Essays in the Transformation of Higher Education: Dan Morris and Harry Targ

 

 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 21^st 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.’ ”

https://www.citybiz.co/article/378157/krach-institute-for-tech-diplomacy-at-purdue-names-daniel-kurtenbach-as-chief-growth-officer/

Homepage - Tech Statecraft (techdiplomacy.org)

 

 

Thank you for the good wishes: I posted this essay on my birthday 2010.

 https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2010_01_30_archive.html

FOREIGN POLICY: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM (A timely update from a 2017 post which appeared in The Rag Blog)

 Harry Targ

 

An Empire in Relative Decline

United States global hegemony continues to be challenged. As the beneficiary of war-driven industrial growth and the development of a military-industrial complex unparalleled in world history, the United States was in a position in 1945 to construct a post-war international political and economic order based on huge banks and corporations. The United States created the international financial and trading system, imposed the dollar as the global currency, built military alliances to challenge the Socialist Bloc, and used its massive military might and capacity for economic penetration to infiltrate, subvert, and dominate most of the economic and political regimes across the globe.

The United States always faced resistance and was by virtue of its economic system and ideology drawn into perpetual wars, leading to trillions of dollars in military spending, the loss of hundreds of thousands of American lives, and the deaths of literally millions of people, mostly people of color, to maintain its empire.

As was the case of prior empires, the United States empire is weakening. There is now the possibility of a multipolar world emerging with challenges to traditional hegemony coming from China, India, Russia, and the larger less developed countries such as Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, South Korea, and Thailand. By the 1970s, even traditional allies in Europe and Japan had become economic competitors of the United States.

The United States throughout this period of change has remained the overwhelming military power, however, spending more on defense than the next seven countries combined. It remains the world’s economic giant even though growth in domestic product between 1980 and 2000 has been a third of its GDP growth from 1960 to 1980. Confronted with economic stagnation and declining profit rates the United States economy began in the 1970s to transition from a vibrant industrial base to financial speculation and the globalization of production.

The latest phase of capitalism, the era of neoliberal globalization, required massive shifts of surplus value from workers to bankers and the top 200 hundred corporations which by the 1980s controlled about one-third of all production. The instruments of consciousness, a handful of media conglomerates, have consolidated their control of most of what people read, see, hear, and learn about the world.

A policy centerpiece of the new era, roughly spanning the rise to power of Ronald Reagan to today, including the eight years of the Obama Administration, has been a massive shift of wealth from the many to the few. A series of graphs published by the Economic Policy Institute in December, 2016 showed that productivity, profits, and economic concentration had risen while real wages have declined, inequality increased, gaps between the earnings of people of color and women and white men grew, and persistent poverty remained for twenty percent of the US population (https://www.epi.org/publication/inequality-2021-ssa-data/ for 2021 data on economic inequality). The austerity policies, the centerpiece of neoliberalism, spread all across the globe. That is what globalization has been about.

Contrary to the shifts toward a transnational capitalist system and the concentration of wealth and power on a global level, the decline of U.S power, relative to other nation-states in the twenty-first century, has increased.  China’s economy and scientific/technological base have expanded dramatically. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the spreading violence throughout the Middle East have overwhelmed US efforts to control events. Russia, Iran, China, and even weaker nations in the United Nations Security Council have begun to challenge US power and authority. Mass movements increasingly mobilize against regimes supported by the United States virtually everywhere (including mass mobilizations within the U.S. as well).

However, most U.S. politicians still articulate the mantra of “the United States as the indispensable nation.” The articulation of American Exceptionalism represents an effort to maintain a global hegemony that no longer exists and a rationale to justify the massive military-industrial complex which fuels much of the United States economy.

(For more data on military bases see https://www.davidvine.net/bases.html)

Imperial Decline and Domestic Politics

The narrative above is of necessity brief and oversimplified but provides a backdrop for reflecting on the substantial shifts in American politics. The argument here is that foreign policy and international political economy are “the elephants in the room” as we reflect on the outcomes of recent elections. It does not replace other explanations or “causes” of election results but supplements them.

First, the pursuit of austerity policies, particularly in other countries (the cornerstone of neoliberal globalization) has been a central feature of international economics since the late 1970s. From the establishment of the debt system in the Global South, to “shock therapy” in countries as varied as Bolivia and the former Socialist Bloc, to European bank demands on Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, to Reaganomics and the promotion of Clinton’s “market democracies,” and the Obama era Trans-Pacific Partnership, the wealth of the world has been shifting from the poor and working classes to the rich.

Second, to promote neoliberal globalization, the United States has constructed by far the world’s largest war machine. With growing opposition to U.S. militarism around the world, policy has shifted in recent years from “boots on the ground,” (although there still are many), to special ops, private contractors, drones, cyberwar, spying, and “quiet coups,” such as in Brazil and Venezuela, to achieve neoliberal advances.

One group of foreign policy insiders, the humanitarian interventionists, has lobbied for varied forms of intervention to promote “human rights, democratization, and markets.” 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton and a host of “deep state” insiders advocated for support of the military coup in Honduras, a NATO coalition effort to topple the regime in Libya, the expansion of troops in Afghanistan, even stronger support of Israel, funding and training anti-government rebels in Syria and the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was a major advocate for humanitarian interventionist policies in the Obama administration.

Humanitarian interventionists have joined forces with “neoconservatives” in the new century to advocate policies that, they believe, would reverse the declining relative power of the United States. This coalition of foreign policy influentials has promoted a New Cold War against China and Russia and an Asian pivot to challenge an emerging multipolar world. The growing turmoil in the Middle East and the new rising powers in Eurasia also provide rationale for qualitative increases in military spending, enormous increases in research and development of new military technologies, and the reintroduction of ideologies that were current during the last century about mortal enemies and the inevitability of war.

In sum, the “elephant in the room” for the peace movement pertaining to US politics must include building opposition to an activist United States economic/political/military role in the world and the long history of United States imperialism.

Finally, it must be articulated that to the extent that economics affects domestic politics the neoliberal global agenda that has been enshrined in United States international economic policy since the 1970s, coupled with humanitarian interventionism, has had much to do with rising austerity, growing disparities of wealth and power, wage and income stagnation, and declining social safety nets at home. As millions of Americans struggle to survive poverty, inadequate access to healthcare, homelessness, a variety of environmental disasters it is time to reinsert visions of a non-interventionist, anti-militaristic foreign policy into our progressive political agenda.

How Should the Peace Movement Respond to the Elephant in the Room?

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967

 

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

--2023 Doomsday Clock Announcement, January 24, 2023

The Peace Movement has been engaged in a variety of separate but interconnected tasks. It may be useful to identify them, see how they are interrelated, and think about ways in which it and other social justice campaigns can more effectively work together in the coming period.

Peace Movement tasks should include the following:

1.Oppose war. In 2022 the war in Ukraine has captured the attention of activists everywhere. Attention also has been paid on other wars, such as in Yemen and Palestine. Peace researchers have often referred to the historic need to end “direct violence”; that is killing. That task remains preeminent.

 

2.Reconceptualize “war” as a problem not only of killing and dying in war but also as a problem of hunger, inequality, environmental spoilation, and powerlessness in a world of power, control, and oppression. Peace researchers have called this “structural violence.” Theorists/activists like Vijay Prashad have argued that the problem of “war,” both direct and structural is more about the divide in resources and power between the countries of the Global North (the traditional imperial powers in Europe and North America) and the vast majority of humankind living in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. For Prashad, the war problem is about hundreds of years of exploitation, occupation, military assault, sanctions, and the threat and destruction of the resources and environment of the Global South. From this point of view, the peace movement task is to engage in solidarity with those struggling for their liberation from domination and control.

3.Oppose militarism. Historically peace movements have identified an inextricable connection between growing militarism and war and further a connection between military spending and concentrated wealth in selected military corporations. From this point of view as the old slogan suggests: “war is a racket.” And that "racket” can be seen as directly reallocating societal resources from fulfilling human needs to the construction of more and more weapons. Some theorists referred to the history of United States foreign policy, at least since World War II, as one of creating a “permanent war economy.”

4.Oppose the use of war to achieve pernicious goals domestically. This perspective sees war preparation as tied to efforts to create solidarity at home, to the detriment of domestic social groups seeking significant social change. For example, as World War II  ended, the labor movement sought significant policy changes to improve the rights and conditions of American workers. During the late 1940s, workers were demanding more rights to form unions, national health care, pension systems, and in some unions and communities an end to racism. The emergence of “the Soviet threat” served to stimulate nationalism, a rekindling of the vision of American exceptionalism, and increased repression against those pursuing worker rights and racial justice. In short, the war system, has served to reallocate societal resources and create a virulent nationalism which supports the interests of the wealthy and powerful. The war system, in this sense, is a status quo system. And to justify the war system an increasingly concentrated media institutionalizes narratives justifying war and imperialism.

 

5.Educate, agitate, and organize around these four major tasks. The questions that peace movements need to address include:

a.How to theorize about the interconnections between these four points? How do we develop a compelling narrative that targeted audiences find compelling for them? Young people, people of color, men, women, gays and lesbians?

b.How to network with other peace and social justice organizations?

c.And for now what kind of programs-education, street heat, networking, organizing-  should the peace movement engage in to address the four key elements raised above.

 

IN THE SPIRIT OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING

 IN THE SPIRIT OF Dr6 2.docx