From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the
Neoliberal University (lulu.com)
Table
of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Macro and Micro Analyses of Higher Education
Chapter Two:
Discourses On Ideology
Chapter
Three: Branding
Chapter
Four: What Do Universities Do?
Chapter
Five: Universities and War:
Conclusion
Appendix
Introduction
In the following pages, you are going to
find a lot of specific information about what is happening at one major
public research university, but we believe what is happening at Purdue is
analogous to a canary in a coal mine. We believe that Purdue under
Mitch Daniels, a former George Walker Bush administrator and Governor of
Indiana, is becoming a high profile and influential spokesperson for the
transformation of public higher education in the 21st century
in directions that we find dangerous and that go against how we value higher
education. We realize that, while we address extensively
institutional changes and policies at Purdue, Indiana’s Land Grant University,
our interest is in using this case study to illustrate larger patterns and
issues that should be of concern to readers who care about the future of higher
education in a broader sense.
Harry Targ's pieces do tend towards a
wider-angle perspective than do those by Dan Morris, although both of us rely
on our "boots on the ground" level understanding of Purdue to
counteract and contest official media versions of what is happening at
Purdue. We write at a moment when there is something of a "media
desert" in terms of local news coverage of higher education in small
markets such as Lafayette, Indiana. We have both tried to work to rectify
the "media desert" landscape in our community by contributing to the Lafayette
Independent, an electronic
newsletter. We appreciate efforts by
local journalists such as Dave Bangert and the student staff of the Purdue
Exponent to offer coverage of the university in ways that are more
substantial, and, often, more critical, than what one finds in the area's only
mainstream newspaper, the Journal and Courier, and main local TV
news source, and the Purdue NPR radio station, whose ownership in the last year
has been mysteriously transferred to an Indianapolis corporation. Paradoxically
the richest data for many of the essays below come from the official daily
public relations newsletter from Purdue called
Purdue Today. This public relations source celebrates
Purdue’s latest connections with multinational corporations, the military, and
state politics, and provides links to editorials published by Purdue’s
President and other officials in the national press. Ironically, oftentimes
what Purdue celebrates becomes the data for our more analytical and discursive
writings.
Like alternative media sources, we see
this book as another intervention in offering an alternative view of what is
happening at our campus, but we also write with the hope that readers can apply
the readings we bring to Purdue to begin conversations about the
promise and problems of contemporary higher education on campuses. The authors
wish to praise and encourage further research and activism around the
transformations of higher education in general. We identify with what some
scholars have referred to as Critical University Studies (CUS). The essays
below, we believe, are part of this emerging tradition of critical and
self-reflective scholarship.
The authors also wish to identify at least
three major elements of the transformation of higher education. First,
Purdue, like many other universities, is once again pursuing research contracts
with huge corporations, and perhaps most importantly, the Department of
Defense. As essays below suggest, Purdue research is increasingly justified as
serving the interests of United States “national security.” Often this is
conceptualized as helping the United States respond to “the Chinese threat,”
rarely identifying what exactly is the threat, or considering the possibility
that contributing to a new arms race with a perceived adversary may increase,
rather than reduce, the possibility for conflict between nations.
Second, the work below and other writings in CUS, highlight the
purposive transformation of the content of higher education. Universities are
moving resources away from the liberal arts, creating new programs in
“artificial intelligence” and “data science,” and in response to political
pressures are diminishing programs that emphasize interdisciplinarity,
intersectionality, and the structural problems of race, class, gender, and
sexual preference in history and contemporary society. Essays below on “civics
literacy” suggest that leading administrators at Purdue, while refusing to
defend its universally praised Writing Lab after it was ridiculed on Fox News
for its recommendation that student writers select gender-neutral terms such as
postal worker when writing about occupations, seek to avoid the controversaries
around Critical Race Theory by requiring all students to study in some fashion
“civics literacy.” President Daniels has made it clear that the study of civics
literacy will illustrate the “vitality” of US political institutions (as
opposed to over-emphasizing the slaughter of the original inhabitants of the
North American continent or the history of slavery and white supremacy).
Third, the essays below do not dwell enough on the transformation of
the university as a workplace. While there have been attacks for years on the
tenure system, a system of job security which was initially designed to protect
faculty from external political pressures, recent additions to the transformations
of the university as a work site should be noted.
Adjunctification is a term that refers to
the qualitative increase in the hiring of various forms of part time
instructors: full-time instructors for a
set time period, instructors to teach less
than a full complement of courses, and instructors with various arrangements
that limit their work life, their ability to do research and prepare for their
class time, and their time to serve the many needs of students. The fundamental trend in higher education is to “cheapen”
and make insecure instructors, ultimately to destroy the job security that
comes with academic tenure. In many cases this impacts negatively on the
quality of the educational experience. (In colleges and universities in general
about 70 percent of classes now are taught by instructors who are not
tenure-line faculty).
And finally, every effort is made by universities to limit and derail the workplace concerns of non-teaching staff, particularly opposing their right to form unions.
One positive development from all of
this-destroying the tenure system and job security, adjunctification, increased
exploitation of graduate students, and finally restricting the rights and the
wages and benefits of staff has been the rise of labor militancy. The American
Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT), and various unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) and
the United Electrical Workers (UE) with a history of militancy have been
organizing graduate students and staff.
Finally, the authors acknowledge that in
the months after we completed our manuscript, Purdue administrators and
trustees have announced a series of initiatives without an appropriate level of
input from university stakeholders and the wider Lafayette area community:
1. Purdue is building a housing complex
near the Discovery Park part of campus to attract higher income earning
technologists to relocate in West Lafayette. To encourage new high-income
residents, the West Lafayette city government has authorized $5,000 cash
incentives for any purchasers of these new housing units adjacent to Purdue.
Such offers are not available to lower income earners or students.
2. To deal with record enrollments, Purdue
has purchased a privately constructed apartment complex across from campus at a
price well more than the cost of its construction.
3. Purdue officials have expanded
partnerships with Saab, Rolls Royce, the Raytheon Corporation, one of the
world’s five largest military contractors, and undertaken a controversial
business mission with the Indiana governor to Taiwan to pursue research and
production of semi-conductors, in part to respond to what Purdue officials have
described as a ”Chinese threat” to national security in the United States.
4.The College of Liberal Arts has
announced it will be partnering with the College of Science to develop a new
interdisciplinary degree program in
artificial intelligence. CLA calls its “new field” of interest,
“sociogenomics.”
5. Purdue received an award recognizing
its “excellence in counterintelligence,” one of only four such award recipients
in 2022. Purdue joins those few universities which protect “sensitive national
information from foreign adversaries.” The award announced in Purdue Today,
August 24, 2022, noted that the university continues to work with the Defense
Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) and the FBI.
In short, the transformation of Indiana’s Land Grant
university continues at a rapid pace. And while the essays below concentrate on
the developments and forces leading to these changes, the broader point of this
collection of essays is to suggest that higher education in the twenty-first
century is changing in a rapid and largely deleterious way. The appended essay
by Carl Davidson reflects a similar critique of the university during the
height of the Cold War. What we are witnessing today is a revitalization of
that trend.
For those who value the university as a site for
informing students about the world and debating the value of changes occurring
in it, the developments highlighted in these essays are a warning. And for
faculty and students alike the antidote to the militarization of the
university, the transformation of the curricula, and the disempowering of those
who work in universities is organizing against those elements of change that
are antithetical to the educational process.
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And More:
“The Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue has created a category
of its own. As part of the nation’s leading national security university, it is
rapidly becoming the world’s premier institution focused on Tech Statecraft, a new model of diplomacy bridging the gap
between technology experts, government officials and policymakers, and business
leaders to ensure tomorrow’s tech secures our freedoms,” said (Daniel)
Kurtenbach. ‘I’m excited to contribute to the Krach Institute’s
already-impressive momentum by enhancing and building its innovative
partnerships and relationships to achieve our shared vision of a future that
prizes individual freedom through trusted technology.’ ”
Homepage
- Tech Statecraft (techdiplomacy.org)
