Student Movements and the Entrepreneurialization of the Universities

By Robert Ovetz
Capital & Class, 58 [96]. Pages 113-152
Spring 1996

Ovetz argues that higher education worldwide is becoming 'entrepreneurialized' as universities are forced to organize themselves increasingly as profit-oriented businesses. This involves commercial partnerships with private capital and the State; and the growing exploitation of both teaching staff and students however, there is also growing resistance to this trend from students, staff, and local communities. Ovetz illustrates his argument by detailed reference to the USA, and especially to the University of Texas at Austin.

 

The universities are no longer 'closed corporations' as James Ridgeway tagged them more than two decades ago in his hook by the same name. In response to the crisis of higher education that developed from the student insurgencies of the 1960-70s, since the late 1970s US-based universities are rapidly beginning the conflict ridden process of becoming profit making businesses while hiding it from the public and students they supposedly serve. The universities have not, simply tightened and transformed their partnerships with business but they are becoming businesses themselves through various forms of profit making ventures based on university resources, faculty and cheap and unwaged student labour. They are undergoing a process I call entrepreneurialization, which in the face of rising resistance, may not be working as planned.

The following is an analysis of the entrepreneurialization of US-based universities offered as a case study for understanding and resisting an ongoing global transformation of higher education. Austerity, pressures to further serve the market, direct commercialization of academic research as new university-faculty owned business ventures, and the rerouting of campus finances to underwrite these projects are becoming a common occurrence at universities throughout the world. Although this article primarily focuses on US universities, restructuring here is integrally connected with the reorganization of Canadian and Mexican universities facilitated by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as well as other Latin American universities. Because US universities often serve as a model for entrepreneurialization, it is vitally important that we study the beginnings of this process to begin building cross-national alliances among students, faculty, staff and communities already actively resisting these changes.

The Roots of the Crisis

Facing a crisis of manageability precipitated by the student rebellions of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the financial disinvestment from education that immediately followed as a response and still continues, the universities have been faced with a multitude of financial predicaments that have pushed them to find new sources of funds and, in the process, a new way of operating. As rebellions rocked the campuses in the 1960-70s, others were being organized in the urban cities, by women, factory workers, blacks, chicano/as, asian-americans, the unemployed, puerto ricans, gay and lesbians and many other communities that ruptured the Keynesian organization of capital and threw the system into a crisis from which it has yet to recover. Even today, low productivity, the Savings & Loans (S&L) collapse, government debt, and the resurgence of numerous social movements in the West, insurrection in China, Korea, and Africa, the international debt crisis and the crushing of Eastern Bloc state capitalism demonstrates that the crisis continues both at home and internationally.

In the midst of these insurrections, disinvestment began to take place in every area of higher education in the US. Military research. the foundation upon which the nearly 200 research universities were erected since the 1940s, fell from almost 80% to 44% of total R&D spending in the mid 1970s, and declined in the universities from more than 25% to less than 10% of federal R&D in the mid 1970s.[1] Concurrently, cuts occurred in every area from ROTC to liberal arts as tuition skyrocketed, state funding declined, grants were replaced with loans for financial aid, and graduates' employment possibilities turned bleak. In all, universities suffered a 43% decline in non-defence federal support over the past fifteen years.[2] In 1992, total state funding declined for the first time since such data began being collected about 30 years ago.

Ironically, capital is again looking to the universities - one of the terrains of conflict that helped to create the crisis in the first place - to restore manageability and profits. Today there is a massive attempt to reorganize the universities so that they contribute to the restoration of 'productivity' (i.e. more work) and 'competition' (i.e. new ways to divide us), primarily by commercializing military research in high-tech and biotechnology. In addition to their responsibility for producing disciplined workers, the universities are now preparing to turn technology once handed over to corporations into products that are marketed directly for profit.

Like the rationalization and industrialization of the universities before it, entrepreneurialization is a response to the disinvestment by state and federal governments and corporate foundations with the continuing disruption in the disciplining of new workers since the 1960s. Although universities have long been corporations, profiting from the disciplining of new workers through expanded funding, contracts, grants and gifts as well as real estate ventures and investment portfolios, their role in capital accumulation continues to be mystified by the unwaged status of students and the lack of overt profits. With entrepreneurialization, however, this mystification is being stripped away and the relationship of the universities to other sectors of global capital is becoming clearer. The universities are no longer just subordinate to the interests of business by reproducing labour power (the ability of a person to work) that is later used to produce profit but are becoming explicit businesses themselves - developing and selling new technologies, often developed by unwaged student labour, through their own for-profit corporations. The disciplining of young people to submit to a life of endless work is now joined by the commercialization of profitable technology - often indistinguishable from each other - as the primary functions of the universities.

Entrepreneurialization, however, is not going as planned. Entrepreneurializing universities are increasingly faced with renewed student struggles organized around environmental and multicultural (a buzzword referring to reforms aimed at giving access to disempowered social groups) issues and against militarism and austerity. These struggles often directly and indirectly conflict with entrepreneurialization and austerity while seeking to transform the campuses to serve the multiple needs of students. Entrepreneurialization is also facing resistance from US Congressional investigations, faculty, students, animal rights and environmental groups, and local communities blocking the poisoning of their neighbourhoods. But for students to help block entrepreneurialization it is necessary to recognize how the existing student movements and relatively ignored everyday forms of resistance can complement each other locally and globally, turning resistance into rebellion to not only disrupt but transform the universities to serve the multiple desires of students.

This article briefly examines existing research into this reorganization, focusing on entrepreneurialization in the US by providing a brief case study of the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). However, just as the crisis began in student struggle, it continues by the same hand. Entrepreneurialization is not a done deal, but only a name for the current terrain of struggle we face in higher education. I will analyse not only the forces that refuse entrepreneurialization but how they can link up in a complementary way to stop it in its tracks. While this study is limited to the US, the same process is taking place throughout Europe and internationally with the help of local national governments, US based corporations, university based think-tanks and even the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It is for this reason that we must understand entrepreneurialization in a local and international context if we are to defeat it.

New Strategies for the Same Crisis

Universities are getting out of the education business like U.S. Steel got out of the steel business
- David Noble

The entrepreneurialization of the universities is taking place through so-called 'technology transfer,' a process of commercializing university based high-tech by 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 programmes, 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 fees directly into the corporate bottom line. But how did all of this start?

The disinvestment from military research in the universities that followed the student anti-war related movements, began to be reversed in 1979 when the Department of Defence (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 track. Since many campuses had been forced to make at least a token opposition to classified research on paper, the military supposedly funded most of its research in small fractured projects and as unclassified, under the guise that it is only basic research without an immediate application.

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.[3]

Key federal legislation served to stimulate 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.[4] This was further amended a few years later to allow all corporations, regardless of size, to commercialized publicly subsidized research. OMB Circular A124 which soon followed formalized the removal of research results from the public domain, thereby casting privatization, and 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 federal 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 further 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% and there is a push 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. Where 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 student paid faculty. In the process, the burden for financing high risk R&D has begun to shift to the universities as major multinationals such as Kodak begin to downsize their research divisions.

Corporations have upgraded little used strategies such as consortia and research parks to consolidate redundant research projects. Consortia, monopolies 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, Texas is home to possibly two of the most significant consortia created so far, MCC and Sematech, which have served as important model consortia. In 1984, the 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 consortia increased five fold, almost all of them in existence since 1979.[5]

Consortia and research parks are certainly not new, Stanford having created Stanford Research Park which incubated such companies as Hewlett-Packard and spawned the Silicon Valley, MIT's park, and North Carolina's Research Triangle. 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.[6] Many of these parks were built with the use of Urban Development Action Grants that had previously served communities rebuilding their neighbourhoods to block spatial deconcentration during the 1960s that followed the uprisings of Harlem, Watts and Newark.[7] Tax exempt Industrial Revenue Bonds also became quite popular slush funds, totalling $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 the Texas A&M Research Park and UT does with the Balcones Research Center.

The federal government also played a role in bankrolling entrepreneurialization. Much of the federal tech transfer policy was developed by the Reagan Administration, under whom federal research and labs were first opened to commercial application. The 'Stevenson- Wydler Innovation Act of 1980' allowed federal labs to authority to license commercialized research and the 'National Competitive Technology Transfer Act of 1989' finalized the incentives for commercialization. Federal labs, which received one third of the $45 billion of federal R&D in 1984, between 1980-83, saw their funding increase 9.7% while university R&D only increased by 7.4%.[8] Considering that 70% of the funding comes from DoD and the Department of Energy (DoE), opening the labs to intensified tech transfer provides a massive untapped pool for capital to socialize the costs of commercializing military technology.[9] The potential returns to the 183 research universities is also great: Stanford University of California, one of the five largest recipients of federal R&D money, made $3 million in 1983-84 alone from patents. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has made more than $3 million from patent licensing by 1987 and is expected to top $50 million by 1992.[10] However, Stanford and MIT, who have been commercializing research for decades, are rare exceptions limited to the wealthiest endowed universities. The are many other well endowed federal incentive programmes originating from many federal agencies aimed at promoting entrepreneurialization.

Such schemes are predicated on the illusion of money flowing from corporations to the universities - exactly the opposite of what is happening. In all, corporate sponsorship of R&D is still at a dribble: around 8% in the early 1960s, it fell to 2-3% in the 1970s and early 1980s and now stands at only about 6-9%, depending on who you talk to. 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] The reality does not match the rhetoric. Even after the publicity of the big deals in the early 1980s between Monsanto and Washington University (in Missouri), Harvard's deals with Exxon and Whitehead's deal with MIT, university-industrial combinations are 'neither a rousing success or dismal failure.' [14]

Some estimates even show a disinterest by the government. Lindsey argued that 1985 federal R&D spending levels are equivalent to 1967 levels in real terms.[15] The universities are making virtually no money in return for their vast investments. In fact, only 10% of all new discoveries become patented, 1% are licensed and 0.1 % generate income greater than $25,000.[16] 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-Austin it is rarely more than 15%.

However, 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.[17] With the returns from commercialization still very low or even in the red, these universities resorted to profiting from overhead costs charged to 'society' for what is presumed to be a public good. The crackdown on overhead costs appeared much earlier in 1983-84 when President 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 this process 'privatization,' I call it entrepreneurialization. Denied adequate public finances, the universities are not simply selling themselves to outside corporations as 'privatization' implies, but are being prodded to become overt profit-making business or face extreme financial hardship.

If these negative incentives have driven the universities to become more receptive to entrepreneurialization, it has not had the supposedly intended affect of drawing investments to higher education. Corporate research contracts have remained steady at about 6% in 1991 even since the early 1980s, 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 centres, unwaged student 'interns' that work up to 30-40 hours a week, university paid faculty that do everything from advising to running the companies and state monies in the form of tech transfer advisory services and centres, R&D grants and financial incentives.

University of Texas Inc.

These federal incentive programmes do not work alone but in conjunction with a large number of other factors at state, local and university levels that are worth investigating in some detail. Although many academics and students know intuitively what is happening where they work, they seem woefully ill-equipped with the details to document this transformation to a larger audience. I offer the following brief case study of the beginning process of entrepreneurialization of the University of Texas System (UT) and UT-Austin campus as a model not only of entrepreneurialization but for the kind of adversarial investigative research needed to expose and resist it.

IC²

For George Kozmetsky, former weapons contractor and now chief economic advisor to the Board of Regents and founder and director of the UT associated IC² (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-Austin, just as Stanford stands in the center of what they perceive as a 'completed' 'Silicon Valley' technopolis, and TNCO and the University of Bari in Southern Italy.[18] Through the guidance of IC² and other close high-tech players, Austin (with its low paid labour, 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,[19] could indicate not only the direction further entrepreneurialization takes, but also how we can stop it.

Kozmetsky has played a central role in the international entrepreneurialization of higher education. He is a primary moving force of entrepreneurialization of higher education in Texas, having been responsible for the establishment of a number of commercially oriented research centres in Texas universities and helping to bring Sematech and MCC (military backed semi-conductor consortia) and a number of other defence related corporations to Austin. He is now helping train planners in the Soviet Union how to do the same with their universities.

Kozmetsky is known. along with Charles Hurwitz, for his role in MAXXAM Inc.'s clearcutting of old growth redwoods in California in 1990. insider trading with Michael Milken's Drexel, and junk bond scams through United Savings which became one of the best known S&L scandals.[20] IC² is also active internationally, helping to set up the center for Economic Development at the University of South Florida and the Science and Technology Foundation in Alaska. They sponsor numerous annual conferences and generate a wealth of publications advising corporations in university entrepreneurialization in numerous countries, including China, in which IC² was a booster as early as 1981, and through the use of the military. Its army of fellows include faculty and employees from at least twenty five other corporations and universities.

The remilitarization of the U.S. has been central to Kozmetsky's reorganization of the university. Kozmetsky's strategy is to turn government funded military research into private profitable new products. For example, MCC and Sematech along with many other recently arrived multinationals in Austin, rely on UT-Austin to subsidize the costs of research and commercialization. It is no surprise that two IC² generated conferences and the resulting books are titled: Commercializing SDI Technology and Commercializing Military Technology. The prime movers in carrying out this military lead development planning have included a slew of ex-military men, including former UT Chancellor Hans Mark, former Secretary of the Air Force, a NASA Ames executive and Star Wars promoter.

Entrepreneurialization planners 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.

Texas goes high-tech

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 1980s has forever torn the shroud of ivy from UT. Beginning in 1982, the state began a series of high level legislative studies and reforms that established legal and financial incentives for public subsidization of the high-tech industry.

In 1985, the legislature required 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. At the same time, the Center for Technology Development and Transfer (CTDT), which operates out of the UT College of Engineering, was created. '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'.[21] This includes everything from channelling 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. according to the Polemicist, an alternative UT student newspaper at the time, 'to allow a member of the board of regents of public universities to sit on the boards or invest in non-profit or for-profit corporations that have licensing or sponsored research contracts with the university they preside over.'[22] This opened the door to formalizing participation by a number of UT System 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 to facilitate such business schemes.[23]

RAI was established as the venture capital fund for the commercialization of research conducted by the CTDT. It is one of five for-profit venture capital funds in Texas. In addition, both are served by the Center for Technology Venturing (CTV) set up in the Business School (which is named after Kozmetsky, who was once its dean) to run the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI). ATI offers the subsidized facilities to 'grow' new high-tech companies and CTV provides the unpaid graduate students to work them under the guise of 'class requirements' by affiliated faculty.

In 1987, the legislature also added two programmes to subsidize research in science and engineering with commercial, potential. Run by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, these programmes have supplied many millions of dollars to military and commercial high-tech and biotech research including $3.3 million to the rail gun programme at UT-Austin. The advisory committee and review panels are a who's who membership of representatives from 91 universities, defence corporations and the federal government. Between 1985 and 1992, the coordinating board doled out $246 million for commercializable research.[24]

UT Inc.

As one of the largest research universities in the US and centrally tied into the high-tech industry, UT-Austin has become the centrepiece of statewide entrepreneurialization. Of the many small r to multinational sized companies relocating here, nearly half have ties to the university.[25]

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 28 in 1988 and 102 in all by 1991, with 98 total issued patents. Twenty six licenses have been 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.[26] There are presently at least 31 'significant' income earning spin-offs or licensing arrangements according to the UT System Office of Legal Counsel, six involving UT-Austin, including one with Astec Industries for whom William Weldon is director. Weldon is UT's most entrepreneurial faculty member, holding 20 patents and 16 applications in his name.[27] 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.[28]

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 programme, and $1 billion through a state public bond sale for the now defunct supercollider.

UT is closely connected to many multinational corporations through the change in its intellectual property regulations. One such partnership is that of current UT System Chancellor and former UT-Austin President William Cunningham's holding of stocks, advisory role and membership on the boards of several ii Freeport McMoRan subsidiaries (which is discussed later in this article).

The 'rail gun' programme 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 former UT Chancellor Hans Mark who brought his SDI research programmes from the Air Force to UT. Some of this technology has most definitely already contributed to the anti-tank weapon systems and steel piercing bombs used by the US in the genocidal 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. Rail gun technology has been applied for 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 the Center for Energy Studies and other new facilities and amenities have come from tuition and fee money, bond issues, and other university sources.[29]

It has also been discovered that UT is leasing 2,000 acres of West Texas land for $3.00 an acre per year to the so-called 'nonprofit' military contractor, MITRE Corporation, for whom former Chancellor Mark was a trustee until just prior to the agreement. MITRE is also the host organization for JASON, a think tank of 50 academics who have advised DoD on the MX, ICBMs, the electronic fence devised by Jason during the Vietnam war, laser weapons and other technologies.[30] MITRE will be conducting sensor research near the UT-Permian Basin Center for Energy and Economic Diversification, which tests the railgun by shooting at a mountain.

UT is only one example of many universities and research institutions pursuing commercialization in Texas.[31] The Houston Area Research Center (HARC), a consortium of universities in Texas, Louisiana and Tissot of Switzerland, is a center of research on so-called 'smart' weapons, the Superconductor (SSC), biotechnology, and economic planning. Nearly every state university has established commercialization support programmes and some such as the UT System Cancer Center has made more than 100 licensing deals alone in only a three year period, have been significant.[32]

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 reappropriate funds from programmes 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 federal and state funding has been pushed sharply down, each campus - and within them, each programme - 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 Canada to China.

In Texas, austerity has become the order of the day, driven by the engine of ' budget flexibility' (and along with it 'flexible tuition' as the increases which are only flexible upwards are called). Between 1984-87 alone more than $300 million was slashed from all 37 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.[33] 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% 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 1991-92.

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 programme 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 programme further subordinates itself to the overt needs of the market it is rewarded, as engineering and biotech have been, with massive support.

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. Tuition increases have now become an annual regularity for both undergraduate and graduate students after an initial divide and conquer strategy of raises for certain colleges. For example, between 1985-96 graduate student tuition has increased 1600%. 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 the administration to redirect money from elsewhere.

Student financial aid has also faced the knife. While the State Higher Education Coordinating Board was funnelling $246 million to commercializable research, 1000 UT-Austin students had their aid delayed in January for months because the Board's loan authorization 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 -Austin 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. The UT-Austin administration has attempted to reduce undergraduate enrollment while rapidly increasing graduate enrollment, many of whom work as virtual slaves on commercializable research projects or teaching huge introductory classes at the fraction of a professor's salary.

'We're Broke' and Other Complete Bullshit

The state and university have attempted to legitimize this austerity by claiming that they are broke. Yet UT's support for Sematech, HARC, 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. In 1989, state legislation granted increased budgeting flexibility to the campus administration to reallocate money to where it may deem necessary. Since more than half the $666 million 1991-92 UT-Austin budget is unrestricted the administration has a large amount of money to direct to where the financial returns are the largest.

UT has a number of lesser publicized supplementary sources of funds. Its $4 billion Permanent University Funds (PUF) shared with Texas A&M 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 programmes 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, which amounted to $10 million in 1991 and is paid by every student, goes directly toward the construction and expansion of commercially oriented facilities, including $8 million for the Jim Bob Moffett 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.[34]

In an in depth study I conducted, which was 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.[35] 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 a word, UT is not broke.

Austerity 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 hardship.

Much of what is described at UT-Austin is becoming standard operating procedure throughout universities in the US and the world. 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.' [36] No dearer can it be said that entrepreneurialization is being driven by austerity.

The 'talents' of the universities are becoming apparent as funds are being reappropriated from areas that serve students needs or desires to those that serve the entrepreneurial 'open corporation.' 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.' [37] However, it isn't working as planned.

A Theory of Entrepreneurialization

The entrepreneurialization of US universities is taking place on two levels. Formal campus decision-making comes to be dominated by non-academic forces within the university, and the overriding function of the university becomes transformed from disciplining labour power to using that labour power to produce direct profits. 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.

While my focus is on the latter, Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder analyse the former: how the daily working of the university have been reorganized in Canada.[38] They focus on the reorganization of the internal daily working of the universities undergoing entrepreneurialization with an emphasis on the conflicts involving faculty, who are more widely organized into unions in Canada than in the US. Newson and Buchbinder argue that whereas previous business activities did not determine what kind and how knowledge was produced, recent entrepreneurial activities do. These entrepreneurial activities, unlike other campus concerns, become parasitic institutional policy without going through normal academic decision-making channels, unlike progressive reforms.[39] Over time, Newson and Buchbinder find Canadian universities becoming increasingly reorganized into overt businesses, where each unit operates as a business buying and selling knowledge created by entrepreneurial and waged academic workers while attacking faculty unionization and traditional faculty governance. The 'service university' is becoming fully integrated into post-industrial capitalism by commodifying all aspects of education.[40]

Hugo Aboites and others have analysed the commercialization of universities in Mexico.[41] Aboites analysed the conflicts arising from student and faculty resistance to attacks on university autonomy from business and the state and pressures of austerity and entrepreneurialization since the early 1980s. Entrepreneurialization is seen arising within the context of antagonism between the subordination of the universities to the needs of students and faculty, enforced by widespread unionization, strikes and resistance, and that of global capital which initiated the imposition of austerity through the IMF in the 1980s and will continue to do so through NAFTA. For Aboites, entrepreneurialization is a strategy for reimposing control over the universities and smashing student and faculty organization in order to restore their usefulness to business. A similar process of also taking place in universities throughout Latin America.[42]

What is sorely missing is a comprehensive analysis of the entrepreneurialization of US universities, although some have begun to examine it.[43] However, the idea that the universities are a productive part of capital is hardly new theoretically, Thorstein Veblen and Upton Sinclair having made the argument more than .70 years ago as part of a movement against the growing pre-dominance of Taylorist rationality as the organizing principle of the universities.[44] 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.

In 1918 Veblen was already critiquing the emerging 'new practicality,' as C. Wright Mills came to call it,[45] the businesslike operation and organization of the universities. Mill further explained that 'by force of the same businesslike bias the boards I unavoidably incline to apportion the funds assigned for current expenses in such as way as to favour 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.[46]

David Noble and Clyde Barrow's research are contemporary follow-ups of Veblen, Sinclair and Mill, establishing a foundation upon which to understand the process of industrialization that preceded entrepreneurialization. Taking the starting point that the universities are a productive part of capital, 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,[47] Barrow recognizes that the impetus for reorganization stems 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)

Barrow thoroughly documents the dominance of standardization as the new method for organizing the university recognized by Veblen. Its introduction is found in Frederick Taylor's disciple Morris Cooke's influential 1910 study Academic and Industrial Efficiency commissioned by the new higher education-oriented Carnegie Foundation, which as Barrow explains 'translated the ideals of corporate capitalism into a practical strategy for educational reform' (p.74). Higher education changed dramatically as a result of Cooke's recommendations. Every aspect of the university became subject surveys that were used to standardize, routinize, and measure the labour of students, faculty and staff. Such now taken-for-granted measures as student-teacher ratios, student hours, the quarter system, costs per student hour, departments, central administrative control over facilities, line item budgeting, and annual reports were taken directly from Cooke's study.

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.

Much of the most thorough research into the reorganization of the universities into multinational corporations is coming from student activists and journalists carrying out research as part of students movements concerned with issues such as tuition and fee increases, budget cuts, anti-militarism, and the unionization of graduate students. Aside from my own case study of UT-Austin, there exists two other studies of the reorganization of particular campuses. Charles Betz' study of 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.[48] Austerity is central to the reorganization since it allowed resources to be rechannelled to where the largest, most profitable return could be gained.[49] In analyzing this attempt to transform UM into a 'global academy', Betz found a conflict between the university's traditional mission for producing new labour 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.[50] 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 programmes 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 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.[51] 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.[52] Jonathan Feldman analysed 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.[53] The reemergence of the military in the universities since the late 1970s is also detailed.

Although sociology has been one of the first disciplines under attack for its general failure to consistently 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.[54] The dominance of the natural science model during World War II 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 useless both to those who manage and to those who resist.

My analysis of entrepreneurialization is not to simply decry the soiling of the university by capital but to demonstrate that it has long been an important part of capital. By studying the current reorganization we can understand how the university's relationship 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.' [55] 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 not simply changing those who control it.

The Crisis Continues

Austerity has hardly worked as planned in service to entrepreneurialization. Joining a flurry of journalistic accounts of declining support for R&D in U.S. universities, an August 26, 1991 Time magazine cover story best summed up the crisis in its title: 'Crisis in the Labs: Beset by a budget squeeze, cases of fraud, relentless activists and a sceptical public, American researchers are under siege.'

How could a new round of disinvestment be taking place in the universities? Has entrepreneurialization failed so soon? And at whose hands? While too early to tell, these analyses make it apparent: entrepreneurialization has not delivered the goods for capital. We have seen the corruption, fraud and scandals of the past five years: exploding space shuttles, blind satellites and probes, and the overpriced space station, genome project, star wars and defunct supercollider. With costs skyrocketing, the universities 'are neglecting teaching and churning out science of questionable quality,' Business Week (May 1991) adds. As a result of lawsuits and faculty criticism, in 1995 the University of Arizona became the first to explicitly prohibit institutional support for the 'spinning off' of new university owned and funded companies in favour of licensing and collaborations.

Not only are commercially oriented projects not providing the expected monetary and social returns, but they are increasingly coming under attack from community groups fighting toxic dumping and students fighting for multicultural reforms and against tuition and fee increases, cutbacks and corporate oriented research. Entrepreneurialization also finds opposition in well organized areas of the universities such as women's, black, chicano, peace and environmental studies, experimental art, public interest law, as well as large numbers of radical faculty and research centres scattered throughout the traditional disciplines that grew out of the student movements of the 1960-70s and continue to seek to transform the campuses and society.

However, for these struggles to succeed we must try to understand how they can come to complement each other so that can become stronger. These struggles could be circulated a number of ways in terms of the growing environmental or multiculturalism movements or by expressing a demand for income for students to undermine the use of austerity against us. By understanding the global dimensions of entrepreneurialization we can better prepare ourselves to further develop international alliances that can not only block capital's restructuring but promote our own

Greening the Campuses

While faculty have organized at the University of Arizona, MIT, UC-San Francisco, UC-Berkeley and Harvard to block or slow down university-business relationships,[56] other more frequent actions have come from students. Highlighted by the massive growth of the Chapel Hill, North Carolina based Student Environmental Action Coalition,[57] which had more than seven thousand show up to its Catalyst conference in 1990, students have been actively investigating university environmental records, health and safety, conduct environmental audits, and start up recycling programmes and force them upon campus administrations. Most important is SEAC's attempts to link up the military, corporations, and racism to the environment. Environmental audits, first developed by students and faculty at UCLA, are becoming a vital asset to making the broad connections to other movements missing for a long time among students.

The struggle of Students for Earth Awareness and Action at A&M Galveston and a local community group against a Mitsubishi owned copper smelter is one of many successes by students. The company, which planned to locate the smelter on land bought from UT-Austin, already owned a smelter in the area with a long history of toxic contamination that has put it on the Superfund cleanup list. The groups not only investigated the environmental impact of the Texas Copper plant, but exposed numerous lies that won them a battle at the Texas Water Commission that may make the whole project too unprofitable to proceed. They have traced connections to Maryland, where the same project was recently defeated. In Spring 1992 Mitsubishi cancelled the project because of the persistent opposition that blocked the company from gaining a necessary state permit.

Another battle has been aimed at preserving over 100 acres of the spruce-fir ecosystem atop Mount Graham, an Apache spiritual centre, in Arizona that would be destroyed by the $200 million telescope consortium. Arizona SEAC has linked up with Apaches, local environmental groups and students at consortium member universities to block the project. While they have yet to succeed, they have helped drive out Ohio State University, UT, University of Chicago and are working with people in Toronto to dissuade the university of Toronto from joining.[58] Many in SEAC are making similar efforts to connect the entrepreneurialization of the university to environmental destruction and even racism.

The growing student environmental movement is quickly beginning to make the connection between the university and global environmental destruction. SEAC is currently involved with an international coalition of students called ASEED that is actively working to build resistance to the World Bank, the IMF and regional treaties such as NAFTA. As this connection is substantively pursued it can potentially lay the foundation for a widespread international student rebellion against the toxic side effects of entrepreneurialization and even entrepreneurialization itself.

Fighting Austerity

Student organizing against austerity has circulated at an intense pace since the late 1980s. Many have heard about the pitched battles at the City University of New York System in Spring 1989, 1990 and 1991 that led to massive takeovers on many of the campuses to protest tuition increases and cutbacks. Lesser known struggles have also been waged at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where thousands struck for a day in 1989 against a new fee; Rutgers, where thousands of students blockaded a regents meeting and fought police to protest cost increases in 1990; and even such disparate campuses as San Diego State University, the University of New Mexico and UT-Austin. While in only a few cases is it known that connections were made between the entrepreneurialization of their campus and austerity, it has not inhibited their effect.[59] Graduate students are also starting to take the offensive. In fall 1991 graduate students at Yale and UMass-Amherst struck and won pay raises and other amenities to undermine cost increases at those universities and graduates at UC-Berkeley and UC-Santa Cruz followed suit in November 1992 with their own jointly orchestrated strikes. In all, there are graduate student unions on at least 24 campuses in the US and Canada and graduate students are getting organized on countless more.

The National Coalition of Universities in the Public Interest has served as a clearinghouse of information about military and corporate ties to the universities and current federal activities to promote them. Their Education for the People Organizing Guide ties together numerous campus movements and offers ideas for how to research ones campus connections. The University Conversion Project, which formed just prior to the Gulf War as the War Research Information Service, has linked up activists on more than seventy campuses researching and resisting the militarization of their campuses.

At UT, while tuition and fee increases have not been stopped, we have seen a few modest victories: the long-awaited creation of a university financed childcare programme and the premium sharing battle. Numerous forums, petitions, lobbying and small scale day care center run out of the department of education forced the university to fund and expand the programme. At the same time, after 26 months of fighting for the restoration of UT's contribution to premium sharing for graduate student employees, led by the Graduate Professional Association, nearly full victory was accomplished. Along the way it took marches on the capital and Regent's offices, lobbying, power structure research, two huge Main Mall rallies, and a huge 'teach-in' that numbered almost 8000 students for classes and office hours. In September 1991, graduate students followed up this victory by successfully organizing to restore a $1000 pay rise for TAs and AIs.

Unfortunately, many students are unaware of and unconnected to widespread direct action of students in countries such Australia, Nigeria, France, Greece, England, Brazil, Italy, Canada and Mexico opposed to austeric attacks that have resulted in formation of militant unions, nationwide strikes, rioting, and even the overthrowing of governments.

Fighting Militarization

Student resistance to the Gulf War got off to a quick, if not unsuccessful start. Aside from the hundreds of protests that erupted on the campuses, students on some of the largest research campuses attempted to expose and fight the university's specific role in the war itself. At UT-Austin for example, Students Against War attempted to take this even farther by demonstrating that austerity and tuition/fee increases were going to fund military projects on campuses and at the Balcones Research Center. Although some of the student anti-war movement failed to make many of these connections those who did have generated a new strategy for articulating the relationship between militarization austerity and, hopefully, eventually entrepreneurialization. The roots of what is now becoming a growing anti-militarism movement began as early as the anti-CIA and anti-Star W movements of the mid 1980s that reached hundreds of campuses.

To stop the next war however it will require that we connect the war to the struggles we are already fighting. Jonathon Feldman makes an effort to trace the connections between many defence builders, chemical companies (most of the time one and the same), and universities to exports of deadly herbicides, pesticides and weapons to Central American governments.[60] With this information, the potential exists to link up anti-intervention groups, students fighting entrepreneurialization (since many universities do the research for and own shares in these corporations), so called 'underdevelopment' (self-sufficient agriculture wiped out by dependence on expensive chemicals), the peace dividend (where we should demand use of the money cut from DoD), workers organizations (such as the United Farm Workers fighting the use of deadly pesticides), and the environmental movement (such as opposition to toxic dumps in our neighbourhoods). We need to fight where we're at, a strategy we could utilize to block entrepreneurialization at our campuses.

Multiculturalism: Building a Rhizome

While it is not immediately apparent to many, the continued success of the multiculturalism movement has a tremendous impact on whether we can block entrepreneurialization. As a demand of the black, gay and lesbian and other communities, 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. While chicana/o and black students have made attempts to present multiculturalism in the context of the crisis and restructuring of the universities by explaining the impact on their communities, the movement has barely yet tapped its potential.

Those of us in the movement who have yet to address multiculturalism to our own communities, whether as 'whites', or of European ethnic ancestry, need to articulate it in a way that rings out the fact that the university serves the needs of neither of us who want to learn about ourselves and others who don't. Since we do not control the university, we are unable to study the subjects, cultures and societies we would like. Likewise, those who may have no interest in this are also suffering from increasing tuition and fees, class shortages, weeding mechanisms, future indebtedness, etc. because they have no say over how education serves their needs. They're channelled into boring classes, with inattentive and overworked faculty, and arc hounded by grades, tests, and second and third jobs.

We need to speak to the fact that for both groups the university serves to process and prepare us for a lifetime of work while attempting to suppress our original intention for going to school. This means subsidizing Sematech and everything else we've discussed occurs at the expense of learning about what interests us while it punishes poor students who cannot afford school and have to get second and third jobs to pay increasing costs. Making this connection means linking together how these various struggles are complementary, and through this complementarity, express how others not interested in multiculturalism have desires that are complementary to it.

Some of these kinds of connections have been attempted at UT-Austin. The ONDA proposal presented by chicano/a students and the Black Student Alliance's Project PRIDE called for a required course on black, chicano/a, asian-american or women's studies, intensified resources (peer guidance, financial aid, faculty) be put at the disposal of chicano/a students to help recruit and retain them. These proposals received much national attention since they were approved by the faculty Senate and the University Council as a consolidated proposal but lost a faculty ballot characterized by an initial fraudulent distribution of ballots. The entire effort to diversify the campus and curriculum faced heavy opposition by alumni, administration officials, and right wing academics, especially engineering faculty.

Much of what passes for National Association of Scholars (NAS) high profile opposition to multicultural reform is aimed directly at the effect these efforts would have at subordinating the university to our diverse desires rather than those of profit. Demanding more resources to study solar energy, holistic medicine, whole language, popular culture, cultural studies, or whatever we desire runs counter to attempts to commercialize all aspects of the campus by placing it further under the imperatives of business. It should be no surprise that some of the same forces behind entrepreneurialization arc also bankrolling the right wing counterattack - including the NAS and other affiliated groups. Just as business has found multiculturalism to be a threat to their reorganization of the university, so must we see our own plans to reorganize the universities to serve our purposes as subverting entrepreneurialization.

While we need to draw out the connections between these struggles and how they may complement each other, these movements must begin to dig deeper, articulating a critique of education itself. The problem is not simply diversifying the campus or banning military and corporate activities, but the primary role of the education and the universities - to discipline us to spend our lives working. 'The real diversion of money to capital comes through us as workers' whether as paid graduate student employees working on a contract or unpaid English students.[61]

A Case Study of Resistance

It is important to offer a specific case study of a continuing effort to circulate such struggles beyond a single campus or country. The following case study details how UT-Austin students and Austin community activists investigated the multinational operations of UT-Austin and its corporate partner Freeport McMoRan using alliances with other activists in Louisiana and West Papua to discredit two proposed development projects.

Blocking Freeport McMoRan

At UT, there is no lack of diversity among environmentalist arid animal rights groups, although few work together. An alternative student paper, the Polemicist, did incredible investigations into UT-Austin's numerous toxic waste violations of Texas Water Commission and EPA regulations, and Sematech's toxic dumping in the predominantly black and latino East Austin that has served a new neighbourhood group's battle with the consortium. Best known and most successful has been Earth First!'s work with a graduate student group and local neighbourhood groups to block Freeport McMoRan's development and destruction of Barton Creek and links to the UT administration at the local level, while linking up an Indonesian Human Rights group fighting its activity in West Papua, and environmental groups blocking its toxic dumping in Louisiana.

The details of the resistance to the Freeport-UT partnership are quite exciting. The partnership included a gratuitous naming of the proposed biotechnology building after Moffett on the site of Anna Hiss gym, paradoxically the only original building on campus named after a woman and only gym and pool that is accessible to the disabled. Development had also come full circle: development in Indonesia and the halls of Freeport required underdevelopment at UT. To oppose the original plans to destroy the gym (and later plan to use part of it) a wide range of groups and organizations on and off campus quickly mobilized. This struggle has crossed many divides and coordinated the resistance of many diverse groups and interests. It proved to be a powerful movement against the entrepreneurialization of UT-Austin, blocking construction of the Moffett building for two years. Unfortunately, in the calm days of summer this year UT began construction of the Moffett building.

While UT students began to fight Freeport at UT-Austin, the corporation was under attack in Louisiana, where it is the worst polluter in the state, and West Papua, where aborigines living in and around the mountains stolen by Freeport with the help of the Indonesian military, have engaged in many forms of resistance including armed struggle. Austin has also been the sight of as powerful if different types of struggle as in West Papua. In 1990, about one thousand residents stormed a City Council meeting to oppose Freeports' development project on the popular greenbelt Barton Creek, which runs through town. Since that uprising, Freeport's and other development projects have been stalled if not blocked entirely and in August 1992, a city-wide referendum establishing stronger limits on development proposed by the Save Our Springs Coalition passed by an overwhelming margin, and continuing public opposition to secretly negotiated compromises brought before the City Council.

Much of this activity has tripped up plans to turn Austin into a technopolis. IC²'s Gibson and Smilor express their fear of possible disruption by local communities and the obstacles set up against the technopolis.[62] In all three of their supposed US based technopolises, developers have had to face movements opposed to high-tech pollution and toxic waste. In Austin, the combination of the movements against many projects organized with the help of IC² just mentioned, along with the successful blocking of plans to build a new international airport, an essential piece in the technopolis puzzle, has definitely painted a picture of unsuccessful entrepreneurialization.

Turning Resistance into Rebellion

Just recognizing the potential for circulating resistance to entrepreneurialization locally and globally is not enough to expand the issues beyond the concerns of small groups of activists. Rather, it requires that we re-evaluate what we recognize as resistance just as much as we need to re-evaluate the operations of the universities. It is easy to miss everyday forms of resistance that do not take the form of an overt movement. We often hear complaints that the majority of students are 'apathetic', 'passive', and even 'conservative' because they are not joining these mentioned student movements. However, we cannot confuse the lack of participation in a movement with the absence of resistance.

If the universities in the U.S. are not being wracked by overt rebellion on the scale of that of the 1960s to early 1970s, they do face widespread disruption and resistance that take subtle, subterranean forms. Throughout the 1980s, when students were chastised for being conservative, apathetic, concerned with grades and wealth, incidences of cheating skyrocketed, joined by the buying, selling and cooperative sharing of class notes, test answers and homework. Even more spectacular is the growing length of time students have taken to complete school - a planned reduction in productivity even as austerity is aimed at increased productivity - as well as increased frequency which students change their majors and schools in search of the easier grades and workloads. This does not even include the commonplace skipping of classes, showing up late, and leaving early. To top it off, many of these same students were also receiving student loans (often used for various purposes other than school), which they later refused, upon graduating, to spend their lives working to repay. Although many 'defaulters' probably did not articulate this reason for not paying, one cannot write off more than $4 billion in unpaid student debt due to 'poor economic conditions' alone.

Resistance is taking place in many forms among students. It is essential that we understand and make explicit the complementary relationship between everyday and overt forms, breaking down the false division and oppressive hierarchy between the two. Infinite forms of resistance are already contributing to the disruption of higher education's role in generating generations of people willing to spend the rest of their lives working. The power of a student movement(s) lies in the ability of students to recognize that there is not one way to resist and begin to make links between those that exist. Just because few students go to meetings, protests, or building takeovers does not mean we are not already struggling in our own ways. To turn resistance into rebellion we need to understand where students are already and how they struggle, not to 'raise' them up to the level of a movement, but to articulate alliances.

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References

[1] Sheila Slaughter argues as well that the student movements and Notes 'widespread social protest' of the 1960s-70s severed the connection between the universities and the military. As a response massive disinvestment took place through most of the 1970s (Slaughter 1990: 42, 48).

[2] Ibid., p. 123.

[3] Ibid. 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 programmes were created or enhanced, a joint DoD-NSF coordinating committee formed, the pop University Forum started in 1982 that is composed of university presidents and MU administrators, and the Independent Research and Development Council was created to tighten university-industry interactions. (Ehrlich, 1985: 4).

[4] It was not the first time patents to federal research could be held privately. The Institutional Patent Agreements negotiated with HEW in 1968 and NSF 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).

[5] Fairweather 1990: 6.

[6] University Research Parks 1987: 106-114.

[7] Yales' 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.

[8] Newman 1985.

[9] No doubt this is already occurring and has been for a long time, since AT&T has been running Los Alamos and Martin Marrietta the Oak Ridge Lab for years. In fact, since these changes, Livermore has spun off at least 50 companies (Business Week 1990: 84).

[10] See Arntzen and Money, 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 (1991: 216). 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.

[11] Newman, p.217.

[12] Chronicle of Higher Education 1983: 4.

[13] Kay 1988: 24 (chart). Kay is the Executive Director of CORETECH, which is composed of 47 university, 20 corporations and various higher education associations (The Chronicle of Higher Education 1987: 20).

[14] MacCordy 1984: 59.

[15] Lindsey 1985: 86.

[16] Bok 1982: 156.

[17] 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 1991: 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.

[18] 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.

[19] Chronicle of Higher Education, table of largest U.S. university Defence Department monies, January 17, 1990, reprinted in Education for the People Organizing Guide, 1991: 15.

[20] Henson and Philpott, 1990: 8-9, 11.

[21] Henson and Philpott 1990: 4.

[22] From Discovery, published by UT, in Henson and Philpott, p.4.

[23] The Washington DC based National Coalition of Universities in the Public Interest (NCUPI) may be helpful with challenging such nonprofit legal status of entrepreneurial universities. Section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code exempts a university's income related to educational and basic research activities. However, since the subsidiaries they create as tax shields are incestuously tied to the university, they could be challenged as violating 512(b)(3) which prohibits exemptions for organizations controlled by the parent campus (Walker 1991: 275). Ironically, even as the whole book brags about how much the university is like a business, they try to suggest ways at the end to hide it in this article.

It is interesting that Derek Bok (1982) attacks this strategy that is already occurring on various local levels. In fact, he notes that more than 30% of private colleges and universities are already being made to contribute to local governments for the expenses they incur, which he opposes. Since universities were granted tax exemptions long ago because they made little profit, it seems time to challenge their tax status since they are now overt entrepreneurial businesses.

[24] Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board 1988; Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board 1989; and Texas Science and Technology Council 1987.

[25] Gibson and Smilor 1991: 55. This article appears in a book of papers presented at a conference organized by IC², for whom Gibson and Smilor work for, and its associated organization, the RGK Foundation.

[26] Wilson date unknown: 3.

[27] 'UT Patents Issued' and 'Patent Applications' through 1991, documents provided by Dudley Dobie of the UT System Office of Legal Counsel.

[28] Vision 2020 1991: 8.

[29] Weldon 1987: 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.

[30] See The Nonviolent Activist 1988: 14-5. Information regarding MITRE'S support of JASON comes from Rich Cowan of the War Research Information Service through a response to an FOIA dated August 19, 1991.

[31] See Arntzen and Money for their description of the process at Texas A&M (1991: 220). An interesting explanation for the Baylor College of Medicine, for example, developing a tech transfer programme is that 'it has no history or philosophy departments to challenge whether academic freedom would be compromised by commercialization' (Johnston and Edwards 1987: 87). They could only hope opposition was limited to a bunch of liberal arts faculty as we'll see.

[32] For UTSCC see Richardson 1987: 47-52.

[33] On Campus 1990: 2.

[34] State Comptroller 1991: ED151; and UT System 1991,: D15.

[35] Ovetz 1992: 5.

[36] Jaschik 1991: Al, A38-39; and 1991: A31.

[37] Noble 1989: 7.

[38] Newson and Buchbinder 1988; Buchbinder and Newson 1991; Newson 1992; Buchbinder and Newson 1990: 355-379; and Buchbinder and Newson 1992: 13-15.

[39] C. Wright Mills describes how the 'new entrepreneur' professor 'is able to further his career in the university by securing prestige and even small-scale powers outside it' allowing them to determine university policy by becoming 'Executives without having become Deans' (capitals in original) (Mills 1959: 98.)

[40] Newson and Buchbinder 1988: 72. For analyses of the effect of NAFTA on Canadian universities see Calvert and Kuehn 1993: 6-37; and Remus 1993: 17.

[41] Aboites 1993.

[42] Levy 1994: 3-16.

[43] Noble 1982: 1, 143-48; Noble and Pfund 1980: 246-252; Noble 1984: 25-40, and Noble 1989: 7; Negin 1993: 32-34, 43-44; Slaughter 1990; and Minsky 1984.

[44] Veblen 1918, 1957; and Sinclair 1922.

[45] Mills 1959: 95-6.

[46] 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.

[47] Noble (1977) offers a well detailed investigation of the industrialization of US universities at the turn of the century.

[48] Betz 1991.

[49] Betz and Errickson 1991: 32-4.

[50] Kenen 1990.

[51] Kenney 1986.

[52] Bourke and Weissman 1990: 15-21.

[53] Feldman 1989.

[54] Vaughan, and Sjoberg and Vaughan 1993.

[55] Feuer is responding to this very type of critique of commercialization that advocates student control and restoration of the ideal university (Feuer 1993: 9-10).

[56] This is documented in numerous places: Washington Post 1980: A32; The Chronicle of Higher Education 1982: 9.; and Noble 1982: 1, and Noble and Pfund 1980.

[57] Ironically, SEAC was founded and based right at the heart of the NC Research Triangle, developed by Governor Hunt in the 1950s to provide an infrastructure for the high-tech commercialization of local universities. It appears that the battle has just begun.

[58] Hirt, Hodges and Lopez 1991: 1.

[59] University of Massachusetts students produced a very detailed document concerning the money flows of the university, Rutgers students wrote a well documented study of university-corporate links, while papers at Harvard, MIT and UT, the Subterranean Review, Thistle and Polemicist have done ongoing research into entrepreneurialization. The Education for the People Organizing Guide (1991) has a vast array of articles about numerous universities.

[60] Feldman 1989.

[61] This point was made by UT-Austin professor Harry Cleaver at a Students Against War 'Burn Your Fee Bill!' protest, September, 1991 at UT.

[62] Gibson and Smilor 1991: 50.

 

Notes

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Arntzen, C. and M. Money (1991) in Commercializing Biotechnology in the Global Economy, Tom Mabry, Steven Price, and Mark Dibner (eds). IC², Austin.

Betz, C. (1991) Restructuring the University, unpublished BA Thesis, University of Minnesota.

Betz, C. and K. Errickson (1991) 'A Question of Focus: The University of Minnesota has big plans for the future-but they have more to do with courting business and Government research contracts than educating people'. City Pages, August, 1991, reprinted in War Research Information Service, No.2, August-September: 32-4.

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