Jeffrey Williams
Department of English
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
engjeff@showme.missouri.edu
(573) 441-8775
for College English
Brave New University
Last year, at faculty convocation inaugurating the school year at the public university where I used to teach-somewhere between flagship and outpost, with research ambitions but with vestiges of a teacher's college-the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences "encouraged" us to "market the college to alumni and friends of the university" and to form "partnerships" with local business, such as Glaxo-Wellcome or Dupont a few miles down the road. While I usually slouch in the back and whisper to friends-such ceremonial events bring out my adolescent defiance, like misbehaving in church-I sat up and took notice. Normally the Dean ushered in the new year with the kind of exhortatory if empty rhetoric one expects on such occasions; if I recall, the motto of the previous year had been that we should "be the best we could be." But this was different and announced a more concrete imperative. Hailing from the literature faculty, the Dean had previously been an enthusiastic defender of the values of humanistic inquiry and traditional scholarship, exhorting us to "boost our bibliographies" and thereby to augment our university's "national prominence"-his cheerleading toward the vague vista of "being the best we could be" fit consistently with this-whereas now he seemed to be telling us to get out of our library carrels and start hawking our wares, trading vita lines for a more tangible bottomline. More concretely, shortly thereafter he instituted a policy to encourage us to seek grants, amending the criteria for our yearly evaluations (determining salary raises) so that in English we received research publication credit for external grants submitted, four grants equalling an article. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Dean by fiat seemed to rewrite our professional self-definition, from scholarship to salesmanship.
To be fair, grant-seeking is not necessarily independent of scholarly productivity, although one might speculate without much of a stretch that research on, say, the conjunction of the new science of eighteenth-century geology and literary attention to landscape in Romantic poetry that one of my colleagues does would not fare as well under this new dispensation as a proposal in tech writing, so this shift tacitly reconfigures the internal hierarchy of research, what kind of research carries more value, and what research comes to represent the discipline of English. (As Michael Bérubé pithily observes, "the discipline thinks it's going from literature to culture [i.e., cultural studies], and the [job] market tells us we're going from literature to technical writing" ["Peer Pressure" 139].) The sciences and progressively moreso the social sciences have been subject to such "market" criteria for some time now, but my Dean's imperative grafted the protocols of business applicability rather decisively onto the formerly semi-autonomous zone of the humanities.
This marketing motivational rhetoric and explicit change in research criteria prompted another of my colleagues to suggest that instead of our being the indirect and occasional conduits for grants and donations, we streamline the process and simply stop, say, every half hour during class to give a minute pitch for the local MacDonald's, or Wendy's, or Hardee's, or Burger King, which line the perimeter of campus. We proceeded to draw out the all too viable possibilities for this new form of academic fundraising, but fortunately my friend has no aspirations to be in administration. Though this might seem farfetched, it's not entirely facetious, as evidenced by the advent of corporate advertising and marketing in many public high schools via programs such as Channel One (including those near the university), which daily feeds students ten minutes of Entertainment Tonight-style news mixed with five minutes of commercials for Coke, corn chips and Clearasil. The lure for schools, and especially for school administrators, is that Channel One provides "free" TVs-their grant heralded as beneficent support for education, lessening the burden on public funds-in exchange for a contractual guarantee that their programs run every day. The grant, in other words, has strings and is hardly altruistic; if schools decide not to run the Channel One program, then the TVs are repossessed (see Kleinfeld).
Though my recounting of the Dean's imperative is admittedly anecdotal, the model of the university it beckons is not a Chicken Little-like millennial prediction but reflects the looming trend in university funding, from being publicly funded to an unabashed imperative to be corporate-sponsored, injecting revenue from an amalgam of external, private sources (for a dean's rationale of public-private "partnerships" and a concrete breakdown of sources of funding, see Breneman). Further, this imperative is not anomalous, applying only to the person down the hall or across the quad, but has real and significant effects on all of us, on our everyday worklife and what counts as academic work. As a counterpart to the stress on grants, unspoken by my Dean but manifest especially in the humanities where grants are fewer and where there has historically been less immediate transfer to commercial uses, is the ensuing pressure to cut costs and more "efficiently" administer funding, that is, to generate greater numbers of FTEs with fewer faculty and especially fewer permanent faculty-part-timers, lecturers, and so on, as I am sure is familiar to anyone working in an English department and to readers of College English. The criteria which mandates the garnering of grants-whereby the primary measure of education is taken in short-term, quantitative monetary gains-also generates the conditions of the current job market, by intractable fiscal logic propelling the speedup, outsourcing, and destabilization of teaching labor. Permanent workers are expensive, and an impermanent labor pool also helps to control those who have permanent positions. In other words, the current job crisis stems not from magical or aberrant conditions that the word "crisis" seems to imply, but from the profit criterion that fosters the greater extraction of labor (lest we think that teaching somehow constitutes a sacrosanct species of work outside the realm of capital and profit, see Marx on surplus labor and the schoolteacher [644]). It bears repeating that the job crisis is not a question of an economic downturn that might right itself magically, like the weather (cloudy today, but we hope for sunshine tomorrow), for the economy has been flush for the past decade if you read the Wall Street Journal, nor does it derive from a lessened need for teachers (count the students in your comp classes), but from the greater extraction of labor from teachers.
Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter succinctly define this shift in criterion to what they call "academic capitalism," observing that "Not-for-profit institutions in the academy are taking on the characteristics and activities of profit-making organizations" (13). One could amass statistics on this overall trend toward bottomlining universities (see, for instance, Bérubé and Nelson)-for instance, drastic and disproportionate cuts in the University of California and SUNY systems and the ensuing pressure for private funding (see Lauter 212-15), as well as for labor speedup and outsourcing (Ohmann notes the shift from 10% to 60% part-time labor since the mid-1960s [231], although most estimates place it at about 50%)-and survey the complementary calls for accountability and productivity (see Williams, "Renegotiating" 299-301), but my interest here is the rise of what might be called the new idea of the university, as an accepted and appropriate model by which universities should operate to bring them "into the twenty-first century."
This shift in the dominant prescription for higher education, and especially for public universities, is aptly represented by the two senses of "franchise," its historically celebrated sense as attaining a vote and in general a purchase in the public sphere, influence on public policy and access to public programs, and its more current colloquial sense as a licensed storefront for namebrand corporations (Kentucky Fried Chicken). Universities are now being conscripted as the latter kind of franchise, directly as training grounds for the corporate workforce, obviously in the growth of business departments but impacting English too, in the proliferation of more "practical" degress in technical writing and the like (see also Watkins on the role of humanities teachers themselves as "resource managers"). In fact, university work has been more directly construed to serve not only corporate-profit agendas via its grant-supplicant status (for a disturbing and detailed account of the influence of grants, see Soley), but universities have become franchises in their own right, reconfigured according to corporate management, labor, and consumer models and delivering a namebrand product (see, for instance, Brenner). Related to this, many corporations have been getting into the education business for themselves, as evidenced by Motorola University or Phoenix University (see Bartolovich 119-20). The traditional idea of the university as a not-for-profit institution that offers a liberal education and enfranchises citizens of the republic, not to mention the more radical view that the university foster a socially critical if not revolutionary class, has been evacuated without much of a fight.
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One can also surmise the tacit expression of the new idea of the university in what might seem an unlikely place, the 1996 blockbuster, The Nutty Professor. It was, of course, an extraordinarily popular summer release and star-vehicle (hailed as Eddie Murphy's "comeback"), earning record profits in both initial showings and in video, probably due to its feelgood message that we should be comfortable with our appearances and bodies, whatever shape they take, as well as to its humor. What I find especially striking about it, though, as an inveterate university watcher, is its image of and assumed rationale for the work of the university. The title character played by Murphy, Professor Klump, teaches-inattentively and irresponsibly, missing classes after his transformation to the svelte Buddy Love-but his real work is his research into genetic manipulation for the sake of weight loss. This differs precipitously from the original Jerry Lewis version (1963), in which Lewis plays the snaggle-toothed, prototypically geeky Professor Kelp rather than the rotund Klump. After Kelp blows up a classroom full of students during a chemistry class, the Dean lectures him: "I will not stand for any members of my staff utilizing the facilities of this university for his or her own personal experiments" (my emphasis). In other words, the work of a professor in the earlier popular imaginary is coded primarily as a teacher rather than as a researcher, research outbounded as a "personal" interest or hobby, expressly prohibited by university policy! This stands a world apart from the recent version, in which it is taken for granted that Klump's job is in the lab, and from the criteria under which we work, whereby the predominant measure for hiring, tenure, and promotion is precisely our "personal" research-and more and more, the entrepeneurial ability to fund that research.
Further, in the recent Nutty Professor, not only is teaching relegated to a peripheral duty, but Professor Klump's research is hardly pure or motivated for the advance of scientific knowledge per se, which is the normal disciplinary rationale for research, nor is it for the sake of the health of mankind, which is the more altruistic, public rationale for research. Rather, his professional prospect is essentially product development, for a techno-miraculous Slim-Fast for the sake of cosmetic change, which would obviously carry enormous commercial potential and profit for his university. In other words, The Nutty Professor assumes without blinking the new commercial profit rationale for research. These popular images from the earlier to later Nutty Professor mark a decided shift in professional definition; modifying Regis Debray's charting of the changing social role of intellectuals in this century from "teacher to writer to celebrity," they project a course from teacher to researcher to entrepeneur. (While these images apply largely to the more commercially transferable results of the practical sciences, one way to see the recent celebration of the figure of the public intellectual in the humanities is as a celebration of the success of an individual academic career-that is, of a symbolic entrepeneur. It presents the vista of professional success as transcending the confines of a traditional academic career, transformed to a successful writer for glossy magazines and commentator for major media. In other words, rather than its putative assertion of our renewed public relevance and power in toto, in a significant way it poses a model of good old American individualism and a symbolic Horatio Alger-like rise, out of the slums of a 4-4 or 5-5 teaching load and transcending the inconsequence of day-to-day life lecturing on Beowulf or Barthes or sitting on the curriculum committee [see my "Posttheory Generation" 69-73].) That the transformation of professional prospect occurs as business as usual in the recent Nutty Professor demonstrates how deeply the corporate-cultural norm of the university has been naturalized in the popular imaginary. We've come a long way from Mr. Chips (we don't see Murphy dazzle us with his charisma in the classroom), not to mention Cardinal Newman.
In conjunction with the role of the professor, the portrait of the Dean in the recent Nutty Professor also marks a precipitous shift in the model and expectation of administration. The Dean is uptight, condescending, and sneaky, alternately cajoling and bullying, parodying the stereotype of a white male middle manager and carrying on a long line of film satires of college life. However, previous portraits of deans, most famously in Animal House, show their job as that of a stuffed-shirt headmaster, worrying about behavior codes and keeping fraternities in check. The Dean in the earlier Nutty Professor somewhat more benevolently works with students in organizing a senior dance, pronouncing that "the faculty, as always, is ready to serve the needs of the student body." The Dean in the 1996 The Nutty Professor has only one concern, with which in fact he is obsessed: to garner a donation from a local businessman, and his job entails not dealing with students, but in managing-coaxingly or threateningly-faculty toward the goal of dollar signs.
Though bullying, he is remarkably complacent upon discovering Professor Klump has missed a class, delivering an ultimatum about his research, that his job-and in fact his life, threatening in lurid detail to strangle him-depends on his success in procuring the grant. (The Dean's threat to Professor Klump parodically literalizes the cliché publish or perish, revised now to procure a grant or perish.) This characterization of the Dean testifies to the blatant shift in university rationale, for work that directly generates "external" funds, and succinctly represents the reconfiguration of administration as managing faculty rather than serving students, pressing the mandate on faculty to "produce" and holding them accountable to do so. While my former Dean is gracious and encouraging, and to my knowledge has never threatened to strangle anyone, the administrative protocol is one and the same; that the Dean's portrait in The Nutty Professor seems to come from central casting emphasizes the present cultural assumption of these protocols, commonplace enough to be the object of parody.
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Overall, I would distinguish three dimensions to the present cultural reimagination and material reconfiguration of the university that these films and my Dean's charge bespeak: first, the codification of administrators as corporate managers, overseeing and pressuring faculty toward greater "productivity," i.e., to generate revenue explicitly through grants, notably in the sciences, and implicitly through increased FTEs, which is closer to home for those of us in English (see Rhoades and Slaughter on "managed professionals," 17-24). As I've mentioned, this latter dimension of fiscal-spreadsheet protocol is less publicly advertised, though part and parcel of it (while he would extol the income from grants, my former Dean would hardly advertise how many sections of composition and survey courses are covered by T.A.'s or part-timers to decrease expenditure, though he determines funding and positions).
In a corrective of the commonplace view of academic freedom, Stanley Aronowitz relevantly underscores the redistribution of power inherent in the shift to a managerial administration:
We understand and generally support the right of an individual faculty member to speak and write free of legal or administrative sanction and according to the dictates of her own conscience. . . . But the second dimension of academic freedom, the rights of the faculty as a collectivity to retain soveignty over the educational process, has been buried with the restructuring. Matters such as the establishment, expansion, retention, or elimination of departments and programs; the hiring and dismissal of faculty; the assignment of positions to programs and departments; and workload and class size are only a few of the crucial decisions that were traditionally addressed by faculty and have been gradually assumed by administration and boards of trustees. (91; see also Rhoades and Slaughter 19)
In the new corporate-modelled, profit-protocol university, administrative jobs, rather than being service positions integrated with faculty interests and that fell to those tired of teaching or retired from research, have become preeminent, constituted as top-down, "winner-take-all" jobs (as they are called in the new corporate lingo), and administrations now account for a substantial proportion of university budgets. As Paul Lauter notes, citing Department of Education statistics that nonteaching professional staff expanded by 61% between 1975 and 1985 while faculty increased negligibly, "of all college costs, those for administration have increased by far the most rapidly" (216-7). Despite cries of budget crises, one rarely hears of cuts in administration. In turn, faculty has progressively been disenfranchised as having determinate political power in the university; a recent Association of Governing Boards study, "Renewing the Academic Presidency," rather baldly puts the new administrative imperative, "including faculty in shared governance had been the source of many ills in the modern university" (Perley A48).
Second, the recoding of faculty not as disinterested researchers in their disciplines for an abstract knowledge production or for the general public good but as R & D workers and entrepeneurs, to develop more immediately practical, corporately-approved and marketable products that generate funds-or one might literally say profits, given the fattening endowments of many universities (see the more than 270 entries in the 1997 Chronicle Almanac of "Endowments over $65 Million"). Even in their traditional role as teachers, faculty has been placed in the position of readily replacable service workers, to process more "products," ascertainable in the accounting of FTE's. In this sense, faculty have been disenfranchised as semi-autonomous intellectual professionals-whether in the conservative view as transmitting the canon and extolling Western Civilization in the humanities, or in the progressive view as fostering an oppositional pedagogy and intellectual dissent, or even in a labor view as those with rights to a secure job for decent pay-instead taking up a direct service position to those "who pay their salaries," which includes franchise managers and owners (administrators, boards of trustees, and grantors), as well as consumers at the franchise (students and their parents).
Third, although largely invisible in The Nutty Professor but consistent with the ethos of the profit-protocol of the new university, students have been unabashedly reinvented as consumers, as shoppers at the store of education, buying a career-enhancing service. This commodification of students' interests manifests itself ideologically, in projecting their experience primarily as a monetary exchange, paying tuition for accreditation necessary get a professional-managerial class job. This is not necessarily wrong on the part of students-what would we have them do, given the world they find themselves facing?-and in a significant way the opportunity represented by university education, particularly public university education, is precisely to give students a step up the class ladder, especially working class students (see Smith's recent College English corrective on the vexed issue of "gatekeeping"). That, after all, represents one real if modest vehicle of the American Dream. However, with the present restructuring of labor, a college degree is no longer a guarantee of a secure job, so the gate frequently doesn't open to the presumed garden on the other side (see Lipsky and Abrams). In other words, even if one accepts the capitalist-prep model of the university, that model doesn't deliver on its promise on its own contractual terms, thus constituting a kind of false advertising. It fails an economic franchise for many of our young. Further, even if one takes job-training as the primary aim of university education, that training does not exhaust the possibilities of education and its unquantifiable surplus. Not to mention that there might be another basis for the university, perhaps less tangible or quantifiable: a university education might offer a safe space and concerted time for students to imagine other prospects for their lives than being a consumer, to examine critically the social world they had no part in making, and to envision a different world they might choose to enter. On the consumer model, students are disenfranchised as future citizens, reconstituted as consumers and potential workers (see Rhoades and Slaughter 27-8).
In a different way, the commodification of students occurs more concretely in the recent and disproportionate rise in college costs and the ensuing restructuring of financial aid-in other words, in what is done to students materially, as objects of banking profit and interests, instead of what is projected ideologically as in their interest (to get a job and middle class toehold). In a chapter entitled "Indentured Students" in their account of the present twenty-something generation, David Lipsky and Alexander Abrams detail the cost-literally and figuratively-of university education, noting that tuition rose exponentially, from the 1970s at more than twice the rate of inflation despite relatively stagnant wages. To pay for it there has been a massive increase in loan programs like the GSL, about which Lipsky and Abrams state, "In 1978, after thirteen years of the program, a little more than $10 billion had been loaned to students. . .. . By the early nineties, more than 62 million student loans had been made through the federal government"-bear in mind that this doesn't include private or other forms of loans-"ten times as many as the 6 million loans in the GSL's first decade. There had been more than $100 billion borrowed," more than $15 billion a year in the nineties (119). Less abstractly, Steven Watt remarks that many current humanities graduate students finish grad school with debts of $25,000 or more (31; see also Nelson 173). It is almost impossible for those of us educated before 1985 or earlier, when there was a more active sense of public entitlement, to imagine the costs, real as well as psychic, of entering an unwelcoming workforce while carrying such a burden of debt.
In short, higher education has become a substantial banking franchise, a new domain of extraordinary, low-risk (given federally subsidized and guaranteed loans) profit for Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Marine Midland, and other sanctioned lenders. As the staid U.S. News and World Report observed, with some shock, in 1993: "Nearly 8,000 banks, savings and loans, credit unions and other lenders will make an estimated $18 billion in new federally backed student loans in fiscal year 1993" ("Defaulting the Future" 56). This in turn effectively indentures students for ten to twenty years after graduation and intractably reduces their career choices, funneling them into the corporate workforce in order to pay their loans, which are not only federally guaranteed but federally enforced (if necessary, through wage and property garnishees) and nearly impossible to default (for instance, bankruptcy doesn't exempt one from student loans). Even if we take gatekeeping in the most benign sense, this fails students in not providing them education as a public entitlement to enter a productive workforce, as the G.I. Bill did for the post-WWII generation, by most accounts with great success not just individually but for the public good of American society. In sum, students have progressively become more disenfranchised, literally kept out of colleges they can't afford and driven to make career choices based on the bottomline, the bricks in the new pyramid scheme of the corporate franchising of higher education.
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Given the advent of the brave new university that I have sketched, what, as the saying goes, is to be done? The current restructuring of higher education is one facet of the restructuring of civic life in the U.S., whereby previously assured public entitlements such as healthcare, welfare, social security, and so on, along with education, have evaporated or been "privatized," so any solution to our situation can't be separated from a larger vision of what it means to enfranchise citizens of our republic. However, my proposals are less cosmic and speak more specifically to our roles as critics and academic-professionals. First, I would advocate a relentless reflexive criticism, that is, one that turns the plentiful analytical tools we have at our disposal to where we work, examining the material effects of the kind of work we do (say, as graders, rather than in our more abstract self-definition, as purveying literature), the material institutions that we work in (as labor structures, from housekeepers to provosts), how they govern our work, how they serve the needs of the society at large, and how they bear on students. Of late, a good many of us have been calling attention to the embattled state of the university and especially to the horrendous labor conditions of new Ph.D.'s (notably Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson, among many others, and heroically against the grain for a long time, Richard Ohmann), but by and large our analytical tools remain ratcheted to producing readings of literary and critical texts.
I would especially advocate a concerted examination of the idea and history of the university, not only as the place where we work and that sets the limits of our professional self-definition, but as one of the few zones in contemporary life that represents the possibility of a public sphere which fosters discussion of public issues and policy and that represents the prospect of public entitlement and opportunity for class levelling. I confess that by titling this essay "Brave New University" I have weighted the dice to a story of the fall, that the university was once better but has now fallen on hard times. As Clyde Barrow shows in Universities and the Capitalist State, the university hardly has a halcyon history and has always negotiated the tension with the protocols of business. However, my point is not that the university was better in past, glory days, but that one can imagine a better future for the university, for those how work there and for those who attend it, than the one that we are witnessing.
Second, I would advocate attention to the "idea" of the university in what I've called the "cultural imaginary," in movies, general media reports and representations, policy statements, and so on (for a rare example of this, see Dale Bauer's recent College English essay on "Teachers in the Movies"). Most accounts of "the idea of the university," from Kant's Conflict of the Faculties through Bill Readings' University in Ruins (and, in the pages of CE, Ziolkowski's "Slouching Toward Scholardom"), are internal and prescriptive, expressing our self-definition and centering on the disciplinary history of an idea rather than the historical institution. Instead, we should examine how the university is defined by our culture at large, on its terms and as a response to its needs, as well as the historical and material embodiment of that cultural idea. My point in talking about The Nutty Professor is that it represents how we are defined publicly, rather than how we issue our image to a public. As a counterpart to advocating what Michael Bérubé has called public access-to make our work accessible to a larger, less narrowly academic audience-we need to access the public need and expectation of the university. In other words, we need to listen to and read that need, rather than only tell what we do.
Third, I would advocate an unremitting critique of what I've called the profit-protocol governing the new idea of the university. To offer a basic lesson in political economy, we need to distinguish the university as a not-for-profit institution, which serves a public interest, from for-profit organizations, which by definition serve private interests and often conflict with a public interest. What's good for Microsoft or Disney, and for their quarterly stock reports, is not necessarily good for the public interest or for public education. Conceptually, the problem with the university being governed by profit criteria is not the taint of business-mindedness impinging on our tweediness, but that the quantified measure of billable student hours is a non-commensurate criterion by which to measure the more intangible qualitative category of actual education. In practice, the imperative to decrease expenditure through generating more billable hours functions adversely on teachers and students alike (how much attention can a teacher give to a student in a writing class of twenty-six or seven?; on the ill effects of downsizing teaching labor, see Reichard). Conversely, the problem with the profit criteria which fosters the increase of funding through grants is that in practice grants channel research to corporately usable results (see Soley), in effect subsidizing private profit-making corporations with public facilities and staff (see Rhoades and Slaughter 13-14). In other words, rather than private support for the public interest, grants foster the public support of private shareholders. And the problem with top-down, corporate-modelled administrative mandates is not their presumed drive for "efficiency," but that efficiency in education, again, cannot be measured by profit criteria, that in actuality it results in the greater extraction of labor for unfair wages, and that an administration based on such criteria tends to be beholdened to private interests and not to serve the needs of its workers and students, but instead disempowers them.
Finally, especially for those of us in English, we need to pose new images or fictions, as Richard Rorty might put it, of the university, to reclaim the ground of a public interest, and of higher education to operate for that public interest. We need to reassert the sense of franchise as empowering citizens, as the OED defines it, offering freedom, immunity, and privilege, rather than the putative freedom of choice of hamburgers or mouse ears. We need to reimagine the rationale of the university, drawing the prospect of education as fostering a public franchise in several ways: for students that they might enter a world that values, to borrow the motto of the Socialist Party, people over profits, granting a genuinely public access to a quality American education and teaching them the values of an open rather than corporately controlled society; for professors, that our research might further a public interest rather than the more immediate and tangibly quantifiable gains of corporate interests, or for that matter our own narrow professional self-interest; and for administrators, that they might serve the needs of the people within universities, from the bottom up rather than from top down, toadying to the imperatives of our corporate sponsors.
We've awakened to a brave new world of the university, where the values neither of humanism nor of tenured radicals hold, but the values of Boeskyism do. It seems to me that we usher in the future we imagine, and I imagine a different and more convivial future from the present we now have.
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