and contested, and students and teachers alike connect these ideas to their activity in the world beyond the campus, then conceiving of the impacts only in terms of careers, job satisfaction, and vague references to “well-being” in terms of “purpose, social, physical, financial, and community” dimensions is too limited and simplistic. The university should be a place where traditional and non-traditional students are stimulated to develop a deeper understanding of the world and some sense of how it can be changed for the better.
In addition, the model of the university as
“contested terrain” is a communal one, involving teachers and students in the
ongoing collective struggle to better understand the world and conceptualize
ways to engage in it. AND for a brief time period, the 1960s, and the more
creative education that followed to our own day, the university has been a site for “contested
terrain.” That is the model of higher education that politicians and the
business class are seeking to eliminate today.
