Unionists delve into university corporatization

UUPers convened in late October to explore a contemporary topic — the corporatization and globalization of the university — and found themselves grappling with some academic concepts that are nearly a century old.

During a two-day symposium held by UUP’s Globalization and Corporatization Committee, several dozen members conferred with colleagues from around the country to define issues that arise for faculty as the university drifts from an institution devoted to teaching the liberal arts to an increasingly corporatized entity.

“There’s been an attempt to shift to a corporate governance structure” in the contemporary American university; to turn large, generally public universities into “direct sites of capitalist accumulation,” said Jeff Lustig, a professor in the department of government at California State University at Sacramento.

As the university becomes a “knowledge industry” in the marketplace, faculty is fighting for an institution that remains committed to the fundamental principles of academic freedom, Lustig said in his keynote speech during the conference.

Academic freedom — a notion incorporated within the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 founding statement — is the most important principle in this fight, according to Lustig. It should be looked at, he said, as both “a positive freedom, where faculty participates in the shaping of the university through shared power, and a negative — the freedom from interference.”

Henry Steck of SUNY Cortland moderated a plenary session and presented strategies for fighting corporatization — such as senior faculty taking leadership roles, and building coalitions with faculty senates.

During the plenary, Sidney Plotkin, a political science professor at Vassar College, discussed “The Higher Learning in America,” a 1904 work by American economist Thorstein Veblen. Veblen believed what made the university special was its devotion to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, insulated from the major social and political forces.

Veblen’s early 20th century critique noted how — in contrast to his own views — the higher education managers of his day set about to expand the university. He said these “captains of erudition” focus on raising funds, and maintain a hierarchical structure of authority, led by a president whose role is to keep the faculty in line.

As Plotkin said, “though widely ignored,” Veblen’s work offers “an acute analysis of problems in American higher education today.”

Sally Knapp, a librarian at SUNY Albany, presented an example of these problems in her report on the continuing thwarting of access to information. Corporations have supplanted library-member consortiums as suppliers of the sources of information, she said.

“Today, [university] library access to most databases is provided by a few multinational corporations,” Knapp said during a panel discussion. “Decisions about access to databases are made on the basis of market values and what is profitable,” she said.

While library users can get the information from other sources, “in time, these may be equally vulnerable to ‘market-based’ decisions,” she said.

Joining Knapp on the panel were Frederick Floss, a professor of economics and finance at Buffalo State, and Michael Silverberg of Stony Brook HSC, an associate professor of medical informatics.

“The university has become the ‘nodal point’ within the network of corporatization,” said Stephen Rosow of Oswego, chair of UUP’s Globalization and Corporatization Committee. “Our charge, as a committee, is to explore this connection [within SUNY] and to aid in the union’s long-term thinking about how it responds to the changes in the university.”

To that end, conferees met in work groups and discussed topics ranging from post-national education to global capitalism in the university. The groups will ultimately produce a series of white papers to guide UUP and other higher education unions as they fight corporatization in academe.

Unions are the “last best hope in this process, as the independent defenders of the university,” Steck said.

— Lisa Feldman Reich