Higher education is in the midst of a radical transformation and it is not for the better. In recent years we have witnessed an unprecedented invasion of universities and colleges by major corporations: buildings and professorships named after companies and their chief executive officers; courses sponsored and funded by big business concerns; and the proliferation of corporate ad and logos throughout university space. And indications are that things are about to get much worse.
In June, a federal advisory panel proposed that university research ought to be oriented to the needs of Canadian businesses. That comes in the context of the Liberal government's decision to establish an Education Marketing Advisory Board, a body which openly advocates privatizing the country's universities.
And these developments are part of a wider neo-liberal agenda throughout the western capitalist world. Last October, the World Bank presented documents to the World Conference on Higher Education, documents which proposed deregulating university education, privatizing institutions, and reorienting them toward to the market. The end result of this trends is obvious: soaring tuition, larger classes, internet courses, cuts to full-time faculty, and heightened control of education by major corporations.
Moreover, this is not something that lies down the road in the barely perceptible future. All of this is happening at this moment and it is happening with increasing speed. Consider the following professorships that have been created at a number of universities in recent years. The University of South Carolina recently established the Bell South Professor of Education through telecommunication. The University of Pennsylvania has created the Reliance Corporation Professor of Free Enterprise, while the University of Memphis now has the Federal Express Chair of Excellence in Information Technology. Not to be left out of the act, York University in Toronto has set up the Scotiabank Professorship of International Business.
All of these chairs and professorships are funded by private corporations. And these corporations have also been designing the mandate for these professors and setting the teaching curriculum. At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, the Reliance Corporation Professor must be "a spokesman for free enterprise." Critics of big business need not apply. That's what academic freedom means in the era of corporatization.
So intrusive has corporate domination become that a student literally can't
escape it. At the University of Toronto, as writer Sarah Schmidt has observed,
"a student can now visit the Xerox library or stop at the Price Waterhouse
seminar room before heading to the Ernst & Young classroom, located in
the Joseph Rotman building, to listen to the Royal Bank Professor of Social
Policy."
Alongside
these worrying trends go moves to privatize universities in this country.
The thin edge of the wedge is represented by initiatives in which universities
offer degrees awarded in concert with private business institutions. In Halifax,
for instance, Dalhousie University has teamed up with the Institute of Canadian
Bankers to launch a Master of Business Administration degree in private financial
services. The ICB is directly involved in designing curriculum. It seems that
getting rich off other people's money qualifies you to determine what students
should be learning. All of these trends are closely tied to the drive toward
the on-line university. In the United States, for example, the Apollo Group
corporation has set up an institution called the University of Phoenix. The
U of P has no library and almost no full-time faculty. It does have 49,000
students in 12 different states, however, who are paying for BAs and MAs.
It does all this by offering on-line "courses" and by employing
3400 part-time instructors (many of them moonlighting business people) who
correct assignments and the like by email.
Again, Canadian provinces are moving to get into the act. Alberta has formally established a "virtual university" which would have no campus, operating instead out of two of the province's existing universities. In Ontario, economic development officials in the Ottawa-Carleton area are considering a similar initiative.
What all of these moves will do is to make higher education effectively an appendage of big business. And this means that university teachers and researchers will increasingly be monitored, regulated and controlled by corporate interests. In the US, a drug company has prevented Betty Dong, a clinical pharmacist at the University of California, from publishing her findings since these show that one of the company's key pharmaceuticals provides no advantage to patients. Similar problems occurred at the University of Toronto and Sick Children's hospital last year when Dr. Nancy Olivieri was harassed for similar reasons. As corporations establish an ever-stronger grip on higher education, it is less and less far-fetched to imagine university researchers harassed for criticizing industrial pollution, discrimination in the workplace, or the social role of big business. Not only will students be paying more to get less in the form of larger classes, more instruction on-line, and less contact with qualified teachers. But they may also find it more difficult to get access to critical perspectives on modern society. And staff and faculty will undoubtedly find that the "lean university" of the corporate era is less tolerant of full-time jobs, collective agreements, or niceties about academic freedom.
There are, however, important ways of resisting these trends. But this will require new levels of solidarity among students, faculty and staff in defense of accessible, quality higher education. Two years ago at York University in Toronto, a two-month faculty strike won the right of all professors to refuse to teach courses on the internet. A strike by teaching assistants at Yale University defended important initiatives in anti-racist and feminist teaching. A staff strike at the University of Windsor and a faculty strike at Trent University both challenged cutbacks. Alongside these forms of resistance, we have seen occupations, rallies and demonstrations by students against soaring tuition and students debt. But to really challenge the corporatization of higher education, struggles like these will have to be linked into a meaningful common front of students, faculty and staff to roll back corporate control of colleges and universities. Not to do so will mean very bad news for those who work in higher education, and those who pay to study there.
THE END