It may seem to some that I am conjoining two phenomena that should not be mixed up given that I am talking about sin. Sin, of course, is usually classified as something cultural and more specifically religious in form, while universities are generally thought of as educational bureaucracies and hence without sin. On the contrary, I don't think that I am mixing incompatible things up here though I may be doing a bit of, what is for many, an odd kind of mixing and matching by arguing that there were and are three original sins that characterised research universities of the past and characterise research universities in the present.
There are, I would argue, three original sins that have characterised American research universities since the beginning. There is the sin of corporatisation (the corporate form and corporate leadership of research universities). There is the sin of managerial capitalism (the ever increasing numbers of non-academic bureaucrats) in American research universities. There is the sin of big-time college sports and the boosterism that accompanies them--
There are several reasons why I have been thinking about the three original sins of American research universities in American research universities. There is, for example, the current right wing populist attack on American research universities we are seeing as I type. The right wing populist forces associated with the cult of Donald Trump have been very clever when it comes to bending American research universities, particularly the research universities classified as Research I by Carnegie, universities, to their will. The maga forces, like many nations and organisations before them, have long thought of American research universities along with governmental bureaucracies (the "deep state"), state bureaucracies (which are staffed with educated people and as data has shown the more educated one is the more likely they vote liberal and left), and intellectuals as the "enemy" standing in the way of making America great again.
Given this categorisation of research universities as "evil" or profane by right wing populists the maga forces are committed, just as their kissing cousins they were in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, to reeducating the "left wing" administrators and faculties dominant in American research universities (studies have shown that faculties are indeed liberal but hardly radical outside of ever diminishing humanities and social science faculties, and vote Democrat). Welcome to the new cultural revolution!
To accomplish this task the right wing populist maga forces have been using research monies as a weapon in their campaign to reeducate "evil" liberals, leftists, progressives, socialist, etc and their campaign to make universities Great (i.e., like us) again. They can do this because these research monies, which increased in quantity and significance to research universities during the Cold War and, particularly, during Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society, have become central to the continuing functioning of research universities and their hard science programmes and even their humanities and social sciences (the military-industrial-governmental-university complex). These research monies have become even more important to research universities in the economic contraction era of the post 1970s, an era when state support of educational institutions declined.
Non-academic research university bureaucrats responded to this economic contraction and its era of boom after boom and bust after bust in several ways. They increased the numbers of students. They increased student fees. They increased the number of poorly paid and lucky to get benefits contingent faculty. They increased the number of non-academic bureaucrats to assure the continuing flow of research monies and donations from alumni and the wealthy. The last, the research university addictiion to research monies as a kind of life blood, has allowed the bureaucrats at the Trump administration to use federal research monies as leverage, as a form of blakcmail, to bend universities like Indiana, Columbia, NYU, and Northwestern to their political and ideological will in what is in many ways a rerun of the McCarthy era in the United States.
One of the reasons maga has been able to bring many of America's research universities to heel lies in the very structure of the research university. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out long ago the American research university, unlike the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge which at the were a guild run by the faculty of the various colleges, was actually run largely by the business class who had high status in an America that saw business achievements, i.e., making monies rather than writing a book or doing philosophy, for example, as the height of American civilisational achievement. This meant that local and eventually regional and national business types were appointed to research university boards, the governing boards that controlled research universities. It has also meant that a growth mentality with its notion that growth is inherently good and that it must be maintained at all times, was strongly embodied in the local, regional, and national businessmen dominated research university governing boards.
Many research university bureaucrats, who were socialised into the same growth ideology as business men and women, also believed that growth was good and that growth helped enable the research university to survive and thrive and grow. In the post-1970s economic climate many of them came to believe that one of the ways to stimulate the growth in the student body was via big-time college sports (an ideology Murray Sperber laid to rest long ago). One can debate, of course, when big time college basketball and, in particular, big-time college football, arose and became central to America's research universities boosterist strategies. One can argue that it began in the years when Army's and Notre Dame's football teams or clubs fought their wars, wars that became a part of the fabric of broader American culture, with each other on the football pitches or fields in the 1910s through the 1950s. Alternatively, on can argue that big-time college football became important after World War II and particularly after the 1960s thanks to the the increasing professionalisation of college football and college basketball (the era when the category of "student-athlete" was invented), the expansion of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, an NCAA that defeated, bought out, or occupied its rivals, making the NCAA akin to the commissioners of professionalised and professional sports in the United States, and the rise of regionally and nationally televised college football and basketball disseminating, in the process, the sports cult to the mostly male masses. I would argue for the latter and see the former as a prelude of coming not very attractive attractions. I would also argue that we are now at a crucial moment in the history of big-time college sports given the fact that increasingly professional college athletes can now be paid over the table instead of under it thanks to Name, Image, Likeness (NIL). Regardless of which perspective one takes it is incontrovertible that big-time college sports are now as central if not more central to the mission and functioning of America's research universities than education.
There is a lot that is rotten in the state of American research universities these days. There is the corporate control of American research universities. There is the fact that American research universities mimic the structure of American corporate capitalism. There is the fact that their has been an expansion of managerial bureaucracies in American corporate universities. There is the fact that monies are central and one of the central addictions of the non-academic bureaucrats who run American universities. There is the fact that in the increasingly economically unstable post-1970s era these bureaucrats have turned to part-time faculty who receive little pay and few if any benefits. There is the fact that American research universities have increasingly adopted the customer, the student, in other words, is always right mentality in American research universities (the university as consumer capitalist). There is fact of big-time college sports in research universities and the rot it brings including millions if not billions of dollars which are not used for educational purposes, the supposed mission of research universities, but for what are now professional sports teams owned if not controlled by university bureaucrats. There is the fact that academic bureaucrats, addicted to federal monies and the status such research monies bring are making treaties with the latest in the line of politically and ideologically correct "devils". And there is the fact that just as they did in the McCarthy era most American research universities are giving in to governmental power. I can smell the sinful stench from here.
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