(The post pandemic crisis has escalated the conflicts over the very character of higher education: substance, governance, employment, and specifically whether universities should address the ugliness of United States history as well as accomplishments. It does us well to revisit the issue of higher education and whose interests it serves).
Harry Targ
Since Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement almost every
institution in American life--financial, corporate, political party, media,
military, and religious--has appropriately become subject to scrutiny and
evaluation. In each case analysts and activists have begun to raise questions
about what these institutions look like, whose interests they serve, and how
they contribute to the well-being of society.
Until recently colleges and universities have been
largely above reproach. Research and education have been seen as the
cornerstone of American democracy and economic development.
Institutions of higher education have traditionally
performed four tasks in the service of maintaining and enhancing the
development of the other institutions referred to above. First, universities,
particularly since World War II, have provided research resources to
produce the products and technologies that have stimulated the capitalist
system. Often basic research has fed into major enterprises in society, from
promoting a global food system, to building sophisticated armies, to developing
new high speed systems of communication that maximize control of economies and
peoples. Major universities bring together talented research scholars and
public and private research dollars to create inventions that promote greater
control of nature and people and to expand profit.
Second, universities train work forces. Some
graduates will become the research scholars who will continue the tradition of
study and economic development to advance the economy and the polity further.
Others will be provided the skills to work in the private and public sectors to
carry out the work of institutional perpetuation. Corporate managers, computer
specialists, tourism experts, and employees in the public sphere are trained at
the modern university. And, increasingly universities train the soldiers who
will fight the wars that the United States continues to fight.
Third, universities provide an education that in the
main facilitates the transfer of legitimated knowledge to
consumers of that knowledge. Particular attention is given to the promotion of
a scientific worldview that reduces physical and social reality to a
multiplicity of “variables” that can be studied with statistical rigor.
Knowledge is primarily scientific knowledge.
Legitimated knowledge that is passed along to college
students also includes highly selective portraits of how economies work, what
constitutes democratic political institutions, and what constitutes standards
of quality in the arts. In subtle forms, universities pass along celebratory,
often uncritical, images of the society in which students live.
Finally, universities are credentialing
institutions. They reward students with degrees, recommendations, and honors,
which can be used as licenses to participate in the other institutions in
society. Even when political and economic elites receive prestigious degrees
through family connections, it is the degree that helps the accumulation of
power.
The four functions --research, training, legitimizing,
and credentialing--have changed concretely over time. For example, in the
United States, the development of the modern university paralleled the
industrial revolution. Prestigious universities, such as Harvard, initiated
modern departments at the dawn of the twentieth century replacing the primacy
of theology and law with economics, business administration, and industrial
engineering. Training in fields such as education was designed to create a
literate work force that could staff the factories of modern society. And
social sciences were created to develop theories that comported with industrial
development, such as Social Darwinism. These theories largely justified the
distribution of wealth and power within societies and in the international
system.
After World War II higher education took on vital
functions in new ways. The GI Bill funded college education for veterans to
train the scientists and managers of the new age. Also, higher education would
credential students to be placed in higher paying jobs so that they could earn
enough to buy the goods that a booming American economy was producing.
By the 1960s, higher education experienced enormous
growth. For University of California President Clark Kerr, the “multiversity”
was the institution critical for the development of a new global economy,
scientific and technological advances, and the invention of new tools to fight
the Cold War. In addition, social scientists and economists, studying
development, would generate theories to guide public policy, particularly in
poorer countries experiencing revolutionary ferment.
The massive growth in higher education from the 1960s
to the new century led to increased university budgets, higher tuition costs,
over-trained and underemployed college graduates, and a layer of overpaid
administrators who had taken over the operations of most universities from the
professor ranks. In addition, many non-professional workers at the university
kept universities operational and were paid a living wage with justifiably
secure benefits.
Now, in the midst of a deep economic crisis, political
and economic elites are lobbying to create new structures of power in higher
education while still supporting research, training, legitimating, and
credentialing. The approach that is increasingly promoted by political leaders,
educational foundations, and most important, Boards of Trustees of
universities, is what Kevin Phillips labeled “market fundamentalism.”
The market fundamentalist approach emphasizes cutting
public support for higher education and reducing financial support for
students, particularly underrepresented students. In other words, as opposed to
the era of the GI Bill, the operant vision is ultimately to reduce access to
higher education which will contribute to the increasing inequality in wealth
and income in the United States.
Also, market fundamentalism relies on the market to
induce “competition” to reduce costs among universities. It encourages new
profit-based universities that can sell college degrees cheaply, primarily by
substituting on-line courses for campus experienced-based education. In
addition, market fundamentalists call for forcing universities to make every
academic unit in the university pay for itself.
What is new about the crisis in higher education
today, what appointment of new presidents represents, is that economic and political elites wish to continue the
traditional functions of the university while reducing costs in higher
education.
They want to transfer continuing costs to students and
workers at the university.
They are working to streamline university education to
research on corporate agriculture, medicine, computer technology, military
developments, and allied fields.
And they want to cut educational programs that link
research, education, and community service. This may entail eliminating
programs that cannot be linked to the making of profit, such as in literature,
the arts, and various social sciences and cultural studies. This is probably
what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce meant when it warned of “growing skepticism
about whether those lucky enough to graduate have acquired the skills and
knowledge necessary for success in the 21st century economy.”
And finally, since politics has never been absent from
debates about higher education, in today’s context corporate elites including
those in the media, wish to eliminate the enduring tradition of “academic
freedom” which has celebrated the view that the university must be a venue for
the pursuit of “the marketplace of ideas.”
Expect the university to be another emerging site for
contestation and political struggle.
