Ovetz Dissertation

Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and the Crisis of the Universities:
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin

Approved by
Dissertation Committee:

Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and the Crisis of the Universities:
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin

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.

Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and the Crisis of the Universities:
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.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	xi

Introduction	1

Section I. Research Methodology	10
Chapter 1. Developing and Adversarial Methodology
Adversarial Methods:	11
The Advantage of Adversarial Methods	18
Adversarial Data Sources	22
An Example of the Social Construction of Data by Adversarial Methods	25
Comparative Case Studies	28
Class Power and Methodology	30

Section II. Case Studies of Entrepreneurialization and Multiculturalism at UT-Austin	32
Chapter 2. A Case Study of Entrepreneurialization and Austerity at UT-Austin	32
The Current Strategy: The Creation of an Unofficial Federal Policy	34
University of Texas Inc.	43
IC² Meets DoD	43
Texas Goes High Tech	46
UT Inc.	48
Entrepreneurialization and Austerity	52
"We're Broke" and Other Complete Bullshit	55
A Comparison of the Colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts	57
Reorganizing the Authority Structure	65
Entrepreneurialization and Crisis	72

Chapter 3. Multiculturalism: Moving Beyond Resistance	75
From "Ethnic Studies" to Multiculturalism	79
The Struggle for Multiculturalism at UT	81
The "Ethnic Studies" Movement	81
The Struggle Over "Minority Recruitment"	84
Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism at UT	95
Anti-Racism	96
PRIDE and ONDA	98
The Struggle Widens	108
Fighting for Institutionalism at the University Council	112
The Counterattack Against Multiculturalism at UT	118
E306: A Lot of Hype About Basic English	118
The Hatchet Man	122
Tejas: the (Un)Free Press	127
Planning a Nationwide Counter-Movement	120
Multiculturalism: Against Entrepreneurialization and for Our Needs	143
Answering the Charges	157
Which Way for Multiculturalism?	167
Not the Conclusion	173

Section III. The University and Students in Capitalism	177
Chapter 4. A Theory of Entrepreneurialization of the Universities	177
Inversion of Class Perspective	179
The Industrialization of the Universities	183
The Strategy of Entrepreneurialization	197
Internal Reorganization	198
Systematic Transformation	199
Bracero Graduate Students	205
Im-mobile Campuses	208
Ivory Tower or Overt Business?	210
Promoting Entrepreneurialization	217
University Inc.	221
Institutional Organization	222
Resource Allocation	224
Research and Teaching Agendas	225
From Analysis to Resistance	226

Chapter 5. Marginal No More: Student Resistance to Entrepreneurialization as Class Conflict	229
The Myth of Students as Middle Class	232
Working But Not Workers	245
Class Struggle in the Classroom: Students as Unwaged Workers and the University as a Social Factory	269
A Class Analysis of Education	272
Rethinking the Crisis of Higher Education	286
Multiculturalism, Student Struggle and the Crisis: The Case of UT-Austin	295

Chapter 6. Conclusion: Turning Resistance into Rebellion	301
Moving Beyond Resistance: The Greening of the University	302
Carving Out Spaces at UT-Austin	310
Rethinking Our Strategies	321
Wages for Students as a Tactic	322
Summing Up: Entrepreneurialization, Student Autonomy and Class Struggle	327
Bibliography	337
Vita

List of Tables
Page
2.1 Gift Funded Endowments by College/School, 1985-86 to 1990-91	61
3.1 Changes in Minority Enrollments, UT-Austin, 1982, 1991	86
3.2 Changes in Minority Faculty, UT-Austin, 1982-83 and 1991-92	90
5.1 Frequency of Innovations (5 Year Moving Average)	252
5.2 Invention of University/Industry Linkage Models	253
5.3 Date of Invention or Early Prototype of University/Industry Linkage Models	254

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.

Adversarial Data Sources

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 ce

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Ovetz Dissertation

Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and the Crisis of the Universities:
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

List of Tables

Introduction

Bibliography

Section I. Research Methods

Chapter 1. Developing an Adversarial Methodology

Adversarial Methods

Comparative Case Studies

Class Power and Methodology

Bibliography

II. Case Studies of Entrepreneurialization and Multiculturalism at UT-Austin

Chapter 2. A Case Study of Entrepreneurialization and Austerity at UT-Austin

The Current Strategy: The Creation of an Unofficial Federal Policy

Archives

Quick Links

Search

Ovetz Dissertation

Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and the Crisis of the Universities: A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

Bibliography

Section I. Research Methods

Bibliography

II. Case Studies of Entrepreneurialization and Multiculturalism at UT-Austin

Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and the Crisis of the Universities:
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin