This theological platitude—the free market is the best of all possible economic worlds, the capitalist version of the Bolshevik notion that they and they alone knew the direction of history because they numbered among nature’s chosen-- can even be found in bureaucracies where you would not have expected to find it forty or fifty years ago. You can find the money makes the world go around attitude, for example, in corporatised doctor’s offices with their increasing number of nurse practitioners and physicians assistants who are in some ways a kind of medical bureaucracy version of the higher education adjunct in the US. What Hippocratic Oath? You can find it in corporatised American dental offices. You can find in in the corporatised law offices of the United States. And you can even find it in the ostensibly non-profit world of corporatised and bureaucratised world of American higher education. What devotion to learning for learning’s sake?
There are a number of reasons for the corporatisation of what used to be public service oriented educational bureaucracies whether of the public or private sort. Most importantly, perhaps, there is the cultural religious like notion that the free market is nature’s or god’s economy, that the free market conception of modern capitalism is the only viable and true (note the theocratic nature of this faith) economic theory non-theory. There is the increasing prominence of political groups, mostly on the conservative and right wing populist parts of the ideological spectrum and particularly in the historically racist Dixie and the historically nativist West. There is the decrease in relative terms of national and state support for higher education in the US. There is the culture war between American universities and the wider world over books, the curriculum, classes or courses themselves, and administration, for instance. There is the need, a need others like Thorstein Veblen and Upton Sinclair recognised at the turn of the last century, to appoint hardly radical or even progressive business interests to their boards, and the power of these boards—they are the actual powers that have the authority to run universities and colleges—and faculties really have little means at their disposal to block or even ameliorate them. And there is the increasing notion among those with dreams of well paying academic jobs dancing before their eyes, that the American university and college is a way to advance one’s bureaucratic and financial career.
Quite a number of intellectuals regardless of political persuasion have not been particularly fond of the neo-liberalisation of American higher education large, medium, or small. But gee, what’s not to love about the neo-conservative university and college? I mean who doesn’t love the 200% plus increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities and colleges between 1979 and 2008? Who doesn’t love the 60% increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities and colleges between 1993 and 2009? Who doesn’t love the corporatisation and professionalisation of particularly male college football and basketball programmes on America’s university campuses and the use of student fees to build sporting facilities for the privileged few who “play” these childhood games at these universities? Sis Boom Bah! Who doesn’t love the increasing retailistion of America’s universities and colleges with their customer oriented mentality and their customer service bureaucratic operations with their keep the customer satisfied attitudes, their grade inflation, their dumbing down of the curriculum, their speech codes, and their consequent and often selective curtailment of free speech? Who doesn’t love the increase in part-time yearly contract faculty, the lumpen academitariat, the cheap labour counterpart in American academia of cheap labour in the exploited peripheral world? Who doesn’t love the kowtowing of the university and college to big business, big business “practicality”, and big business spin doctoring? And who doesn’t love the increase in student fees to not only compensate for lost public support at public universities and colleges but to raise monies for the institution as well.
So, dear readers, let us raise our voices in praise for what is happening at Columbia University. Let’s praise what is happening at Indiana University. Let’s praise what is happening at the University of Southern California where that retailversity, showing its commitment to image over free speech, shut down its Facebook page at the end of the week to those who did not already like the USC page and, in some cases, to only the chosen, for obvious reasons and with obvious happy faced consequences. Let’s praise what is happening at the University of Michigan. Let’s praise what is happening at Yale and NYU. Let’s praise Columbia and USC for shutting down their FaceBook pages to public comment pointing up their real commitment to free speech (translate where “freedom” to spin doctor trumps freedom of speech every time). Let’s praise what is happening to public universities in theocratic and authoritarian parts of the United States (you know where they are who they are). What’s not to love, after all, about the public relations conscious and let’s raise monies from the economic elite for the postmodern American megaretailversity? Isn’t it the best of all possible academic worlds after all? And doesn’t building the best of all possible world mean that Orwellian language must be used to curtail free speech on university and college campuses if we are to remain the nation that we imagine in our myths and epic tales--myths and tales undergirded by power realities—we are? Hosanna, hey-sanna, sanna sanna, hosanna he-sanna hosannah!
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