- Overview
- Newspapers
- Guides
- Dissertations and Theses
- CMAS: The Beginning
- FOIA Files
- UT Watch Resources
- Bevo Bucks the Students
- Interview with Jennifer Washburn
- Nine reasons to worry about UT's future
- November 2004 Higher Education Voter's Guide
- Speak now or forever pay your fee
- Students and their money are soon to part
- Tent City Blues, UT-Austin Tent State University
- Texas Open Records Resources and the University of Texas
- The Rise of Network Universities
- UT's questionable corporate ties
- UT-Austin - Tent State University - April 20-22, 2005
- UT needs less fees, better priorities
- 78th Texas Legislature
- 79th Texas Legislature
- Other Resources
- Backyard Bioweapons
- Capitalism in West Campus
- Emergency Action on HB 2447
- Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society
- KTSB Does Not Belong to You - But it Can
- Letter from Suran Wije to Student Government on West Campus Rezoning
- Protection or Proliferation? High Containment Labs and Other Facilities of the US Biodefense Program
- Reputable Reporter Resigns from Daily Texan
- Robert Ovetz vita
- Sabotaging the Dissident Press
- Shall The University Become A Business Corporation?
- StratCom on Campus: The Global Innovation and Strategy Center at UNO
- Support the Washington University Sit-in
- The Tyranny of Structurelessness
- Throwing Away The Ladder: The Universities In The Crisis
- Turning Resistance into Rebellion
- Universities Under Siege Globally: Thoughts on Student Struggle From Canada
- Who Rules Columbia? Original 1968 Strike Edition
Ovetz Dissertation
by
Robert Frank Ovetz
1996
Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and the Crisis of the Universities:
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin
| Approved by | |
| Dissertation Committee: |  |
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin
by
Robert Frank Ovetz, B.A., M.A.
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
December 1996
Acknowledgements
Both Karen Palazzini and Tim Dunn, although he won't be around Austin to see this dissertation completed and turned in, gave me the support and inspiration to stick with my project and pursue my Ph.D. Without their support I would never had made it this far.
Over the past nine years my life as has swung back around as if following the spirals of a spring, if not to where I began then definitely still in sight of my starting point. Nine years ago, newly on my own, I enrolled in Professor Les Kurtz's "Nuclear Threat" course because I wanted to learn about something immediately relevant to my life that I was not getting in my required courses. Little did I realize until much later that this one course provided me with my original inspiration to do something about not only the world but this university. A few years ago I returned to Les to in desperation to seek his help as the chair of my dissertation committee, shocked to find that although we had only exchanged passing "hellos" in the halls over the years, he remembered me from that class - something you don't find very often at UT-Austin especially in a class of more than 100 people. Since then Les has given me the friendship, support, advice, insight, push and editing needed to complete the dissertation. Many thanks also to Professors Christine Williams, Anne Kane, David Montejano and Doug Foley for their encouragement and support as members of my dissertation committee, and to Doug Kellner for getting me out of a jam. Finally, I offer a gentle bow to Harry Cleaver for being my teacher, inspiration and friend.
Last but not least, I want to thank you for not only reading this but hopefully putting this information to use to transform or dismantle the universities as we know them.
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin
Publication No. _________________
Robert Frank Ovetz, Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, 1995
Supervisor: Lester Kurtz
Entrepreneurialization, the process by which universities are being restructured as overt profit-making multinational businesses, capitalizes upon the rationalization, industrialization and militarization of higher education. This case study focuses on the early stages of the entrepreneurialization of the University of Texas at Austin into a multinational corporation, a model for what is happening to universities throughout the US. This new stage of reorganization is a strategic response to the crisis of higher education in the US that resulted from the campus rebellions of the 1960-70s. While hardly complete, entrepreneurialization is in conflict with the "multiculturalism" movements, for example, that propose reforms that would further subordinate the universities to the needs and interests of diverse disempowered people. Entrepreneurialization has had an unintended side effect: as overt multinational businesses, we can better understand the central relationship of the universities in the international accumulation of capital and the importance of students in the class struggle. As the US model of entrepreneurialization spreads to universities in many other parts of the world as a result of global restructuring it also offers the possibility for fusing new transnational connections among student movements in different countries fighting common struggles.
The culmination of a unique development of "adversarial methods," this dissertation combines participant observation, journalistic investigative methods, archival research, Freedom of Information and Open Records requests, budgetary analyses, and social movement research and activism to investigate and analyze a newly emerging multinational institution.
Introduction
Throughout the world, the universities are in trouble. Students are rioting against arbitrary exams in Sri Lanka and France, the replacement of government grants with loans in Australia, repressive university administrations and governments in Nigeria, Korea, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Brazil, China and Palestine to name a few. They're marching and taking over buildings and entire campuses to protest higher tuition and fees and cutbacks in Canada, Mexico, England, Italy, and even the US. But while students have been on the move, so have coalition of business, international development agencies, local state and national governments, and entrepreneurs in efforts to raise the campuses from their abyss of inefficiency, low productivity, and declining usefulness to the accumulation of capital. Embattled from all sides and from within by a multitude of conflicting and contradictory forces and demands, the universities are increasingly the site of crisis and conflict.
Like in many other countries, the rebellious 1960s brought about many still ongoing conflictual and deep-rooted changes for US-based universities. The student and faculty uprisings of the 1960-70s were followed by the widespread growth of ethnic and women's studies programs and the entry of many progressive and radically minded persons into the faculty, foundations and campus administrations. Alongside these widespread reforms began a process of austerity as business, the federal and state governments began to enact austeric policies to get higher education back on track into serving the demands of business and the market. Since the early 1980s, this process of cutbacks and reorganization began to take particular "pro-active" forms developing incentives for universities to profit directly from the products of research and education.
This dissertation is an attempt to flesh out the current reorganization of the universities into businesses in response to the creation of free spaces within the university created and defended by students, faculty and community groups. As a result, I do not intend to examine the spaces themselves, but the details of the counterattack so that those of us coexisting within the interstices of the corporate university may know what we're up against, "the nature of the beast" so to speak, that threaten to collapse the very spaces in which we flourish. To do so, I examine the two complex processes of entrepreneurial reorganization and student struggle in the universities in the US and the further complexities of their overlapping relationships.
Although the crisis of higher education in the US has brought much attention over the past decade with the scandalous overcharging of overhead costs for federally funded research projects, scientific fraud, sexual harassment, racist violence and especially the growth of the multicultural reform movement and the manufactured "Politically Correct" backlash, little critical analysis is forthcoming. Rather, throughout the campuses, critically minded academics have remained awfully quiet, if not silent, about what is to many intuitive knowledge. The universities are changing, pushed by a manufactured financial crisis and the influence of business, reforming its operating logic so that it mirrors the ideal of a business: the subordination of all activities to the pursuit of profit.
If academics have publicly said little outside departmental meetings concerning these entrepreneurial pressures, students have not been as reserved. Although infrequent and sporadically organized, students have begun to employ what Boyd Littrell calls "adversarial methods" to investigate and expose the reorganization of the universities into multinational corporations. Through campus and "alternative" student newspapers, regional activist networks, campus environmental assessments, and student direct action groups, students have begun to investigate, expose and resist what I call the "entrepreneurialization" of the universities, that is, their reorganization into overt profit-making multinational corporations. In section I, chapter 1, Research Methods, Developing an Adversarial Methodology, I analyze the development of my own use of adversarial methods to investigate a massive public but closed institution of higher education, the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), before delving into the specifics of entrepreneurialization and multiculturalism. I found over the course of my 7 years of investigative study of higher education in the US and UT-Austin that for individual researchers working alone without a power basis from which to draw support and pressure, it is difficult if not impossible to gain access to the necessary data for a thorough and critical analysis.
An investigation of the crisis of higher education requires a magnitude of complexity beyond that of a single investigator. Often, those investigating issues of militarization, austerity, development projects, and research contracts have had to enter into alliances with other groups concerned about these issues from other vantage points. Often these alliances stretched beyond university systems, states, regions and even national borders. The increasing accessibility of telecommunications such as fax machines and the internet have facilitated communications between students in US-based universities with those fighting development schemes engineered by partnerships of US based multinational corporations and universities, such as happened between UT-Austin students and residents of West Papua. In turn, this has begun to evolve into international organizations such as ASEED that bring together student activists from dozens of countries from many regions of earth concerned with the effects of international development projects, the IMF, World Bank and regional business pacts such as NAFTA.
To offer a complete picture of the global restructuring of higher education is currently beyond my capabilities. However, in order to demonstrate the global context in which entrepreneurialization is occurring I have chosen to concentrate on my own terrain of conflict, UT-Austin, which I have attended for 10 years. By offering a case study of the beginnings of entrepreneurialization of UT-Austin, I hope to be able to articulate in detail what is occurring in many universities.
Section II, Case Studies of Entrepreneurialization and Multiculturalism at UT-Austin, examines UT-Austin as a case study of the ongoing conflict between efforts to further subsume the university to the interests of business and profit and those who seek to carve out new spaces or maintain those that already exist. Chapter two, A Case Study of Entrepreneurialization and Austerity at UT-Austin, offers a summary case study of the process of entrepreneurialization that is intensifying at UT-Austin. Entrepreneurialization is only in its early stages and is far from completely successful, as we'll see.
Although this chapter details the context and motivating incentives promoting entrepreneurialization, chapter three, Multiculturalism and "Political Correctness" at UT: the Making of the Nationwide Counterattack, demonstrates only one source of opposition coming from "ethnic" and women's studies advocates who are working to further "multiculturalize" all areas of the university. When not limited to formal institutional reforms, multiculturalism can serve as an antagonistic disruption of entrepreneurialization. The complex terrain of this conflict can be seen in the struggle over the meaning of multiculturalism. Is multiculturalism to be understood as a service to business to learn how to better manage a diverse workforce or is it a resource for those who seek to learn more about their own class and oppressed histories of resistance and struggle? This conflict shapes the struggle over the meaning of the university itself: whether to serve to business, government, and the "market" or the needs of diverse and oppressed social groups can be seen in the corporate backed "politically correct" backlash that perceives such reforms as subverting the very ideological foundation of capitalism.
In no way, does my analysis of entrepreneurialization presume a monolithic university completely subservient to the interests of capital. In fact, entrepreneurialization is only the most recent counterattack by business to reseize full control over the universities.
It must also be emphasized that I do not assume that multiculturalism is inherently subversive. Rather, efforts to add a standardized "multicultural course requirement" to an already standardized curriculum forces the question as to whether the ideology of multiculturalism is inherently reformist? Or is the limited extent of the movement a result of the repression of the more fundamental reorganization advocated by some to subsume the university to the interests of diverse resistance movements? In some cases, such as the repression of an effort to consider certain already required courses as "multicultural" at UT-Austin, multiculturalism can be accused of neither subversion nor cooptation. The fundamental restructuring of UT-Austin advocated by many groups of students, faculty and community groups became watered down into a harmless formal change in the required courseload that was perceived by the right as potentially opening up space for further more deeply rooted reforms.
In this way, I perceive neither entrepreneurialization nor multiculturalism as either concrete or complete. Rather, they are struggles-in-progress, subjected to changing balances of power between various organizations both within and across classes. Neither are they processes in themselves, but only contemporary signposts of the larger historical context of class struggle that characterizes the organization of the university like any other organization or institution in capitalist society.
For example, this is evident in the case of multiculturalism. Among the ruling class, in which I include managers and campus administrators, there are conflicts as to how they should relate to multiculturalism. As the demand for multicultural reorganization has been made from below, self-identified "sympathetic" university administrators and businesspeople have responded by attempting to put limited aspects of "multiculturalism" to use to reduce conflict by learning more about different groups of people. This is done with the intentions of better managing a diverse and antagonistic student population and waged workforce. To the extent that such people "endorse" multiculturalism, their take on this struggle is to coopt limited aspects of the movement to their own advantage. Of course, the different official responses between universities such as Stanford and UT-Austin demonstrate the continuing conflict pitting the "smart" against the "stupid" capitalist, the latter relying on brute force rather than finesse and cooptation. Such a conflict also exists at the grassroots level as well between students and faculty who advocate "multiculturalism" only to the extent that it shores up their own professional potential by expanding faculty and administrative positions for certain groups and larger corporate and foundation money for their "research". A similar conflict began to develop in the late 1960s (and continues today) as universities began to cave into student demands for Chicano/a, Black/African-American and Women's studies programs and centers. These new spaces were soon subsumed to the academic rationality of scholarly legitimacy, budgets, hiring, research and careers rather than maintaining spaces for further struggle to radically transform the universities and all of society.[1]
Although my case study applies first to US-based universities, there are many international parallels to draw since even US universities do not exist in a global vacuum. Under pressure to restructure their higher educational systems by multinationals, the IMF and World Bank, other countries are beginning to use the restructuring of US-based universities as their models just as they were used for the expansion of public higher education in the 1950-60s.
In Section III, The University and Students in Capitalism, I analyze the theoretical work pertaining to the university and student struggle in capitalism. Chapter four, A Theory of the Entrepreneurialization of the Universities, follows the case study of entrepreneurialization with an historically grounded theoretical discussion. In it, I ask whether the entrepreneurialization of the universities into overt multinational businesses should allow us to consider universities as fundamental institution of capitalism rather than "unproductive" and "marginal" as it is commonly acknowledged on the US left. Current research into the university as a corporation limit their analysis of universities within a particular state or country, such as the US, Mexico or Canada. The beginnings of entrepreneurialization signal the expansion of the university not only into an overt business but a multinational corporation.
The question of the impact of entrepreneurialization on theories of higher education is further examined in my analysis of students: does the process of entrepreneurialization strengthen the case for perceiving students as unwaged workers? This is the focus of chapter five, Marginal No More: Student Resistance to Entrepreneurialization as Class Conflict, in which I survey theoretical examinations of student struggle during and since the 1960s uprisings. The extent to which students resist the unwaged labor of discipline and obedience points to not only to frequent everyday forms of resistance occurring at times when commentators and student radicals themselves only saw apathy. If students consistently engage in everyday forms of refusal to be students does this not also locate the class struggle in the universities, in education?
It is insufficient to locate students within the theoretical construct of class conflict if class conflict is limited to an understanding of resistance as a reaction to something. The crisis of higher education is rooted in a multitude of efforts to reorganize the universities into spaces in which its resources could be used to transform the way we live. Could these forms of resistance be more than simply reactions to but attempts to reorganize life and the university along to serve their diverse needs? Could not this suggest the very source for the continuing crisis of the university rooted in the very class struggle between the interests of business and the diverse interests of the majority of the population?
These are some of the questions I ask in the conclusion, chapter 6, Turning Resistance into Rebellion. My hope is that by recognizing the complementary relationship between these two types of student struggle, we can transcend resistance as something against into the transformation of the universities into increasingly larger free spaces in which to pursue our own autonomous projects.
In my research I have often been tempted to see these huge multinational corporations as monolithic and hegemonic empires untainted by resistance. Reminded of the numerous students and academic theorists who take such a perspective I have sought evidence of a university in crisis not because of structural causes or diversions due to outside influence but because of the day to day explicit and subtle struggles of students and those who reside and work within them. As Henry Giroux reminds us, such analyses of the educational process as monolithic are already too commonplace and self-defeating:
There are, on the one hand, radical educators who collapse human agency and struggle into a celebration of human will, cultural experience, or the construction of "happy" classroom social relations. On the other hand, there are radical views of pedagogy that cling to notions of structure and domination. Such views not only argue that history is made behind the backs of human beings, but also imply that within such a context of domination human agency virtually disappears. The notion that human beings produce history - including its constraints - is subsumed in a discourse that often portrays schools as prisons, factories, and administrative machines functioning smoothly to produce the interests of domination and inequality. The result has often been modes of analysis that collapse into an arid functionalism or equally disabling pessimism.[2]
This is not the case with this dissertation. Born out of nearly ten years of participation in varying student activist movements and everyday forms of resistance, the analysis that follows is a tribute to the power of students to fatally disrupt the service of the university to a dying socio-political system of capitalism.
Bibliography
[1] Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth. Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989. p. 161-165. Munoz argues that Chicano Studies lacked a critique of capitalism, leaving itself unprepared to face the counterattack against radical efforts to restructure the university. Ironically, he denounces "multiculturalism" as inherently reformist although some of its most radical proponents have such an analysis.
[2]Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, Bergin & Garvey Publishers: Mass., 1983, p. 4.
Section I. Research Methods
Chapter 1. Developing an Adversarial Methodology
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing.
- John Cage[1]
The University of Texas at Austin (UT) offers a fascinating case example of the initial stages of a university's reorganization into an overt profit-making multinational corporation and the resistance of those opposed to this transformation. I have relied upon my experiences as part of a number of student movements since 1985 in conjunction with my own training as a sociologist and what Boyd Littrell called "adversarial methods" in order to offer a case study of what I call the "entrepreneurialization" of UT to substantiate my critique of the university in contemporary capitalist society.
Using what Boyd Littrell calls "adversarial" methods,[2] I argue that social scientists have great opportunities to understand critically their everyday lives and the institutions in which they work in order to transform the way we live. This can only be accomplished by articulating the relationship between our own everyday lives and the distant institutions, peoples, ideas, and issues we study. Unfortunately, this is not being done. While the universities are hardly monolithic and are home to many critical voices, only a very few of these voices are talking openly about the universities. Misperceiving themselves as vulnerable voices in the wilderness, these critics overlook that they are voices of an already existing and potentially powerful power base opposed to the corporate activities of the university.
Adversarial Methods
To study the universities (which I roughly define as the 183 "research" oriented campuses in the US) requires direct action types of methodologies to break open the rigid, closed structures that govern their operations. Large, complex hierarchies in which even those at the top know little about the whole operations of the campus govern contemporary universities. There are some avenues for shedding light on its internal workings, such as through state-enforced Open Record Requests (which only apply to state universities and not private campuses), and the federal Freedom of Information Act. However, considering their strict enforcement of secrecy (especially in the case of financial, military and business activities), close relationships with multinational corporations and organizations and the federal government, and their ever rapid integration into international global capital, universities cannot be adequately studied with standard sociological or even journalistic techniques alone.[3] Rather, we need to utilize existing power bases of student, faculty and community social movements concerned with the universities in order to exert the necessary pressures to not only force the release of sensitive information but to put that information to use in changing their operations. This is the basis of adversarial methods.
Littrell's distinction between "cooperative" and "adversarial" methods employed by sociologists can help explain this alienation of the researcher from their own everyday experiences. The adversarial research act is "one of mutual antagonism between researcher and researched" (p. 208). Littrell builds upon Norman Denzin's discussion of the research act, recognizing "data as the products of negotiations between researchers and researched, and that the 'research act' (or the acts that comprise it) affects the social milieu under investigation".[4] According to Littrell, adversarial methods "must be considered (1) when social groups or their agents define researchers as antagonists; (2) when agents act to block, misdirect, or mislead researchers; and (3) when researchers decide to proceed with projects, despite opposition" (p. 208). Rather than assuming cooperative methods are either necessary or sufficient to get at the data needed, Littrell seeks to develop a methodology that recognizes the inherent antagonisms between the two parties and prescribe the means for carrying out the research.
My advocacy and utilization of adversarial methods does not mean that I preclude cooperative methods. I used the latter in my participant observation and interactions with university offices and officials in collecting information. Since we work within the university itself we can use cooperative methods or feign cooperativeness as "professional academics" to gain access that would otherwise be closed. Yet, cooperative methods alone are incapable of cutting open the multinational corporation that is the university since it is predicated on the myth of academics as autonomous individuals while ignoring the organizational character of the university in which they work.[5]
Recognition and participation in one's local power base is the first step toward cracking open these immense structures that govern the universities. One may participate in student movements, for example, that challenge the nature of the university from the many perspectives of students such as "minorities", graduate students, or anti-militarists, or with faculty groups and unions that investigate and challenge institutional decisions. In times of crisis, such well-sealed information is leaked as challenges to the authorities structures crack. Countless examples abound, such as the liberation of documents from the Stanford Research Institute by student occupiers in 1967 that exposed Stanford's central role in the Vietnam War and urban counterinsurgency in the US.[6] Members of such movements are already doing adversarial research in order to prepare themselves better in the pursuit of their interests and to gain friends and allies. I learned my adversarial methods "in the street", so to speak, not in my sociology seminars, although these methods have been honed as a result of efforts to theorize about these experiences in the classroom.
With recognition of the entrepreneurial organization of the university within a multinational capitalist system, a reevaluation of sociological methods for studying large scale organizations is vital. As sociology has grown dependent first on government research money and support after WWII and corporate money and support since the 1960s it has become prone to the very interests I seek to expose. Its subservience to these interests was facilitated by the dominance of the natural science method which legitimized the emerging organization of society.[7] In the process, critical voices were pushed out or silenced as sociology became unwilling and incapable of investigating transnational organizations such as the university.
Facing further cutbacks and closings of sociology departments (such as the defeated effort at San Diego State University in 1991-92), sociology has intensified efforts to demonstrate its usefulness to these interests by further embracing quantitative methods and attempting to directly apply them to the needs of business and the state - as is the case with the 1992 appointment of an IC2 fellow to the chair of the UT-Austin sociology department. Ironically, in wake of this transformation, I have undertaken an investigation of entrepreneurialization of the universities. As a result, I have combined sociological resources such as "adversarial methods" with existing approaches from investigative journalism and activist research efforts in order to devise my own.[8]
Just what are the adversarial methods I and others devised in the process of our participation? I use a wide range of methods including textual analysis of secondary and primary official documents, student movement literature, participant observation, simple expressions of quantitative data, and first hand investigative collection of data using the Texas Open Records Act and the federal Freedom of Information Act.
How did I conduct my textual analysis of these written sources? First, the term "textual analysis" is partially misleading since I do not rely only on written texts but also observed and recorded actions. Because it is difficult to impute intention to someone's writings, it is important to test the validity of my interpretation against their actions which are either observed firsthand or documented in one or more journalistic accounts, written memos, letters and reports garnered by Open Record Requests. Following the old adage: "actions speak louder than words," I flowcharted a person's actions until the repetition of their actions indicated a close fit with their written comments. If they were engaged in two or more actions fitting the motives of their own writings I perceived their writings as equivalent to a personal interview. If less than two actions occur, I quote them with a qualification that no pattern of actions can be imputed to fit with their comments. In this way, I found that their actions became a reliable indicator of their written comments. I believe this is complementary to participant observation in many ways since we can observe one's actions while also knowing their thoughts though limited to those articulated in writing and has the advantage of observing the person engaged in social activity not always pursued by interviewers.
But can one read actions in the absence of written text or personal contact such as interviews? I would definitely say so. Much of reconstruction of pre-industrial societies and "marginalized" social groups has relied on non-verbal information such as ruins, art, tools, and even myths. Because it is often the powerful that write and rewrite history to legitimize their position, we are left with the actions of people to decipher not only motives but the effects of their actions. Working class history, for example, relies on a rereading of capitalist law and the media to document the actions of otherwise unrecorded organizing efforts, strikes and marches that may still remain known only in song, legend or street signs. Without actually speaking to the "actors" we can still impute their motives by the ways in which their actions were recorded.
However, the sources of data cannot be separated from the means by which I gained access to them. I often gained access to the most enlightening data while participating with Students Against War and various graduate student organizations that used its power base to gain access to internal UT and UT System documents regarding military research, financial reports, business dealings, sexual harassment, and a number of other topics. Without the publicity about these groups' actions and efforts, these documents may have been harder to pull loose from the UT administration even with the Open Records Act and at times still remained very difficult.
These approaches have been flexible and ever-changing depending on new research strategies learned from others or failures of existing methods. It has been, as Littrell points out, "a partly fixed and partly evolving research design" (p. 218). I have utilized many sources of public information provided by the UT-Austin and UT System administrations, related state and federal agencies, trade and business publications, newspapers, alternative student newspapers, pamphlets and fliers produced by student groups, electronic mail, open meetings, press conferences, informal interviews, and when necessary to crack the forces of secrecy, Open Records requests under Texas law and the Freedom of Information Act.
Studying the university as a "participant observer" implies certain sociological methods. While I agree with the necessity to take the perspective of the "subjects", on which qualitative sociology is founded, I reject both a passive perspective of "researcher" and "subject" and attempt to go beyond this duality.[9]
Littrell points out how "'community participation,' ... requires participation in the community in a sense quite different from many discussions of participant" and he describes ways in which the "researchers" can use action and alliances with adversarial groups (p. 217). By implication, the methodology I chose serves to flesh out the everyday experiences of myself, as the sociological researcher, in order to articulate what is happening at this juncture in the university as part of an ongoing pitched battle between students and those that manage higher education.
More than simply observing a "community", my approach recognizes that the researcher is already part of one. Much too often, researchers choose topics, communities, cultures, places and times far distant from their everyday lives. This occurs for many reasons including a protection against political retribution for covering hot topics too close to home. Dorothy Smith articulates the process by which the researcher is alienated from everyday experiences by sociology's central focus on conceptualization for the purposes of categorizing and managing the subjects we study. "Sociology provides a mode in which people can relate to themselves and to others in a mode which locates them as subjects outside themselves, in which the coordinates are shifted to a general abstracted frame and the relation of actions, events, etc., to the local and particular is suspended or discarded."[10] This distance is often still left standing long after the research is completed and analysis produced. Little or no connection is made between the source of study and the life of the researcher. Typically, no copies of the research report is given to the "subjects" to study. Even in the case in which another movement or struggle is studied, little attempt is made to draw the links to immediate issues or struggles in which the researcher is a participant.
Working inside the entrepreneurial university, the academic researcher can either help reproduce the role of the university in capitalism or participate in efforts to resist it. An adversarial methodology must transcend simply critically studying something to making the substantive connections between the subject of study and our lives in or around the universities. Studying our own everyday experiences as people who also happen to be academics is one method for refusing the alienation from our own experiences as sources of knowledge about the world that Smith describes. The almost complete lack of focus on the universities themselves by academics - but not students - suggests that many of us face disincentives from doing so or lacked the research skills or power base to carry out such research. This is beginning to change with research into sexual harassment and sexism, racism, and peace studies but these efforts are far from comprehensive. It is time for this to change. This dissertation is predicated on my own experiences as part of various struggles to confront and transform the universities while making the links to broader struggles against their international business operations.
The need for adversarial methods is highlighted when attempting to research large bureaucratic organizations such as universities, multinational corporations or the government. As researchers we must examine the differences of power between ourselves and those we are studying.[11] These differences in power bases need to be known since they influence the methods we choose and the data we can collect. (Littrell, p. 214). In my own research, the power base of a student resistance movement (such as the anti-war or graduate student movements) often served to inform my adversarial methods and generate data that I could otherwise not have accessed working alone. As a result, I have been able to study the very university in which I am a student in order to draw broader theoretical conclusions about the university itself.
The Advantage of Adversarial Methods
Recognizing and activating differential power bases gives the researcher an advantage over traditional sociological methods. Whereas cooperative methods accept the contention that individual corporate subjects must be protected under the unstated guise of objectivity, adversarial methods recognize that the researcher has a political position within a larger socio-political context.[12] When this political position is antagonistic to the subject, adversarial methods means using the political power at one's disposal to gain access to the information.
Such objectivity is extracted from researchers under the requirement that they protect corporate secrecy. Cooperative methods of organizational research often carry an inherent requirement of legitimacy before the corporate subject, be it a business, university or government agency. Cornfield and Sullivan recommend obtaining such legitimacy to protect the subject from conflict and antagonism: "Social scientists seeking access to oligopolistic enterprises must legitimate themselves before managers, who fear exposure of business strategy and sensitive data to competitors and the public. The social scientist is an outsider to the corporation who may harbor ideas foreign to the business world, and fear of the outsider qua outsider persists" (p. 260). In effect, the researcher that gains access in this way is one hand-picked by the corporation. It is not surprising that given Sullivan's inclination to protect the corporate subject from such ideas "foreign to the business world" that she was appointed an Assistant Dean of Graduate Affairs at UT in 1991 ensuring protection of UT entrepreneurial activities.
While such an approach ensures the collection of information useful to the corporate subject about itself through the eyes of an outsider it offers nothing useful to "outsiders". This same critique could be made for any qualitative sociological methodology whether they be "reality reconstruction" or "formal sociology."[13] Both privilege the individual as data source: reality reconstruction privileging the interviewee and formal sociology privileging the researcher's interpretation of her everyday life. Cornfield and Sullivan may be explicit about their intentions but they do not deviate from the self-imposed limitations and even censorship required by these methods.
In advocating formal sociology, Schwartz and Jacobs confront the predicament of whether what we learn from individuals can be used to suggest "patterns", or as far as I'm concerned, socio-political organization. Reality reconstruction faces the problem that "It is not the perception of order on the part of individuals is the cause of the emergence of actual order in social behavior. Rather, the two are so inextricably intertwined that they should be collapsed into one problem" (p. 374). This problem occurs in the various methods that Schwartz and Jacobs call reality reconstruction such as interviewing, participant observation, life histories, and content analysis all of which privilege data culled from individuals and used to explain society.
Likewise, formal sociology of ethnomethodology, phenomenology, conversational analysis, and dramaturgy, are faced with extrapolating social organization from everyday life. This problem is quite pressing for "the more daring formal sociologists who reject the idea that studying everyday life consists of studying 'other people' as they interact within a real world."
These sociologists see themselves and their own activities as irreparably part of what they are studying. Science, as ordinarily construed, is abandoned in favor of a transcendental way of learning about social life that collapses "us" and "them," "the real" and "the apparent," or "the subjective" and "the objective." This is all well and good. Yet, as far as we the authors are concerned, no one has come up with a workable way to do this and still answer "How is society possible?" in any meaningful way (p. 375-376).
Both methods face the problematic of how to go about understanding social organization by simply studying the individual. What Schwartz and Jacobs overlook is that even if these patterns are simply created in people's heads, enough people have reproduced similar patterns to result in the formation of organizations and structures. Adversarial methods attempts to bypass this dilemma by recognizing that however these structures come to exist the academic has a political position which must be recognized and acted upon if they are to crack them open. Simply interviewing corporate subjects or writing about one's own everyday life as an academic cannot get the job done alone.
Nonetheless, interviews were one means of gathering information necessary both for my involvement in various political struggles and for investigating UT and other universities. I have spent many hours interviewing UT and other university officials in person and by phone and/or letter regarding their research, and the analysis of financial statements and annual reports, as well as to gain access to relevant documents through the Texas Open Records Act and the federal Freedom of Information Act. Many students, local residents and journalists have also been interviewed regarding their activities or those related to UT and other universities and used in conjunction with published interviews and first hand written accounts of those involved. Informal verbal interviews were extensively used in ways that did not draw attention to the interviewee as a "subject" or even "data source." Rather, what we might call interviews were often times informal conversations with a self-active social individual either specifically sought out or engaged in some common event related to a particular student movement at UT. Although these interviews are used in this dissertation, they are not relied upon as the primary data source.
Such an approach differs greatly from Michael Moffatt's ethnography of students living in a dormitory at Rutger's University where he is a professor. Moffatt's study offers a good example of how this dilemma is played out by participant observation of the university.[14] Living among the students a few days a week during 1977 and 1987, Moffatt interviewed his fellow students and hung out with them, making many observations about race, gender, schoolwork and relations between students and the university administration. However, Moffatt had little to say about the university as an organization beyond his interview questions and everyday experiences playing student. The university was reduced to simply a backdrop in which his subjects worked, played and lived but never critically analyzed. We get the student's attitudes on a wide range of topics but never an understanding of the very organization that brought them together and keeps them working - Rutgers university.
By focusing on the individual within the corporate organization we bear the costs of an indirect objectivity. Why indirect? A strict focus on the individual leaves us nothing to say about anyone other than the individual, leaving the organization in which they exist unexplored. Since the individuals do not simply add up to the organization, such research looks at the individual out of its context and leaves the organization untouched. Focusing on the individual also serves as a gatekeeper to what can be found out about the organization. This is the case with Cornfield and Sullivan who not only suggest giving interviewees censorship privileges but never advocate other methods for researching the corporate subject other than through interviews.
Where the individual is not the only focus of one's research into a corporate organization, an adversarial stance becomes necessary. Getting at internal documents, records, reports and other inside information is bound to stir resistance from the corporate subject. Littrell's adversarial approach offers a means to match such resistance with a power base to get access to this information and create a way inside that would not be possible through reality reconstruction and formal sociological methods. An adversarial methodology has a wide advantage over these other two methods by recognizing that such organizations are antagonistic to research efforts whose objective is critical analysis and transformative change, options unavailable to those using methods that privilege the individual.
For this study, I have chosen to utilize a variation of "community participation" along with a critical analysis of a wide variety of written material. This methodology grows out of my experiences as a UT student since 1985. In this time, I have been able to study patterns and processes of change that are relatively unobtainable by methods of surveys, interviews and other forms of quantitative analysis. In fact, I have had a longer period of time to do my first hand research than most social scientists utilizing these other forementioned methods. Time is a different factor for academics under deadline to publish in order to keep their jobs while the time limits for me have been more flexible or non-existent. Without such deadlines, I have able to more thoroughly investigate particular issues and even wait for years until a power base could be organized to further the research. For example, my research has been aided by the reemergence of alternative students newspapers concerned with UT's business activities (first the Polemicist, then The Other Texan and currently (sub)TEX). Community participation provides me information unobtainable by solitary interviews by those unfamiliar with the multiplicity of languages, cultures and forms of organization that exist among students, faculty and the bureaucracy in and around UT (I do not claim to be familiar with more than a few of them). Without such first hand experiences, my analysis would depend on making inferences from interviewees who may not want to provide essential information, make mistakes of memory, or interpret events differently than if I were to also experience them.
This is the case in Ronnie Dugger's study of UT, Our Invaded Universities,[15] who, because he was not a day-to-day participant at UT relies on interviews - almost all of them with only faculty and administrators - for a good bulk of his information. Dugger is dependent on second hand accounts even from people he knows personally, and the need for checking and rechecking their validity. My strategy for studying UT differs fundamentally from Dugger's even if we agree that UT has been subordinated to corporate interests. We cannot ignore however that Dugger's study is that of an outsider, and as a result of his reliance on personal links to faculty and administrators he frequently either takes their perspective or at least personalizes them in his analysis while dehumanizing the students whom he rarely knew or understood.
As a student, I rely primarily on my own experience and observation of other students, faculty, administrators and government and corporate bureaucrats in the reorganization of UT and the organizing of various student movements. This is supplemented by a wide range of secondary sources including publications and other local and national alternative news sources like the New Liberation News Service bi-weekly dispatches, Polemicist, The Other Texan (which I help publish), the Griot, Tejas, (sub)TEX, the University Review, Discovery, Alcalde, and On Campus. These sources are essential to my research because they are self-expressions of those involved in the process of entrepreneurialization, or engaged in activities antagonistic to it, that I am studying and would in most cases be unavailable to the distant academic researcher or non-student.
This is also the case for obtaining state, university and local foundation and institute documents that served to present the views of industries, corporations and individuals involved in the entrepreneurialization of the university. As a result, I also use simple demonstrations of quantities in my analyses of the UT-Austin budget and commercial operations that originate directly or are abstracted from such sources. On a broader level of higher education as a whole, books, scholarly journal articles, national magazines, daily newspapers, conference presentations and reports, and so-called private sector research reports were instrumental.
Each of these types of primary and secondary sources provides crucial elements to this study. My use of local publications of the university, corporations, state agencies, neighboring communities and students provides a wide range of voices for each type of political actor. These publications are written to varying types of audiences and as such provide a diverse array of faces for each that would be unobtainable from solitary interviews or surveys. A number of published interviews provide access to communication between and within each of the relevant groups (such as numerous studies of industry-government-university partnerships) illustrating many of their actors' own perceptions about their role in the transformation of both UT and higher education as a whole. Such primary sources offer texts written by the actors themselves concerning their thoughts about these issues. This becomes apparent when one cross checks simple newspaper articles or interviews with any high tech booster or administrator that offer only scant information with internal documents produced by their organization that outline detailed processes and intentions.
By examining a variety of documents from a multiplicity of sources within the debate over the reorganization of the university I am able to explore the larger issues of the process of entrepreneurialization and the role of the university in capitalist society.
An Example of the Social Construction of Data by Adversarial Methods[16]
How did this research and use of materials take place and in what context? Although my interest in students and student activism began in 1987 with my own initial involvement in student activist movements at UT-Austin, the in-depth investigation of UT-Austin itself did not begin until 1990.
Initially, my research into UT was limited to narrow concerns of student organizations until I participated in a student group working with homeless organizers and Blackland community residents. In 1988, this coalition successfully blocked UT from continuing to destroy homes in that predominantly black neighborhood to expand the baseball stadium parking lot. This experience precipitated my interest in investigating the business operations of UT. While it is only one of a number of similar types of experiences I have had since then and plays a minor part in the research that will end up in the dissertation, I want to offer it as an example of the way Littrell's adversarial methods has plays itself out among grassroots resistance efforts.
Much of the information culled about UT's attempt to buyout the neighborhood originated in searches of corporate and government documents such as titles and mortgages to learn how UT had quietly hired a realtor to purchase the homes while concealing the name of the actual owner. This information was then circulated through articles and letters in the Austin-American Statesman, Nokoa/The Observer and our ownshort-lived newspaper Ecesis to elicit responses from UT and local politicians. This publicity concurrently generated a student documentary film about Blackland and news articles in the Statesman and investigative articles in the Austin Chronicle, all of which served to confirm much of our research while adding additional information of which we were unaware and allowing us to check our "facts". The response came one Saturday afternoon when a UT Regent personally oversaw the bulldozing of 16 houses.
The bulldozing, our demonstration, squatting, and the campaign of a neighborhood woman for state representative Wilhelmina Delco's (D) position, eventually drew attention of the NAACP, local politicians and UT officials, who began to negotiate once again with the neighborhood. To support the neighborhood and homeless activists, about twenty students organized a demonstration on campus and fed about one hundred homeless people, after which we marched to UT President William Cunningham's office and held a sit-in in the lobby. A few weeks later we also held a bike tour of Blackland. Over the next two years, when a moratorium on UT's purchases and destruction of houses in the western eight blocks of the 16 block neighborhood was agreed upon, much of our research was confirmed both directly by UT in public responses, personal letters from top UT officials and in negotiating meetings.
Even over the course of the negotiations, additional information was uncovered about UT's refusal to abide by an earlier agreement with the city to restore some of its boarded up houses for low income housing. Open meetings, memos, city council reports, press conferences and additional newspaper articles added further to what we knew about the situation. The negotiations had served by this time to remove any direct challenge to UT's plans by the previous coalition by dragging it out over a period of a few years by which time many people had lost interest or a direct say in the negotiations. Decisionmaking had moved from behind closed doors of UT to public debate but the forces that stimulated this change were stripped away in the process. Direct action served to force UT and local politicians to the negotiating table. But this refocused the efforts of the neighborhood coalition from implementing their own decisions about their neighborhood to handing back that decisionmaking power to UT and the city council.
My interest in investigating UT and the growing student movements developed further in 1989 with the publication of the Polemicist, an alternative student newspaper that investigated the everyday operations of UT. In 1990, I began to also investigate UT on my own using the Polemicist's research as my starting point, eventually participating with other students and staff in uncovering UT's role in the Persian Gulf War, issues of austerity and entrepreneurialization, and the role of graduate students in UT. During 1992-93, I assisted in the publication of The Other Texan which investigated many of these issues. In each case, many of our experiences paralleled those of the Blackland case.
My involvement with the Blackland struggle was the first time I actively participated in investigating the operations of UT-Austin. Since that time, I have also participated in active investigations regarding UT-Austin's partnerships with the military and multinational computer companies, budgetary issues and austerity measures, and issues concerning the organization of graduate students. Although the complete details of research from all of these investigations are not included in this dissertation, they were part of the process of informing my methodological approaches. This is especially the case with the attempt to organize graduate students. Like the lone researcher graduate student organizers face the sheer power of the multinational university which not only seeks to disrupt their efforts but puts in question their very role in the corporate process. Revolting graduate students have the potential to become academics who use their collective strength of a movement and research skills to investigate, expose and resist the corporate activities of the university. This was the case in 1989-90 when graduate student researchers exposed hidden funds forcing UT to restore health benefits for graduate employees that had been defunded. There are other recent cases of graduate students successfully using adversarial research methods that combine an analysis of the university as a business with their organizing efforts.[17]
Perhaps this development among graduate students to focus their research on the university in which they work indicates a slow transformation of the research process within the university about the university? Currently, such efforts are not widely supported. As Littrell laments: "Sociologists usually work from weak power bases. Their professional associations offer little or no help. There is no discussion of the impact of power on methods in research methods textbooks. There is no preparation or guidance about when to submit to power or about when and how to resist it. In brief, sociologists have no methodology for research in antagonistic settings" (p. 224). Maybe such experiences that informed this dissertation can contribute to the articulation of adversarial research methods for sociologists.
Comparative Case Studies
The heavy use of local materials originally informed my case study of the entrepreneurialization of UT in my MA thesis. I chose to do a case study of UT primarily because I am driven by a need to better understand the context in which I live and work and relate these everyday experiences in broader sociological terms. Orum, Feagin and Sjoberg develop this idea terms of the usefulness of the case study to understanding our everyday lives, which is certainly in short supply among many graduate students and faculty in the social sciences. The "case study," they write, "seeks to capture people as they experience their natural, everyday circumstances, it can offer a researcher empirical and theoretical gains in understanding larger social complexes of actors, actions, and motives."[18] It offers us an inroad to the very perceptions of the actors themselves: "such analyses [of the case study] permit the observer to render social actions in a manner that comes closest to the action as it is understood by the actors themselves. Here the observer wishes to make claims that are grounded in the claims of those who make them." (p. 8)
This is certainly the case when using documents written and produced by university administrators and students engaged in entrepreneurialization and student movements. Much like interviews, these publications offer direct testimony of the ideas and motivations of these participants although they determine which topics are covered, which is important in itself.
Orum, Feagin, and Sjoberg's methodology does not account for what happens when the researcher is himself an "actor" as well which is a significant issue in participant observation literature. While some would raise questions of validity in this case, it is possible to recognize the researcher/actor as writing his own oral history which is played off the perspectives of other actors and a vast array of government, university and movement documents. The false distinction between researcher and actor and the remaining myth of objectivity (still seemed to be held to a limited extent by Orum, Feagin and Sjoberg) are shattered.[19] Most apparent in my own case of a graduate student researching the university is the inseparability of the actor/researcher from the institutional context of the university in which I do my research.
Class Power and Methodology
Universities are full of knowledge; the freshmen bring a little in, the seniors take none away ... the knowledge accumulates.
-Mark Twain
The potential for successful investigation lies in the recognition of not only the researcher's position in society as a whole but the very institution in which she works. In my own investigations into UT-Austin specifically, I found my own intent for challenging repressive features of the university complemented those goals of numerous student organizers, organizations and faculty groups focusing on issues such as racism, homophobia, the Persian Gulf War and other like political issues in which I already took part. My limited formal training in sociological research methods which suggested avoidance of controversial topics, direct confrontations, explicit political motivations, and a pseudo-objectivity, could not offer me the methodological means for a thorough investigation of UT-Austin or any similar multinational institution. Like Alexander Cockburn, I found my research methods in the innovative and confrontational approaches of the movement participants with whom I worked, methods both borrowed from past and current student and other "grassroots" movements and methods devised in the heat of the moment. The methods of investigation became inseparable from the means of struggle, a process in flux with the changing nature of struggle:
Direct action - sit-ins, occupations, etc. - is contagious and cumulative among students because it gives them a glimpse of disalienation. During such events the rocksolid structures of the institution seem to dissolve. The mysterious operations of bureaucracy are exposed. Familiar unquestionable routines no longer seem part of the natural order of things. Pretensions of authority seem arrogant and hollow. Before the laughing audience the conjurer has lost his mirrors, his curtain, his false-bottomed hat and his capacious sleeves, and is reduced to simulated jocosity and fervent hopes that the attendants will throw them all out.[20]
Such knowledge of the university as a business becomes possible through the struggle and not merely careful academic observation from the sidelines. Those rising in rebellion throw aside not only that which creates for them alienation in the abstract, but their imposed duties and roles as passive linear students and teachers, devising the means for not only making sense of their world and everyday experiences or just for the sake of knowing or understanding but to change it to serve their many needs and desires. These are the adversarial methods of the class struggle, methods that inform my own dissertation.
Bibliography
[1] "Lecture on Nothing," reprinted in John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, New Hampshire: Wesleyan Univ., 1959.
[2] Boyd Littrell, "Bureaucratic Secrets and Adversarial Methods of Social Research," chapter 5 in A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology, edited by Ted Vaughan, Gideon Sjoberg, and Larry Reynolds, NY: General Hall.
[3] Sjoberg, Gideon and Ted Vaughan's "The Bureaucratization of Sociology: Its Impact on Theory and Research," p. 54-113, in Vaughan, Sjoberg and Reynolds, outlines the limitations of sociological methods in studying large multinational organizations such as universities.
[4] Norman Denzin, The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods, 3rd ed., NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989.
[5] Barrow, 1990, p. 250.
[6] Ann C. Bauer and Harry Cleaver, "from Student Minority Report on the Stanford Research Institute," in Charles Perrow, The Radical Attack on Business: A Critical Analysis, NY: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1972, p. 135-149.
[7] See Vaughan and Sjoberg.
[8] For investigative journalist techniques see John Ullman and Jan Colbert, The Reporter's Handbook: An Investigator's Guide to Documents and Techniques. NY: 51. Martin's. 1991; and Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. (IRE) magazine which coordinated this handbook.
[9] William Filstead, ed,. Qualitative Methodology: Firsthand Involvement with the Social World, Markham Publishing Co., 1970. Filstead makes this argument in the "Introduction," especially p.7.
[10] Dorothy Smith, "A Sociology for Women," in the Prism of Sex, ed. by Julia Sherman and Evelyn Torton Beck, University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, p. 160.
[11] We often hear of vital data being leaked by unnamed individuals outside and against their official duties. Les Kurtz reminds me that "often when individuals are approached on a personal basis (especially in anonymous contexts), they reveal bureaucratic secrets because they relate as people rather than officials." (Communication with the Author, February, 1995.)
[12] Daniel Cornfield and Teresa Sullivan, "Fieldwork in the Oligopoly: Protecting the Corporate Subject." Human Organization, vol. 42, no. 3, Fall 1983.
[13] Howard Schwartz and Jerry Jacobs, Qualitative Sociology: A Method to the Madness, NY: The Free Press, 1979.
[14] Michael Moffatt, Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture, New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1989.
[15] Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: A Nonfiction Play for Five Stages, New York: Norton & Co., 1974.
[16] While useful for demonstrating my adversarial methods, further discussion of the following movement is not included in this dissertation .
[17] This is discussed in detail by David Barker, "Why we still have health insurance: A case study of the Graduate Professional Association," The Other Texan, Fall 1992, p. 3; Karen Palazzini, "The micro and macro of student organizing," The Other Texan, Fall 1992, p. 6; and Robert Ovetz, "Who says it can't be done?!: A history of graduate student organizing and unionization in the US and UT," The Other Texan, Fall 1992, p. 8.
[18] Anthony Orum, Joe Feagin, and Gideon Sjoberg, "Introduction: The Nature of the Case Study," chapter 1 in Feagin, Orum and Sjoberg, A Case for the Case Study, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991, p. 8.
[19] Although Ted Vaughan, with whom Sjoberg often works, attacks the researcher/actor dichotomy and locates its origin in the natural science method which provides subjectivity to the researcher to exempt herself from greater forces while positing the actor as having no control over their own lives and constrained by natural social laws. See Vaughan, Sjoberg and Reynolds, p. 32.
[20] Alexander Cockburn, "Introduction," Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis. Action, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn, Baltimore: Penguin and London: New Left Review, 1969, p. 12.
II. Case Studies of Entrepreneurialization and Multiculturalism at UT-Austin
Chapter 2. A Case Study of Entrepreneurialization and Austerity at UT-Austin
Universities are getting out of the education business like U.S. Steel got out of the steel business.
-David Noble[1]
Following the global student rebellions of the 1960s and early 1970s that disrupted the operations of higher education, among other areas of society, the universities became subject to widespread cutbacks and austerity as business and state and federal governments began to disinvest. Pressures to "slim excess," and "raise productivity and efficiency" evolved by 1980 into measures expected to align the management of the universities with current business management principles while further integrating them into the global economy. At the root of these principles was a reorientation of the mission of higher education from contributing to "economic growth" and "development" to creating it directly. Since 1980, federal agencies and state legislatures have implemented numerous incentive programs and developed new resources to promote efforts to restructure the universities so that they serve the needs of the "market" more efficiently. Since then, we have begun to see a fundamental effort to change the character of the universities, signaling the beginnings of their reorganization into overt multinational businesses, a process I call "entrepreneurialization." Entrepreneurialization is hardly complete or successful and is limited primarily to large private research universities and state funded campuses. Nonetheless, a quiet transformation is taking place which threatens to subject all aspects of the university to the interests of profit.
This chapter offers a case study of the entrepreneurialization of the University of Texas-Austin not only because of the advanced stage of its reorganization into an overt multinational corporation. Because UT-Austin sits near the US-Mexico border it has a unique position from which it has only just begun to take advantage of investment opportunities brought about by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). To demonstrate this process, I conducted an investigative case study of the UT System focusing primarily on UT-Austin from 1985 to 1992.[2] This chapter offers a brief summary of my findings in order to provide empirical documentation of a process that has evolved in response to the persisting changes brought about by the campus rebellions of the 1960-70s.
It is important to recognize that the entrepreneurialization of UT-Austin is only in its early stages. Equipped with supporting federal and state initiatives and resources, the activities of UT-Austin are being re-prioritized so that many and ideally all aspects of the campus are subject to the demands of the market. At this point in time, the most evident case of commercialization exists in the College of Engineering, the predominant source of UT-Austin's patented and marketable research and as a result, one of the primary recipients of institutional financial support. To the extent that entrepreneurialization has taken root more quickly in Engineering than say Natural Sciences or Liberal Arts can be attributed both to the more abstract and less applied nature of those fields as well as more overt hesitations and resistance to the dictates of the market.[3]
As a result, the process of entrepreneurialization is not uniform across the UT-Austin campus. It appears that by tracking the reallocation of resources to meet the reprioritization to the market, we can identify the differing footing of entrepreneurialization across the campus well as its vulnerabilities. The process of entrepreneurialization relies on selective austerity that rechannels resources from unreliable or resistant academic areas to commercially oriented programs forcing the former to look to serving market needs in order to make up for budget shortfalls.
In this chapter, we will examine the current unofficial federal policy promoting entrepreneurialization and related legislation passed by the Texas legislature. This is followed by a summary of my case study of how selective austerity has rechanneled resources for from resistant programs to promote commercialization of UT-Austin. A more detailed comparison of the effects on the College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts and the change in the decision making structure are made.
The Current Strategy: The Creation of an Unofficial Federal Policy
In the drive for a new source of high tech innovation and generate new profitable products, business is looking to the universities as a source of commercializable knowledge. With billions of dollars of public monies already invested in physical infrastructure, intellectual labor and both basic and applied research, the universities offer the means for shifting the costly burden of high tech development to society while retaining private ownership over the research and resulting products and profits. Through so-called "technology transfer," the universities are undergoing a process by which their resources and knowledge are increasingly coming under the direct control of private companies. The common justification running through the technology transfer literature is that these renewed university-business relationships are generating a renewed flow of funds into the universities. However, this mystifies the fact that much of the investment capital actually originates from federal programs, state governments, tuition and fee payments, university endowments and bond financing - in effect, a massive outflow of students and taxpayers money through governmental R&D funding and tuition and fees directly into the corporate bottom line. Now underway for about fifteen years, technology transfer has become an unofficial federal policy in the US and a primary stimulus for the "entrepreneurialization" of the universities.
The process of entrepreneurialization was not forged by a select few behind closed doors but is rather the result of overlapping complementary efforts by many decision-makers in the military, business, federal and state governments, universities, as well as wealthy individuals and think-tanks. Although premeditative cooperation can be documented, such as through IC2, it has been to align and consolidate existing efforts rather than initiate them. What has facilitated this cooperation has been a common concern and focus on restimulating the economy by making rigidly regulated, publicly financed resources accessible to private interests for the purposes of profitmaking, which helps to undermine that cooperation. Not only can no one or small group of institutions or individuals can be held responsible, but many have even begun to compete with each other over the goods. We should also keep in mind that there still isn't even a coherent federal policy endorsing the process.
The disinvestment from military research in the universities that followed the student anti-war movements of the 1960s-70s was reversed in 1979 when the Department of Defense (DoD) reinterpreted the Mansfield Amendment, which restricted the breadth of research the military could fund, to open the way for increased military research in the universities along a new tact. Since many campuses had been forced to make at least a token opposition to classified research on paper, this reinterpretation conveniently opened the way for the rapid increase in military research that followed.
The fiscal crisis that was extenuated by the refusal to invest in the universities drove the universities in the late 1970s to re-embrace military funding even as the anti-draft, anti-nuke and Central American anti-intervention movements grew in and around the universities. DoD served to bring "national security and economic prosperity together under the umbrella of high technology" thus providing the resources to back incentives for entrepreneurialization.[4]
Federal legislation that soon followed stimulated the commercialization of renewed military and other federally financed R&D. The Patent and Trademark Amendments of 1980 allowed universities, not-for-profit institutions, and small businesses to hold patent title to federally funded research for the first time.[5] This was further amended a few years later to allow all corporations, regardless of size, to commercialized publicly subsidized research. OMB circular A124 formalized the removal of research results from the public domain, thereby casting privatization. A few years later, the Technology Transfer Act of 1986 cemented a few final details, allowing for exclusive rights to government research and the sharing of royalties with government researchers.
Previously, only 4% of more than 28,000 federally owned patents were licensed for a fee. With these changes, corporations had made their first successful move to gain access to a massive resource that would now serve to socialize the costs of commercial R&D. The Economic Recovery Tax of 1981 enlarged the write-offs available to corporations that donated equipment to a university and a tax credit of 25% to companies with increases in existing R&D expenses above existing levels. Although it expired in 1985, further extensions through 1986 were made while lowering the credit to 20% followed by efforts to make it permanent.
University-corporate combinations that have existed for decades in the form of faculty consulting, research contracts, student employment and the like soon took on a new angle. Whereas previously most development and all marketing was done by the corporations, universities now began rushing to establish and fund technology transfer offices and services, business parks and incubators, venture capital funds and guidance, and facilitate the creation of spin off companies, frequently owned and operated by students, alumni, and former and current faculty. The university often covers its tracks by setting up "nonprofit" foundations to handle the licensing, royalties, and equity stakes in the new corporations. In the process, the burden for financing high risk R&D has begun to shift to the university's budget as major multinationals such as Kodak begin to downsize their research divisions.
Corporations have upgraded little used strategies such as consortiums and research parks to consolidate redundant research projects. Consortiums composed of many of the largest corporations in a market are increasingly settling on university property and using campus and government funded research and facilities to build an industry monopoly. Austin, home to possibly two of the most significant consortiums created so far, Microelectronics Computer Company (MCC) and Sematech, was an important template. In 1984, the Reagan Justice Department ruled that the proposed MCC was not in violation of anti-trust federal laws, thus managing to stir up a renewed cycle of university-corporate conglomerations. This served the passage of the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 that legalized joint ventures among companies that hold more than 25% of market share. As a result, between 1982-85 the number of consortias increased five fold, almost all of them in existence since 1979. About 50 were created within only four years after MCC was founded.[6]
Consortias and research parks are certainly not new, Stanford having created the Stanford Research Park in the 1950s, spawning Hewlett-Packard and the Silicon Valley. By 1990, there were already 109 university related research parks in the US and 15 in Canada, an increase of 22 in the US since 1987.[7] Many of these parks were built with the use of Urban Development Action Grants that had previously served communities rebuilding their neighborhoods to block spatial deconcentration during the 1960s that followed the uprisings of Harlem, Watts and Newark.[8] Tax exempt Industrial Revenue Bonds also became quite popular slush funds, totaling $20 billion in 1981, as they were used to build such parks as New Haven's Science Park. Others are funded by the university or state who cedes land, tax and fee abatements, provides tax-free loans to finance construction or just builds the facilities itself and rents them at a minimum cost as UT does with the Balcones Research Center.
The costs of commercializing university based research is facilitated by a number of federal programs such as the Research and Development Limited Partnerships (RDLPs), which offers a host of extraordinary federal incentives. A large corporation will enter into an agreement to cover the marketing costs of a new technology in exchange for tax breaks, royalties, and up to 50% stock discounts. The tax law allows write-offs for research costs and royalties are taxed as capital gains (20% in 1986). Between 1978-86 there were 218 RDLPs worth $2.5 billion.[9]
The National Science Foundation created a five year program in 1985 worth $94.5 million to set up six university engineering research centers to facilitate tech transfer at UC-Santa Barbara (UCSB), Columbia, MIT, Purdue, and joint programs at the University of Delaware/Rutgers and the University of Maryland/Harvard. The UCSB program focuses on creating the robotic technology necessary for the completely automated factory, certainly motivated by the unmanageability of industrial labor whether in Korea or the US. The NSF funds 25 centers in all including one at UT-Austin that works closely with Sematech.
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program created in 1982 provides venture funding for small businesses engaged in federally funded research. Each of the largest federal agencies set aside money for the competitive program which totaled $100 million in 1982. By 1991, at least 12,000 awards have been made totaling more than $1.4 billion.[10] Since the program considers the most successful applicants to have university connections, this program socializes the costs of university spin-offs engaged in tech transfer at both ends: providing funds for the research and the commercialization.
These programs are only the largest of their kind. There are other programs in nearly every federal agency that support commercial high tech research. There are also proposals to transform DoD's "venture capitalist" DARPA (which is a tiny $1.2 billion a year agency that initiates all military R&D projects and helped develop the Internet to keep in contact with its scientists) into a so-called "civilian" agency to federally subsidize private commercial R&D and tech transfer. In addition, there are plans to create a $5 billion Civilian Technology Corporation to do the same.
The myth that universities receive more money from corporations than they themselves spend is still predominant. In all, corporate Sponsorship of R&D is still at a dribble: around eight percent in the early 1960s, it fell to 2-3% in the 1970s-early 1980s and now stands at only about 6-9%, depending on the source. Even though it is rising faster than federal contributions, 7% vs. 4% between 1980-85, it is still minuscule.[11] Overall, only 10 companies give one third of the money and two give 20%.[12] In fact, on average in 1987, while capital's share of funds was about 6%, universities themselves supplied at least 24%.[13] Clearly, the reality does not match the rhetoric that corporations are funding university research. Even with all the federal programs, 1985 federal R&D spending levels were equivalent to 1967 levels in real terms.[14]
Much of the money universities do make are through the rental of licenses of patented research, from which even the flag wavers admit only 10% of all new discoveries become patented, 1% are licensed and .1% generate income greater than $25,000.[15] The rest of the money comes through overhead charges for the indirect costs of the research: library, staff and facilities usage. This can go as high as 90%, although at large public research universities like UT it is rarely more than 15%. Like most universities, UT takes 50% of the overhead, the college and department each receive 25% each and the faculty member is left to haggle with the department for a minuscule share.
Even so, only a handful of universities have "profited" from entrepreneurialization, although the returns are minute fractions of their original investments. Stanford, one of the five largest recipients of federal R&D money, made $3 million in 1983-84 alone from patents. MIT has made more than $3 million from patent licensing by 1987 and was expected to top $50 million by 1992.[16] However, Stanford and MIT, who have been commercializing research for decades, are rare exceptions limited to the wealthiest endowed universities.
Although profits generated from licensing is increasing rapidly, universities are making only an average of 2-5% of the profits. As 1994 study by the Association of University Technology Managers of 158 found that 158 US and Canadian universities, hospitals and independent research institutions collected over $322 million in royalties from between $6 and $16 billion of sales of 2,227 licensing agreements involving new products and processes derived directly from academic research.[17] Although a large sum in itself, if we were to calculate the billions of dollars in publicly funded resources and infrastructure that made the research possible, we may find that these institutions actually lost money that went to subsidize their corporate partners.
In the absence of direct profits, overhead costs have been huge sources of funding - goldmines many of the times - for huge "private" universities such at MIT and Stanford as Congressional investigations proved in early 1991.[18] With the returns from commercialization still very low, these universities resorted to profiting from overhead costs charged to society. The crackdown on overhead costs appeared much earlier in 1983-84 when Reagan called for a massive reduction in the maximum charge. Although only marginally successful, it set the stage for pushing the universities further from a guaranteed source of funding to having to prove their profitability in the market. Some call it privatization; I call it entrepreneurialization. Denied adequate public finances, the universities are having to become overt profit making businesses, not just sell themselves to outside corporations as "privatization" implies, or go under.
But if all of these negative incentives have driven the universities to become more receptive to entrepreneurialization, it has not had the intended affect of drawing investments to higher education. Corporate research contracts are still low, leaving huge deficits in campus financing. Estimates for equipment repair and replacement, placed at least $300 million for emergency efforts and $10 billion in long term help, and tuition and fee increases, that have outdistanced inflation until recently, attest to the level at which capital still refuses to invest in the universities, whether it be for high tech or cultural studies.
This may explain the intensified interest in tech transfer and spin-offs that take almost no corporate investment and grow almost unilaterally on university donated land used for incubators or research parks and centers, low paid graduate students, unwaged student "interns" that work up to 30-40 hours a week (such as through the IC2-run Austin Technology Incubator), paid faculty that do everything from advising to running the companies and state monies in the form of tech transfer advisory services and centers, R&D grants and financial incentives.
University of Texas Inc.[19]
The University of Texas at Austin (UT) offers an extraordinary case study of the entrepreneurialization of a state funded research university. With more than 40,000 students, a share of a $4 billion endowment, and a ranking among the top university recipients of DoD research money, the entrepreneurialization of UT-Austin is endemic of other universities its size, offering hints of what is to come for smaller colleges and universities as well.
The militarization of UT-Austin is inseparable from commercialization. As we'll see in chapter 4, during the time of WWI, the rationalization of higher education according to Taylorist principles of industrial organization was stimulated by efforts to place the universities at the service of the military's needs for new technology and "manpower." Likewise, during WWII, UT became incorporated into a federal research system that contributed both to the US's role in WWII and later the cold war. This reached its zenith, as it was, with the universities direct role in fighting the Vietnam war as well as contributing to counterinsurgency efforts within the US.[20] In effect, the industrialization of the universities has been inseparably interwoven with their militarization.
Likewise with entrepreneurialization. Although the presence of military dropped off during the campus anti-war movement, it took new footing with the reinterpretation of the Mansfield Amendment and the commercialization of military research promoted by the federal policy outlined above. UT-Austin offers a fine case study of the inseparability of militarization and entrepreneurialization. As one of the largest university military contractors, UT has relied upon these projects both to service the military as well as to develop new knowledge that can be commercialized as profitable products and business ventures.
For George Kozmetsky, chief economic advisor to the Board of Regents and founder and director of the UT associated IC2 (recently renamed the Institute for Innovation, Creativity and Capital from the Institute for Constructive Capitalism), Austin, Texas is a test case for technology transfer and the development of a "technopolis", the further subordination of all aspects of life, work, leisure, government, and education to the high tech industry. Although it appears as just another factor, at the center of the planned Austin technopolis lies UT, just as Stanford stands in the center of what they perceive as a "completed" "Silicon Valley" technopolis and Arizona State University in a "developing" Phoenix technopolis.[21] Through the guidance of IC2 and other close high tech boosters, Austin (with its low paid labor, local tax abatements, infrastructure, etc.) and UT are being reorganized to serve as resources for the expansion of the high tech industry. What transpires at UT, the seventeenth largest recipient of research money in the US,[22] could indicate not only the direction further entrepreneurialization takes, but also how we can stop it.
The remilitarization of the US has been central to Kozmetsky's reorganization of the university. "Kozmetsky believes that DoD dollars can be transformed into personal economic wealth and that civilian industry can gain substantial advantages from the technological breakthroughs of the military and aerospace R&D programs," explained one writer.[23] Using DoD reentry into the university to bankroll the emergence of a high tech based economy is one of the primary tactics of entrepreneurialization. A study of Austin would demonstrate this to be the case: MCC and Sematech along with many other recently arrived multinationals in Austin, rely on UT to subsidize the costs of research and commercialization. It is no surprise that two IC2 conferences and the resulting books are titled: Commercializing Defense-Related Technology and Commercializing SDI Technology.[24] The prime movers in carrying out this military lead development planning have included a slew of "retired" top ranking intelligence and military men who have now settled into top level positions at UT.
The stated goal of such "technology transfer" is often portrayed as serving the general interests of "society." Kozmetsky's coordination of publicly funded resources of the universities, state and federal governments with that of private business "to stimulate economic growth," as the saying goes, is often described in vague, general terms in his and other IC2 writings. However, in a rare articulate moment, Kozmetsky articulates the inseparability of the university in the development of a disciplined workforce (seen as human capital resources) and entrepreneurialization specific to UT-Austin:
As a Texas flagship research university, The University of Texas is crucial to developing educated people. These are the intellectual resources who, in turn, fulfill much of Texas' current economic, social, political, and cultural needs. Among these resources are the UT Austin graduate scientists, engineers, and managers who sustain and transfer the new knowledge that builds Texas' economic future based on science and technology. In this respect, The University of Texas at Austin is an intellectual catalyst that helps link technology with enterprise growth necessary to propel Texas' modern economy forward.[25]
Entrepreneurialization planners such as Kozmetsky make little distinction between military or commercial and biotech or high tech, and neither should those who oppose it. To respond to these developments with the argument that military spending has little value to the economy not only bypasses the obvious contention that the problem is "the economy", i.e. capitalism, but is also factually wrong since business is using public monies to restore accumulation. Military spending has been central to capital's persistence in the face of the ongoing crisis and has served to reverse many of the advances culled by the movements of the 1960-70s.
While long tied to numerous industries overtly through agriculture (going back to the Morrill Act of 1862), cement, real estate, construction and, of course, oil and gas, most of what has transpired since the mid 1980's has forever torn the shroud of ivy from UT. Beginning in 1982, the state began a series of high level legislative studies and reforms following the federal initiatives outlined above that established legal and financial incentives for public subsidization of the high tech industry.
In 1985, the Texas Legislature altered the Texas Education Code requiring each university to establish "intellectual property" regulations that would allow university ownership of campus generated innovation that could then be patented and licensed by the university. The Texas Open Records Act was amended so that any information deemed related to research with broadly defined commercial potential or already licensed or funded by an outside sponsor does not have to be released. In addition, the Center for Technology Development and Transfer (CTDT), was created in the UT College of Engineering. "The purpose of the CTDT," with the added bonus of allowing universities and their researchers to hold ownership in corporations that invest in university research, is that "it is to take publicly funded university research and market it for private gain".[26] This includes everything from channeling faculty members into profitable research projects, locating start-up capital and even marketing the research directly through university owned and operated spin-off companies.
The passage of the "Equity Ownership Bill" in 1987 gave UT and other state universities the ability to own campus based spin-off companies. As a complement, in 1989-90, the conflict of interest law was revised to allow regents to invest in non- and for-profit companies that have licenses or contracts with their university. This opened the door to formalizing participation by Regents and the UT Engineering Foundation Advisory Council (composed of many investors and multinational corporations) in the creation of Research Application, Inc. (RAI) in 1987 in which two recent UT regents, Kozmetsky and a UT System Vice Chancellor have invested.[27]
RAI is a private company dedicated to transferring university research into private hands through the CTDT.[28] The Center for Technology Venturing (CTV) set up by Kozmetsky, the Business School and UT to run the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI). By 1991 ATI houses 13 companies and has provided hundreds of unpaid under- and graduate students as employees for multinational corporations and the state.[29]
In 1987, the legislature also added three programs to subsidize research in science and engineering with commercial potential. Run by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, these programs supplied $246 million between 1985 and 1992 to military and commercial high tech and biotech research including $3.3 million to the military rail gun program at UT-Austin. The advisory committee and review panels are a who's who membership of representatives from 91 universities, defense corporations and the federal government.[30]
As the largest research institution and centrally tied into the high tech industry, UT-Austin has become the centerpiece of statewide entrepreneurialization however incomplete it may be. Nonetheless, its commercial output has been greatly enhanced by the federal and state programs described above as well as the use of selective austerity within the campus to rechannel resources away from unprofitable areas to those that offer commercial potential.
Long touted for its contribution to "economic growth," UT-Austin has been a central institution in the development of business in Texas and especially Austin. Since 1988, 33 companies have either relocated or been founded in Austin. Six of them had direct and indirect ties to UT. Of the 103 small and medium sized technology based companies in Austin in 1986, 53 - or 52% - have direct or indirect ties to UT.[31]
UT-Austin is not merely a magnet for attracting high tech corporations but has become one itself. The number of patent filings for UT based research has increased from 3 in 1983 to 102 in all by 1991, with 98 total issued patents. Twenty six licenses were executed between 1986 to mid 1988, a 62% increase over the period 1983-86. The UT System holds 311 research agreements with an option to license to the corporation and UT itself owns equity in 6 spin-offs and is responsible for 41 high tech spin-off companies.[32] Of the 31 "significant" income earning spin-offs or licensing arrangements identified by the UT System Office of Legal Counsel, six involve UT-Austin, including Astec Industries for whom railgun researcher William Weldon is director. Weldon is UT's most entrepreneurial faculty member, holding 20 patents and 16 applications in his name.[33] In 1984, well before the reorganization began, UT-Austin was generating $100,000 a year in royalties. In all, income from these arrangements total more than $1.2 million in 1990 as the number of licensing arrangements skyrocketed from a mere 15 in 1987 to 150 by 1990. About 30 new corporations have spun off of faculty research or some type of UT System support since 1987.[34] Nearly every state university has established commercialization support programs and some such as the UT System Cancer Center that has made more than 100 licensing deals alone in only a three year period, have been significant.[35]
Together these and other entities have facilitated widespread entrepreneurialization at UT: $34 million in land and equipment that rent for $2.00 a year and most of $16 million for newly endowed professorships for MCC, $140 million for the DoD funded Sematech, $20 million for a Cray supercomputer, $70 million for the proposed Jim Bob Moffett Molecular Biology Building (named after the CEO of Freeport McMoRan) and Molecular Biology program, and $1 billion through a state public bond sale for the supercollider.
UT is closely connected to many multinational corporations through the change in its intellectual property regulations. One such partnership is that of UT chancellor and former UT-Austin President William Cunningham's holding of stocks, advisory role and membership on the boards of several Freeport McMoRan subsidiaries (which is discussed later in this chapter). To solidify the partnership, the UT Geology Department recruited eight graduate students for a million dollar grant to map the island. Natural Science's Dean Robert Boyer, Freeport's President Jim Bob Moffett's' old geology professor and first recipient of an endowed position he funded at UT explains it away quite honestly: "Everybody from President Bush on down is encouraging partnerships between industry and higher education, and this is one of those partnerships."
The range of entrepreneurial activities undertaken by UT and its corporate partners are vast, crisscrossing not only Austin and Texas but stretching globally as well. The rail gun program best demonstrates the complex web of forces at work entrepreneurializing UT. Originally conceived as part of the Star Wars project, the rail gun has found new significance as an anti-tank land warfare weapon. This has developed under the guidance of recent UT Chancellor Hans Mark who brought his SDI research programs from the Air Force and NASA to UT. Some of this technology has most definitely already contributed to the antitank weapon systems and steel piercing bombs used by the US in the genocidal Persian Gulf War.
The railgun has been a major recipient of federal research monies, including a recent $13 million/5 year Army grant for land warfare research in 1990. Harry Fair, one of the key researchers, came to UT after having directed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Land Warfare Office. William Weldon is one of UT's top ten paid professors. According to Weldon, the mission of the Center for Electromechanics (CEM), which he directs, is to "develop the required technology base, perform preliminary investigations of promising applications, and transfer technology to the industrial sector, working closely with industrial and governmental sponsors to accomplish these goals."[36] Rail gun technology has been put to commercial purposes by at least six multinational corporations involved in oil drilling, audio tape production, advanced sparkplugs, and metallurgy to develop their own products and increase their profits. The recently finished $62 million building shared by the CEM and other new facilities and amenities have come from tuition and fee money, bond issues, and other university sources.
Entrepreneurialization and Austerity
In order to free up the capital necessary to underwrite entrepreneurial projects, the universities have introduced a process of selective austerity to re-appropriate funds from programs that are "unprofitable" or resistant to commercialization. Tuition and fee increases, reorganization of the way the endowment is spent and invested, and a change in the way austerity is imposed have become commonplace. Campus administrations circulate a mythology of declining state revenues even as they have increased over the last decade in actual dollars, most of which goes to support commercially oriented projects, as we'll see in this section. As federal and state funding has been pushed sharply down, each campus - and within them, each program - increasingly come under pressure to prove their profitability in order to justify current funding let alone increases. This is unique not only to Texas or the US but appears to have become the standard operating procedure of almost every university system from China to England to East Germany to Nigeria.
In Texas, austerity has become the order of the day, driven by the engine of "budget flexibility" (and along with it "flexible tuition" which are only flexible upwards). Between 1984-87 alone more than $300 million was slashed from all 37 Texas state colleges, universities and community colleges. Overall state funding of UT has fallen 2.7%, or $5.6 million dollars since 1985 and another $9 million was cut during Spring and Fall 1991 alone. Most importantly, this small but significant decrease is overshadowed by the source of this money: tax dollars now only account for 30.5% of the budget compared to 44.7% in 1985.[37] Yet, it is completely ignored that state appropriations have nearly doubled during the same period since 1980 from $106.8 million to $198.4 million in 1991. Funding in 1991 was only $5.6 million or 2.7 percent off that of 1985. The total budget itself has rocketed from just under $100 million in 1969-70 to $277 million in 1980-81 to $506.9 million in 1986-87 and $666 million in 199l-92.[38]
These figures demonstrate a fundamental change in direction for university funding that is influencing a transformation of the fundamental nature of the university. Although state revenues are not rising as rapidly as the overall budget, the money is available nonetheless since more than one half of the budget is "unallocated," i.e. that it can be used however the UT-Austin administration wishes. In effect, if a program refuses or is unable to entrepreneurialize it falls under the pressures of austerity since it is completely dependent on relatively declining state money. If a program further subordinates itself to the overt needs of the market it is rewarded, as engineering and biotech have been, with massive support. That these pressures are beginning to have an effect on areas such as the Liberal Arts at UT is apparent with talk by recent Dean Robert King's about it being a "debtor college" in his rationalization of a doubling in graduate tuition in late 1991.
The range of austerity has been almost limitless at UT-Austin. Fearing student responses to tuition increases, the Board of Regents has selected its targets in a careful and fragmented manner. From 1988-90 only a few graduate schools had their tuition increased and when that was successful, tuition was raised for all graduate students in 1992 under the guise of paying for insufficient funding for faculty salaries by the state, a clear case of divide and conquer between faculty and students. Since 1985, undergraduate tuition has increased from $4/hr to $24/hr while control over graduate student tuition was given to the more politically insulated Board of Regents who have increased it to $52 per hour by 1993 - an increase of 1300% between 1985-1993. Fees for hundreds of classes were either created or increased incrementally to siphon money from students in a more individual and less explicit manner. The "general fee" was increased and new fees created to pay for services once included in tuition like advising on a school by school level and registration. A staff hiring freeze lasted throughout most of 1991 has been extended even as services, lines and employee working conditions worsened. Faculty positions remain unfilled due to departmental cuts and fund shortages that were made up by taking money from funds providing visiting professors, xeroxing, phone and mail services, sabbaticals and hiring for new positions. Library funding has been cut as the state has underfunded the requested budget by 42% in 1990-91, forcing UT to redirect money from elsewhere. It did not prevent cutbacks, since 1416 publications were slashed due to a shortfall of $260,000, in addition to the net loss of 1200 more since 1985. Library usage fees were added at the Law library, book binding eliminated for many new acquisitions and hours slashed.
Financial aid has also faced the knife. While the State Higher Education Coordinating Board was funneling $246 million to commercializable research, it refused, despite numerous warnings, to sell $200 million in bonds to fund a state run guaranteed student loan program through August 1991 that has made a profit of $75 million by 1991. As a result, 1000 UT students had their aid delayed in January for months because it had run dry. As federal aid has shifted from grants to loans, its share of funding has declined from 83% to 73% while the university and state shares have increased to cover the deficit. This has been met by UT with almost $19 million in unmet student need in 1989-90.
A 1987 law provided the coordinating board with the authority to impose enrollment caps on campuses unable to do so themselves by placing a cap on allocations based on a per student formula. After students successfully opened UT by pushing up enrollment by 15,000 in the 1970s and 1980s, and continue to threaten to do so through the 1990s, UT has had only minor success in pushing it down by a percent or so a year. Combined with cuts in aid, attacking enrollment has worked to weed out those who would be likely to oppose the university's partnerships with business. With increased pressures for the implementation of multiculturalism, including further increases in minority enrollment and faculty hiring, as one student wrote, they don't want to "educate the pests he [President Cunningham] let in the first place." UT has attempted to reduce undergraduate enrollment while rapidly increasing graduate enrollment, often by offering already filled teaching assistant jobs to new applications.
If anything, the crisis has only intensified, but with students, faculty and staff as the central targets. While the state is set to sell $1 billion in bonds for even more jails and $1 billion to subsidize the $8 billion superconducting supercollider,[39] the state used the hype of a $4 billion shortfall in 1991 to justify massive slashes in higher education. In the end, a $4 dollar an hour tuition increase emerged coupled with a continuing hiring freeze, layoffs, a failed attempt to cut AI salaries, and $4 more million in cuts - what they really wanted in the first place.
"We're Broke" and Other Complete Bullshit[40]
The state and university have attempted to legitimize this austerity by claiming that they are broke. Yet UT's support for Sematech and other commercially oriented projects show this to be otherwise. In fact, UT has been found to have a number of different sources of unrestricted funds that can be used however it pleases. To begin with, legislation passed in 1989 granted increased budgeting flexibility to the administration to reallocate money to where they deem necessary. Since more than half the $666 million 1991-92 budget is unrestricted the administration has a large amount of money to direct to where the financial returns are the largest.[41]
To discuss UT finances, no one document can be referred to for a comprehensive picture. The Operating Budget, published annually, only offers a breakdown of the money appropriated to the UT-Austin campus by the legislature for that year of the biennium. The Annual Financial Statements which has a more restricted circulation than the "budget", details the total value of UT-Austin above and beyond the annual budget and thus outside public oversight. But even it does not cover the Permanent University Fund (PUF), detailed by the annually published Permanent University Fund Investments, and other reserve funds and investments held by the UT System and shared by all the campuses, detailed in their Bond Issue Papers.
UT has a number of lesser publicized supplementary sources of funds that can be studied only with access to the later three highly secretive documents. Its $4 billion PUF shared with the Texas A&M System yielded about $250 million in interest of which UT receives two thirds. Although the money goes first to repay bond debt, UT received about $82 million in 1991 in cash that it used for a wide range of projects, mostly supporting entrepreneurial programs in engineering. The interest forms the Available University Fund (AUF) which over the years has been used to establish a matching fund for endowed faculty positions that amounts to about $377 million. Some of the AUF has also gone into a reserve fund for construction projects that totals about $78 million. The PUF itself is a source of capital since bonds can be sold to finance construction projects backed by the endowment. Tuition, general fees and other sources of capital provide UT with collateral for selling bonds that are repaid by increased tuition and fees. The "General Fee" paid by every student, amounting to $10 million in 1991, goes directly toward the construction and expansion of commercially oriented facilities, including $8 million for the molecular biology building. In all, the UT System is nearly $1 billion in debt through each type of bond sale. UT-Austin was also found to have $91.6 million and the UT-System $428.3 million in all in discretionary funds that the State Comptroller wanted to expropriate in 1991 and the system has more than $1.3 billion in short term investments and cash.[42]
In an in depth study I conducted for my master's thesis and published in The Other Texan, I found that UT and the UT System actually had a total of $3.3 billion in discretionary, unrestricted funds available.[43] These funds were not part of the PUF but found in some of the accounts mentioned above as well as short-term flexible investments. In other words, UT is not broke.
A Comparison of the Colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts
It is not enough to only promote commercialization of academic activities, but to ensure a constant, unobstructed flow of resources to support and reproduce it which is why localized austerity and increased budget flexibility are pivotal to the entrepreneurialization of UT. We can see how this works by comparing Engineering and Liberal Arts access to endowment money, bond issues, corporate funding and overhead. The distinction is very simple: Engineering has broader access to each of these than Liberal Arts.[44]
The UT College of Engineering has had the most success in using austerity to generate entrepreneurialization. Of its entire operating budget, only 25 percent comes from the legislature while 10 percent comes from gifts and its endowment income. With $56.7 million in research grants and awards to the college in 1989-90 (up 15 percent from 1988-9) engineering is a proven profit-making operation. Considering that nearly all the entrepreneurial faculty and staff originate from this college, engineering is the model of what is planned for the university as a whole.
Through the Engineering Foundation, the college received $9.6 million in contributions from its "Industrial Program" and maintained a $69.3 million endowment.[45] Started in 1959 by allowing corporations to give money for limited consulting services and extension services with Humble Oil (whose owner was a regent in the 1960s) as the first Industrial Associate in 1961, the Industrial Associates Program (which operates much like MIT's ILP) received contributions from 72 (up from 65 in one year) member companies totaling $2.86 million including Dow, Exxon, IBM, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, Motorola, Shell, Southwestern Bell, and 3M to name a few of the $20,000 grantors. Others include Bechtel, Radian (a Tracor spin off), and Mitchell Energy and Development (which is a financial supporter of the Houston Area Research Center with which UT is closely connected). Phillips Petroleum was even given an award by the college for "Outstanding Corporate Service" for their support of the program. The Engineering Foundation Advisory Council includes Phillips (chairman), Monsanto (vice chair), MCC's CEO, Sematech's CEO, and 3M. "Senior Active Members" include former Regent Louis Beecherl, MCC founder and former CIA and National Security Agency official Bobby Ray Inman, and Tracor founder and former UT-Austin professor Frank McBee.[46] Created in 1955, the Foundation's chairmen have included high level employees of Tenneco, Texas Utilities, Texas Instruments, Gulf, Amoco, Shell, Cockrell Oil, Parker Drilling's founder (who is licensing railgun technology), Fina, Texaco, Western and MCC's Inman. With the interest of these large corporations, the endowment grew from a slim $255,200 in 1977 to $41.1 million in 1986, nearly quadrupling between 1982 and 1985 and growing.
The years 1981-85 were a boomtime for the college with a growth in the number of endowed positions which totaled 146 new slots. By comparison, after the Texas Legislature changed the manner proceeds from the Available University Fund (AUF) could be spent in 1981 so that it could be used to create endowed positions, the number of endowed positions skyrocketed to 700 by April 1984 alone most of them geared to business and engineering. By contrast, Liberal Arts went from having three chairs worth $300,000 in 1970 to only 70 for $15 million in 1984 - only 10 percent of the university-wide total for the largest college at the time. One of the new chairs in engineering was the Chair in Free Enterprise, initiated by Frank McBee and others with an initial executive council composed of the deans of education, business and LBJ. The chair, which funds the CTDT director, received a $.5 million boost from Virginia Murchson to launch CTDT's Stephen Szygenda into the position which Dale Klein, Associate Dean for Research and former director of the Nuclear Engineering Teaching Lab, now holds.
It is necessary to examine the growth in endowed chairs from 1985-86 to 1990-91 to understand the way in which emphasis has been placed on certain disciplinary programs at the expense of others. As chart 2.1 shows, the largest recipients of endowed positions from fiscal 1985-86 and 1990-91, and thus, AUF and other institutional funds, have been engineering (140 positions), law (118), and natural sciences (88) - more than half of the total of 610.
Chart 2.1 - Gift Funded Endowments by College/School,
1985-86 to 1990-91[47]
| College | Total # positions |
| Architecture | 13 |
| Business | 36 |
| Communication | 19 |
| Education | 18 |
| Engineering | 140 |
| Fine Arts | 3 |
| Interdisciplinary | 77 |
| Law | 118 |
| Liberal Arts | 46 |
| GSLIS (Graduate School of Library and Information Science) | 5 |
| Natural Sciences | 88 |
| Nursing | 8 |
| Pharmacy | 4 |
| Public Affairs | 4 |
| Social Work | 5 |
| TOTAL | 584 |
Liberal Arts has been under pressure to follow the route that Engineering has taken to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency. Expecting a budget shortfall of $200,000 in 1992, the College of Liberal Arts began "The Annual Fund" campaign to generate outside private support. The prospected donor is encouraged that they may "double or triple the value of your gift if you work for a matching gift company," wrote Dean King in a fund raising letter.[48] When King met with graduate students about the tuition increases in fall 1991, he referred to this campaign as a way to turn around what he calls a "debtor college." What he meant was liberal arts will be forced to undergo austerity unless it can entrepreneurialize and generate the operating capital necessary to survive. Perhaps his resistance to multiculturalism, discussed in chapter 3, served this purpose by eliminating those forces resistant to further subordinating the college to the dictate of the business?
The pressure on Liberal Arts to entrepreneurialize appears to have begun to generate results if we examine the dramatic increase of outside support since the mid 1980s. In 1985-86, from the categories of alumni, parents, other, foundations, and corporations, the college received $379,638 in gifts for current operations and $2,098,655 for capital purposes, a total of $2,478,294. By 1990-91, it received $1,509,280 for current operations and $5,281,399 for capital purposes, for a total of $6,790,680, a near tripling in support. During the same period, Engineering received $2,556,532 for current operations and $3,076,968 for capital purposes in 1985-1986, for a total of $5,633,501, and less than doubled by 1990-91 with gifts of $4,920,257 for current operation and $4,569,222 for capital purposes in 1990-91, for a total of $9,489,479.[49] The Colleges of Natural Science and Law also experienced rapid growth in their private endowments between 1988-89 and 1991-92 while Communications and Nursing declined.[50] It is interesting to note the primary sources of funds for each college. Corporations were one of the smallest sources of support for Liberal Arts during both of these fiscal years while they were the largest for Engineering. Ironically, although Liberal Arts still generates less outside support it is increasing at a faster rate than engineering.
These figures do not include research money, endowed positions, and debt financing of facilities and equipment which engineering dominates. During the 1980s, at least $60 million was spent on construction of labs, buildings, faculty, and facilities on campus and at the Balcones Research Center (BRC) just for Engineering.[51] The Engineering Teaching Centers I and II finished in 1974 and 1982 cost $25 million together, much more than the estimated $10 million. The Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Building finished in 1986 cost $20 million and is part of an engineering plant all built since 1958 valued at $51 million. There is also the Center for Electromechanics/Center for Energy Studies building for $23.2 million and all the other facilities at the BRC that shoot the total far above $60 million.[52]
By contrast, since the mid 1980s the College of Liberal Arts, which had the largest student enrollment for most of the time period, has merely received a remodeled chemical and petroleum building and E.P. Schoch building for the economics and anthropology departments. Meanwhile the sociology department has lost space in Burdine Hall even though there are two fewer departments located there than were in 1986 when it housed Computer Science and Anthropology as well as Government. The College of Communications have had to wait many years until 1992 for the corroded and falling outer metal surface of one of the communication complex buildings to be repaired while asbestos continues to fall from the ceilings of some of their classrooms.
From the very beginning, the history of UT-Austin is one of investment in engineering when the rest of campus is suffering from austerity. The first classroom building to break out of the original forty acres was Taylor Hall which opened in 1933. At a cost of $4 million that was generated from the sale of bonds covered by the PUF that had reached a value of $4 million in only 1925, Taylor Hall was one of nine new buildings for the college of Engineering and Architecture. While spending the $4 million in the midst of the depression, UT- Austin cut all salaries by 25 percent in 1933 and paid a script that local banks honored for faculty at face value but reduced for everyone else.
Even basic funding per student differs sharply between colleges. Brooks provided a concise contrast between support for engineering and liberal arts:
Budget and other documents show that, between the fall of 1981 and the fall of 1990, UT spent less on students in the College of Liberal Arts than on students in the College of Engineering. During this period, enrollment of full-time engineering students decreased by 3.7 percent while full-time faculty for the department increased nearly 22 percent. At the same time, enrollment of full-time liberal arts students rose 2.3 percent while full-time faculty for the department grew 8 percent. Although enrollment was dropping, spending in the College of Engineering more than doubled during the period - from $10.3 million to $21.2 million. While enrollment was climbing, spending the College of Liberal Arts rose 62% - from $20 million to $32.4 million. In 1990-1991, UT spent about $2,363 on instruction costs per full-time liberal arts student and $5,569 on instruction per full-time engineering student.[53]
This demonstrates concretely what students and faculty already knew as the real cause of so-called "overcrowding" in 1989 when hundreds of students could not sign up for their required English class. The problem is not one of too many students, but too little money in certain places. In one sense, the administration calls it "overcrowding" because it has too many students it cannot control. Yet, that students in colleges like liberal arts have to take classes with 100 to 500 other students or cannot get any classes at all is the result of planned underfunding of those programs so that the classes are so overcrowded - and the working conditions so deteriorated - that it serves as a disincentive for staying in programs UT-Austin does want to fund. This is especially the case with financial aid on which many students depend. Although the office received a larger building the only thing that changed is students can now watch TV while they wait in line in a larger air conditioned hallway to refile documents the overworked staff lost and wait for their money to come months after the semester started.
In 1991, while raising tuition (and cutting AI and TA salaries as a result), freezing staff hiring (cutting staff relative wages by increasing their workload) and cutting faculty supplies, long distance calls and copying, UT-Austin was investing hundreds of millions in commercializable research as we've seen. Just as the depressions of the 1930s and of the 1990s can be interpreted as a capital strike, a refusal to invest in areas with the lowest return (because they serve a multiplicity of needs antagonistic to capital or face resistance from students and others), so can the pattern of funding at UT-Austin.[54] It is far too simplistic to frame the problem as education versus research. To do so would only skim the surface of a much more complex political conflict at work in the universities between the desires of students and the demands of capital.
Reorganizing the Authority Structure
Who is making these decisions? This is the question asked by Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder in their analysis of the commercialization of Canadian higher education discussed in depth in chapter 4.[55] In the case of UT-Austin, there is not one locus of decision-making located either in the sponsoring agency or corporation, the university administration, student or faculty pressure, or the state legislature. Rather, the fact that decisions affecting the daily operation of UT-Austin originate from several sources indicates a fundamental reorganization of the university's authority structure as part of a global process.
Faculty governance structures are no longer a fundamental site of decision-making. Rather, new bases of unrecognized power are being developed in order to promote the reorganization of UT-Austin into an overt business. Until 1994 much of this power base is centralized in the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost Gerhard Fonken. An entire infrastructure is in place to compile information about campus research in order to evaluate it for potential commercialization, marketing and even investment for the creation of start-up businesses. Vice Provost and administrator for UT-Austin's intellectual property and licensing program Patricia Ohlendorf explains in detail how it is organized:
The Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost works with the inventor in market evaluation and in finding a licensee to commercialize the technology embodied in the intellectual property. Activities regarding each intellectual property are entered into an electronic data base for monitoring. Prospective licensees and research sponsors are identified through contacts with of the faculty researcher, market research done by The University, periodic mailings by The University to key companies, and contacts made at professional meetings. We perform due diligence by gathering information regarding companies such as profiles of specific technical interests, funding capabilities, and the track record working with universities. We send a prospective licensee model agreements for the exchange of confidential information, patent and technology licensing, and sponsored research as a starting point in negotiations.[56]
It is important to add that Ohlendorf is also a board member of the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) which houses spin-off companies, including those owned by UT-Austin faculty and the University.[57] ATI is jointly run by UT- Austin and IC2, bringing the influence of the institute on UT-Austin decision- making full circle.
The Executive Vice President and Provost are not alone in this work. In addition to the Austin Technology Incubator and IC2, this office is joined by the Center for Technology Development and Transfer (CTDT) and the Office of Technology Transfer in the College of Engineering. CTDT focuses on energy related technology, using students in the School of Law and Graduate School of Business to aid in the commercialization process, "specifically in license agreement review and the assessment of industry markets ad prospective venture capital investors," according to Ohlendorf.
This infrastructure not only facilitates the location of research funding, as is commonly understood, but serves a wide range of roles as an intellectual labor contractor, locating companies that can use the labor to produce new marketable products for a share of the proceeds. According to Ohlendorf, after expenses, royalties from licensing deals are split 50/50 between the university and the researcher.[58] Within the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost there is a Technology Licensing Specialist whose "responsibilities include evaluating, marketing, and licensing intellectual property which results from academic and research activities."[59] Paulette Braeutigam, who held this position as of 1993, also serves on the University Intellectual Property Committee. The Office of General Counsel and the Office of Asset Management operate at the UT System level to also coordinate licensing and commercialization among each of the campuses.[60]
Although the UT-Austin Faculty Senate, Graduate Assembly and University Council retain say over matters of curriculum and academic disciplines, they are marginal to the actual organization of the campus. Even in matters of curriculum, such decisions are often made by the president's office, the chancellor, provost or even a myriad of vice presidents before they even reach these bodies. For example, as of October 10, 1994, the Graduate Assembly had before it a proposal to develop a new master's degree in the Commercialization of Science and Technology which would have its own department with George Kozmetsky as the graduate advisor.[61] Yet, unaware of the influence of IC2 in developing commercialization policy and the re-channeling of resources to support them, the Assembly is unprepared, uninformed and unable to adequately resist the proposal. What the Assembly is most likely unaware of is the role of IC2 in developing such policies but that it even exists let alone the fact that IC2 fellows already teach courses in a wide number of departments including sociology whose chair is a fellow. The ultimate irony is that the faculty are being asked to formally approve a process of which they are almost completely unaware.
Even the limited sphere of faculty voice is circumscribed at will by the administration in instances that directly or indirectly challenge the commercial mission of the university. As we'll see in chapter 3, although historically an internal concern of the department faculty, a proposal to formally restructure the curriculum of E306 to include issues of gender and racism was struck down by the upper levels of the administration. In effect, although policies promoting entrepreneurialization are not subject to oversight, faculty reforms do not have the power of implementation.
This follows a particular logic. In order to promote the commercialization of the campus, such initiatives cannot be subject to discussion since they are predicated on socializing the costs of profits owned by the few and could be recognized as the source of the financial hardships now commonly faced by all. On the other hand, traditional faculty self-governance institutions that gave formal recognition to programs such as Chicano Studies that challenge the very organization of society must be subject to tighter control and circumvention.
As Daniel Levy and Hugo Aboites demonstrate in the case of Latin American universities, commercialization efforts must deal with well organized student, faculty and staff organizations and unions that hold varying types of formal decision-making control over the campuses.[62] As this is not the case in the US and Canada, university administrators can just change the course of policy behind closed doors without public oversight, at least until their decisions become known and the object of opposition.
Another factor to consider is independent wealth of particular segments of the campus and their influence over campus decision-making. As a two-tiered structure of the "haves" and "have nots" develop,[63] the haves, with their own independently controlled sources of funds either from donations, endowments, endowed chairs, research contract overhead income, and corporate sponsorship, can block or elude formal decision-making structures that may curtail their own priorities. For example, the College of Engineering, the wealthiest college on campus,[64] successfully asserted its opposition to the multiculturalism course requirement (even though it did not propose the addition of a new core course) because, according to arguments from professors and administrators within the college, it would detract engineering students from their expected studies. Using its wealth and status as a profitable academic discipline, the administration used the college of engineering's opposition as a justification for its own. Such colleges may circumvent the necessity of formal requests for resources to hire new faculty or purchase new equipment for example by relying on its own internal funds or donations from large corporations or even the re-channeling of PUF monies by the administration and board of regents. Whereas other academic programs resource requests may eventually become topic for public debate, and with it their own productivity and service to the market, engineering is not held accountable for its military and nuclear research projects and its frequent toxic dumpings into Waller Creek.
This transformation in the authority structure of the university is not simply that decisions which affect the character of the campus are now being made outside traditional faculty structures.[65] These are not decisions that can be made or not made in isolation of the global reorganization currently taking place. Placed into an international context, social institutions within particular national boundaries face new burdens to demonstrate their contribution to the global market. Universities, subject to the conflicts between students and faculty and administrators that have disrupted their service to business, are being pushed through austerity to generate a larger share of their operating expenses on their own. As a result, many universities are becoming partners in business ventures that transcend specific national interests as is the case with UT and Freeport McMoRan's joint venture in West Papua.
This is the case with UT-Austin. Although it is unknown whether faculty governance structures actually ever had much day to day decision-making power, today their roles are eclipsed by administrative niches responding to state and national policies which in return compose the local part of a larger global picture. The issue at hand is not merely that IC2 or CTDT or even George Kozmetsky possess unaccountable decision-making power but that many forces are being organized simultaneously to promote new orientations and emphases for UT-Austin.
This is also not to say that UT-Austin is simply subject to larger structural forces over which it has no control. Rather, UT-Austin, representing more than simply a physical structure, is already and has long been part of the global organization of society. It not only trains students and employees academics from around the world and consumes other resources generated abroad, but is home to research projects that run the gamut from anthropologist Steven Feld's recordings of Papua New Guinean rain forest people threatened by development to mapping the other side of the island for Freeport McMoRan.
It is important to place UT-Austin into an international context that is not one of monolithic control but crisis and conflict. Since other tactics such as the use of debt and violent repression for restoring control have failed, business is now looking anxiously to the universities to find new high tech solutions to old political problems. Yet, the universities have not even resolved their own conflicts. In this way, we can see in entrepreneurialization only a response to the success of the campus rebellions of the 1960-70s in creating spaces oriented to needs other than that of business and control. Likewise, entrepreneurialization is not simply a cut and dried policy being carried out in its entirety, but only a tactic to restore control riddled by conflict and contradictions.
Entrepreneurialization and Crisis
We are seeing a pattern of selective disinvestment from higher education as a whole and from certain areas within each institution. Unable to restore control and thus the universities' usefulness to capital accumulation, the universities are being forced to undergo fundamental reorganization through the pressures of austerity that will make them prove their entrepreneurial usefulness or face increasing financial hardship.
Much of what is described in the UT System and at UT-Austin is becoming standard operating procedure throughout universities in the US and the world as we'll see in chapter 4. Nationwide, universities are cutting back ever more rapidly, raising tuition and fees, laying off staff and part time faculty, reducing class availability and library funding, and taking other measures that shift a larger share of the costs of education to the students. For the first time in the 33 years that records have been kept, state governments spent less on higher education in 1991-92 than the previous fiscal year. Seven of the 11 states that spend more than $1 billion spent less than the year before. Thirty-five states did not increase spending at all or reduced it in real terms. In all, according to the Pew Higher Education Research Program's report that provided these figures: "More than any time in the last half century, American colleges and universities are likely to be on their own - left to their own best instincts and to draw upon their own talents and resources as they go about the business of adjusting their appetite to the provisions at hand."[66] No clearer can it be said that entrepreneurialization is being driven by austerity.
The "talents" of the universities are becoming apparent as funds are being re-appropriated from areas that serve students needs or desires to those that serve the entrepreneurialization. Higher education historian David Noble concurs, explaining that "the tuition increase is just a symptom of the more fundamental transformation of our higher educational institutions - public and private alike - into corporate research, and hence money-making machines."[67]
Universities are using publicly funded resources in order to develop research into marketable products that can be sold directly for immediate profits or in collaboration with other corporate partners. UT-Austin has begun such projects in collaboration with a kind of corporate club in which multinationals pay an annual fee to the College of Engineering for complete access to faculty, staff, facilities and students. Through joint capital investments in Sematech and MCC the UT-Austin administration hopes to develop, market and profit from research conducted in the Philosophy, Computer and Mechanical Engineering Departments in the further development of artificial intelligence, robotics and computers. The identification and coordination of such projects for commercialization is carried out the CTDT and IC2, the latter organized as a collaboration of academics from many disciplines, campuses and countries with assorted multinational corporate sponsors. Those programs that serve a direct role in such ventures profit through assured if not steadily rising levels of funding as well as independently controlled resources and decisionmaking powers not available to other academic programs just as we saw with the comparative study of the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Engineering.
However, it isn't working as planned. Although the process of entrepreneurialization is underway at UT-Austin, it faces many challenges, one of which being demands of students and faculty to transform the university to serve the need for radical social transformation. Faced with a well organized and powerful multiculturalism movement, UT-Austin's reorganization into a multinational corporation was temporarily held-up in the early 1990s by demands for additional resources and institutional support for programs antagonistic to commercialization.[68] It is to this conflict that we now turn.
Bibliography
[1] David Noble, "Higher Education Takes the Low Road," Newsday, October 8, 1989, p. 7.
[2] Robert Ovetz, UT Inc.: Austerity and Entrepreneurialization at the University of Texas at Austin, unpublished master's thesis, 1992.
[3] Of course, some academic fields such as law and business have long since enjoyed predominant positions and large shares of campus resources.
[4] Slaughter, p. 123. Ehrlich outlines a whole range of new initiatives to bring DoD and the universities closer together. Basic research support increased by 15% between 1982-83, graduate fellowship programs were created or enhanced, a joint DoD-NSF coordinating committee formed, the DoD University Forum started in 1982 that is composed of university presidents and DoD administrators, and the Independent Research and Development Council was created to tighten university-industry interactions. (Howard Ehrlich, "The University -Military Connection, Social Anarchism, Nos. 8-9, 1985, p. 4.)
[5] It was not the first time patents to federal research could be held privately. The Institutional Patent Agreements negotiated with HEW (the Department of Health, Education and Welfare) in 1968 and NSF (the National Science Foundation) in 1973 allowed institutions and universities that could demonstrate transfer capabilities with the right to hold a patent. The NSF started even earlier. In 1968 it redirected its funding emphasis to applied research (from their perspective, there is a distinction between the commercial potential of basic and applied).
[6] Fairweather, James, "The University's Role in Economic Development: Lessons for Academic Leaders," SRA Journal, Winter, 1990, p. 6.
[7] University Research Parks, "Research Parks: A 1990 Directory," p. 12-17; and Sarah Glazer, "Research Parks Plug into the Electronics Industry," Electronic Business, March 15, 1987, p. 106-114.
[8] Yale's Science Park, the Biomedical Research Park in Chicago, and both the University City Science Center and the Business and Technology Center in Philadelphia are prime examples.
[9] Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex, Conn.: Yale Press, 1986, p. 164-5, offers an analysis of how RDLPs have been used to build the biotech industry. The eight year figure is from Business Week, June 23, 1986.
[10] Diversification: The Economic Diversification and Technology Business Development Newsletter of Texas, Fall 1990, v.4, n.3, p. 3. This is published by Technology Business Development located at the Texas Engineering Experiment Station which was created by the state as the statewide tech transfer agency.
[11] Newman, p. 217.
[12] Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/5/83, p.4.
[13] Kay, Kenneth, "Research and Development in the 100th Congress, SRA Journal, Winter, 1988, p. 24 (chart). Kay is the Executive Director of CORETECH, which is composed of 47 university, 20 corporations and various higher education associations ("Universities and Businesses Join to Lobby for Research," The Chronicle of Higher Education, January, 28, 1987, p. 20).
[14] Lindsey, Quentin, "Industry/University Research Cooperation: The State Government Role," SRA Journal, Fall, 1985, p. 86.
[15] Bok, Derek, Beyond the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibilities of the Modern University, Cambridge: Harvard University, 1982, p. 156.
[16] See Arntzen, Charles and Mark Money in Commercializing Biotechnology in the Global Economy, ed. by Tom Mabry, Steven Price, and Mark Dibner, 1991, Austin: IC2, p. 216, which is a compilation of presentations from a conference sponsored and published by IC2. MIT has also been linked to more than 400 firms in Massachusetts with revenues of more than $27 billion started by alumni or professors. Also notable are the gigantic Genentech, formed by UC-San Francisco professor Herbert Boyer in 1976 that grew to a $600 million company in only four years and Biogen, an equally large biotech firm started by Harvard's Walter Gilbert. Arntzen and Money, are integral to the commercialization of university-based research themselves at Texas A&M. Arntzen is the Deputy Chancellor for Agriculture and Director of the gigantic Texas Agricultural Experiment Station while Money recently resigned as the Vice Chancellor for Research Park and Corporate Relations, essentially the director of the Texas A&M University Research Park. Tom Mabry, one of the editors, happens to be a UT faculty member and IC2 fellow.
[17] Technology Access Report, "University Licensing Continues to Soar,' vol. VII, no. 12, December 1994, p. 1.
[18] Prior to the scandals, Stanford's overhead rate rocketed from 58% in 1980 to 74% in 1990. Now capped by the government at 55.5%, the university will lose at least $20 million in 1991. Business Week, May 20, 1991, p. 124. As a result of the scandal, Stanford fired President Donald Kennedy a few months later in July. How easy the mighty shall fall. For more than a decade, he was considered one of the top entrepreneurial presidents and was the moving force behind the 1982 "Pajaro Dunes" summit between research university presidents and corporate executives that pretended to deal with criticisms of conflict of interest and forced secrecy of research results that result from commercialization.
[19] As a student at UT-Austin, I have undertaken a critical investigation of the entrepreneurialization of the campus and the UT System which has been published in various student newspapers and magazines and evolved into my MA thesis and eventually my dissertation.
[20] Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist Stare: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education 1894-1928, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, 1990; David Noble's America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, New York: Knopf, 1977; Gideon Sjoberg and Ted Vaughan, "The Bureaucratization of Sociology: Its Impact on Theory and Research," chapter 2 in A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology, NY: General Hall, 1993; Ann C. Bauer and Harry Cleaver, "from Student Minority Report on the Stanford Research Institute," in Charles Perrow, The Radical Attack on Business: A Critical Analysis, NY: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1972, p. 135-149; and Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1990.
[21] It is interesting to note that Stephen Gomes, who is directing Bechtel's Technopolis Development Project, is also an IC2 fellow. Remember, Bechtel was a major contractor for Iraq and is now raking it in rebuilding Kuwait.
[22] Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 1990, reprinted in Education for the People Organizing Guide, 1991, p. 15.
[23] Arnie Weissmann, "Contract Warriors", 3rd Coast, June 1986, p. 43.
[24] Robert Kuhn, (ed.), Commercializing Defense-Related Technology, NY: Praeger, 1986; and Robert Kuhn and Stewart Nozette (eds.), Commercializing SDI Technologies, NY: Praeger, 1987.
[25] George Kozmetsky, "Comment," Discovery: Research and Scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin, vol. 13, no. 1, 1993, p. 2.
[26] Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, "Free Market Scholarship: UT, Technology Transfer and Academic Freedom," Polemicist, November, 1990, p. 4.
[27] Ibid., p. 4.
[28] Frank McBee, "Comment," Discovery: Research and Scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin, vol. 11, no. 3, 1991, p. 2. McBee is founder of RAI.
[29] See IC2 Institute Annual Report 1989-1990, The University of Texas at Austin, 5-7; or any of their annual reports for current data.
[30] Advanced Research Program, Advanced Technology Program, Preliminary Report, June 1988, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board; "Thirty Two Texas Campuses to Receive Almost $62 Million in Nation's Largest Competitive Research Program," Coordinating Board press release, Oct. 26, 1989; and Strategies for the New Texas Economy, Texas Science and Technology Council, January 1987.
[31] Gibson, David and Raymond Smilor, "The Role of the Research University in Creating and Sustaining the U.S. Technopolis," in University Spin-off Companies: Economic Development, Faculty Entrepreneurs, and Technology Transfer, ed. by Alistair Brett, David Gibson and Raymond Smilor, 1991, P. 55. This book is a collection of papers presented at a conference organized by IC2, for whom Gibson and Smilor work for, and its associated organization, the RGK Foundation.
[32] Meg Wilson, "The University Role in Commercializing Technology," date unknown, p. 3; and Raymond Smilor, David Gibson and Glenn Dietrich, "University Spin-out Companies: Technology Start-Ups from UT-Austin," Austin: IC2, no date, p. 10.
[33] "UT Patents Issued" and "Patent Applications" through 1991, documents provided by Dudley Dobie of the UT System Office of Legal Counsel.
[34] Vision 2020: The University of Texas System Strategic Plan 1991-1997, February 1991, p. 8.
[35] Provine, John, "UT's Role in High Tech Research," Austin Magazine, November, 1984, p. ? At the time, Stanford was making $4 million a year. For UTSCC see Tim Richardson, "No More Curving the Grades," Texas Business, December 1987, p. 47-52.
[36] Weldon, William, "Kinetic Energy Technology," in Commercializing SDI Technologies, edited by Stewart Nozette and Robert Kuhn, 1987, p. 148. This book was also collected from a conference sponsored by IC2. It includes an unbelievably comprehensive list of contributors like Mark, Adm. Bobby Ray Inman (ex-National Security Agency and MCC's founding chief), Kozmetsky, and a load of military officers, who have been at the forefront of entrepreneurialization.
[37] On Campus, October 15, 1990, p. 2.
[38] These figures are taken from the fiscal Operating Budget for UT-Austin for each of those years.
[39] Which has been proven to have both military and commercial applications. Charles Schwartz, a UC-Berkeley Physics professor quotes a memo from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the White House he received through FOIA: "the SCC project will have many spin-offs for the DoD, especially in technologies required by the Strategic Defense Initiative, including particle beams, information processing, computer control, pulse power sources, and high energy accelerators." "Political Structuring of the Institutions of Science," paper presented at the Symposium on the Anthropology of Science and Scientists, AAAS Meeting, February 16, 1991, p. 4.
[40] All the data cited in this data can be found in more detail in Robert Ovetz, UT Inc.: Austerity and Entrepreneurialization at the University of Texas at Austin, unpublished master's thesis, 1992; and Robert Ovetz, "'UT's Broke' and Other Complete Bullshit Or Why UT Can Afford Tuition/Fee Waivers and Other Grad Student Necessities," The Other Texan, #1, Fall 1992, p. 5.
[41] The University of Texas at Austin, Operating Budget, Fiscal Year Ending August 31, 1992. "Unrestricted" funds refer to monies not specifically designated to particular areas of the universities and are subject to the priorities of the administration.
[42] State Comptroller, Texas Performance Review, July 1991, p. ED 151; and the University of Texas System, Bond Issue Paper, February 15, 1991, p. D15.
[43] For a detailed breakdown of the location of these funds see Robert Ovetz, UT Inc.: Austerity and Entrepreneurialization at the University of Texas at Austin, unpublished master's thesis, 1992; and Robert Ovetz, "'UT's Broke' and Other Complete Bullshit Or Why UT Can Afford Tuition/Fee Waivers and Other Grad Student Necessities," The Other Texan, #1, Fall 1992, p. 5. Much of the data originates from The University of Texas System, Bond Issue paper for $282,725,000, dated March 8, 1991.
[44] The comparison is made only between engineering in liberal arts because these are the two programs I am most familiar with and is not intended to detract from the significance of the effect on other colleges. However, information about liberal arts is available also because students and faculty there have spoken up and begun to fight and unless others begin to do so elsewhere they will continue to suffer in silence. The connection between liberal arts and other programs must be made since disciplines are only used to divide us, but this cannot be done until others begin to come into the light.
[45] College of Natural Sciences also has the Natural Sciences Foundation Advisory Council which raises money for the college. Members of its "hail of honor" includes Norman Hackerman, Donald Carlton, president and CEO of Radian and former Tracor employee, and Jim Bob Moffett all appointed in 1991-92. On Campus, "Natural Sciences inducts three into Hall of Honor," April 20, 1992, p. 6.
[46] College of Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 1989-90 Annual Report. p. 32-33, 37-39, 42-46.
[47] From Scott Henson, "Gift Funded Endowments By College/School from 1985-86 to 1990-91," worksheet, 1991, calculated from University of Texas-Austin, Development Office, "All Endowments Sorted by Name Within Board of Regents," September 1, 1985 Thru August 31, 1991, all colleges.
[48] Letter from Dean Robert King for The Annual Fund, January 1992.
[49] These figures are from the University of Texas-Austin, Development Office, "Gifts to the College of Liberal Arts" and "Gifts to the College of Engineering," as reported to the Council for Financial Aid to Education, for the years September 1, 1985 Thru August 31, 1991.
[50] Kevin Williamson, "Private Funding Benefits Some Profs," The Daily Texan, June 24, 1992, p. 5.
[51] The BRC was renamed the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in 1994.
[52] Information for the preceding two paragraphs comes from the Commitment to Excellence, p. 113, 188-40.
[53] A. Phillips Brooks, "Research is growing in significance," Austin American-Statesman, February 25, 1992, p. A8.
[54] It is interesting to note that the pattern of funding follows the pattern of campus growth. Soon after Taylor broke from the 40 acres, it was followed by the Schoch and Petroleum Engineering Buildings located in a line next to Taylor and in front of the ROTC building built in 1919 during the militarization of UT led by Engineering Dean Taylor during WWI. With Schoch and Petroleum Engineering now the Economics and Anthropology buildings and the Nuclear Engineering Teaching Lab moved this year along with the nuke to the BRC, all of Engineering is located in a complex of recently constructed buildings on the very edge of campus at 26th and Speedway. Thus as the campus grew, engineering stayed on the very outskirts, purposely isolated from the rest of campus (e.g. liberal arts) and safe from student protest, with its old facilities taken over by the "debtor" programs of liberal arts. That is, Liberal Arts got the hand-me-downs of the entrepreneurial programs. This still happening. If the Molecular Biology building (located on 24th street a block from the engineering complex) happens, Liberal Arts will inherit the Biology Lab building. UT is also planning to use property it is still buying up in what remains of the western half of the 16 square block Blackland neighborhood to build administrative office buildings as part of its plan "for the clustering of professional schools around the periphery of the campus," leaving "key administrative offices", Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences to let inherit the central campus. This is clearly a strategy of spatial deconcentration to not only isolate its biggest problem but protect its entrepreneurial investments from attack. (See Richard McCaslin and Dean Earnest Gloyna, Commitment to Excellence: 100 Years of Engineering Education at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin: The Engineering Foundation of the College of Engineering, 1986, p. 35-45 and University of Texas-Austin Strategic Plan, 1994-99, vol. I, p. 105-106.
[55] Howard Buchbinder and Janice Newson, "The Service University and Market Forces," Academe, July-August, 1992, p. 14.
[56] Patricia Oh1endorf "Pathway from Research to Commercialization: Technology Transfer at the University of Texas Moves Research into the Marketplace," Discovery: Research and Scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin, vol. 13, no. 1, 1993, p. 9.
[57] Ibid., p. 10.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid., p. 11.
[60] The University of Texas System, Intellectual Property Policy, 1986, p. 18-19.
[61] "Major Legislation from the Graduate Assembly: Substantive Degree Program Request Summary, Executive MS Degree in the Commercialization of Science and Technology,", October 10, 1994, p. 2081 b-c.
[62] Daniel Levy, "Higher Education Amid the Political-Economic Changes of the 1990s, Report of the LASA Task Force on Higher Education," LASA Forum, PA: Latin american Studies Association, Spring 1994, p. 3-16; and Hugo Aboites, "Economic Globalization and the Transformation of the Mexican University," undated manuscript.
[63] Mark Yudof, "The Burgeoning Privatization of State Universities," The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 1992, p. A48. Yudof is currently UT-Austin Provost and Vice President and formerly Dean of the Law School.
[64] However, according to a mechanical engineering Ph.D student I interviewed who works on solar energy for the Center for Energy Studies at the Balcones Research Center I interviewed in March 1992, there is a hierarchy within engineering. Those working on solar energy had to share a building with railgun researchers for many years and did not even have adequate office equipment.
[65] Newson and Buchbinder, 1992.
[66] Scott Jaschik, "State funds for higher education drop in year; first decline since survey began 33 years ago," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 6, 1991, p. Al, A38-39, and "Cut staffs but not across the board, strapped colleges are advised," February 13, 1991, p. A3 1.
[67] David Noble, "Higher Ed Takes the Low Road," Newsday, Sunday, October 8, 1989, p. 7.
[68] In my MA thesis I also discussed in depth how the partially successful demands for more resources for higher education in the predominantly Mexican-American Rio Grande Valley offered another conflict disrupting the entrepreneurialization of all higher education in Texas. (Robert Ovetz, UT Inc.: Austerity and Entrepreneuria1iation at the University of Texas at Austin, unpublished master's thesis, 1992, p. 175-198.)
Chapter 3. The "Multiculturalism" Movement and the Making of a Right Wing Counterattack at UT-Austin
Contrary to popular belief, the university campuses never really returned to a calm quiet state following the rebellions of the 1960s-1970s. Actually, the 1970s were filled with anti-war activism until as late as 1973, protests against tuition and fee increases, the organization of nationwide Women's Studies and Peace Studies movements, and towards the end of the decade, the ignition of a draft resistance movement when the registration was restored. By the 1980s, campuses were increasingly the sight of militant student activism over university investments in South Africa, campus racism, CIA recruiters, the US war in Central America and Star Wars research. Although hardly on the scale of the student rebellions of the late 1960s, as Philip Altbach and Robert Cohen explain, it made its presence felt. "There has been some activism, and the revolution in attitudes and values started in the sixties has not completely disappeared."[1]
From the ashes of the student anti-apartheid movement that reignited in the mid-1980s rose a nationwide student led effort not just to make the university accountable for the racism and discrimination in its investments abroad but in its everyday operation and character at home. Although later dubbed the "multicultural" movement, in actuality this movement grew from years of coalition efforts among a diversity of student groups, faculty and nearby communities. These coalitions recognized the limitations of demanding the creation of academic resources to study particular ethnic and racial histories and cultures that were successful in creating Black/African-American, Chicano/a, Asian and Women's Studies programs and centers on hundreds of campuses since the late 1960s and foresaw the need to transform the university in its entirety to serve these diverse needs for fundamental socio-political change.[2]
For the first time since the uprisings of the 1960-70s, students and faculty began to formulate plans backed by widespread direct action to transform the university as a whole working from a base of what remained of 1). previous student movement's successes that resulted in the creation of the above mentioned ethnic, racial and gender focused academic programs and centers and 2). the entrance of many more progressives and radicals into college faculty and even (although less frequently) administrative positions. Growing out of existing "single-issue" student movement groups and working from a foundation created by the efforts of students and faculty in the 1960-70s, the "multiculturalism" movement was hardy new.
Of the existing student movements, multiculturalism has spread the farthest and has had the most explosive impact. Most importantly, it is explicitly both positive and negative in its orientation. Resistance to racism and sexism, increased "minority" recruitment, multicultural classes, and "ethnic" and Women's Studies programs and centers all suggest a refusal of sexism and racism and other forms of hierarchy in the university. At the same time, these struggles organized changes that can potentially transform the fundamental nature of the university itself. Multiculturalism has the potential and in many cases has been able to transform the university from a social factory into a free space which students can use for their own purposes whether they be studying about their heritage and power, creating access to literature, music and people of their ethnicity and cultures, and developing renewable energy.
As a result, multiculturalism has become one of the most significant threats to the stable operation of the university. The subversive potential of
multicultural reforms is not inherent, there are plenty of cases of attempts to institutionalize it to make students better workers. However, we can "re-read" the backlash against these reforms as an indicator of the level of its current or potential threat to the university.
Since 1991, we have heard much organized opposition to the multiculturalism movement put in terms of opposition to specific "multicultural" reforms predicated upon what are perceived to be larger threats to the organization and function of the universities as we now know them. Conservative commentator Irving Kristol warned as early as 1986 that "Our universities as institutions have moved rapidly and massively to the left - and, more often than not, toward the extremities of the left." Just months before, then Secretary of Education William Bennett made the threat explicit: "academic totalitarians are turning our universities into a kind of fortress at war with society, an arsenal whose principal talk is to raise 'revolutionary consciousness.'"[3] Sweeping accusations of "political correctness" made by opponents to multicultural reforms can be re-read as a pejorative generalization of the organizational threat of students, faculty and community groups who sought to refocus the emphasis of the universities from serving business to serving the needs of the oppressed and exploited.
A number of questions that will be asked in the following critical case study of the repression of the multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin in view of both the radical intent of the movement and the opposition. In what ways can multiculturalism subvert or reinforce the entrepreneurial university? Has the movement developed an adequate analysis of the contemporary university in capitalism to see through its demands beyond limited curricular reforms or is it inherently cooptable?
In light of this case study, we need to analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of the movement that I find illustrated in the literature of the right wing counterattack that perceived such reforms as only the tip of an iceberg slowly pushing the university out of the grasp of capital. Yet, with numerous efforts by some sectors of business and the government to coopt multiculturalism as their own in order to better manage a diverse and antagonistic workforce, we also need to consider the inherent limitations of the movement. I do not intend to imply that all sectors of business and government institutions are any more monolithic than the multiculturalism movements. No doubt there are conflicts among the former as among the latter otherwise we would not be seeing the kinds of resistance to these reforms documented in this chapter. Such conflict only helps to confirm the persisting subversive potential of such reforms.
As with the case study of entrepreneurialization at UT-Austin, this case study of the multiculturalism movement must be viewed in light of the complexity of struggle that has resulted in not only different interpretations and analyses of multiculturalism but also different actual forms. I do not recount the creation of the ethnic, racial and gender studies programs nor the wide variety of free spaces that accompanied the increasing radicalization of the faculty. Although I summarize the historical context that serves as the foundation for the multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin, my intent is to detail and analyze the recent efforts to suppress further expansion of radical free spaces within the university and how such repression is predicated on the perceived subversion of the newly entrepreneurializing university. In other words, I ask how the multiculturalism movement can serve as a source of antagonism to new efforts to entrepreneurialize the universities.
This chapter examines the content and context in which the multiculturalism movement has been organized and how it has begun the process of transformation. The multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin offers a case study of both the rise of the movement and the emergence of a counterattack. The conflicts at UT-Austin will be looked at in light of the right wing counterattack under the banner of fighting "PC" and how this counterattack is related to the crisis of the university and the strategy of entrepreneurialization. This will allow a re-analysis of the movement and how the struggle can be further circulated to other sectors of the university in a way that will extenuate the crisis. Clearly, the growing reaction to the multiculturalism movements demonstrates its great if mostly unrealized potential to transform the university to serve the multiplicity of desires held by those who use them but to succeed the movement must articulate an understanding of how it complements other struggles both inside and outside the university.
From "Ethnic Studies" to Multiculturalism
No concise, let alone comprehensive, analysis of the rise of the ethnic studies movements in the universities in the U.S. exists.[4] What we do know about the movement is that much of the ethnic studies programs emerged from movements such as the "Third World Student Front" at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the late 1960s that forced the creation of various programs and cultural centers for Black, Chicana/o, and Asian-American students. The Women's Studies movement grew mostly during the l970s (as did Environmental, Cultural, Marxist, and Peace Studies), motivated by the powerful success of the ethnic studies movement in the 1960-70s and the entrance of many radicals into the universities beginning in the late 1960s.
One characteristic that distinguishes the ethnic studies movement from multiculturalism is an insistence on a self-proscribed free space for particular communities of students and faculty. This ranged from an academic center, program or degree granting program, to cultural centers or houses such as the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor's Ujama House which are run by students and may range from providing employment preparation skills (such as UT's Minority Information Center) or become a center for organizing struggle. Many universities that created academic programs soon found that the struggle was hardly over, as students and faculty continued battling for the university to provide the resources to attract and keep faculty to teach the classes and the students wanted access to them.
Because the movement has been organized around demands for free spaces which it could control and use as it wishes autonomous from the university as a whole, the offensive struggles that won the programs and resources were soon turned to the defensive in order to defend them. This transformation did not take long, since at the time of the movement's greatest successes such as at SFSU, capital had already begun contemplating a disinvestment from the universities (which we'll see in chapter 5). Because these movements were successful in carving out their own autonomous space within the universities, they became vulnerable to the pressures of austerity and later commercialization that used their isolation against them. Since many of the programs remained relatively separate from the main academic programs as a whole (there were not required classes etc.) administrations responded to their success almost immediately by using this as a justification for taking out budget cuts on them first. This increasingly became the case if these programs were resistant to the pressures of market demand for research or unable to generate large grants. While students and faculty have fought this all the way through the 1970-80s, it did signal a reversal of strategy as a result of the use of autonomy against them.
Perhaps the most significant distinguishing feature between ethnic studies and multiculturalism is that the latter offers the potential for transforming the entire university to serve the multiple needs of every student, whereas ethnic studies sought to carve out a space of its own for the purposes of specific groups. While many people have found this distinction to suggest multiculturalism is integrationist or reformist, it may actually point to an entirely different outcome. Multiculturalism has had the effect of pushing that remaining free space out from its current boundaries to incorporate the entire campus. It aims to transform all the university into a free space under the control of the faculty and students for their own needs - in a way a realization of the early ideals of the uni-versity.
The current phase of struggle has become a threat to efforts to transform the universities into overt businesses because of the movement's ability to devise a strategy that creates rather than reacts. Instead of just defending the existing space of ethnic studies - if even that since many programs have already become institutionalized and commercialized - mu1ticulthsm is an offensive effort to recreate the university to serve the multiplicity of needs and desires of those who use it. And because many of these needs and desires are antagonistic to entrepreneurialization, multiculturalism. has come under heavy attack.
The Struggle for Multiculturalism at UT
A nice way to examine what multiculturalism is and what it can be would be to look at UT-Austin. UT-Austin opened in 1883 under a state constitutional mandate that it be segregated, free of charge and not require entrance tests to its albeit "white" students. Another university was simultaneously created to serve Black students.[5] UT remained a segregated, white only university until 1950 when the Supreme Court ordered the administration to allow Heman Sweatt to enroll in the law school becoming the first Black to attend classes in the law school. However, Sweatt was given separate facilities and did not finish. It didn't take long for those first Black students to launch an attack on racism at UT after it began admitting Black undergraduates in 1956.
A struggle to force UT to integrate the entire campus was finally successful in May 1964 after about five years of student organizing. However, the regent's ruling effectively outlawed minority recruitment because it mandated that "neither the University of Texas nor any of its component institutions shall discriminate either in favor of or against any person on account of his or her race creed, or color." This violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act that was passed a month later and resulted in a decrease in minority enrollment during 1965-66 that would take eleven more years of struggle to eliminate.[6]
In only a few years the struggle for integration would evolve into a struggle for the establishment of ethnic studies programs. In May 1968, the new Afro-Americans for Black Liberation (AABL) won two new programs: a course on Afro-American culture and a lecture series on Afro-American history. In February 1969, AABL presented eleven demands to President Norman Hackerman. "The demands of the militant students included a Black studies department, affirmative action in admissions and teaching staff, dismissal of the Board of Regents, an ethnic studies center in East Austin, the removal of racist faculty and statues, memorials for King and Malcolm X." The Mexican American Student Organization (MASO) linked up with AABL by demanding both Black and Chicano studies programs. While the administration was forced to create an ethnic studies program that was implemented in the fall of 1970, none of AABL's other demands were acted upon, especially UT's 1964 policy banning affirmative action, until much later. At the time there was only one Black faculty member (hired in 1964) and 1 percent of the students were Black while they composed 11 percent of the Texas population.[7]
In the fall of 1971, as a result of further demands by the Mexican-American Youth Organization (MAYO) and AABL, the Ethnic Studies Program grew, offering 14 courses in Mexican-American Studies and 15 in Afro-American Studies. Chicano studies protested a temporary closing of the Mexican-American Studies program soon after that led to its director, Americo Paredes, resigning in protest. The students presented a list of demands to President Stephen Spurr, including "1) the establishment of a degree program in both Mexican American and Afro-American Studies, 2) that the new director of the program be appointed with the approval of Chicano students and faculty, 3) that the university reinstate PEO and CLEO (provisional admissions programs which had helped many minorities enter UT) and 4) that more Mexican-American professors be hired." Between 1972-1974, the Women's Studies program was also started.[8]
In January 1975, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, responded to requests from MAYO and the students group The Blacks to investigate violations of the Civil Rights Act by UT. HEW found UT in violation on nine counts. Concurrently, members of MAYO, The Blacks, and the Radical Student Union formed the United Students Against Racism at Texas (USARAT) which issued 12 demands that were presented to President Lorainne Rogers. Their demands were "1). standardized tests be eliminated for minority admissions, 2). more financial aid for minorities, 3). teaching assistantships represent minority population of the state, 4). a full-time minority recruitment program, 5). more Black and Chicano faculty, 6). restructuring of Ethnic Student Services, 7). funds for minority newspapers, 8). more money for culture centers, 9). minority grievance committee be established, 10). one Black and one Chicano doctor at the Student Health Center, 11). departmental status for the Mexican-American Studies and Afro-American Studies Centers, 12). a new education building be named after Black and Chicano educators."[9]
To push their demands, ten students took over the president's office on March 13, 1975 while about 1000 people were rallying on the main mall in support of the demands. Although the occupiers abandoned the office for a chance to speak at the regents' meeting the next day, which achieved very little at that meeting, that summer the regents changed the wording of the 1964 nondiscrimination rule so that UT complied with the Civil Rights Act. The phrase "Either in favor or against" was changed to "against any person on account of his race, color or sex."[10]
The Struggle Over "Minority Recruitment"
The ethnic studies movement hardly ended with the 1975 takeover. By the late 1980s, students had begun to expand the discussion of racism beyond just increasing minority enrollment and faculty to a transformation of nothing less than the entire campus. In the process, Black and Chicano students began to articulate plans to implement multicultural reforms while expanding their existing space through Black and Chicano newspapers, a non-discrimination clause, the creation of the Minority Information Center and a battle over the reform of a required English class.
The change in strategy has paralleled a fundamental reversal of advances made in minority recruitment since the 1960-70s when student struggles forced a significant increase. In 1950, only 75,000 Blacks attended higher education institutions in the U.S., rising to 1.1 million in 1980. This rise turned into a decline according to Manning Marable when "the number of Black students in higher education decreased by about 10,000 between 1980 and 1987."[11] The Eighth Annual Status Report on Minorities in Higher Education released by the American Council on Education's Office of Minority Concerns reported significant drops in minority participation in higher education in 1990. Participation for low-income Black high school graduates between the ages 18 and 24 (51 percent of which are from families with incomes under $18,581) dropped from 39.8 percent in 1976 to 30.3 percent in 1988. The rate for low-income Latinos (45 percent of those attending) dropped from 50.4 percent to 35.3 percent during the same period and low-income whites only rose slightly from 36.8 to 38.8 percent. Rates for middle-income Latinos and Blacks fell even further, from 52.7 percent in 1976 to 36.2 percent in 1988 for Blacks and from 53.4 percent to 46.4 percent for Latinos.[12] This is matched by the small number of degrees earned by minority students which is facilitated by low retention rates due to little support by universities. Minority groups only earned about 11 percent of the BA degrees, 10 percent of the master's and 9 percent of all doctorates. However, since the explosion of the multiculturalism movement in the late 1980s as millions of students begin to fight for the diversification of their campuses we have begun to see this turn around. According to the Department of Education, "minority enrollment" rose by about 10 percent from 1988-90 setting records for every group especially Black students who saw the largest gain in ten years.[13]
"Minorities" also constitute a small fraction of the full-time faculty in 3300 colleges and universities (including traditionally Black institutions and community colleges - 9.6 percent. According to the UCLA Higher Education Institute, minorities only make up 3 percent of the faculty at all public, four year institutions.[14]
UT's progress on increasing minority enrollment is not impressive. Chart 3.1 shows the uneven changes in "minority" enrollment.
Chart 3.1 Changes in Minority Enrollments, UT-Austin, 1982, 1991[15]
| Group | 1982 enrollment | 1991 enrollment |
| "American Indian" | 82 | 136 |
| "Black" | 1,311 | 1,808 |
| "Asian American" | 859 | 3,403 |
| "Hispanic" | 3,899 | 5,615 |
| Total Minorities | 6,151 | 10,962 |
| Total Minorities | 48,039 | 49,961 |
Over this ten year period, only the number of what are broadly and mystifyingly termed "Asian American" more than doubled. None of the other three either doubled or increased to their levels of population in Texas. Even though then President Cunningham has bragged that "UT-Austin has the largest number...of African-Americans and Hispanic students among the 50 flagship state universities" - ignoring the fact that UT has more students than most state universities except Ohio State making the percentages very small - it is still inadequate. This is a clever distortion since President Cunningham's comparison is being made to universities the UT administration likes to compare itself to rather than to all universities. For example, in Texas alone UT-Austin has a smaller percentage of minority enrollment than Laredo State, Pan American, UT- El Paso, UT-San Antonio, and Prairie View A&M, not to mention many junior and community colleges. Although 25 percent of high school graduates are Mexican-American, they are only 12 percent of first year students at senior colleges and 60 percent of all college students attend institutions in El Paso or the Valley. In fact, not only are the increases in enrollment of Blacks, "Hispanics", and Native Americans low but the number of students from these groups at UT-Austin is far below their percentage of the state's population. "Based on the 1990 Census figures, 37.2 percent of the state's 16.9 million population is Black or Hispanic. UT-Austin's enrollment is 14.9 percent Black or Hispanic." In addition, Black enrollment has declined from 1,866 in 1989 to 1,746 in the Spring of 1992, 11 more than spring 1991. Much of this had to do with the fact that new Black student enrollment was only 358 in 1991, the second lowest total since 1982.[16]
The other side of enrollment is retention of minority students at UT. Twenty percent of Black and Latino students leave after their first year compared to 16.6 percent of "whites" and 11.9 percent of Asian-Americans. The overall average in 1990 was 15.2 percent. Within five years, about half of both Black and "Hispanic" freshman left UT, while about 33 percent of both "whites" and Asian-Americans leave. Only 35.9 percent of Black and 41.9 percent of Latino students graduate within five years compared to 53.6 percent for all students.[17]
The administration often reiterates claims that it has extensive services available to the recruitment and retention of minority students. A look at the fact shows this not to be the case. In 1991-92, it only spent $11 million of its $666.1 million budget on related programs - less than 2 percent of the total budget. A list published by Vice President of Student Affairs claims that UT funds 137 different programs to serve this purpose. However, a 1989 Students Association study found that 46 of these were non-existent. The types of services included in the list demonstrates UT's dedication to minority recruitment and retention: seventeen of the programs list "all students" not just minorities as its target group; eight liberal arts programs had the same contact person and four of those are listed separately but are actually the same program; one listed as "Film Series" only uses money for Spanish-speaking films for an RTF class which in fall 1990 enrolled students had to pay an additional fee; and a letter to minority parents and a roundtable luncheon are listed as recruitment and retention programs.[18] "Minority" scholarship programs amount to only $4.5 million annually, "roughly 6 percent of the University's $66 million financial aid total. Each year, roughly 1,600 incoming students apply for the 450 new awards." These programs only serve Black and Hispanic students since UT does not consider Asian-Americans as minorities.[19]
The breakdown of the distribution of financial aid is also indicative of UT's emphasis on minority recruitment and retention. "In 1988, 6.6 percent of the total financial aid of $95,655,759 went to Blacks, 15.3 percent went to Hispanics, 6.5 percent went to Asians, and 71.2 percent went to whites." In addition, only 25 of 2,340 graduate fellowships are reserved for minorities.[20]
It is also interesting to note where the emphasis is being placed on minority recruitment and retention. The Equal Opportunity in Engineering (EOE) program, created in 1970, has grown from a recruitment service to retention and scholarship programs run with four full time staff members. In 1990, EOE spent $150,345 on minority scholarships in engineering alone. This demonstrates that minority recruitment follows the process of capital investment in education. While disinvestment is taking place in areas such as liberal arts, ethnic studies and minority recruitment and retention as a whole, investment is flowing to selective minority recruitment in areas such as engineering where there is more control over the student population. However, even in engineering there is little concern for retention, since only 11 percent of EOE's funds went to retention while 47 percent of its funds went to financial awards and 22 percent went to recruitment.[21]
With much of this information in hand, Dixon, Robinson and Marshall conclude that "there is no substantive affirmative action program here. A true affirmative action program attempts to fill the void left in history by getting minorities in the door and assuring that they do not encounter racial or sexual discrimination while they are there - thus ensuring that opportunities of mobility are unhampered. All other cross-racial and cross-sexual barriers such as qualifications and performance still exist."[22]
The same conditions that exist for minority students are repeated for minority faculty at UT. While UT claims the number of minority faculty increased by 47 percent in the last decade, the actual real numbers are far less impressive considering that, whether for students or faculty, if the study starts with low numbers, the high percentages are meaningless.
Chart 3.2 Changes in Minority Faculty, UT-Austin, 1982-83 and 1991-92
(UT-Austin, Office of Institutional Studies Statistical Handbook, 1991-92. p. 94)
| Group | 1982-83 | 1991-1992 |
| "American Indian" | 4 | 8 |
| "Black" | 32 | 52 |
| "Asian American" | 51 | 97 |
| "Hispanic" | 60 | 82 |
| TOTAL | 2,188 | 2,341 |
Of the 2,341 full faculty (including lecturers and instructors) in 1991-92, only 3.5 percent are Latino, 2.2 percent are Black, 4.1 percent are Asian-American, 0.3 percent are Native American, and 89.8 percent are "white". It is also broken down into 73.8 percent male and 26.2 percent female. Yet, these are increases of Black faculty from 1.6 to 2.2 percent and of Hispanic faculty from 2.7 to 3.5 percent for example - hardly that great an increase. The gender split on tenured faculty inched its way up from 1,707 men and 508 women in 1986 of 2,215 faculty to 1,727 men and 614 women of 2,341 faculty in 1990-91.[23]
There are several factors to take into account when looking at these numbers. In 1987, when there were 28 Black and 56 "Hispanic" faculty, only 20 and 35 of them were tenured. While the number increased from 55 to 101 tenured minority faculty, minorities were still only 5.5 percent of tenured or tenure-track faculty. While the actual number of all ranks of Black and "Hispanic" faculty has increased due to pressures of students demanding the diversification of the campus, the number achieving tenure has not showing this increase to be temporary at best. From 1983-91, the number of tenured Black faculty only increased .4 percent and the number of "Hispanic" faculty by .9 percent. Statewide, for example, "Hispanic" faculty make up less than 4 percent of the state's 13,120 full time faculty, few of whom are tenured. The administration also plays loose with whom they classify as a "minority," leaving one student activist skeptical of the administrations claims to success. Then Students' Association President Eric Dixon uncovered that of the 16 "new minority faculty [hired in 1991], at least two of the new Black faculty members on the list are not Americans at all, but foreigners..." and questioned how the administration defined "Hispanic" albeit with a touch of xenophobia. And even though the number is increasing there is still a high turnover. "They're bragging that it's doubling, but last year [1990] alone during the racial incidents they lost six Black faculty," explained Dixon.[24]
Even the funding created to increase minority faculty is not being fully used. While then President Cunningham set up a fund of $400,000 a year to hire minority faculty not hired through regular department budgets, only $250,000 was spent per year. But this strategy is liable to the possible marginalization of minority faculty recruitment by separating the process from the departments, making it the president's and not their responsibility. For example, if department recruitment committees perceive it to be the responsibility of the President's office to recruit qualified minority as faculty, they will overlook this responsibility. In addition to other factors such as the lack of support for minority scholars, this has indirectly contributed to the rejection of some desired minority who have applied for faculty positions and the departure of those already here.[25] This is apparent in the administration's above responses to the multiculturalism movements demand for increased minority faculty that such efforts have met success. As a result, a conflicting message emanates from the top levels of the administration that sets up a fund to hire minority faculty that goes partially unused while offering misleading statistics to demonstrate their success.
Behind this recruitment strategy lies the assumption that departments can eventually hire "enough" minority faculty with the aid of special funding. Such logic relies on the unexplicit use of quotas (such as claims that one, two or three minority faculty are "enough" for each department) and the generalization of "minorities" as interchangeable commodities whose presence grants a department particular credibility. As a result, departments that have successfully diversified their faculty with what is arbitrarily considered "enough" minorities are punished in order direct funds to favor those that haven't.
In rare cases, a department successfully diversifies its faculty with politically outspoken "minorities" who seek to transform the department curriculum or even the university. This was certainly the case with the backlash against the English Department documented in this chapter. Minority recruitment brought in many radical scholars whose proposal for departmental level multicultural curricular reform and support for UT-wide multicultural reforms was met with defeat and the splitting up of the English department into two divisions.
This analysis of the logic of minority faculty recruitment at UT-Austin does not seem so far fetched when one examines the details of the right wing backlash against the multiculturalism movement documented later in this chapter. Without the benefit of an opinion poll, one can speculate that one of the reasons for the eventual faculty vote against the proposed reforms and the widespread ambivalence among students to the issue of racial discrimination was the common misperception that since an effort to recruit minority faculty existed it was enough and perhaps dangerously too much. Supplied with percentages instead of real numbers and locked out from the behind closed doors meetings of faculty recruitment and hiring committees, many people came to perceive of these efforts as sufficient.[26]
No doubt many faculty have worked diligently and sometimes successfully to recruit more minority faculty on local departmental and college levels. Facing great odds, it is their efforts with occasional student support that has result in success. Despite affirmative action programs, without these faculty and student efforts to push for more minority recruitment, possibly nothing would have been accomplished. Although the number of minority faculty recruited to UT-Austin during this period seems small to supporters, they are increases nonetheless, increases that can only be attributed to their struggles. To opponents and stubborn administrators, these increases have been accomplished too rapidly and even too dangerously. The danger lies in allowing student and faculty pressure to alter rigid institutional master plans that often result in the hiring of new scholars not only sympathetic to these movements but by introducing even more students to a diversity of perspectives. Armed with this new knowledge, more and more students begin questioning the organization of not only the university but society. In the process we discover that every bit of ground given in compromise to demands for change are used to make even more demands. Rather than solving the crisis, such compromises can feed the fires of rebellion.
It is not surprising that much, of the struggle for multiculturalism, as for ethnic studies before it, has focused on minority student and faculty recruitment and retention. In fact, minority recruiting policies are now being challenged in the US Supreme Court resulting the temporary dismantling of policies in California and in 1996 at UT-Austin. While these demands frequently are posed in terms of numbers for the purpose of increasing access to positions within the power structure, it frequently has opposite and even antagonistic outcomes. At many of the protests I attended and student newspapers and pamphlets I read (such as in The Griot and Tejas newspapers and the PRIDE, ONDA and QUEERS programs discussed in this chapter), increased minority recruitment and an expansion of access were not always demanded with the intention of climbing the socio-economic ladder. Rather, these demands were made with the foresight of providing access to resources at UT for others who would otherwise be excluded because of what was called "institutional racism." By expanding access these students can contribute to the further transformation of the university into something that can serve not only their own diverse needs but those of a wide diversity of local and global communities. This is demonstrated by the ethnic studies movement's ability to open access to other minorities, many of whom did not intend to train themselves to work but spent a lot of their time studying their own histories, cultures and power and utilized this information to make further changes from affirmative action to divestment from apartheid.
Minority recruitment is part of the uncontrollable process of the crisis: minority recruitment means letting in a never-ending flow of students and faculty who will continue to make demands for change. University of California at Berkley sociologist Troy Duster has deconstructed counterattacks against minority recruitment that are made with charges that minority students are segregationists by suggesting that these counterattackers fear less possible segregation than "the challenges that the growing numbers of Asian, Latino, and African-American students pose to the faculty once they find their ancestors' histories and contributions largely ignored in the classroom."[27]
While students have been winning battles over recruitment and retention, some forces within the university have been resistant out of fear that letting in more minorities will not be the end of the organized challenges. The increases in recruitment that have occurred can only be attributed to the students and faculty that have fought all along for it. But this struggle has gone much deeper than just playing a numbers game. It has never been separated from struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia and demands for the transformation of the entire education system.
Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism at UT
During the late 1980s, while UT was under heavy criticism for its poor "minority" recruitment and retention record, renewed attacks on racism, sexism and homophobia were being made by students. Through financial support from the Students Association (SA), the Minority Information Center (MIC) was opened in 1989 to serve the retention needs of Black and Chicana/o students. During the movement that would ensure in 1990, MIC became a fundamental resource for organizing. SURE Walk (Students United for Rape Elimination), also created by the SA in the mid 1980s, evolved for a while into a force for fighting sexism on campus as University NOW had been for some years, especially incidents of sexual assault that were reported in 1990 to have occurred at fraternity parties. University Lesbians successfully won an inclusion of sexual preference to UT's non-discrimination clause in 1990. This group's efforts were rooted in years of organizing by Gay and Lesbian students to come out of the closet, fight Gay-bashing, sponsor SA funded events and their Friday happy hours that offered a weekly free space. Disabled students have also been on the move. In 1989, ABLE (All Bodies Learning Equally) protested their lack of access to the shuttle buses by being carried on and off a couple buses during the height of campus traffic. They quickly won when UT was forced to not renew the contract with Laidlaw and chose Capital Metro that had lifts. ABLE has continued fighting for ramps and access to classroom and buildings.
In the midst of these resurging struggles, UT attempted to devise a racial harassment policy. The six month long Ad Hoc Committee on Racial Harassment, chaired by then UT Law School Dean and current Provost Mark Yudof, offered a recommendation in 1989 which was later adopted as university policy. The nine member committee had only one Black student member. Rather than addressing institutionalized racism at UT such as its poor minority recruitment and retentions, statues of Confederate Civil War politicians on the South Mall, toxic pollution of and expansion into Blackland, South African investments or "hate crimes" on campus or by students, faculty and staff, the committee and its resulting recommendation leaned toward heavy punishments for verbal harassment. In effect, because it focused on punishing individual actions - effectively censoring - such as what people can say, it faced heavy opposition from students such as the BSA (Black Student Alliance) who otherwise would have supported a harassment policy.[28] Ironically, the policy turns student challenges against racism into a means for pitting student against student by redirecting the focus to the students themselves while ignoring the organization of the university. The advocacy of a harassment policy was originally guided by an attempt to restore in loco parentis under the terms of students needs by students themselves. Unfortunately, like many other universities have done, the committee transformed it into a source of university control over even more of students' lives and a tool for dividing students based upon the false assumption that minority students want censorship of others activities.[29]
While heated debate was taking place over the recommendations in Spring 1990, racial and sexual violence within more fraternities triggered an offensive by the movement. On April 12, 1990, more than 1000 students marched through campus, to downtown and to a fraternity house to protest two acts of fraternity racism that occurred within a three day period. On April 9, a car used by Delta Tau Delta fraternity during the Round Up parade was found outside its house smashed up and sprayed with two racist insults. The march was organized after Phi Gamma Delta (the "Fiji's") fraternity was found selling t-shirts with a "sambo" caricature face on basketball player Michael Jordan's body. The fraternity used the caricature in the past as its official mascot, "Fiji Island Man."[30]
On Friday, April 13, President Cunningham was met by about 1000 angry students as he attempted to make a press statement about the week's events on the West Mall. Unannounced to but a few faculty and students who Cunningham invited as his entourage and the press, the students listened for a few minutes until it was clear he was not addressing popular complaints and then surrounded him. After a few minutes, Cunningham nervously retreated to the main mall where he began to give a statement to the press. However, the students soon followed and chased him into the tower. After a short rally at the main entrance, BSA President Marcus Brown opposed any further action and broke up the protest suggesting more organizing meetings that never materialized.
Outrage against President Cunningham's press conference reverberated for a couple more weeks. He had invited two Black basketball players and minority faculty, including professor and current chair of the sociology department John Butler, to stand behind him while he made his speech. While some of the faculty were hounded by students for standing at his side, the athletes began to realized they had been used and mislead. Assuming they had been invited by Cunningham to speak, "Panama" Myers, one of the players, soon realized that "an illusion was created by my standing behind Cunningham that I agreed with what he said...I felt used."[31] On May 2, about 100 student athletes, including the two misled to stand by Cunningham, marched through campus to a rally of more than 750 students on the West Mall. Many athletes also formed the Student Athlete Coalition to break down the division between students and athletes and endorsed BSA's PRIDE.
PRIDE and ONDA
The following week after the racist fraternity actions, a coalition of about 15 Black student groups presented six demands to the university, four of which deal specifically with the incidents. The most significant demand was the immediate adoption of PRIDE (Proposed Reforms to Institute Diversity in Education) which had been in the works for a few years and parts of which had already been presented in the past. PRIDE is composed of six proposals from which I summarize:
- The African and Afro-American Studies Center should have independent hiring and firing of faculty and staff, have a separate budget for student sponsored projects that does not reduce the center's budget, and the director should be chosen by faculty, students and scholars familiar with the center.
- Curriculum Diversity should be implemented at each state institution by requiring each student to complete three hours (one course) in African or African-American history to graduate and the creation of a center or department of African and African-American studies.
- Curriculum Diversity at UT would be implemented at UT with the 3 hour requirement that would also include cross-listed courses.
- Faculty: double the Dedicated New Minority Faculty Position Fund and retain prominent faculty, sponsor racial awareness seminars for faculty, allow students to challenge "scholastic racism" without academic penalty, and hire more tenured and tenure-track Black faculty.
- Establish an African-American Student Cultural Center with a $50,000 budget and university space for the facilities.
- Specifically, the College of Liberal Arts should hire faculty to teach diverse courses on the impact of slavery, increase the percentage of African and African-American faculty in each department, and allow English 314L (African-American Literature) to be a substitute for English 316K and hire an African- American faculty member to teach the course, replacing former Assistant Professor Wahneema Lubiano.[32]
After a seven month delay by the administration in responding to PRIDE, the administration outlined its position in a report presented to BSA on November 2, 1990. These responses were not only questionable in their sincerity and the amount of time it took to generate them, but also an attempt to decentralize authority over each proposal to diffuse the efforts of the movement. The administration's reasoning in responding to each part of PRIDE were problematic:
- Independent authority over faculty for the Center were denied claiming that "no campus unit has 'independent authority' to appoint and dismiss faculty and staff." This is questionable however. Do not the Institute for Advanced Technology or Center for Electromechanics have control over which faculty and staff will work for them because they are engaged in research potentially profitable to UT? Are not faculty appointed to endowed chairs and granted tenure by a vote of their department (with final approval by the President) thus giving the department nearly "independent authority" to appoint and dismiss? An independent budget for student organized activities was also denied with the suggestion that to do so would not fulfill the center's mission as an "interdisciplinary academic studies unit." It also lists about a dozen general university programs (the libraries, Dean of Students, and the President's Office for example) that sponsor Black cultural programs. None are shown to provide money for student run programs (except the Student Union, and even it requires "adult" supervision) however. Control over the selection of the director was denied. The response reiterated the structure of the selection process that includes the Dean of Liberal Arts selection of a committee of any eight faculty and five students who recommendation are subject to veto by the dean and president. The executive officers of the administration denied responsibility for the entire proposal by directing it to Liberal Arts Dean Standish Meacham.
- The administration also denied responsibility for the curriculum diversity proposal for all state universities by directing it to the state legislature. It claimed that "it would be inappropriate for the University administration to comment prior to consideration by that body."
- The administration responded to the multiculturalism requirement for UT students by suggesting that it be presented to the Faculty Senate's committee on multicultural education that was formed on September 10, 1990 and the University Council's Committee on Multicultural Education that was formed on September 17, 1990. Clearly, whether or not it was orchestrated to create these committees during the seven month delay, the administration used the initiatives of the faculty senate and university council to dismiss its own responsibility. The report also suggests presenting the proposal to "relevant departmental faculties and college curriculum committees". The illusion of decentralized responsibility (a similar strategy used to impose austerity) appears as an administration concern for diverse interests. In effect, it disperses the energy and focus of the movement in many directions in order to refract the concentration on the administration that developed in the Spring of 1990. It was also suggested that Dean Meacham be addressed about cross listing courses.
- The administration offered to increase the $400,000 annual fund to hire more minority faculty if it was able to locate enough candidates since "relatively few Black students are continuing their academic studies to complete the doctoral degree." Such a claim is rooted in the administration's narrow classification of "qualified" minority faculty. The university refuses to consider hiring faculty who have received their degrees from or have taught at historically Black universities and other universities that are not considered as "first class." As a result, the administration's narrowing of the field significantly reduces the available faculty to choose from, most of whom are already courted by many other universities that do the same. In 1989, two Black faculty candidates in Anthropology and one Chicana in English were not hired.[33] Of the 12 offers to Black faculty candidates in fall 1990, only five accepted. Of course, the issue is not to be narrowly construed as these candidates being refused employment due to race alone but in combination with other factors such as their politics. The recruit most likely to be hired is one most suitable to those making the actual hiring decision up the administrative ladder. Often those few hired tend to leave soon after their arrival because of many reasons, including the lack of support and continuing racism. Six Black faculty members left UT following after the events of spring 1990 alone.
The administration also created racial awareness workshops for some faculty and newly admitted freshman during summer orientation in the summer before it made a formal response. One of the seminars conducted for faculty and administrators is run by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, a group that fights discrimination against Jews. The choice of the ADL is questionable, since it assumes that Jews are a race and also because the issue of anti-Semitism, although prevalent and related, was not an issue of the thousands protesting and organizing against racism. No Jewish student organizations were even involved. The implementation of these workshops "conveniently excludes the very groups who originally submitted detailed proposals for the multiculturalism awareness initiative," according to a statement of 12 faculty and student groups.[34] PRIDE's concern about "scholastic racism" were dismissed with a vague concern for "academic freedom" and "free speech" with the suggestion that these issues be raised before the new committees, deans and faculty groups.
- The request for a student center was denied because of the claim that it would lead to "resegregation". Behind this assumption is not only a racist distinction between demands for Black autonomy as "segregationist" and "white" segregation as "separate but equal." The administration's refusal to provide money for student organized activities and a student center demonstrates a fear of providing resources to students who would once against use them to further expand their struggles, as happened with the "ethnic" studies movement of the 1960-70s and continues today with multiculturalism.
- The proposal for curricular reform in liberal arts was also reflected to departmental faculty and course and curriculum committee of the college.
While the administration attempted to delegate responsibility for implementing these proposals in an apparent attempt to dissipate and diffuse the movement the struggle had the momentum and was able to circulate the struggle throughout the university. That summer, students began to expose UT's connections to Freeport and Gay and Lesbian students fought for inclusion in the discrimination policy. PRIDE also received support from Chicana/o students who devised their own multiculturalism plan, the University Lesbians and Asian- American students. Four new progressive faculty groups (Chicano Faculty Caucus, Black Faculty Caucus, Progressive Faculty Caucus and FACT: Fight Racism (the Faculty Ad-hoc Committee to Fight Racism)) were also organized not only to support PRIDE but to get faculty organized for some later battles in the English department and to stop the Gulf War.
Todos Unidos (TU), a coalition of Chicana/o organizations and individuals formed in 1990 and later proclaimed their support for PRIDE in April. TU members formulated a complementary proposal to PRIDE called Orientaciones Nuevas para la Diversificacion de la Academia (New Direction for the Diversification of Academia or ONDA) and began to organize around its implementation. There are 10 parts to ONDA that focus around student and faculty recruitment and retention, the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS), and curriculum reform.
ONDA has the following 10 chapters and five appendixes from which I summarize:
- Social Problems - Suggests that UT identify racism, sexism and heterosexism as social problems, conduct research on them, document "hate crimes" that occur on campus, and identify these problems in the Strategic Plan, 1992-1997. Mechanisms should also be put in place to hear and investigate complaints of discrimination.
- Admissions - Admissions criteria should be reformed. ONDA suggests norming each ethnic/racial group and selecting the highest scorers if GPA and tests scores are not replaced with unbiased criterion. Also, recruitment should be conducted with geographic criteria and culture-based reference tests. A minority affairs position is also suggested for the office of admissions to aid students at all class levels.
- Recruitment - UT should expand recruitment of Chicana/os in junior colleges and in areas with high Chicana/o concentrations. Also one minority graduate student should be included on each department's graduate admission's committee, minority outreach centers created on people of color communities, assist public school students to attend college, and increase minority involvement in summer orientation.
- Retention - UT should create a centralized retention program for all students and faculty. Additional new programs are suggested such as a comprehensive tutoring program for minority and low-income students using graduate students as tutors, increasing minority graduate fellowship funding from $350,000 to $1 million offering multi-year packages, reduce competition for the provisional admissions program and provide tutoring and counseling support, reopen the English Department Writing Lab, increase minority mental health counselors and increase cost free visits.
- Faculty and Staff - A Vice-President for Minority Affairs should be created. Faculty and administrators should be actively recruited at Chicana/o scholars conferences. Also, two Latina/o law faculty should be hired who teach immigration law and test case courses and faculty multicultural sensitivity workshops should be required.
- Curriculum - Every college should be required to offer at least one course on Chicana/os, except Liberal Arts which must offer one per department. Emphasis should be given to the Chicana and at least four courses a year offered on Latinos. A master plan should be developed to integrate multiculturalism into the curriculum by implementing it at the institutional rather than departmental level. The American History and Texas Government course requirements must be reevaluated to include a multicultural content. Students should be required to take a multicultural course within the US and world contexts. Also Government and History 314 classes should be expanded to each semester and English 314L (Introduction to Chicano Literature) should be substitutable for English 316K.
- University Publications - The Minority Advisory Group of TSP should be upgraded to a standing committee; funding should be increased for Tejas and Griot; and more distribution boxes should be made available for alternative publications.
- Financial Aid - The Office of Student Financial Aid should expand its hours at the start of the semester, eliminate the GPA requirement, provide alternative sources of aid for students on academic probation and create a scholarship database.
- Center for Mexican American Studies - CMAS should receive a new facility that is accessible to the disabled and has more space. Funding should be increased for a student run Chicana/o cultural center and other student programs.
- Fraternities and Sororities - A policy and means to investigate sexism, racism and heterosexism by members of the Greek system should be established under the VP for Minority Affairs. Mandatory multicultural awareness programs should also be established.
ONDA also includes further expands on these programs in the following five appendixes:
- The Excel Tutoring Program - The program would serve low income undergraduates by hiring low income graduate students as the tutors, matching up minority and female students and tutors.
- Equal Opportunity Program (EOP) & Young Scholars Program (YSP) - EOP would admit and mentor minority and/or economically disadvantaged applicants who are not admitted. YSP would mentor sophomores from "high risk" urban or rural high schools and guide them to admission to college.
- New Administrative Structure - Established VP for Minority Affairs and details responsibility over multicultural reforms, recruitment and retention programs, Excel, EOP, YSP, and investigate and report racial, sexual and homophobic harassment and violence.
- The Faculty Development Plan - Five additional faculty positions should be established on a two year trial basis for each in which funding will be shared by the department and administration. Three of the positions will be filled by Chicana faculty and the search and selection committee will be composed of three members of the Chicano Faculty Caucus (CFC), two members of the department and one graduate or undergraduate student appointed by the CFC chair. One visiting Chicana/o faculty position should be funded along with two Chicana/o Faculty Fellowships and six additional Latina/o graduate students as research assistants to support Latina/o faculty.
- CMAS - An Advisory Committee of four faculty members, two undergraduates, two graduate students, and director should be created to define its goals and objectives, plan the curriculum and participate in hiring. Among the changes suggested are: create an annual orientation program, write an annual report, provide access to resources by Chicana/o students, expand the number of offered courses, offer an activist oriented course, fund faculty and student research, create a student advisor position, fund student attendance for conferences, create a Chicana/Latina Studies Unit, offer a post-doctorate in Chicana Studies, begin a working paper series, expand TA and R.A positions and establish fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students who combine community activism and scholarship.[35]
Although ONDA was presented to the administration in April 1990, they did not receive a response until early December 1990 just as the semester was ending. The responses to both ONDA and PRIDE were coordinated by Lewis Wright, assistant vice president for administration. Not surprisingly, the responses are almost identical in their strategy of decentralizing responsibility for the proposals or touting current administrative programs. According to one Todos Unidos member, eight of the nine pages are spent "advertising" the current programs while using the last page to answer the proposals. For example, the vice president for minority affairs was rejected and the curriculum proposal was delegated to the University Council Committee on Multicultural Education as was PRIDE.[36]
The movement for multiculturalism is made complex by its two fundamental aspects: expanding enrollment and faculty recruitment and totally revamping the way we learn and what we learn to include a multicultural, even international, perspective. At UT, both PRIDE and ONDA place their emphasis on a massive increase of the recruitment of students and faculty and institutional support so that they continue to graduation. They have answered the attack on accessible enrollment with demands for not only increased enrollment but resources to support them, thereby confronting the issue of income used against students with austerity. The most important resource demanded is the hiring of many Black and Chicana/o faculty in every department not only in their own specialized departments.
These demands had the unintentional affect of undermining the very purpose of enrollment management: weeding out students the university doesn't want. UT administrators were simultaneously faced with polar opposite pressures: top-down legislative mandates to reduce enrollment and bottom-up student and faculty pressures to open up enrollment for specific groups of students. Over time, this movement threatened to grow on the strength of participation from students who gained entrance and studied with the new faculty hired as a result of the movement and continued the struggle. I summize that this is why the administration took so long to respond to these proposals while attempting to cover up its own overt fraudulent inaction concerning campus racism and in the end needed a right wing backlash to slow down the movements. More worrisome is when students begin to link up with faculty, which is common in the multiculturalism movement. As the role of faculty as mediators for the administration and implementers of restructuring - as in the case of the promotions of two Black faculty to administrative positions: George Wright to Vice President and John Butler to Sociology Department Chair and endowed professor - are attacked by students, control over the faculty becomes even more tenuous. The formation of the autonomous Black and Chicana/o Faculty Caucuses since late Spring 1990, later joined by the formation of the Progressive Faculty Group and the American Association of University Professors, is evidence that when challenged faculty are capable of coordinating their struggles with students rather than serving as mediators between students and the administration.
Neither the delays nor the denial of administrative responsibility stopped the movements even if they have derailed them temporarily. In fact, PRIDE triggered the circulation of the multiculturalism movement throughout the university. The Indian Progressive Action Group endorsed PRIDE, proposing a multicultural requirement that includes coverage of contributions by Blacks, Asian-Americans, Latina/os and Native Americans as well as intensified faculty and student recruitment. The Native American Student Association was formed as a support group and to expand the number of courses on Native Americans. The University Lesbians and the Gay and Lesbian Student Association also publicly supported PRIDE and efforts have even been made to establish a Gay Studies. The Korean Language Promotion Committee is attempting to establish a Korean language program in the Department of Oriental and African Languages. A group of students and faculty is attempting establish a degree granting Peace and Conflict Studies program and submitted a draft of a proposal to the Dean of Liberal Arts in 1994. Even during the Gulf War, the anti-war movement included the adoption of PRIDE and ONDA in its list of demands to end military and corporate oriented research and funding among other things.[37]
That summer, the University Lesbians won the inclusion of Gay and Lesbian students to the university's anti-discrimination policy. In January, the law school had been requested by the Association of American Law Schools to add sexual orientation to its list of prohibited forms of discrimination as do all its member schools. When Dean Yudof petitioned President Cunningham for advice, University Lesbians sprang into action with demonstrations, blocking traffic on Guadalupe Street with a street festival and a march on the ROTC building to protest its discriminatory policies. In all, 37 campus groups endorsed the petition for inclusion in the policy. This time it took only a few months for the clause to be approved which it was in August. In 1985, President Cunningham "lost" and essentially vetoed a similar proposal.[38]
Soon after the victory, a coalition of five groups - GLSA, UL, Law Graduate Students for Gay and Lesbian Concerns, University NOW and University ACT-UP organized events during the first two weeks of classes in fall 1990 to present their plan QUEERS: Queers United in Envisioning an Egalitarian Restructuring of Society. QUEERS demands that UT acknowledge domestic partner status for Gay/Lesbian students and employees, including access to married student housing, health insurance and other benefits; sexual orientation policy apply to all off campus organizations that use UT facilities; create a Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies and recruit Gay and Lesbian faculty; fund sensitivity workshops for dorm residents and RAs; establish a multicultural panel to advise the Student Health Center; and adopt PRIDE and ONDA.[39]
Even though the new sexual orientation policy has many problems, it was only the beginning to further expanding the movement. However, while UT is now prevented from discriminating, outside organizations and corporations that use UT facilities such as ROTC, are only "encouraged" to adopt the policy. This is unlike the University of California-Los Angeles which has a mandatory anti- discrimination policy. It also only "refers to access to facilities, programs and services. It does not mention harassment," Jessica Selinkoff of Austin ACT-UP points out. As a result, Gay and Lesbians are unable to come out about their sexual preference to outsiders on campus without a threat of discrimination.[40]
For three straight years, the Coalition for a Diversified Law School has participated in a nationwide law student strike to protest the composition of the law faculty, students and course content. By 1990, the faculty was composed of 50 "white males" (84.7 percent of the total), 6 white females (10.2 percent), 2 African-American males (3.4 percent), one Asian-American male (1.7 percent) and no Hispanics (0 percent). During the first National Law Student Strike in 1989, students at 38 law schools boycotted classes and rallied. In Berkeley, 90 percent of the students struck and 43 were arrested when they occupied the admissions office. At UT, 25 percent of the students boycotted classes and about a third showed up for a rally in 1989.
The Coalition's demands in 1990 included four areas:
- Recruitment and Retention - disclosure of faculty hiring criteria and methods to students, increase student participation in hiring process and allow students on appointments committee to publish a report for students, and increase the number of first year classes taught by minority and female faculty.
- Recruitment and Retention of Diverse Law Student Body - makeup should reflect state demographics, and increase annual minority orientation program.
- Changes in Placement Office - Recruiters must be prohibited from discriminating based on sexual orientation.
- Suggestions - Create at least three endowed chairs for Mexican- Americans, African-Americans, and Women, create a fellowship for minority and female students planning to teach, recruit minority and women faculty to teach at UT, and hire more minority and female adjunct professors immediately.
In 1991, the Coalition, which includes 11 law student groups and a Graduate Student "Support the Boycott" Committee, stopped boycotting classes after participation declined in 1990 and turned the protest into a party to celebrate since the law school was forced to give into their demands. In 1990-91, the law school hired four women, one of them Latina, increasing the total number of women faculty to nine of 60. Only a month before, a group of law students created The Texas Journal of Women and the Law to "focus on legal, social and political issues affecting women." The journal is not strictly focused on academic legal issues but will include first person accounts and papers delivered at symposiums.[41] At the same time, UT was being sued by "white" applicants for charges of "discrimination" in their efforts to enter the law school. In 1996, they were eventually successful in having the US Supreme Court strike down its minority recruitment policies.
Fighting for Institutionalization at the University Council
In the midst of these diverse struggles being fought around multiculturalism, PRIDE and ONDA were transformed into a recommendation by the University Council Committee on Multicultural Education which was chaired by journalism professor Wayne Danielson. After nearly a year of deliberation, the final proposal was made in the fall of 1991 and passed the University Council in October. The recommendation called for the approval of a 3 hour multicultural requirement beginning with fall 1992 and increased to 6 hours by fall 1996. Before 1996, the student may chose between a U.S. or international multiculturalism course. In 1996, this would change to one of each. Foreign language courses that are not primarily grammar oriented can be used to fulfill the requirement. The main thrust of the recommendation comes with a suggestion that currently existing multicultural courses be allowed to count as credit: "The Committee encourages each college and department to seek ways that the multicultural requirement can overlap with other course work required for graduation, thus allowing as much flexibility as possible in planning their schedules."[42]
However, when twenty two faculty members wrote letters of protest to the University Council in October, the proposal was required to be approved by vote of the entire faculty instead of going directly to the board of regents for approval. After letters of opposition from 17 faculty members were received, the non-curricular recommendations (minority student and faculty recruitment, cohort registration, sensitivity workshops for faculty and staff and a student run cultural center) were also brought to a vote of the General Faculty (that is, all the faculty) after they were approved by the University Council. At its only meeting of the year in October 1991, the General Faculty did not achieve a quorum and was unable to vote. Although, all the non-curricular changes were approved by the Faculty Senate's Committee on Multicultural Education and the University Council, the recommendation was sent back again to the University Council.
After a mistake on the Council's faculty list in January, about 432 faculty members (two-thirds of whom were assistant professors and lecturers) were unable to vote by mail on the multiculturalism requirement and were asked to come to University Council Secretary Paul Kelly's office to vote in person, which only 63 (15 percent) did. Of 2,077 faculty, 1,193 (57 percent) voted on the proposal: 434 (36 percent) voted for the proposal and 759 (64 percent) voted against it. Of the 432 who did not receive mail ballots, 30 (48 percent) voted for it and 33 (52 percent) voted against the proposal.[43] Because the margin of defeat is smaller than the number of those who did not vote in person, the vote has come under heavy fire as illegitimate.
Opposition to the plan was clearly organized by a small group of self- described ideologically conservative faculty, most associated with the National Association of Scholars (NAS) through the Texas Association of Scholars (TAS), and entrepreneurial engineering and science faculty. Although many struggles are organized by mainly a small group over a long period of time, this group differs from most activist groups since it had access to alumni and high ranking administrative officials in another effort to block the E306 reforms that we'll see next. This small group of senior faculty were able to dislodge and block a desire for reform demanded by thousands of students in marches and protests and thousands more who voluntarily sign up for multicultural courses. In fact, a University financed survey of UT students conducted in March 1991 by a graduate journalism class found that 57 percent of all 432 students surveyed by phone said UT should require a multiculturalism course.[44]
Student and faculty opponents however attempted to recast the required course as a burden to students in an attempt to utilize popular anger against rigid course requirements that leave no space for a student to take classes in other areas of interest. While all students have little room for taking diverse courses, such a strategy was aimed especially at appealing to engineering students who have almost no allowance or time to take outside courses. Lyle Clark, one of seven engineering professor who filed letters of protest, used this strategy: "Engineers don't have many electives anyway. If you require six hours of multicultural courses, you're taking away the right to take music, art and some of these other things." This was echoed by engineering professor Dale Klein.[45] Engineering Dean Herbert Woodson, who is integral to the entrepreneurialization of UT, based his opposition to the course on the claim that it may "cease being a writing course."[46]
What is clever about this strategy is the very faculty that are imposing the rigid and overworked schedules on engineering students are the ones suggesting that diversifying their coursework would take away what little extra time they already allow them. The very faculty who are denying students free time in the structuring of their degree program opposed multiculturalism under the guise that it would do what exactly that: deny them free time. Opposition also came from other elite faculty such as Steven Weinberg, a physics professor who helped bring the later aborted Superconducting Supercollider to Texas. Weinberg and computer science professor Robert S. Boyer, stressed a lack of time and suggested requiring the "masterworks of literature" such as Greek tragedies. Classics professor Karl Galinsky also touted the virtues of "Western culture" and suggested more time to study the matter by sending the proposal to the Faculty Senate's Committee on the Undergraduate Experience or the Educational Policy Committee - the latter of which he is a member.[47]
This attempt to justify their opposition based on multiculturalism reducing space for electives took place even though the UC recommendation specifically calls for overlapping course requirements so that even the already required foreign language courses can count doubly. Paul Woodruff, professor of philosophy, even opposed an amendment that would allow the humanities requirement to be fulfilled by humanities courses with multicultural content. Woodruff "believed that the multiculturalism courses should be courses taken in addition to not as a part of, the present requirements."[48] Because students can already fulfill more than one requirement with a single course, multiculturalism may have had little or no impact on courseload size. Thus, there must be another explanation for opposition to the recommendation. Opponents wanted to make it appear to increase the amount of required schoolwork to generate opposition.[49] When it was clear that this may not be the case, some like Woodruff attempted to make sure that it would. Although the reasons for its defeat are unclear, the opposition's strategy appeared orchestrated around an attempt to turn multiculturalism into more work in order to strip it of both its support and its potential antagonism to the function of the university to teach us to work. This in mind, it is hardly surprising that the most opposition came from engineering and the sciences since these disciplines are fundamental to re-imposition of control over the universities.
Even though the proposal was temporarily defeated, it has done nothing to slow the implementation of multicultural reform. Classes are still being organized and taught by students and faculty such as E376 by Elizabeth Fernea, professor of English, titled "Multicultural Approaches to Literary Studies." Two Plan II students created a conference course titled "Views of World Cultures" that offers a series of lectures by UT professors. Students are also still fighting to increase minority faculty hiring in department such as sociology where the Sociology Graduate Student Group (SG2) did a survey of what graduate courses have been unavailable and which of these as well as others graduate students would prefer to take. Multicultural topics ranked among the top five. All the colleges except Engineering and Natural Science have established committees to evaluate multicultural reforms or have attempted to do so. The College of Communication held a faculty seminar to brainstorm on introducing multiculturalism into teaching and research, the School of Social Work has a committee that evaluates if courses are culturally diverse, the College of Business Administration attempted to require a three hour degree requirement in either a foreign language or international studies but was rejected by the University Council, the College of Fine Arts has been creating multicultural courses for several years in areas of ethno-musicology and non-Western music, and the College of Education has established a committee as well.[50] According to a guide by the Office of the Dean of Students, there were 33 multicultural courses in 1991, although six dealt with societies outside the U.S.[51] While these efforts may have accomplished little of the comprehensive demands made by students, it is impossible to charge that nothing is changing.
The movement has forced the administration to deal with student demands and has resulted not only with these decentralized efforts but also expanded minority recruitment of students and faculty, new retention programs by the Dean of Students Office, awareness seminars for the administration, and the Faculty Senate and UC's approval of most of the important proposals included in PRIDE. Even without formal admission, the uprising has resulted in a tremendous victory in forcing an increase in the hiring of minority faculty. Between 1989 and fall 1991, the number of minority faculty was increased: women increased from 559 to 614, Blacks from 40 to 52, and "Hispanics" from 70 to 82 while "Asians" only increased from 96 to 97 and Native Americans remained at 8. In all, while the total faculty increased from 2,273 to 2,341, the number of minority and women faculty increased by 72.[52] While this is hardly the spectacular 45 percent increase the administration would have us believe - it is actually only .85 percent between 1989-91 when women are included - it would not have happened even at this level without the spring 1990 uprising and all the other facets of the multiculturalism movement that have complemented it. The uprising gave strength to the many decentralized departmental struggles for minority faculty recruitment and multicultural reform.
Paradoxically, the administrations' diffusing of responsibility for multiculturalism has backfired against it since many departments, colleges and students have continued to quietly but powerfully transform the university without interference from a centralized power. Decentralization has resulted in some defeats, which I will discuss regarding E306, but it has also enabled students and faculty to maintain their own distinct needs in transforming their programs, something that would be difficult if something like the ONDA's VP for Minority Affairs (which would oversee all the changes) were created.
The Counterattack Against Multiculturalism at UT-Austin
Along with the defeat of the UC recommendations, opposition also arose over an attempt to reform English 306 and Tejas newspaper. The opposition developed as the result of organizing by the Texas Association of Scholars (TAS), Students Advocating Valid Education (SAVE), the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) and a coalition of national backers that began in 1990 following the spring uprising and victories that began to follow with the sexual orientation clause, the attack on the UT-Freeport McMoRan connection, and the law school strike victories.
E306: A Lot of Hype About Basic English
The Lower Division English Policy Committee (LDEPC), chaired by professor Linda Brodkey, was appointed to reorganize E306 in time for fall 1990. Because AI's were given inadequate instructions on how to organize the course and leeway in selecting texts and developing the syllabus, many AI's had already begun diversifying the content of their E306 courses on their own.[53] LDEPC was only an attempt to begin institutionalizing what was already being done. The committee added two new features to the course which was renamed "Writing About Difference": readings from Supreme Court decisions about civil rights and Racism and Sexism, written by Paula Rothenberg, as a main textbook.[54] After internal opposition arose from three English professors over the Rothenberg book, its assignment for the class was canceled on June 26, 1990 and parts of it selected for the reading packet. Only a small part of the book was originally intended to be used in the course.
The internal opposition came from professors Alan Gribben, James Duban and John Rusckiewicz, all of whom were members of the policy committee. Shortly after the Rothenberg book was dropped, Duban and Rusckiewicz both resigned from the committee on July 18. Only three days later, President Cunningham and Gerhard Fonken, executive vice president and provost, met with Liberal Arts Dean Standish Meacham to discuss the course. On Monday, July 23, Dean Meacham announced that the course changes would be postponed a year.
Although President Cunningham has claimed that "the dean [Meacham] made the decision" there is evidence that the decision was made from the highest levels of the administration. President Cunningham's response to a letter received from a Dallas woman concerned about the course on July 9 bears this out. Cunningham responded in a July 11 letter that "After careful consideration, the Department has decided that the course will not be modified this fall." This decision to postpone the course was supposedly not made for almost another two weeks. Although Cunningham has defended the letter by suggesting that it should have included the words "with the Racism and Sexism textbook" added to the end of the sentence, the letter from the Dallas woman never mentions the textbook. With this in mind, English professor Kurt Heinzelman may have been correct in concluding that Cunningham and Fonken were responsible for postponing the course. According the Heinzelman, "Before the weekend [July 20], Meacham and Kruppa were ready to start the course, and after the meetings with Fonken and Cunningham, Meacham reversed his position."[55] Soon after, Meacham announced he would not continue as dean and was replaced by his predecessor, Robert King.
LDEPC kept working after the postponement and devised a new syllabus that still utilized Supreme Court decisions on civil rights cases and parts of the Rothenberg book. However, although the committee reviewed a 46 to 11 vote of confidence from departmental faculty and a proposal to create a oversight committee was defeated 30 to 27, the committee resigned in early February 1991 when a second syllabus was also rejected.
Cunningham was not the only one who had received a letter concerning the course. Anne Blakeney, a Dallas resident and member of the UT Liberal Arts Foundation Council (many of whom donate about $1000 a year to the College of Liberal Arts) wrote Gribben after reading his editorial in the Dallas Morning News. As one internal opponent to the E306 changes, Gribben's response to Blakeney on July 9 indicates a sense of defeat by a powerful multiculturalism movement that could not be stopped without top level administrative intervention - that would come only 12 days later. Gribben suggested to Blakeney that:
*The English department should be placed in receivership indefinitely, with someone like Donald Foss (chairman of the Psychology department) as its director for several years; and then be governed by a new English chairman appointed directly by Gerhard Fonken, executive vice president and provost; and
*During this period of receivership the department faculty should be divided into a Department of critical Theory and Cultural Studies and a Department of Literature and Language. This division of the radical theorists from the remaining traditional scholars would give the latter the freedom to offer a true literature and writing program. Or
*Barring the accomplishment of these steps, the two University-wide required English courses (E306, E316K) should be abolished, thus ending the necessity of hiring additional English professors at the rate they have been recruited from the most radicalized (but prestigious) graduate programs across the nation.
Most vital of all will be a comprehending College of Liberal Arts dean with nerve and a determination to oversee the recruiting policies and decisions of the English department, which has lost all sense of tradition, direction, civility and academic freedom in the classroom.[56]
While there is an irrational level of paranoia and conspiratorial planning in this letter, too many people failed to take what it says seriously. Although it has not been placed in "receivership," the English Department's nearly twenty year old Executive Committee governance structure was soon after abolished by interim dean Robert King who returned as a "comprehending" dean to the college as Gribben had hoped. Although Fonken did not appoint a new English Department chair, he was apparently involved only twelve days latter in reversing the LDEPC decision on E306. The abolition of the executive committee by King fulfilled much of Gribben's plan to divide the department into two departments in order to isolate the "radicals" because only senior (and most likely more conservative) faculty are members of the budget council whereas all faculty can vote in the executive committee. In May 1992, President Cunningham announced a plan to follow through on Gribben's plan to split the department by creating a division of rhetoric and composition.[57]
Gribben's fear of the snowballing success of the multiculturalism movement was quite explicit. The "most disturbing trend I have observed here in the past 10 years," he wrote Blakeney, "would be the selective recruitment of the new faculty members with an expectation that they will bring with them an ideologized sense of advocacy - radical feminism, Marxist analysis, militant 'ethnic' studies - to influence students inside and outside the classroom."[58] (italics in original)
Gribben's letter and the intervention of the administration and other outsiders were reactions to the continuing successes of the movement. One possible explanation for the failure to generate support outside the department until after it was delayed may be that proponents of the reforms neglected to emphasize the strength of the movement and instead focused on the supposed power of opponents and the administration. Simply, the struggle was not circulated sufficiently to others fighting the same battles elsewhere in the university.
This was especially true in the case of students. The terms of debate over E306 were about whether or not it was scholarly or was about writing but rarely whether it was what students wanted. While both sides were busy debating whether the course was ideological "brainwashing" or writing, students only entered into the discussions as presumably passive and susceptible to manipulation. This underlying assumption is paradoxical considering that it was students who initially demanded and protested for multicultural reforms. In the end, just as E306 was taken out of the hands of the English faculty, multiculturalism was taken out of the hands of students who created and demanded it. This is still the case with the movement at large whose discourse about itself remains at the level of the struggle over theory rather than the struggle over the way we live or even the university itself.[59]
Could it be coincidental that Robert King was selected to replace Dean Meacham so soon after Gribben's letter calls out for what would soon be done not only to the English department but other programs as well? Gribben and King have crossed paths at least once before. In 1985, when King kicked students off the Freshman English Policy Committee, Gribben was "disappointed" and opposed to the students taking out an ad in the Daily Texan to publicize the action.[60]
Almost immediately, King moved to abolish the executive committee and impose a budget council over the expressed consent of the faculty due to a claim that the department had become "dysfunctional", the only reason permitted by the UT Handbook of Operating Procedures for changing a department's governance structure. According to professor Kurt Heinzelman, such a claim was grounded on the misperception of a crisis and antagonism perpetuated by professors Duban and Gribben. For example, Gribben claims that he was driven out of the department and UT because he lost a vote of 41 to 1 to create an MA in what he calls "Third World Studies." The vote was made by the Graduate Studies Committee - which Gribben chaired - and he was even allowed to vote even though it is prohibited by the rules for the chair to vote. Duban has also cited "factionalism" as justification for praising King's threat to change the governance structure, a move Duban never brought up publicly before the department faculty.[61] In fact, no evidence of the department becoming "dysfunctional" was ever presented.[62]
On February 22, 1991, the English department voted 80 to 1 to retain the ten member elected executive committee (which has five full, three associate, and two assistant professors). On June 26, King notified Kruppa that he is "inclined not to approve a continuation of the Executive Council mode of governance as the Department has proposed" and instead suggests its replacement with a budget
council consisting of "all and only the Full Professors in the Department." On July 9, the faculty once again vote 34 to 11 to reaffirm their support of an executive committee. King never responded directly to this resolution nor to a proposal by Kruppa to set up an outside committee to study the governance question until the Executive Committee's term expired in February.[63]
Rather than moving against disfunctionalism, King actions indicate a pattern by which he acted to undermine a governance structure that significantly increased recruitment of minority faculty, initiated E306 and began to transform the rest of the curriculum. According to Heinzelman, who resigned in September as chairman of the English Department recruitment committee, a memo from King asserts that "our recruitment practices have long troubled him." "During our two years without King, the English Department hired women and minorities with unparalleled success, and the first action King takes when he is back in office is to suspend the departmental agency that made those appointments." Coincidentally, the change to a budget council also excludes many of these new hires since there are only three female and two minority full professors in the department. Soon after the governance change chairman Joseph Kruppa was informed that only four of nine available faculty positions could be filled due to budget cuts. King had suspended hiring once in 1989 noting his discomfort with the increased recruitment of faculty with "non-traditional approaches to literary interpretations" according to a memo to then department chair Bill Sutherland.[64]
King continued to disrupt other academic programs for a few more years until his retirement as dean. When he replaced Meacham in June 1991, he refused to honor an agreement made between Meacham and sociology professor Susan Marshall to head the Women's Studies program. Marshall had been offered certain support provisions including a small pay raise, a larger budget to hire its own staff, tune off for the summer and a reduced course load to carry out administrative duties. When King refused to allow these provisions, Marshall refused and King offered the position to other members of the Women's Studies Steering Committee who turned him down. One of those candidates, Carol Mackay, an English professor, said she was offered the position "while Marshall thought she was still negotiating with Dean King." A few months later Marshall accepted the job without a reduced course load and a promise to maintain the same low level of support (e.g. not to cut the budget).[65]
King's relationship to the program reflects a deeper conflict between the administration and the Women's Studies program. Women's Studies is neither a department or a required course for any of the UT curriculum. English professor Jane Marcus (who left the university in 1990) notes that "There is a 10- to 15-year gap in funding Women's Studies at UT compared to other comparable universities." Even though six Women's Studies faculty finally received Regents approval for the "Proposal for a Special Concentration in Women's Studies" in 1987 after years of struggle, students must take 21 hours of cross-listed courses to qualify for the concentration - while most minors in other fields only require about 12 hours - and write a thesis. When they complete this, they'll receive a handmade certificate and their concentration will not show up on their diploma. UT's refusal to adequately fund the program is quite explicit. According to Catherine Cantieri, "Women's Studies' funding for printing information and an occasional lecture comes from the LAIP's [Liberal Arts Interdisciplinary Program] $74,308 share of the more than-$600 million UT budget. And that $74,308 is shared with African-American Studies, Mexican-American Studies, and European Studies. The money allocated for Women's Studies is so small that Marcus takes $3,000 out of her salary each year and donates it to the program."[66]
Marcus reasons that "It appears that the opposition [to Women's Studies] comes from above." "Under Dean King, [1980-1989] Women's Studies was built by volunteer faculty members who had no time off or extra pay for building the program. The only thing we got in return [for the volunteer efforts] from the university was occasionally money for speakers, but no women's center...or meeting place... [which would] make the program comparable to [other studies at the University]," says Marcus. Even though 800-1000 students register for Women's Studies cross-listed courses each semester, the program ranks far behind the University of Alabama, for example, which has a center and official program. When Marcus took it into her own hands to generate outside financial support for Women's Studies by speaking at a house of a UT alumna with prior permission from King, and raised thousands of dollars, she felt the weight of opposition. According to Catherine Cantieri, "when she took the checks to King, [according to Marcus] 'he was furious and refused to allow any more fund raising' because such efforts were 'earmarked for other projects...that were considered more important."[67]
King's handling of the selection of the new Humanities head was almost identical. King would not recognize Meacham's offer of a small pay raise and a reduced course load to Michael Stoff to head the program. Although King gave Stoff until July 15 to accept his offer, on July 10, King notified Stoff by letter that he had already offered the position to Norman Farmer of English. Farmer is a close ally of King's, having written a letter of support for a budget council to King just before his appointment. Farmer was also one of only seven English faculty to sign the TAS "Statement of Academic Concern" opposing E306 reforms and has publicly warned of the "politicization" of the English department.[68]
The situation concerning the replacement of Jan Manners as Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Center has also been tainted by Dean King. Although Meacham appointed Elizabeth Fernea as director, King rejected the decision and instead chose a geographer, Bob Holz, as the new director. While Fernea is a respected Middle Eastern scholar and has served as the center's undergraduate advisor and on its executive committee, Holz has almost completely inadequate experience. Holz speaks no Middle Eastern languages and his primary area of research does not concern the Middle East. He has never served on the executive committee and has only minor involvement with the center. Although he has used his satellite mapping technology for research in the Middle East, his research interests do not appear equivalent to Fernea's. Other reasons for King's rejection of Fernea may have to do with her outspoken support of the E306 revisions and her membership on a committee to formulate multicultural curriculum proposals for the College of Liberal Arts appointed by Meacham and participation in the publishing of two books on the subject.[69]
As Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, King demonstrated the extremities of the backlash against not only multicultural reform proposals but institutional academic programs and established academics aligned with the multiculturalism movement. Although the attack on the E306 reforms utilized various explicit and subtle methods to defeat its implementation, King stood out in his use of swift repression.
Soon after it published a scathing cover article - "Rattle of a Very Curious Dean" - in its May 1990 issue on psychology professor and TAS president Joe Horn, indicating his race based theories of intelligence and calling for him to resign as associate dean of Liberal Arts, the Chicana/o student newspaper Tejas came under heavy fire from SAVE (which was formed by members of the YCTs) in 1990. Horn, the faculty advisor to the University Review (formerly the Texas Review), a self-described conservative newspaper funded by the Institute for Educational Affairs (which well discuss more late in the chapter) has also been a faculty mentor of SAVE and spoke at their first meeting in April 1990 and other meetings of the YCTs. SAVE was formed by members of the YCTs and College Republicans and its first president and vice president was Geoff Henley (Daily Texan editor 1992-93) and Scott Gaille of YCT.[70]
SAVE began their counterattack by writing a letter to the vice provost charging that Tejas violated state appropriations code that prohibited state agencies from using state money to bring attention to state employees or officials, in this case Horn. Although Patricia Ohlendorf, associate vice president in the office of the provost, disagreed, she cited Tejas in violation of a "UT rule banning publications the University funds, but does not control." This is certainly no exaggeration, since UT tightly controls each of the media entities it funds through oversight by Texas Student Publications. Tejas is produced by a journalism class and is funded through the Center for Mexican American Studies. Dean Robert Jeffrey of the College of Communications endorsed Ohlendorf's ruling to cut off Tejas' CMAS funding, claiming that "without this policy, any professor on campus with a political interest could gather students, offer them an independent course, and produce a newspaper expressing his political views. Obviously we can't have 100 papers like that on campus without any University control."[71] (emphasis added) Jeffrey is evidently aware of the kinds of reporting that can and has been done without administrative oversight.
After Ohlendorf and Jeffrey banned Tejas a barrage of national media attention on the action and support from students, faculty and Texas Senators forced them to back off. Jeffrey allowed Tejas to publish but with only enough money to print copies for each student in the class and journalism faculty - although with newsprint the cost is nearly identical since much of the expense is in set-up. Jeffrey believed that the only value in the project was in its production not its distribution. A few months later Tejas had been able to generate enough outside financial support to continue publishing regularly and distribute campus- wide.
Tejas has continued to report on a wide range of issues concerning Chicana/os and other students at UT, including stories concerning racism at The Daily Texan, the disproportionate funding of higher education in South Texas and UT's minority recruitment policies. It has been joined by a number of other alternative student papers that have developed over the last four years. While the Griot, a Black student paper, was already in existence, Tejas, the Polemicist, The Women's Alternative Times (no longer publishing) all began in the late 1980s. There have also been other publications formed since then or published on a sporadic basis by graduate students, environmental organizations, architecture students, and even classes. Many of these publications have devoted considerable critical attention to UT and have provided information about UT's entrepreneurial and other activity that students cannot find elsewhere. Some like Tejas receive funds from the university and most don't. Clearly, Tejas' frontal attack on one of the primary faculty member of the counterattack on multiculturalism figured significantly in a failed attempt to eliminate it. This counterattack on Tejas, unlike most of the rest of the alternative student press, was possible only because it received UT money.
Planning a Nationwide Counter-Movement
The counterattack on the multiculturalism requirement, E306 reforms, and Tejas newspapers at UT-Austin are not isolated local occurrences but only a node in a larger well-financed campaign to stop the multicultural transformation of US based universities. Many of the organizations at UT-Austin that have acted to block these reforms - the University Review, Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), Students Advocating Valid Education (SAVE), and the Texas Association of Scholars (TAS) - are part of a network of corporate-backed organizations that have figured in the "PC" media blitz that has translated in some places such as UT to material counterattacks against the gains of the student movements. It is no coincidence that many of the financial backers of these organizations also hold significant interests in the entrepreneurialization of the universities and have come under siege for their support of Central American Death squads and contribution to toxic pollution and environmental destruction.
The connection between opponents to multiculturalism at UT and these national organizations are explicit. College of Liberal Arts Dean Robert King, at a lecture given in September 1991, elucidated his concern for a rising insurgency on campus by utilizing the code phrases of the movement's opponents. He noted that the threat to free speech, "the pressure to conform, to not even mention certain topics, is coming down from the professors and students and not from outside the University."[72] By claiming that such pressure is "coming down," King reverses the source of the real power to suppress "free speech" from the higher levels of the administration and rich supporters who control the university to that of a movement that seeks to open spaces in the universities for those who have been prevented from speaking there.
King's lecture was sponsored not only by the College of Liberal Arts and the Philosophy department (which was chaired by TAS member Daniel Bonevac), but SAVE and the University Review. Together with TAS, these student organizations have been fundamentally supported by the Madison Center for Education Affairs and the NAS, two organizations that have led the charge on multiculturalism.[73]
TAS, which sponsored placed a "Statement of Academic Concern" in The Daily Texan as a paid ad on July 18, 1990 attacking the revisions of E306 signed by 56 faculty members including Duban, Galinsky, Farmer, Gribben, Horn, King, and Rusckiewicz, is a chapter of the NAS.[74] NAS grew out of the Coalition for Democracy (CFD) which was formed with the assistance of Midge Decter, a board member of both the Heritage Foundation and Institute for Educational Affairs. CFD was chaired by Herbert London, who is closely associated with two organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and its president was Stephen Balch, a City University of New York professor. In 1987, CFD evolved into the National Association of Scholars, chaired by London and with Balch as president. Its board of advisors include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and former UT Arts and Sciences Dean and Boston University President John Silber. London has written for The World and I, a large glossy monthly published by Moon. London is a member, along with former CIA official Ray Clime, of its editorial board. He has also written for the now defunct Moon-owned New York City Tribune and currently edits NAS'
journal Academic Questions. Decter, who directs the Committee for the Free World and is married to Norman Podhoretz, also publishes Commentary which featured an article by Balch and London in October 1986 that fretted about a "Marxist" take over of the universities.[75] In this article they break with the tactics of Accuracy in Academia, which has similar concerns as NAS about the internal transformation of the universities.
NAS works closely with the Madison Center for Educational Affairs which was formed in 1990. The Madison Center was the product of a merger between the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), formed in 1978 by former Nixon Treasury Secretary William E. Simon who was then head of the John N. Olin Foundation, and writer Irving Kristol, and the Madison Center, founded in 1988 by writer Alan Bloom and former Reagan education secretary and drug czar William Bennett. IEA began a program to fund and provide logistical support to right wing student newspapers such as the infamous Dartmouth Review. At the time, the Review's staff, which included then editor Dinesh D'Souza, hung a Black effigy by a tree and quoted Hitler on its front page in an issue that appeared during Yom Kippur in 1990.
The program, called the Collegiate Network, began in 1980 with five papers increasing to 61 by 1991 at a cost of $330,617. IEA was spending a total of $1 million on all its projects in 1990.[76] The Collegiate Network not only provides hands on assistance, but a toll free hotline, semesterly grants, and an advertising consortium that sells ads to businesses and requests that the papers run them for a share of the money. Some students have even been placed in internships with prestigious publications or politicians. Madison internships in 1990 "included full-year positions for MCEA editors at The New Republic and Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. MCEA editors also interned at the Office of the Vice President of the George Bush administration, The Bradley Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, NBC News, and Policy Review, the theoretical organ of the Heritage Foundation."[77] Some papers have gotten even more funding from other organizations - some of which also back the Madison Center and NAS. The Dartmouth Review alone received about $800,000 alone in support between 1987 and 1990 from William Buckley Jr., $150,000 of it from the Olin Foundation in 1989.[78]
Madison is involved in various projects including a reference guide of US universities for parents and students. Madison spent $120,930 to prepare the guide which is based on a 36 page questionnaire sent to NAS members in 1990. Prepared by a group of outspoken opponents to multicultural reforms including Chester Finn, former Reagan appointee to the Department of Education, Leslie Lenkowsky, Stephen Balch, and David Bernstein, editor of Diversity, the survey asks if there "are any groups on campus critical of the core curriculum? If so, which groups and why?" "Do homosexuals comprise a vocal, active interest group on campus? ... What are their objectives?" "Are there minority and/or Women's Studies centers on campus? If so, what is their role?" "Are many courses used for indoctrination?" Cast in apparent innocuous language about "partying," tuition costs, "undergraduate education," housing, and entertainment, the guide consistently steers back to coverage of the status of radical professors and students and multicultural programs, concluding with a recommendation of attendance based on whether the campus is wracked with conflicts. Although the information is being gathered as intelligence for use in battling the multiculturalism movement, it is not well researched and provides few concrete details to be of much use for any purpose than to scare away parents worried about "PC" from allowing their children to attend certain campuses, a veiled threat of disinvestment.[79]
Besides the member papers of the Collegiate Network, another group is also using this information to their advantage. Sponsored by the Madison Center, the Student Forum is organizing Black and "Hispanic" students to oppose multicultural reforms on their campuses. The Forum can be traced back to a group of Black students brought together by the Republican National Committee who wanted to form a student organization for Black republicans. This evolved into its present "multi-ethnic" composition of minority students who, according to its coordinator, would prefer to be treated as "individuals" and "americans" rather than Black or "Hispanic." In conjunction with the Student Forum, Madison has begun publishing Diversity, a magazine devoted to issues of race.[80] The strategy behind this effort mirrors that of the counter-movement as a whole; they deny race is the issue with one hand while waving it around for legitimacy with the other.
Madison is continuing IEA's support of in-depth research as well by adding a $50,000 grant to IEA's $150,000 for D'Souza to write Illiberal Education. Early on, Kristol suggested that IEA publish "outstanding work by recent Ph.D.'s in order to give their work impact and promote their careers." In 1980, IEA bankrolled a large study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) of the role of church groups in the boycott of Nestle's promotion of its infant formula to Third World families. EPPC was formed in 1976 as a think tank that would help respond to growing criticism of corporations. Ernest Lefever laid out its purpose in a 1978 memorandum that noted "US domestic and multinational firms find themselves increasingly under siege at home and abroad...They're accused of producing shoddy and unsafe products, fouling the environment, robbing future generations, wielding inordinate power, repressing peoples in the Third World, and generally of being insensitive to human needs." Lefever suggested that the role of organizations like EPPC would be to provide "meticulous research and assessment [on] the attack on the multinational firms by university groups and so-called public interest lobbies."[81]
Madison's budget overwhelmingly favors the Collegiate Network. According to its 1990 annual report, its total budget was $1,035,457, of which it spent 32 percent on the student newspapers, 12 percent for the college guide, 7 percent to editorial internships, and 23 percent for its grants to scholars program. It carried over unspent $565,000 into 1991.
These projects would be impossible without large scale financial aid from many foundations and multinational corporations. IEA began with start-up grants of $100,000 from the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family Trusts, the J.M. Foundation, and the Smith-Richardson Foundation. They also established a list of primary donors that included Bechtel, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, K-Mart, Mobil and Nestle.[82] Madison received funding from 54 donors in 1990, including the Committee for the Free World, Adolph Coors Foundation, Dow (whose board chair is board chair of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)), Lilly Endowment Inc. (the Eli Lilly & Co. chair is also on the AEI Board), Milliken Foundation, John Olin Foundation, Olin Corporation Charitable Trust, Pfizer, Inc. (whose employee Edmund Pratt has been on the AEI board), Sarah Scaife, Smith Richardson Foundation, and Warner-Lambert Company.[83] Some of these same donors also funded the NAS, including the Olin Foundation which gave it $85,000 in 1988 and $125,000 in both 1989 and 1990. Olin also gave IEA $89,782 in 1989 for its campus journalism program and $153,000 to Madison in 1990. Many of these foundations are motivated by similar political intentions. According to Sara Diamond,
In 1989, the Olin Foundation alone dispersed nearly $15 million to about 200 different institutions, including both public and private universities and several dozen 'independent' think tanks. A similar array, but smaller number of organizations received a total of $4.8 million from the Smith-Richardson Foundation's Public Policy Program in 1989. The Scaife Foundation spends about $8 million annually, mostly on private right-wing think tanks, the largest recipient being the Heritage Foundation. The Earhart Foundation disperses about $2 million per year, and makes relatively small ($10,000) donations to scores of individual professors, mostly in departments of economics, philosophy and political science. These are only some of the best known right-wing foundations. Others include Coors, J.M., Bradley, Gates, Kirby, the Lilly Endowment...[84]
Smith-Richardson has been with the NAS since at least 1984 when it was CFD. A confidential memo written by Roderic Richardson in late 1984 would establish a new tactic that would latter become fundamental to the PC counterattack. In it, he distinguishes between "deterrence activism" and "high ground articulation" in fighting the campus left. Deterrence activism, he explained, is at most an uninteresting reaction to the left, "at best it is a form of cheerleading that can focus some attention on stirring media events." "High ground activism," on the other hand, is "the attempt to steal one or another high ground away from the left, by...doing things like insisting on rigorous discussions and debates, setting up political unions, battling divestiture and other causes, not by calling their goals wrong...but by proposing better ways of solving the problem. Student journalism is a high ground approach. It is...an approach geared to long run success."[85] Such as strategy can be seen in the shift of groups at UT who have attempted to turn the issue toward positive suggestions (e.g. SAVE suggested expanding the multiculturalism requirement to "Western" cultures) and alternative solutions instead of only criticizing. Although this has not always been the case, it has become noticeable.
Many individuals serve with more than one of these organizations. Some are even affiliated with the National Endowment of the Humanities such as NEH chair Lynne Cheney who writes for Newslink, the Collegiate Network's newsletter. NEH board members Hillel Fradkin is vice-president of the Bradley Foundation, Edwin Dellatre is on the NAS Board of Advisors, Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield is on the Madison Center board and Carol Iannone, who was rejected by the Senate for the NEH board, was the NAS vice-president.[86] The connections between these corporations and foundations with Madison, IEA and the NAS extend beyond their role in attempting to block the multicultural transformation of the universities.
Smith-Richardson "has had a history of sponsoring CIA-linked media projects and leadership training programs for CIA and DOD personnel. It was also privy to some of the covert operations conducted on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras," says Diamond.[87] Smith Richardson's president Leslie Lenkowsky left the foundation in 1983 to take an interim appointment as deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency which is well known for working with the CIA. Lenkowsky was denied a permanent appointment by the U.S. Senate which charged him with blacklisting liberal speakers at USIA.[88] Ideally, Lenkowsky took over IEA in 1985 and one year later expanded its support of the student newspapers with "editorial and management advice", including the toll free hotline, clippings, story ideas, tips on selling ads and writing stories as well as holding training conferences and renamed it the Collegiate Network. He is now president of the Hudson Institute.
The Bradley Foundation was formed in 1985 following Rockwell International's, a multinational weapons builder, buyout of the Allen-Bradley Company which works on "fuzzy logic" (another name for computer programs based on case based "human reasoning") among other high tech projects. The foundation provided $500,000 in seed money in 1989 to establish the Madison Center and another $93,000 in 1990. In 1989-90 IEA also received $255,000 and NAS $177,178.[89]
The Sarah Scaife Foundation's president, Richard Mellon Scaife, provided seed money along with Joseph Coors in 1974 for the Heritage Foundation. William Bennett "joined the Scaife board this summer, just before the foundation funded his new position as 'culture czar' at Heritage." Scaife worked with Joseph Coors to help found the Heritage Foundation and is still a primary backer giving it $800,000 in 1990. From 1973 to 1984, Scaife gave more than $37 million to conservative causes and institutions.[90]
Richard Mellon Scaife also ran Forum World Features in London, one of his many news services, from the late 1960s to mid 1970s. However, "Scaife shut down Forum in 1975 shortly before Time Out, a British weekly, published a purported [sic] 1968 CIA memorandum, addressed to then director Richard Helms, which described Forum as a CIA-sponsored operation providing 'a significant means to counter Communist propaganda.' The Forum-CIA tie, which lasted into the seventies, has been confirmed by various British and American publications." Scaife also funds Accuracy in the Media, Freedom House, and the Committee on the Present Danger and gave NAS $50,000 in 1988 and $300,000 in 1989.[91]
Some of these associations also bear out ties to Moon and death squads in Central America. Although they differ in tactics, Accuracy in Academia (AIA), a spin-off from Reed Irvine's Accuracy in the Media (AIM), formed in the mid 1980s to compile information of professors they called "left-wing propagandists."[92] According to Diamond,
AIA's president John LeBoutillier...was then [1985] a leader of the World Anti- Communist League (WACL), as were three other members of AIA's initial advisory board. Irvine had at one time been prominent within WACL and served on its "Psychological Warfare Committee." At the time of AIA's founding in 1985, WACL was one of the most important coordinating bodies for death squad activities in Central America and elsewhere. While AIA was busy collecting field data on campus "subversives," the group's Latin American counterparts were among those blowing up schools in Nicaragua and systematically assassinating progressive students and professors in El Salvador and Guatemala.[93]
NAS and AIA cross paths through the activities of Herb London, co-founder and the first chair of both CFD and NAS, and D'Souza, who spoke on "race, gender, and class issues on campus," at AIA's July 6-7 1991 conference.[94] Both London and AIA have documented working relationships with various organizations established by Rev. Moon. According to Daniel Junas, who is writing a book about the Unification Church, "WACL grew out of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, which had been founded by Taiwan and South Korea in 1954. Two key behind-the-scenes players in WACL were Moon's patron [Ryoichi] Sasakawa, and Ray Cline, who was CIA chief of station in Taiwan from 1958 to 1962 when plans were laid for WACL." Moon first met Sasakawa during his first missionary trip to Japan in 1958. Sasakawa, who is known as the "godfather" of the Japanese right, had been imprisoned by the US occupation force after WWII for his explicitly fascist organizing as a suspected Class A war criminal. Sasakawa, along with another suspected war criminal whom he befriended while in prison, assisted Moon in forming the Japanese chapter of WACL, the Internal Federation for Victory Over Communism, in 1967.[95] In 1991, Sasakawa gave the UT Business School $1 million. He has also given money to a few other universities, including the University of Houston which named a space research center after him. His offer to Columbia was rejected after mass protests by students however. He plans to create $1 million endowments at 50 universities worldwide by 1996.[96]
Another of Moon's organization, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP) which was formed in 1962, was soon expanded to the U.S. in 1973 to counterattack the student left in the U.S. as it did in Japan. "In the early 1980s, CARP conducted a smear campaign against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, accusing it of 'Marxist ties.' More importantly, CARP aided the FBI's illegal investigation of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) by spying on the solidarity organization and providing information on CISPES' campus activities to the Bureau. CARP is certainly not alone in its role in counterinsurgency on our campuses. Young Americans for Freedom, which was founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1962, disrupted anti-war protests in the 1960s, released a pamphlet titled "List of Un-American Organizations on Our College Campuses," in 1989 and supplied the FBI with information on CISPES. The YCTs at UT-Austin have also spied on and kept records of student activists, including academic transcripts, photos and clippings which they have provided to various state and local agencies.[97]
Olin, a huge chemical and conventional weapons builder for DOD, and partner in the Yale Research Park, has also been a primary backer of these three organizations providing an estimated $600,000 between 1988-90 alone. However, Olin has not only relied on them alone for only indirect influence over the organization of higher education, but has also intervened directly in an attempt to guide various academic programs as well as even establish the Yale Park. The foundation gave $55 million in 1988 alone to university programs, "to strengthen the economy, political and cultural institutions upon which...private enterprise is based." Olin Foundation's president is William Simon, a co-founder of IEA.
Many university law and economic departments get big Olin grants. Last year, the law schools at the University of Chicago, Stanford University and Harvard University each got close to $1 million and the University of Virginia, Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT receive about a half a million dollars each for their Olin "Law and Economics" programs. These programs provide rationales for right-wing policies, and promote government laissez-faire in the business realm. Most of the Foundation's $55 million in grants, according to its 1988 report, is "intended to strengthen the economic, political, and cultural institutions upon which...private enterprise is based." In 1985, after trying out the Olin Program in Law and Economics for one year, UCLA rejected the program because according to the law school's curriculum committee, Olin was "taking advantage of students' financial need to indoctrinate them with a particular ideology" according to the law school's curriculum committee. Students recipients of the fellowships were required to attend lectures by Olin funded faculty. They were also required to attend talks by such notables as Robert Bork, who was rejected by the Senate for the Supreme Court, and current justice Antonin Scalia. However, two other professors in economics and management have accepted $1 million to establish the Olin Center for Policy at UCLA's Graduate School of Management. Yale Law School's George Priest takes in about $1.5 million for fellowships, lectureships, journals and other programs he administers including $464,000 for himself.[98]
The Foundation is also backing other big name conservative academics such as Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, who is getting $3.6 million to run the University of Chicago's John M. Olin Center for the Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy. Samuel Huntington is receiving $1.4 million to establish the Olin Institute of Strategic Studies at Harvard, and $618,000 for the Olin Program in National Security Affairs and another $100,000 for his own Olin Research Fellowship for a total of $2.1 million.[99] Peter Collier and David Horowitz, two sixties radicals turned right-wing, have received $200,000, and conservative Catholic theorist Michael Novak received $163,000. It gave a $75,000 fellowship to Robert Leiken to do research on the "media treatment of the conflict in Central America" at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. And Irving Kristol, and AEI board member, received $376,000 as the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor at the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration. The National Interest, edited by Kristol, also grabbed another $1 million from Olin.
Olin has been a primary financial backer of Dinesh D'Souza, giving $150,000 to the Dartmouth Review, provided D'Souza $30,000 in 1988 through a grant to IEA, and increased its support of the American Enterprise Institute in 1989 when D'Souza joined the staff.[100]
Multiculturalism: Against Entrepreneurialization and for Our Needs
While Sara Diamond has stressed the material connections between the "PC" counterattack and the war in Central America for example, she and others have neglected to explicitly demonstrate how students can capitalize on these relationships in order to circulate the struggle for multiculturalism to other movements. Much great work has been done to uncover the workings of this counterattack, but little has been done to trace out its cause and how it can be fought. Contrary to the information overload about the size and wealth of NAS, IEA and Madison's backers, little has been said about the potential power of the multiculturalism movement and how the counterattack stems from the threat to entrepreneurialism that it poses. Charges of "PC" appear to be yet another in a long line of tactics to reimpose control over the universities in order to demonstrate a stable arena of investment.
That "PC" is a reaction to the threat the multiculturalism movement offers to entrepreneurialization is no more evident than in the words of its organizers. In his 1978 best selling book, A Time for Truth, William Simon lays out his concern for the crisis state of the universities: "Business must cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economics, government, politics and history are hostile to capitalism and whose faculties will not hire scholars whose views are otherwise." His greatest fear is that "in the universities of which I speak, capitalism is no longer the dominant orthodoxy" in the universities which instead are "churning out young collectivists by the legions."[101] Simon's declaration, hardly the rash polemic of a political outsider, appeared nearly concurrently with the first stirrings of federal policies promoting entrepreneurialization. Since its publication, Simon has headed or helped organize IEA, Olin Foundation, and Madison Center - the three central organizations behind the "PC" counterattack against the multiculturalism movement.
Frustrated that capitalism is helping to create those very forces that will destroy it: "it is through the very generosity and tolerance of capitalism that the enemies of capitalism have come to dominate our campuses today," Simon suggested initiating a counterattack that today composes the two fundamental components of entrepreneurialization: austerity and further subservience to the market. "Now that they [the enemies of capitalism] have achieved dominance," Simon generalizes "there is no longer any reason for capitalism to support them, and it is ridiculous for them to claim (as they loudly do) some sort of 'entitlement' to support from a system which they openly despise and lose no opportunity to disparage." "Business money must flow generously to those colleges and universities which do offer their students an opportunity to become well-educated not only in collectivist theory but in conservative and Libertarian principles as well."[102]
Roger Kimball would make similar sweeping charges about the threat to knowledge and university curriculum by a ragged bunch of Marxists, feminists, and assorted deconstructionists in his recently widely received Tenured Radicals - which he dedicated to no less than the Olin Foundation and IEA.[103] Kimball, like Simon, accurately recognizes the multitude of free spaces carved out in the universities by the student radicals of the 1960s even if he does overstate their success. Now professors and sparsely distributed administrators, these former student radicals are taking aim at fundamentally transforming the university from within:
The truth is that when the children of the sixties received their professorships and deanships they did not abandon the dream of radical cultural transformation; they set out to implement it. Now, instead of disrupting classes, they are teaching them; instead of attempting to destroy our educational institutions physically, they are subverting them from within. Thus it is what were once the political and educational ambitions of academic renegades appear as ideals on the agenda of the powers that be. Efforts to dismantle the traditional curriculum and institutionalize radical feminism, to ban politically unacceptable speech and propagate the tenents of deconstruction and similar exercises in cynical obscurantism: Directives encouraging these and other radical developments now typically issue from the dean's office or the Faculty Senate, not from students marching in the streets. (p. 166-67)
Although he obscures the role of student movements as a power base for faculty advocates of multicultural reforms, Kimball attempts to draw attention to the subtle challenges to the corporate university. "The radical ethos of the sixties has been all too successful, achieving indirectly in the classroom, faculty meeting, and by administrative decree what it was unable to accomplish on the barricades." (p. xv) The terrain of struggle for Kimball remains ideological and confined to the existing academic disciplines. Kimball's emphasis on the challenge to and displacement of the literary and theoretical canons, which is resulting in the "crisis" of thought itself - now that infinite interpretations are possible so are infinite realities beyond capitalism - must be placed in context. The delegitimization of the canon (e.g. capitalist ideology), which is presumably responsible for the undocumented rise in student militancy, is taking place currently with the further entrenchment of the university onto the business track.
At this junction, the clash of entrepreneurialization and multiculturalism is the very source of the continuing crisis of higher education. This is where I part company with the right. If this is one of the sources of the continuing conflict, it needs to be made explicit among radical students and faculty and used to our advantage in order to accomplish the fundamental transformation of the universities we advocate. Unfortunately, this is not presently the case. For example, in Debating P.C., a volume of writings from the left and the right concerning multiculturalism and "PC" not one contribution is from a student.[104] Moreover, not one article discusses the participation of students let alone the fact that the multiculturalism movement sprang from student mobilization.
No doubt, the relationship between the growth of Gay and Lesbian, Black, women, and other forms of multicultural student activism has been the motivating factor behind Madison's survey and student guide and Student Forum which is attempting to use the right skin color to legitimize it politics. The rhetoric of a rising left control over the universities is a reaction to the growing power of students and faculty with diverse interests and desires who are further deepening of the crisis by carving out spaces on the campuses in order to concentrate on them.
The real fear shrouded behind rhetoric of a "New McCarthyism" is no more than a fear of a university being rapidly transformed by students to serve the desires of students. John Taylor's "Are You Politically Correct," in New York magazine demonstrates the fundamental transformation of the universities taking place.
There is an experiment of sorts taking place in American colleges: directed at changing the consciousness of this entire generation of university students. The goal is to eliminate prejudice, not just the petty sort that shows up on sophomore dorm walls, but the grand prejudice that has ruled American universities since their founding: that the intellectual tradition of Western Europe occupies the central place in the history of civilization. In this context it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she would be expected to 'affirm' their presence on campus and to study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke. This agenda is broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists and Gays. It is also the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up in the '60s and are now achieving positions of academic influence.[105]
While Taylor is resorting to some hyperbole (not everyone would require that these literatures and cultures be studied but to at least recognize their place and contributions in the U.S. and the world and allow those who wish the freedom to do so without repression) the thrust of his argument is clear: it is students, followed by radical professors, who are changing the universities as we know them. However this was not clear enough for Michael Berube who sought to deny students any role in the struggle and crisis of the universities by suggesting that Taylor's article "provides us with a rogue's gallery of intolerant students, muddle-headed administrators, misguided activists, and the occasional 'extremist' (i.e. 'Afrocentrist'), but it really winds with very little to say about the academic teachers and critics its purports to attack."[106] Berube, like others, dismisses students as the source of tension and conflict that has given rise to the "PC" counterattack and media charges of McCarthyism.
As D'Souza accurately charges in his 1991 Atlantic Monthly article "Illiberal Education" that the debate "has so far been passionately superficial, posing false dichotomies...and missing the underlying principles that are shaping the dramatic changes in universities."[107] While D'Souza is far from innocent of his own charges, he has identified a fundamental pattern among the whole debate: while the right mystifies a threat to the universities as we know them as "a revolution from the top down,"[108] the left has persisted with its own mystification denying any threat exists whatsoever.
Like William Simon, D'Souza not only recognizes the threat he is quite explicit about what capital should do about it. "An academic and cultural revolution has overtaken most of our 3,535 colleges and universities. It's a revolution to which most Americans have paid little attention...It amounts, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala, to 'a basic transformation of American higher education in the name of multiculturalism and diversity," he writes. D'Souza attributes this "academic and cultural revolution" in the university to both students and faculty. "It should come as no surprise that many sensitive young Americans reject the system that has nurtured them," he says almost mimicking Simon. Universities in the US are no less than "the birthplace and testing ground for the enterprise of social transformation."[109]
These students who are demanding and winning "redoubled preferential recruitment of minority students and faculty, funding for a new Third World or Afro-American center, mandatory sensitivity education for whites, and so on," are doing so in their own autonomously organized groups and "theme houses," as D'Souza writes, from which they launch their attack. D'Souza's fear of this autonomous base of organizing scares him so he attributes it to the creation of "a kind of academic apartheid" while ignoring that which already exists.
However, what makes these students even more powerful is for the first time, they have a large number, rather than a scattered few, of faculty behind them, faculty who having fought in the 1960s with few faculty on their side, know the strategic importance of their alliances with students - the same students who fought to get and keep them there. D'Souza clearly recognizes and fears this strategic alliance. He cites an English professor who explains that "After the Vietnam War, a lot of us [students] didn't just crawl back into our library cubicles. We stepped into academic positions...Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the university has begun in earnest."[110]
This alliance also provides historical continuity between struggles of the 1960s and today, something students did not have during the 1960s since there were few radical faculty to draw the connections with the 1930s. As Asian- American scholar Shirley Hune points out, "multicultural education has grown from a demand in the late '60s for separate programs to today's emphasis on 'mainstreaming' or 'balancing the curriculum,' with readings and courses on the formerly excluded." (p. 63) This strikes at the very nature of the university since the original demands for a free space - that have frequently been isolated and attacked - have developed into demands for the transformation of all of the university into a free space quite similar to the view of university "autonomy" in Mexico and Argentina now under attack as well.
Much like Simon, D'Souza does not hesitate to demonstrate the threat to capitalism posed by the radical wing of the multiculturalism movement, asking if "the new policies in academia [will] improve, or damage, the prospects for American political and economic competitiveness in the world?" (p. 15) Unlike Simon, Kimball, Bennett and Kristol, D'Souza emphasizes the mutual threat from both radical academics and student activists whose actions have stimulated formal multicultural reform plans some of which were successful in part at more than 27 major public and private research universities. (p. 16-17) Although D'Souza has been one of the primary contributors of outright lies, distorted historical facts, unsubstantiated evidence and vague sources, and mystifications concerning multiculturalism not to mention denials of discrimination in the universities,[111] he has repeatedly emphasized that student radicals (with whom he battled while a student himself at Dartmouth) compose the actual base of power upon which radical academics rely in their attempts to institutionalize multicultural reforms.[112]
The shortcomings of separate "ethnic" programs has been fundamental to PRIDE and ONDA's recommendations which request student and faculty from ethnic studies control over appointments and the functions of the centers. Black students have charged that the ethnic studies centers have strayed from their original goals. Former UT-Austin student activist Toni Luckett explained that "the centers, which came out of student movements in the late '60s and early '70s were to do research like African-American culture. But it was also a center to support students who came here. Those centers have now become dedicated to complete research," making the same simplistic dichotomy between teaching and research. Yet, her point reflects a larger criticism raised by other students that the centers are focused too narrowly on academic issues rather than the struggles that created them. PRIDE proposes student and faculty control over appointments as a way to redirect the center back to the needs of students. "Because the University's Afro-American studies field is not a department, professors who come to the university to teach classes for the center must be hired by another discipline. Furthermore all tenure decisions are made by the department in which the professor is hired."[113] Although PRIDE proposes the creation of a student run cultural center, it would take place in conjunction with the imposition of student control over the centers and the transformation of the core curriculum as a whole. In other words, PRIDE and ONDA, as have other student proposals on other campuses, take advantage of what current space remains from victories of the ethnic studies movement in order to launch a broader foray into the university as a whole.
While multiculturalism grew out of the struggles to create Black and other special departments of study, it goes beyond them. Chicana/o students have critiqued CMAS as a strictly research oriented institute outside of the control of students and cut off from the campus and community struggles. Where some in the movement during the 1960s-70s saw the need for separate departments and research as part of active organized struggle, they were mostly conceived as autonomous free spaces within the university. Those universities that were forced to concede to these demands turned this space against them by forcibly cutting them from the rest of the campus. Recognizing this development, students are demanding faculty and student control over CMAS not as a free space but as a means for transforming the rest of the university and society. "The Center for Mexican American Studies should serve as a focal point for Chicana/o student, staff and faculty activism...[and] should help facilitate the full integration of Chicanos and Chicanas into the university community."[114] ONDA demands that Chicano faculty be placed throughout the university with a role in CMAS and answerable to students. Winning these departments and programs gives the movement the strength to demand a total transformation. Their resulting institutionalization as research centers required that students demand nothing less than the total reorganization of the university.
Demanding the integration of a multiplicity of perspectives into the curriculum can be more than reforming the curriculum, it could mean the reorganization of not only the university but of society as a whole. Hune is very explicit about this:
Asian American studies is part of an effort to change education in all its facets, with an emphasis on making it more equitable, inclusive, and open to alternative perspective...It is transformative in that Asian American studies looks to both a restructuring of education and an expansion of knowledge...their teaching and research will play a role in countering the cultural domination of the existing Euro-American knowledge base taught in American colleges; they hope to produce the kind of scholarship and students capable of resolving injustices and creating a more equitable society.[115]
Hune's strategic connection between the ethnic studies movement and multiculturalism is a source of dispute among radical faculty. Carlos Munoz, a Chicano student activist in the 1960s and now a professor at UC-Berkeley, not only denies the existence of an evolutionary connection but that they are even complementary. "I see it as a continuation of the 1960s, although at that time we didn't call our goal 'cultural diversity.' We demanded Chicano studies, ethnic studies programs, and the admission of students of color not for 'diversity' but for empowerment.... We didn't even talk about 'affirmative action' - we talked about power, taking over things. Now, 20 years later, the struggle for cultural diversity appears to be reformist, at best...." He has "no optimism that the cultures requirement or the diversity movement is going to result in any kind of radical change. If cultural diversity or affirmative action is going to work, there has to be access to the corridors of power where they decide who gets hired and fired," he explains, retaining an orthodox perception of power and change residing in formal existing institutions. Ignoring the radical origins of the movement in the student movement, Munoz sees multiculturalism as a one-sided top down imposed policy: "Berkeley, along with other university centers, has made it clear that 'cultural diversity' shall be a capitalist-approved substitute for dealing with the ugly realities of racism."[116]
Nonetheless, the parallels are stilt significant. Today, as during the 1960- 70s, the multiculturalism movement has the university administrations off balance and on the defensive. Winifred Wandersee, who has documented the rise of Women's Studies during the 1970s, explains that "the demand for reform that characterized the politics of education in the decade after 1965 undermined the authority of schools and universities to control their own affairs. Educational administrators found themselves embroiled in power struggles with students, the courts and civil rights agencies, faculty and teachers' unions, and political action and special interest groups."[117] With the authority of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in hand, these groups forced the federal government into the role of enforcing antidiscrimination laws by threatening to withdraw funding. "Since federal funding for education at all levels expanded rapidly after 1965, the threatened cutoff of these funds was an impressive weapon," Wandersee suggests. Perhaps, it is a fear of a similar process taking place that has stimulated the fierce counterattack against multiculturalism.
Far from aiding the implementation of multicultural reforms, federal intervention has come to the aid of those against such reforms. Hune points out that the resistance to multiculturalism as a means of liberation has come from those, such as the National Association of Scholars and then US Secretary of Education William Bennett, who Hune explains value education as an "instrument of social control to perpetuate the culture and produce the next generation of citizens and workers." (p. 62) Because multiculturalism is an extension of the struggles that launched the crisis of the university in the late 1960s, it too has come under attack.
Recognizing the power of this revolution in the universities, D'Souza makes a valiant stab at attempting to divide and conquer: student against faculty, radicals against concerned but hounded moderates, and liberal arts against science students. For instance, although he clearly attributes the threat to both students and faculty struggles, he uses a rhetorical sleight of hand: "Who is behind this academic revolution, this connived multiculturalism?,"[118] a question he answers with the above quote about radical faculty reshaping the university. This enables him to demonize the faculty, committing his own self-described sin of "false dichotomies" and superficiality.
Likewise, D'Souza posits these multicultural reforms as "imposed upon" students who have mostly liberal views about race. He cleverly tries to turn a real problem that the movement has been unable to admit exists into a solid example of divide and conquer, a strategy that lay behind the entire "PC" hype: "These liberal attitudes are sorely tried by the demands of the new orthodoxy: Many undergraduates are beginning to rebel against what they perceive as a culture of preferential treatment and double standards actively fostered by university policies."
Finally, D'Souza sees to it that the interests of science students are antagonistic to that of liberal arts students - a tactic we saw repeated at UT- Austin:
Yet, a student can still get an excellent education - among the best in the world - in computer technology and the hard sciences at American universities. But liberal arts students, including those attending Ivy League schools, are very likely to be exposed to an attempted brainwashing that deprecates Western learning and exalts a neo-Marxist ideology promoted in the name of multiculturalism. Even students who choose hard sciences must often take required courses in the humanities, where they are almost certain to be inundated with anti-Western, anti-capitalist view of the world. (sic, p. 86)
Certainly, it appears that multiculturalism threatens the one sphere of the university that capital maintains relative control over: the hard sciences. The overwhelming resistance from engineering and the sciences to E306 reforms at UT demonstrates the very threat multiculturalism poses to entrepreneurialization. Multicultural reforms offer to open up the horizons of students otherwise being narrowly tracked into long lives of specialized technical work.
This threat to entrepreneurialization lies at the heart of Simon's, D'Souza's and others counterattack against multiculturalism. Simon and D'Souza concur on both the source of the threat and what should be done to defeat it. D'Souza skips right over trying to rally students or forcing campus administrations to resist the transformation. Apparently recognizing the growing financial dependence of the university upon market activity due to growing government cutbacks and austerity, he suggests continued disinvestment. Calling upon parents, alumni, corporations, foundations, and state legislators to backup the "outgunned campus resistance to the academic revolution" that "sorely needs outside reinforcements," he recommends that "the best way to encourage reform is to communicate in no uncertain terms to university leadership and, if necessary to use financial incentives to assure your voice is heard."
There is little doubt that they [campus administrators] would pay keen attention to the views of donors on whom they depend. By threatening to suspend donations if universities continue harmful policies, friends of liberal learning can do a lot.... The illiberal revolution can be reversed only if the people who foot the bills stop being passive observers. Don't just write a check to your alma matter; that's an abrogation of responsibility. Keep abreast of what is going on and don't be afraid to raise your voice and even to close your wallet in protest. Our Western, free-market culture need not provide the rope to hang itself. (p. 86)
It is no coincidence that many corporations who are entering into entrepreneurial relationships with the universities are also bankrolling resistance to multiculturalism. FMC (Ford Motor Company), Pfizer, Olin, Mobil, Werner-Lambert, Lilly, and other corporations are replaying their moves when their investments are threatened abroad by class warfare: they are bankrolling a counterinsurgency apparatus to fight class struggle inside the universities. Olin is a prime example. Expecting a return on its investment in Yale Research Park and its military contracts, it is in its interest to finance those forces that can defend these investments. The same can be said for Bechtel, whom as we've seen has come under tremendous fire for its many activities and is currently allied with IC2 in the technopolis program that requires the reimposition of control in the universities. D'Souza has been useful to capital because he recognizes the role disinvestment can play in disciplining student struggles which is why he suggests his own benefactors use it to protect themselves.
Robin Templeton of the National Coalition of Universities in the Public Interest (NCUPI) suggests that "we must recognize this attack [on so-called political correctness] for what it is: propaganda for the military/corporate drive for campus control, and a clearly successful attempt to shift the terms of the educational debate away from the central, material question of who controls and benefits from the universities." However, what is being played out with PC is much more concrete than a propaganda ploy to control the debate over education. Rather, it is capital's attempt to save education itself; to maintain its usefulness in disciplining and managing us. A more useful interpretation of what lies beneath the PC counterattack is a battle "for the image of the university as a stable arena for investment," as two writers interpret Alan Gribben's corporate strategy to request outside intervention into the English department so that it can be reorganized to provide a promising return on investment.[119] Such an analogy touches the heart of education as part of the process of capital accumulation and its pending destruction in the face of class struggle.
D'Souza's analysis should suggest to us that the movement is yet another chapter in more than two decades of struggles that have thrown the universities into a crisis that capital has failed to bring under control even through austerity and entrepreneurialization. The strength of multiculturalism then is integrally tied up with each of the other struggles taking place inside the universities that also seek to transform it by subordinating it to the wide-ranging needs of those who use them. What it requires then is intensified efforts to understand how each of our struggles can complement each other while respecting our own distinct needs for autonomy and to circulate these struggles. The multifaceted connections of those opposing multiculturalism to entrepreneurialization, racism, sexism, toxic pollution, the war in Central America, the CIA and a host of other struggles offers a tremendous opportunity to make these connections and strengthen our ability to transcend not only the present university but the way in which we live as well.
These connections can help block the goal of the counterattack to preserve the university - and its commercial activities, military production, intelligence, biotech, high tech research, and environmental destruction - against articulate demands of students that it be subordinate to their many diverse projects and desires.
Two questions arise regarding the so-called "PC" counterattack. First, do the charges of "PC" have any existence in reality? And second, how can the movement respond in a manner that would not only defend its ground but also allow it to expand its space by circulating the struggle to other areas of the university and society?
There have been three types of denials in responses to charges of "PC". As I've already briefly noted, some responses have been restricted to analyzing the academic activity of the faculty while ignoring, and thus disempowering, the role of students. By omission, many intellectuals and academics deny students are even involved. Second, many responses deny that any radical change is even occurring inside the universities. Although this is frequently used as an answer to hysterical charges of a "leftist takeover" of the universities, at the heart of the response is a denial any change whatsoever is even occurring. Lastly, an equally self-destructive response has been to outwardly deny the existence of what is commonly referred to as "PC" activity.
The second denial, that any struggles are taking place in the universities, ignores the wide range of movements - environmentalism, graduate student unionization and anti-austerity - that currently exist in the universities. While such a claim may be a purposeful exaggeration in order to refute charges of a leftist takeover, it too has the effect of disempowering those who have been fighting to transform the university and subverts efforts to circulate the struggle to others. Only one of many examples is a piece written by UT English professor Evan Carton in mid 1991. Carton makes a fascinating analogy between the Gulf War and the PC War: "While they obviously differ in innumerable respects," writes Carton, "Operation Desert Storm and, if you will, Operation Campus Storm both respond to internal challenges to the traditional character of the American union and the ostensible unity of the American self in the 1990s."[120] Yet, Carton who was a fundamental member of the E306 battle denies that the struggle has accomplished anything at all: "Operation Campus Storm pillories a veritable juggernaut, a takeover of the academy by minorities, leftist professors, and PC courses. The truth, though, is that universities have undergone no radical change, and that administrative power still resides elsewhere." Thus, we are hit with a triple whammy by those who are a part of the movement: students play only a minor role, nothing has changed, and control over the university is external. With an attitude like this who would want to participate? Presumably the strategy appears to be to deny much struggle exists and that little has been accomplished in order to answer undocumented and hysterical charges that a McCarthyite takeover is occurring. In the process, Carton and other likeminded "defenders" overlook the point that the interests of the power elite are being protected because they are under attack.
This strategy, applied to charges of threats to free speech, has also been self-destructive. What is clear from the rhetoric surrounding the PC counterattack is an attempt to use occasional examples of authoritarian activity on the part of the student and faculty left so as to taint and delegitimize all the activity of the student and faculty movements.[121] Yet, denying that any of this activity exists only feeds their charges since many people who has participated in student movement activities have experienced one form or another of authoritarian relationships.[122]
There are innumerable cases of one group of students attempting to impose their interests over another group of students. It may be that so-called "white" students attempt to speak for everyone on campus (which many did during the anti-apartheid and anti-CIA movement) or even Black and female students fighting a similar related battle. Since the 1960s, this attempt to subordinate the interests of others to one's own has been fought by autonomous organizing by Black, ethnic, female, graduate and all types of students. The success of a movement has often depended on figuring out ways for many of these groups to work in ways that both complements and retains their own autonomy. At UT-Austin, this took place with the election of Toni Luckett to the symbolic position of Students' Association president in 1990 by a wide range of student groups. Although nothing came out of her presidency (and nothing should have been expected to since it would only subordinate a multiplicity of interests through one hierarchic organization and one person) it established a means for these groups to continue working together for another six months on a few other issues.
However, far too often attempts by a group or groups to "lead" or represent many other diverse people still occurs. This has been true of many diverse types of student movements but it has become an especially troubling problem over the last five years. For example, many students who worked to elect Luckett believed that as a "Black Lesbian," she is somehow more legitimately radical and should lead all students who wanted change.[123] Such hierarchicalization of exploited groups is common among the U.S. left, as we'll see in chapter 5. When this did not materialize, those like Henson and Philpott, co-editors of The Polemicist, who were part of the initial small group who put her up to running (Henson had run the previous year), later remorsed that it was her fault but not a result of the refusal of students to be spoken for by one student. Many times, "white" students attribute a special character to minority or female students and abdicate control to them whether they want it or not.
Ami Chen Mills, an anti-CIA organizer in the Progressive Student Network, summarized the ideas of much of the "white" student activists in the US: "Oppressed groups often resist working with male, white and/or more privileged activists because they don't see these activists confronting oppression at home, nor do they see a willingness on the part of white activists to give up leadership or establish a multicultural or tolerant atmosphere within their organizations."[124] In other words, while she has a legitimate concern for whether groups make the connection to home about their own or others racism, she generalizes all "white" students as presumably privileged, ignoring entirely the role of the university in capitalism, and abdicates her own autonomy to another who she perceives as more oppressed and/or less privileged and thus more capable of speaking for her.
Sometimes, minority students welcome the authority and power granted by white activists. Trayce Matthews, an anti-racism activist at Michigan State who works with the Ella Baker-Nelson Mandela Center for Anti-Racist Education, suggests that "whites have to be willing to accept leadership from people of color..."[125] While she is correct to demand that they work with people of color from the beginning rather than as an afterthought, she still assumes a priority for groups of what she refers to as predominantly "whites" to subordinate their needs to the issue of racism. Barbara Ransby, an organizer at the University of Michigan, explains that "the second major obstacle to forming lasting multiracial coalitions is the refusal of many whites, especially men, to accept leadership from Blacks and other people of color," an apparent contradiction since it would hardly be a multiracial coalition if certain groups - white or Black - are running it. However, Ransby's point is succinct and often ignored: rather than "white" activists taking over a movement of students of color and imposing their priorities, they need to understand "how racism relates to 'their' concerns" and use it as a basis for circulating the struggle to autonomous movements already being organized by students of color.[126]
For some reason, a glaring double standard persists within the student movements: after decades of struggles the autonomy of people of color, women and Gay/Lesbians are now accepted as valid demands but the autonomy of everyone else is denied. For example, at the second Students Against War (SAW) meeting shortly before the bombing of Iraq began, a small group of activists wrote an agenda in private that began with a mandatory self-criticism section on racism and sexism in the movement - an antiwar movement that did not yet even exist. In another instance, Luckett and three other women - all but one of whom had never even been to a meeting - showed up an hour into a SAW meeting late in the spring and interrupted the meeting to chastise the group for being almost all "white" and the male members for talking too much and talking over the women. After the chastisement, they immediately walked out without allowing any discussion about their criticisms and only one returned a few minutes later. Although their criticisms were legitimate, the manner in which they presented them violated SAW's own autonomy. Certainly, three men or "whites" could not walk into a Black Student Alliance meeting and chastise them for something without it being immediately obvious that they had been authoritarian and insulting. In the same way, Luckett's entourage, three of whom had never participated or even discussed these matters with those in the room prior to that meeting, was illegitimate in its action. Did they assume that they were the authorities on racism and sexism? Where they there to give orders or to discuss and work out the relationship between the anti-war and anti-racism and anti- sexism movements? In addition, they insulted the desire of those people of color who may have chosen to work against the war in their own organizations, as had Todos Unidos, a Chicano student organization. Even some women members reported feeling insulted that the entourage had failed to note the women's own responsibility for speaking up for themselves and instead disempowered them by blaming it all on the men.[127]
In other words, actions like these suggest that some "white" and minority activists believe there is one way to organize and one set of issues and needs. While demanding their own autonomy, that of others who may be working on different but related issues are denied. Rather than struggling to find ways to relate to each other and discover the ways in which many diverse struggles may complement each other while maintaining each's autonomy, sometimes activists attempt to impose a totalization of struggle that subsumes the needs and desires of many to that of a few - whether "white" or otherwise.
This is hardly standard operating procedure among student radicals. In fact, as D'Souza keenly observes in an attempt to pit students against each other, many students will not put up with this kind of muscling for long and drop out of the movements; one of the sources of what is often blamed for the high "turnover" of student activism.[128] Paradoxically, this is exactly what the "PC" counterattack assumes: students whose needs have been run over by authoritarianism on the left will either drop out or turn against them. While there are no documented cases of students coming out on the right after being involved in student activism, no doubt many become disgusted by the authoritarianism and lose interest. A Jumpcut editorial recognizes this as well: "It's not surprising then that many students today are profoundly skeptical of and sometimes hostile to the rhetoric of progressive movements from the past. Though our causes are still just and our grievances still active, we have lost much mass support."[129] However, without admitting that this problem even exists - which the editorial fails to do - we can only fail to grasp the root of the problem, leaving us open to ingenious ploys by those like D'Souza who attempts to not only divide and conquer but block any possibility of circulating the struggle.
The "PC" hype has been a well planned and well financed attempt to capitalize upon a sense of frustration and disillusionment by student and faculty with leftist forms of organizing and struggle. Charges of PC is a twisting of student alienation from movements that have far too often subverted their own autonomous multiplicity of desires and needs in favor of the desires of those presumed to be more "exploited" or "less privileged." In many cases, autonomy is subverted by essentializing people as "white", "Gay" etc. while ignoring their own diverse needs and identities. The essentializing of Blacks or Gays, for example, as "the most oppressed," which presumably qualifies them to lead everyone else, in effect also denies these Black and Gays students their own autonomous diverse identities. "'Radicals' seem to think that all homos experience oppression in the same way," writes Derek Robert a UT student who participated in ACT-UP. "Refusing to associate homos with anything bad, 'radical' homos privilege all homo men and women as being above greed, racism, sexism and homophobia; after all, straight people are responsible for everything bad. 'Radical' homos seem unwilling to fight homophobia or other forms of oppression without essentialist notions of 'what it means to be Black, Woman, or Gay/Lesbian.' Instead of starting with a desire for a movement against racism, sexism, homophobia and class exploitation, they insist that identity comes first."[130]
Thus what we have not outwardly recognized is that "PC" capitalizes on the existence of a very real debilitating problem among the student movements and exaggerates it geometrically in a way as to delegitimize every struggle. It is up to those involved in these struggles to face up to the existence of these forms of authoritarianism that undermine the very foundation of multiculturalism: a recognition of the autonomous existence and innumerable experiences of every person and social group.
This requires that we not only recognize the multiplicity of non-western and non-"white" peoples but that we also acknowledge the multiplicity of what is too often dismissed as simply "white" or "Eurocentric".[131] As Christine Stansell fascinatingly points out,
To use "Eurocentric" as a term of derision, as earnestly rightminded students too often do, cedes much of the territory radical scholars have worked hard to claim in the last twenty years. The Europe that radical scholarship has revealed is one of Jews as well as Christians, peasants as well as lords, laundresses as well as ladies, the slave trade and imperial conquest along with constitutionalism and popular sovereignty. "Eurocentrism" as slogan seals off "Europe" in its own category and plays into the conservatives' ideologically driven, untruthful depiction of Western civilization as a tidy island of Christian prosperity, cantatas, and cathedral building, interrupted only periodically by acts of God and national conflicts orchestrated from above.[132]
If multiculturalism is to mean recognition of diversity it must apply that same standards to all social groups in a search of histories, desires, and identities that have been mystified, smothered, repressed, distorted and exploited no matter what its origin. By looking at even Europe as a terrain of conflict and diversity as Stansell suggests, we can strive to uncover a different Europe and thus dismiss a misrepresentation that has harmed peoples of Europe as much as peoples of Africa. Two members of the UT department of Germanic languages demonstrate this in the case of Franz Kafka, who while writing in Germany originally came from Prague and had a strong interest in the Yiddish language and its theater.[133]
Their article can be seen as much a demystification of the goals of multiculturalism as a retort to those who have their own class or other interests placed above another's. Sometimes the dominance of a perceived monocultural west is swapped for its African twin. They continue: "The use of Eurocentrism has also bred a troubling version of what a non-Eurocentric curriculum might look like: 'Afro-centrism,' for example, with a celebratory emphasis on the dynasties of Africa, especially the male dynasties, as if the triumphs of African monarchs rather than the heroic struggles of common people - African peasants and Afro-American farmers and laborers - provided the most salient history for young Black people."
Rather than pitting "privileged" against "oppressed" and "western" against "non-western" we need to slice through the mystifications of the multiplicity of existence and experience and forms of oppression that characterize each of them in different, yet inherently related ways. Instead of accepting the distinctions given to us we need to try to establish relationships between us that cross and conflict with these racial and cultural distinctions while acknowledging the autonomy of those covered by them. For students, that means not dismissing students or "whites" as "privileged", but struggling to understand that they too have needs and desires to eliminate the exploitation they suffer and create new ways of living as do others. It is this dire need to trace the relationships of the struggles of "people of color" and "whites" and students and non-students that has motivated my research. We have come over the last two decades to acknowledge this for people of color, women, Gays and Lesbians and others but this accomplishment is hollow without recognizing this for all.
Multiculturalism has the potential for circulating the struggle to those "left out," either because they do not think they are part of a multicultural society or feel mistakenly threatened or confused. Those in the movement who have yet to understand how multiculturalism is addressed to their own communities, whether as "whites," or of European ethnic ancestry, need to articulate it in a way that brings out the fact that the university serves the needs of neither those who want to learn about themselves and others who don't. Since students do not control the university they are unable to study the cultures, societies or whatever else we would like. Likewise, those who may have no interest in this are also suffering from increasing tuition and fees, class shortages, weeding mechanisms, etc. because they have no say over how education serves their needs. They're channeled into boring classes, with inattentive and overworked faculty, and are hounded by grades, tests, and second and third jobs. Education means nothing more to them than jumping through hoops without catching the ring and having a nervous breakdown or even committing suicide. The relationship between overworked engineering students who are denied the opportunity to study renewable energy and maybe how other societies have used it instead of nuclear power and students seeking a multicultural education become complementary struggles as both come to understand how the organization of the university conflicts with their own desires.
We need to speak to the fact that the university serves to process and prepare each member of all groups for a lifetime of work. This means entrepreneurialization occurs at the expense of Black students learning about their own communities as poor students who cannot afford school and have to get second and third jobs to pay increasing costs and combinations of both. Making this connection means linking together how these various struggles are complementary. And through this complementarity, express how others not interested in or afraid and confused by multiculturalism are a part of it and can grow from it. This means organizing our own communities in struggles that can be mutually complementary with, if not eventually one part of, a struggle for multiculturalism that radically transforms higher education but all of society.
Which Way for Multiculturalism?
The question has inevitably been asked whether multiculturalism is simply a minor adjustment, a reform, or whether it has the potential to contribute to a larger transformation of the university and maybe beyond. Too often a false dichotomy is drawn between "reform" or "revolution" that precludes one from the other. This has generated debate for decades which is unnecessary to replicate here. However, suffice it to say that reform cannot contribute to a greater transformation, a reconstitution of the way we live, if it is an end in itself. Reform is revolutionary if it sets a groundwork for further reform and classwide insurgency. One other factor comes into play as well. If we perceive revolution as catastrophic or apocalyptic, in which it happens at one definable moment, then reform is precluded from being revolutionary. However, if we understand the transformation as revolutionary, then reform, if it is not used to block further reform, can be a vehicle of revolution.[134] These are the questions we must ask about multiculturalism.
I have attempted to demonstrate how multiculturalism has expanded the disruption of the university's role in the accumulation of capital by subordinating its function to the diverse needs of students. By reading through the rhetoric of the PC counterattack this appears to be a primary concern of its corporate and elite organizers. However, there are measures being taken and internal contradictions that may turn multiculturalism into more work for students, dead- end reforms turned upon those who made the original demands for change.
Numerous views of what multiculturalism is within the movement exist making it almost undefinable - perhaps a positive attribute. Within the movement, much of the reason for these conflicts can be attributed to significant class differences that are still being fought. For example, upper class Mexican-Americans frequently want multiculturalism in order to climb the ladder, while Chicana/os want it to transform society, although admittedly even this is not so clear cut. For Todos Unidos member Catarino Felan, this is all part of the class antagonisms that cross racial (and gender and sexual orientation) lines: "when class lines are drawn, racial equality falters and dies."[135] As a result, one of the main thrusts of the movement has been to increase enrollment and retention. Sometimes it is made as part of the struggle to transform society by helping to bring in other potential student allies. Other times, it is an explicit demand for inclusion into the ranks of capital's management elite or the creation of a separate racial capital.
Some business executives and educational planners have visualized multiculturalism as a mechanism for learning to cope with an increasing diversity of the labor force and turning it to their advantage for generating more productivity and efficiency from their workers. Frank Newman is the author of the famed Newman Report and president of the Educational Commission of the States. Newman recognizes a need for a more "educated" and "flexible" workforce which must be accomplished "while facing, as a country, this massive effort of learning to deal with cultural diversity."[136] Opponents have resisted, recognizing that giving a little space will only lead to demands for more and deepen the crisis.
A significant conflict in tactics has arisen around the primary demand of most sectors of the movement, such as at Stanford where it was successful, to require one or more classes from a multicultural perspective for all students. This tactic has been met with opposition or mostly indifference by students who are not necessarily opposed to multiculturalizing the university but resist multiculturalism that, once in the university's hands, becomes yet another course with more imposed schoolwork to struggle through. This, as we've seen has been used to divide students. Recognizing students' resistance to school/work, the countermovement has gone to great lengths to taint multiculturalism as creating more work. They are mostly right since turning it into a required course makes it just more schoolwork for many students. Demands for required courses reproduces the organizational structure of education by reducing multiculturalism to work which will inevitably be despised and resisted by students who might otherwise want to participate in efforts to transform society. Even though the UT-Austin Faculty Senate and University Council framed the requirement in a very flexible way so as to allow existing courses to overlap in credit, thus making it almost meaningless, science and engineering faculty ignored this and continued to demonize the reform as more work that would distract their students from what they wanted them to learn in preparation for waged jobs.
Requiring classes is only one tactic of many but it is becoming the most successful with courses required at a number of universities. This success needs to be thoroughly reevaluated. Of all the PRIDE proposals why did the required course come closest to being realized? Probably because that proposal follows the logic of higher education that divides our experiences into courses, grades and grade points, manageable segments of information. As multiculturalism increasingly becomes limited to being required, another hoop for us to jump through, it will become increasingly stripped of its subversive potential. Changing the content without transforming the form cannot help but reproduce the existing organization of the university. It is not enough to learn something different but to learn it differently as well. If we continue to define education as capitalist, racist, etc. by what rather than how we learn instead of both, then we have not progressed anywhere. Requiring multiculturalism is the 1990s version of the left's strategy for dealing with the universities, as we'll see in chapter 5; "after the revolution" the content is changed but the university remains.
The limits inherent in requiring multiculturalism courses are being turned against those who are fighting for it and those who can use it. If multiculturalism only means more work then we have not realized our goal of further making the universities a space for studying ourselves and the ways in which we've lived, loved and fought. It becomes something more to do to raise one's future income.
Corporations and educational planners have begun to recognize this new institutionalized role as well. Companies are increasingly turning towards it for understanding diverse parts of society and the world that they have not been able to in the past. As the birthrate of "white" workers declines and their refusal of work increases, businesses are becoming increasingly vulnerable to their reliance on workers who it does not understand and cannot control. "Companies like Kochman Communications use the 'management of diversity' catchphrase to promote their high fee services. According to Kochman's brochure, 'If you don't recognize varying cultural differences then you run the risk of underutilizing employees.' Like a growing number of others, this company offers help in changing employees' bad attitudes toward authority; developing flexible disciplinary styles and diversity management. Profit provides motivation for understanding others, promoting cultural knowledge as a management tool."[137] Although multicultural education can teach many antagonistic groups to struggle together it can also be used to make them work together and to train Black and brown managers who can control a rapidly increasing Black and brown workforce. The American Institute for Managing Diversity Inc. based at Morehouse College is taking the lead in offering such services.[138]
The supreme nightmare may be that multiculturalism could also become a means for regaining control over the universities. Carmen Valera draws the connection to UT-Austin: "as recently racially motivated events on campus demonstrate, universities may prove harder to govern." To do so, UT brought in the Anti-Defamation League, who opposes affirmative action, to give racial sensitivity workshops to administrators. The question that must be asked is whether multiculturalism will be presented in such a way that it can be easily assimilatable as just more schoolwork and a mechanism of reimposing control or whether it is part of a broader struggle to reorganize the campus and society.
Whether or not the multiculturalism movement is successful depends on whether it can produce reforms that can strengthen student struggles to subordinate the university to their needs or can be used against them. This turns upon apparent inconsistencies in how schoolwork relates to multiculturalism. Is multiculturalism only another type of schoolwork, with tests, grades and a degree? Are students resisting schoolwork that processes them as homogeneous workers only to demand more that will train them as "diverse" workers? Is multiculturalism no more than an extension of the left's claim that more studying creates a more class conscious worker who will then begin to struggle? Or is multiculturalism a coalescence of the long resistance to school as a disciplining for work and the struggle to reorganize society so that embraces a multiplicity of ways of living?
One way to resolve these apparent conflicts is to address the expected role of students in capitalism, which is only beginning to be done. We have seen how multiculturalism can be used to manage. What is the connection between multiculturalism and student income and austerity? ONDA addresses, along with demands for more faculty and student enrollment, the difficulty of working class and "minority" youth to afford higher education by proposing the creation of paid tutor/mentor positions for Chicano students to assist other Chicano students. The connection between the hardships of being an unwaged student, loan debt, disinvestment of the universities and the demand for multiculturalism is made quite brilliantly: "the insufficient number of TA, RA, and grader positions force many such graduate students [with little support other than loans] to register only part-time and some to drop out. The creation of a tutoring program can meet these needs by paying low-income graduate students to tutor low-income undergraduate students."[139] By implication, it seeks to make the university pay for helping "politicize" new students: "these tutors will also serve as role models and assist in the socialization process of undergraduate students into university life."
Besides demanding more fellowships, scholarships and financial opportunities for "minority" and other working class students, ONDA connects financial aid to access. It recommends that UT "eliminate the GPA requirement to receive financial aid. Students 'at risk' are among those who would be least burdened with the responsibility of having to work while simultaneously raising their GPA's. The university should provide alternative financial aid for all students on academic probation." (p. 12)
These demands impressively call for breaking the relationship between how much work one does - measured by ones' grades, progress and wage - in the form of financial aid. The connection between schoolwork and subsistence would be severed by replacing "aid" with a guaranteed income or wage that is not measured by how much work one does. By demanding more grants and scholarships, while the latter is still on a competitive basis, there is an expressed refusal of debt and the extra work it requires. We have here the seed of a new analysis of income missing from student struggles and coincidentally how cutbacks have worked to force us out of the university faster or prematurely, turned us into cheap labor while in school, and divided the movement. While a similar analysis has been articulated by Black students it needs to be fleshed out and circulated throughout the campus.
ONDA's connection between income and multiculturalism suggests one manner in which efforts to institutionalize the movement can be headed off. Multiculturalism is more than just learning about Black or brown cultures but, as ONDA would seem to indicate, a means for allowing broad access to the resources and social spaces of the university which can be used for many diverse purposes. Perhaps this may be further served by an explicit demand for wages for schoolwork, which I will examine in the last chapter, that would give students an autonomous resource to confront the use of money to keep them out.
Not the Conclusion
I have attempted to reexamine the motivations for the PC counterattack in terms of the crisis of the university and the use of entrepreneurialization and austerity as a mechanism to reimpose control. This is evident in D'Souza's analysis as I have demonstrated above who suggested disinvestment as a weapon against multiculturalism. Likewise, it is implicit in the UT-Austin based University Review's (a Collegiate Network member) attempt to explain multiculturalism in terms of a cut in student's standard of living: "The cost of the extra tuition [for the multiculturalism requirement] - and in most cases, the extra semester in which to take the courses - is more than the average student can handle in today's hard times."[140] Such an analysis attempts to portray multiculturalism as a cost rather than a change that can be used to serve needs that are being blocked from realization. It is a similar tactic utilized by UT-Austin faculty who played upon student dissatisfaction with degree programs that allow them little time to pursue other academic interests.
Deep down multiculturalism isn't about required courses, awareness seminars, and recruitment and retention as much it is a question of what students do in and with the university, what the university is and its role in the broader global society. If we recognize that being a student is to be trained to accept work as an interchangeable mass part in the machine of accumulation, then multiculturalism is an expression for multiplicity and refusal to be reduced to just being students. Just as Harry Cleaver has suggested that "most workers have struggled to cease being defined as workers as they have sought a richer, more multilateral existence," so have students struggled against being defined as students trained to spend their lives working and have sought, through demands for multiculturalism, new ways of living.[141]
Because it has served as an experimentation with new ways of living and learning, multiculturalism offers an element of "self-valorization" to the other struggles against entrepreneurialization, environmental destruction and militarism on the campuses. Combined, these struggles have rattled the operation of the social factory and have played with new social formations. In this sense, each of the movements I have examined are complementary. It is for this reason that a well planned and financed campaign to defeat the multiculturalism movement is in operation. It is no coincidence that the same corporations that have participated in the reorganization of the universities to make them more subservient to the interests of capital accumulation have pinpointed multiculturalism as its greatest threat. Students have begun to look directly at the universities and themselves and have decided its time for a change.
The crisis of the universities that the multiculturalism movement threatens to extend is being reproduced throughout all of capitalist society. Then UT- Austin Dean of Liberal Arts Robert King laid out his own opposition to multiculturalism as a local expression of larger socio-political crises in capitalist society:
The problem today - and this is society's problem as much as it is the university's problem - is that no one can agree on the common good. Everywhere factionalism rages like a mad, insatiable beast of prey. All the horses are pulling in opposite directions. Think of your local school board. Think of the terrible disagreements about theology that have factionalized religion in this country and throughout the world. Think of the irresolvable disputes about the environment. Think of the battlelines that are drawn in the legislature at the beginning of the biennium. Think of our own university, where a great noble entity - The University - has to an ever sadder degree been replaced by competition among great and powerful fiefdoms...Too few people want to pull together. That's why multiculturalism causes such problems: nobody trusts anybody; there's too little spirit of compromise.[142]
The crisis of the universities and of society as a whole demonstrates a grave danger to the existence of the current dialectical organization of life which is temporarily determined by the accumulation of capital. For Michel Foucault, this crisis was reflected in thought itself which has undergone an explosion of multiplicity evading all efforts at a totalized and unified logic.[143] This rupturing of the dialectic is coming about because of the multiple forms of struggle that are taking place international against work, the international debt, development, environmental destruction, and most importantly in our case, against education, concurrently with the pursuit of the infinite desires and needs of life and existence. Whether a new dialectic will be imposed or we can break away into an infinite forms of social organization cannot yet be determined but if the struggle around multiculturalism is any indication, we are right now taking part in the organizing of multiple futures in the present.
Bibliography
[1] Philip Altbach and Robert Cohen, "American Student Activism: The Post-Sixties Transformation," in Philip Altbach (ed.), Political Student Activism: An International Reference Handbook, NY: Greenwood Press, 1989, p. 457.
[2] Although I only discuss these four academic areas in this chapter, I consider multiculturalism to be broader than the study of different social groups. Rather, if we consider multiculturalism to be an attempt to diversify the curriculum to include previously excluded topics of social concern then we must also include programs such as peace studies, gay studies, environmental studies, etc.
[3] Irving Kristol quote from the Wall Street Journal, June 17, 1986; and William Bennett quote from May 14. 1986 speech to the American Jewish Committee, cited in John Trumpbour, "Introducing Harvard: A Social, Philosophical, and Political Profile," p. 9, in Trumpbour (ed.), How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, p. 3-31.
[4] I will use "ethnic studies" to represent a broad array of struggles - women's, Black/African- American, Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, Latin American, Jewish, Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual, Asian- American (of all types) and Native American - that have no sufficient word to represent them, and probably shouldn't. I do not mean to imply a theory of "ethnicity" by its use as if to suggest race should be understood as ethnicity. It is only a shortcut and as such is limited. For a detailed historical analysis of the Chicano studies movement see Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989; for the women's studies movement see Winifred, "Scholars and Activists: The Gender Factor in Education," ch. 6 in On the Move: American Women in the 1970s, Boston: Twayne, 1988, p. 102-126; and for the current queer studies movement, see Linda Garber (ed.), Tilting the Tower, NY: Routledge, 1994.
[5] Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: A Nonfiction Play for Five Stages, New York: Norton & Co., 1974, p. 6.
[6] Burr, p. 14. Thirty years later, events have come back around in full circle with the University and federal government ironically on opposite sides. In the summer of 1996, the Supreme Court ruled the UT-Austin School of Law's minority recruitment policy unconstitutional putting the future of the University's entire policy into question.
[7] Ibid., p. 34.
[8] p. 51 and 54.
[9] p. 55; capitalization is repeated from cited text.
[10] p. 55.
[11] Anthony Shadid, "Racism on Campus: Students Fight Back," Guardian, April 5, 1989, p. 10.
[12] The Daily Texan, "Study finds dramatic drop in minority college students," January 15, 1990, p. 1.
[13] U, "Minority enrollment figures set record highs,' March 1992, p. 6.
[14] Manuel Justiz, "Population trends challenge national educators," On Campus, December 3, 1990, p. 2; and A. Phillips Brooks, "Diversity key recruiting factor," Austin-American Statesman, February 27, 1992, p. A8.
[15] From The University of Texas at Austin, Office of Institutional Studies, Statistical Handbook, 1991-1992, p. 6, table S 4. There is no explanation of how "Hispanic" or "Asian American" are defined, leaving this open to further analysis of discrepancies in representation by the diverse types of communities that are generalized under these totalizing labels.
[16] Brooks, p. A8; and Cheryl Fields, "Hard-times budgets for universities in Southern Texas perpetuate historic discrimination, Hispanics charge, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 1988, p. A18
[17] A. Phillips Brooks, "Despite progress, minorities still find a rough road at UT," Austin American Statesman, February 27, 1992, p. A 8; and Office of Institutional Studies, p. 29, Table S 24 (2).
[18] Candice Driver, "Minority story evokes anger: Student leaders blame UT for 'sugarcoating' issues," The Daily Texan, June 29, 1990, p. 1; and Eric Dixon, Shuronda Robinson and Wayne Marshall, "Affirmative action critics distort facts," The Daily Texan, September 10, 1991, p. 4.
[19] Tini Tran, "Why the furor over minority scholarships?," Tejas, May 1992, p. 7.
[20] Dixon, Robinson and Marshall; and Brooks, p. A8.
[21] Robert Tindol, "Retention programs bolster success," On Campus, February 18, 1991, p. 3.
[22] Dixon, the SA attorney general, Robinson, director of the Minority Information Center, and Marshall, President of the Cabinet of College Councils, wrote this editorial as a thorough critique of the Young Conservative of Texas' claim that affirmative action is widespread and allows "unqualified" minorities to take spots at UT from "whites" and "Asians".
[23] Douglas Hok, "Texas lacking Hispanic professors," The San Antonio Light, May 17, 1991.
[24] Brooks, p. A8; Adam Hersh, "Minority faculty numbers rising: Further steps remain in dispute," The Daily Texan, September 3, 1991, p. 1; and Deborah Shoop, "Minority faculty percent doubled from '83 to '91," The Daily Texan, April 27, 1992, p. 5.
[25] UT-Austin has a national reputation for not only being a site of overt racism but also a poor record of hiring and supporting minority faculty. For example, since the late 1980s a number of not only minority but also progressive faculty have left UT-Austin for other campuses in part for better financial offers but also the repressive political climate. Professors Wahneema Lubiano and Velma Garcia left promising positions in the English and Government departments for these reasons.
[26] This is apparent from a reading of articles, editorials and letters to the editor of The Daily Texan, The Austin-American Statesman, and observations of rallies in support of these reforms which dwindled to non-existence even as the proposals faced fraudulent balloting and eventual defeat.
I would like to reiterate how I conducted my analysis of "textual" sources. Because it is difficult to impute intention to someones writings, it is important to test the validity of my interpretation against their actions which are either observed firsthand or documented in one or more journalistic accounts, written memos, letters and reports garnered by Open Record Requests. Following the old adage: "actions speak louder than words," I flowcharted a person's actions until the repetition of their actions indicated a close fit with their written comments.
[27] Troy Duster, "Understanding self-segregation on the campus,' The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 1991, p. B 1-B2.
[28] Dane Schiller, "BSA unhappy with harassment policy," The Daily Texan, December 4, 1989, p. 5. Also, Schiller, "Harassment task force proposes racial policy," The Daily Texan, November 29, 1989, p. 1-2, outlines the main facets of the recommendation. Based on a definition of racial harassment as "extreme or outrageous acts or Communications that are intended to harass, intimidate, or humiliate a student or students on account of race, color or national origin that reasonably cause them to suffer severe emotional distress," the policy is clearly aimed at individual actions. In order to handle complaints, a Race Relations Counselor was created in the Office of the Dean of Students which devises the punishments.
[29] James Szablewicz and Annette Gibbs, "Colleges' Increasing Exposure to Liability: The New In Loco Parentis," Journal of Law and Education, Vol. 16, No. 4, Fall 1987 is an interesting discussion of the return of in loco parentis due to harassment, rape, anti-discrimination, and other policies as well as university responsibility for protection from rape and other crime. They recognize that "What distinguished the in loco parentis of the 1980s is that it is limited to protection of student safety. Missing is the complementary power of colleges to police and control students' morals..." This represents a growing power of students: "...the student-college relationship may not be so one-sided in favor of the college after all. When students rejected college supervision and protection, the courts responded. And now when students ask for protection, but not supervision, the courts are responding again. Thus students may be able to shape the student-college relationship through the judicial system." (p. 465)
But what they do not recognize is the distinction from in loco parentis that was crushed by student resistance that began as early as the 1950s, is that today these policies are being dictated and imposed upon the universities by students themselves to serve their own needs. In response, the universities are desperately attempting to use them in ways antagonistic to their original intent, such as UT has done with the harassment issue. However, a fundamental limitation of these demands is that they give responsibility to the university rather than students empowering themselves to take control. This is the case, for example, with resistance to sexual harassment: "By according too little value to student-run efforts and too much to university resources, these feminists [fighting sexual harassment] have obtained narrow reforms at the cost of extending university control over students lives - empowering the institution, not women." (L.A. Kaufman, How Political is the Personal," The Nation, March 26, 1988, p. 419-20).
[30] In 1989, three Phi Gamma Delta were arrested after along with three other men assaulted a Latino family resting in a van outside a Congress Avenue bank building where there were janitors. Matthew Canton, "TU [Todos Unidos] angered by assault," The Daily Texan, November 21, 1990, p. 5.
[31] Quoted in Shaun Jordan (a UT swim team member), letter, "Tokenism on podium," The Daily Texan, April 20, 1990, p. 4.
[32] This comes from "PRIDE Update is presented to students by administration," On Campus, November 5, 1990, p. 1, 4, and 6. The administrations' responses to PRIDE that follows also appears here.
[33] "Minority Faculty Hiring/Retention and Its Connection to Student Retention: What is at Stake?," June 1989, flyer. Although no author is credited it was handed out at an event organized by the Black Student Alliance.
[34] Chris Barton, "Multiculturalism to be taught by outsiders," The Daily Texan, July 27, 1990, p. 1.
[35] Todos Unidos, Orientaciones Nuevas para la Diversificacion de la Academia, 1990.
[36] Matthew Canton, "Todos Unidos faults administration for slow response," The Daily Texan, December 10, 1990, p. 1.
[37] Heather Wayment, "Native Americans adjust to UT life: Underrepresented minority fights to learn strange customs, culture," The Daily Texan, December 10, 1990, p. 6; David Miller, "GLSA supports BSA plan," letter, The Daily Texan, May 2, 1990, p. 4; and Indian Progressive Action Group, "Indian Group supports PRIDE," letter, The Daily Texan, April 24, 1990, p. 4.
[38] Candice Driver, "Cunningham's inaction echoes '85 reply to anti-bias plan," The Daily Texan, July 23, 1990, p. 1.
[39] Dinica Quesada, "QUEERS plans programs on gay, lesbian concerns," The Daily Texan, August 28, 1990, p. A6.
[40] Matthew Canton, "Students air concerns at meeting," The Daily Texan, date unknown; Deanna Roy, "For UT homosexuals, the fight against discrimination continues," The Daily Texan, October 18, 1990, p. 1.
[41] Coalition for a Diversified Law School, "Protest the Lack of Diversity at the UT Law School; Support the Boycott of Classes at the UT Law School," April 1990, flyer, Madhawi Kuckreja, "Law school students take affirmative action," Guardian, April 19, 1989, p. 5; Michael Margolis, "200 attend rally at UT law school: Turnout low compared with '89," The Daily Texan, April 6, 1990, p.1; Aaron DaMommio, "Diversity rally takes lighter vein," April 5, 1991, p. 1; and Fabienne Labourey, "Students create law journal for women," The Daily Texan, March 20, 1991, p. 6.
[42] Paul Kelly, "University Council approves multicultural proposals," On Campus, October 28, 1991, p. 2-3, italics mine. This is the minutes of the debate during the UC meeting.
[43] Jeff Rhoads, "UT faculty rejects multiculturalism proposal," March 3, 1992, p. 1.
[44] Erica Shaffer, "UT survey shows students support multiculturalism," The Daily Texan, September 5, 1991, p. 6.
[45] Brian Anderson, "Faculty concerned about multicultural proposal," The Daily Texan, December 4, 1991, p. 5.
[46] Katherine Mangan, "University of Texas' Postponement of Controversial Writing Course Kindles Debate Over Role of Outsiders in Academic Policy," The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 1991, p. A18.
[47] Kelly, p. 2-3 and Robert S. Boyer, "Western ideas transcultural," The Daily Texan, December 4, 1991, p.4; and Karl Galinsky, "Committee's report flawed," The Daily Texan, November 7, 1991, p.4. Galinsky is a member of NAS.
[48] Ibid., p. 3, italics mine. It is surprising that Woodruff was chair of the faculty Senate's Committee on Multicultural Education.
[49] This was the strategy even weeks after the UC had approved the overlapping. For example, Daniel Bonevac, chairman of philosophy and TAS member, was still arguing that "if students do not combine requirements, time will be added to already overburdened programs." Holly Wayment, "Multicultural requirements hit new snag," The Daily Texan, November 14, 1991, p. 1.
[50] Jenny Huang, "Schools' multicultural plans vary," The Daily Texan, June 13, 1990, p. 5.
[51] Office of the Dean of Students, A Multicultural University Resource Guide, 1991, p. 5.
[52] Holly Wayment, "Official: Number of minority faculty at University has increased," The Daily Texan, November 12, 1991. p. 6.
[53] Margot Fitzgerald, "Students, AIs deserve changes in E306," The Daily Texan, August 8, 1990, p. 4 and Susan Dauer, "E306 opponents should learn how to support arguments," The Daily Texan, October 4, 1990, p. 4. Fitzgerald and Dauer as well as the 19 other cosigners of Dauer's editorial are English AIs.
[54] Paula Rothenberg, Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, NY, 1988.
[55] Christopher Anderson, "E306 questions go unanswered: Cunningham dodges inquiries," The Daily Texan, September 18, 1990, p. 1. The letter was uncovered by the Polemicist.
[56] Gribben's letter was printed in entirety by The Daily Texan, August 6, 1990, p. 4. Professor Donald Foss has denied knowing or ever meeting Gribben. Soon after this letter was published, Gribben resigned to take a position at Auburn University.
[57] This was suggested in the report of the Committee on Undergraduate Education chaired by sociology professor Frank Bean, which was the third committee appointed by President Cunningham to examine undergraduate education. Since the recommendations of the first two were ignored it seems Bean's committee figured out that it needed to say what Cunningham already planned to do. (Kevin Williamson, "English department could be redesigned," The Daily Texan, June 10, 1992, p. 1.)
[58] Gribben's letter, italics in original.
[59] This is the case in many of the pieces I have already cited but especially Linda Brodkey and John Slatin, "New E306 keeps commitment to writing," The Daily Texan, September 4, 1990, p. 4 which accepts the terms of debate over whether it is a writing course; Brodkey and Shelli Fowler, "Political Suspects," Village Voice, April 23, 1991, p. 3-4; and various other editorials by faculty, AIs and the Polemicist that so rarely even mention anything about students - who are required to take the course. Only professor Robert Solomon of philosophy is keen enough to recognize that "UT students seem remarkably immune to indoctrination, especially in required courses. If anything, they develop an immunity...toward the subject matter forced upon them." ("Recruiting diverse faculty requires long-term commitment," The Daily Texan, June 5, 1990, p. 4. This inadequacy of discussion about the movement can be further seen later in the chapter during discussions about the nature of the movement itself and the counterattack.
[60] Kevin McHargue, "Recomposition: Confusion reigns in the world according to Gribben," The Daily Texan, July 20, 1990, p. 4.
[61] Kurt Heinzelman, "Cries of factionalism in English Dept. come from sore losers," The Daily Texan, July 30, 1991, p. 4.
[62] A July 24, 1991 letter from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to Dean King, suggested that "Absent compelling reasons for not providing...approval, such as evidence that a department has become dysfunctional in its operations, generally accepted principles of collegial government would call upon the administration to respect the decision of members of the department to continue the mode of governance under which they have been operating." (in Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, "On the Attack: Bob King opposes autonomy, collegiality in Liberal Arts," Polemicist, September 1991, p. 3).
[63] Scott Hanson and Mary McGlynn, 'The facts tone down the English Department 'soap opera", The Daily Texan, October 29, 1991, p. 5
[64] Francine Bosco, "Dean King's 'threat' cited in resignation," The Daily Texan, September 9, 1991, p. 1-2; and Hanson and McGlynn.
[65] Shai Tsur, "Compromise sees new head of women's studies program," The Daily Texan, July 25, 1991, p. 1.
[66] Catherine Cantieri, "We've still got a long way to go," Utmost, Winter, 1990, p. 8-9.
[67] Ibid., p. 8-9.
[68] Henson and Philpott, p. 16.
[69] Henson and Philpott, p. 16.
[70] Some YCT members attempted to register for the Tejas production class but failed when it caused an overload and delayed registration. (Henson and Philpott, "Tejas: The Attack on Diverse Press," Polemicist, September 1990, p. 5, cite an August 1, 1990 article regarding this failed attempt to take over the class). The YCTs have collected information and infiltrated other groups in the past and continue to do so. According to a YCT agenda, they have an "intelligence" branch of the organization, "YCT's equivalent to the CIA intelligence members monitor other campus groups and professors by attending meetings and classes and infiltrating groups." (Christopher Anderson, "Infiltrating' meetings part of YCT agenda," The Daily Texan, October 5, 1990, p. 1.)
[71] Candice Driver, "UT policy halts funding for 'Tejas"', The Daily Texan, June 7, 1990, p.1, italics mine.
[72] Jenny Lin, "Political correctness assailed by UT dean," The Daily Texan, September 23, 1991, p. 1.
[73] Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, "E306: Chronicle of a Smear Campaign: How the New Right Attacks Diversity," Polemicist, September 1990, p. 4.
[74] Although TAS collected the money and wrote the check for the ad, its name does not appear anywhere on it. In fact, "When contacted later, the majority of the faculty we [Henson and Philpott] talked to who signed the ad weren't associated with TAS, and non-members weren't told that TAS had coordinated the effort." (Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, "E306: Chronicle of a Smear Campaign: How the New Right Attacks Diversity," Polemicist, September 1990, p. 4.)
[75] Stephen Balch and Herb London, "The Tenured Left," Commentary, vol. 82, October 1986, p. 41-51.
[76] Diamond, "Corporate interference: Endowing the right-wing academic agenda," Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB), Number 38, Fall 1991, p. 47; and the Madison Center's, Annual Report, 1990.
[77] Henson, "Circle the Volvos: Building a 'Grassroots' Political Newspaper," Polemicist, July 1991, p. 10.
[78] Henson and Philpott, "Charge of the right brigade against multicultural education," Guardian, October 16, 1991, p.7; Henson, July 1991, p. 4; and Theresa Bergen, "PC windmills: Right wing money on campus," NLNS, packet 2.1, September 3, 1991, p. 5.
[79] The Common Sense Guide to American Colleges 1991-1992, Charles Homer, Executive Editor, Charles Homer, Madison Center: Lanham, 1991. Interestingly, although the information was provided by a large number of students and faculty, few are given credit.
[80] Sara Diamond, "Madison Ctr. tries affirmative action," Polemicist, May 1991, p. 3.
[81] Diamond, CAIB, p. 46-47; Institute for Educational Affairs, Annual Report, 1980; and Ernest Lefever, "The Corporation Project," unpublished memorandum dated July 18, 1978.
[82] Diamond, CAIB, p.46; IEA; Annual Report, 1980.
[83] Henson, July 1991, p. 4; Madison Center, Annual Report, 1990.
[84] Diamond, CAIB, p. 47-8; Olin Foundation's, Annual Report, 1989; Smith-Richardson, Annual Report 1989; and Sarah Scaife Foundation's IRS Form 990-PF, 1987 and Earhart Foundation's IRS Form 990-PF 1988. See also Henson and Philpott, p. 9. Bergen cites the John Olin Foundation 1988 annual report's figure of $55 million in grants. (p. 5)
[85] Ibid., citing Inter-Department Memo, December 20, 1984, "The Report on the Universities". This tactic has also been explicitly discussed elsewhere. At a 1982 conference sponsored by IEA, Madison, and The American Spectator to help students start their own newspaper, a speaker suggested "if someone accuses you of being a racist or a sexist, accuse them back of McCarthy tactics."
[86] Mark Hager, "The real orthodoxy network," Z, April 1992, p. 59-60.
[87] Ibid., p. 48.
[89] Henson and Philpott, p. 9.
[90] Louis Wolf, "Accuracy in media rewrites the news," Covert Action Information Bulletin, number 32, Summer 1989, p. 20.
[91] Henson and Philpott, p. 9.
[92] Although AIM is not immediately involved, it is supported by many of the same forces including William Simon who has served on its advisory board, the Scaife Foundation which has given it about $433,000 from 1977 to 1984, Mobil which gave it about $40,000, and Texaco, Exxon, Chevron, Getty and Phillips. (Louis Wolf, p. 20.)
[93] Diamond, CAIB, p. 48.
[94] D'Souza's speech is noted by Scott Henson, "Dinesh D'Souza," New Liberation News Service, packet 2.1, September 3, 1991, p. 12.
[95] Daniel Junas, "Rev. Moon goes to college," Covert Action Information Bulletin, number 38, Fall 1991, p. 22-3.
[96] James Allen, "UT accepts controversial grant," The Daily Texan, June 11, 1991, p. 1-2.
[97] Ibid., p. 25. See Theresa Bergen concerning YAF (p. 6) and Christopher Anderson. I was one of the students the YCTs were discovered to have a file on in 1987.
[98] Bergen, p. 5; and Jon Weiner, "The Olin money tree: Dollars for neocon scholars," The Nation, January 1, 1990, p. 12-13.
[99] Jon Weiner, p. 12.
[100] Scott Henson, New Liberation News Service, p. 11-12; and Mark Hager, "The real orthodoxy network," Z, April 1992, p. 59.
[101] William E. Simon, A Time for Truth: A Distinguished Conservative Dissects the Economic and Political Policies that Threaten Our Liberty - And Points the Way to an American Renaissance, NY: Reader's Digest Press, 1978, p. 231-232.
[102] Ibid. p. 231-232.
[103] Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, NY: Harper & Row, 1990.
[104] Paul Berman (ed.), Debating p.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses, NY: Dell, 1992.
[105] John Taylor, "Are You Politically Correct?", New York, January 21, 1991, p. 32-40.
[106] Michael Berube, "Public image limited: Political Correctness and the media's big lie," Village Voice, June 18, 1991, p. 35.
[107] Dinesh D'Souza., "Illiberal Education," Atlantic Monthly, March 1991, p. 51-79.
[108] Donald Kagan, dean of arts and sciences at Yale, quoted without citation in Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, NY: Free Press, 1991, p. 15.
[109] Ibid., p. 13.
[110] Dinesh D'Souza, "The visigoths in tweed," Forbes, April 1, 1991, p. 84.
[111] While too many to list and analyze here, one of D'Souza's most glaring lies and distortions concerns Stanford's multicultural course requirement. In the text of his book, D'Souza lists supposed topic categories and authors from which the syllabus must draw, warning that "this is not a mandated list." However, buried deep in the footnotes is the harsh truth that this list was developed prior to the actual initiation of the course with the disclaimer that "it is fairly typical of the texts actually assigned so far." (p. 70 and 274)
[112] Examples of radical student actions resulting in partial multicultural reforms mostly concerning the curriculum abound in his book. For examples, see D'Souza, 1991, p. 136-37.
[113] David Lay, "Panel decries multicultural efforts," The Daily Texan, October 5, 1990, p. 1; Scott Stanford, "Butler Did It: Multiculturalism has a long way to go," The Daily Texan, June 22, 1990, p. 4.
[114] ONDA, p. 20.
[115] Shirley Hune, "Opening the American mind and body: The rote of Asian American studies," Change, November/December 1989, p. 59.
[116] Elizabeth Martinez, "A Chicano Left Perspective on Berkeley - An Interview With Carlos Munoz," Z, July-August, 1990, p. 39-40. Since Munoz wrote a book about how the Chicano Studies movement was a project of the Chicano student movement of the 1960s, it is ironic that Munoz would ignore the conflict between the radical projects of the student movements that created the multiculturalism movement and later watered down trace elements formally proposed as university policy.
[117] Wandersee, 1988, p. 103.
[118] Dinesh D'Souza, "The visigoths in tweed," Forbes, April 1, 1991, p. 81-86.
[119] Robin Templeton, "The war on campus," Education for the People, Volume 2, Number 1, fall 1991, p. 1-2; and Liz Henry and Kathy Mitchell, "Gribben, colleagues make English department a battlefield," The Daily Texan, August 13, 1990, p. 4.
[120] Evan Carton, "The self besieged: American identity on campus and in the Gulf," Tikkun, July-August, 1991, p. 40, italics mine.
[121] Berube provides an excellent critique of many of the mainstream press coverage of PC by demonstrating that they almost completely lack evidence to make their case. He finds that they rely on a handful of examples such as the teaching of Rigoberta Menchu's I Rigoberta Menchu and another professor's viewing of The Godfather in class to demonstrate the immorality of capitalism. This is certainly a blessing, since the right has hardly discovered many worse examples of authoritarian behavior that do exist.
[122] I found this to be the case among many of the students I interviewed since 1990.
[123] Although never put into print, this argument was made to me by three student activists at the time.
[124] Ami Cheri Mills, CIA Off Campus: Building the Movement Against Agency Recruitment and Research, South End Press: Boston, 1991, p. 54-55.
[125] Cited in Barbara Ransby, "Black students fight back," The Nation, March 26, 1988, p. 412.
[126] Ibid.
[127] This came up in the discussion that followed the appearance of Luckett's entourage and my later interviews of three women members of SAW.
[128] Philip Altbach, "Perspectives on Student Political Activism," in Philip Altbach (ed.), "American Student Activism: The Post-Sixties Transformation, "in Philip Altbach (ed.), Political Student Activism: An International Reference Handbook, NY: Greenwood Press, 1989, p. 3-4.
[129] John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julia Lesage, "p.C.' hysteria," Jump Cut, number 36, p. 127.
[130] Derek Robert, "Homo essence is sexual, not political," The Daily Texan, January 28, 1991, p.4.
[131] This the reason that I have placed quotation marks around the word "white" each time it appears and why I do not capitalize "black", Latino" etc. By not doing so I believe I prevent the totalization of these groups that capitalized words and labels often entail.
[132] Christine Stansell, "Liberated loutishness," Tikkun, July-August, 1991, p. 53.
[133] Kit Belgum and Irene Kacandes, "Tales of German monoculture ring false," The Daily Texan, April 29, 1991, p. 4. They note that Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are examining Kafka's "linguistic synthesis as a multicultural project."
[134] This was the very concern of Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution?, NY: Pathfinder, 1970, her analysis of social democracy in pre-WWI Germany, and Toni Negri in Marx Beyond Marx. Lessons on the Grundrisse, translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, edited by Jim Fleming, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1984.
[135] Catarino Felan III, "Hispanic decade," Tejas, December 1990, p. 6.
[136] Quoted in Richard Bonnin, "Newman urges education reform for U.S., Soviets," On Campus, November 19, 1990, p. 10.
[137] Carmen Valera, "Multiculturalism: Big business in small souls," Tejas, December 1990, p. 2.
[138] Julie Nicklin, "Helping to Manage Diversity in the Workforce," The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 30, 1992, p. A5.
[139] ONDA, p. 15.
[140] The University Review Editorial Board, "An appeal to University of Texas faculty members, from the University Review of Texas," University Review, February 1992, p. 11.
[141] Harry Cleaver, "Notes on the Argentine Gauchos and the nature of the working class: from a letter to George Rawick," Common Sense, number 10, May, 1991, p. 59. Cleaver continues: "From this point of view, to call such workers part of the 'working class' is almost insulting, it implies their failure to avoid having their lives reduced to work. To be a worker, for such a person, is to be a loser. Who wants to be a worker?" I plan to expand further on this theme in the last chapter.
[142] Robert King, "Community and factionalism," The Texas Observer, November 29, 1991, p. 14, italics mine. This appeared as a paid ad by American Income Life Insurance Co. whose Chairman of the Board and CEO is current UT Regent Bernard Rapoport.
[143] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse and Language, NY: Pantheon, 1972.
Section III. The University and Students in a Capitalist Society
Chapter 4. A Theory of the Entrepreneurialization of the Universities
There are two primary strategies currently in use for restoring the manageability of US universities in the face of the two decade long crisis of higher education. A manufactured fiscal austerity (including increased costs, cutbacks, and disinvestment) is joined by a comprehensive reorganization of the very nature of the universities - which I call entrepreneurialization - that has been in the works since the early 1980s. Entrepreneurialization is the process of reorganizing the universities into overt businesses whose primary mission is to profit directly from the intellectual activities taking place on campus. Austerity is a key aspect to the transition process because money is rechanneled into profit-oriented projects and ventures. Each aspect of the university is put under pressure by austerity to generate its own operating funds. As a result, those areas resistant to or unable to generate revenues through adapting its mission to making and selling new products undergo rampant austerity. Over time, commercially promising programs and activities come to dominate the operation of the university.
Entrepreneurialization is the latest stage of reorganization of the universities following their industrialization into businesses from 1894-1928 and their integration as part of the military-industrial-academic complex beginning with WWI but formalized during WWII.[1] Industrialization proceeded through standardization of the activities of each campus in order to analyze them in terms of productivity and investment potential, their final product being ideological control and disciplined intellectual labor power.[2]
Such standardization has facilitated entrepreneurialization by providing information that has come to guide academic policy-making to the point where, short of resistance, "unprofitable" activities are disinvested from in favor of profitable high tech areas. However, entrepreneurialization is more than a change in investment but a fundamental shift in the organizational impetus of the university itself. The university is increasingly being organized around the commercialization and marketing of profitable activities while cutting and discontinuing those areas that do not successfully begin to commercialize or are antagonistic to commercialization. During the process of industrialization, the university was subordinate to business and the state which applied and profited from their research, few universities doing so themselves due to federal restrictions and limited capital. With entrepreneurialization the university no longer only serves to discipline labor power but also to use that labor power in the production of new commodities and the direct accumulation of capital. As we saw in chapters 2-3, universities are beginning to privately patent and commercialize publicly funded research, knowledge and technology as products. These products of the university "enterprise" are then marketed by university- and faculty-owned "spin-off" companies germinated in university owned business parks and small business incubators, and coordinated by university-owned foundations posing as non-profit institutions. That only small aspects of each university have been entrepreneurialize since the reorganization began in 1980 can be attributed to overt and everyday forms of resistance by faculty, staff students, and neighboring communities who have stood in the way.
This chapter briefly examines the industrialization of the universities beginning during the late 1900s in order to demonstrate that the deindustrialization of the universities - like the economy as a whole - came about as a response to class struggle within the universities which took the form of the student revolts of the l960-70s. My focus, however, is on analyzing how this reorganization has come about both on the day-to-day organizational level of the university and its role in capitalism. Taking the form of entrepreneurialization, the universities, like capital as a whole, are now focused on the development of high tech development and commercialization in order to reduce their dependency on unpredictable human labor. In response to their inability to discipline uncontrollable students into docile workers, the universities too have become capital intensive, developing new high tech tools for automating production, war, and even biological reproduction. While still serving to generate new workers, the universities have a new primary focus - selling directly for profit what they create. This very reorientation makes it clear for the first time that the universities are not only a part of capitalist accumulation but central to it.
Inversion of Class Perspective
Taking the starting point that the universities are a productive part of capital, Clyde Barrow attempts to understand the process of industrialization and the reorganization of the universities into businesses as part of the class struggle. Unlike Noble in America By Design, Barrow recognizes that the impetus for reorganization sterns from periods of class conflict both within and without the university that took place not only from 1894 to 1928 but also from 1929 to 1962 and continues today. "Contemporary concepts of modernization and rationalization," he explains "are ideological euphemisms concealing the class conflicts which shaped and still structure American universities" (p. 251).
Such a class analysis is useful for re-reading the voluminous materials generated to facilitate and plan industrialization and attempts to entrepreneurialize the universities. Since little critical analyses exist it is necessary make use of these materials to understand not only what capital ("composition of capital") is doing but the "political class recomposition" which gave impetus to restructuring. Once we understand the composition of capital, "we can...reverse our perspective and examine the phenomenon from the point of view of the people whose productive activities are being subordinated."[3]
This dissertation is an effort to carry out the two tiered task of examining the current conflict over the composition of capitalist power in the universities (chapters 2 and 4) and analyzing the recomposition of the working class as it specifically deals with student struggle (chapters 3, 5 and 6). Cleaver makes clear the distinction and the interrelationship of the composition of capital and the recomposition of the working class:
While it can be said that capital seeks a 'class composition,' i.e., a particular structure of inter- and intra-class power which gives it sufficient control over the working class to guarantee accumulation, it is also true that workers' struggles repeatedly undermine such control and thus rupture the efficacy (from capital's point of view) of such a class composition. Such a rupture occurs only to the degree that workers are able to recompose the structures and distribution of power among themselves in such a way as to achieve a change in their own relations of power to their class enemy. Thus the struggles which achieve such changes bring about a 'political recomposition' of the class relations - 'recomposition' of the intra-class structures of power and 'political' because that in turn changes the inter-class relations.[4]
While they are abstract concepts, the composition of capital and the political recomposition of the working class are an attempt to view empirical day-to-day interplays of antagonisms. During periods of class insurgency, new means are devised to restore control by putting people back to work. If these new methods of control are successful, they rarely last long as new eruptions of class struggle disrupt their operation leading again to new efforts of organization control.[5] Since the turn of the century, the universities have become a fundamental means for restoring control by helping to devise new means of social organization. As we'll see, during a period of world revolution, the industrialization of the universities provided efficient means for producing more disciplined workers and a new technological means of production that Concurrently became the organizational principle of higher education. Likewise, entrepreneurialization follows another period of international student rebellion that ruptured human capital management of higher education.
"The concept of political recomposition theoretically articulates the central role of working class struggle at the heart of technological change and the concepts of class composition and decomposition provide vehicles for rethinking issues of technological domination in terms of capital's efforts to cope with an autonomously active, and opposed, historical subject" (Cleaver, p. 5). Such an inversion of class perspective allows us to understand how the industrialization and entrepreneurialization of the universities are fundamental technological responses to class struggle. Such an approach guides the work of others investigating higher education besides Barrow. Noble views technological change as a social process for organizing society although overlooking any existence of resistance;[6] Sinclair offered a strategic analysis of students and faculty as part of the class struggle through their struggles for academic democracy during industrialization; and Aboites, Slaughter, Newson and Buchbinder all recognize current restructuring as rooted in the political crisis that began in the 1960s and still characterized by conflict.[7]
Ironically, as factories, the universities are producing new technologies of automated production (better known as CAD/CAM or Computer Aided Design) for responding to working class re-organization. From biotechnology to automation, assembly lines of university researchers are designing the means for continuing production and warmaking but without human workers. Describing the University of Michigan's Center on Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing (CRIM), John Schloerb points out that automated technologies "can perform a variety of manufacturing tasks with more precision - and less chance of striking - than volatile human workers."[8] At the same time, these technologies also become the means for automating the university through interactive CDROM and televised classrooms for example. As discussed further in the conclusion, the university is not simply "participating in the creation of the 'factory of the future' or 'the automated factory'," as Slaughter found many university presidents acknowledging the role of the universities, but is itself a proto-type (p. 124). Such research is not only the socialized cost of the reorganization of reproduction due to class conflict but is the impetus for the reorganization of the universities motivated by internal conflicts as well.
The Industrialization of the Universities
The industrialization of the universities was preceded by the establishment of "land-grant colleges" through the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 and finalized in 1887 by the Hatch Act. These acts established the purpose of what are known as "land-grant colleges and universities" to serve in the development of agriculture and manual training. Although some publicly funded universities already existed, the land-grant universities marked the federal government's first intervention into higher education in a three-fold effort to train workers, expand colonization and develop new agricultural technologies. From the very beginning of the land-grant universities, the role of the universities in organizing society around work - "practical studies" - was clear: "The founders of the land-grant colleges, in keeping with historical thought and experience, acknowledged the essential importance of work, as they dedicated their institutions to helping the industrial or working classes better their lot in life."[9]
Although land-grant campuses were created throughout the country (37 states authorized campuses within the first eight years), their establishment in the western half of the country coincided with the long running "Indian Wars." Likewise, the Morrill Act passed on its second attempt while in the midst of a failing Union Army eight months into the Civil War by requiring military cadet training. Since land-grant campuses were required to offer cadet military training programs[10] and existed mostly in regions of the country that had not been completely colonized, they went hand in hand with the militarization of the west where few government institutions other than Army forts existed.
These military responsibilities point to the militarization of the universities beginning largely before WWI as is commonly assumed.[11] In the big picture, the universities were one of a number of tools crafted for the purposes of colonization. The same month the Morrill Act was passed, Congress also passed the Homestead Act which granted 234 million acres to encourage rapid settlement and colonization and provided 181 million acres to the railroads to make their way across the country.[12] As colonists drove Native Americans and Mexicans off their lands with Army assistance and federal recognition of their homestead claims, the land grant universities were looked upon to provide not only trained cadets but also the workers and technological know - how for agriculturally exploiting it. From their very inception public universities were a primary force of primitive accumulation, aiding in the subduing of resistant Native American tribes, removing them from access to their traditional means of subsistence and placing them at the mercy of the US government. The creation of militarized universities and colonization went hand in hand. The universities' early role in the process of primitive accumulation, that is reducing Native Americans from autonomous communities to people who were forced to work to survive, was their first contribution to capital accumulation - by helping to create a class of people reduced to workers.[13]
At the same time, the land-grant universities became a significant terrain of struggle between independent farmers, so-called "white" subsistence farmers, and large growers and, by the 20th century, large industrial capitalists, for control. This conflict mirrors the university's role in primitive accumulation. University extension agents and experiment stations, which were mandated by the 1887 Hatch Act in response to the National Grange, Farmer's Alliance and Populist investigations and criticisms, soon fell into service to agri-business in developing new technologies that undermined subsistence farming and served to place tighter control over farm laborers, many of whom would increasingly become waged workers after losing their land.
But the Morrill Act's influence was not limited primarily to agriculture. Its passage led to a rapid increase in engineering programs in the l870s and eventually engineering stations by the turn of the century although they received one-twentieth the funding of agricultural stations even in 1925 (Madsen, p. 44). As Barrow, Veblen and Sinclair note, university governing boards became overwhelmingly dominated first by large growers and then industrial capitalists, displacing the clergy as the predominant group from which trustees were chosen.[14] The transition of formal control from first the clergy and then from agri-business to industrialists corresponds with the changing class relations of the universities and their integration into industrial capital.[15]
Although university professors began conducting research in coordinated efforts with corporations in the telephone, electrical, and chemical industries, for example, and private contracting began in 1910, it was another decade until the universities became fully integrated into the industrial structure (Noble, p. 128). These efforts were far from federally supported or organized policies. Aside from the creation of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) in 1906 and the Rockefeller Foundation/General Education Board in 1903, there was little coordinated effort to carry out this integration. It was the founding of the National Research Council during WWI to organize university resources for the war effort that signaled the first federal effort to consolidate a coherent relationship between the universities and industrial production, its primary focus after the war (Noble, p. 154). In effect, the industrialization of the universities is inseparable from their militarization.
Although the extent of industrialization was not limited to simply formal relationships and service between universities and business, it signals the existence of a more substantive reorganization of the universities. For Noble, this reflected not simply the socialization of the costs of private corporate research, a common critique of commercialization even today,[16] but the transformation and subordination of all of science to the needs of capital (p. 147).[17]
The substantive transformation of the universities into a sector of industrial capital came about as a result of more than simply the creation of corporate foundations and corporate control over boards of trustees and research projects. Such connections were not without resistance, as was agri-business' previous domination, and a number of well documented critiques were made of industrialization, a few American Federation of Teachers locals formed, and the AAUP created in 1915 to defend tenure.[18] The heart of the transformation of the
universities into a central component of industrial production came about as a result of the application of business principles to their everyday operation, more specifically, the rationalization of academia.
As with entrepreneurialization, industrialization was a process of reorganization that mirrored the contested class relations of the time period. As Barrow notes:
The modernization of American universities, as well as the emergence of the professional academic intellectual, coincided with the industrial revolution in America. The structural patterns associated with capitalist development reappear in a series of quite similar events that also revolutionized the American college and labor process. The transformation of the traditional American college into the modern university followed the same pattern of institutional change: concentration of the means of mental production, centralization and bureaucratization of administrative control, the construction of national academic markets, and the rationalization of market relations between competing institutions. (p. 31)
Barrow provides intricate detail of one of the fundamental means of industrialization: the application of quantitative surveys to higher education to evaluate productivity and efficiency. Following his observation that the university is coming to "more and more conform in its administration to the methods of the business corporation," the Carnegie Foundation's first president Henry Pritchett contacted Frederick Taylor in 1909 to conduct "an economic study of education."[19] Taylor put Pritchett in contact with his disciple Morris Cooke who a year later completed his groundbreaking analysis, which was published by the Carnegie Foundation. The power of Cooke's study was that he "translated the ideals of corporate capitalism into a practical strategy for educational reform" (Barrow, p. 74).
Cooke went about this by applying principles of business to a strategy for managing the universities. He attempted to reorganize the various activities of the universities so that they could be compared in terms of their so-called productivity and efficiency. In an effort to standardize these operations, Cooke recommended numerous structural reorganizations and measurement tools that are not only still with us as today but taken for granted as indicators of learning. He suggested the creation of academic departments, budgetary cost-benefit accounting of expenses, line item budgeting, annual financial reports, centralized management of facilities and physical plant, and clearer hierarchic distinctions between faculty and the administration. At the time, few universities had separate departments, faculty could teach in nearly any area they chose, and faculty dominated most day-to-day decision-making. Many presidents still even taught classes. A more distinct hierarchy or division of labor was required in order to make this analysis. Once departments were created, they could be compared with the use of standardized statistical methods.
While management had to be differentiated and analyzed, so did the workers. Various means were suggested and implemented to measure the productivity and efficiency of faculty by measuring the same of students. In order to compare the productivity of departments and faculty, Cooke suggested the creation of student-hours and an analysis costs per student hour. The CFAT's Mann Report later recommended standardizing the engineering student workload like that of waged workers, restricting it to eighteen hours or less per week.[20] The logic behind these measures was to manage the labor of faculty who Cooke explicitly recognized faculty as workers, overlooking students as workers.[21] Although the measure of student workloads was central in evaluating faculty labor, Barrow focused on the proletarianization of professors. He summizes that "The theoretical effect of this new measurement was to focus attention on professors as mental workers for the first time in their history. If the university was conceptualized as an economic unit of production, the role of the professor as its chief producer was altered as well" (p. 70).
Cooke emphasized a need to transform the labor of professors by suggesting an attack on the guild organization that preserved faculty power through inbreeding and tenure and advocated national searches and competition among candidates. Criteria for appointments and wages were changed to emphasize specialization, efficiency, and productivity. Today, these are measured at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) by annual reports and other departmental requirements that faculty report their number of published articles, books, grants, and awards in order to demonstrate their productivity and qualification for tenure, promotion or raises. Specialization was conceived by Cooke as a means for standardizing and making the labor of professors interchangeable. Specialization and Cooke's "elective system" idea worked hand in hand to make courses "standardized, interchangeable parts with precise and predetermined specifications with which students could be assembled" (Barrow, p. 72). His suggestion that standardized lecture files be created is today a fundamental means by which introductory courses are taught by constantly changing graduate students and part-time faculty. Cooke devised the means for measuring faculty time use and other techniques for measuring faculty productivity.
Cooke's reforms carried with it the power of the corporate foundations. Since there was little federal and state financial support for higher education, the foundations were able to use access to their endowments and faculty pension funds to impose a new industrial order. "By linking the availability of increased financial resources for higher education to the adoption of a corporate reform program, the foundations could use material pressures to reinforce the appeal of their proposed policies" (Barrow, p. 75). Access to Carnegie pension funds was mediated by the requirement that the university follow the procedures laid out in its Standard Forms for Financial Reports, and the Rockefeller General Education Board sent out "field representatives" to assist the campuses in their reorganization and published a manual for standardizing fiscal management (Barrow, p. 77). Combined, CFAT and the GEB's pension fund and endowment totaled 26% of the existing college and university endowments. That most of the money went to only a few handful of about 1000 institutions indicates that existing resistance to industrialization and the influence of the foundations in implementing it may have caused problems in implementing these reforms.
A number of additional standardization processes came about as a result of WWI. In 1917, 20% of the universities switched to a quarter system to speed up the graduation of students into the military. The ROTC was created in 1916 under another title, the first selective service law was also passed that year and the draft changed to allow technical students to allow to finish school first (Barrow, p. 128). Techniques used to sort and manage soldiers were applied to the universities in the form of placement, guidance, honors programs, tracking, and entrance tests based on IQ tests given to draftees (Noble, p. 233). For Barrow, the "the nationalization and standardization of university administration was one of the war's [WWI] most obvious results. The necessity of conducting constant inventories of personnel and plant for national agencies hastened the diffusion of standardized measurements developed by the educational engineers. It promoted internal reorganization as an adaption to national directives" (p. 146).
It was no accident that a number of top ranking CFAT and GEB administrators were instrumental in government war preparation commissions that consolidated and organized the universities' participation in the war. Sam Capen of CFAT, who conducted the first survey of universities based on Cooke's study, served on a commission to expand ROTC and an academic militarization commission during WWI, became the first director of the American Council on Education which was formed to centralize the role of the universities in manpower training and industrial research according to national policy (Barrow, p. 147). WWI provided the impetus for widespread adoption of standardization that the foundations and surveys alone could not accomplish.[22]
Higher education became the focus of the foundations not simply for intellectual resources but for disciplining of new labor power, that is, the creation of new workers, as well. Behaviorist psychological methods created in the universities and first used during WWI, became the basis of what Noble called the "the science of education." The same "manpower" techniques applied to the utilization of college students as soldiers became fundamental to the organization of students as waged workers. "The conceptual lens through which this proud new breed of 'scientific' educators viewed the 'process of education' was identical to the one through which the personnel directors of the science-based industrial corporations viewed it earlier in the century: education was one side of the corporate 'personnel problem'" (Noble, p. 253).
The "personnel problem" was studied and researched by the NRC, GEB and ACE who devised new sorting mechanisms such as distinguishing "gifted students" who were tracked into "honors programs" based on ability, sifting them out through exams, vocational placement and career counseling.[23] The introduction of labor planning to students, as measures of productivity and efficiency were applied to faculty labor, implies an implicit recognition of students' unwaged labor contribution to future profits. Today, in Australia for example, standardization takes place in the form of a focus on "competency" in education "in which the outcomes of education are defined in terms of transparent, observable, and measurable qualities of an individual." "The reorganization of education to produce competence is the latest and most effective of a long line of policies designed to ensure that the kind of people produced in education are centered on work."[24]
For advocates of "progressive education," questions of reform became questions of how to better discipline new workers. In 1923, Harvard professor George Mirick explained that "the power of the machine is determined...by measuring the amount of work it can do, and this amount can be stated in what are called foot-pounds or horse-power. It is in this direct way that mental abilities are measured. A human being is a machine. This machine is moved by nervous energy... As in the case of an electric or steam machine, the quantity of the human energy and the quality of the human machine can be perceived the quantity and quality of the work that it does."[25] Rationalization of higher education was merely the latest means by which to churn out productive human workers.
President Clinton's Labor Secretary Robert Reich recognizes standardization as analogous to organizing the schools as assembly lines. Since "the only prerequisites for most jobs were an ability to comprehend simple oral and written directives and sufficient self-control to implement them," Reich explains, US public schools mirrored mass production.[26] "Children moved from grade to grade through a preplanned sequence of standard events, as if on factory conveyor belts. At each stage, certain facts were poured into their heads." From there the children were sorted according to productivity and discipline. "Children with the greatest capacity to absorb the facts, and with the most submissive demeanor, were placed on a rapid track through the sequence: those with the least capacity for fact retention and self-discipline, on the slowest." Eventually, "standardized tests were routinely administered at certain checkpoints in order to measure how many of the facts had stuck in the small heads, and 'product defects' were taken off the line and returned for retooling. As in the mass-production system, discipline and order were emphasized above all else." A similar process of standardized production was also applied to teaching.
It was 1930s education theorist Elwood Cubberly who draws Reich's analysis to its ultimate conclusion: "Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw materials are to be shaped and fashioned...and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications laid down."[27]
For Noble, standardization of education did not passively reflect "outside" industrial organization but was part of a process through which it stimulated social reorganization; it meant militarization, industrialization and education were interlinked for the first time and incorporated into national planning. "Fresh from their Army experience in personnel classification and officer training, the educational reformers in the engineering schools had begun to envision cooperation on a grand scale: industry as a whole would furnish the job specifications and employment requirements the schools demanded, and the schools would provide the complementary testing, training, selection, and distribution of manpower for industry," Noble explains (p. 234-5).
Standardization and managerial reorganization was required for not only running the university like a corporation but in order to integrate it into the industrial process. By reframing academic activities in terms of efficiency, productivity, labor use, outputs and inputs, the foundations could better understand how to utilize the universities. As Barrow explains for CFAT, "the initial absence of standardization between institutions had presented an immediate investment dilemma" (p. 83). This process reflected the underlying class tensions at work within the university:
The accumulation of capital as a purely quantitative measure of academic efficiency was closely related to administrative anxieties about a school's prestige. Social efficiency - or the functional integration of institutional roles under the leadership of a managerial expert - was measured by the relative peacefulness of industrial relations within the university. A good administrator, therefore, 'made determined efforts to keep the peace within his own institution, since if it appeared disunited it would lose prestige and influence' and, ultimately, the capacity to attract additional capital. Thus, new texts on university administration generally advised 'that quarrelsome debate, including that based upon conflicts among academic ideals, must be minimized or suppressed whenever it became threateningly serious.'[28]
Internal class conflict over the changing nature of the university coincided with the rising class antagonisms throughout not only the US but internationally. Carnegie and Rockefeller founded CFAT and the GEB as part of an effort to devise new technological responses to the widespread class upheaval occurring at the time. Marietta Baba identifies the industrialization of the universities as the first of four periods during which new university-business relationships were created. "Each of the four invention clusters occurred during periods of intensive international competition and/or crisis, and during times noted for pronounced technological change."[29] The second period occurred during the depression (1929-1933), during and after WWII (1943-1954) and from 1967-1985.
If we understand technology, as Noble suggests, as more than simply machines but a social process for organizing society, the application of "manpower" planning from the military and business to the universities and the extension of university-industry cooperation is a reflection of capital's attempt to deal with class struggle. Each of these periods of reorganization took place during times of intense class conflict during which time new means of technology were sought to respond to the effects of insurgency and regain control. As Richard Lyman, former Stanford president put it, "Our traditional method of handling both graduate education and research has been to provide a burst of support in reaction to a national crisis - to the Cold War, to the health crisis, to Sputnik, to the environmental crisis..."[30]
That Baba identifies 1967-1985 as the most recent period is indicative of the role of entrepreneurialization as a strategic response to class antagonisms at work inside the universities and throughout society. Her chart listing "university/industry linkage models" demonstrates a fundamental change in the nature of these models over the four periods from consulting and research contracts, to incubation, research parks and eventually "direct" (e.g. spin-off companies owned by the universities themselves) and "indirect investment" (e.g. venture capital funds) (p. 200).
The differences between the forces surrounding industrialization and entrepreneurialization reflect the class relations of the time period in which they took place. Whereas industrialization was initiated as a response to class antagonisms outside the universities in order to integrate them into production, entrepreneurialization was a response to class struggle from within by students, a struggle which disrupted the human capital investment strategy of the 1950- 60s.[31]
That the universities were a business and a productive part of the capital accumulation process was without question during industrialization. Not only did Cooke's study assume the businesslike organization of the universities, the foundations conceive of them as businesses for investment, and the faculty recognized as laborers on an assembly line, but Henry Pritchett was already publicly asking "shall the university become a business corporation?" in an article published by that title in Atlantic Monthly in 1905.[32] Not only were critics like Sinclair and Veblen calling and analyzing the universities as businesses, but so were those attempting to reshape them into businesses and running them.[33] Samuel Chapen possibly put it more succinctly than anyone since during his inauguration as chancellor of the University of Buffalo:
The people of the United States have a great national industry which is never mentioned in the summaries of the productive enterprises of the country. It is the industry of building universities. The industry has absorbed an extraordinary amount of creative energy...It now represents an invested capital of $1,250,000,000. In cash it has never paid a penny on the investment, which accounts for its common omission from the record of those productive undertakings that add visibly to the wealth of the nation. But indirectly what has been the return? Scientific discoveries and the application of scientific knowledge to manufacturing, to commerce, to agriculture, to engineering processes, to the prevention and cure of diseases which are responsible for a large part of the actual profits of the nation's business. Wipe out the contributions made by the universities during the last fifty years and the industrial life of the nation would shrivel up to insignificant dimensions.[34]
The Strategy of Entrepreneurialization
The student rebellion of the 1960-70s not only undermined the human capital strategy of investing in the reproduction of labor power in order to increase productivity and profits, but it set off a crisis of control and management that still reverberates today.[35] Disinvestment was soon recognized as a temporary response to the disruptions caused by the rebellions. New efforts to retool the universities so that they could contribute to restoring manageability and profits in the economy as a whole led to efforts to reorganize the universities themselves to deal with their own internal problems. Using austerity to weed out academic programs that served needs irrelevant or antagonistic to business forced administrators to devise new means of raising operating funds to cover shortfalls. Facilitated by changes in federal intellectual property laws regulating expensive publicly funded research, the universities began looking internally at their own activities as sources of profits. As federal and state funding for all but commercially oriented high tech research shrinks, these activities have come to dominate not only the operation but the very nature of the universities.
The entrepreneurialization of the university takes places on two levels: formal campus decision-making comes to be dominated by commercially oriented forces within the university and the overriding function of the university becomes transformed from disciplining labor power to using that labor power in the pursuit of direct profit. This is not as simple as saying outsiders come to dominate the organization of the university. In fact, long existing activities inside the university, research geared towards capital accumulation, come to not only determine but reshape the campus as a whole. Both aspects are inseparable and cannot be understood chronologically but as interactive and in-process.
Potentially profitable activities within the university gain priority by being separate from the formal decision making structures of the universities. After two decades or more of intensified efforts to strengthen university collaboration with business, entire new separate administrative infrastructures are created. Offices for technology transfer, research grants and support, intellectual property, business relations and development exist in many universities as high as vice president, chancellor and advisors to trustees. Actual research infrastructures such as spin-off companies, university foundations, research parks and centers and commercialization think-tanks have come to carry much of the informal decision-making power of the universities. We've seen this demonstrated in the case study of UT-Austin in chapter 2. In their extensive studies of the reorganization of Canadian universities into businesses, Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder find these new sources of power not only parasitic but an emerging transformative force changing the very nature of the universities.
For Newson, these infrastructures are not simply "'parasitic' off the universities which host them, insofar as they draw on the resources of the university to accomplish their activities without being subject to these practices in their own operations." These have a much more substantial impact:
these new structures also provide the political means for transforming both the practices and the programmes and goals of their host institutions. Limited resources are increasingly allocated to these new structures and to the academic work that is carried out within them, through procedures other than those governed by academic fora like senates, faculty councils and local departments. Moreover, these structures initiate new programmes and insert them into the university's agenda, again without following established academic procedures.[36]
Whether these new structures may come into being for matters of expediency (formal collegial structures are too "rigid" and "slow" or occur on a departmental level through personal contacts with a funding agent, for example) or in secrecy, in the context of austeric pressures to find new sources of funds, they not only reproduce themselves but grow in influence. However they may come about, these structures "have separate boards and are not accountable for their actions or initiatives to the collegial decision-making bodies of the host university. The creation of centers and similar special units undermines accountability to academic peers and the wider academic community, while permitting the needs of corporate partners to define research goals - all without any form of public scrutiny."[37]
Newson and Buchbinder do not delude themselves with the idea of somehow "preserving" the non-existing self-managed "academic community" from the threat of intrusion[38] but attempt to demonstrate how far from that ideal the universities have become. They are also not simply decrying business influence over the universities. For them, the focus is on the changing social relations of the university as the context in which the "service university" - which serves only the interests of capital - is being realized. Simple business influences, "although having considerable bearing on certain aspects of academic functioning, did not generally affect the kind of knowledge that was developed and taught nor the process of its development and dissemination. The kind of corporate linkages that have been advocated as part of 'the service university' over the past decade directly intervene in the knowledge-seeking and knowledge-sharing process" (Newson, 1992, p. 7).
The production of knowledge is characterized by the relations of production. These relations change as the university becomes governed by efforts to directly profit through immediate integration into production. The source of change is not simply from one type of business to another but how they do business, using student, faculty and staff labor directly. "Universities, like industrial companies, are corporations that require labor and capital to operate," Leonard Minsky proposed. But until now they have had no tangible product. This has all been changed by a new patenting law that essentially makes business the university's business."[39] Minsky is partially correct in saying they have had no "tangible product" because the universities have long produced disciplined workers although they were not sold directly for a profit. As emphasis is now placed on biotech and computer technologies, for example, the university becomes the site of production and sale using the very labor it disciplines, not simply an adjunct to another corporation that transfers ideas into production and new products.[40] The site of creation, production and sale, the university's mystified role in capital accumulation is stripped away once and for all.
On a day to day level, academic work becomes increasingly subordinated to an administrative apparatus that perceives of intellectual labor as a commodity to be bought or sold. All aspects of the university become rationalized in terms of whether they can contribute a return on investment. "Individual academic units, and even the individual member of the units, are treated as mini-cost centers," write Buchbinder and Newson. "The university can not only monitor their expenditures against the income they generate, but can also require them to break even or produce a profit. Academic units are thus made dependent on targeting their activities to a clientele that will generate enough income - either directly or through government support - to sustain their activities" (1992, p. 15). With the rapidly predominance of part-time teaching staff and the attack on tenure, faculty become interchangeable workers hired or fired based on their contribution to the university enterprise. For those that are more difficult to remove, a hierarchy forms within the university between the "haves" (the commercially viable) and the "have nots" (the resistant or irrelevant). The former not only receive the bulk of operational funds, equipment and physical plant but establish the guidelines by which the latter are to be evaluated.
Even the business activities of the universities are transformed. Henry Morgan shows how real estate is now being strategically used "as an investment in income producing property" by the creation of research parks. This is combined with the use of endowments and university foundations transforming the university into "a venture capital investor in its own right" as he describes Boston University's Community Technology Foundation, and the transformation of intellectual property into income producing products.[41] His analysis offers a view of the university as a prototype of capital itself using the very labor power it generates to create profits that it reinvests to continue the process. While the university has long been a business, until recently it engaged in a number of diverse business activities which may not have been central to its function.
Likewise, the "haves" are even under pressures to demonstrate commercial applicability of their research and academic work. Exploratory (e.g. basic) research becomes subsumed by commercial pressures engendered by profit driven administrators and funding agents. The size and skills of one's research staff is directly related to levels of funding. The more contracts or licensing income the more staff and graduate student researchers are assigned, creating mini-assembly lines generating commercially viable technologies that can be patented, licensed or even marketed by already existing companies or new ones created by the universities called "spin-offs". Since few universities have actually generated large direct profits from entrepreneurialization in the form of royalties or sales, income is often calculated indirectly through overhead costs, grants or contracts revenues. However, as we saw in the case study of UT- Austin, there really are not any profits.[42] Returns on entrepreneurial projects hardly measure up to publicly funded resources expended on them, amounting to a socialization of costs.[43] It is a misnomer to call this process "privatization" since only the profits are "privatized" while the costs are "socialized", that is, borne by society. In addition, privatization refers only to the change in formal ownership. Instead, I devised the term "entrepreneurial-ization" to reflect the process in which knowledge undergoes in becoming a product; the suffix hopefully making it clear that we are dealing with a process and not an absolute.
Perhaps David Noble has done the most to document and oppose this process by offering a number of case studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an example of the reorganization of US universities. Reflecting on MIT's Industrial Liason Program, that enlists 300 corporate partners full access to any of the intellectual and physical resources of the Institute for an annual fee, Noble finds that
ILP activities reflect the unprecedented commoditization of science which has occurred in recent years, in the wake of the so-called 'knowledge-based' high tech multinational gold rush. What is for sale here is not simply the products of research but the research itself, reflecting the transformation of the intellectual endeavor into intellectual capital. Despite high-sounding rhetoric about the free exchange of scientific ideas, what is going on here is the buying and selling of goods, the proprietary control over which has all but put an end to the free exchange of scientific ideas...The Program is designed to serve neither the needs of the scientific community nor the end of public enlightenment; it is a closed consortium of corporate clients whose sole purpose is to secure exclusive control over the precious new commodity, intellectual capital.[44]
Such a process underlines a more fundamental transformation of the character of the university. "Once intellectual endeavor becomes intellectual capital, it soon becomes also intellectual property, and government policies of the last decade - well reflected in ILP activities in patent licensing - have guaranteed that such property will fall into private hands," Noble warns, reiterating the implications of the Patent and Trademark Act of l980 (p. 22). Rapidly becoming a central force of capitalist production, the universities are concurrently becoming an active part of multinational capital. As Noble explains, "Over the last decade, these institutions have once again undergone a structural transformation. Now the 'oil wells' of 'intellectual capital,' central to the new multinational high-tech political economy, they have become integrated as never before within the multinational corporate structure: multinational universities serving global but still narrow, ends" (p. 17).
For more than a decade, Noble's emphasis has been on demonstrating the socialized costs and privatized profits of the commercialization of the universities. Like my work on UT-Austin, Noble demonstrates how tuition and fees have served to fund entrepreneurialization and has helped document the "conflict of interest" between public subsidization of private profitmaking ventures.[45]
Unfortunately, like the other critical analyses of commercialization reviewed above, Noble's analysis is limited to an expression of a so-called "conflict of interest" between the socialization of costs and the privatization of profits. If we acknowledge the university's role in capital accumulation, there can be no conflict of interest: the universities are intended to serve capital. The conflict they do overlook is that between those who wish to subordinate the universities to the needs of business or other needs of social movements perhaps. In fact, Noble does not recognize the existence of such conflict in America By Design until page 321 of 334 pages of text.
The socialization of costs is characterized through the implementation of austerity as standard operating procedure. Funds and resources are rechanneled from resistant or irrelevant academic areas to income producing ones. Although funding continues to rise, in the case of UT-Austin, the declining percentage of public sources of funding becomes a justification for selective austerity by passing the costs of commercialization onto faculty and staff through increases in workloads and decreases in real wages and onto students through increases in workloads (overcrowded classes) and increased share of the costs through higher tuition and fees. Ironically, these increased costs do not actually go to "general appropriations" but are used to bankroll entrepreneurialization.
Because entrepreneurial projects are funded outside traditional decision- making structures, university administrations are able to cry poverty without actually being broke. There is no public oversight over entrepreneurial activities and since few are even aware that they exist let alone understand how they operate, austeric measures are often not only implemented without much resistance but genuinely accepted as part of the "collegial responsibility" by students and faculty who sometimes actively participate in localizing their implementation.
Bracero Graduate Students
The globalization of the university is not limited to simply the international activities of particular institutions but also their student composition. Universities are training more than the future elite of other countries, but a sizable part of the US and international professional workforce. With slowly rising student resistance to the imposition of austerity, such as the resurgence of graduate student unionization and strikes in North America since the late 1980s, universities have looked increasingly abroad for graduate students. Since the threat of deportation to their home country with the possibility of imprisonment for their activism, international students serve the universities as supposedly "docile," "cheap" labor. The university's corporate partners also receive high quality research at a fraction of the costs of hiring a highly educated engineer or researcher or hire them later as temporary workers at a fraction of the cost. According to Harvard lecturer Dorothy Zinberg, "The majority of foreign students study science and engineering. They remain in the United States filling junior positions, particularly in engineering departments that without them would have to close and jobs in industries that until the most recent economic downturn would have been crippled without them."[46]
Since graduate students often serve as inexpensive teaching and research staff, the gradual increase of international graduate students has served to subvert graduate student demands for higher pay, less work, better working conditions, and abusive faculty-student relationships. International graduate students have become a covert pool of scab labor used against the demands of other graduate students and professional researchers currently being laid off in droves by the computer and defense industries. The use of this divide and conquer strategy leaves international students highly vulnerable to exploitation.
This is borne out by the numerical growth of international students in US universities. In 1989-90, the number of international students grew 5.6% to 386,000, the largest increase in seven years. It was also the third consecutive years in a row that Asian students composed more than half of all international students, increasing 9% to 208,110. In fact, eight of the top ten countries of origin were in Asia, with China at the top of the list.[47] By 1991-92, the total had increased to 419,585, with 59% coming from Asian countries, a 7% increase in one year. Ten of the top 12 countries of origin were Asian, with China leading again.[48] Not surprisingly, most international students are concentrated in large research universities in business, engineering and the hard sciences. In 1991-92, 56% were in these areas alone, 72% of the total focused on research and 68.8% received support from universities most likely in the form of employment.[49]
UT-Austin ranked very high in the number of international students during both years. In 1989-90, UT-Austin was ranked third in 1991 and first in 1992.[50] In fact, as undergraduate enrollment is being pushed down and graduate enrollment pushed up, the number of international graduate students is rising. In 1982, 15.9% (1,675) of UT-Austin graduate students were international, increasing to 21% (2,717) in 1991 although for all students these figures rose from 6.1% (2,934) to only 8.3% (4,137).[51] These percentage figures are deceptive though because the actual increase in the total number of international students is much greater. In 1991, seven of the ten largest source countries are in Asia accounting for 63% of all international students, rising from 41% in 1981. 73% are concentrated in business, engineering and natural science. International students are congregated in engineering and the hard sciences where they work long hours with little pay and intellectual recognition (such as patents or co-authorship of articles). As UT-Austin explicitly attempts to reduce undergraduate enrollment while increasing graduate to become strictly a "research university" international graduate students have become their primary source of cheap labor.
International students are part of the international working class, seeking better working conditions and pay while fleeing repression. Like any multinational corporation, universities profit from the use of students fleeing repressive political conditions, since such repression reinforces their exploitation in university labs. International students live under the constant fear of the university and US government rescinding their job and visa for their political activity resulting in their deportation and possible punishment back home. This makes it easier for universities to overwork and underpay international students in isolated, dangerous high tech research labs and low quality, overcrowded married student housing.
There is another, more positive side to this labor flow. International students bring with them the knowledge and experience of struggles from home that they circulate to american students. The Korean student rebellion, which received much media attention in the mid to late 1980s, heavily influenced the anti-apartheid and anti-CIA student movements in the US. Unfortunately, this is often muted by politically motivated divisions between international and american students such university quotas and "English Only" requirements for teaching assistants and assistant instructors. These divisions have yet to be successfully overcome by graduate student unionization efforts or other student organizers.
Im-mobile Campuses
Universities have not simply increased recruitment of international students to attend US based campuses, but have invested abroad to directly train students in their home countries. Like multinational corporations, a few universities are beginning to flee the US where their investments are realizing low returns by disinvesting from all or select parts of their home campuses and investing abroad. In effect, just as corporations flee well organized workers and unsympathetic political conditions, so are universities beginning to flee so-called unproductive students (i.e. those who resist schoolwork which is discussed further in chapter 6) and now with NAFTA, overpaid academics.
It is no accident that a common analogy is made between the amount of work done by students in the US and Japan. Business attempts to pit American against overworked Japanese students in order to make American students work more both in school and in waged work. At the same time that they impose austerity in their US based campuses, some universities are opening campuses in Japan, where like any business, they expect more work at less cost from their students. Currently, twenty three universities and colleges including Texas A&M, SUNY, CUNY and Boston University have campuses in Japan.
But do universities have the mobility of multinational corporations? Following David Noble, Jack Trumpbour notes a fundamental limitation of the entrepreneurial university: "Universities may have made one serious miscalculation in their newfound eagerness to replicate capitalist enterprise. While capital is notoriously mobile, able to pick up stakes and flee entire nations, universities are inherently immobile and, still heavily dependent on public funding, unable to take flight in the midst of sustained political challenge."[52]
This limitation is inherent only as far as universities are understood mainly as physical structures rather than social relationships. Universities are capable to responding to turmoil with flight even though those means are much more limited than those at the disposal of corporations. A few have opened up branches in other countries and increasingly financially unstable campuses are being shut down, merged, or sold. Some universities are even closing entire departments and colleges such as at the University of Michigan, University of California, Yale and Washington University. Universities are just beginning to develop means of mobility so we cannot assume it is impossible. It may take different forms than we realize such as internal mobility by re-channeling capital away from unprofitable to profitable programs and/or building separate campuses for research (from Liberal Arts to the Balcones Research Center at UT for example) which is happening on a wide scale. Computerized and televised extension courses are another form mobility is taking, totally transforming what we have come to accept as a university from a physical structure to analog or digital space. And even then we should not overestimate the power of either corporations or universities to flee unhindered from conflict. The next few years of struggles over tuition and commercialization may demonstrate the power of students to block such financial mobility.
Yet another possible form of mobility is beginning to be realized as a result of NAFTA. As we saw above in the case of UT-Austin and Monterrey Tech's collaboration, universities are just beginning to take advantage of highly educated and skilled Mexican academics and businesspeople at a fraction of the cost of doing so at home.[53] Through joint research, exchange and training programs, universities are developing a new way out of relying on inflexible and well paid researchers in US universities. While the more commercial areas of the campus are being spun off into independent units, as the Solomons explain, in the event of renewed campus upheaval, these ventures may potentially even be moved abroad or supplemented by what is perceived to be a more manageable intellectual workforce.
Ivory Tower or Overt Business?
The idea that the universities are a productive part of capital is hardly new theoretically, Veblen and Sinclair having made the argument more than 70 years ago. The antiquity of this question raises serious questions as to the continuing debates regarding the role of the university in capital and strategic organizing questions such as the relationship of students and faculty to the rest of the working class. Nonetheless, in 1918 Veblen was already critiquing the emerging "new practicality" as C. Wright Mills came to call it,[54] businesslike operation and organization of the universities. "By force of the same businesslike bias the boards unavoidably incline to apportion the funds assigned for current expenses in such as way as to favor those 'practical' or quasi-practical lines of instruction and academic propaganda that are presumed to heighten the business acumen of the students or to yield immediate returns in the way of a credible publicity" (p. 59). To make this transition, he demonstrated the infusion of a new principle of rationalization in which the pursuit of knowledge and academic work were perceived as standardized and measurable quantities (p. 163). Seeing the university as a space for the free pursuit of knowledge, Veblen saw the pursuit of profitable activities inconsistent with that mission. But he not only pointed out inconsistencies with that ideal but articulated the conflicts that began to arise as a result of faculty resistance to such pressures. [55]
Like Sinclair, Barrow's study informs his strategic thinking. He refutes the myth that professors are classless and autonomous individuals in pursuit of knowledge and argues that they are not only workers but part of the class struggle, an analysis that can also be applied to an understanding of students. While explaining how the university is a part of capital and a terrain of class conflict, Barrow fails to demonstrate exactly how professors contribute to the accumulation of capital and are part of the working class.
There are a few other useful though less thorough analyses of aspects of the reorganization of the universities. Sheila Slaughter has found that as the result of the fiscal crisis stemming from the rebellions of the 1960s, the universities have begun to be reorganized through the military to emphasize entrepreneurial activities that can produce profits.[56] Even Arthur Stinchcombe did a study of the utilization of research space and teaching loads based on the analogy of the university to banks since "both banks and universities are fiduciary institutions."[57]
As students begin to confront the effects of the fiscal crisis and resist their being passed along to them, some have engaged in in-depth investigations. At least two other case studies and a number of shorter analyses of entrepreneurialization of US universities have been done. Charles Betz' case study of entrepreneurialization at the University of Minnesota outlines the reorganization of the campus through austerity (enrollment cuts, disinvestment from disciplines not useful to business, tuition increases, and cutbacks) and how most of the plan was defeated by students, faculty, farmers and parents.[58] Austerity is central to the reorganization since it allowed resources to be rechanneled to where the largest, most profitable return could be gained.[59] In analyzing this attempt to transform UM into a "global academy", Betz found a conflict between the university's traditional mission for producing new labor power and the new emphasis on high tech development. Entrepreneurialization evolved out of plans developed by a "tripartite" coalition of elites (from the university, business and government) and characterized by structural contradictions rather than a socio-political crisis. While the university plays a productive role in the international capitalist economy, students appear more incidental than as subjects of conflict within the universities.
The University of Massachusetts was the subject of Marc Kenen's analysis, finding a connection between increasing responsibility of the states for financing higher education and pressures to commercialize.[60] Kenen identifies a coalition of businessmen opposed increases in taxes for higher education in order to pressure the universities to generate their own revenue through increased commercial activity. As a result, by 1989, non-state funding surpassed state funding for higher education for the first time, resulting in widespread tuition and fee increases, attacks on non-traditional and multicultural programs and childcare. Kenen's research proved useful to widespread student and faculty resistance to austerity and military research, including a successful strike by graduate students in 1991.
A few others have examined the effects of entrepreneurialization, offering case studies of the commercialization of particular academic disciplines such as the medical and biological sciences and even sociology. Unfortunately, some of them fail to develop a substantive theoretical analysis of what is happening and simply provide documentation. Martin Kenney offers a meticulously detailed study of the commercialization of medical, biological and chemical research in the universities.[61] He shows how the rise of university based biotechnology depended on access to university funding and resources and low paid graduate student workers. The universities' use of venture capital funds to commercial their faculties' biomedical research is also the focus of Jaron Bourke and Robert Weissman study of Harvard and Washington University's activities.[62] Jonathan Feldman analyzed the role of the universities and their multinational chemical company partners in the war in Central America and the dependence of agriculture on bio-engineered seeds and pesticides.[63] The reemergence of the military in the universities since the late 1970s is also detailed.
Writing without mention of any specific university or particular event, Robert (a UT-Austin philosophy professor) and Jon Solomon, offer their critique of the corporate university. Borrowing the theme of the no longer existing alternative student newspaper, The Polemicist, the Solomons view the university as a huge profit-making corporation:
In the present scheme of things, the university is clearly not administered for the benefit of undergraduate education. It has become a multimillion-dollar corporation that thrives on much, much more than receiving tuition and issuing baccalaureate degrees. In addition to tuition, the university requires hundreds of millions of state tax dollars, but this still feeds only part of its voracious appetite. The university survives only by attracting more hundreds of millions of state dollars from the federal government, private donors, the local pizza parlor, Fortune 500 companies, and anywhere else it can. It demands one fee after another from students, solicits donations from faculty, shamelessly sells its logo on T-shirts and shot glasses. It sends fund raisers overseas to court foreign capital, markets it research products, and solicits huge sums for investment purposes. No university, it seems, ever has enough buildings, and many universities now seems to be in the real estate business.
Seeing through these myriad of business activities, the Solomons hone in on the most fundamental function of the university: the disciplining of new workers.
Because the university mission has become so business oriented, the university views students as part of its business, the purpose of which is to supply the corporations as well as the state and federal governments with a commodity - trained employees. Education, accordingly, becomes training. It is the process of providing skilled, disciplined, narrowly knowledgeable technicians, managers, and professionals. (p. 16)
In addition to the disciplining of new workers, the universities are themselves beginning to operate as overt businesses. "Many universities, like some of our largest and most successful corporations, have overextended themselves, gone into debt unnecessarily, and gotten into ventures they should have never undertaken." When real estate investments, research and building projects go bad, the "universities, like some corporations, have spun off their most profitable divisions, putting them into the hands of those who are quite indifferent to or unsympathetic with the aims of education, like newly merged corporations, have insisted on keeping the unhappy halves of a hostile merger together, with all the consequences of a bad marriage" (p. 33-34).
Recognizing that the university's entrepreneurial activities may cause financial ruin, the Solomons accurately recognize that in the end, it is the students that pay, either through the sacrifice of learning, creativity and personal growth as well as resources.
When the university turns out to be an expense instead of a profitable investment, the corporations and communities that find themselves facing shortfalls try to soak the university and its students for immediate gains, through increased student taxation and tuition, reduced academic services (e.g. fewer tutorials, remedial classes, and other aids for weak or disadvantaged students), and by way of renewed corporate favors and financial deals. (p. 17)
Unfortunately, the Solomons' analysis of the university becomes derailed into solipsistic game-playing and reactionary proposals that only reinforce the current entrepreneurialization of the university. For example, suggesting it will contribute to "student control", they advocate hiring undergraduates for $6/hour as tutors, a measure endorsed by the UT Students' Association and Dean of Students as cheap replacements for better paid graduate teaching assistants at the very time graduate students were actively engaged in two unionization efforts. In addition, they denounce multiculturalism as "silly" (p. 184), advocate the abolition of tenure and replacement with short-term contracts (p. 243), and endorse increased hierarchy of campuses that reflect the productivity of students (p. 78). Ironically, each of these measures, rather than "Re-Creating Higher Education in America" as the subtitle of their book would suggest only reinforces various efforts to downsize various areas of the campus in order to undermine the limited strength of faculty, graduate students, and student activists. Rather than allying themselves with active efforts to resist the reorganization of their campuses into overt businesses, their book is no more than a thinly veiled endorsement of that very reorganization - such as UT-Austin into a business.
Their critique is consistently vague, never mentioning a university, administrator, or event by name. Most disheartening is their refutation of the myth that entrepreneurial projects actually cost the university more money than they make. Ignoring the very research by the Polemicist - which they thank in their acknowledgements - that uncovered the costs of entrepreneurialization, the Solomons plead for the university administration to open their books because "we do not have either the accounting skills or access to the numbers" (p. 283). The Solomons critique abdicates responsibility to the truth by refusing to provide the very empirical common knowledge about at least one of the very universities that employ them!
Although sociology has been one of the first disciplines under attack for its general failure to contribute profitably to the university enterprise, the attack is motivated by its continued irrelevance to business even under the regime of the natural science method and subservience to business and the state.[64] The dominance of the natural science model during WWII meant the adoption of quantitative methods and the emergence of large scale survey research projects funded by corporations, the military, the state and foundations. As a result of the reorganization of the universities to focus on profits and their integration into the structures of transnational capital, sociology became dominated by the "new practicality." Today, sociologists find themselves mostly irrelevant to capital and incapable of investigating and learning about capital's global organization. It has become nearly useless to those who manage and to those who resist.
Promoting Entrepreneurialization
While these case studies remain marginally known to those engaged in active resistance to one aspect or another of entrepreneurialization, the most compelling evidence of the university's reorganization into a profit-making business comes from those carrying it out.
There has been much written as to the so-called "positive" aspects of the process.[65] Ironically, while some critics continue to debate whether or not the university is a productive part of capital, business is articulating a strategy for using the universities to transform the basis of the economy to high tech and biotech and restore accumulation. The transformation of the university into a vital sector of capital is put quite directly by James Fairweather. He explains that federal and state technology transfer programs "clearly demonstrates an expectation for colleges and universities to do more than indirectly affect economic development through training the work force and through basic research. Colleges and universities are beginning to affect industry and the populace actively and directly in the development of new work habits, new technologies, and new industries."[66]
IC2, the driving force behind the entrepreneurialization of UT which is discussed in more detail in chapter 3, advocates a theory of the "technopolis" in which cities would be reorganized around a particular high tech industry, generated by the universities, government, and other local institutions.[67] At the heart of this technopolis, of which Austin is a "developing technopolis", is the commercialization of publicly funded university research. As we saw in chapter 3, IC2 founder George Kozmetsky recognizes the integral relationship between the development of disciplined intellectual labor and entrepreneurialization lies in the formers' development of commercializable research.[68] Gibson and Smilor, two top officers of the institute, explain in their book University Spin-Off Companies[69], the role of the universities:
The research university plays a key role in the fostering of research-and- development activities, the attraction of key scholars and talented graduate students, the spin-off of new companies, and the attraction of major technology- based firms; it serves as a magnet for federal and private-sector funding and as a general source of ideas, employees, and consultants for high technology and infrastructure companies. (p. 36-7)
They also pinpoint the fundamental business activities characterizing entrepreneurialization:
Universities also team with developers, or become developers themselves, in undertaking projects to provide industrial or commercial space and incubator facilities. Some universities have established affiliates directly or by joint venture to conduct research and to provide specialized services to industry. These may have the effect of accelerating innovation while reducing the costs to companies supporting the research program. It also creates revenues and develops properties - such as research parks - adjacent to the universities. (p. 37)
IC2, a UT funded think-tank, could very well be the most articulate advocate for the entrepreneurialization of the universities in the US although they have little direct with few campuses other than UT. They have held many conferences and published volumes of reports and books demonstrating the central role of the universities in high tech development. In the process, they outline the process for commercializing the universities themselves through "technology transfer" of publicly funded research, the creation of "spin-off companies" to commercialize this technology, and the various interdependencies of multinational high tech corporations and the universities. Since much of the federally funded research money originates from the Department of Defense, such entrepreneurialization is inseparable from the remilitarization of the campuses. This is made explicit in early IC2 research focusing on the commercialization of military technology in the universities, especially SDI. In fact, IC2's founder and director George Kozmetsky made his fortune by founding the multinational weapons corporation Teledyne.[70]
There are numerous reports and studies funded or carried out by business organizations, corporations, universities, foundations, and government agencies extolling the virtues of what is often described as "stronger ties between business and the universities." While many go as far as to examine commercialization of the university, few do so in detail or with originality. Many are no more than position papers detailing numerous useful examples of commercialization involving specific universities, state and federal programs and policies, and corporations to justify its continuation. This is evident in the majority of IC2's publications and articles.[71]
There are some unusually well done studies too. Nicolas Wade's study, commissioned by a business backed Twentieth Century Fund whose board disagreed with his sparse analysis, argues that "science" and the university are endangered by commercialization through biotech. His conclusion, while mildly critical turns on adherence to science and the university as somehow separate and objective, threatened by outside forces.[72]
The most unique of such analyses is offered by Richard Anderson who while recognizing the reorganization of the university into an overt business is taking place, endorses rather than resists it. Anderson explains, as well as Newson and Buchbinder do, that there "is the belief that colleges and universities can relieve financial stress by acting more businesslike - with 'businesslike' being defined in entrepreneurial terms. As a consequence, colleges and universities have become real estate developers, venture capitalists, and even impresarios." "The pursuit of commercial activities is a fundamental strategy change and must be considered in that way," Anderson explains overtly as capital's new tact in responding to the crisis created and continued by student demands. However, he concludes not by opposing entrepreneurialization but endorsing it cautiously so as to be successful without generating opposition. One has to wonder why he's writing for the American Association of University Professors, a faculty union magazine?[73]
UT-Austin Law School Dean Mark Yudof has also expressed concern with the privatization of state universities at the same time he was a candidate for UT president.[74] He recognizes a growing gap between the corporate funded "haves" and the "have nots" that is resulting in the creation of "two universities, one reasonably financed and the other starving for funds" and undermining the "historical mission" of public universities. Contradicting himself, he writes that "I am not troubled that markets influence educational priorities within public universities" and advocates austerity - one of the key aspects of entrepreneurialization - and a return to increased state funding.
Ironically, such positive analyses of the commercial potential of the universities make a stronger case for understanding the productive relationship of the universities to other institutions of capitalism than do most critical and even radical analyses. One of the least subtle ironies is that while students and the universities are understood to be "marginal" to capitalism by radical theorists as we'll see in chapter 5 - an analysis widely adopted among students themselves, especially among student activists - they are recognized as a productive nexus of capitalism by those attempting to reorganize them into overt multinational businesses.
University Inc.
The combined strategies of manufactured austerity and entrepreneurialization are beginning to indicate fundamental changes in the organization of US based universities on the levels of institutional organization, resource allocation, and research and teaching agendas. As each of these areas are affected by pressures to commercialize, the university as a whole gradually comes to operate increasingly as a business in which each activity is evaluated and undertaken for its potential profitability.
Just as policies encouraging entrepreneurialization do not come from one source, the implementation of campus-wide reforms do not originate merely from the shadowy confines of the administration. As we've seen in the case of UT-Austin, such reforms are being devised and implemented by combined coalitions of multinational corporations, local businessmen, entrepreneurial faculty, UT regents, IC2, the Executive Vice President and Provost's office, the Center for Technological Venturing, technological transfer professional organization and lobbies, the state legislature, state agencies, federal agencies, and international business demands. In effect, these various coalitions have had the effect of strengthening certain areas of the UT-Austin administration such as the Executive Vice President and Provost, Vice President for Development, the Vice President for Business Affairs and the Vice President for Research over traditional academic governance structures such as the University Council and Faculty Senate.
Separate offices are being created and certain existing offices strengthened within the universities that operate outside the traditional academic process to restructure the campus according to the dictates of the market, On many campuses there exist an "Office of Technology Transfer" (the equivalent at UT- Austin would be the Vice Provost) that maintain records of faculty and staff research funding, consultancy work, patents, licensing, revenues from licenses and marketing, faculty start-up companies and provide this information not only to the administration but to outside business to encourage collaborations. Such offices not only retain information but actually evaluate campus research for
marketable potential, assess industry markets, evaluate and file for patents, and negotiate licenses and joint ventures.
Such offices wield tremendous power at a time when all areas of academia face pressures to "serve the needs of the market." Marketability is rapidly becoming a central standard for evaluating efficiency and productivity of faculty, departments, colleges and even graduate students. They are replacing existing calculations of teacher-student ratios, faculty rank, publications, and even grades - all of which rely on the static assumption that teaching (or the disciplining of labor power) is the primary activity of the university. As the primary evaluators of campus efficiency, these shadowy, informal bases of power are indirectly controlling increasingly more areas of the universities such as finding allocation and with it teaching and curriculum priorities.
One does have to look far to see this formalization taking place in the curriculum: IC2 has been able to gain approval for the creation of a Ph.D. concentration in Technology Transfer, MBA concentration in Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship,[75] and a new master's degree and Department of Commercialization of Science and Technology for whom Kozmetsky will conveniently be the graduate advisor.
During a time of manufactured austerity, such activities are being pointed to as avenues for reversing declining real wages, budget cuts, and even a resource for supporting graduate students. In turn, many faculty and academic departments and colleges, unaware of the questionable data presented to them demonstrating the need for austerity, are reevaluating their priorities and shifting their research and teaching agendas to serve business.
Meanwhile, the informal decision-making power of these groups within the university go unchecked and unhindered by faculty and students in the Faculty Senate, Students' Association and University Council consumed by trivial and narrow issues of curricula. The informal power of these offices and groups promoting entrepreneurialization has eclipsed the decision-making power of faculty over the campus. Faced with assumed financial hardship, faculty are two versions of the same choice - how to accept cutbacks and reach out to business to offset them.
Across the campus and within colleges and departments, two tiers of the "have" and "have nots" are becoming increasingly entrenched. As we've seen at UT- Austin, across the campus, fields such as engineering are faring increasingly better than liberal arts (not to mention traditionally commercially viable areas such as business and law) in faculty hiring, endowed chairs, research money, and administrative financial support. Just by entering any engineering building on campus, the reason becomes clear. Many class rooms have engraved signs indicating corporate sponsorship of that space. However, the reasons are much more fundamental. Funding flows increasingly to academic areas more successful and willing to submit and reprioritize their activities to serve the needs of business. For example, many of the older buildings composing the main campus that mostly serve the liberal arts and natural sciences continue to carry asbestos while tens of millions of dollars are spent to construct new state of art facilities for the College of Engineering.
Campus priorities reflect the commercial viability of particular academic programs. This is increasingly becoming the case even within departments. In the Department of Sociology, for example, the Population Research Center, which conducts mostly quantitative demographic studies, is heralded for its successful collaborations with government agencies, research funding, and support of graduate students as research assistants. As a result, a split is being engineered in the department between the "demographers" and the "theorists," the later whom are called upon to behave more like the former. As a result, the department is increasingly finding itself under pressure to further subject its research and teaching to the needs of business. For example, those faculty and students lacking outside or UT research support end up subsidizing necessities of their work such as photocopying, faxes and 800 WATS line use from their own salaries.
Since the mid-1980s many students have openly criticized UT-Austin for putting too much emphasis on "research" rather than "teaching". Such a criticism overlooks that both are integrally related in the university's mission to deliver well-trained and disciplined skilled workers. In fact, this cry could be interpreted as the complaints of those who want to be trained that they are being ignored. Perhaps the critique is not as simple. As the university becomes to operate more and more as a business, those areas of teaching and research receiving adequate administrative support are those that best demonstrate their commercial potential. Such potential is not limited only to the development of new technologies but also in the transferring of basic skills such as statistics and writing necessary for training as a researcher. The Sociology Department, although it has very few undergraduates, receives much of its funding based on outside undergraduate enrollment in statistics courses taught by demography faculty. As a result, the department is financially rewarded for its service to more commercial academic programs.
The key trend is departments, colleges and research centers engaging in the training of students with skills desired by companies and research leading to the development of new profitable products do not face financial hardship. Those programs that do not successfully serve their interests or outright resist serving them face the brunt of a manufactured austerity that restricts their flow of funding and research support. As a result, many of these areas reprioritize their teaching to create classes that pass along basic work-related skills rather than abstract critical thinking or the examination of scientific issues or technologies useful so other sectors of society. Again, this is the case in the Sociology Department which requires all Ph.D program students to take two courses in quantitative methods whether studying it or not and has a larger abundance of faculty concentrating on those areas than others.
Those faculty and students engaged in research and study in commercially profitable areas are rewarded with not only funding, but smaller and accessible classes, research money, and employment. On the other hand, students and faculty continuing to pursue knowledge for their own curiosity face budget cuts, tuition and fee increases, overcrowded classes, and increased workloads - not to mention decreasing power to affect how the university is being run.
Yet, these changes reflect only the effects of entrepreneurialization at the institutional structural level. The picture is incomplete. When we take into account the historical context of global socio-political conflict that gave rise the crisis of control over the universities and the continuing struggles of students to also reorganize the universities to serve their multiple needs, entrepreneurialization appears to be a process of change characterized by conflict, antagonism and struggle.
From Analysis to Resistance
As we saw in chapter 3, the most significant vulnerability of student resistance movement has been not simply their inability to recognize the university as a productive part of capitalist social relations but to fight it as such.[76] Offering an a-historical critique of university collaboration with business and the military cannot help us to understand what is happening all about us. The point is also not to ensure that everyone reaches the same level of "consciousness" about what is happening, only understand better what we are facing and fighting and that we are not alone on any given campus or even inside arbitrary national borders.
This analysis of entrepreneurialization is not to simply decry the soiling of the university by capital but to demonstrate that it long been an important part of capital. By studying the current reorganization we can understand how the university's relationships to other institutions of capital are transformed because of the class struggle. Unfortunately, many of these analyses of the commercialization process never make it this far but "call for the displacement of the master by the slave, the slave or student who the university was 'originally meant for.' Insofar as the university was originally 'meant for' the students, rather than the corporations."[77] The question at hand is to understand the role of the university in reproducing capitalist social relationships and how they are and can be disrupted and further destabilized not simply changing those who control it. For example, if in the process of entrepreneurialization, US universities are blocked from fully participating in the global economy by militant student and faculty protest movements, these universities will lose or default on billions of dollars of investments causing a financial collapse on the level of at least the S&L banking crisis.
Perhaps Alain Touraine best perceived the inseparability of the entrepreneurializing university and the changing relationship of the student movement in class struggle, asking: "If it is true that knowledge and technical progress are the motors of the new society, as the accumulation of capital was the motor of the preceding (industrial) society, does not the university then occupy the same place as the great capitalist enterprise formerly did? Thus, is not the student movement, in principle at least, of the same importance as the labour movement of the past?"[78]
I disagree that the university and the student movement are somehow displacing the "great capitalist enterprise" and the traditionally conceived labour movement but rather recognize the need to reevaluate their ever-changing relationship. US based universities are going through the beginning of what may fundamentally transform their relationship to other sectors of society. While these relationships change so do the relationships of those affected by them. As the universities become overt businesses, students, faculty and researchers will need to be reevaluated not only to understand the extent to which what they do is productive labor but also to recognize the ways in which they resist further subordination to work and the market brought about by entrepreneurialization. For this reason, chapters 5-6 is an intervention into this ongoing theoretical discussion by attempting to reevaluate the conflicting relationship of students within the universities.
Bibliography
[1] For industrialization see: Barrow, 1990; Upton Sinclair, The Goose Step: A Study of Higher Education, Pasadena Ca.: self-published, 1922; David Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, NY: Knopf, 1977; and Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, NY: Sagamore Press, 1918, 1957. For militarization see Committee for Non-Violent Research, Going for Broke: The University and the Military-Industrial Complex, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982; Noble, 1977; Howard Ehrlich, "The University-Military Connection," Social Anarchism: A Journal of Practice and Theory, nos. 8&9, 1985, p. 3-21; Robert Krinsky, "Swords Into Sheepskins," Science for the People, Jan/Feb, 1988, p. 2-5; David Wilson (volume editor), The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, "Universities and the Military," Newbury Park: Sage, Vol. 502, March 1989; Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State University of New York, 1990; and Barrow, 1990.
[2] Barrow, p. 82-83.
[3] Harry Cleaver, "Marxian Theory and the Inversion of Class Perspective in its Concepts: Two Case Studies," draft paper, April, 1989, p. 6.
[4] Cleaver, p. 5.
[5] Cleaver writes: "The introduction of new technologies, of new organizations of machinery and workers, if successful, results in the undermining of workers' struggles and their reduction, once more, to the status of labor power. But whatever new 'class composition' is achieved, it only becomes the basis for further conflicts because the class antagonism can only be managed, it cannot be done away with. Thus, these three new concepts, one static and two dynamic, provide guides to the analysis of what have come to be called 'cycles of class struggle,' wherein the upswing in such a cycle involves a period of political recomposition by workers and the downswing, however much the workers win or lose, a process of class decomposition through which capital reestablishes sufficient control to continue its overall management of society." p. 5.
[6] Noble, 1977, P. xxii: "An essentially human phenomenon, technology is thus a social process; it does not simply stimulate social development from outside but, rather, constitutes fundamental social development in itself: the preparation, mobilization, and habituation of people for new types of productive activity, the reorientation of the pattern of social investment, the restructuring of social institutions, and, potentially, the redefinition of social relationships."
[7] Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State University of New York, 1990; Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder, The University Means Business, Toronto: Garamond, 1988; and V. Hugo Aboites, "Economic Globalization and the Transformation of the Mexican University," undated manuscript.
[8] John Schloerb, "Which Way CRIM? The Military, Industry and Academic Enquiry," in Committee for Non-Violent Research, Going for Broke: The University and the Military Industrial Complex, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982, p. 11.
[9] David Madsen, "The Land-Grant University: Myth and Reality," chapter 3 in G. Lester Anderson (ed.), Land-Grant Universities and Their Continuing Challenge, Michigan State Univ. Press, 1976, p. 24, 34-35
[10] Barrow, p. 134.
[11] See Barrow, 1990; and Noble, 1977.
[12] Richard Abrams, "The US Military and Higher Education: A Brief History," in David Wilson, 1989, p. 16; and David Madsen, p. 32.
[13] The concept of primitive accumulation is discussed by Karl Marx in the last chapter of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, NY: Vintage, 1977. Carey Eskridge and I are currently exploring this argument in our research.
[14] Barrow documents that agri-business composed between 43-50% of the membership of midwestern land grant university boards of trustees until the early 1900s. (p. 56) Their domination was often challenged by the Grange, Farmers' Alliance and Populist Party movements who actively resisted their control and ran opposition candidates, at one point actually composing 29% of these boards during the period 1881-1900. (p. 58)
[15] Bow argues that "This shift constituted an opening through which businessmen acquired an institutional capacity to reconstitute dramatically the intellectual labor process with modernizing policies." (p. 60)
[16] Slaughter offers this interpretation. Corporate executives "development strategy turns on 'privatization,' or socializing the costs of development, maintaining profits, and hoping that prosperity will expand to include the majority of the citizenry. The public is asked to spend increasing amounts of tax dollars to underwrite university-industry agreements." (p. 46-7)
[17] This process has occurred much later in Mexico, for example. Aboites argues that the current reorganization of Mexican universities is an attempt to undermine the use of the universities for those in areas of society other than business. (p. 22)
[18] Lightner Witmer, The Nearing Case, NY: B.W. Huebsch, 1915; Veblen, 1918; Scott Nearing, "Who's Who Among College Trustees?" School and Society 6, September 8, 1917; Faculty of Colorado College, Report on College and University Administration, General Series no. 94, Colorado Springs: Colorado College Publications, 1917; J.A. Leighton, "Report of Committee T on the Place and Function of Faculties in University Government Administration," Bulletin of the AAUP 6, March 1920, p. 17-47; Sinclair, 1922, p. 454-459; and Barrow, 1990, p. 88-94 and 180-182. A good example of such resistance occurred with the defeat of a corporate initiated bill to establish engineering experiment stations modeled after agricultural stations because of opposition to public subsidization of industry. (Noble, p. 136) From its very inception the AAUP, however, accepted the corporate control and organization of the university and attempted to work within it to defend tenure while also participating in their militarization. (Barrow, p. 130-131, 171-173 and 255).
[19] Henry Pritchett, "Shall the University Become a Business Corporation?" Atlantic Monthly 96, September 1905, p. 289-99; and Pritchett quoted in Kenneth Trombley, The Life and Times of a Happy Liberal: A Biography of Moris Llewellyn Cooke, NY: Harper, 1954, p. 6-11. (Cited in Barrow, p. 66-67)
[20] C.R. Mann, "A study of Engineering Education," Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bulletin No. 11, 1918, in Otis Lancaster, "The Future of Engineering Education in Land-grant Universities, ch. 6 in G. Lester Anderson (ed.), Land-Grant Universities and Their Continuing Challenge, Michigan State Univ. Press, 1976, p. 110-111.
[21] Morris Cooke, "Academic and Industrial Efficiency," CFAT Bulletin no. 5, Boston: Merrymount Press, 1910, p. 21.
[22] Although much attention has been focused on the effects of WWII on the universities, they can be seen as simply extensions of the developments that took place during and after WWI. Contrary to prevailing historical accounts, the subordination of the universities to the state, national policy-making and planning did not begin with WWII but was deepened by it.
[23] Noble, p. 233; and Veblen , p. 73-77.
[24] Simon Marginson, "Competent for What?," Arena Magazine, date unavailable, reprinted in Processed World, no. 31, Summer-Fall, 1993, p. 48-49. This is an analysis of educational reforms in Australia.
[25] George Mirick, Progressive Education, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1923, p. 202, 306. See also John Trumpbour, "Blinding Them with Science: Scientific Ideologies in the Ruling of the Modern World," in John Trumpbour (ed.), How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, p. 231. Trumpbour documents numerous Harvard professors promotion of Taylorism with the strange claim that universities resisted the implementation of scientific management for fifty years.
[26] Robert Reich, The Work of Nations, NY: Vintage, 1991, p. 59-60.
[27] Cited in Reich, p. 60.
[28] Barrow, p. 79. Quotes from Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1965, p. 308.
[29] Marietta Baba, "University Innovation to Promote Economic Growth and University/Industry Relations," chapter 11 in Pier Abetti, Christopher LeMaistre, Raymond Smilor and William Wallace (eds.) Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: The Roles of Industry, Small Business Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and the Universities, Austin: IC2, no date, p. 201.
[30] Richard Lyman, witness to US Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor, Special Subcommittee on Education, "Student Financial Assistance/Graduate Programs, State Programs and Grants," 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, June 4, 1974, p. 17
[31] See testimonies of two university presidents concerning the crisis of higher education and the student revolt A. Bartlett Giametti, witness, US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Labor and Human Resources, Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities, "Basic Skills, 1979," 96th Congress, 1st Session (February 13, 1979), from document attached, Giametti, "Sentimentality,' Yale Alumni Magazine, (January 1976), pgs. 39 and 40; and Wesley W. Posvar, witness, US Congress, Senate Committee on Human Resources, Subcommittee on Health and Science Research, "National Science Foundation Authorization Legislation," 95th Congress, 1st Session (March 3, 1977), p. 147.
[32] Henry Pritchett, "Shall the University Become a Business Corporation?", Atlantic Monthly September 1905, p. 289-99.
[33] Noble, quotes Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler in 1916 and University of Buffalo chancellor Samuel Chapen in 1922 who were quite explicit about the university being a business. (p. 145-6)
[34] Samuel Capen "Inaugural Address," October 28, 1922, Capen Papers, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives.
[35] The human capital investment strategy will be more fully examined in chapter four.
[36] Janice Newson, "The University of the 1990s: Harbinger of the Post-Industrial State," presented at the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association Meetings, May-June 1992, at the University of Prince Edward Island, p. 21. See also Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder, The University Means Business, Toronto: Garamond, 1988, P. 81 and 85; and Howard Buchbinder and Janice Newson, "Corporate-university linkages in Canada: transforming a public institution," Higher Education, 1990, n. 20, p. 368-69.
[37] Howard Buchbinder and Janice Newson, "The Service University and Market Forces," Academe, July-August, 1992, p. 14.
[38] This is the extent of Derek Bok's critique. Liz McMillen, "Quest for Profits May Damage Basic Values of Universities, Harvard's Bok Warns," The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 24, 1991, p. Al-31.
[39] Leonard Minsky, "Greed in the Groves: Part Two," Thought & Action, Fall 1984, vol. 1, n. 1, p. 46.
[40] Former Stanford president Donald Kennedy explained that with "the commercialization of gene splicing...the value added part of the process has somehow shifted from the applied phase, usually conducted in an industrial setting, into the university laboratory." We could also add, the applied phase occurs within the cell itself which has become a biological factory. (Quoted in Nicholas Wade, "Gold Pipettes Make for Tight Lips," Science, vol. 212, no. 19, 1981, p. 1368.)
[41] Henry Morgan, "Pickled in Brine: The Possible Costs of Speculation," Academe, September-October, 1990, P. 22-26. Surprisingly, Morgan is dean emeritus of BU's School of Management.
[42] For further detail refer to my unpublished MA thesis: UT Inc.: Austerity and Entrepreneurialization at the University of Texas at Austin, unpublished master's thesis, 1992.
[43] For more on the socialization of costs see David Noble, "Higher education takes the low road," Newsday, October 8, 1989, P. 7; and Slaughter, p. 46-7.
[44] David Noble, "The Multinational University," Zeta Magazine, April 1989, p. 22. This article retains less of a nationalistic bent than his earlier work. In this article, his warnings of US-Japanese corporate collaboration is retorted with warnings to academics in Japanese universities undergoing similar pressures to submit to pressures of commercialization.
[45] David Noble, "The Selling of the University," The Nation, February 6, 1982, p. 1, 143-48; Noble and Nancy Pfund, "The Plastic Tower: Business Goes Back to College," The Nation, September 20, 1980, p. 246-252; David Noble, "Science for Sale," Thought & Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, Fall, 1984, p. 25-40. Agreeing with David Noble, Elliot Negin found rising tuition funding corporate research projects fueling the commercialization of the university. (Elliot Negin, "Why College Tuitions are So High," The Atlantic, March, 1993, p. 32-34, 43-44.)
[46] Dorothy Zinberg, "Don't Tie Foreign Students to Black Ph.D. Drop," letter to editor, The New York Times, May 12, 1992.
[47] Robin Wilson, "Foreign Students in US Reach a Record 386,000," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 1990, p. Al.
[48] Beverly Watkins, "Foreign Enrollment in US Colleges and Universities Totaled 419,585 in 1991-92, an All-Time High," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 25, 1992, p. A28.
[49] Watkins; and Anthony DePalma, "As Black Ph.D.'s Taper Off, Aid for Foreigners is Assailed," The New York Times, April 21, 1992. In comparison, 41.8% "american" students received support from universities.
[50] Watkins.
[51] UT-Austin, Office of Institutional Studies, Statistical Handbook, 1991-1992, p. 10, 13-14, and 33-34.
[52] Jack Trumpbour, "How Harvard rules," Z, November 1989, p. 54.
[53] Hugo Aboites, "Integracion Economica y Educacion Superior. TLC y Educacion Superior en Estados Unidos y Mexico," draft manuscript, Octubre, 1993, discusses other efforts by Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley as well.
[54] C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, P. 95-6.
[55] Strangely enough, Veblen's study can also be used as a case example of the repression inflicted on critics of academic industrialization documented by Barrow. Not once does Veblen ever mention a specific university or person by name.
[56] Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State University of New York, 1990.
[57] Arthur Stinchcombe, "University Administration of Research Space and Teaching Loads: Managers Who Do Not Know What Their Workers Are Doing," chapter 9 in Information and Organizations, Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1990.
[58] Charles Beta, Restructuring the University, unpublished BA Thesis, University of Minnesota, 1991.
[59] Charles Beta and Kurt Errickson, "A Question of Focus: The University of Minnesota Has Big Plans for the Future - But They Have More To D With Courting Business and Government Research Contracts Than Educating People," City Pages, August, 1991, reprinted in War Research Information Service, No. 2, August-September 1991, p. 32-4.
[60] Marc Kenen, UMassachusetts in Crisis: Budget Cuts, Military Spending and the Privatization of a Public Research University, 1990.
[61] Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex, New Haven: Yale University, 1986.
[62] Jaron Bourke and Robert Weissman, "Academics at Risk: The Temptations of Profit," Academe, September-October 1990, P. 15-21.
[63] Jonathan Feldman, Universities in the Business of Repression: The Academic-Military-Industrial Complex and Central America, Boston: South End Press, 1989.
[64] Ted Vaughan, "The Crisis in Contemporary American Sociology: A Critique of the Discipline's Dominant Paradigm," and Gideon Sjoberg and Ted Vaughan, "The Bureaucratization of Sociology: Its Impact on Theory and Research," chapters 1 and 2 in Ted Vaughan, Gideon Sjoberg and Larry Reynolds (eds.), A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology, NY: General Hall, 1993.
[65] Nicholas Wade, The Science Business: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Commercialization of Scientific Research, New York: Priority Press, 1984; and Robert Johnston and Christopher Edwards, Entrepreneurial Science: New Links Between Corporations, Universities and Government, New York: Quorum Books, 1987. For a critical assessment of documents produced by the Business-Higher Education Forum see Slaughter, ch. 6-7.
[66] James Fairweather, "The University's Role in Economic Development: Lessons for Academic Leaders," SRA Journal, Winter, 1990, p. 5.
[67] David Gibson, George Kozmetsky, Everett Rogers, and Raymond Smilor, The Technopolis Phenomenon, Austin: IC2, 1990.
[68] George Kozmetsky, "Comment," Discovery: Research and Scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin, vol. 13, no. 1, 1993, p. 2.
[69] David Gibson and Raymond Smilor, "The Role of the Research University in Creating and Sustaining the US Technopolis," p. 31-70, in Alistair Brett, David Gibson, and Raymond Smilor, University Spin-Off Companies: Economic Development, Faculty Entrepreneurs, and Technology Transfer, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
[70] Commercializing SD! Technologies, ed. by Stewart Nozette and Robert Kuhn, NY: Praeger, 1987; and Commercializing Defense Related Technology, ed. by Robert Kuhn, NY: Praeger, 1987. They are collections of presentations from IC2 sponsored conferences.
[71] A few examples of how much useful detail is available although lacking any substantive analysis: Robert Johnston and Christopher Edwards, Entrepreneurial Science: New Links Between Corporations, Universities and Government, NY: Quorum Books, 1987; Stephen Szygenda and Meg Wilson, "Technology Transfer Commercializing University Research," Proceedings of the 1987 Fall Joint Computer Conference, 1987, p. 696-700; Meg Wilson and Stephen Szygenda, "Promoting University Spin-Offs Through Equity Participation," undated manuscript; Stephen Szygenda and Clint Murchison, "Technology Commercialization: A Model," College of Engineering, UT-Austin, manuscript, December 1987; and Meg Wilson, 'The University Role in Commercializing Technology: Building New Relationships," manuscript, Center for Technology Development and Transfer, UT-Austin, date unavailable.
[72] Nicolas Wade, The Science Business: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Commercialization of Scientific Research, NY: Priority Press, 1984.
[73] Richard Anderson, "The Advantage and Risks of Entrepreneurship," Academe, September-October 1990, p. 9-14.
[74] Mark Yudof, "The Burgeoning Privatization of State Universities," The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 1992, p. A48.
[75] Kozmetsky, p. 6.
[76] I do not intend to exclude others inside the university but to focus on that which I know best as a student and participant of student movements. I wish to contribute to Barrow, Newson, Buchbinder, and Aboites' excellent complementary analyses by understanding the relationship of students in the process.
[77] Matt Feuer, "Sell Out? Or the Production of the Student," Coup De Tete, September 1993, 9-10. Feuer is responding to this very type of critique of commercialization that advocates student control and restoration of the ideal university.
[78] Alain Touraine, "Naissance d'un Mouvement Etudiant," Le Monde, March 7 and 8, 1968, translated and quoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, "The Meaning of the Student Revolt," Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn, Baltimore: Penguin and London: New Left Review, 1969, p. 26. Although Jones acknowledges that "student radicalism may be a new social movement at the core of the new forces of production," he denounces Touraine's thesis as "scientifically incorrect and politically reactionary." (p. 27)
Chapter 5. Marginal No More: Student Resistance to Entrepreneurialization as Class Conflict
One mistake radical students have been making in relating to the worst aspects of the multiversity's academic apparatus has been their avoidance of it.
-Carl Davidson[1]
Davidson's critique also applies to most critical observers of the university: in attempting to discuss the university, they have ignored the university. A lot has been written about the presidents, regents and businessmen who run them, income characteristics of students and the various assumed ideals which drive student protest. Far and few between are there actual attempts to understand the causes of the breakdown of the universities and what part students have played in them as students.
As the entrepreneurialization of US-based universities offers evidence of the productive relationship of the university to capital accumulation, it requires that we reevaluate our understanding of what students mean in a capitalist society and student political organization. Are students merely "privileged," "workers" or a combination of both and more? Is student political activity, to the extent that it disrupts the operations of the university, a subsidiary or complementary part of class conflict?
Studies by the Brookings Institute and the Committee for Economic Development in the 1960s showed that higher education was related to one-half the growth rate in the 1950-60s, one-fifth was the direct result of the increased quality of the labor force from education and one-third from "advances in knowledge" applied to the production process.[2] Considering the widespread manufactured disinvestment from higher education since the late 1960s, I am compelled to ask what happened? Since the 1950s much attention has been focused on the contribution of higher education to economic growth in the development of disciplined intellectual labor according to theories of investment in "human capital." With the campus rebellions of the l960-70s, the focus shifted to ongoing discussions of the university's generation of new marketable technologies, start-up of new high tech companies and direct role in the global economy.
While little critical commentary has been offered regarding the productive economic activity of the university in a capitalist society, even less has been offered concerning the dynamics of the internal conflicts and struggles taking place during the transition of the university into an overt multinational business. Critical commentators on the university still hold to the notion of the universities being organized to serve only the development of disciplined labor while ignoring the more direct participation through the process I call entrepreneurialization. The changing "class composition" of the universities has been almost entirely ignored.[3]
Our failure to investigate the class composition of the universities is a direct result of the theoretical failures of our understanding of student political activity. This chapter analyzes the two most common views of students as either "middle class" and "privileged" or working but not part of the working class that is most common among contemporary student activists. As we'll see, both theories rest on an identical assumption of the university as a marginal and unproductive institution in capitalism - the very assumption this dissertation seeks to refute by documenting the continuing reorganization of universities into overt profit-making businesses.
This debilitating assumption has been taken for granted among many student activists, as we saw in the case study of multiculturalism and the rightwing counterattack in chapter 3. Although student activists lacked a thorough analytical critique of the university in capitalism, the repression was predicated upon the threat of the multiculturalism movement to the university's role in capital accumulation. In order to better understand why the movement lacked such a critique we need to look at the theoretical underpinnings that has informed nearly every radical study of students and higher education since the 1960s.
Ironically, the more the managers of higher education have indirectly and sometimes directly attributed the breakdown of the universities to the struggles of faculty and students, the less credit we receive from the left. On the left, there have been a few recurring themes that define the way many look at the universities and students. These themes have received much agreement between a diverse array of theorists and activists who may agree upon little else. The first seems to be a vulgar idea that students are "privileged" because of their location in the university or because of their parent's income level. Such labels as "petit bourgeois" or "middle class" often explicitly or implicitly resound in discussions of students. This one-dimensional thinking has great parlance among students themselves as well who have come to believe that their roles as students are insignificant because of a presumed privilege and thereby prefer to identify with other groups (waged workers, "minorities," black South Africans etc.) who are perceived to be more exploited or less privileged. It is vital to understand how this dynamic is rooted in theories of students as middle class.
Some have attempted to deal with these theories by looking at how students do fit into the working class. "Fit" is the key word here, since students are seen to be part of the working class only because of their work role whether in or after school rather than for their self-activity. As we'll see, many times the working class is boiled down to a category in the strictest sense in which being a worker is to have a specific type of job, level of salary or even a salary itself. Students are then forced into this category since they are being trained to fit into these functions. However, the activity of students as students is neither perceived as productive to accumulation nor are their forms of refusal recognized as class struggle.
Given the reorganization of the universities into overt businesses, students can be understood as unwaged workers - to the extent that they do the work of disciplining themselves to work. Expanding upon the analyses of the "Wages for Students" movement of the 1970s, I argue that student struggle, both against being unwaged workers and in pursuit of their own autonomous projects within the university antagonistic to work, is not subordinate to other sectors of class struggle.
This chapter concludes with an analysis of how these theories implicitly informed the multiculturalism movement at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). In what way did the student organizers failure to develop a critique of UT-Austin as a business in organizing their struggle contribute to the movement's inability to respond to the attempts to coopt and institutional limited demands as well as the repressive countermeasures? In light of my case study of the multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin, a class analysis of the university and student movements can benefit student resistance to entrepreneurialization.
The Myth of Students as Middle Class
Richard Flacks, an early member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) has spent much of his academic career critically investigating student and youth rebellion. In Youth and Social Change (1970) Flacks contends that the student movements of the 1960s grew out of a structural breakdown generated by technological change.[4] Student movements and other "generational revolts occur when societies undergo processes of cultural breakdown" according to Flacks.
Such cultural crises have typically been evident when traditional values, meanings, and norms appear to be obsolete, retrogressive, or incoherent to an increasing number of members of society. Usually these crises are symptomatic of the fact that technological change has rendered traditional practices and institutions irrelevant and has generated a spreading pattern of new hopes, expectations and demands. These new aspirations are, however, not met by existing institutions and by the established structure of authority. Indeed, they are often actively resisted and repressed by those who have power (p. 18).
Flacks assumes that these movements grow out of a structural-functional breakdown of the dialectic.[5] The existing values and norms are no longer suitable due to technological change, the motivation for which is unexplained, that then triggers dissatisfaction. These norms, transferred to the youth by their parents, become irrelevant and leave perceptions of "declining expectations" to repeat in "middle class" jobs and communities. Yet, with the new requirements of technological change, these students no longer have the possibility to continue as middle class (e.g. petit bourgeois), but are in turmoil due to their unpredictable future and "receptive to new values, meanings, and identities" (p. 35).
As a result, the universities appear to breed radical criticism at the same time they are preparing the new managers, a "vanguard" group of middle class intellectual youth who come to be caught between the deterioration of the petit bourgeois and the demands of technological change (p. 52-54). Spurred by the civil rights movement, this vanguard began to perceive of themselves as agents of social change and sought to realize the radicalizing potential of the universities.
They shared with their parents a reverence of the university; like their parents, they found organized religion an inadequate source of values, and perhaps even more than their parents, they identified the university as the sole institution in the society that could facilitate the search for new values and meanings and help define a morally coherent and humanistic way of life. Far from wishing to destroy the university, Flacks sees radical students as among the most committed to its fulfillment as a central institution in their lives (p. 79).
More than making education the "new religion," as Ivan Illich called education in the west,[6] Flacks portrays the university as the final synthesis of the capitalist dialectic, resolving political crises by transferring new values and behavior to the alienated vanguard. Isolated from "the rest of" capitalist society, the universities could serve to resolve the cultural contradictions of technological change.[7] The university
provided a kind of freedom virtually unavailable elsewhere in society. First, time was relatively free and unsupervised. The university student was at once free from the supervision of parents and the regimentation of work situations. His time was his own and he need not account for it to either his parents or his employer (as he would in a work situation). (p. 40)
With all the talk of freedom, Flacks has apparently overlooked the central aspect of school that makes it useful to business: self-managed discipline for work. Work at the university can be more vicious than at a waged job because it has no set work hours or evident boss. Since no one looks over the shoulder of a student or pays for the work, work can conceivably go on all day long - there is no end to the work day. These invisible means for regulating and regimenting the work day defies any universal claim that "his time was his own and he need not account for it" or that it is "free and unsupervised," as Flacks suggests.
Of course, it is not so clear cut. Flacks overlooks the conflicts between the unwaged work of self-discipline and the ideal of the "free and unsupervised" student from which the pursuit of autonomous social projects can emerge when students resist the imposition of self-discipline. At UT-Austin I have found this antagonism quite strong. Many students feel the pressure to work but relay it by accomplishing the most in the least amount of time and effort possible by taking classes that give credit for what they would do anyway, cheating, cooperation, absenteeism, purchasing or trading notes, attending part-time, staying longer and dropping out and back in. With their "free time" carved out by refusing such discipline they have been able to pursue a multitude of projects from publishing alternative newspapers, starting a radio station, playing music, traveling, or organizing protest movements.
Using a structural-functionalist approach, Flacks argues that student rebellion is determined by technological change that renders the traditional social structure irrelevant and raises social expectations. When these expectations are not realized student and youth rebellion limited to aspirations of the middle class results.[8] The crisis of the universities originates in capital's need for new technology. Not only are these developments not explained in terms of the disruption of their usefulness to capital accumulation (which primarily is the accumulation of a class of workers[9]) but it even determines a possible resurgence of activism.[10] Nonetheless, his theories do not fit. If students are "free and unsupervised" within a space that allows for critique how is their rebellion structurally determined? Ironically, although Flacks was a member of one of the students movements that created the crisis, he finds the crisis originated in a structural-functional process of social change.
Jurgen Habermas carries this theme of psychological disruption a bit further in his commentaries on the West German student movement in Toward a Rational Society.[11] Like Flacks, Habermas locates the motivation of the student movement in the breakdown of the university's function of transmitting the "dominant culture".
Habermas finds the 1960s generation to have been the first to have grown up under less burdensome economic conditions and is psychologically less subject to the disciplinary compulsions of the labor market. He hypothesizes a context on the basis of which we can explain the singular sensitivity of young activists: They have become sensitive to the costs for individual development of a society dominated by competition for status and achievement and by the bureaucratization of all regions of life. These costs seem to them disproportionately high in relation to the technological potential. (p. 29)
Put another way, the breakdown of parental authority and the spread of permissive educational systems "make possible experiences and promotes orientations among children that necessarily conflict with the standards of the perpetuated ideology of achievement while simultaneously converging with technologically available, although socially enchained, potential leisure and freedom, gratification and pacification" (p. 30).
There is little difference between Habermas and Flacks on the cause of the movements and their analysis of the role of the universities in a capitalist society. Habermas identifies three functions of the university: to efficiently instill skills and abilities, transmit the dominant culture, and form the political unconsciousness of students (p. 2-4). The crisis erupts as a result of technological imperatives, the student rebellion grows from the structural technological imperative that stirs middle class values of extended leisure. With rising development in the Western countries "the problems of structural social change...once again find in the formative processes of the rising generations a correspondence with psychological development." (p. 30)
Once again, student movements rise out of structural maladjustments of the accumulation process, posing a crisis of values to the middle class youth. Studying the role of education in the production of labor power is forsaken in favor of a superficial articulation of the accepted ideology. Habermas and Flacks never question the myth that education is a "privilege" and not a virtually costless means for developing a potential labor force. In turn, student movements are not struggles against the hidden process of production but a searching for new middle class values of consumption. To them, students organize movements not to realize their own articulated needs and desires, but to defend their narrow middle class interests so as to bypass the psychological disruptions of economic reorganization.
Education is seen as subordinate to production, not a part of the process of circulation, a "use value", of "exchange values" writes Habermas (p. 48). It is no more than a distribution system of social status that is challenged in the process of conflict, not a hidden part of production. Habermas' failure to apply a class analysis to education itself leaves his analysis looking much like the Carnegie Commission's,[12] by calling for the development of more critical professionals, subordinating research to popular needs, and equalizing access to the status rewards of the university (p. 47-48). When he dismissed the student movements' claim that students are workers, even going so far as to say that the movements are entirely unrelated across national boundaries, it is not shocking to read that he disagrees that student movements are a part of international circulation of class struggle (p. 35). This conclusion is easily reached by dismissing any significant meaning of the universities in capitalist society except as a functional institution. If students have no strategic place to play his call for student/faculty councils to run the universities would eventually backfire. If students are socially insignificant, then such a strategy would be no more than sloganeering designed to allow the faculty, who like him have rejected any suggestion that the student movements have ruptured accumulation, a foothold in what they have long abandoned.
Instead of using the university for "pseudo-revolutionary adventures," Habermas argues, "the movement should aim at creating for it an institutional framework that would make it possible to undo the interlocking of instruction and research with power and privilege inside and outside the university" (p. 46). Aside from proposing that the struggles inside the universities could and should speak for those outside it, he attests to the need to preserve not just the universities but make them more efficient in their tasks. Thus, turned against the students who seek to burn the universities down, Habermas offers a fire extinguisher. Now the universities are not only linked to "outside" struggles as their vanguard but are made even more efficient in their calling to resolve structural complications.
So too does Robert Paul Wolff, in the Ideal of the University, set aside the student movements in the U.S. in favor of preserving his ideal university.[13] Rejecting the movement's analysis that students are workers in the corporate universities (p. 44-45), Wolff from a counterview of faculty as the actual workers, with the students acting as a consumers, investing in their own human capital (which we will soon discuss in relation to Gary Becker) to the universities being an assembly line for the production of "establishment man", which are really no more than middle level managers[14] (p. 50). In fact, by the end of the book, the university appears as neither. Instead, it has become a place of "free inquiry" (p. 56) that is being corrupted by outside forces that have imposed on it arbitrary rules and regulations such as grading, admissions and sorting mechanisms.[15] While the university is far from neutral, Wolff pines for the old days when the campus was a community and an assembly line left to "intellectual maturation" (p. 150).
Like Habermas, Wolff hypothesizes the taking power by the university student/faculty community with the goal of returning to his self-described utopian campus of intellectual pursuits. "Utopian" may be a misnomer for his vision since the Carnegie Commission's reforms look quite like Wolff's community of scholars. Some of their reforms are even identical: reduce the undergraduate education to three years, abolish the Ph.D. and replace it with a three year professional degree for college teaching. While some of his other reform ideas were not replicated by Carnegie (abolish grades, sever the professional schools and create random admissions) functionally they serve the same purpose of institutionalizing student's limited demands for reforms to reimpose control over the campuses. In the meanwhile, the universities could keep churning out "establishment men," Wolff's term for students.
The same problem can be raised with Wolff's analysis as well as Habermas' and Flack's: the universities reproduction of labor power is never challenged and students resistance to that reproduction is nonexistent. Instead, Wolff sees the assembly line as something imposed from the outside on the university (p. 53), which is seen as marginal to economic production, totally divorced from its pursuit of profit through the imposition of work. Without recognizing the centrality of the university in the sphere of circulation, Wolff's ideal reforms are easily complementary to capital's dire need to reestablish control inside them. His analysis speaks to capital's search for an answer to a crisis wrought by student and faculty struggles - ironically it is even complementary to National Association of Scholars' current proposal for returning to the classics - not to students desires to transform or even explode the university. The class content of the struggles is gutted in favor of restoring the universities role by resolving supposed structural-functional crises generated by changing capitalist imperatives. Flacks' analysis has come full circle, choking the necks of the student movements like a noose.
Implicit in Wolff's characterization of the assembly line rolling off new units of "establishment man" is the concept of education as consumption. Rather than seeing education as producing labor power, leftist consumptionist theories accept the notion of human capital that education is an investment in oneself that later results in a higher standard of living without questioning its fundamental basis. In other words, because a student is consuming and paying to do so, education must be a privilege restricted to only those who can afford to do so. Ironically, not only is this the mask spread over education, but it is dated even by common knowledge that the expansion of higher education in the late 1950s was seen as tied to economic growth. Even today, neo-classical economics uses education to account for residuals in growth that cannot be specifically accounted for.
Yet, even in the face of such evidence that education is a source of growth and profits, the left still persists in calling students consumers. Michael Miles writes that "the position of students is not the role of the proletariat but, on the closest analogy, the role of consumers.
The outputs of the higher educational system are educational credentials, which determine the holders' place in the labor market on the presumption that they represent mental skills and intellectual training. In this enterprise, the major universities certify the elite cadres, while the lesser institutions turn out trained manpower. Although these degrees and credentials are the main products of the educational institutions, students are in a sense not only consumers of the products but the products themselves.[16]
A few years later Gintis and Bowles would subscribe to a similar model of education which they called the "correspondence principle" which suggests, as Miles does, that education mirrors ones position elsewhere in the economy.
The irony of the theory of students as consumers is that it fetishizes credentials and status in the form of degrees and grades in the same way the universities present them as rewards. Each of these supposedly indicates the promised students' future standard of living and status in society. However, what is ignored is the means in which grades and degrees are used to measure, channel, and divide students among themselves and serve labor planning. The difference between universities and community colleges are not strictly the graduates' wages as much as the work they do in school. Low entropy students generally make it up the educational hierarchy while the slackers are kept below. Even university students are subject to such evaluations that are used to channel them from "state" to "research" or "undergraduate" to "graduate" universities. Grades indicate both the amount of work a student has done and the quality, or the extent to which the students fulfill the expectations of the authority structure. Grades hypothetically lead to a degree which indicates to a potential university or employer that the individual did the required amount of work in the prescribed amount of time and has the potential to do so again. According to the rhetoric, grades serve like company script which can be turned in upon graduation for a certain wage.
Left theories of students as consumers shamelessly fail to recognize how what are described as beneficial are actually used against them as forms of control and work. The student as consumer reinforces the ideology of education as privileged access to a piece of the socio-economic pie. However, as the percentage of people who attend college rises and employment opportunities dry up due to automation, telecommunications and capital flight, these pieces are no longer guaranteed. Students may not graduate with a guaranteed step on the ladder but they are stamped with the assumed seal of quality self-discipline that will contribute to their productivity and their employers profits in a waged job.
This is especially so in the case of the draft which ranked students based upon grades and area of study. According to a document liberated from the Selective Service, deferments were used as a means to channel youth into various types of work, including school. The term "deferment" is used
to describe the method and means used to attract to the kind of service considered the most important, the individuals who were not compelled to do it. The club of induction has been used to drive out of areas considered to be less important to areas of greater importance in which deferments were given, the individuals who did not or could not participate in activities which were considered essential to the defense of the Nation.[17]
In other words, for the Selective Service, students were no more than labor power being driven to areas of training that were most needed by business. "The psychology of granting wide choice under pressure to take action is the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted," the planners wrote themselves. By exposing the use of grades, degrees, deferments, and wages as part of a process of labor distribution and control, the notion of free choice that lies behind theories of students as consumer is shattered.
Another twist to the student as consumer argument is the view that students are a product. In the absence of an understanding who does the work of producing the student and what exactly is produced, such an approach frequently becomes reduced to a view of students of as tabula rasa, blank slates to be written upon at will. Not only is this hardly been the case since the mid 1960s, but to see students this way is to disempower them by reducing the process to a one-sided passive activity.
These theorists abandonment of the class struggle inside the university left open a space for Ernest Mandel to charge through with The Revolutionary Student Movement: Theory and Practice.[18] Giving ideological lip service (with slogans like "revolutionary youth") to a role for students in revolutionary struggle, Mandel attempts to capitalize on the theoretical vacuum on the left to insert the student movement into an effort to build a vanguard party. Dismissing claims that students are workers, Mandel easily finds student self-activity insufficient as long as it remains confined to a struggle against the university (p. 5). Student struggles over the conditions and content of education are a dead end; "the mainspring of the revolt would persist even if these material conditions were corrected (p. 7). "Student power" is meaningless since the root of the problem for students is the capitalist economy that has invaded the universities. Seeking a "transitional slogan" to draw in those students who have not seen the priority of the larger struggle "outside" the universities, student power is limited because it "would not change the roots of alienation of students because these do not lie in the university itself but in society as a whole" (p. 9).
Dismissing the claim that students are workers as "bourgeois," he posits the university as Flacks and the others do as separate and margin to the economy. In his passing critique of liberal reformers, Mandel suggests that they would only serve to further the invasion of business in the universities (pgs. 7- 8). Likewise, the students themselves may begin their struggles by resisting the universities and seek to change them but that in itself is limited. While it is valid to attack any idea that the university is isolated from other sectors of capitalist society, Mandel abuses this to suggest the reverse: that rather than isolated, the universities are a subordinate institution: "The structure of the bourgeois universities is only a reflection of the general hierarchic structure of bourgeois society," he writes (p. 6). Thus, what is required is that the movement "spill over the limits of the university" to achieve its revolutionary subjectivity.
This "spill over" is suggested in order to establish subordinate links with Third World Liberation movements (p. 9-10) and the industrial working class (p. 25). At this point can students gain revolutionary consciousness by studying Marx and socialism, finally offering a contribution to the revolution (p. 18). It is at this point that the struggle has transcended the limits of the struggle against the university and raised the necessity of the party.
Like the others we've discussed, Mandel places the university on the margins in order to save it. He begins by prompting students to "spill over" in order to distract them from burning them down so that they can return later to work in them after the revolution. Certainly, the university are important, Mandel implies, even if students themselves are not - especially if they do not pledge their allegiance to the waged working class. Here raises the unresolved contradiction of left theories of the university: the universities are important - if only marginally - but students themselves are not. Only the worst mind games can hide this, but never any better than the planners who utilize the same myth of the insignificance of students to maintain the unwaged reproduction of labor power.
Much of Mandel's analysis has become the commonly agreed upon analysis of higher education for many "white" radical student activists. Groups such as the Progressive Student Network, the Student Environmental Action Coalition and many local independent "progressive" campus groups have accepted the notion that students themselves are insignificant in absence of their service to struggles outside the university or those of waged university employees or people of color who are perceived to be more oppressed. As a result, many student movements that gained ground in the 1980s such the anti-apartheid, anti-CIA and anti-intervention movements did so at the expense of circulating the struggle to millions of other students fighting their own struggles against school/work, austerity, cutbacks, and for enlargened social wages and protection from sexual violence. While these movements have contributed to the continued disruption of the universities, they have self-circumcised themselves by ignoring their relationship as students to the university itself and the relationship to a host of other struggles taking place alongside them but with hardly any public exposure.
Working But Not Workers
One of the problems with these theories of students as the middle class, Carlos Munoz points out is that "it is generally not placed in the context of class conflict."[19] Some attempts to answer the charge that students are part of the middle class posited students as part of a "new working class" yet not as workers themselves, as those who see the school as a social factory have attempted to do.
Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, who were also active in SDS for a few years, attacked the idea that students are middle class as destructive to attempts to relate student struggles to those of other parts of the working class. Not only do they attack the "Old Left's" demand that students subordinate their struggles to that of industrial workers (which were assumed to be the real proletariat) but it is
blind to the real role of the multiversity in the transformation of the labor force and the training of a new and vitally important sector of the work force to fit the needs of the new technology, but it was attempting to enforce false consciousness within one group in the society - a group which was beginning to develop a revolutionary class consciousness of its relationship to the means of production. Old Left ideological categories centering on 'the industrial working class' hindered rather than aided the development of socialist consciousness among students. In calling students 'middle class,' the Old Left was promoting a false picture of class relations in the society - a false picture which was precisely the same as that promoted by the governing ideology.[20]
Michael Spiegel, former SDS National Secretary, is cited by Neiman and Calvert as an extension of their attack. Clearly, the concept of students as middle class does not grow out of the expressions of students themselves, but has been imposed from elsewhere, creating a schizophrenic disruption between experience and ideology. Spiegel explains that
A consciousness which defines students as members of the elite is obviously destructive not only to the establishment of our own identity as radicals but also to our ability to become a vehicle for the challenging of ruling class values. We cannot see ourselves building a totally declasse movement of people who stand outside of the classes of society as pure revolutionaries. One may be able to build a cadre who perceive themselves in that way, but not mass movement. A mass movement must grow out of the experiences and oppression of people's lives. An organization must see itself as being able to speak for a group of people out of a set of values, but to accept the false definition of the role of students in this society denies us the ability to build anything more than a small organization of guilty, alienated youth who see themselves as 'denying class privilege' (an unheard of basis for building a mass movement).
Spiegel's analysis is quite prophetic today. Because the student movements were not able to heed his warning that they base themselves on the experiences of students, much student activism since the 1960s has been based upon "guilt politics" where "white" activists act not so much because it is an expression of their own resistance to their oppression as students but because out of a rejection of privilege that contributes to the oppression and exploitation of others. In a sense, the notion of students as middle class has served to not only keep students divided from the rest of the working class by tainting them as inflictors of exploitation but has perpetuated a paternalism within the working class generated by those perceived as privileged aspiring to dedicate their lives to serving those perceived to be more exploited and thus powerless.
Spiegel rejects this paternalism and intra-class division by examining the actual social relationships of students. While Spiegel does not conceive of students as oppressed, he does offer a substantial methodology for relating the struggles of students to other struggles, something few other theorists of student struggles have been able or willing to do.
A class is defined by its relationship to the means of production: by whether or not it control those means and has the power to direct their course. As students, it would be difficult to say that we are oppressed - but our class situation is certainly not one of control over the means of production (or of eventual control over them) - at least this is true for the vast majority of students. Thus our interests lie with others who have the same relationship to the means of production (for most of them, their material condition is also much worse than students - they are more clearly "oppressed"). The values of a student struggle must be seen as part of a broader class struggle against the ruling class. (Even though the other elements of the struggle may not have emerged yet, the values must show implicit support of other potential struggles.)
A correct understanding of our own consciousness in these terms makes it possible for us to not only "fight our own battles," but also to link up with other groups of oppressed people (in determining values, conscious strategy and direction, if not in tactical or strategic coalition.) If we are to direct our struggle against the oppression of all people, we must first be clear about our own relationship to the class structure of America. No organization ever succeeded in building a strong movement for social change out of guilt - by building the consciousness of a movement on the motivation that one is in fact a member of the class of the oppressors and must salve that guilt. If we are to go beyond the politics of alienation, we must be able to present students with an analysis which does not motivate them to move out of guilt produced by false consciousness. In this respect, the widespread use of the concept of manpower channeling when working with draft resistance has been very important...Manpower channeling is no replacement for a class analysis by destroying the self-concept in middle class students that they are members of the ruling class and that their interests are thus tied to that class.[21]
However, this attempt to articulate a relationship between students and "workers" turns into a strategic dead end because Calvert, Neiman and Spiegel are all unclear on exactly what students mean in a capitalist society. Students are neither workers nor are they part of the middle or ruling class. It appears that they desire to destroy the idea of students being privileged but are afraid to call them workers. Such ambivalence becomes apparent when Calvert and Neiman dismiss calling students middle class as a myth perpetuated by the ruling class "to obscure their real position in society" as "pre-workers, trainees for the new jobs created by advanced industrial technology" needed to run the empire (p. 56). While the university creates these pre-workers and serves the repressive needs of the military to control the empire, and perpetuates competition between students and reproduces the ideology of capitalism, being a student itself never factors into the equation capital accumulation, from Calvert and Neiman's and Spiegel's points of view. In fact, students are only workers once they leave the universities and become waged workers.
While Calvert and Neiman attack the Marxist-Leninist position that students are not a revolutionary force as students and must subordinate themselves to the waged industrial class to be part of that force, they are also unable explain what makes students revolutionary as students. The only difference with Marxist-Leninists they attack, is students are revolutionary only because they will be waged workers after they leave the university. But students, the "ghetto poor", unemployed and rural poor, are "peripheral" to the means of production because they do not have jobs and are not a force of "socialist revolution" (p. 99). In effect, while they suggest we examine the conditions of students, they fail to do so themselves. For them, their lack of a formal wage indicates that they are not really workers and do not contribute to the accumulation of capital.
This analysis is replicated by David Smith in Who Rules the Universities.[22] Smith explains that with the reorganization of higher education following WWII to begin training working class youth, an expanded conception of the working class became necessary. With the new technological imperatives discussed above, these working class students are trained to become low level managers and skilled workers that can be described as part of the "new working class" (p. 12). What is unique to his approach is that students need to be considered as part of the working class, if not for what they do as students as much as kinship or as future members of it.
Similar to Gintis and Bowles efforts in Schooling in Capitalist America, Smith begins by offering a long account of monopoly capital's invasion into the universities that were under the control of the churches and aristocratic elite. Ignoring that the universities have long since served the purposes of business through research and the training of a selected capitalist elite, Smith demonstrates that with the rise of the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations the new focus of the universities became the development of technology and workers (p. 119). Nearly mimicking Mandel and Wolff, Smith ascertains that the universities were invaded by business: "The systematic organization of the universities thus mirrored and contributed to the systematic [sic] organization of capital itself taking place during this era [turn of the 20th century]"[23] (p. 139-140). In the drive to capture the universities, Smith also portrays "monopoly capital" as entirely in control of a passive working class.
While recognizing that "the principal relation between higher education and capitalism resided in the production of a new type of labor power," John Beverly surprisingly finds that "higher education cannot be considered a branch of capitalist production per se" (p. 69, 75).[24] Rather, "higher education [is] a dependent and subsidiary institution of capitalist society involved in particular with the training of certain areas of the labor force and (as in the past) with the elaboration of the technical and ideological practices that permit the maintenance of the capitalist system" (p. 75). Students are found to be part of the working class as far as their families (read: waged relatives) are or, confusingly, as far as "their work as students in higher education increasingly takes the form of an apprenticeship for wage-paid labor." (p. 74) In short the absence of the wage means students are not workers. Ironically, although seeing universities as "large socialized workplaces" and calling for a class analysis of the crisis he can only recognize class struggle occurring within the university among waged workers. Nonetheless, he analyzes strategic relationships between struggles within and outside the university and rejects the subordination of the former to the latter (p. 86).
Gintis and Bowles, however, see a different history of education, one wracked by class struggle. "The organization of education...has taken distinct and characteristic forms in different periods of US history, and has evolved in response to political and economic struggles associated with the process of capital accumulation," they write in what could be taken as a retort to Smith (p.12). Gintis and Bowles make this clear: "The three turning points in U.S. educational history [land grant colleges, progressive education and the growth of the universities] which we have identified all corresponded to particularly intense periods of struggle around the expansion of capitalist production relations" (p. 234). While Gintis and Bowles nearly abandon the implications of recognizing that the struggles of the working class have shaped the structure of education as business has sought to control them, it lays the groundwork for understanding the contemporary crisis of higher education discussed above (chapters 2-3).
In fact, by understanding how the organization of education follows the class struggle, the current crisis can be placed in an historical context. A study sponsored by UT-Austin's Institute for Innovation, Creativity and Capital (IC2) of the form of university-industry connections found that there have been four clusters of activity since 1900. The author suggests that "Each of the four clusters occurred during the periods of intensive international competition and/or crisis, and during times noted for pronounced technological change."[25] These four clusters occurred during the 1880-90s, beginning with the creation of Johns Hopkins University in 1875, between 1910-WWI, during WWII, and following 1967. What is interesting to note is that each of these clusters follow or begin during intense periods of working class insurgency and drop off as a new cycle of struggle begins. This is demonstrated in chart 5.1 that shows a rise of innovative linkages during 1880-90 that drops off during a period of international revolution at the start of the century and begins recovery with WWI.[26] The next decline occurs a little before the 1960s but falls to zero during the 1960s (chart 5.2) and begins to rise in the 1970s, a period of austerity and cutbacks. In other words, these new university-industry links are necessitated by a need to decompose existing working class insurgencies. This also indicates that although many of these forms (chart 5.3) have existed for decades, in some cases "direct investment" and "indirect investment", that is, the university using its own capital to invest in spin-offs, limited partnerships etc., did not occur until 1981, the start of a significant transformation of the university from a subordinate to an overt business discussed in chapter 2.
Chart 5.2 Invention of University/Industry Linkage Models
Chart 5.3 Date of Invention or Early Prototype of University/Industry Linkage Models
According to David Noble, beginning in 1900 research became a coordinated effort by corporations in the telephone, chemical and electric industries to name a few and formal private contracting of university professors by large corporations began soon after in 1910.[27] This industrial activity was predated by the creation of the agricultural extension and experiment services at Land Grant Colleges in 1862 with the Morrill Act, its extension in 1890, and the 1887 Hatch Act that set up extension offices and programs throughout the country to transfer agricultural technologies straight from the university laboratories to the fields. In fact, the Morrill Act also called for the teaching of "mechanic art" or engineering; it never worked as well as its agricultural segment because it never received support for extension and research. Increasing industry relationships with the universities in the early part of the 20th century were modeled on the agricultural extension program and began to coalesce around many institutions that were created during WWI such as the National Research Council and engineering and technology research programs at various universities such as MIT's Division of Industrial Cooperation and Research in 1920 which became the Division of Sponsored Research after WWII.
What appears to have driven capital's turn to higher education by 1900 was the rupturing of accumulation by frequent waves of class insurrection that began in 1848. The frequent periods of insurrection in the 1840-50s, 1870s, and 1890 by both industrial and agricultural workers resulted in massive uncontrollable collapses in production and depressions. The Hatch Act for example, was devised soon after the abolition of slavery, which eliminated a source of unwaged labor, and at the same time the agriculture industry was importing large numbers of asian workers to undermine strikes by developing and applying new technologies in the field that could increase productivity and control while reducing the need for human labor. The same can be said for industry's interest in university research in the 1910s which also happened to be a period of mass revolution throughout the world including the US.
Andrew Carnegie's new attention to education immediately followed his long inability to crush the Homestead strikers short of military attack. In the process, business sought to raise the organic composition of capital (e.g. the process of substituting technology for labor, or automation) by developing new forms of technology and planning that could be used against the working class struggle.[28] Best known from this period were of course the development of Taylorism and its time-motion studies, social welfare planning, housework efficiency studies, and mass public high school education that is still with us in similar form. With the waves of international struggles between 1910 and 1920 and 1930-1940s, higher education was reorganized by combined efforts of corporations, private foundations and the state in the search for a means of disciplining workers in the universities and developing further increases in the organic composition of capital. Thus, the massive new involvement of the federal government in the universities marked the extension of state capitalist planning to the university as a source of disciplined labor. Following the civil rights and urban inner city insurrections in the 1950-1960s, yet another strategy was devised to invest in the reproduction of labor power as a means to channel the power of the working class for struggle into energy for work. Of course, we need to also take into account the rise of elementary and kindergarten schools in the late 1800s as well.
In all, it appears that with each cycle of class struggle that taken the form of resistance to work by fighting for and winning shorter working hours, day and lifecycle, the amount of school work increases. Marx himself recognized this connection early on in volume I of Capital.[29] He found that as workers fought successfully to have their children removed from the workplace and to have time and resources to learn, business distorted their demands by putting the children into rooms they called schools located in the factory in order to hold them until they could work their shorter shifts or learn to obey authority.
The last period of reorganization of the university that began in the late 1950s and lasted until the late 1960s was guided by a theory of human capital. Growing out of the Keynesian recognition that labor was not just a cost but a factor of growth, human capital theory attempted to apply this idea to education. "The basic reality, for the university," wrote Clark Kerr "is the widespread recognition that new knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth," ironically calling knowledge the "invisible product."[30] Gary Becker, in Human Capital, attributes education as contributing to future earnings and views it as an investment made by the individual student.[31] No doubt Becker's approach mystifies education to appear as a privilege, since it offers payoffs to the individual down the road in terms of higher wages.
In reality, the largest return on the investment goes to the employer, which Becker almost entirely neglects. The return is no more than the resulting higher productivity from a worker that comes from years of disciplining oneself as a student with grades, homework, papers, exams, etc. which translates into a net loss of wages. According to one estimation,
The financial opportunities forgone to pursue these [Ph.D.] studies are immense. These losses are never recovered...To use Electrical Engineering (EE) as an example, EE Ph.D graduates earn an average salary of $57,800 while EE BS graduate earn $43,700. Taking $8,000 as an average GSE salary [graduate student employee] and 5 years as the average program length, one finds a total opportunity cost of $178,500 while in a graduate program. After graduation however, the EE Ph.D graduate earns $14,100 more per year. Using a 7.75% discount rate, one finds that the Ph.D graduate recovers the lost funds only after 53 years of employment (long after retirement).[32]
Human capital theory turns out to be no more than the application of the productivity deal (i.e. that wages rise with productivity) to education in terms of future wages. The work put into preparing oneself to work for the rest of one's life is what is valuable to an employer. The degree itself is evidence that one has done a lot of bullshit and is willing to do more. This what Jerry Farber meant by "student as nigger": that being a student means learning to internalize authority and endless work.[33]
Yet, there is a catch: the return on capital's investment in education is not always accessible; students aren't always willing to spend the rest of their lives working. This is one way to interpret Becker's fear that human capital is "illiquid" and "uncertain" (pgs. 77-78). Human capital cannot be used as collateral because unlike constant physical capital, paying for a worker's capacity to work does not mean that she will actually work. If there's one problem that has haunted business from day one it is that people are unpredictable. This has showed itself most of all in the universities during the 1960-70s and is the root of the disinvestment from human capital investment.
Ironically, if Becker and other human capital theorists could foresee the productive relationship between education and profits, neither Smith nor Gintis and Bowles could. Smith identifies the class relationship of students in their lack of control over their working conditions, the domination of the universities by business, and the incomes of their parents and future labor (p. 229-231). But one's existence as a student itself is not important in a class analysis of the universities. There is a possibility that Smith might go further however when he reproduces a passage where Marx explained that "no longer the individual labor but rather the socially combined labor power becomes the actually agent of the collective work process" concluding himself that "the proletariat as a whole must be viewed as the agent of productive labor" (p. 213). Yet, in his discussion of housework, he finds that although it contributed to production "indirectly" by serving to prepare the waged worker for work, it is not productive. This is never pursued in any understanding of the work students do.[34]
A lot of this has to do with his confusion around the meaning of value. Smith offers a fetishized definition of "value" as some magical essence passed only by the working class and "surplus value" as being the amount of that essence retained by the capitalist "above the wages paid to the worker". Without getting into a drawn out argument, it could be said that value is simply an abstraction for explaining the organization of capitalist society around work. There is no such thing as value. It only represents the centrality of putting people to work for maintaining capital's control over the organization of society. In turn, surplus value is an abstraction for the surplus amount of work business can extract from a person above what the working class can be forced to do.
This is an important distinction to be made; Smith offers us a definition of value, rather than an understanding of the social relationships of capitalist society it represents. By explaining that students are part of the working class because of their or their parent's salaries is a classification, not a class analysis of the content of education. Students are not understood to be workers because they actually do work without being paid for it (Becker claims they are paid back later). Rather, they are workers because they will be waged workers. This is explained in his analysis of housewives and state workers who are not workers because they do not directly produce commodities for sale (p. 219). Class has been reduced to just another category, stripping it of its value in understanding the relationships of class struggle.
Strategically, these problems compound themselves. While Smith brilliantly argues that as part of the working class, students - as other sectors of the working class (i.e. housewives, people of color, etc) - cannot be subordinated to other sectors. Joined by Carl Davidson, Carol Neiman, and Greg Calvert, Smith launches a critique of the left's subordination of student struggles still applicable today, which we'll discuss further in the final chapter. He proposes that "what this means is that students must no longer confine themselves to supporting struggles of other sectors of the international working class but must work among students; in order to truly support other branches of the working class and make a shared revolution possible, students must be an organized force in their own right," echoing the strategies of Wages for Housework (p. 248).
Yet, this all falls short in his long run strategy, for a couple reasons. First, student autonomy, while important, lacks an explanation of the source of intra-class domination through the wage in the first place. Considering that the subordination of students has been rationalized by their absence of wages to prove their usefulness to business (as if the wage were a reward) Smith strips autonomy of its strategic importance: to demand an independent source of power to counterbalance the wage.
Secondly, Smith sees the potential for radical organizing growing from rising unemployment and continued job dissatisfaction. Like Flacks, the potential for struggle among students results from education's provision of higher consciousness, giving them a "special role to play" in spreading that among other workers.[35] (p. 279) In the long run, the struggle is carried beyond the universities where it has the most value. Whether inside or out, workers are reacting; to unemployment, alienated schoolwork, unsatisfying jobs, capitalist regents. Nowhere in Who Rules the Universities?: an Essay in Class Analysis is there a class analysis of how students struggle. The overproduction of college graduates that leads to unemployment and radical struggle is only a structural side effect of the capitalist system. These same college graduates for whom no jobs exist is never seen as a counterattack for their refusal to be disciplined in the universities in the 1960s. Rather than seeing unemployment as an attempt to prevent them from carrying their struggles into the waged workplace, Smith fits the recession of the early 1970s into an overproductionist framework. In the schools, students are trained for work, outside they do the work. The unwaged exploitation of students is resolved with the waged work outside the universities. Never does there appear the duality of the class struggle: teachers and university administrators trying to make students work and students resisting homework and term papers in order to put out an alternative paper, take over a building or have a party. From a wide angle, students are part of the working class because they are trained to be not because they struggle against being workers and for a different way of organizing society.
This same approach to analyzing education is repeated in many ways by Gintis and Bowles.[36] In debunking the idea that education contributes to equality and liberty in the form of higher incomes, they perceive of education as separate from and subordinate to the economy, explaining that "the pattern of economic inequality is predominantly 'set' in the economy itself" (p. 102). The school itself is set in an analogy to the workplace, "mirroring" and "corresponding" to many aspects in the form of grades, rules, threats and hierarchies (pgs. 12, 125, and 131). Yet, never does education appear as part of the productive circuit of accumulation. Never is the school a workplace.
This is no mistake, but follows their long run reforms for the US. While the US, they argue, is democratic in its political institutions, the economy is undemocratic. It is the economy, with its alienating, powerless jobs that need to be changed first. Education is seen as separate from the rest of capitalist society ("the economy" for them) because it is determined by it: "the sources of repression lie outside the school system. If schools are to assume a more humane form, so, too, must jobs" (p. 252). From this easily follows their defense of education as essential to production in their vision of a democratic socialist economy. It would serve to train youth to not only work but accept a new type of authority that resolves the contradiction between the needs of the hypothesized community for workers and our needs (or desire not to work, I would argue) (p. 269-272). The construction of their new society differs little from capitalist society: work is the defining activity of life and school services the need for obedient workers.[37] It is no surprise then that the authors never take their analysis of education any further than the issue of whether it actually offers equality of opportunity to each worker. That the schools serve to reproduce our one-dimensional role as workers is never questioned, but is actually reinforced under democratic socialism. While education arose as capital's response to periods of class struggle, as they brilliantly note themselves, it serves their functions in a socialist state capitalist system.
Gintis and Bowles' correspondence principle is applied by John and Margaret Rowntree in their analysis of students and soldiers as workers.[38] The Rowntrees argue that although school is a full-time unpaid job, students themselves are not productive: "Students absorb surplus that has already been produced; and they refrain from producing more surplus product that must be disposed of profitably; instead they labor but do not produce a tangible product." However, two sentences later, they cite the U.S. Council of Economic advisors figure that estimate that "earnings forgone by students would be between $20 and $30 billion a year" and "would have increased 1966 GNP by 3.5%." This 3.5 percent along with the 6.5 percent of the GNP invested in education, they suggest, shows that students "in effect absorb the economic surplus that they refrain from producing." Instead of arguing the obvious: that the investment of 6.5 percent of the GNP results in a 3.5 percent increase in the GNP as the result of school/work by students, the Rowntrees instead accept capital's ideology that students are only consuming and not working.
While they try to suggest that students and soldiers are workers (although unproductive) because of the work they do, in reality their analysis is grounded in something else entirely: the sheer number of people engaged in particular activities. Because the defense and education industries have absorbed two-thirds of the total increase in 18-64 year old in the working population (which I assume only accounts for waged workers), they suggest that students and soldiers are workers.
While they seem willing to call students workers, one has to ask whether they actually mean they are workers in the sense of what social relationships they are a part of or whether they fall into the right category. It would not be adventurous to suggest that they are not really sure what about school makes it work, which is surprising since they immediately dismiss it as unproductive. They even suggest that "studying has lost any trace of the self-directed activity that it may once have been" ignoring that the essence of school/work is self- imposed labor without anyone looking over one's shoulder and describe the passing of bourgeois education which foster "maturity" or "self-direction" with a socialized workplace that builds docile workers while "simultaneously promotes proletarian consciousness" (p. 175). With their extensive use of data, it appears that most of their argument rests on a strictly quantitative understanding of the working class based upon predefined notions of productive labor. This is especially clear when they suggest that Canadian youth are not a class formation because the number of Canadian youth in the universities or the military is only half that in the US. (p. 184).
However, the Rowntrees are able to make some significant insights into the issue. They briefly attack Richard Flacks and others theories of "youth exploitation" as a mystification of the class nature of education. Even though the Rowntrees appear to be trying to define a "youth class" they look at it in occupational rather than ideological terms.[39] For them, the ideology of youth oppression
functions to explain the discontent and anti-social attitudes of young people in terms of their personal problems (as the poverty of the working class was attributed to their defects of character by Social Darwinists). This ideology seeks to obscure the emerging class struggle between youth and the dominant forces of society by discussing the "conflict of generations" as if age were the significant source of the conflict. (p. 174)
They also raise the issue of student struggles moving from being a youth class-in-itself to a youth class-for-itself. This is explained in terms of black youth and white youth whose "Communities also offer laboratories for the development of communal, life-affirming forms of living, eating, sharing and participating in public activities." (p. 177-78) This is an especially unique insight since they find youth and students doing more than struggling against their social position but also creating new ways of living, which was widespread during the 1960-70s in the form of housing and food coops, communes, festivals, music, underground newspapers, health clinics, free universities, etc.
In addition, the Rowntree's strategic analysis of student autonomy precedes but is complemented by Calvert and Neiman. The Rowntrees reject the notion that the idea that the university is not an integral part of the system and that students should be radicalized "in terms of their future rather than present class roles." They explain that "Increasingly, however, youth are understanding that they must mobilize for their own liberation as oppressed youth before they are ready to join other oppressed groups in revolutionary action," they write. Exposing the relationship of the university to corporations and the war machine "has made an increasing number of young radicals ready to disrupt and even destroy it [the university], if they can" (p. 182, italics in original).
This is hollow praise since they earlier flesh out their intention to preserve the university - and thus the work - while changing only the content.
But we do not want to abolish broad based mass education anymore than we would advocate abolishing mass production because the factory system of capitalism is alienating to the workers. Socialists have never been machine wreckers; but just as the socialist order will change the product of the factories, ending the production of fanciful packages for inferior detergents, so will the content of education change, ending college courses that are merely cold war indoctrination. The students have become proletarians and the class rooms their workplaces in the mass education systems of the United States. Ironically, dialectically, the highly touted growth of mass education, the "best" feature of liberal capitalism, will be a major engine of the destruction of the system.
Once gain, we find the identical perspectives shared among these diverse group of theorists. One main theme holds them together: that the universities should be preserved. They would not let them be burned down as the Irish immigrants continually did to the one school the Lowell School Board kept building in their neighborhood in the mid 1800s. The inadequate analysis of the role of education in the sphere of accumulation is no accident, but the outgrowth of the ideological imperatives of these writers. By attributing a potential to the student struggles to rupture the process of accumulation would mean reevaluating their whole understanding of capitalist society and the working class. It would also mean acknowledging that these antagonisms would continue in the state capitalist systems they favor where education still serves to discipline youth for work. In an ironic way, this thesis is a child of their failings.
Offering insight into the false dichotomies often utilized by many of those we have discussed, Gareth Stedman Jones suggests that "any characterization of students as a social group must simultaneously encompass student origins, the student situation itself, and the social destination of students. It is the unilateral insistence upon any one of these factors to the exclusion of the others that has resulted in lopsided or reductionist theories of student consciousness."[40] Unfortunately, these are not the standards Jones holds to his own analysis. Failing to defend his argument empirically, he rejects the idea that the university is a central productive institution in capitalism and the strategic placement of students as part of the working class as "scientifically incorrect and politically reactionary" (p. 27). Rather, he concludes that "students are not a class, but a temporary occupation: they are apprentice intellectual workers..." (p. 35).
Carl Davidson's quote at the start of this chapter critiquing student activist's avoidance of the university itself is just as applicable to those who write about it. While he calls most students "workers-to-be, i.e. trainees or apprentice", what he describes is students as unwaged workers. "It is important that we recognize that many students share many of the social relations and conditions of production with many of the skilled workers of large-scale industry"[41] (p. 18). Those conditions, he continues, is that the universities "are deeply involved in the production of a crucial and marketable commodity - labor power. It is this aspect of the university that is most crucial for the political economy. The production of an increase in socially useful and necessary labor power is the new historic function of our educational institutions that enables us to name them, quite accurately, knowledge factories"[42] (p. 19). With the recognition of the university as the knowledge factory comes the antagonism of the class relations: the resistance to work. "But it is not enough for the knowledge factory to produce skilled labor power in the form of a raw material. The commodity must be socially useful as well" (p. 21). Quoting Clark Kerr that "the well-behaved advance even if the geniuses do not"[43] Davidson locates the root of the crisis of higher education: our resistance to being disciplined as workers. "Our rough edges must be worn off, our spirits broken, our hopes mundane, and our manners subservient and docile. And if we won't pacify and repress ourselves with all the mechanisms they have constructed for our self-flagellation, the police will be called" (p. 21). And if that doesn't work, disinvest.
To begin to understand the crisis of the universities, and in turn the meaning of the struggles that created them, Davidson's perspective entices us to read the managers of education own explanations of the rupture of the system. It is here, with a little demystification, that Davidson's analysis proves political useful by indicating how the crisis is a development of the class antagonisms of the multiversity. But before we can do this reading, a new theory of students as workers needs to be developed.
Class Struggle in the Classroom: Students as Unwaged Workers and the University as Social Factory
We have traced a recurring theme that appears throughout many radical and left theories of the universities and student struggles: the insistent refusal to analyze either students or the universities in terms of their antagonistic relationship to the interests of maintaining the social organization of capitalist society. However, there is something even more fundamentally inept in the methodologies of the theorists discussed above.
These and many other writers have attempted to examine the universities and students without even specifying the particular class composition of students or the working class as a whole at the time they are writing. This is especially the case in each of the works we have examined so far with the exception of the Rowntrees. Every other study has either abstracted or ignored the issue of the class composition. This problem is not unique to these writers. While speaking specifically about left theorists of public education, the following critique is equally applicable to studies of the universities:
There is a gap here between class struggle understood theoretically (an important first step) and class struggle understood in terms of revolutionary practice. Without a practical grasp of the class struggle the Monday morning chapters [which explain "what is to be done" in a mere 20 or so pages at the end of the book] assume the general significance of educational struggles when this can only be demonstrated concretely.[44]
What is at stake here is understanding how education functions and is griped by conflict and crisis created by student (or teacher) struggles so these struggles can be extended and circulated. This is the fundamental failure of abstract theories that neither grow organically out of existing struggles nor can be appropriated by them.
It appears difficult to undertake an analysis of the crisis of the university without examining both the forces that gave rise to and have extended their breakdown. It is my intention to avoid this shortcoming of previous and existing theories of the universities by not only examining the cause of the crisis but the very student struggles that have deepened it and how the ongoing recomposition of class struggle within them threatens the very existence of the universities as we know them.
Henry Giroux points out another fundamental inadequacy of left educational theory which may explain why this work remains so abstract. Many educational theorists, especially on the left, view the schools as a location of absolute capitalist power and domination, rather than a terrain of conflict and struggle. Giroux contends
There are, on the one hand, radical educators who collapse human agency and struggle into a celebration of human will, cultural experience, or the construction of "happy" classroom social relations. On the other hand, there are radical views of pedagogy that cling to notions of structure and domination. Such views not only argue that history is made behind the backs of human beings, but also imply that within such a context of domination human agency virtually disappears. The notion that human beings produce history - including its constraints - is subsumed in a discourse that often portrays schools as prisons, factories, and administrative machines functioning smoothly to produce the interests of domination and inequality. The result has often been modes of analysis that collapse into an arid functionalism or equally disabling pessimism.[45]
Giroux suggests that there is a duality at play in the schools, a contestation between the power and desires of students and teachers and that of business. "One of the most important theoretical elements missing from the hidden curriculum literature is a view of schools as sites of both domination and contestation...In other words, domination is never total in this perspective, nor is it simply imposed on people." (p. 62-3) The power of the dominant society and culture "is not simply inscribed or imposed in the consciousness or ideologies of the oppressed. It is always mediated - sometimes rejected, sometimes confirmed. More often than not it is partly accepted and partly rejected. The issue here is that class and power intersect in the form of lived experiences that accommodate and contest the dominant school culture in a complex way." (p. 66)
Needless to say, this is not evident to nearly all the theorists of higher education we have examined. In fact, it could be said that their failure to recognize education as a terrain of conflict and resistance is responsible for their failure to offer a strategic analysis that takes into account current struggles or any strategizing at all. As Giroux suggests, for some to transcend their bleak view of totalizing capitalist power over the schools and mention the existence of resistance and struggle would be a monumentous task out of their reach.
This inadequacy spins off a much more serious problem: there has very little work on developing a theory of students as part of class struggle that may offer us a methodology for recognizing and strategizing about the everyday contestations that occur in education. Without such an understanding of the role of students and the university in capitalist society, the same mistakes in understanding the political significance of the continuing crisis of education will be dangerously continued. As Giroux perceptively warns:
The issue here is that the current withdrawal of resources from the schools and the redefinition of the curriculum in watered-down pragmatic and instrumental terms cannot be viewed as problems solely due to demographic shifts in the population and short-term recessional tendencies in the economy. Such a position not only abstracts the current crisis from its historical and political roots, it also uses the existing economic crisis to legitimate conservative modes of pedagogy and to silence potential critics. (p. 44)
Rather than understand that the crisis lay in the conflicts and antagonisms within the schools, it has been perceived in structural terms as the result of functional maladjustments or other maladies. As a result, students, faculty, courses of study and research, funding and other spaces that have been opened through struggle over the last twenty years have been exposed to the threat of austerity, entrepreneurialization, and counterattacks from the right. What is needed is an analysis of the university as a terrain of conflict within capitalist society in which we recognize entrepreneurialization as a counterattack against continuing efforts to expand those spaces that have subverted the university's production of disciplined labor and prolonged the crisis.
For the past few decades, a theory of "social capital" has been elaborated that analyzes capital's attempt to turn all of society into a social factory.[46] Inside the social factory, "all of human activity outside the sphere of production would be subordinated to the reproduction of life as labor power."[47] Tronti analyzes how "capital" replaces the concept of the workday by expanding work into the sphere of reproduction. As he says, "the social work-day functions directly within the process of production of social capital. Within this process of production it produces, reproduces, and accumulates new labor power" (p. 101). This extension of the work-day into the sphere of reproduction, which was once understood as "unproductive" by both capital and Marxists alike, serves as the "maximum degree of socialization of capitalist production, socialization of labor power and, therefore, socialization of capital" (Tronti, p. 101).
The social factory grew very early to incorporate education into the social workday. In the 19th century, capital was forced to respond to worker's demands to reduce the length of the work day and working week, and to remove children from the sphere of direct production, by colonizing the resulting free time won by these struggles to serve the reproduction of labor power for work[48] (Cleaver, 1979, p. 122). It is important to note that from its outset in the US, education has been characterized by conflict and struggle, from its beginning which was forced upon capital by factory workers, to the burning down and attacks on schools in Irish and other ethnic neighborhoods, the creation of summer vacation in response to farmer's children refusing to attend during harvest, to today with its high drop-out rates that belies an inability to make youth go to school.
Attempt to colonize various spheres of social life outside of the factory (such as housework, the peasantry, prison, the unemployed, etc.) is an effort to make these areas productive for the needs of business. People involved in activities such as housework, schoolwork, sex, unemployment, among others, are therefore part of the working class to the degree that capital has been powerful enough to use their activities to reproduce them or others for waged work. When it has been successful in turning it into work, it hides it with the absence of a wage.
The Wages for Housework movement has explained how the service of the wife (or partner) in reproducing the spouse for work is work for capital which is hidden by the wife's dependence on the wage of the spouse.[49] Similarly, the wage of the parent hides the work of the child and student for capital as that sibling is (or may be) dependent on the wage of the parent. The demand for wages for housework is part of a greater strategy to destroy this veiled hierarchy to show how these unwaged workers are a part of the working class and that their struggles are those of the class. Forcing business to pay a wage for housework is seen the first step to achieving autonomy by providing houseworkers with a wage which can then be used as a source of autonomous political power (what they call a political wage) and destroying the waged/unwaged hierarchy of the class. Although we will further examine this demand for wages in chapter 6, it is important to note that this hierarchy of the wage is critical to capital's control over the social factory by maintaining intra-class divisions among the working class. When this hierarchy and division crumble these newly autonomous sectors may contribute to a recomposition of working class power.
While many have accurately examined the role of education in disciplining workers, they have fallen very short of perceiving this as productive unpaid work. Moreover, the controversy on the left surrounding the analysis of students as workers is especially perplexing when economic planners frequently examine the relationship of education to growth, productivity, and even taxes scholarships and fellowships as income. While it would be easy to explain this by overt ideological bias to students, in turn it is rooted in inadequate and narrow frameworks that are for the most part uncognizant and unrelated to any struggles taking place within the schools at best and ignore students and the universities themselves, at worst.
When Marx wrote that "capital is not only the command over labor...it is essentially the command over unpaid labor" he was referring to capital's ability to extract surplus value from the waged work he was documenting.[50] This analysis has allowed us to see how capital's control over unpaid labor may occur both with and without the wage form. While Marx did not perceive this command over unpaid labor in the school he agreed with Robert Owen that the "germ of the education of the future is present in the factory system" (p. 614). The Factory Acts were recognized as the first attempt to successfully combine "education and gymnastics with manual labor, and consequently of combining manual labor with education and gymnastics" (p. 613). These acts were an advance over previous legislative acts that resulted in the four-walled circuses used to control youths freed from factory labor. Business, unable to use children in the sphere of direct production, began using children in the sphere of reproduction. In the words of one capitalist at the time, it became clear that "the secret of producing efficient workpeople is to be found in uniting education and labor from a period of childhood" (Marx, p. 613). By the turn of the century, compulsory education became the mechanism for the development of workers who would be willing to accept a life of work.[51] Rooted in the ideals of the "progressive education" and its best known theorist John Dewey, the schoolplace has become integral to capitalist accumulation by creating the means for the reproduction of labor power.
"Children work for capital to the extent that they produce their labor power for future roles as workers (waged and unwaged), but they are not directly waged," explains Cleaver (p. 165). From the time one starts school it is made clear that one must work to survive and that the amount of schoolwork will supposedly indicate one's future level of pay and thus the "quality" of adult life. Pink Floyd puts it rather simply in the song Another Brick in the Wall: "if you don't eat your meat/How could you have any pudding?/How can you have any pudding/if your don't eat your meat?" The greater the amount of self-discipline a student develops, the more valuable the student's labor power will be to capital and will, supposedly guarantee a higher future wage. While this process certainly does not go unchallenged by these unwaged workers, as will be shown, some fundamental aspects of school, such as homework, extend and reproduce this unending work beyond the classroom into the evening, the weekend, and even vacation.
The role of school/work in accumulation was understood by human capital theorists but articulated in terms that mystified the actual relationship as an individual rather than social investment. At the level of the individual, this investment is made to appear as resulting in a later payoff in one's wages while glossing over the return to business. In order to understand this, it is necessary to read through the rhetoric to understand the actual social relationships at work. "Capital shaped 'public' education, not for the 'enlightenment' of workers' children, but to meet its own needs for particular skills, for new technology, for new social control strategies, and above all, to inculcate discipline."[52] This discipline is intended to make the worker more productive, thus increasing the surplus value produced in the waged workplace given that all else is constant. "The more work students do in the school, the less value must be invested in their training and disciplining for the factory (or the home)" (p. 122). This is what lies at the heart of human capital investment. School insures that this discipline is instilled in students with endless schoolwork. Students do the unwaged work of developing their productiveness that would ordinarily be paid in the waged workplace.
Grades, like the diploma, are supposed to serve as a standardized measurement of the "quality" of the student and her potential usefulness to a future waged employer. It is grades that offer a bridge along the continuum from unwaged work in school to waged work elsewhere. Cleaver suggests that,
We are not just talking about analogies here. At the heart of the clear historical parallels between grade inflation and price inflation, lies the basic homology between grades and wages. As a general rule, wages are the monies workers get in return for working for business (whether directly in industry or indirectly in the state, whether in Stanford's industrial park, or on campus). The harder they work, they are told (often fraudulently), the more wages they will earn. Grades, on the other hand, are supposed to be IOUs on future wages. Good grades now, 'educators' promise, will mean good wages later. Grades, like the university diploma, are both an index of work performed and an indicator for business of an individual's willingness to work in the future.[53]
As Henry Giroux reminds us, this process can be easily exaggerated to paint schools as hegemonic without conceptualizing how they are complex terrains of struggle. Cleaver uniquely notes that one of the fundamental lackings of Marx's work was an analysis of the struggle between capital and the working class over the content of free time (1979, p. 121). For example, higher incomes resulting from struggles over the wage were transformed into a Keynesian strategy for turning consumption into a source of economic growth and thus more instead of less waged and unwaged (such as housework) work.
It is insufficient to restrict an analysis of education to its role in capital without seeing how this process is far from automatic and monolithic. Once we see how business profits from students as unwaged workers it becomes necessary to see how students struggle not only against school/work and the subordination of their youth to work, but also for expanded free time to pursue their own needs. While Cleaver has begun to do this, there are still empirical gaps to be filled in order to understand how these struggles are the source of the ongoing "education crisis" to be laid.
Throughout Reading Capital Politically, Cleaver examines how the unwaged have figured centrally to the accumulation of surplus value. His analysis is the most extensive to date, and has many insights which we will review. It is necessary, however, to test his analysis in the context of schools today and explain how these mechanisms of control have continued to fail as a response to student struggles against schoolwork.
As in the waged workplace, many types of hierarchical divisions other than the wage began to be adopted before WWI from Morris Cooke's recommendations discussed in chapter 4 in the universities as a means to ensure the imposition of work and control. At first, one may find it difficult to recognize these divisions, because we have been long trained to accept the structures of school without question, but they do exist as Cleaver points out:
The division of labor in the university is structured partly along disciplinary lines: economics here, anthropology there, etc. and this departmental division helps the university to rule its workers, professors and students alike. Professors are pitted against each other within and between departments over allocation of money, prestige, etc. Students are mobilized around liberal arts versus practical sciences, etc. Within the classrooms and courses the students are always organized hierarchically by grades, there are good students and bozos and everybody knows it. And the interests of one are not those of the others. Computers are "personal" and students are to work as individuals most of the time, pitted against each other in the struggle for grades (IOU's on future income). Even when they work as teams it is one team against another. The competition is reinforced in reproduction as students are divided and organized in competitive sports, fraternities, and sororities, etc. These divisions serve to keep students pitted against students and undermine efforts to build united student movements which could press for issues of concern to all students, or at least to all who don't want to play the game according to current capitalist rules."[54]
The Wages for Students collective found that these divisions are used as tools to divide students so as to better train them as workers. "Grading and tracking are ways of measuring our productivity within the school-factory. Not only are we trained to take our future 'position in society' we are also being programmed to go to our 'proper place."[55] Grades can serve to separate out uncontrollable workers, those making Ds and Fs for refusing (which is often assumed to be because they can't) to do their schoolwork, from those who have shown their willingness to work. Mediations are used to divide students among themselves to ensure that work is imposed upon them. Both parents and teachers are used to mediate the relationship between business and students. Teachers make sure students work while in school and parents make sure that students work on their home/work. One need only examine the many proposals suggested for improving "the quality" of students to find recommendations for more attentive teachers and parents to spend more time at home with their children. It is their job to ensure that students are kept working hard and that this is rewarded while avoidance of work is punished.[56]
In theory, these mediations are reproduced throughout the social factory to fulfill its need for control over the working class in abstencia. Since it is a system that organizes society around work, access to those who can continue the imposition of work is essential. Thus the need for mediations between business and the working class is satisfied by attempting to use one part of the working class to mediate and eventually, by taking on that role, that group acts as part of capital (Cleaver, p. 159). Parts of the working class are used to force other parts of the working class to work. This takes place throughout society with the use of race, sex, sexual preference, wages, age etc. that are not only used to divide and conquer but to turn one sector of the working class to manage and discipline another. The other forms of domination are hardly new with capitalism but have been appropriated by it in new ways.
Within the schools, teachers and students are used to mediate at different times and in different ways. Teachers are used to mediate between students and the school administration or state legislature and students are used to mediate between teachers and the administration/legislature. In some cases, graduate students are used to mediate undergraduates and blacks mediate whites, etc. As teachers mediate between university administration and students, so as to serve the process of work discipline, students may also do the same for teachers who refuse this task by inflating grades, calling in sick or striking. "The administration mediates the relations between students and professors through its institutional structures, from class structure to the use of police" (Cleaver, 1979, p. 160). Not uncommonly, the administration is composed of members of the managerial sector of the capitalist class and so their interests lie with ensuring the disciplining process of the school. Unruly students are punished by teachers who refuse to allow them to make up missed work while they were taking over the president's office and were hurried off to jail. Teachers who refuse to succumb to competition, massive workloads, and undisciplined students by striking are attacked for letting thousands of uncontrolled kids run free in the streets. Teaching evaluations by students, merit pay scales and other mechanisms are some of the subtle uses of students as watchdogs over faculty work levels. However, mediations are needed as reactions to conflicts in order to generate additional forms of control to supplement institutional means that have been attacked and subverted. These mediations are most commonly rejected when teachers go out on strike over their working conditions, rejecting claims that they are letting down their students, and students attack the administration, regents or legislature rather than the teacher or each following level of mediation (Cleaver, 1979, p.161).
These mediations are strengthened by the wage hierarchy within the schools. Students appear to be marginalized from the sphere of accumulation because they lack a wage. Teachers appear lumped in with the administration, and other waged workers on campus such as those in the cafeteria, the dorms, or the physical plant appear as workers because they receive a wage. Graduate students employed as teaching assistants (TAs) and assistant instructors (AIs) are isolated from graduate students on financial aid or fellowships, faculty and undergraduates. All of these particular group's interests, we are told by the administration, are separate and antagonistic. This is especially the case among students: those who have to work to make it through school, because they are unwaged, are used by employers antagonistically against waged workers by paying them less to undercut the power of the waged. The use of underpaid desperate students serves as a mechanism to control and manipulate waged workers. Unemployed graduate students are held out as replacements for recalcitrant RAs, TAs and AIs. The unwaged status of students is used as a means for not only controlling students but waged workers and those few students who have wages.
Parents are looked upon to insure the imposition of work on students at home when teachers have failed. Because they lack a wage, students are frequently dependent on a waged worker such as parent or spouse, further undermining the autonomy of the student. Rather than a wage, they receive an allowance contingent on the satisfaction of the demands of the benefactor. The "sibling wage" is comes with many strings attached as even the highest paid sibling will testify. Parental expectations to "graduate in four years, go to medical school and date the right boy or girl" is a form of parental control in the absence of, or in addition to, the disciplining of the school.
Yet, this dependency is also turned the other way in order to use the student against the waged benefactor. The parent or spouse is restricted in their range of activity because losing their job or taking a pay cut would negatively affect their dependent. They could also be threatened by competition with unwaged desperate students who may be willing to replace them at a lower wage and higher productivity. In effect, the unwaged status of the student turns dependency on a waged supporter into a mechanism of control over that person.[57]
Whether as a requirement of financial aid, the sibling wage or as a calculation of future wages, the use of grades is used to measure the amount of school/work performed and what wage it justifies. In a sense, before the 1970s period of rising unemployment and wage reductions, the grade served as a wage-productivity deal modeled after Keynesian productivity deals between unions and business. Grades provide a way for potential employers to measure the development of labor power of students and how likely it can be used by in waged work the way productivity of waged workers is a measurement of the amount and intensity of work a business can get out of them.
There are two primary aspects to grades. Assuming that they are accurate indicators of both work performed and futures wages to be received, they can either function in a fascist or democratic manner.[58] The latter form takes the place of what we perceive as choice: no one has to do their homework, only not doing it means low grades and possibly being kicked out of school into the welfare lines or to a more tedious and underpaid job than you had expected. This explicitly underlined the strategy of the Selective Services use of deferments to manage the flow of labor. Democracy is equated with choice: "if you don't like it here then go somewhere else." This choice is only an illusion. Sure, leaving school may mean going home with your tail between your legs but putting it in this manner only distracts the focus from seeing how students are trained to internalize this work discipline in order to intimidate students into endless studying. Since, in capitalism, work and money are used as the means social control by forcing one to work to survive (Cleaver, p. 189), we can perceive of this choice as nothing but a serious threat to those less able or willing to both produce and keep reproducing one's ability and willingness to work (Cleaver, p. 175). School obviously involves something more than consumerist choice.
Homework is one of the training grounds on which a student cuts his/her teeth on the production of self-imposed labor. Cleaver has related homework to piecework in that the grade one receives for work performed is gauged not by actual time in hours worked but by the piece. If the other hierarchies are successful in pitting student against student, then fierce competition can drive a student to do more and more homework in quantity and quality while in pursuit of the ever-reduced value of the grade. The more work that students do, the lower the value of the work all of which leads to an ever upward spiral of forced work.
Homework is an important example of how schoolwork can be seen as abstract labor. It is not the content of the work that is significant, but the act of work itself. Each college bound student has it deeply ingrained in their consciousness that once they get to college no one will order them when to get up and when to do homework. This becomes solely the work of the student. Those that can best teach themselves to internalize work as a primary activity will be able to consistently do their homework and get the grade which, in theory, will prepare them for the job of their choice. Homework is the test of this abstract ability to work. The hardest thing, students will tell you, is getting over that procrastination to start on their homework. This is what is meant by "abstract labor." The everyday experience of students is a struggle to get out of bed and to class on time; a struggle against this self-imposition of work. Going to the lake, listening to the stereo, or having sex instead of going to class or doing homework is a rejection of this work. Since homework is linked to grades, the threat of failing school and being thrown into the welfare lines or fast food sweatshops are hammers students raise above themselves to force themselves to work. Those who refuse to do this have escaped and undermined the disciplining of the schools.
Understanding the use of mediations, grades, homework and the wage in this way differentiates schools very little from any other workplace. For this reason, Wages for Students and others have expanding their understanding of the social factory to include education. Carl Davidson sums up these work relations of education quite succinctly.
What does the interior of the new knowledge factory look like? Where are the workshops? Specifically, these are to be found in the classrooms, the faculty offices, the study rooms in the libraries and homes, the psychological counseling offices and clinics, the conference rooms, the research laboratories, and the administrative staff offices...The machinery of knowledge-production pervades the university. And, despite its apparent invisibility, it is no less real or tangible. The productive apparatus consists of grades, exams, assigned books, papers, and reports, all the curriculum and scheduling requirements, non-academic in loco parentis regulations, scientific equipment and resources, the mechanics of grants and endowments, disciplinary procedures, campus and civil police, and all the repressive and sublimating psychological techniques of fear and punishment. ('...' in original, p. 20)
If these mediations offer a commonality to the repressive features of waged workplaces, they also demonstrate commonality as means for managing terrains of conflict. As we'll see in the conclusion (chapter 6), grades, tests, and other measures of student discipline and productivity are daily subverted through cheating, skipping class and other everyday forms of resistance.
Although they recognize these forms of mediations as hardly absolute and subject to the antagonisms of struggle, these theorists tend to overemphasize the repressive features of education and exaggerate its success in order to make their case that students are workers to the extent that they do the unwaged work of being a student. But in what ways do students resist being students? This is a question they often cannot answer, although they would not dispute it. To see students as workers is to implicitly acknowledge to power of capital and the failure of people's struggles to transcend a life of work.
Nonetheless, the knowledge/social factory has been forced to take a backseat on the left in favor of guilt politics that romanticizes struggles of waged, black, female and other workers. Ironically, even today, when struggles of the so-called "new social movements", which are frequently struggles of the unwaged such as peasants, the unemployed and women, are being recognized on the left, the struggle of students have been sacrificed. The left is no less than 30 years behind in understanding the transformation of education into unwaged work. And in doing so, the crisis of higher education that has been ignored and the attempted reinvestment in the universities by business and the state as a means to resolve the crisis of accumulation has gone unanswered by all except students.
Rethinking the Crisis of Higher Education
The two great new forces of the 1960's were the federal government and the protesting students.
-Clark Kerr[59]
One thing that stands out in the Carnegie Commission's reports is that they perceived the underlying problem inside the universities to be the uncontrollable struggles of students to transform the universities. If we are to understand their focus on runaway costs as a result of the student movements for new programs, more grants, etc., then their proposals to cut spending by 20 percent by 1980 and holding growth in expenses to 2.5 percent a year rather than the average of "inflation+3.5%" of the 1960s should be seen as an attempt to decompose those struggles. That higher education is wracked by perpetual class warfare with students becomes clear in their research reports. The language may be in terms of efficiency and GNP, but at its heart is the inability to manage the universities.
Civil rights pressure and growing concern over equality of opportunity led to substantial increases in federal funds, and also to significant increases in funds from state and private sources, for student aid. In addition, civil rights pressure stimulated the development of "ethnic studies" programs, while more open-admission standards created a need for expanded resources to serve the needs of larger student populations. "Other forces, such as growing concern over urban issues and environmental problems, led to the development of new programs. Also contributing to rapidly rising expenditures were the...tendency to expand student services, expenses associated with episodes of student unrest, and rising security costs."[60]
One could say that during the 1960s we moved from Kerr's "multiversity" to "Crisis U." In the Carnegie Commission Final Report, chapter 1 begins with a section on "The Political Crisis", pointing out that "in recent times, students and faculty members in unprecedented numbers have engaged in political activity, some of it illegal, against dominant policies and institutions in the surrounding society. Campuses have been torn apart; relations with external groups seriously damaged. Dissent is an essential aspect of academic life and there was much to dissent about; but the disruption was excessive" (p. 4). A sense of collapse loomed over the education planners.[61] Kerr asked himself "will 1870 to 1970 have been the century of the rise and the beginning of the decline of the American university?" (p. 128). The Carnegie Commission added its own fearful prophesy: "Will higher education," collapsing under the weight of strikes and rebellions, "follow the course of the railroad industry?," disbanded by business and the state since it could no longer serve its need for growth (p. 7-8). Then comes the second section, "The Financial Depression," warning that higher education has gone from "genteel poverty to genteel poverty in one decade" (p.4.) as the assembly line was ruptured by the student insurgency and disinvestment as rates or return tell. Looming over the dark horizon were very hard times. Aside from purposeful mystification, the planners discovered what the left has been incapable or unwilling to do: the rupture of the universities could be traced to the struggles of students inside them.
This was explicitly understood by former Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1969 who, much like William Simon and Dinesh D'Souza would later repeat, not only credited the student rebellion with the crisis but warned of corning austerity if order could not be restored. "The time has come for men and women who prize civil liberties and academic freedom to take a public stand against the coalition of destruction that is terrorizing American classrooms and campuses. It is time to act," Humphrey trumpeted. "Because of the excesses of a hard-core minority of recalcitrant radicals, the entire structure of federal, state, and private financial support to institutions of higher learning is now imperiled."[62] In no clearer terms was the threat of disinvestment from the universities laid out. Humphrey was echoed by then Yale University President A. Bartlett Giametti who is cited in chapter 4. In her provocative analysis of Giametti's testimony, higher education historian Sheila Slaughter explains that he
held the student 'revolution' generally accountable for problems encountered by the university. He saw what he regarded as the excesses of the 1960s portrayed most clearly by the betrayal of language, which in turn undermined the university by creating bad thinking, a loss of discipline, a preoccupation with feeling, or sentimentality, and a loss of the notion that we should work hard and submit ourselves to the rational and precise discipline embodied by language and the basic curriculum once central to elite colleges.[63]
The crisis turned out to be the rupture of use of education since the late 1950s to stimulate economic growth. This began at the end of WWII, as the GI Bill opened up a new source of massive finds for the university, providing students "an explicit wage for school work as training for a new post-war labor market."[64] This is also what Becker calls "forgone earnings," which as we've seen is the unpaid wages for school work. Throughout the 1950s funds stagnated at about one billion dollars. During the 1960s, this investment grew from one billion to almost seven billion in 1970s (Caffentzis, p. 130). Clearly, the function of the university became evident to business. At the heart of this new direction in Keynesian planning was an extension of human capital investment to the universities as a means for stirring growth. Caffentzis pinpointed this new strategy beginning with the Kennedy administration: "if increased 'growth', hence increased rates of profit and exploitation, were the order of the day, then increased investment in university both for general R&D work and the training of its working class on a mass scale must be instituted" (p. 131). What has become common terminology today was being derived in the mid 1960s:
...automation and the changing patterns of consumer wants have greatly increased the importance of investment in human beings as a factor in economic growth. More investment in plant and equipment without very large increases in our investment in human beings seems certain to enlarge the surplus of underdeveloped manpower needed to design, install and man modern production facilities.[65]
This investment strategy transformed education from being seen as a cost to an investment; which is why education became a "return on investment". It is worth quoting Caffentzis at length here because the implications of this new investment planning of higher education is fundamental to understanding the crisis:
It constitutes the capitalist recognition that merely planning the level of constant capital does not automatically lead to appropriate changes in the composition of the working class. The working class does not merely follow along with the level and kind of investment, as in the Keynesian supposition, but must also be explicitly planned. And so investment in the university system got pushed through Congress as part of a more general strategy to deal with this new aspect of class struggle. Thus in class terms investment in human capital arose when capital had to begin to take into account in an explicit way the whole social circuit of capitalist society in which labor power is produced, qualified and reproduced. In this attempt to plan social capital in both its constant and variable parts, the previously "non-productive" relations and institutions of capitalist society had to be recognized as productive. The Keynesian integration of the whole reproductive cycle of labor power which could no longer be left to chance, the "automatic" market forces, or ideology. Consequently, the previously "costless" (for capital) and "wageless" (for the working class) work began to change in status for social capital (p. 132, emphasis added).
It cannot be emphasized enough that no matter what the plan, the working class does not necessarily follow; this is an unintended interpretation of what Becker meant by human capital being "ill-liquid" and risky" and not even worth its weight as collateral. By the late 1960s this became so very clear to those who hoped the unpaid studies of students would season them as labor power for endless waged work. The students would have none of it.
After graciously caving into student demands for expanded enrollment and financial aid, the universities were incapable of dealing with the circulation of student insurgency throughout them. Students were doing more than fighting the Vietnam War at home or skipping class to devise a counterculture but were also organizing alternative universities, putting together underground newspapers, and campaigning for "ethnic studies" programs. They also fought for better working conditions in organizing for better dorm food and housing conditions, and against racism, sexism, in loco parentis (which actually began in the 1950s), grades, heavy workloads, and enrollment and sexual restrictions. The vitality of these movements were their at once decentralized yet established local and international complementary connections.[66] As Caffentzis explains, they "used the money from the very investment funds meant to turn students into human capital against the plan of development" (p. 133) by using not only their financial aid to bankroll these struggles but also university resources by demanding new subjects of study and more free spaces. For Caffentzis, the apex of this rupture of the human capital management of the universities came with the defeat of the use of grades as a devise to channel students into the jungles or the waged workplace. The massive resistance made the whole system of grades as a means of control "an object of refusal in a way that the previously ideological attacks never could" (p. 133).
The ensuing fiscal crisis of the universities, Caffentzis posits, was not a misdirection or mistake; the imbalanced books indicated an "inability to deal with the class struggle. The financially endangered universities of 1970 and 1971 were the weak links in the previous development strategy" (p. 136). The "high risk" and "ill-liquidity" of human capital were no longer abstractions. For Becker, the rates of return on investments fluctuated tremendously between 13 percent and 25 percent. The reason is apparent: it depends on both whether students were actually doing any work in the schools and if their labor power could be accessed in the workplace. That the investment in education is not a sure thing is also the reason education is still lumped into the residual left over in calculations of growth.
The relationship between student insurgency and crisis is quite explicit in Earl Cheit's The New Depression in Higher Education that listed the most important characteristics of a school not in crisis being 1) less affected by campus disorders, 2) good fit between aspiration and program, 3) having high community regard, 4) smaller student aid costs, 5) defined program and controlled growth, 6) lower faculty costs, and 7) efficiency.[67] Then the dilemma for administrators was to stop the movements (although today the sources of the crisis are not always as obvious as student strikes) or risk financial destruction. Once again, Caffentzis puts the predicament quite sharply: "what had to be reintroduced was a wholly new relation between state investment, university structure and labor market with a wider restructuring of capital in the crisis, for the previous relation just could not guarantee control over the reproduction of labor power" (p. 137).[68]
Central to this restructuring was the use of money as a means of control to impose the discipline of schoolwork. The wage-productivity deal established by human capital investment - increased productivity in exchange for low tuition and fees and financial aid for students and increasing wages for faculty - had been ruptured. Financial aid was increasing along with tuition, faculty salaries were rising 1 percent faster than the rapidly increasing salaries of the rest of the working class, and spending on the whole was outstripping productivity (Carnegie Commission, 1972, p. 4). In response, the use of money appeared in many forms in the Carnegie plan to decompose the struggles inside the universities. Spending to fulfill massive student demands for new programs, aid and other reforms would have to be cut by $10 billion a year or 20 percent (1972, p. 1). The cuts were hardy abstract: 50 percent would have to come from reducing time students spent in school (just hanging around, not working was apparently their primary concern), and the other 50 percent by reducing the increase in annual costs per student from 3.4 percent to 2.4 percent, of which, 12.5 percent would be by increasing the faculty/student ratio (breaking the productivity deal) and 12.5 percent by reducing faculty salaries during the 1970s. (1972, p. 15 1-152) Tuition would be increased; every tub would have to be put on their own bottom, selling themselves out to raise their own funds; Ph.D. programs would have to be cut; undergraduate degrees should be sped up to three years; community colleges should be expanded to siphon off unproductive students; faculty productivity measured; enrollment controlled; and most importantly "reluctant attendees" should be allowed to exit the campuses where they have stirred up trouble. The Carnegie Commission plan was explicit: to end the crisis students, staff and academics will have to pay with more work.
The one sure link between a degree and a job and higher standard of living was ruptured. With crisis, all deals were off. Kerr's pyramid tossed out its base from necessity. "Discipline over students is not accomplished with the old schoolmasterish ways (grading) but through connecting in a very explicit way work in the university with waged work: the job," writes Caffentzis (p. 138). Unemployment, recession, insecurity were the result of business' and government's disinvestment from employment of a growing restless work force arriving from the universities to join the already recalcitrant work force. Caffentzis' titled his article appropriately: capital was "throwing away the ladder" that higher education served as into the higher rungs of waged work pyramid.
School administrators would soon seek to institutionalize some innovations such as the open classroom and alternative universities as "informal classes" or attempt to outright crush them. If enrollment would increase and more "minority" students would enter, income would serve to divide and pit students in competition with each other in the face of a growing a shortage of aid, classes and services. This would be the fundamental turning point of the restructuring. Control over the reorganization and crisis of the university would pass by the early 1970s from the students to capital. The failure of the student movements to articulate the position of students in capital would prove to be cause of long-term defeat. "Since the student movement did not take the question of income in its most general form - wages for schoolwork - capital could simultaneously accede to its partial demands while using the imposition of work to silence it. Capital takes the initiative in recognizing school as work and begins to wage it on its own terms"[69] (p. 139). And silence us it did - for more than a decade.
Caffentzis utilized an analysis of the university as a social factory, finding the crisis of higher education rooted in the struggles of students against school as work and for lives filed with a multiplicity of desires and needs. By analyzing the very theories and empirical research of educational planners, he was able to demonstrate that austerity in higher education during the late 1960s and 1970s was no more than the current tactic for repressing students activism within the universities and restoring control.
Multiculturalism, Student Struggle and the Crisis: The Case of UT-Austin
Caffentzis' analysis can inform our own attempts to transform the university by recognizing the class nature of not only austerity but entrepreneurialization as well. The crisis outlined by the Carnegie Commission reports has hardly been resolved and control reimposed. Rather, entrepreneurialization reflects a new international offensive by business and educational managers not only to restore control but to transform the university into an overt business itself that offers a stable arena of investment.
Such analysis of the political context of such reforms is entirely among the radical advocates of multicultural reforms.[70] Although it is taken for granted that the universities have much in common with large corporations, this almost never appears as part of their analysis. Professors advocate multiculturalism and offer retorts to charges of "PC' by focusing almost completely upon issues of minority enrollment and the curriculum, ignoring how what we now call multiculturalism originates in the demands of students for the reorganization of the university into an institution that no longer perpetuates various forms of domination and discrimination while at the same times servicing the needs of the oppressed in their efforts to transform all of society. This is especially the case with Debating P.C., a collection of writings from the left and right that not only completely excluded student writers from the volume but ignored how the multiculturalism movement was created through radical student mobilization.[71]
Inversely, radical student advocates of multiculturalism often accept the university as a place of privilege for a select few from the middle and upper income groups, a generalization of some of their own backgrounds to all students. The university is seen to participate in the reproduction of racial, gender, ethnic and other forms of domination but how these contribute to larger social processes are rarely examined since the university is presumed to be marginal to society as a whole, a carry over from the non-academic left. Issues of class and capitalism are subsumed to these other concerns in response to decades of overemphasis of class above other forms of repression. In some ways, this reprioritization stems from the motives and backgrounds of the middle and upper class students who see racism and sexism for example as barriers to their own potential successful careers and ambitions. As a result, the university's businesslike operations are often ignored, although this is not always the case.
Unlike the substantive critiques of the university's role in maintaining and building an international empire during the Vietnam War, few students make a connection between the business activities and multiculturalism as we saw Robin Templeton doing in chapter 3. Unconcerned by the widespread austerity and entrepreneurialization of all aspects of the campus, the multiculturalism movement is unprepared for the impact these changes will have on whatever reforms they succeed in forcing the university to adopt and the forces of repression that will seek to block them. Rechanneling resources to commercially oriented operations, university administrators justify their refusal to adopt multicultural reforms with cries of poverty. Those they do eventually adopt not only run through so many layers of bureaucracy that they hardly resemble the original ideal but are funded by rechanneling resources from other related academic programs or student and faculty populations or even from the students themselves through higher tuition and fees or even additional course requirements. In essence, university administrators utilize a divide and conquer strategy to generate new unforeseen conflicts among potential allies in order to destabilize the movement. Without an analysis of the university as a corporation, the movement finds itself unprepared to resist the formalization and institutionalization of their demands into the academic enterprise or even their marginalization, repression and subversion through selective reshuffling of resources to fund them.
Just as importantly, the multiculturalism movement has failed to analyze the university in an international context - quite ironic considering the common goals of the movement are to further understanding of diverse groups of people. The restructuring of the university does not stop at the border but has become formal policy in the US, Canada., Mexico and Latin America we saw in chapter 4. Entrepreneurialization in the US is only the local facet of a global restructuring effort that picked up speed during the 1980s. Without recognition of this process, the multiculturalism movement is unprepared for both the repression and efforts to coopt its goals in order to better manage an undisciplined and diverse international population.
We still have much to learn from the history of previous student movements. Carlos Munoz finds the ultimate vulnerability in the Chicano Studies movement was its limitation to rechanneling resources to the needs of the Mexican-American community without an analysis of how to go about radically restructuring the university. Lacking a critique of the university in capitalism, Munoz finds that the movement was woefully unprepared to defend its position:
A critical look at the nature and structure of the university and, in particular, its role as perhaps the most important institution in the shaping of dominant societal values and ideology (the kind of ideology needed by those who rule) would have provided evidence that the opposition met by Chicano Studies, and similar programs, was inevitable, for in final analysis the university has been created and shaped by those with the same general economic, political, and cultural affinities as those who rule.[72]
Without an analysis of the university's role in capitalism the multiculturalism movement has been unprepared for the repressive counterattack launched by the right-wing from within the government and through various corporate financed foundations. Unaware that the university is in crisis due to the continuing creation of free spaces that subvert the disciplining of new labor power - to which they contribute - the multiculturalism movement has not expected such incursions motivated by a threat to capitalism posed by their demands. Since the university appears as marginal to capitalism, such concern was unexpected. Caught by surprise, many mainstream advocates of multiculturalism have seized the moment by suggesting that multiculturalism is hardly a threat but actually a potential source of profit for businesses by offering the necessary knowledge for controlling a diverse and antagonistic workforce. It is no surprise that when student demands for multiculturalism finally undergo formal consideration, as happened at UT-Austin, they become reframed in terms of how they can be legitimized as new forms of knowledge within existing academic disciplines.
Efforts to legitimize multiculturalism academically are not limited to the center but are often a side effect of efforts by academic radicals as well. Munoz reminds us how this same process of legitimation occurred once Chicano Studies programs were up and running. "In the absence of a strong student movement, however, most of these [Chicano movement] intellectuals have assumed roles in institutions that reinforce the dominant values of capitalism. The critiques of 'ivory tower intellectualism' that characterized the militant period of the movement are often not heard today, and certainly do not carry the sting they once had." Without the force of a militant student movement reminding faculty allies that the issue is not one of institutionalization but radical transformation, the goals of the movement cannot be realized. "Without a strong student movement," Munoz notes "it is not always easy to distinguish between the professionalism and sophistication required to compel social change and the professionalism used to maintain the status quo."[73]
Munoz' critique applies to the movement at UT-Austin detailed in chapter 3. To some extent, the silence of the student multiculturalism movement at UT- Austin during the process of formalization as a course requirement demonstrated an overall lack of understanding of their own power in not only initiating the demands but implementing them. That PRIDE and ONDA became nothing more than a proposed curriculum change reflects not only the defensive posture of the movement once the repression began but the abandonment of responsibility to faculty allies to see them through. What is unclear are the reasons the movement quieted down once the process of formal adoption began. The demands were not for entirely new changes but an expansion of isolated spaces that already existed to the university as a whole. For example, the proposed English 306 reforms were mostly already in place, quietly initiated by the Assistant Instructors (AIs) who already taught the course. In essence, the class had already been restructured. Yet, once the effort to formalize those changes within the English Department began the movement failed to publicly voice its position. With every defeat, little or no student response was forthcoming. As a result, not only was the space opened by the AI's shut down but the department split up.
Unaware of the corporate character of UT-Austin, the movement was unable to counter both the corporate backed backlash that eventually defeated even the watered-down distant relative of their plans and insist on militant reforms originally advocated. Instead, ONDA and PRIDE became merely a topic for debate in the Faculty Senate and the newspaper and no longer a demand of the movement in the streets and on the West and Main malls.
The academic professionalism that has developed in programs such as Chicano Studies has become the target of criticism among black and Chicano student activists as we saw in chapter 3 at UT-Austin. However, the same critique could be applied to the multiculturalism movement as well. By abdicating control over the implementation of multicultural reforms by allowing it to take place through formal academic decision-making channels, the movement severed student control before the reforms ever got off the ground. Munoz explains how the realization of Chicano Studies also meant the almost immediate exclusion of students from control over the programs:
Students had supported the efforts to make the [Chicano Studies] programs an integral part of the institution. However, once programs became part of the institution they came under the general rules and regulations governing all academic programs. In the case of Chicano Studies, this meant exclusive control of curricula by the faculty was expected to ensure conformance with university policies. Students thus could no longer expect to play an influential role in the further development of Chicano Studies programs unless 'understandings' were reached with the program faculty. Although some programs did make efforts to allow students a direct role in decision making, the usual outcome of institutionalization was the gradual decline of student participation in the governance of the programs. (p. 89)
Unprepared and uninformed about how the university operates and functions, the movement's success was short-lived. As long it fails to develop a radical critique of the university, the multiculturalism movement is only an implicit threat to the entrepreneurial university. As long as it continues to fail to offer a critique of the university in capitalism and recognize the autonomous power of students it will continue to be subjected to cooptation, institutionalization and repression.
Bibliography
[1] Carl Davidson, The New Radicals in the Multiversity and Other SDS Writings on Student Syndicalism, Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1990, p. 35.
[2] Edward Denison, The Sources of Economic Growth :The Alternatives Before Us, Supplementary Paper No. 13, NY: Committee for Economic Development, 1962, pgs. 67-79 and 229-255; and Edward Denison, Why Growth Rates Differ, Wash. DC: Brookings Institution, 1967, pgs. 78-108 and 279-295.
[3] By "class composition" I mean the way in which institutional organization changes in response to ongoing internal class conflict in an effort to restore manageability. See Harry Cleaver, "Marxian theory and the inversion of class perspective in its concepts: Two case studies," first draft, April 1989.
[4] Richard Flacks, Youth and Social Change, Markham Publishing Co.: Chicago, 1971. He also makes a Freudian argument in the text that these middle class students partially developed their radicalism by identifying with their highly educated, liberal mothers in revolt against their materialistic fathers. This injection of the Oedipus complex into explaining the student revolt of the 1960s could easily be the weaponry of the right. Not only is it premised on the deluded imagination that these movements engendered only male desires whatever that may be (women were subordinated but not powerless) but that there is an instinctual, human rationality that governs our behavior.
[5] Clark Kerr testified to the rupture of the dialectic in the universities as a result of the refusal of students: "Should the model of the university be based more on productive conflict or on doctrinal unity, on the interaction of disparate entities or on the integration of fully compatible parts? The multiversity is based more on conflict and on interaction; the monistic university more on unity and integration" (p. 140). And consider "It [the multiversity] worshipped no single God; it constituted no single, unified community; it had no discretely defined set of customers. It was marked by many visions of the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and by many roads to achieve these visions; by power conflicts; by service to many markets and a concern for many publics" (p. 136-7). There is no doubt about the importance of this conjecture in his repeated reminders that the university has never developed by any coherent plan but by haphazard, crisis decisionmaking when needed, whose cause is never admitted, that is constantly blocked by faculty and student insolence (p. 166, 177). Paradoxically, the left grasps to preserve capital's dialectic capital itself admits, in mystified terms nonetheless, its devastation in the face of struggle (Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, Harvard Press: Cambridge, 3rd ed., 1982).
[6] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, NY: Harper & Row, 1971, p. 15.
[7] Of course, this appears even more ridiculous when takes into account the struggles around race and gender that erupted in the 1950-60s that Flacks totally ignored.
[8] Flacks, p. 18, 35.
[9] This is one possible interpretation of section eight of Capital volume I made by Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, Univ. of Texas Press: Austin, 1979.
[10] Flacks, p. 18.
[11] Jurgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
[12] The Carnegie Commission's proposals for reform are described in The More Effective Use of Resources: An Imperative for Higher Education, A report and Recommendations by The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, McGraw-Hill: New York, June 1972, and Priorities for Action: Final Report of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973.
[13] Both books by Habermas and Wolff were published by Beacon Press in 1970.
[14] Vladimir Escalante disputes the case that students are consumers, a myth he finds reinforced by "a legal system that tends to view the relation between student and university as a contract for services," ignoring the fact that students are a disenfranchised sector. (Vladimir Escalante, "A History of University Labor Struggles," in Trumpbour, 1989, p. 205).
[15] The gravest absurdity behind the claim of "autonomy" is that Kerr himself recognizes that the universities have always been shaped by outside influences (p. 49), and by the time he wrote The Uses of the University would find "the boundaries of the universities are stretched to embrace all of society" (p. 115) becoming entrepreneurial corporations in themselves. (p. 58-9)
[16] Michael Miles, The Radical Probe: The Logic of Student Rebellion, NY: Antheneum, 1971, p. 125.
[17] "Memorandum from National Headquarters, Selective Service System," July 1, 1965, reprinted in The University Crisis Reader: The Liberal University Under Attack, Volume I, edited by Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr, Random House: New York, 1971, p. 195, 200.
[18] Ernest Mandel, The Revolutionary Student Movement: Theory and Practice, NY: Young Socialist Publications, pamphlet, April 1969.
[19] Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989, p. 14.
[20] Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism, Random House: New York, 1971, p. 24.
[21] Michael Spiegel, "The Growing Development of a Class Politics," Outgoing National Secretary's Address, New Left Notes, June 10, 1968.
[22] David Smith, Who Rules the Universities: An Essay in Class Analysis, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
[23] This is also the thesis of David Noble's America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, Knopf: New York, 1977, who brilliantly documents the role of capital in reorganizing higher education in order that it may serve its needs for producing highly skilled labor. However, like Smith, Noble seems to imply that capital invaded the universities, thereby subordinating them to accumulation rather than the universities already being a part of accumulation.
[24] John Beverly, "Higher Education and Capitalist Crisis, Socialist Review, no. 42, vol. 6, November-December, 1978, P. 67-91.
[25] Marietta Baba, "University Innovation to Promote Economic Growth and University/Industry Relations," p. 201, in Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: The Role of Industry, Small Business Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital and Universities, ed. by Pier Abetti, Christopher LeMaistre, Raymond Smilor, and William Wallace, University of Texas at Austin: IC2, 1987.
[26] All charts from Baba, pgs., 200, 202-203.
[27] David Noble, p. 110-117.
[28] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1976, especially chapter 25.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Clark Kerr, 1983, p. viii.
[31] Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Specific Reference to Education, 2nd ed., New York, 1975.
[32] Graduate Professional Association, "The Case for the Restoration of Graduate Student Employee (GSE) Insurance Benefits," no date (estimated to be 1988), Austin, Texas, p. 9.
[33] Jerry Farber, Student as Nigger, reprinted in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, assembled by Mitchell Goodman, Pilgrim Press: Philadelphia, 1970, P. 303-304.
[34] Strangely, he develops his analysis of housework from the works of Wages for Housework's Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, who actually come to entirely different conclusions from Smith. Not only do they aim to dispute any claim that housework is anything but directly productive to capital, but they even extend their analysis and conclusion to all forms of unwaged labor - including education - which for some reason Smith decided to ignore. Instead, Smith fetishizes the "productive" question, which Wages for Housework set out to put to rest by showing how the continuing unwaged labor serves to reproduce the internal hierarchy of power of the working class. This will be further discussed in chapter VII.
[35] This is also Bettina Aptheker's argument in The Academic Rebellion in the United States, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1972, where she argues that because of technological and structural changes in capitalism that have subordinated the university to the needs of production, intellectuals are automatically part of the working class. Because of the resulting alienation from this subordination, a rebellion will occur that will restore scientific reason to the university by removing the irrationality of capitalist imperialism. As one can imagine, Aptheker's analysis is a virtual regurgitation of orthodox Marxism. However, beneath the vulgar theoretical posturing is the basic ignoring of students, mystification of the role of the university itself to capital (other than capital's formal control through military research as she documents) and a dire struggle to save the university from those who wish to destroy both it and science (p. 165).
[36] Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, Basic: New York. 1976.
[37] The extent to which they go to defend the value of social control is downright chilling: 'The majority of individuals with senses tuned to the realities of everyday life will take pleas for a release from the bonds of authority for what they are: poetic fancy" (p. 272). As we've seen they have no qualms about authority, considering how it is necessary to put people to work: "Differences must not lie in the absence of authority but in the type of authority relations governing activity." The new type is none other that the old by a new name.
[38] John and Margaret Rowntree, "The Political Economy of Youth," Our Generation, number 6, 1968, p. 155-190.
[39] Irving Louis Horowitz and William Friedland do so much more abstractly in The Knowledge Factory: Student Power and Academic Politics in America, Aldine: Chicago, 1970. They argue for students and youth as a social class (a "politicized generation class") involved in inter-generational conflict. However, this is more a rigid categorization based on the arbitrary gauge of age rather than real social relationships. Not only are youths and students "no longer functional participants in the economic and political structure of industrial society; they have no formal role in the world of work and politics." (p. 120, 125) The class formation is not specific to any self-activity of students and youth or even the Rowntree's rigid occupational categories. For Friedland and Horowitz they are a social class because of their intuitive expression of desires for political power within the university for example which excludes them from decisionmaking and violates their tights to "full fledged citizenship" in the "university community." (p. 135) Their ambiguous analysis evolves into a strategy of reinstating these rights in order to heal the university. Without a critical analysis of the role of the university, in the end they simply suggest including students in decision making but not even going so far as to allow one person-one vote or student votes on governance committees to run the university but rather to just consult them in advance and set up a governing senate of the different groups as Wolff also suggests (pgs. 211-217).
[40] Gareth Stedman Jones, "The Meaning of the Student Revolt," p. 25-56, in Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn (eds.), Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, Baltimore: Penguin and London: New Left Review, 1969.
[41] At this point I am not going to raise any comment on his analogy to 'industry" since I believe he means and says that the connection exists to work as a whole. Others however have made a similar point about the university being a factory. Besides the ones we've already discussed, Veblen, Sinclair, the Rowntrees and Nicolaus have also made this argument. Martin Nicolaus, for example, finds that the university is an assembly line: "One person, a teacher, takes a batch of students...and runs them through a predetermined, standardized routine with textbooks. These are the methods of industry; you recognize them as the method of Taylorism, of scientific work management; you recognize in the process the principle of the highest output at the least cost, least wages and least educational investment." (Martin Nicolaus, "The Iceberg Strategy: Universities and the Military-Industrial Complex," SDS: The Radical Education Project, 1967). However, this is taking the "industry" analogy a bit structurally, without examining the content of the work process or motivation for implementing Keynesian planning. Students appear to go right along the assembly line without ever working. They are just products churned out to keep running the system.
[42] It was easy for Kerr to deny he ever called the universities "factories' in his 1972 postscript, but the fact was that he was analyzing a factory. While describing the growing role of the federal government in the university based high tech research following WWII, he notes that "it all becomes a kind of 'putting out' system with the agency taking the place of the merchant- capitalist of old. Sweat shops have developed out of such a system in earlier times and in other industries" (p. 60). It would be hard to get any more explicit.
[43] It is enlightening to consider the full passage: "it is also part of the process of freezing the structure of the occupational pyramid and assuring that the well-behaved do advance, even if the geniuses do not. The university is used as an eggcandling device; and it is, perhaps, a better one than any other that can be devised, but the process takes some of the adventure out of occupational survival and does for some professions what the closed shop has done for some unions" (p. 111). With the student insurgence, he concern soon turned to the immanent threat to this whole hierarchy (p. 133). According to Caffentzis, the entire first rung of the ladder was soon abandoned by the early 1970s. This is what the Carnegie Commission meant by letting "reluctant attendees" leave. It was also echoed by reformer John Holt during the 1960s who feared the purposeful damage and costs wreaked by the "angry and resentful prisoners" (John Holt, "School is Bad for Children," Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1969).
[44] Hugh Lauder, John Freeman-Moir, and Alan Scott, "What is to be done with radical academic practice," Capital & Class, number 29, Summer 1986, p. 89. Ironically, the authors ignore that academics themselves are workers and are engaged in struggles within the universities ("the context in which they teach and do research is removed from the real interests of groups engaged in political struggle") and even suggest that students are part of the "new middle class." (p. 99) By doing so, they too fall prey to their own critique that left educational theory fails to provide "serious strategic analyses" that can be used by struggles within education.
[45] Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1983, p. 4.
[46] See Harry Cleaver, 1979; and Mario Tronti, "Social Capital," Telos, number 17, Fall, 1973, reprinted from Operai e Capital, Turin: einaudi, 1966, 1971.
[47] Harry Cleaver, "Marxian theory and the inversion of class perspective in its concepts: Two case studies," first draft, April 1989, p. 11.
[48] My use of the word "capital" to indicate the characteristics of capitalist society refers to this theory of "social capital" and is not simply an alternative label. Although the word may seem at first to humanize a non-human political system, from my perspective, it explains how through waged and un-waged work humans are organized systematically. Once in place, such a method of organizing society is insistent in the exploitation of living people to give life to a cold, dead system. When used to capacity (e.g. retirement or death) these people join the ranks of what Marx called "dead labor" in which their labor is embedded in the infrastructure (e.g. machinery, buildings, knowledge) in which others work (1976).
[49] For English language perspectives see Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, Counterplanning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework, A perspective on Capital and the Left, NY: Wages for Housework Campaign, 1975; and Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework, NY: Wages for Housework Campaign, April 1975; and Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972.
[50] Marx,, p. 672.
[51] John Holt launches an attack on compulsory education, not because it disciplines children to accept work, but because it breeds resistance to work. Abolishing compulsory education, Holt contends, would actually reduce tensions since the unsatisfied could leave and force the schools to improve their preparation of students for a life of work (Holt, 1969).
[52] Cleaver, 1979, p. 122.
[53] Harry Cleaver, "Worried About Grade Inflation? Abolish Grades!," special to The Stanford Daily, May 31, 1994, p. 3.
[54] Harry Cleaver, Introduction to Marxist Economics, packet #2, p. 94.
[55] The Wages for Students Students, Wages for Students, Amherst, 1976, pamphlet, p. 4.
[56] Martin Nicolaus discusses disciplinary hierarchies in terms of their usefulness to capital's needs rather than the need to manage conflicts within academia. "The reason we have departments in the first place, other than for administrative convenience, is because industry needs 'economists' or political scientists.' Industry needs people with job classifications thatare standardized, rationalized, and computerized" (Nicolaus, 1967). This is echoed in his discussion of grading: "you will see that the people with the higher grades get the better jobs. Industry needs a better grading system in the knowledge industry in order to know who to hire in the top position and who to hire in the less important positions; to know who to pay and where to feed people into industry."
[57] Tim Grant, "Student as Worker: Wages for Homework," the sheaf, March 26, 1976, p. 4, explains this relationship very well as does Cleaver (1979).
[58] I point to Montano's supposition that capital can use either democracy or fascism interchangeably to reimpose control over workers to make them work, as applicable within schools (p. 51). One only has to look at the use of fascist tactics in the schools to reimpose work, such as the bat wielding principal Joe Clark, swatting, and not police that takes place besides joint student/administration committees and student affairs offices to perceive their flexibility in tactics of control (Mario Montano, "Notes on the international crisis," Zerowork, Number 1, December 1975).
[59] Kerr, p. 132.
[60] Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, The More Effective Use of Resources: An Imperative for Higher Education, June 1972, McGraw-Hill: New York, p. 28. Kerr recognized the growing turmoil was brewing in the early 1960s. "What are the current concerns?" There are: "problems related to cost...fuller utilization of the calendar, excessive numbers of courses, mechanization of instruction; problems related to the vast numbers of young people already knocking on the doors; problems related to public service - cultural programs, urban extension. Additionally, there is the general public concern with 'morality' on the campus; with the so- called beatniks, with the young radicals, with cheating and with sex. These 'moral' concerns are filling the incoming mailbox of the administrator" (p. 106). As we can see, there was no limit to the form and content that forbode crisis to the planner.
[61] Priorities for Action: Final Report of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973. Considering that the biggest names among them - Kenneth Kenniston, David Reisman, Norton Simon, Kerr, and Nathan Pusey - sat on the Carnegie Commission and did the research and writing - Earl Cheit, Philip Altbach, Seymour Lipset and Andrew Greeley - their research is quite representative of their varying management strategies.
[62] Hubert Humphrey, "Repression's Gaining Speed," Nashville Tennessean, May 18, 1969.
[63] Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1990, p. 119; and A. Bartlett Giametti, witness, US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Labor and Human Resources, Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities, "Basic Skills, 1979," 96th Congress, 1st Session (February 13, 1979), from document attached, Giametti, "Sentimentality," Yale Alumni Magazine, January 1976, pgs. 39 and 40.
[64] George Caffentzis, "Throwing Away the Ladder The Universities in the Crisis," Zerowork, No. 1, December, 1975, p. 130.
[65] C.C. Killingsworth, "The Effects of Automation on lobs," in B.R. Cosin, Education: Structure and Society, NY: Penguin Books, 1972, p. 94.
[66] Katsiaficas argues that the New Left (including the student movements) were international and triggered by a basic human desire for justice (a "human species consciousness", p. 11) and the creation of a future way of living in the present (George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968, Boston: South End, 1987). On the other hand, Cleaver rejects any notion of a youth, class or human species consciousness and suggests that the student insurgence was comprised of numerous multidimensional projects of "self-valorization" that at once subverted capital's subordination of life to work and attempted to realize multiple futures in the present. Nonetheless, even though he does not attempt to deal with students or universities in terms of capital, Katsiaficas provides the most comprehensive and exciting documentation of the international youth and student rebellion that I have found.
[67] Earl Cheit, The New Depression in Higher Education: A Study of Financial Conditions at 41 Colleges and Universities, A General Report of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the Ford Foundation, NY: McGraw Hill, 1971, especially chapters 3 and 6.
[68] This is reinforced throughout the literature of the crisis. It would also be my theoretical motivation for developing this thesis as an extension of Caffentzis' analysis.
[69] This statement cannot be taken for granted. Business not only has recognized school as work as we've seen, but has even devised various tactics to use wages to raise productivity. Gary Becker, a recent Nobel Prize winner in economics, is the first to suggest paying wages for schoolwork as far as I can tell. He argues that since "forgone earnings" contribute a larger cost than tuition charges, poor students would be more likely to attend college if they could do so without the cost of forgone earnings - that is, if they were paid their supposed higher wages while in school (p. 155). This is not surprising, since as a result of discrimination in the universities and job market women and "minorities" will receive a lower return (i.e. lower future earnings in exchange for the same effort), he notes they should be enticed to sharpen their productivity discipline by paying them to attend (affirmative action scholarships). This has been reproduced numerous times with ploys to pay for grades, offer trips and prizes for attendance, and cut the number of required classes or years of school in exchange for high grades or test scores (Business Week, "Special Bonus Issue," 1989, has some fine examples of this in a special advertising section).
[70] Paul Berman (ed.), Debating P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses, NY: DelI, 1992.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989, p. 165.
[73] Ibid, p. 97.
Chapter 6. Conclusion: Turning Resistance into Rebellion
Entrepreneurialization, although still quite new, is rapidly becoming national policy through the US. Hardly complete or entirely successful, restructuring faces numerous forms of overt and implicit forms of resistance. Nonetheless, this resistance is limited by a failure to directly challenge the university as a multinational corporation in an international context. Student and faculty activists have demonstrated an inability to conceive of the university as a factory in which people are expected to work and prepare themselves to work but don't. Few conceive of the university as a terrain of conflict beyond the contestations created by formal protest movements. For some, this failure holds dire consequences for continuing efforts to radically reorient the universities to serve the needs and desires of people rather than control and exploitation.
In conclusion, I examine efforts to move beyond resistance by creating new and expanding existing spaces within the universities. My purpose is not so much to offer detailed documentation but to raise questions as to the possible relationship of such resistance to the continuing crisis of higher education in the US. There are many questions to be asked in future research into entrepreneurialization. How do these spaces relate to formal student movements? Do such forms spaces have implications beyond the conceptions of those engaged in them? Do these implications have a place in an analysis of the continuing crisis of higher education, the crisis of capitalism, and the current strategy of entrepreneurialization?
However, these spaces cannot exist independent of the universities even as they transform them from within. Eventually, much like the ethnic studies and multiculturalism movements, they will undergo conflicting pressures of institutionalization, commercialization and demands that they serve the diverse needs of student, faculty and local communities. Without an analysis of the universities in the context of international capitalist society, such efforts may not withstand the weight of institutionalization and pressures of entrepreneurialization. A "wages for students" perspective may offer a starting point for developing an analysis from which we can both resist entrepreneurialization while defending and expanding such spaces. Such an analysis begins by articulating the conflict between school being unwaged work that served current and future employers - the very foundation of entrepreneurialization - and the pursuit of our own autonomous projects.
While there are many more aspects of students and the university that require critical attention such as the relationship between "everyday forms of resistance" and existing student movements, the international dimensions of entrepreneurialization, and the international circulation of struggle against NAFTA, GATT, and university development projects, I have decided to focus on entrepreneurialization of US universities in order to offer a case study that can help launch further efforts. I conclude with a look at the existence of spaces within the entrepreneurial universities that can tell us something about how people are already attempting to reorganize the universities to serve needs other than those driven by profit and control. Knowledge of such spaces offers a foundation for organizing broader movements beyond simply responding to austerity, entrepreneurialization, and repression to transforming or transcending the university as we attempt to transform all of society to serve our own diverse needs.
Moving Beyond Resistance: The Greening of the University
Alongside the multiculturalism movement lies a growing effort to refocus many facets of the universities on documenting, studying and attempting to resolve aspects of the "environmental crisis" of our planet while transforming the way we live in ecologically sound ways. Although many know of student recycling and anti-CFCs campaigns that have been adopted by many universities administrations as a result of legislative mandates, little is known of a wide range of efforts being directed at investigating the environmental impact of university operations and research and development projects, identifying threatened species or sensitive marshes and recharge zones, the development of alternative renewable energy sources and even the documentation of the music and customs of endangered human societies. While most of these efforts exist outside formal academic programs and departments and are carried out by individual faculty and students, they span the academic spectrum from the biological sciences, geography, liberal arts, music, and even mechanical engineering which is better known for its military research. However, some universities and colleges are beginning to embrace such research activities by creating environmental studies departments and even student centers far transcending the mere collection of office paper and soda cans.
Much of the emerging concern for environmental issues in the universities is rooted in low-profile student cooperative housing movement that emphasizes an ecological transformation of living space, diet, consumption, self-education and even decision-making. Since the late 1960s, cooperative housing, as well as cooperative grocery stores, has offered a base for not only the current widespread environmental action in society as a whole but even throughout the universities. Lee Altenberg suggests that such "ecological living groups" have played a powerful role in the reorganization of the universities and for establishing an autonomous foundation for the student movement. "Students form a group that takes control of their living situation - including running their own meal plan and housekeeping - so they can express their ecological interests not just as an extra-curricular activity, but as the very fabric of their college life." These houses become laboratories for the direct utilization of appropriate technology such as solar energy, vegetarianism, composting, recycling and consensus living arrangements. "By giving environmental activism a literal home on campus, a culture of ecological skills and experience can be transmitted from one year to the next and can keep evolving. Campus activism can change from a pattern of disconnected projects that are accomplished and soon forgotten, to one of continuous history where students can leave a legacy that future students will benefit from."[1]
Such ecological living groups have long been positive complements to a vast assortment of student movements, including those resisting the university's role in environmental destruction. Ecological living groups provide experiments with new forms of social relationships that may give us a glimpse into some of the many possible ways we may live in the future. Unlike a commune, these living groups are tightly wound up in the everyday activities of the universities while it both subverts its function as a corporation and transcends beyond it. There are numerous examples of ecological living groups that exist between the interstices of even the most entrepreneurial universities. Synergy House was established in 1972 at Stanford, home for more than 500 students throughout its lifetime. Qumbya Co-op was formed by 15 students at the University of Chicago in 1987. There are also houses at UC-Berkeley and the University of Michigan where the North American Students of Cooperation, which assists students in establishing co-ops with financial and other resources is based. In Austin, during the 1970s-80s, the Ark served as a center of radical political organizing. House of Commons (HOC) is still known as a social space for those trying to establish new ways of living, although financial hardship has eliminated the Inter Cooperative Council's (ICC) policy that house members have a consensus vote on new members, thus providing HOC with a diverse collection of members which sometimes results in conflicts over basic intentions for living there. Ironically, ICC officially insists upon a policy of being "non-political" ignoring the inherent political nature of co-ops.
Since many of the residents are students, these cooperative living experiments have gradually begun to have an influence on academia itself. Some students have attempted to use the structure of the university in order to create unstructured degree programs, student-run courses, and environmental studies centers and degree programs. These efforts demonstrate a tactical move from simply resisting to efforts to reorganize the university, creating numerous future ways of learning and living in the present.
At a growing number of universities students are organizing their own courses dealing with the environment. Altenberg, who has been working on the creation of student run courses at Duke, explains that "the most potent instruments students have devised to empower their activism is the student-run course. Students can create their own full-credit courses in which they can do research on the urgent political and social problems of the day, as part of real world campaigns to address them."[2] This idea is hardly new, since it is motivated by the movements of Black, female, Chicana/os and Asian-American students in the 1960-70s to create their own studies programs and "free universities" outside or overlapping the campuses. In fact, as "ethnic studies" faced cutbacks and the free universities disappeared, many students began to look to spreading out their interests to the entire university, giving rise to the multiculturalism movement that spans nearly every program and department of the universities.
Student-run courses are a predominant occurrence in the university. Students at Stanford and UC-Berkeley fought for and created programs where it can be done for full credit. At UT-Austin they may take the form of conference courses in which students with a project in mind work one on one or in groups with a professor of their choice. Students may do their class projects or papers on topics that interest them, thereby indirectly redesigning the intent of the course. A few schools go even further than individual courses. Evergreen State University in Washington has an option for students to spend much of their undergraduate years designing their own degree program. UC-Santa Cruz has a heavy emphasis on environmental studies and is organized with on-campus housing dedicated to cooperative living integrated with academic studies. Goddard College in Vermont hosts the Institute for Social Ecology which offers summer undergraduate and master's degree programs. Even the new UC campus in Monterey Bay has a public service requirement that will heavily emphasize political activism rather than charity work.[3]
No matter what form they take, student-run courses are fundamental to the reorganization of the university. Altenberg suggests that student-run courses may "integrate students' academic program with their social concerns; provide a means to channel the university's immense resources toward the urgent political and social issues of the day...; [and] create 'free social space' where ideas and aspirations that are unsanctioned and inadmissible in other social situations (classrooms, dorms, on the job, in the media, churches, political discourse, etc.) can be openly broached, shared, reflected upon, acted upon, and where new understandings can be developed among a group of people, who learn to work together, and can continue to work after the conclusion of the course."[4]
Concern for the environmental crisis has begun to influence the direction of scholarly research projects as well. The original UCLA environmental audit, that has served as a template for many similar environmental committees, was first undertaken for a master's thesis by two architecture students.[5] At numerous campuses, students and faculty are reappropriating class time - and their time in school itself - intended to train us to work to study the environment and sometime the university itself.
The Student Coalition for Clean Energy at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, decided to challenge the renegotiation of the 25 year, $1 billion energy supply contract by organizing an Environmental Summit and doing research into alternative energy sources in a graduate school energy policy class. Their research demonstrated that UM-TC is the state's 20th largest source of sulfur dioxide, the main cause of acid rain, and has repeatedly violated its state issued air permit. The Minnesota Pollutions Control Agency charged that the monitoring equipment has been broken for over a year, that the university had failed to make many required reports and violated its opacity limits over 35 times. The coalition has distributed a petition, signed by people from 18 different organizations and academic departments, which was submitted to the regents calling for a switch from coal to natural gas. Making the connection to living conditions, they held a press conference at a "family student housing site next to one of the university's coal burning steam plants, where residents live in the shadows of a huge coal pile and are exposed to noxious coal dust." Much of the research that informed the movement was conducted by graduate students who used a required class to study the use of coal and alternative energy sources on campus and issued a report that seriously questioned campus energy policy.[6]
Students at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville won a longstanding battle over the environmental impact of university development projects in Spring 1992. After fighting the campus administration's proposal to destroy a large part of a mature deciduous forest on campus land known as the Sweet William's Trail area since 1990, the local SEAC group signed an agreement with the administration to form an environmental oversight board that would make recommendations to the Vice President for Administration. The board will have an environmental audit committee and a recycling committee.[7]
Students at Oberlin College of Ohio organized the "Biosphere Project" that not only asks about trash and recycling but also the use of pesticides and herbicides, the amount of pollution (Oberlin creates about 15 tons of C02 per student per year), where the food is purchased and what kind of companies it invests in.[8]
At many campuses, environmental studies is far more than low-key individual efforts of students and faculty but are actually becoming integrated into the structure of academia. By one rough estimate, there are nearly 200 environmental studies programs at US universities, many of which are outgrowths of student initiatives. There are also environmental studies centers at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of New Hampshire and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. UC-Boulder's Environmental Center was central to the organization of the 1991 SEAC Common Ground conference. Students also created the UNH Environmental Center that holds a library and serves as a clearinghouse for information and worked with the UN-Lincoln student union to establish a resource center for environmental research.[9]
Aside from its numerous hypocrisies and capital's attempts at institutionalization, Earth Day 1990 exposed a vast concern for the earth that already existed but one that existed on nearly every college campus - both universities and community colleges - throughout the U.S. That year, an advertisement was placed in Greenpeace magazine by students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill asking if there was interest in establishing a student environmental organization. After receiving a tremendous amount of responses, the Threshold conference was held on their campus, attended by more than 1,700 students and the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) was born. After their next conference, Catalyst, in Champaign Illinois, drew about 7,600, SEAC became not only the largest environmental student organization but the largest student organization since SDS with about 33,000 members at 1600 campuses in 50 states, including 750 high schools, and 16 countries by late 1991.[10]
The main current running through SEAC revolves around environmental groups intent on "greening" their campus by implementing paper, aluminum, and other forms of recycling, establishing carpools, cutting consumption by the campus administration, replacing styrofoam with reusable plastic cups and planting trees on or near campus. A smaller but growing current are intent upon conducting "environmental audits" of their campus that encompass an examination of not only the amount of waste generated by the campus but also the universities role in the building of incinerators, toxic dumping, the destruction of natural habitats, and local and international pollution and sometimes corporate and military ties.
While environmental audits have the potential for examining the entrepreneurialization of the university, it has mostly served to indirectly help university administrations problems with "waste management" and "energy efficiency" for example rather than creating new ones. Yet, environmental audits have provided a base of information about the university that SEAC is attempting to expand further to include research into the curriculum, corporate, military and other types of research and connections as well as the political implications of their investments both in the US and internationally. SEAC took a broad step by participating in the formation of A SEED (Action for Solidarity, Equality, Environment and Development), which was developed by international students who attended the Catalyst conference and have since set up offices in five countries. Originally linking up the struggles of students in numerous countries in preparation for the Youth '92 meeting in Costa Rica to prepare actions at UNCED, Brasil, ASEED continues to focus on the international dimensions of the student movement and university development projects.
Carving Our Spaces at UT-Austin
While UT-Austin is being reorganized into an overt profit-making corporation, it faces challenges from within and without by people with different visions of what the university should and could be about, not only in regards to environmental issues such as solar energy research and cleaning up toxic wastes but also in emerging cultural forms, creating alternative learning centers, newspapers and even radio stations. Throughout the campus and UT System, people are silently and not-so-silently working on their own projects, many of which are antagonistic to the administrations entrepreneurial priorities. Below the surface of everyday events there appears a growing conflict between the commercial ambitions of the UT-Austin administration and its corporate partners, and students and faculty who have entirely different ideas about what the university should be. These "alternative" projects are quietly disrupting the mission of the university, which seeks to discipline students to spend the rest of our lives working on meaningless and redundant tasks.
I want to highlight only a few of the recent positive projects on campus by undergraduates, graduates, faculty and staff-projects that are thriving despite entrepreneurial activity and austerity. In the process of fighting against austerity, we need to recognize the many projects going on throughout campus and their implication for demonstrating the possibilities for transforming UT-Austin to serve our needs and desires.
Many of these activities fit neither the neat categories of "education" and "research". A common mystification exists about the concept of "research". The problem is not that research is squeezing out "education" (assuming the latter is somehow ''better'' than the former) but that certain kinds of research - primarily military and commercially-oriented - are taking priority over all else. Neither research nor education in themselves can serve the needs and desires of people for changing the way we live: "education" can serve to either produce obedient workers or empower people to take control over their own lives while "research" can either reproduce the existing systems of power or provide knowledge that can help empower people. Contrary to popular myth, empowering research exists side by side with empowering education.
Empowering research has a long history at UT-Austin. In the 1960s architecture and botany students used a class to study the impact of then Chairman of the Board of Regents Frank Erwin's planned destruction of a grove of trees to expand Memorial Stadium and law students spent time investigating then Governor John Connally's role in profiting from the construction of UT-San Antonio and the LBJ School.[11] In 1990, an architecture student wrote an historical analysis of the use of architecture at UT-Austin to manage and control student struggles.[12]
Since the 1960s, similar kinds of research have continued throughout the campus without quite as much publicity or direct impact. Some engineering students and faculty are engaged research on toxic waste cleanup and environmental technologies. A couple of groups in the Center for Energy Studies, which ironically shares a building with the military funded Center for Electromechanics, are working on solar energy panels and the removal of toxic chemicals from water. Likewise, others are studying pollution in the Galveston Bay Estuary and other waterways. Engineering students annually design solar powered cars even though their research is being sponsored by GM and slated for commercialization.
In Civil Engineering, professor Earnest Gloyna conducts research on "supercritical water oxidation" which may be able to destroy waste, sludge and toxic substances in water. Gloyna's work may soon be commercialized by some of the worst polluting companies and is part of a Defense Department toxic waste cleanup project. Moreover, Gloyna's research would ironically help reverse the environmental destruction perpetuated by the military research of his colleagues such as Ben Streetman, Al Tasch and J.K. Aggarwal, who develop computer technology for automated weapons systems. Although Gloyna's military backing raises the possibility of spin-off applications for cleaning up areas devastated by chemical weapons to allow troops to move in, the military would have completely neglected clean-up of its toxic waste had activists not exposed the widespread pollution and ecological destruction it has caused in the US alone and forced Congress to mandate cleanup.
The law school is home to some alternative projects as well. There are student groups involved in environmental protection law and civil rights. Professor Elvia Arriola studies civil rights, sexual harassment and discrimination on the job and feminist legal theory. In fact, Students for a Diversified Law School organized strikes in 1990 and 1991 to push for multicultural reforms, and a law journal called The Journal of Women and Law was formed a few years ago by a group of students. A professor even coordinates a student lawyer legal assistance program for people who cannot afford a lawyer, although it has received complaints for providing uncaring and inadequate services.
In the College of Liberal Arts, there are an endless number of research projects that exist just below the surface, financed out of the pockets of faculty and students due to the lack of administrative support or downright opposition. Anthropology professor Thomas Hester coordinates a summer field school which conducts archeological digs on upper Barton Creek unearthing hundreds of artifacts of hunter and gathering societies that once lived there. Such research can demonstrate the vital importance of preserving Barton Creek from development projects such as that being pushed by Freeport McMoRan.
There are wide range of other spaces in existence throughout the College of Liberal Arts. There are study groups in "Autonomist Marxism", labor history, and Chicano/a studies that have been in existence for a number of years. Economics professor Harry Cleaver has been building an archive of books, articles, zines and other publications of what he calls "Autonomist Marxism". Sociology professor Les Kurtz and a group of students and faculty have coordinated a proposal for a Peace Studies Program and organize an annual conference. Students working with the Minority Information Center have organized the "Women of Color Conference", and in 1993 a number of people organized a conference on "Women and War" which featured panel discussions concerning the Gulf War and its effects on women and social movements in the US and the Middle East. During the Gulf War, the Progressive Faculty Group, the Chicano/a Faculty Caucus and the Black Faculty Caucus organized a couple of teach-ins on the war that were attended by hundreds of people as well as daily teach-ins by professors and anti-war organizers. Classes on AIDS, Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual culture, and a number of other topics originally began as study groups that became classes.
Philosophy professor Doug Kellner and Frank Morrow of the College of Communications have been doing a show on ACTV cable access since the late 1970s that offers alternative analyses of world events. The Center for Mexican American Studies is producing Latino USA, a weekly radio show for Mexican-Americans, that is being aired nationally on NPR. Anthropology professor Steven Feld has recorded the sounds and music of Papua New Guinea tribes while drawing connections to the destruction of the island's rainforests which threatens their way of life. His last recording, Voices of the Rainforest, was done in conjunction with Michael Hart of the Grateful Dead.[13] Anthropology professor Elizabeth Fernea produced a documentary on peace movements in Palestine and Israel that was aired on PBS last Spring and has published a companion book. History professor David Montejano has served as an expert witness on the League for United Latino American Citizens in their successful lawsuit against the Texas state for its discrimination in funding higher education in South Texas. Government professor Anne Norton is involved in research on sexual harassment at UT-Austin.
Graduate students in Management Science and Information Systems of the College of Business Administration are conducting a study to find patterns of discrimination in the location of toxic pollution. To date, they find that minorities are most likely to live in areas badly polluted with industry and waste dumps. Dave Sullivan, a business graduate student, recently served on a UT committee to investigate campus recycling and conservation. A business professor conducted a study of the economic impact of the Save Our Springs Ordinance finding that the effect of restricted development on Barton Creek would not negatively affect the local economy.
The College of Natural Sciences is teeming progressive projects as well. Zoologist Mark Kirkpatrick has been a driving force behind the effort to have the Barton Creek Salamander listed on the US Endangered Species Act list. As of 1995, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has refused to accept its own staff biologists recommendation that it be included on the list leading Kirkpatrick and the Save Our Springs Coalition Legal Defense Fund (which has been fighting development on Barton Creek) to file a suit in federal District Court.[14] Astronomy professor Edward Nather does not need his own telescope to study the universe, he shares with others around the world. Nather's Whole Earth Telescope links up about a dozen major observatories worldwide by telephone and electronic mail in the study of a star 24 hours a day. While UT is planning to build a new $12 million telescope in West Texas next to the already existing McDonald Observatory ($1.5 million of which will come from student paid general fees), Nather is helping to create a network of astronomers that can share equipment and research rather than waste millions of dollars building more telescopes which destroy the environment in the process.
Joe Frost, early childhood education professor, is internationally know for his work on playground equipment safety. He has done an extensive evaluation of Austin playgrounds which found "dangerous features on most of the city's 78 playgrounds."[15]
In the College of Communications, journalism professor Wayne Danielson was part of the fight among faculty in the Faculty Senate and University Council to implement multicultural reforms outlined by Project PRIDE and ONDA (which were written by the Black Student Alliance and Todos Unidos). Department of Radio-Television-Film chairman John Downing is known for his work on underground and alternative media, having written a book on the subject, and edited another collection of articles about films in the "third world". Journalism professor Mercedes de Uriarte has been the faculty advisor for the Tejas newspaper which is produced by "minority" students and dedicated to minority student issues.
Although students are important partners in many of these projects, there are others that are strictly student initiated and operated. The recycling drums seen in many buildings is coordinated by the Students for Earth Awareness who recycle cans, bottles and paper on campus, eventually pushing UT-Austin to take responsibility for recycling newspaper a few years ago, which it dropped in late 1991 without telling anyone because they didn't make enough money and then reinitiated by legislative mandate. The slate of multicultural reforms, some of which are still under consideration, (although the multiculturalism requirement was voted down by faculty), was almost entirely initiated by the efforts of the Black Student Alliance and Todos Unidos.
If it was not for the efforts of a group of student parents and graduate students in the mid to late 1980s, there would still be no childcare. A few years ago, a group of student parents formed the University Student Childcare Association (USCA), offering inexpensive daycare for 236 student families from 3 to 10pm Monday through Friday and 6 to 11 pm on Saturdays. USCA has recently expanded their hours of service. While providing daycare, the USCA along with other student groups fought to force the administration to establish a daycare program. USCA and Council of Graduate Students were involved in a committee formed by the administration that eventually led to a UT run service in 1990, in addition to the efforts of USCA.
For about four years students have been running the KTSB cable radio station that features music unheard on the commercially dominated airwaves. In 1992, the FCC ruled that KTSB must share 91.7 FM with a local cooperative radio station called KOOP. However, a number of station bureaucrats and the Texas Student Publications board have long refused to work out a cooperative agreement, delaying KTSB's FM debut for three years and spending about $100,000 in student fee money on legal costs in order to control the whole frequency. Although KOOP has offered to negotiate a time sharing arrangement with the student staff - who have not been included in recent negotiations - for more than two years, they have been repeatedly rebuked, although some staff members pushed for negotiations. KTSB, now KVRX, eventually went on the air in Fall 1994 in a time-sharing agreement with KOOP. Students also formed Texas Student Television (TSTV) fought unsuccessfully to get an access channel on ACTV, and is now aired on channel 9.
The independently produced film Slacker is not as rare as one might be led to believe. Every semester, Film I, II and graduate film students screen their semester and thesis projects in Burdine. All types of independently produced films, from animation to spoofs of students trapped in the UT-Austin bureaucracy are featured, each one written, produced, funded and organized by students and their friends. Music students also hold concerts each semester to perform their music, while art students exhibit their works in the student gallery as well as participants in a number of performance art revues and events throughout the city.
Throughout the College of Fine Arts students are exploring and challenging accepted conceptions of not only audio, performance and visual forms but dealing with substantive political issues through reappropriated or newly devised mediums. Students now have their own space to exhibit their creations in the Student Gallery. Long limited to token spaces in the Huntington for selectively chosen students, the student gallery features much more than paintings but also pieces that incorporate video, lighting, film, audio, clothes, and live performance.
Music and theatre students also conduct performances of the pieces they have written and coordinated all semester or even longer. Although the College of Fine Arts has cut back the availability of resources to students to conduct full presentations in favor or practices that appears geared to prepare them for jobs rather than allow them to follow their desires, many productions still go one both through the college and a few new theatre groups. There is a Symphony Orchestra, ensembles for experimental, Brazilian, Caribbean, and other kinds of "world music" which any student can join by signing up for the class. There are also dance troupes, opera groups and a number of experimental and student-run play companies such as the Shadowland Players, the Weetzahs, the Barefoot Players, and The Broccoli Project.
Over the last five years there have also been many new student produced newspapers, comics, and magazines. A journalism class writes and publishes Tejas, which is devoted to the concerns of minority students and community members. The Black Student Alliance publishes The Griot periodically and includes many articles and poetry concerning black students and community concerns. A few former UT students (who also work on Liberated Learning) produced the Polemicist (now The Hot Blast), which provides in-depth investigative news coverage of community issues and UT-Austin affairs. The Polemicist was later followed by The Other Texan, an investigative newspaper published by graduate students and more recently (sub)TEX. There is also the University Review which covers UT and national issues from a moderate to right wing perspective. The University Democrats infrequently publish Foresight, which is mostly devoted to elections. At anyone time there can also be found a few music zines as well, like Powerball and No Reply, which are free. There has recently been a warm breeze of new independently-published local comic books, a number of which are done by former and current Daily Texan cartoonists. There also have been two compilations of local comics recently published, such as JAB, a testament to the overwhelming talent and interest around town.
There are other student projects only partially connected to UT that take place allover Austin. One of the best known was the short lived "free university", Liberated Learning, allows anyone to teach or take classes in whatever interests them. Classes are offered on any topic if there is a group of people interested in learning about it. Liberated Learning also owns a press that anyone can use after taking a class to learn how to operate it. Thousands of zines, fliers, and posters have been printed on it by students and local residents for only the extremely low costs of supplies.
For a few years, Club Whatever could be found in full swing on the West Mall on Friday evenings. The Club offered bands a place to play for free,without the hassles of moneymaking clubs and bouncers. The Renaissance Market on Guadalupe Street is a city-run market that features a slim but interesting collection of pottery, jewelry, and clothes. Each merchant can only sell what they actually make themselves. This limitation has spurred the growth of a number of other people selling clothes from Guatemala, perfumes, locally made incense, and even books on black consciousness and history. Every Friday a Food Not Bombs group serves dozens of people free wholesome vegetarian food on the Drag. On the last Friday of every month a hundred or so bicyclists take to the campus and city streets to promote awareness and cooperation with bicycle riders. Hundreds of students are also involved daily in running their own cooperatively organized and operated homes. There are two different cooperative housing groups that feature vegetarian meals (House of Commons is entirely vegetarian with vegan options), and a couple with swimming pools. There are also a few independent coops, including one in North campus, and there was even one on Dancy Street in East Austin called Guff House for about three years.
There are also many students involved in performing music both on the streets and in many of Austin's clubs. On almost any day, there are at least a few people, some of whom are or were students, playing guitars or having drum jam up and down Guadalupe Street. Many local bands that play at the Cavity Club, the Cactus, Liberty Lunch, the Black Cat, or Emo's also feature students.
This is only a small sampling of projects, happenings and lifestyles ranging from the building of a solar car in engineering to housing cooperatives in West Campus in motion on and around campus. Although it receives the disproportional amount of campus resources, corporate and military research are merely one of many of the wide diversity of events and activities going on everyday.
Some people take varying amounts of time and effort to search out these free spaces in the university and some make them the focus of their lives at UT. This applies to both undergraduate and graduate, full and part time students (although we're all really students whether we enroll or not). And if you can't find something you like, you can always start your own project.
Although many of these activities are little known, their existence demonstrates that more is at work in and around UT than what we're expected to do: study, research, worry about grades, stand in lines, and isolate ourselves from each other in preparation of a "life" of endless work. Aside from the alienating, irrelevant formal activities of UT, many people are spending much of their lives carrying out fulfilling and positive interests.
That a wide variety of independent academic and non-academic projects thrive at UT-Austin raises a number of questions for further investigation. Regarding those spaces focusing on environmental issues, in what ways do they differ or complement the ethnic studies, women's studies and the multicultural reforms movements of the 1970-80s? Can these spaces further complement grassroots student movements to block environmentally destructive research and development projects? Will environmentalism be turned into another academic discipline and schoolwork? Or will further integration into the academic structures and even the development of degree granting programs institutionalize such projects? I have found these questions unique not only to multiculturalism and environmentalism but all such attempts to carve out spaces within the universities. As we saw with multiculturalism, to the extent that these movements fail to act with an analysis of the university as a productive institution of capitalist society, they will fail to either resist institutionalization, repression or the withering away into mere reform movements.
For instance, we find that some of these independently organized ensembles, troupes and newspapers are allowed to persist but when integrated into the formal organization of the university, those involved find themselves increasingly funding them out of their own pockets through new fees and higher tuition. To pay for them, they are forced to take on waged work that in turn drains them of time and energy often resulting in burnout and the demise of the project. The unwaged status of students makes such projects vulnerable to the pressures of entrepreneurialization.
Overlooking this process has resulted in the fundamental theoretical shortcoming among student activist movements since the 1960s that inspired this research. Overcoming this failing means reconceiving the relationship of students and universities to other areas of capitalist society.
Rethinking Our Strategies
In changing the way we look at the universities, it is important that we identify the sources of mystification that have crippled our theoretical, methodological and strategic development. By overcoming such shortsightedness, we can articulate the everyday relationship of austerity and entrepreneurialization to a wider audience of students than simply activists in efforts to both resist commercial reorganization while sowing seeds for our own reorganization or elimination of the university. I am not advocating that we need to change every student's perception only that we change our own.
Rethinking our strategy could begin with the issue of student income, a primary concern of nearly every student and in turn an excellent starting point to organize a movement. Whether one receives support from parents, financial aid, or works for wage, students daily confront the issue of income as a means of domination and control over their own activities albeit choice of study, whether "to go out" or study, and even whether to drop out or stay in. The long term promise of pay-off from working hard in school often also dictates much of a students' life. In attempting to organize students to confront certain issues and advocate change we overlook the force of income on a student's decision to participate. Having to choose between speaking up or going broke, many students repeatedly choose the former. Unfortunately, rather than reevaluating our organizing strategies many activists simply write off these students as apathetic and continue to preach to the converted and often the financially secure.
Wages for Students as a Tactic
As long as the left and student movements neglect to openly deal with the status of students in capital accumulation, they will remain vulnerable to the use of austerity and income as a weapon of control, including the use of explicit wages tied to the work. In the 1970s, a movement arose in Italy with allies in the US and Canada articulating a demand of "wages for schoolwork", a demand for an independent source of income that is not tied to work but can be used to strengthen the refusal of work. The welfare movements of the 1960s demonstrated that receiving social wages from the state does not necessarily result in the imposition of work since that money was used for many purposes other than what they were intended. Wages for students can be undertaken as such a demand that can offer a starting point for organizing a widespread student movement that could eventually transcend the issue of income.
While there are few examples of what could be consider "wages for students" tactics today, Todos Unidos' demand that the minimum GPA requirement to continue receiving financial aid be eliminated and alternative aid be offered to students on academic probation so that they do not have to take on other work for a wage demonstrated a concern for the issue of income in organizing a broader movement. Focused on expanding enrollment and hiring of Mexican-American students and faculty and a reorganization of Chicano Studies and UT-Austin as a whole as part of the multiculturalism movement, Todos Unidos' ONDA confronted the issue of income in order to establish a common concern among many Mexican-American students.[16] A common cause around income could become a starting point for organizing a movement with even wider concerns by ensuring that its participants continue receiving financialsupport if their activism should prevail over grades. Unfortunately, this insightful tactic never really took hold, nor was it picked up by other students.
The aim of demanding wages for schoolwork is not simply a demand for money, although that is one concrete outcome, but more a strategy to expose the unwaged status of students that allows business to profit from it. As Silvia Federici succinctly explains regarding wages for housework,
...to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step toward refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity.[17]
No work is the strategy while the tactic is the wage.
In 1970, Irving L. Horowitz foresaw the student movements of the 1960s beginning to deal with the issue of income and wages as they recognize that "students are the only members of the American academic community who are not paid for the work they perform." However, he foresaw that rather than becoming a resource for struggle, wages for students would conservatize the movements as they begin to refocus on "economistic" issues of money that will subjugate them to a reliance on federal research money.[18]
Although it is impossible to say what would have happened if the students movements had begun to confront the issue of income, we can say that their failure to do so allowed the universities to use the lack of income against them. Facing rising tuition and fees and other forms of austerity, students began to redirect their interests from transforming the universities and society to getting a degree and income that would keep them above poverty and allow them to repay their massive debt. Without confronting the issue of income, the student movement did not become conservative or economistic - it was defeated.
We still cannot ignore the possibility that Horowitz could have been correct, that while facing the issue of income, students began to exchange the money for discipline. Without combining a demand for wages with a refusal of work, such demands are bound to backfire and become a demand for more work linked to a wage. Yet, the wage itself is less important than the strategy of exposing and refusing the unwaged work of being a student. To demand wages for students is to refuse the work of being a student in order to make explicit the unwaged status of students.
As the Wages for Housework movement demanded a wage without working in the home, by refusing to do that work, it "opened for the first time the possibility for refusing forced labor in the factories and in the home itself."[19] It was not a wage that recognized the work they do, but a refusal, a struggle against work. We can learn from this in our struggles. Too many students take on outside waged work to make it through school. Demanding wages for schoolwork is a refusal of this extra work necessitated and hidden by our wagelessness. Grant explains how wages for schoolwork exposes the endless workday student face: "Like housewives, when we are not paid for the work we do, the state doesn't care how many hours we work a day. But when we demand wages for schoolwork, we make visible all the unpaid work school involves, and we can begin to struggle, like other workers, over how much of our time we are forced to submit to schoolwork for how much money."[20] Demanding the wage is to demand less work with pay. It can shift the use of grades as piecework IOUs on future wages to the payment of wages now for every minute of work done, not for each piece or their quality. It is an identical tactic used to end the same exploitation by piecework struggled against and almost eliminated by the working class over the last few hundred years.
Making the unwaged work students do visible, as Federici suggests as the key to the demand for wages, exposes the fact that capitalism is based on unwaged labor. Surplus value, which Karl Marx discusses a length in Capital, is no more than the amount of unwaged labor that can be forced upon a worker. The waged workday itself is divided cleanly between that part which a worker is paid and that which is not. As workers have progressively fought to reduce the length of work over our lifetimes, the year, week and day, thus reducing absolute surplus value, businesses have responded with a myriad of actions one of which was to increase relative surplus value (the intensity at which we work). Although Marx discussed this in terms of weavers being made to tend ever more and more machines as they increasingly pushed down absolute surplus value (the length at which they worked), his analysis is still useful for our purposes. As class struggle has succeeded in reducing the amount of work while pushing up wages (and fighting for holidays, health benefits, safe working conditions, and keeping the school year short) social leisure and outside work activities have increasingly been integrated into the circuit of accumulation.
During the 1920s Taylorism began to be increasingly applied to housework activities in order to understand how they could be managed so as to better reproduce the labor power of waged workers. Keynes' premise that labor was an investment rather than a cost of production became the means for managing the international economy during the 1930s. What made this possible was the ability of millions of unemployed men and women who demonstrated and rioted to successfully force the state to pay for their reproduction of labor power even in the absence of work. The application of Keynesian economics to welfare established a formal productive role for the reproduction of labor power in the accumulation of capital. Reproduction was now recognized as contributing to the production of profit by increasing a workers' capacity to work. Although Keynesianism was also being applied to public education in the 1920-30s, it was not until the 1950s when it would be extended to the universities. Otherwise known as "human capital" theory originating with Gary Becker and others, education became explicitly acknowledged for its role in production.
Housework, education and other reproductive activities (such as sex or shopping for example) have become fundamental to Toni Negri and Harry Cleaver's concept of the social factory in which all activities, waged and unwaged, are productive to capital. The fundamental importance of unwaged labor to business becomes explicit in cases where workers are able to reduce the amount of work they do (thereby increasing the ratio of waged to unwaged work assuming intensity remains constant). Businesses will seek to transfer the work more to unwaged or lower waged workers by moving to another location within the US or another country where they can receive more unwaged work for the same or lower cost.
Entrepreneurialization is a prime example of this process. High tech and biotech companies, facing high wages, vast benefits, computer viruses and hackers, rising environmental opposition, and increasing scandals (which can be interpreted as caused by unproductive workers), are downsizing their in-house research and development and shifting that cost to the universities where it can be done by unwaged engineering and science students in university funded facilities. They are fleeing the antagonisms of the traditional workplace to the universities where they can presumably extract more unwaged work making apparent the function of entrepreneurialization as a response to class struggle. This use of unwaged students against waged workers can be directly combated by exposing the unwaged nature of school/work through the demand for a wage.
Demanding and getting a wage is also a refusal of the parent/teacher/wage mediation. It puts students closer, powerwise, to waged workers. With a wage, students have an independent source of power to refuse subordination their struggles to those of parents, teachers or other waged workers. What Selma James writes for black and "white" women in their struggle for the wage is applicable for students: "we need the autonomy that the wage and the struggle for the wage can bring..."[21]
The student movement "must confront the capitalist strategy of control in the university crisis which is predicated on the wagelessness of students. Students can only attack their wageless status through a demand for wages for schoolwork."[22] The struggle for a wage becomes a struggle against the use of students against waged workers and division of students from each other. It is a demand for student autonomy within the working class via other more powerful sectors and in relation to capital. It is also a complementary struggle to those of waged workers such as parents who are under pressure to work harder and longer, and even mothers to take another job on top of unwaged housework, in order to support their unwaged children. Wages for students would also complement waged workers who are put into competition with poor students who would accept their job for less pay. Until the power of the wage or the lack of and the resulting absence of autonomy is appreciated, not only will students' role in class struggle will not be fully appreciated but the class will suffer as a whole.
Summing Up: Entrepreneurialization, Student Autonomy and Class Struggle
This resulting autonomy can only strengthen the autonomous struggles of students over the past three decades. Student movements have been stubbornly resistant to attempts at centralization, left or "worker" domination, and for one group to speak for another or many. It could be suggested that autonomy has been the underlying characteristic most agreed upon by student movements even if they have not always worked in practice as they have in theory. However, autonomous organizing must be accompanied by a sharpened analysis of the universities as a productive sector of capitalist society if our isolated efforts are to be transformed into widespread movements.
Two published discussions among various UT-Austin student activists demonstrates the conscious reworking of the relationships between groups and hierarchies based on class, gender, sexual preference and race. Kathy Mitchell, former editor of the Polemicist, an alternative student newspaper at UT-Austin, recognized that a new strategy is evolving:
the more people who are speaking from different sites, the more we learn about how all those sites are interconnected. And that's different from trying to create a general agenda because that is going to subsume somebody's interests...When you have multiple sites and people connecting what they're doing to what other people are doing, then you have a real powerful force for change, for mobilizing people.[23]
This reworking of the connections between these different struggles have implications outside the university for the working class as a whole. It is a reworking that is occurring throughout society: in the few remaining factories, but also offices, bedrooms, kitchens and even dance floors. The intra-class hierarchies are under attack. As women, "people of color", youth and students fight for and win their own autonomous sources of power and forms of organization the struggle as a whole is strengthened. It has become very difficult to use one group to undermine a weaker or subordinate group. This is quite apparent through many movements, where women, gay and lesbians, and others have refused to have their interests ignored or subordinated to "greater issues" or "wait until after the revolution".
This is coming to characterize the struggles at UT-Austin. Black, Chicana/o, Lesbian, Gay and Asian-american students have been organizing autonomously - no longer for only their own programs and departments to study their histories, spaces that have over time been isolated from the rest of the campus - but to demand that the entire structure and content of the university be reorganized to encompass their participation and contributions. In the process, multiculturalism offers a capability for refusing the left's formula for class consciousness deriving from more study and unwaged schoolwork, and in the defense of the university as a social constant. We can see elements of the refusal of schoolwork and study of which a rejection of knowledge for the sake of control is only a part. Students are still not studying but struggling - transforming society by creating many "futures in the present." This is the potential of multiculturalism. It is still a viable one. It has yet to be coopted in but minor ways.
In less than two years, the nature of dominant forms of student struggles have passed from agitation solely around international issues such as apartheid in South Africa, made "distant" by students' own inability to connect the issues or even themselves to the campus. The "new" movements have favored autonomous self-organization over the party-like hierarchic organizing of the student left and analyze the student both in terms of the university and internationally. No longer will Black students allow so-called "white" activists to attempt to lead divestment movements they started, "whites" to let Black people speak for them, or Gay and Lesbians allow straights to speak for them. It is an embrace of multiplicity, a recognition that society cannot be transformed by one group for everyone else. There can be no liberation until all are free from all forms of domination. By breaking down a significant source of the conflicts within the working class based on the wage, wages for students should complement this desire for autonomy.
But what does it mean for our purposes for resisting entrepreneurialization? The contemporary environmental, anti-militarism and multiculturalism movements all have in common their need and demand for autonomy. This needs to be not only defended but further developed and expanded. Autonomy is the starting point for relating each of these movements so that they are complementary and continue to be autonomous. Concurrently, a class analysis of students and the university would help maintain the autonomy of students as a sector of the working class in relation to waged sectors, something that does not now exist. These movements have a great opportunity to not only coordinate their struggles and deepen the crisis of the universities but also become an explicit part of the class struggle thus concurrently deepening the crisis of capital as a whole as well.
However, to focus simply on overt expressions of resistance is not only incomplete but a strategic mistake. Everyday forms of resistance are occurring on a wide enough scale to disrupt the smooth operations of the universities. When students emerge undisciplined, unproductive and unsatisfied with the prospects of a lifetime of work, this too has a disruptive impact on all areas of capitalist social organization. While overt student movements confront the content and apparent public aspects of the corporate university, everyday forms of resistance contest its day-to-day forms. Complementary connections need to be made between the two levels in which the refusal of work discipline is acknowledged for its political implications. By utilizing a class analysis of the university as a productive part of capital accumulation and students (to the extent that they work) as unwaged workers, such connections can be made with ease.
Why demand "wages for schoolwork," that is, utilize a class analysis that demonstrates the unwaged character of school/work? Failure to so in the past has prevented the veil of wagelessness from being lifted and allowed students' newly won social wages to be turned back upon them as more work, preventing the evolution of the social wage into the political wage. New areas of studies carved out in the schools have been made programs of study and alternative tracks for schoolwork, grades and waged work. The Free Universities of the 1960s have become university controlled "informal classes" that serve in offering relaxing extracurricular activities for students that prepare their minds and nerves to do more schoolwork. These examples of capital's cooptation of student's newly won free spaces show us that without exposing schoolwork as capitalist work, the vehicles used to impose work on students Cannot be fully destroyed.
Students are already struggling for these social wages, but by explicitly demanding a direct wage for the work they do they can destroy the mystification of student's role in capitalism. In the wake of numerous recruiting scandals in college sports there is some stirring for student athletes to be paid as a way to prevent manipulation of dependent athletes, compensate them for their work in generating vast revenues for the universities they attend and acknowledge college sports as an ad hoc minor leagues.[24] This has not caught on among student activists who tend to write off athletes as pampered and well supported by the universities, ironically overlooking how they too are exploited. Past student struggles have never gone as far as to demand a wage or concern themselves with the issue of income and have paid dearly. Increases in student aid and resources for their own projects have been attacked since the early seventies. Now in some places students are placed in the position of defending past victories before being able to move on to expanding them. These resources can be siphoned off because it was never made explicit that these were wages for the work students. Once the fruit of struggles, they are now mystified as "favors", "privileges", or "fringe benefits".
Demanding a wage does not precede the struggle against work but flows from it. The current struggles students are fighting have brought forward the need to raise the demand for a wage. Without wages entrepreneurialization will continue unabated on the backs of tuition and fee increases, wage cuts for employees and faculty and other forms of austerity that result in more work. Even today, universities are resisting demands for multicultural reforms, environmental cleanups, and an end to military and corporate work with claims that they do not have the money to make these changes even all the while they are funneling millions of dollars into commercialization projects. The cutbacks bankrolling entrepreneurialization are legitimized by mystifying the cause of the crisis as structural-functional in nature rather than the outcome of more than two decades of student rebellion. Articulating a demand for wages can serve to demystify this reorganization by exposing the nature of the universities role in capital accumulation and not only student's role as unwaged workers but also their resistance that has created the crisis. When students are finally recognized for having created the crisis, the nature of entrepreneurialism as a weapon against students will become clear. Without such an analysis students are once again vulnerable to massive tuition and fee increases, financial aid cuts, and other measures that will further intensify their poverty in an effort to intensify competition between them and put them back to work.
Demanding to be paid has the potential for turning around the use of the crisis against us by the universities. Since the crisis is rooted in the refusal of school/work and the organization of self-valorizing activities, wages would provide us the means to generalize these activities. Wages would be demanded because students refuse to subsume their lives to school/work. More resources means the ability to expand projects of self-valorization, projects that are inversions to work and lie outside and against it.
The demand for wages verbalizes the struggle against work by attacking the mediations of the grade, teacher, the antagonisms between students and against waged workers by eliminating capital's ability to use student's lack of income as a way to divide and conquer. There could no longer be a division or conflict between waged workers and students based upon the mystified notion that students aren't workers because they are not paid a wage. So many conflicts generated by whether someone receives a wage or not would be easily overcome allowing many diverse movements the ability to figure out how they can complement each other based on substantial concerns and issues rather than the trivial existence of a wage. By doing so, demanding and getting the wage can help move us ever closer to a society whose members can organize autonomously around life and their own pleasures and not around work.
Is not a demand for wages for schoolwork only a limited reform that can be easily granted in order to ensure students keep working? Could wages just become a new source of control and manageability? Possibly. But "wages for schoolwork" is not a demand but a perspective. If the end goal is not to be paid to work but to abolish work and reorganize society in which we are free to pursue our own needs without want then the demand for wages is merely a tactic. As Sylvia Federici explains in her defense of the "wages for housework" movement, the demand is an analytical perspective that helps to make visible that which we wish to abolish.[25] When we identify the extent to which education serves to reproduce an oppressive social system we can better understand how to reorganize learning so that it serves a diversity of needs and desires freed from work
What I hope to have accomplished is to examine how the crisis of the universities is rooted in the struggles of young people who demand to live as they please, organizing their lives around pleasurable self-fulfilling activities that allow them to form new social relationships that are antagonistic to and transcend capital's attempt to reduce all of life to work. By looking at how the crisis has transpired at UT-Austin, where I have been a part of many types of these projects, I hope to offer some ideas for how students can better understand not only what business has in store for them but what they have in store for business. Of course this is not to say that I expect to see millions of students rioting or partying in the streets (if they are not already after football games and during festivals and greek "rush") but that students are hardly the "apathetic" minions of the establishment many "activists" make them out to be. There is something beautiful brewing just barely below the surface ready to explode unexpectantly and uncontrollably like the LA riots (and North American riots for that matter) or the massive outpouring of enjoyment from the brash rebellious punk of the band Nirvana or rapper Ice Cube that circulated through the airwaves, magazines and conversations of our generation.
This is becoming in increasingly so. The autonomy of students and the recomposition of working class struggle that it is a part of is not limited by national boundaries and threatens the international capitalist system as a whole. Student struggles are circulating internationally thanks to media coverage, the use of fax machines, computer networks and other vehicles. According to Peter Moore of Inferential Focus, a marketing intelligence firm that investigated international student and youth struggles most likely to sell to businesses: "Many protesters in one part of the world actually gain strength for their struggles from news reports of similar struggles elsewhere. The Nepalese, for example, gained momentum in their battle with the royal family from stories about youth protests in other parts of Asia and Eastern Europe. That type of linkage makes the concept of a worldwide generation gap even more apropos. Further evidence of a developing global youth gap comes from Western industrialized countries, which have recently experienced unusual rumblings from the young."[26]
Moore warns of an increasing tendency to what Toni Negri calls self-valorization: "Some US youth have responded to this diminishing economic picture by establishing new priorities - for example, trying to focus more on happiness than material wealth. Others have taken to the streets and, like those who harbored the free-floating anger that precipitated the London riots, they represent a constant threat to the social order."[27] He suggests that the nature of the conflict is different from that of the 1960-70s since it focuses more on economic and cultural than political issues, something we can interpret to mean are still obviously inherently political otherwise it would not concern him. "The new worldwide generation gap reveals the large spread between those inside the system and those who would enter in the near future," he points out with a much weightier concern in mind: "In some Western democracies, youth protests reflect alienation from the institutional process and the first stage of what could be more violent conflicts ahead." Capital has already recognized the rising power of student and youth struggles even if we have not yet.
It is time to abandon the rigid and archaic notion still commonplace among student activists that the university and students are somehow "isolated from the rest of the world". Then-SEAC Threshold editor Chris Kromm expressed this all-to-common self-destructive sentiment when he wrote: "Part of what makes college a hotbed of dissent are their isolation from the marketplace, with a constant flow of ideas and (for many) ample leisure time. This closed reality, however, also separates students from the real world."[28]
This dissertation was written with the explicit intent of dispelling such a myth. By recognizing the gradual, conflictual process of entrepreneurialization going on throughout US-based universities it is apparent that the universities are no longer on the margins of "the real world" but rather emerging as productive multinational corporations making essential contributions to maintenance of capitalist society. Since the 1960s revolution supposedly ended, inside University Inc. students have fought, protested, blockaded and taken over buildings to make themselves heard, stop activities they perceive destructive to students, local communities, the campus, and society. Students have stopped corporate, military and CIA recruiters, organized cooperative housing, opened up the curriculum, diversified student and faculty populations, and increased financial aid. Students have created underground theatre and music groups, newspapers, radio stations and organized environmental studies centers. We have fought, played, cheated, marched and danced. Now we must continue to do all of that while also demanding wages for students. To do any less could mean defeat once again.
Bibliography
[1] Lee Altenberg, "The ecological living group," Threshold, October, 1991, p. 21-2.
[2] Lee Altenberg, "The student-run course," Threshold, September, 1991, p. 21, 23. He includes a helpful list and addresses of programs at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Oregon-Eugene, Florida State University-Tallahassee and UC-Davis where similar programs already exist.
[3] According to Professor Doug Foley, UT-Austin, who was on the original planning committee who designed the campus, in conversation with the author.
[4] Altenberg, p. 23.
[5] UCLA Environmental Study Group and Earth Day 1990, Campus Environmental Audit: A Student Guide to Campus Environmental Change, 1990. The UCLA audit. In Our Own Backyard: Environmental Issues at UCLA. Proposals for Change and the Institution's Potential as a Model, was a thesis project for the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA released in June 1989. This has now been republished as a handbook. See April Smith and The Environmental Action Coalition, Campus Ecology: A Guide to Assessing Environmental Quality and Creating Strategies for Change, LA: Living Planet Press, 1993.
[6] Robert Hogg, "Students fight against coal at the University of Minnesota," Threshold, October 1991, p. 27-8.
[7] Cathy Zeman, "Environmental quality boards as a first step toward campus environmental reform," Threshold, May 1992, p. IS.
[8] "Making Your Campus a Model," Cool it Connection, v. 3, n. I, 1991. 9 SEAC, p. 52-3.
[9] SEAC, p. 52-3.
[10] SEAC. p.6.
[11] Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: A Nonfiction Play for Five Stages, New York: Norton & Co., 1974, pg. 96-9 and 284-5.
[12] Mark Macek, "The Politics of Campus Planning: How UT Architecture Restricts Activism," Polemicist, May 1990, p. 3-5.
[13] Voices of the Rainforest: Bosavi. Papua New Guinea, field recordings by Steven Feld, compact disc, Rykodisc, 1991.
[14] Robert Bryce, "Bunch Sues," Austin Chronicle, November 3, 1995, p. 20.
[15] RU Steinberg, "Playscapes: Are Our Playgrounds Safe?", Austin Chronicle, August 28, 1992, p. 1-8.
[16] Todos Unidos. Orientaciones Nuevas para la Diversificacion de la Academia (ONDA), Austin. Texas, 1990. p. 12.
[17] Silvia Federici, "Wages against housework," in Malos, p. 217-223.
[18] Irving L. Horowitz, "Postscript: The trade unionization of the student seventies," in Irving Horowitz and William Friedland, The Knowledge Factory: Student Power and Academic Politics in America, Aldine: Chicago, 1970.
[19] Selma James, p. 18, italics in original.
[20] Tim Grant, "Student as Worker: Wages for Homework," the sheaf, March 26, 1976, p. 4
[21] Ibid., p. 17.
[22] Caffentzis, p. 141, italics in original.
[23] Utmost, "Who Does the University Belong to Anyway," Winter 1990, p. 33-37. Mitchell, as we've seen, apparently only recognizes this in theory but not practice. The other group discussion was published as "Women and leadership: Interviews with UT women leaders," Polemicist, December 1990, p. 6-7, 13.
[24] Ricky Dotson, "Sociology Teacher Says Paying Student Athletes Makes Sense," The Daily Texan, May 9, 1989, I.
[25] Federici, p. 217-223.
[26] Peter Moore, "The rise in the revolutions of the young," Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1990, p. D3.
[27] Moore; Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, edited by Jim Fleming, Mass: Bergin & Garvey, 1984.
[28] Chris Kromm, "Twenty Five Years After the Revolution," Crossroads, Special Issue: "Youth and the Future of the Left," September 1993, no. 34, p. 8; italics added.
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Vita
Robert Frank Ovetz was born in New York City, New York, on January 8, 1967, the son of Maxine Ratzkin Ovetz and Arye Ovetz. After completing his degree at Taylor High School, Katy, Texas, in 1985, he entered the University of Texas at Austin, receiving the degree of Bachelor of Arts in August, 1989. He entered The Graduate School in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin in September, 1989, receiving a Master's of Art degree in December 1992. During his stay at the University, he has co-founded two alternative student newspapers, Ecesis and The Other Texan, was elected Vice President of the Council of Graduate Students (1992-93), was a disc jockey at KTSB for two years (1990-92), and has written for a number of local, national and international publications such as The Daily Texan, (sub)TEX, The Hays County Guardian, Nokoa-The Observer, the Polemicist, Earth Island Journal, Anarchy, Progressive Student News, Threshold, Yippie!, Earth Island Journal, Processed World, Common Sense (Scotland), Capital & Class (UK), the California Sociologist, Our Generation (Canada), and the New Liberation News Service. His research will also appear in two forthcoming books on the crisis of the California State University System and the Right-wing in the universities. Robert has also free-lanced for the Cable News Network (CNN), breaking the news of the EZLN uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, January 1-2, 1994, and providing the first ever interview with Sub-Commandante Marcos in English which was later translated and published in Japan and aired on Canadian radio.
Robert is also the founding member of the minimalist ambient group ultrasound which has released two LPs and will appear on two forthcoming compilation albums.
Permanent address: P.O. Box 49814
Austin, Texas 78765
earth
This thesis was typed entirely by the author.