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Copyright
by
Robert Frank Ovetz
1996
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Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and
the Crisis of the Universities:
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin
Approved by
Dissertation Committee:
--------
W S t& M ,
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Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and the
Crisis of the Universities:
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin
by
Robert Frank Ovetz, B.A., M.A.
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
December 1996
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Both Karen Palazzini and Tim Dunn, although he won't be around Austin
to see this dissertation completed and turned in, gave me the support and
inspiration to stick with my project and pursue my Ph.D.. Without their support
I would never had made it this far.
Over the past nine years my life as has swung back around as if following
the spirals of a spring, if not to where I began then definitely still in sight of my
starting point. Nine years ago, newly on my own, I enrolled in Professor Les
Kurtz's "Nuclear Threat" course because I wanted to learn about something
immediately relevant to my life that I was not getting in my required courses.
Little did I realize until much later that this one course provided me with my
original inspiration to do something about not only the world but this university.
A few years ago I returned to Les to in desperation to seek his help as the chair
of my dissertation committee, shocked to find that although we had only
exchanged passing "hellos" in the halls over the years, he remembered me from
that class—something you don't find very often at UT-Austin especially in a
class of more than 100 people. Since then Les has given me the friendship,
support, advice, insight, push and editing needed to complete the dissertation.
Many thanks also to Professors Christine Williams, Anne Kane, David
Montejano and Doug Foley for their encouragement and support as members of
my dissertation committee, and to Doug Kellner for getting me out of a jam.
Finally, I offer a gentle bow to Harry Cleaver for being my teacher, inspiration
and friend.
Last but not least, I want to thank you for not only reading this but
hopefully putting this information to use to transform or dismantle the
universities as we know them.
iv
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Entrepreneurialization, Resistance and
the Crisis of the Universities:
A Case Study of the University of Texas at Austin
Publication N o.________________
Robert Frank Ovetz, Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, 1995
Supervisor: Lester Kurtz
Entrepreneurialization, the process by which universities are being
restructured as overt profit-making multinational businesses, capitalizes upon the
rationalization, industrialization and militarization of higher education. This case
study focuses on the early stages of the entrepreneurialization of the University
of Texas at Austin into a multinational corporation, a model for what is
happening to universities throughout the US. This new stage of reorganization is
a strategic response to the crisis of higher education in the US that resulted from
the campus rebellions of the 1960-70s. While hardly complete,
entrepreneurialization is in conflict with the "multiculturalism" movements, for
example, that propose reforms that would further subordinate the universities to
the needs and interests of diverse disempowered people. Entrepreneurialization
has had an unintended side effect: as overt multinational businesses, we can
better understand the central relationship of the universities in the international
accumulation of capital and the importance of students in the class struggle. As
the US model of entrepreneurialization spreads to universities in many other
parts of the world as a result of global restructuring it also offers the possibility
for fusing new transnational connections among student movements in different
countries fighting common struggles.
v
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The culmination of a unique development of "adversarial methods," this
dissertation combines participant observation, journalistic investigative methods,
archival research, Freedom of Information and Open Records requests,
budgetary analyses, and social movement research and activism to investigate
and analyze a newly emerging multinational institution.
vi
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Table of Contents
List of Tables xi
Introduction 1
Section I. Research Methodology 10
Chapter 1. Developing an Adversarial Methodology
Adversarial Methods 11
The Advantage o f Adversarial Methods 18
Adversarial Data Sources 22
An Example of the Social Construction of Data by
Adversarial Methods 25
Comparative Case Studies 28
Class Power and Methodology 30
Section II. Case Studies of Entrepreneurialization
and Multiculturalism at UT-Austin 32
Chapter 2. A Case Study of Entrepreneurialization and
Austerity at UT-Austin 32
The Current Strategy: The Creation of an
Unofficial Federal Policy 34
University of Texas Inc. 43
IC^ Meets DoD 43
Texas Goes High Tech 46
UT Inc. 48
Entrepreneurialization and Austerity 52
“We're Broke ” and Other Complete Bullshit 55
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A Comparison o f the Colleges o f Engineering and
Liberal Arts 57
Reorganizing the Authority Structure ' 65
Entrepreneurialization and Crisis 72
Chapter 3. Multiculturalism: Moving Beyond Resistance 75
From "Ethnic Studies" to Multiculturalism 79
The Struggle for Multiculturalism at UT 81
The "Ethnic Studies" Movement 81
The Struggle Over "Minority Recruitment" 84
Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism at UT 95
Anti-Racism 96
PRTDF. and ONDA 98
The Struggle Widens 108
Fighting for Institutionalization at the University Council 112
The Counterattack Against Multiculturalism at UT 118
E306: A Lot o f Hype About Basic English 118
The Hatchet Man 122
Tejas: the (Un)Free Press 111
Planning a Nationwide Counter-Movement 130
Multiculturalism: Against Entrepreneurialization and
for Our Needs 143
Answering the Charges 157
Which Wayfor Multiculturalism ? 167
Not the Conclusion 173
Section III. The University and Students in Capitalism 177
Chapter 4. A Theory of the Entrepreneurialization of the
Universities 177
Inversion of Class Perspective 179
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The Industrialization of the Universities 183
The Strategy of Entrepreneurialization 197
Internal Reorganization 198
Systematic Transformation 199
Bracero Graduate Students 205
Im-mobile Campuses 208
Ivory Tower or Overt Business? 210
Promoting Entrepreneurialization 217
University Inc. 221
Institutional Organization 222
Resource Allocation 224
Research and Teaching Agendas 225
From Analysis to Resistance 226
Chapter 5. Marginal No More: Student
Resistance to Entrepreneurialization as Class
Conflict 229
The Myth of Students as Middle Class 232
Working But Not Workers 245
Class Struggle in the Classroom: Students as
Unwaged Workers and the University as
Social Factory 2 69
A Class Analysis o f Education 272
Rethinking the Crisis of Higher Education 286
Multiculturalism, Student Struggle and the Crisis:
The Case of UT-Austin 295
Chapter 6. Conclusion: Turning Resistance into Rebellion 301
ix
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Moving Beyond Resistance: The Greening of the
University 302
Carving Out Spaces at UT-Austin 310
Rethinking Our Strategies 321
Wages for Students as a Tactic 322
Summing Up: Entrepreneurialization, Student
Autonomy and Class Struggle 3 27
Bibliography 3 37
Vita
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LIST OF TABLES
Table
Page
2.1 Gift Funded Endowments by College/School, 1985-86 to 1990-91 61
3.1 Changes in Minority Enrollments, UT-Austin, 1982, 1991 86
3.2 Changes in Minority Faculty, UT-Austin, 1982-83 and 1991-92 90
5.1 Frequency of Innovations (5 Year Moving Average) 252
5.2 Invention of University/Industry Linkage Models 253
5.3 Date of Invention or Early Prototype of University/Industry Linkage
Models 254
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Introduction
Throughout the world, the universities are in trouble. Students are rioting against
arbitrary exams in Sri Lanka and France, the replacement of government grants
with loans in Australia, repressive university administrations and governments in
Nigeria, Korea, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Brazil, China and Palestine to name a
few. They're marching and taking over buildings and entire campuses to protest
higher tuition and fees and cutbacks in Canada, Mexico, England, Italy, and
even the US. But while students have been on the move, so have coalition of
business, international development agencies, local state and national
governments, and entrepreneurs in efforts to raise the campuses from their abyss
of inefficiency, low productivity, and declining usefulness to the accumulation of
capital. Embattled from all sides and from within by a multitude of conflicting
and contradictory forces and demands, the universities are increasingly the site of
crisis and conflict.
Like in many other countries, the rebellious 1960s brought about many
still ongoing conflictual and deep-rooted changes for US-based universities. The
student and faculty uprisings of the 1960-70s were followed by the widespread
growth of ethnic and women's studies programs and the entry of many
progressive and radically minded persons into the faculty, foundations and
campus administrations. Alongside these widespread reforms began a process of
austerity as business, the federal and state governments began to enact austeric
policies to get higher education back on track into serving the demands of
business and the market. Since the early 1980s, this process of cutbacks and
reorganization began to take particular "pro-active" forms developing incentives
for universities to profit directly from the products of research and education.
This dissertation is an attempt to flesh out the current reorganization of the
universities into businesses in response to the creation of free spaces within the
university created and defended by students, faculty and community groups. As
1
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a result, I do not intend to examine the spaces themselves, but the details of the
counterattack so that those of us coexisting within the interstices of the corporate
university may know what we're up against, "the nature of the beast" so to
speak, that threaten to collapse the very spaces in which we flourish. To do so, I
examine the two complex processes of entrepreneurial reorganization and student
struggle in the universities in the US and the further complexities of their
overlapping relationships.
Although the crisis of higher education in the US has brought much
attention over the past decade with the scandalous overcharging of overhead
costs for federally funded research projects, scientific fraud, sexual harassment,
racist violence and especially the growth of the multicultural reform movement
and the manufactured "Politically Correct" backlash, little critical analysis is
forthcoming. Rather, throughout the campuses, critically minded academics have
remained awfully quiet, if not silent, about what is to many intuitive knowledge.
The universities are changing, pushed by a manufactured financial crisis and the
influence of business, reforming its operating logic so that it mirrors the ideal of
a business: the subordination of all activities to the pursuit of profit.
If academics have publicly said little outside departmental meetings
concerning these entrepreneurial pressures, students have not been as reserved.
Although infrequent and sporadically organized, students have begun to employ
what Boyd Littrell calls "adversarial methods" to investigate and expose the
reorganization of the universities into multinational corporations. Through
campus and "alternative" student newspapers, regional activist networks,
campus environmental assessments, and student direct action groups, students
have begun to investigate, expose and resist what I call the
"entrepreneurialization" of the universities, that is, their reorganization into overt
profit-making multinational corporations. In section I, chapter 1, Research
Methods, Developing an Adversarial Methodology, I analyze the development of
my own use of adversarial methods to investigate a massive public but closed
2
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institution of higher education, the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin),
before delving into the specifics of entrepreneurialization and multiculturalism. I
found over the course of my 7 years of investigative study of higher education in
the US and UT-Austin that for individual researchers working alone without a
power bases from which to draw support and pressure, it is difficult if not
impossible to gain access to the necessary data for a thorough and critical
analysis.
An investigation of the crisis of higher education requires a magnitude of
complexity beyond that of a single investigator. Often, those investigating issues
of militarization, austerity, development projects, and research contracts have
had to enter into alliances with other groups concerned about these issues from
other vantage points. Often these alliances stretched beyond university systems,
states, regions and even national borders. The increasing accessibility of
telecommunications such as fax machines and the internet have facilitated
communications between students in US-based universities with those fighting
development schemes engineered by partnerships of US based multinational
corporations and universities, such as happened between UT-Austin students
and residents of West Papua. In turn, this has begun to evolve into international
organizations such as ASEED that bring together student activists from dozens of
countries from many regions of earth concerned with the effects of international
development projects, the IMF, World Bank and regional business pacts such as
NAFTA.
To offer a complete picture of the global restructuring of higher education
is currently beyond my capabilities. However, in order to demonstrate the global
context in which entrepreneurialization is occurring I have chosen to concentrate
on my own terrain of conflict, UT-Austin, which I have attended for 10 years.
By offering a case study of the beginnings of entrepreneurialization of UT-
Austin, I hope to be able to articulate in detail what is occurring in many
universities.
3
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Section II, Case Studies o f Entrepreneurialization and Multiculturalism at
UT-Austin, examines UT-Austin as a case study of the ongoing conflict between
efforts to further subsume the university to the interests of business and profit
and those who seek to carve out new spaces or maintain those that already exist.
Chapter two, A Case Study o f Entrepreneurialization and Austerity at UT-
Austin, offers a summary case study of the process of entrepreneurialization that
is intensifying at UT-Austin. Entrepreneurialization is only in its early stages and
is far from completely successful, as we’ll see.
Although this chapter details the context and motivating incentives
promoting entrepreneurialization, chapter three, Multiculturalism and "Political
Correctness" at UT: the Making o f the Nationwide Counterattack, demonstrates
only one source of opposition coming from "ethnic" and women's studies
advocates who are working to further "multiculturalize" all areas of the
university. When not limited to formal institutional reforms, multiculturalism can
serve as an antagonistic disruption of entrepreneurialization. The complex terrain
of this conflict can be seen in the struggle over the meaning of multiculturalism.
Is multiculturalism to be understood as a service to business to learn how to
better manage a diverse workforce or is it a resource for those who seek to learn
more about their own class and oppressed histories of resistance and struggle?
This conflict shapes the struggle over the meaning of the university itself:
whether to serve to business, government, and the "market” or the needs of
diverse and oppressed social groups can be seen in the corporate backed
"politically correct" backlash that perceives such reforms as subverting the very
ideological foundation of capitalism.
In no way, does my analysis of entrepreneurialization presume a
monolithic university completely subservient to the interests of capital. In fact,
entrepreneurialization is only the most recent counterattack by business to resieze
full control over the universities.
4
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It must also be emphasized that I do not assume that multiculturalism is
inherently subversive. Rather, efforts to add a standardized "multicultural course
requirement" to an already standardized curriculum forces the question as to
whether the ideology of multiculturalism is inherently reformist? Or is the limited
extent of the movement a result of the repression of the more fundamental
reorganization advocated by some to subsume the university to the interests of
diverse resistance movements? In some cases, such as the repression of an effort
to consider certain already required courses as "multicultural" at UT-Austin,
multiculturalism can be accused of neither subversion nor cooptation. The
fundamental restructuring of UT-Austin advocated by many groups of students,
faculty and community groups became watered down into a harmless formal
change in the required courseload that was perceived by the right as potentially
opening up space for further more deeply rooted reforms.
In this way, I perceive neither entrepreneurialization nor multiculturalism
as either concrete or complete. Rather, they are struggles-in-progress, subjected
to changing balances of power between various organizations both within and
across classes. Neither are they processes in themselves, but only contemporary
signposts of the larger historical context of class struggle that characterizes the
organization of the university like any other organization or institution in
capitalist society.
For example, this is evident in the case of multiculturalism. Among the
ruling class, in which I include managers and campus administrators, there are
conflicts as to how they should relate to multiculturalism. As the demand for
multicultural reorganization has been made from below, self-identified
"sympathetic" university administrators and businesspeople have responded by
attempting to put limited aspects of "multiculturalism" to use to reduce conflict by
learning more about different groups of people. This is done with the intentions
of better managing a diverse and antagonistic student population and waged
workforce. To the extent that such people "endorse" multiculturalism, their take
5
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on this struggle is to coopt limited aspects of the movement to their own
advantage. Of course, the different official responses between universities such
as Stanford and UT-Austin demonstrate the continuing conflict pitting the
"smart" against the "stupid" capitalist, the latter relying on brute force rather than
finesse and cooptation. Such a conflict also exists at the grassroots level as well
between students and faculty who advocate "multiculturalism" only to the extent
that it shores up their own professional potential by expanding faculty and
administrative positions for certain groups and larger corporate and foundation
money for their "research". A similar conflict began to develop in the late 1960s
(and continues today) as universities began to cave into student demands for
Chicano/a, Black/African-American and Women's studies programs and centers.
These new spaces were soon subsumed to the academic rationality of scholarly
legitimacy, budgets, hiring, research and careers rather than maintaining spaces
for further struggle to radically transform the universities and all of society.1
Although my case study applies first to US-based universities, there are
many international parallels to draw since even US universities do not exist in a
global vacuum. Under pressure to restructure their higher educational systems by
multinationals, the IMF and World Bank, other countries are beginning to use
the restructuring of US-based universities as their models just as they were used
for the expansion of public higher education in the 1950-60s.
In Section HI, The University and Students in Capitalism, I analyze the
theoretical work pertaining to the university and student struggle in capitalism.
Chapter four, A Theory o f the Entrepreneurialization o f the Universities, follows
the case study of entrepreneurialization with an historically grounded theoretical
1 Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989,
p. 161-165. Munoz
argues that Chicano Studies lacked a critique of capitalism, leaving itself unprepared to face the
counterattack against radical efforts to restructure the university. Ironically, he denounces
"multiculturalism" as inherently reformist although some of its most radical proponents have
such an analysis.
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discussion. In it, I ask whether the entrepreneurialization of the universities into
overt multinational businesses should allow us to consider universities as
fundamental institution of capitalism rather than "unproductive" and "marginal"
as it is commonly acknowledged on the US left. Current research into the
university as a corporation limit their analysis of universities within a particular
state or country, such as the US, Mexico or Canada. The beginnings of
entrepreneurialization signal the expansion of the university not only into an
overt business but a multinational corporation.
The question of the impact of entrepreneurialization on theories of higher
education is further examined in my analysis of students: does the process of
entrepreneurialization strengthen the case for perceiving students as unwaged
workers? This is the focus of chapter five, Marginal No More: Student
Resistance to Entrepreneurialization as Class Conflict, in which I survey
theoretical examinations of student struggle during and since the 1960s
uprisings. The extent to which students resist the unwaged labor of discipline
and obedience points to not only to frequent everyday forms of resistance
occurring at times when commentators and students radicals themselves only
saw apathy If students consistently engage in everyday forms of refusal to be
students does this not also locate the class struggle in the universities, in
education?
It is insufficient to locate students within the theoretical construct of class
conflict if class conflict is limited to an understanding of resistance as a reaction
to something. The crisis of higher education is rooted in a multitude of efforts to
reorganize the universities into spaces in which its resources could be used to
transform the way we live. Could these forms of resistance be more than simply
reactions to but attempts to reorganize life and the university along to serve their
diverse needs? Could not this suggest the very source for the continuing crisis of
the university rooted in the very class struggle between the interests of business
and the diverse interests of the majority of the population?
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These are some of the questions I ask in the conclusion, chapter 6,
Turning Resistance into Rebellion. My hope is that by recognizing the
complementary relationship between these two types of student struggle, we can
transcend resistance as something against into the transformation of the
universities into increasingly larger free spaces in which to pursue our own
autonomous projects.
In my research I have often been tempted to see these huge m ultinational
corporations as monolithic and hegemonic empires untainted by resistance.
Reminded of the numerous students and academic theorists who take such a
perspective I have sought evidence of a university in crisis not because of
structural causes or diversions due to outside influence but because of the day to
day explicit and subtle struggles of students and those who reside and work
within them. As Henry Giroux reminds us, such analyses of the educational
process as monolithic are already too commonplace and self-defeating:
There are, on the one hand, radical educators who collapse human agency and
struggle into a celebration of human will, cultural experience, or the construction
of "happy" classroom social relations. On the other hand, there are radical views
of pedagogy that cling to notions of structure and domination. Such views not
only argue that history is made behind the backs of human beings, but also imply
that within such a context of domination human agency virtually disappears. The
notion that human beings produce history—including its constraints—is
subsumed in a discourse that often portrays schools as prisons, factories, and
administrative machines functioning smoothly to produce the interests of
domination and inequality. The result has often been modes of analysis that
collapse into an arid functionalism or equally disabling pessimism.2
This is not the case with this dissertation. Bom out of nearly ten years of
participation in varying student activist movements and everyday forms of
resistance, the analysis that follows is a tribute to the power of students to fatally
2 Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy fo r the Opposition, Bergin
& Garvey Publishers: Mass., 1983, p. 4.
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disrupt the service of the university to a dying socio-political system of
capitalism.
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Section I. Research Methods
Chapter 1. Developing an Adversarial Methodology
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I
know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing.
—John Cage1
The University of Texas at Austin (UT) offers a fascinating case example of the
initial stages of a university's reorganization into an overt profit-making
multinational corporation and the resistance of those opposed to this
transformation. I have relied upon my experiences as part of a number of student
movements since 1985 in conjunction with my own training as a sociologist and
what Boyd Littrell called “adversarial methods” in order to offer a case study of
what I call the "entrepreneurialization" of UT to substantiate my critique of the
university in contemporary capitalist society.
Using what Boyd Littrell calls “adversarial” methods,2 1 argue that social
scientists have great opportunities to understand critically their everyday lives
and the institutions in which they work in order to transform the way we live.
This can only be accomplished by articulating the relationship between our own
everyday lives and the distant institutions, peoples, ideas, and issues we study.
Unfortunately, this is not being done. While the universities are hardly
monolithic and are home to many critical voices, only a very few of these voices
are talking openly about the universities. Misperceiving themselves as vulnerable
voices in the wilderness, these critics overlook that they are voices of an already
1 , "Lecture on Nothing," reprinted in John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John
Cage, New Hampshire: Wesleyan Univ., 1959.
2 Boyd Littrell, “Bureaucratic Secrets and Adversarial Methods of Social Research,” chapter 5 in
A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology, edited by Ted Vaughan, Gideon Sjoberg, and
Larry Reynolds, NY: General Hall.
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existing and potentially powerful power base opposed to the corporate activities
of the university.
Adversarial Methods
To study the universities (which I roughly define as the 183 "research" oriented
campuses in the US) requires direct action types of methodologies to break open
the rigid, closed structures that govern their operations. Large, complex
hierarchies in which even those at the top know little about the whole operations
of the campus govern contemporary universities. There are some avenues for
shedding light on its internal workings, such as through state-enforced Open
Record Requests (which only apply to state universities and not private
campuses), and the federal Freedom of Information Act. However, considering
their strict enforcement of secrecy (especially in the case of financial, military and
business activities), close relationships with multinational corporations and
organizations and the federal government, and their ever rapid integration into
international global capital, universities cannot be adequately studied with
standard sociological or even journalistic techniques alone.3 Rather, we need to
utilize existing power bases of student, faculty and community social movements
concerned with the universities in order to exert the necessary pressures to not
only force the release of sensitive information but to put that information to use
in changing their operations. This is the basis of adversarial methods.
Littrell's distinction between "cooperative" and "adversarial" methods
employed by sociologists can help explain this alienation of the researcher from
their own everyday experiences. The adversarial research act is "one of mutual
antagonism between researcher and researched" (p. 208). Littrell builds upon
Norman Denzin's discussion of the research act, recognizing "data as the
3 Sjoberg, Gideon and Ted Vaughan's "The Bureaucratization of Sociology: Its Impact on
Theory and Research," p. 54-113, in Vaughan, Sjoberg and Reynolds, outlines the limitations
of sociological methods in studying large multinational organizations such as universities.
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products of negotiations between researchers and researched, and that the
'research act1 (or the acts that comprise it) affects the social milieu under
investigation".4 According to Littrell, adversarial methods "must be considered
(1) when social groups or their agents define researchers as antagonists; (2)
when agents act to block, misdirect, or mislead researchers; and (3) when
researchers decide to proceed with projects, despite opposition" (p. 208). Rather
than assuming cooperative methods are either necessary or sufficient to get at the
data needed, Littrell seeks to develop a methodology that recognizes the inherent
antagonisms between the two parties and prescribe the means for carrying out the
research.
My advocacy and utilization of adversarial methods does not mean that I
preclude cooperative methods. I used the latter in my participant observation and
interactions with university offices and officials in collecting information. Since
we work within the university itself we can use cooperative methods or feign
cooperativeness as "professional academics" to gain access that would otherwise
be closed. Yet, cooperative methods alone are incapable of cutting open the
multinational corporation that is the university since it is predicated on the myth
of academics as an autonomous individuals while ignoring the organizational
character of the university in which they work.5
Recognition and participation in one's local power base is the first step
toward cracking open these immense structures that govern the universities. One
may participate in student movements, for example, that challenge the nature of
the university from the many perspectives of students such as “minorities”,
graduate students, or anti-militarists, or with faculty groups and unions that
investigate and challenge institutional decisions. In times of crisis, such well-
sealed information is leaked as challenges to the authorities structures crack.
4 Norman Denzin, The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods, 3rd
ed., NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989.
5 Barrow, 1990, p. 250.
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Countless examples abound, such as the liberation of documents from the
Stanford Research Institute by student occupiers in 1967 that exposed Stanford's
central role in the Vietnam War and urban counterinsurgency in the US.6
Members of such movements are already doing adversarial research in order to
prepare themselves better in the pursuit of their interests and to gain friends and
allies. I learned my adversarial methods “in the street”, so to speak, not in my
sociology seminars, although these methods have been honed as a result of
efforts to theorize about these experiences in the classroom.
With recognition of the entrepreneurial organization of the university
within a multinational capitalist system, a reevaluation of sociological methods
for studying large scale organizations is vital. As sociology has grown dependent
first on government research money and support after WWII and corporate
money and support since the 1960s it has become prone to the very interests I
seek to expose. Its subservience to these interests was facilitated by the
dominance of the natural science method which legitimized the emerging
organization of society.7 In the process, critical voices were pushed out or
silenced as sociology became unwilling and incapable of investigating
transnational organizations such as the university.
Facing further cutbacks and closings of sociology departments (such as
the defeated effort at San Diego State University in 1991-92), sociology has
intensified efforts to demonstrate its usefulness to these interests by further
embracing quantitative methods and attempting to directly apply them to the
needs of business and the state—as is the case with the 1992 appointment of an
IC^ fellow to the chair of the UT-Austin sociology department. Ironically, in
wake of this transformation, I have undertaken an investigation of
6 Ann C. Bauer and Harry Cleaver, "from Student Minority Report on the Stanford Research
Institute," in Charles Perrow, The Radical Attack on Business: A Critical Analysis, NY:
Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1972, p. 135-149.
7 See Vaughan and Sjoberg.
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entrepreneurialization of the universities. As a result, I have combined
sociological resources such as "adversarial methods" with existing approaches
from investigative journalism and activist research efforts in order to devise my
own.8
Just what are the adversarial methods I and others devised in the process
of our participation? I use a wide range of methods including textual analysis of
secondary and primary official documents, student movement literature,
participant observation, simple expressions of quantitative data, and first hand
investigative collection of data using the Texas Open Records Act and the federal
Freedom of Information Act.
How did I conduct my textual analysis of these written sources? First, the
term "textual analysis" is partially misleading since I do not rely only on written
texts but also observed and recorded actions. Because it is difficult to impute
intention to someone's writings, it is important to test the validity of my
interpretation against their actions which are either observed firsthand or
documented in one or more journalistic accounts, written memos, letters and
reports garnered by Open Record Requests. Following the old adage: "actions
speak louder than words," I flowcharted a person's actions until the repetition of
their actions indicated a close fit with their written comments. If they were
engaged in two or more actions fitting the motives of their own writings I
perceived their writings as equivalent to a personal interview. If less than two
actions occur, I quote them with a qualification that no pattern of actions can be
imputed to fit with their comments. In this way, I found that their actions became
a reliable indicator of their written comments. I believe this is complementary to
participant observation in many ways since we can observe one's actions while
also knowing their thoughts though limited to those articulated in writing and has
8 For investigative journalist techniques see John Ullman and Jan Colbert, The Reporter's
Handbook: An Investigator's Guide to Documents and Techniques, NY: St. Martin's, 1991; and
Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. (IRE) magazine which coordinated this handbook.
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the advantage of observing the person engaged in social activity not always
pursued by interviewers.
But can one read actions in the absence of written text or personal contact
such as interviews? I would definitely say so. Much of reconstruction of pre
industrial societies and "marginalized" social groups has relied on non-verbal
information such as ruins, art, tools, and even myths. Because it is often the
powerful that write and rewrite history to legitimize their position, we are left
with the actions of people to decipher not only motives but the effects of their
actions. Working class history, for example, relies on a rereading of capitalist
law and the media to document the actions of otherwise unrecorded organizing
efforts, strikes and marches that may still remain known only in song, legend or
street signs. Without actually speaking to the "actors" we can still impute their
motives by the ways in which their actions were recorded.
However, the sources of data cannot be separated from the means by
which I gained access to them. I often gained access to the most enlightening
data while participating with Students Against War and various graduate student
organizations that used its power base to gain access to internal UT and UT
System documents regarding military research, financial reports, business
dealings, sexual harassment, and a number of other topics. Without the publicity
about these groups actions and efforts, these documents may have been harder to
pull loose from the UT administration even with the Open Records Act and at
times still remained very difficult.
These approaches have been flexible and ever-changing depending on
new research strategies learned from others or failures of existing methods. It
has been, as Littrell points out, “a partly fixed and partly evolving research
design” (p. 218). I have utilized many sources of public information provided by
the UT-Austin and UT System administrations, related state and federal
agencies, trade and business publications, newspapers, alternative student
newspapers, pamphlets and fliers produced by student groups, electronic mail,
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open meetings, press conferences, informal interviews, and when necessary to
crack the forces of secrecy, Open Records requests under Texas law and the
Freedom of Information Act.
Studying the university as a “participant observer” implies certain
sociological methods. While I agree with the necessity to take the perspective of
the “subjects”, on which qualitative sociology is founded, I reject both a passive
perspective of “researcher” and “subject” and attempt to go beyond this duality.9
Littrell points out how “‘community participation,’...requires participation
in the community in a sense quite different from many discussions of participant”
and he describes ways in which the “researchers” can use action and alliances
with adversarial groups (p. 217). By implication, the methodology I chose
serves to flesh out the everyday experiences of myself, as the sociological
researcher, in order to articulate what is happening at this juncture in the
university as part of an ongoing pitched battle between students and those that
manage higher education.
More than simply observing a “community”, my approach recognizes that
the researcher is already part of one. Much too often, researchers choose topics,
communities, cultures, places and times far distant from their everyday lives.
This occurs for many reasons including a protection against political retribution
for covering hot topics too close to home. Dorothy Smith articulates the process
by which the researcher is alienated from everyday experiences by sociology's
central focus on conceptualization for the purposes of categorizing and managing
the subjects we study. "Sociology provides a mode in which people can relate to
themselves and to others in a mode which locates them as subjects outside
themselves, in which the coordinates are shifted to a general abstracted frame and
the relation of actions, events, etc., to the local and particular is suspended or
9 William Filstead, ed,. Qualitative Methodology: Firsthand Involvement with the Social
World, Markham Publishing Co., 1970. Filstead makes this argument in the “Introduction,”
especially p.7.
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discarded."10 This distance is often still left standing long after the research is
completed and analysis produced. Little or no connection is made between the
source of study and the life of the researcher. Typically, no copies of the
research report is given to the “subjects” to study. Even in the case in which
another movement or struggle is studied, little attempt is made to draw the links
to immediate issues or struggles in which the researcher is a participant.
Working inside the entrepreneurial university, the academic researcher can
either help reproduce the role of the university in capitalism or participate in
efforts to resist it. An adversarial methodology must transcend simply critically
studying something to making the substantive connections between the subject of
study and our lives in or around the universities. Studying our own everyday
experiences as people who also happen to be academics is one method for
refusing the alienation from our own experiences as sources of knowledge about
the world that Smith describes. The almost complete lack of focus on the
universities themselves by academics—but not students—suggests that many of
us face disincentives from doing so or lacked the research skills or power base to
carry out such research. This is beginning to change with research into sexual
harassment and sexism, racism, and peace studies but these efforts are far from
comprehensive. It is time for this to change. This dissertation is predicated on
my own experiences as part of various struggles to confront and transform the
universities while making the links to broader struggles against their international
business operations.
The need for adversarial methods is highlighted when attempting to
research large bureaucratic organizations such as universities, multinational
corporations or the government. As researchers we must examine the differences
10 Dorothy Smith, "A Sociology for Women," in the Prism o f Sex, ed. by Julia Sherman and
Evelyn Torton Beck, University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, p. 160.
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of power between ourselves and those we are studying.11 These differences in
power bases need to be known since they influence the methods we choose and
the data we can collect. (Littrell, p. 214). In my own research, the power base of
a student resistance movement (such as the anti-war or graduate student
movements) often served to inform my adversarial methods and generate data
that I could otherwise not have accessed working alone. As a result, I have been
able to study the very university in which I am a student in order to draw broader
theoretical conclusions about the university itself.
The Advantage o f Adversarial Methods
Recognizing and activating differential power bases gives the researcher an
advantage over traditional sociological methods. Whereas cooperative methods
accept the contention that individual corporate subjects must be protected under
the unstated guise of objectivity, adversarial methods recognize that the
researcher has a political position within a larger socio-political context.12 When
this political position is antagonistic to the subject, adversarial methods means
using the political power at one's disposal to gain access to the information.
Such objectivity is extracted from researchers under the requirement that
they protect corporate secrecy. Cooperative methods of organizational research
often carry an inherent requirement of legitimacy before the corporate subject, be
it a business, university or government agency. Cornfield and Sullivan
recommend obtaining such legitimacy to protect the subject from conflict and
antagonism: "Social scientists seeking access to oligopolistic enterprises must
legitimate themselves before managers, who fear exposure of business strategy
11 We often hear of vital data being leaked by unnamed individuals outside and against their
official duties. Les Kurtz, reminds me that "often when individuals are approached on a personal
basis (especially in anonymous contexts), they reveal bureaucratic secrets because they relate as
people rather than officials." (Communication with the Author, February, 1995.)
12 Daniel Cornfield and Teresa Sullivan, "Fieldwork in the Oligopoly: Protecting the
Corporate Subject," Human Organization, vol. 42, no. 3, Fall 1983.
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and sensitive data to competitors and the public. The social scientist is an
outsider to the corporation who may harbor ideas foreign to the business world,
and fear of the outsider qua outsider persists" (p. 260). In effect, the researcher
that gains access in this way is one hand-picked by the corporation. It is not
surprising that given Sullivan’s inclination to protect the corporate subject from
such ideas "foreign to the business world" that she was appointed an Assistant
Dean of Graduate Affairs at UT in 1991 ensuring protection of UT
entrepreneurial activities.
While such an approach ensures the collection of information useful to the
corporate subject about itself through the eyes of an outsider it offers nothing
useful to "outsiders". This same critique could be made for any qualitative
sociological methodology whether they be "reality reconstruction" or "formal
sociology."13 Both privilege the individual as data source: reality reconstruction
privileging the interviewee and formal sociology privileging the researcher’s
interpretation of her everyday life. Cornfield and Sullivan may be explicit about
their intentions but they do not deviate from the self-imposed limitations and
even censorship required by these methods.
In advocating formal sociology, Schwartz and Jacobs confront the
predicament of whether what we learn from individuals can be used to suggest
"patterns", or as far as I'm concerned, socio-political organization. Reality
reconstruction faces the problem that "It is not the perception of order on the part
of individuals is the cause of the emergence of actual order in social behavior.
Rather, the two are so inextricably intertwined that they should be collapsed into
one problem" (p. 374). This problem occurs in the various methods that
Schwartz and Jacobs call reality reconstruction such as interviewing, participant
observation, life histories, and content analysis all of which privilege data culled
from individuals and used to explain society.
13 Howard Schwartz and Jerry Jacobs, Qualitative Sociology: A Method to the Madness, NY:
The Free Press, 1979.
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Likewise, formal sociology of ethnomethodology, phenomenology,
conversational analysis, and dramaturgy, are faced with extrapolating social
organization from everyday life. This problem is quite pressing for "the more
daring formal sociologists who reject the idea that studying everyday life consists
of studying 'other people' as they interact within a real world."
These sociologists see themselves and their own activities as irreparably part of
what they are studying. Science, as ordinarily construed, is abandoned in favor
of a transcendental way of learning about social life that collapses "us" and
"them," "the real" and "the apparent," or "the subjective" and 'the objective."
This is all well and good. Yet, as far as we the authors are concerned, no one has
come up with a workable way to do this and still answer "How is society
possible?" in any meaningful way (p. 375-376).
Both methods face the problematic of how to go about understanding
social organization by simply studying the individual. What Schwartz and Jacobs
overlook is that even if these patterns are simply created in people's heads,
enough people have reproduced similar patterns to result in the formation of
organizations and structures. Adversarial methods attempts to bypass this
dilemma by recognizing that however these structures come to exist the academic
has a political position which must be recognized and acted upon if they are to
crack them open. Simply interviewing corporate subjects or writing about one's
own everyday life as an academic cannot get the job done alone.
Nonetheless, interviews were one means of gathering information
necessary both for my involvement in various political struggles and for
investigating UT and other universities. I have spent many hours interviewing
UT and other university officials in person and by phone and/or letter regarding
their research, and the analysis of financial statements and annual reports, as well
as to gain access to relevant documents through the Texas Open Records Act and
the federal Freedom of Information Act. Many students, local residents and
journalists have also been interviewed regarding their activities or those related to
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UT and other universities and used in conjunction with published interviews and
first hand written accounts of those involved. Informal verbal interviews were
extensively used in ways that did not draw attention to the interviewee as a
"subject" or even "data source." Rather, what we might call interviews were
often times informal conversations with a self-active social individual either
specifically sought out or engaged in some common event related to a particular
student movement at UT. Although these interviews are used in this dissertation,
they are not relied upon as the primary data source.
Such an approach differs greatly from Michael Moffatt's ethnography of
students living in a dormitory at Rutger's University where he is a professor.
Moffatt's study offers a good example of how this dilemma is played out by
participant observation of the university.14 Living among the students a few days
a week during 1977 and 1987, Moffatt interviewed his fellow students and hung
out with them, making many observations about race, gender, schoolwork and
relations between students and the university administration. However, Moffatt
had little to say about the university as an organization beyond his interview
questions and everyday experiences playing student. The university was reduced
to simply a backdrop in which his subjects worked, played and lived but never
critically analyzed. We get the student's attitudes on a wide range of topics but
never an understanding of the very organization that brought them together and
keeps them working—Rutgers university.
By focusing on the individual within the corporate organization we bear
the costs of an indirect objectivity. Why indirect? A strict focus on the individual
leaves us nothing to say about anyone other than the individual, leaving the
organization in which they exist unexplored. Since the individuals do not simply
add up to the organization, such research looks at the individual out of its context
and leaves the organization untouched. Focusing on the individual also serves as
*4 Michael Moffatt, Coming o f Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture, New
Brunswick: Rutgers, 1989.
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a gatekeeper to what can be found out about the organization. This is the case
with Cornfield and Sullivan who not only suggest giving interviewees
censorship privileges but never advocate other methods for researching the
corporate subject other than through interviews.
Where the individual is not the only focus of one's research into a
corporate organization, an adversarial stance becomes necessary. Getting at
internal documents, records, reports and other inside information is bound to stir
resistance from the corporate subject. Littrell's adversarial approach offers a
means to match such resistance with a power base to get access to this
information and create a way inside that would not be possible through reality
reconstruction and formal sociological methods. An adversarial methodology has
a wide advantage over these other two methods by recognizing that such
organizations are antagonistic to research efforts whose objective is critical
analysis and transformative change, options unavailable to those using methods
that privilege the individual.
Adversarial Data Sources
For this study, I have chosen to utilize a variation of “community participation”
along with a critical analysis of a wide variety of written material. This
methodology grows out of my experiences as a UT student since 1985. In this
time, I have been able to study patterns and processes of change that are
relatively unobtainable by methods of surveys, interviews and other forms of
quantitative analysis. In fact, I have had a longer period of time to do my first
hand research than most social scientists utilizing these other forementioned
methods. Time is a different factor for academics under deadline to publish in
order to keep their jobs while the time limits for me have been more flexible or
non-existent. Without such deadlines, I have able to more thoroughly investigate
particular issues and even wait for years until a power base could be organized to
further the research. For example, my research has been aided by the
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reemergence of alternative students newspapers concerned with UT's business
activities (first the Polemicist, then The Other Texan and currently (sub)TEX).
Community participation provides me information unobtainable by solitary
interviews by those unfamiliar with the multiplicity of languages, cultures and
forms of organization that exist among students, faculty and the bureaucracy in
and around UT (I do not claim to be familiar with more than a few of them).
Without such first hand experiences, my analysis would depend on making
inferences from interviewees who may not want to provide essential information,
make mistakes of memory, or interpret events differently than if I were to also
experience them.
This is the case in Ronnie Dugger’s study of UT, Our Invaded
Universities,15 who, because he was not a day-to-day participant at UT relies on
interviews—almost all of them with only faculty and administrators—for a good
bulk of his information. Dugger is dependent on second hand accounts even
from people he knows personally, and the need for checking and rechecking
their validity. My strategy for studying UT differs fundamentally from Dugger’s
even if we agree that UT has been subordinated to corporate interests. We cannot
ignore however that Dugger’s study is that of an outsider, and as a result of his
reliance on personal links to faculty and administrators he frequently either takes
their perspective or at least personalizes them in his analysis while dehumanizing
the students whom he rarely knew or understood.
As a student, I rely primarily on my own experience and observation of
other students, faculty, administrators and government and corporate bureaucrats
in the reorganization of UT and the organizing of various student movements.
This is supplemented by a wide range of secondary sources including
publications and other local and national alternative news sources like the New
Liberation News Service bi-weekly dispatches, Polemicist, The Other Texan
^ Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: A Nonfiction Play fo r Five Stages, New York:
Norton & Co., 1974.
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(which I help publish), the Griot, Tejas, (sub)TEX, the University Review,
Discovery, Alcalde, and On Campus. These sources are essential to my research
because they are self-expressions of those involved in the process of
entrepreneurialization, or engaged in activities antagonistic to it, that I am
studying and would in most cases be unavailable to the distant academic
researcher or non-student.
This is also the case for obtaining state, university and local foundation
and institute documents that served to present the views of industries,
corporations and individuals involved in the entrepreneurialization of the
university. As a result, I also use simple demonstrations of quantities in my
analyses of the UT-Austin budget and commercial operations that originate
directly or are abstracted from such sources. On a broader level of higher
education as a whole, books, scholarly journal articles, national magazines, daily
newspapers, conference presentations and reports, and so-called private sector
research reports were instrumental.
Each of these types of primary and secondary sources provide crucial
elements to this study. My use of local publications of the university,
corporations, state agencies, neighboring communities and students provides a
wide range of voices for each type of political actor. These publications are
written to varying types of audiences and as such provide a diverse array of faces
for each that would be unobtainable from solitary interviews or surveys. A
number of published interviews provide access to communication between and
within each of the relevant groups (such as numerous studies of industry-
govemment-university partnerships) illustrating many of their actors' own
perceptions about their role in the transformation of both UT and higher
education as a whole. Such primary sources offer texts written by the actors
themselves concerning their thoughts about these issues. This becomes apparent
when one cross checks simple newspaper articles or interviews with any high
tech booster or administrator that offer only scant information with internal
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documents produced by their organization that outline detailed processes and
intentions.
By examining a variety of documents from a multiplicity of sources within
the debate over the reorganization of the university I am able to explore the larger
issues of the process of entrepreneurialization and the role of the university in
capitalist society.
An Example o f the Social Construction of Data by Adversarial Methods16
How did this research and use of materials take place and in what context?
Although my interest in students and student activism began in 1987 with my
own initial involvement in student activist movements at UT-Austin, the in-depth
investigation of UT-Austin itself did not begin until 1990.
Initially, my research into UT was limited to narrow concerns of student
organizations until I participated in a student group working with homeless
organizers and Blackland community residents. In 1988, this coalition
successfully blocked UT from continuing to destroy homes in that predominantly
black neighborhood to expand the baseball stadium parking lot. This experience
precipitated my interest in investigating the business operations of UT. While it
is only one of a number of similar types of experiences I have had since then and
plays a minor part in the research that will end up in the dissertation, I want to
offer it as an example of the way Littrell's adversarial methods has plays itself
out among grassroots resistance efforts.
Much of the information culled about UT's attempt to buy out the
neighborhood originated in searches of corporate and government documents
such as titles and mortgages to learn how UT had quietly hired a realtor to
purchase the homes while concealing the name of the actual owner. This
information was then circulated through articles and letters in the Austin-
^ While useful for demonstrating my adversarial methods, further discussion of the following
movement is not included in this dissertation
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American Statesman, Nokoa/The Observer and our own short-lived newspaper
Ecesis to elicit responses from UT and local politicians. This publicity
concurrently generated a student documentary film about Blackland and news
articles in the Statesman and investigative articles in the Austin Chronicle, all of
which served to confirm much of our research while adding additional
information of which we were unaware and allowing us to check our "facts".
The response came one Saturday afternoon when a UT Regent personally
oversaw the bulldozing of 16 houses.
The bulldozing, our demonstration, squatting, and the campaign of a
neighborhood woman for state representative Wilhelmina Delco's (D) position,
eventually drew attention of the NAACP, local politicians and UT officials, who
began to negotiate once again with the neighborhood. To support the
neighborhood and homeless activists, about twenty students organized a
demonstration on campus and fed about one hundred homeless people, after
which we marched to UT President William Cunningham's office and held a sit-
in in the lobby. A few weeks later we also held a bike tour of Blackland. Over
the next two years, when a moratorium on UT’s purchases and destruction of
houses in the western eight blocks of the 16 block neighborhood was agreed
upon, much of our research was confirmed both directly by UT in public
responses, personal letters from top UT officials and in negotiating meetings.
Even over the course of the negotiations, additional information was
uncovered about UT's refusal to abide by an earlier agreement with the city to
restore some of its boarded up houses for low income housing. Open meetings,
memos, city council reports, press conferences and additional newspaper articles
added further to what we knew about the situation. The negotiations had served
by this time to remove any direct challenge to UT's plans by the previous
coalition by dragging it out over a period of a few years by which time many
people had lost interest or a direct say in the negotiations. Decisionmaking had
moved from behind closed doors of UT to public debate but the forces that
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stimulated this change were stripped away in the process. Direct action served to
force UT and local politicians to the negotiating table. But this refocused the
efforts of the neighborhood coalition from implementing their own decisions
about their neighborhood to handing back that decisionmaking power to UT and
the city council.
My interest in investigating UT and the growing student movements
developed further in 1989 with the publication of the Polemicist, an alternative
student newspaper that investigated the everyday operations of UT. In 1990,1
began to also investigate UT on my own using the Polemicists research as my
starting point, eventually participating with other students and staff in uncovering
UT's role in the Persian Gulf War, issues of austerity and entrepreneurialization,
and the role of graduate students in UT. During 1992-93, I assisted in the
publication of The Other Texan which investigated many of these issues. In each
case, many of our experiences paralleled those of the Blackland case.
My involvement with the Blackland struggle was the first time I actively
participated in investigating the operations of UT-Austin. Since that time, I have
also participated in active investigations regarding UT-Austin's partnerships with
the military and multinational computer companies, budgetary issues and
austerity measures, and issues concerning the organization of graduate students.
Although the complete details of research from all of these investigations are not
included in this dissertation, they were part of the process of informing my
methodological approaches. This is especially the case with the attempt to
organize graduate students. Like the lone researcher graduate student organizers
face the sheer power of the multinational university which not only seeks to
disrupt their efforts but puts in question their very role in the corporate process.
Revolting graduate students have the potential to become academics who use
their collective strength of a movement and research skills to investigate, expose
and resist the corporate activities of the university. This was the case in 1989-90
when graduate student researchers exposed hidden funds forcing UT to restore
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health benefits for graduate employees that had been defunded. There are other
recent cases of graduate students successfully using adversarial research methods
that combine an analysis of the university as a business with their organizing
efforts.17
Perhaps this development among graduate students to focus their research
on the university in which they work indicates a slow transformation of the
research process within the university about the university? Currently, such
efforts are not widely supported. As Littrell laments: "Sociologists usually work
from weak power bases. Their professional associations offer little or no help.
There is no discussion of the impact of power on methods in research methods
textbooks. There is no preparation or guidance about when to submit to power or
about when and how to resist it. In brief, sociologists have no methodology for
research in antagonistic settings" (p. 224). Maybe such experiences that
informed this dissertation can contribute to the articulation of adversarial research
methods for sociologists.
Comparative Case Studies
The heavy use of local materials originally informed my case study of the
entrepreneurialization of UT in my MA thesis. I chose to do a case study of UT
primarily because I am driven by a need to better understand the context in which
I live and work and relate these everyday experiences in broader sociological
terms. Orum, Feagin and Sjoberg develop this idea in terms of the usefulness of
the case study to understanding our everyday lives, which is certainly in short
supply among many graduate students and faculty in the social sciences. The
“case study,” they write, “seeks to capture people as they experience their
17 This is discussed in detail by David Barker, "Why we still have health insurance: A case
study of the Graduate Professional Association," The Other Texan, Fall 1992, p. 3; Karen
Palazzini, "The micro and macro of student organizing," The Other Texan, Fall 1992, p. 6; and
Robert Ovetz, "Who says it can't be done?!: A history of graduate student organizing and
unionization in the US and UT," The Other Texan, Fall 1991, p. 8.
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natural, everyday circumstances, it can offer a researcher empirical and
theoretical gains in understanding larger social complexes of actors, actions, and
m otives.” 18 It offers us an inroad to the very perceptions of the actors
themselves: “such analyses [of the case study] permit the observer to render
social actions in a manner that comes closest to the action as it is understood by
the actors themselves. Here the observer wishes to make claims that are
grounded in the claims of those who make them.” (p. 8)
This is certainly the case when using documents written and produced by
university administrators and students engaged in entrepreneurialization and
student movements. Much like interviews, these publications offer direct
testimony of the ideas and motivations of these participants although they
determine which topics are covered, which is important in itself.
Orum, Feagin, and Sjoberg’s methodology does not account for what
happens when the researcher is himself an “actor” as well which is a significant
issue in participant observation literature. While some would raise questions of
validity in this case, it is possible to recognize the researcher/actor as writing his
own oral history which is played off the perspectives of other actors and a vast
array of government, university and movement documents. The false distinction
between researcher and actor and the remaining myth of objectivity (still seemed
to be held to a limited extent by Orum, Feagin and Sjoberg) are shattered.19 Most
apparent in my own case of a graduate student researching the university is the
inseparability of the actor/researcher from the institutional context of the
university in which I do my research.
18 Anthony Orum, Joe Feagin, and Gideon Sjoberg, "Introduction: The Nature of the Case
Study,” chapter 1 in Feagin, Orum and Sjoberg, A Case fo r the Case Study, Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 1991, p. 8.
19 Although Ted Vaughan, with whom Sjoberg often works, attacks the researcher/ actor
dichotomy and locates its origin in the natural science method which provides subjectivity to
the researcher to exempt herself from greater forces while positing the actor as having no
control over their own lives and constrained by natural social laws. See Vaughan, Sjoberg and
Reynolds, p. 32.
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Class Power and Methodology
Universities are full o f knowledge; the freshmen bring a little in, the seniors take
none away...the knowledge accumulates.
—Mark Twain
The potential for successful investigation lies in the recognition of not only the
researcher's position in society as a whole but the very institution in which she
works. In my own investigations into UT-Austin specifically, I found my own
intent for challenging repressive features of the university complemented those
goals of numerous student organizers, organizations and faculty groups focusing
on issues such as racism, homophobia, the Persian Gulf War and other like
political issues in which I already took part. My limited formal training in
sociological research methods which suggested avoidance of controversial
topics, direct confrontations, explicit political motivations, and a pseudo
objectivity, could not offer me the methodological means for a thorough
investigation of UT-Austin or any similar multinational institution. Like
Alexander Cockbum, I found my research methods in the innovative and
confrontational approaches of the movement participants with whom I worked,
methods both borrowed from past and current student and other "grassroots"
movements and methods devised in the heat of the moment. The methods of
investigation became inseparable from the means of struggle, a process in flux
with the changing nature of struggle:
Direct action—sit-ins, occupations, etc.—is contagious and cumulative among
students because it gives them a glimpse of disalienation. During such events the
rocksolid structures of the institution seem to dissolve. The mysterious
operations of bureaucracy are exposed. Familiar unquestionable routines no
longer seem part of the natural order of things. Pretensions of authority seem
arrogant and hollow. Before the laughing audience the conjurer has lost his
mirrors, his curtain, his false-bottomed hat and his capacious sleeves, and is
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reduced to simulated jocosity and fervent hopes that the attendants will throw
them all out.20
Such knowledge of the university as a business become possible through
the struggle and not merely careful academic observation from the sidelines.
Those rising in rebellion throw aside not only that which creates for them
alienation in the abstract, but their imposed duties and roles as passive linear
students and teachers, devising the means for not only making sense of their
world and everyday experiences or just for the sake of knowing or
understanding but to change it to serve their many needs and desires. These are
the adversarial methods of the class struggle, methods that inform my own
dissertation.
20 Alexander Cockbum, "Introduction," Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, edited
by Alexander Cockbum and Robin Blackburn, Baltimore: Penguin and London: New Left
Review, 1969, p. 12.
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Section II. Case Studies of E ntrepreneurialization and
Multiculturalism at UT-Austin
Chapter 2. A Case Study of Entrepreneurialization and Austerity at
UT-Austin
Universities are getting out o f the education business like U.S. Steel got out o f
the steel business.
— David Noble1
Following the global student rebellions of the 1960s and early 1970s that
disrupted the operations of higher education, among other areas of society, the
universities became subject to widespread cutbacks and austerity as business and
state and federal governments began to disinvest. Pressures to "slim excess,"
and "raise productivity and efficiency" evolved by 1980 into measures expected
to align the management of the universities with current business management
principles while further integrating them into the global economy. At the root of
these principles was a reorientation of the mission of higher education from
contributing to "economic growth" and "development" to creating it directly.
Since 1980, federal agencies agencies and state legislatures have implemented
numerous incentive programs and developed new resources to promote efforts to
restructure the universities so that they serve the needs of the "market" more
efficiently. Since then, we have begun to see a fundamental effort to change the
character of the universities, signaling the beginnings of their reorganization into
overt multinational businesses, a process I call "entrepreneurialization."
Entrepreneurialization is hardly complete or successful and is limited primarily to
large private research universities and state funded campuses. Nonetheless, a
1 David Noble, "Higher Education Takes the Low Road," Newsday, October 8, 1989, p. 7.
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quiet transformation is taking place which threatens to subject all aspects of the
university to the interests of profit.
This chapter offers a case study of the entrepreneurialization of the
University of Texas-Austin not only because of the advanced stage of its
reorganization into an overt multinational corporation. Because UT-Austin sits
near the US-Mexico border it has a unique position from which it has only just
begun to take advantage of investment opportunities brought about by the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). To demonstrate this process, I
conducted an investigative case study of the UT System focusing primarily on
UT-Austin from 1985 to 1992.2 This chapter offers a brief summary of my
findings in order to provide empirical documentation of a process that has
evolved in response to the persisting changes brought about by the campus
rebellions of the 1960-70s.
It is important to recognize that the entrepreneurialization of UT-Austin is
only in its early stages. Equipped with supporting federal and state initiatives and
resources, the activities of UT-Austin are being re-prioritized so that many and
ideally all aspects of the campus are subject to the demands of the market. At this
point in time, the most evident case of commercialization exists in the College of
Engineering, the predominant source of UT-Austin's patented and marketable
research and as a result, one of the primary recipients of institutional financial
support. To the extent that entrepreneurialization has taken root more quickly in
Engineering than say Natural Sciences or Liberal Arts can be attributed both to
the more abstract and less applied nature of those fields as well as more overt
hesitations and resistance to the dictates of the market.3
2 See Robert Ovetz, UT Inc.: Austerity and Entrepreneurialization at the University o f Texas at
Austin, unpublished master’s thesis, 1992.
3 Of course, some academic fields such as law and business have long since enjoyed
predominant positions and large shares of campus resources.
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As a result, the process of entrepreneurialization is not uniform across the
UT-Austin campus. It appears that by tracking the reallocation of resources to
meet the reprioritization to the market, we can identify the differing footing of
entrepreneurialization across the campus well as its vulnerabilities. The process
of entrepreneurialization relies on selective austerity that rechannels resources
from unreliable or resistant academic areas to commercially oriented programs
forcing the former to look to serving market needs in order to make up for
budget shortfalls.
In this chapter, we will examine the current unofficial federal policy
promoting entrepreneurialization and related legislation passed by the Texas
legislature. This is followed by a summary of my case study of how selective
austerity has rechanneled resources for from resistant programs to promote
commercialization of UT-Austin. A more detailed comparison of the effects on
the College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts and the change in the
decision making structure are made.
The Current Strategy: The Creation of an Unofficial Federal Policy
In the drive for a new source of high tech innovation and generate new profitable
products, business is looking to the universities as a source of commercializable
knowledge. With billions of dollars of public monies already invested in physical
infrastructure, intellectual labor and both basic and applied research, the
universities offer the means for shifting the costly burden of high tech
development to society while retaining private ownership over the research and
resulting products and profits. Through so-called "technology transfer," the
universities are undergoing a process by which their resources and knowledge
are increasingly coming under the direct control of private companies. The
common justification running through the technology transfer literature is that
these renewed university-business relationships are generating a renewed flow of
funds into the universities. However, this mystifies the fact that much of the
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investment capital actually originates from federal programs, state governments,
tuition and fee payments, university endowments and bond financing—in effect,
a massive outflow of students and taxpayers money through governmental R&D
funding and tuition and fees directly into the corporate bottom line. Now
underway for about fifteen years, technology transfer has become an unofficial
O
federal policy in the US and a primary stimulus for the "entrepreneurialization"
of the universities.
The process of entrepreneurialization was not forged by a select few
behind closed doors but is rather the result of overlapping complementary efforts
by many decision-makers in the military, business, federal and state
governments, universities, as well as wealthy individuals and think-tanks.
Although premeditative cooperation can be documented, such as through IC^> it
has been to align and consolidate existing efforts rather than initiate them. What
has facilitated this cooperation has been a common concern and focus on
restimulating the economy by making rigidly regulated, publicly financed
resources accessible to private interests for the purposes of profitmaking, which
helps to undermine that cooperation. Not only can no one or small group of
institutions or individuals can be held responsible, but many have even begun to
compete with each other over the goods. We should also keep in mind that there
still isn't even a coherent federal policy endorsing the process.
The disinvestment from military research in the universities that followed
the student anti-war movements of the 1960s-70s was reversed in 1979 when the
Department of Defense (DoD) reinterpreted the Mansfield Amendment, which
restricted the breadth of research the military could fund, to open the way for
increased military research in the universities along a new tact. Since many
campuses had been forced to make at least a token opposition to classified
research on paper, this reinterpretation conveniently opened the way for the rapid
increase in military research that followed.
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The fiscal crisis that was extenuated by the refusal to invest in the
universities drove the universities in the late 1970s to re-embrace m i l i t a r y
funding even as the anti-draft, anti-nuke and Central American anti-intervention
movements grew in and around the universities. DoD served to bring "national
security and economic prosperity together under the umbrella of high
technology" thus providing the resources to back incentives for
entrepreneurialization.4
Federal legislation that soon followed stimulated the commercialization of
renewed military and other federally financed R&D. The Patent and Trademark
Amendments of 1980 allowed universities, not-for-profit institutions, and small
businesses to hold patent title to federally funded research for the first time.^
This was further amended a few years later to allow all corporations, regardless
of size, to commercialized publicly subsidized research. OMB circular A124
formalized the removal of research results from the public domain, thereby
casting privatization. A few years later, the Technology Transfer Act of 1986
cemented a few final details, allowing for exclusive rights to government
research and the sharing of royalties with government researchers.
Previously, only 4% of more than 28,000 federally owned patents were
licensed for a fee. With these changes, corporations had made their first
successful move to gain access to a massive resource that would now serve to
4 Slaughter, p. 123. 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 programs were created or enhanced, a joint DoD-NSF coordinating committee
formed, the DoD University Forum started in 1982 that is composed of university presidents
and DoD administrators, and the Independent Research and Development Council was created to
tighten university-industry interactions. (Howard Ehrlich, "The University -Military
Connection, Social Anarchism, Nos. 8-9, 1985, p. 4.)
5 It was not the first time patents to federal research could be held privately. The Institutional
Patent Agreements negotiated with HEW (the Department of Health, Education and Welfare) in
1968 and NSF (the National Science Foundation) 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).
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socialize the costs of commercial R&D. The Economic Recovery Tax of 1981
enlarged the write-offs available to corporations that donated equipment to a
university and a tax credit of 25% to companies with increases in existing R&D
expenses above existing levels. Although it expired in 1985, further extensions
through 1986 were made while lowering the credit to 20% followed by efforts to
make it permanent.
University-corporate combinations that have existed for decades in the
form of faculty consulting, research contracts, student employment and the like
soon took on a new angle. Whereas previously most development and all
marketing was done by the corporations, universities now began rushing to
establish and fund technology transfer offices and services, business parks and
incubators, venture capital funds and guidance, and facilitate the creation of spin
off companies, frequently owned and operated by students, alumni, and former
and current faculty. The university often covers its tracks by setting up "non
profit" foundations to handle the licensing, royalties, and equity stakes in the
new corporations. In the process, the burden for financing high risk R&D has
begun to shift to the university's budget as major multinationals such as Kodak
begin to downsize their research divisions.
Corporations have upgraded little used strategies such as consortiums and
research parks to consolidate redundant research projects. Consortiums
composed of many of the largest corporations in a market are increasingly
settling on university property and using campus and government funded
research and facilities to build an industry monopoly. Austin, home to possibly
two of the most significant consortiums created so far, Microelectronics
Computer Company (MCC) and Sematech, was an important template. In 1984,
the Reagan Justice Department ruled that the proposed MCC was not in violation
of anti-trust federal laws, thus managing to stir up a renewed cycle of university-
corporate conglomerations. This served the passage of the National Cooperative
Research Act of 1984 that legalized joint ventures among companies that hold
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more than 25% of market share. As a result, between 1982-85 the number of
consortias increased five fold, almost all of them in existence since 1979. About
50 were created within only four years after MCC was founded. 6
Consortias and research parks are certainly not new, Stanford having
created the Stanford Research Park in the 1950s, spawning Hewlett-Packard and
the Silicon Valley. By 1990, there were already 109 university related research
parks in the US and 15 in Canada, an increase of 22 in the US since 1987.7
Many of these parks were built with the use of Urban Development Action
Grants that had previously served communities rebuilding their neighborhoods to
block spatial deconcentration during the 1960s that followed the uprisings of
Harlem, Watts and N ew ark. 8 Tax exempt Industrial Revenue Bonds also
became quite popular slush funds, totaling $20 billion in 1981, as they were
used to build such parks as New Haven’s Science Park. Others are funded by
the university or state who cedes land, tax and fee abatements, provides tax-free
loans to finance construction or just builds the facilities itself and rents them at a
minimum cost as UT does with the Balcones Research Center.
The costs of commercializing university based research is facilitated by a
number of federal programs such as the Research and Development Limited
Partnerships (RDLPs), which offers a host of extraordinary federal incentives. A
large corporation will enter into an agreement to cover the marketing costs of a
new technology in exchange for tax breaks, royalties, and up to 50% stock
discounts. The tax law allows write-offs for research costs and royalties are
6 Fairweather, James, "The University’s Role in Economic Development: Lessons for
Academic Leaders," SRA Journal, Winter, 1990, p. 6.
7 University Research Parks, "Research Parks: A 1990 Directory," p. 12-17; and Sarah Glazer,
"Research Parks Plug into the Electronics Industry," Electronic Business, March 15, 1987, p.
106-114.
^ Yale's 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.
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taxed as capital gains (20% in 1986). Between 1978-86 there were 218 RDLPs
worth $2.5 billion.^
The National Science Foundation created a five year program in 1985
worth $94.5 million to set up six university engineering research centers to
facilitate tech transfer at UC-Santa Barbara (UCSB), Columbia, MIT, Purdue,
and joint programs at the University of Delaware/Rutgers and the University of
Maryland/Harvard. The UCSB program focuses on creating the robotic
technology necessary for the completely automated factory, certainly motivated
by the unmangeability of industrial labor whether in Korea or the US. The NSF
funds 25 centers in all including one at UT-Austin that works closely with
Sematech.
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program created in 1982
provides venture funding for small businesses engaged in federally funded
research. Each of the largest federal agencies set aside money for the competitive
program which totaled $100 million in 1982. By 1991, at least 12,000 awards
have been made totaling more than $1.4 billion. 10 Since the program considers
the most successful applicants to have university connections, this program
socializes the costs of university spin-offs engaged in tech transfer at both ends:
providing funds for the research and the commercialization.
These programs are only the largest of their kind. There are other
programs in nearly every federal agency that support commercial high tech
research. There are also proposals to transform DoD's "venture capitalist"
DARPA (which is a tiny $1.2 billion a year agency that initiates all military R&D
projects and helped develop the Internet to keep in contact with its scientists) into
9 Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex, Conn.: Yale Press,
1986, p. 164-5, offers an analysis of how RDLPs have been used to build the biotech industry.
The eight year figure is from Business Week, June 23, 1986.
Diversification: The Economic Diversification and Technology Business Development
Newsletter o f Texas, Fall 1990, v.4, n.3, p. 3. This is published by Technology Business
Development located at the Texas Engineering Experiment Station which was created by the
state as the statewide tech transfer agency.
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a so-called "civilian" agency to federally subsidize private commercial R&D and
tech transfer. In addition, there are plans to create a $5 billion Civilian
Technology Corporation to do the same.
The myth that universities receive more money from corporations than
they themselves spend is still predominant. In all, corporate sponsorship of R&D
is still at a dribble: around eight percent in the early 1960s, it fell to 2-3% in the
1970s-early 1980s and now stands at only about 6-9%, depending on the
source. Even though it is rising faster than federal contributions, 7% vs. 4%
between 1980-85, it is still minuscule. H 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
2 4 %. Clearly, the reality does not match the rhetoric that corporations are
funding university research. Even with all the federal programs, 1985 federal
R&D spending levels were equivalent to 1967 levels in real terms. 14
Much of the money universities do make are through the rental of licenses
o f patented research, from which even the flag wavers admit only 10% of all
new discoveries become patented, 1% are licensed and .1% generate income
greater than $25,000.15 The rest of the money comes through overhead charges
for the indirect costs of the research: library, staff and facilities usage. This can
go as high as 90%, although at large public research universities like UT it is
rarely more than 15%. Like most universities, UT takes 50% of the overhead,
11 Newman, p. 217.
12 Chronicle o f Higher Education, 1/5/83, p.4.
13 Kay, Kenneth, "Research and Development in the 100th Congress, SRA Journal, Winter,
1988, p. 24 (chart). Kay is the Executive Director of CORETECH, which is composed of 47
university, 20 corporations and various higher education associations ("Universities and
Businesses Join to Lobby for Research," The Chronicle o f Higher Education, January, 28,
1987, p. 20).
14 Lindsey, Quentin, "Industry/University Research Cooperation: The State Government
Role," SRA Journal, Fall, 1985, p. 86.
13 Bok, Derek, Beyond the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibilities o f the Modem University,
Cambridge: Harvard University, 1982, p. 156.
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the college and department each receive 25% each and the faculty member is left
to haggle with the department for a minuscule share.
Even so, only a handful of universities have "profited" from
entrepreneurialization, although the returns are minute fractions of their original
investments. Stanford, one of the five largest recipients of federal R&D money,
made $3 million in 1983-84 alone from patents. MIT has made more than $3
million from patent licensing by 1987 and was expected to top $50 million by
1992.16 However, Stanford and MIT, who have been commercializing research
for decades, are rare exceptions limited to the wealthiest endowed universities.
Although profits generated from licensing is increasing rapidly,
universities are making only an average of 2-5% of the profits. As 1994 study by
the Association of University Technology Managers of 158 found that 158 US
and Canadian universities, hospitals and independent research institutions
collected over $322 million in royalties from between $6 and $16 billion of sales
of 2,227 licensing agreements involving new products and processes derived
directly from academic research.17 Although a large sum in itself, if we were to
calculate the billions of dollars in publicly funded resources and infrastructure
^ See Amtzen, Charles and Mark Money in Commercializing Biotechnology in the Global
Economy, ed. by Tom Mabry, Steven Price, and Mark Dibner, 1991, Austin: IC7, p. 216,
which is a compilation of presentations from a conference sponsored and published by IC7.
MIT has also been linked to more than 400 firms in Massachusetts with revenues of more than
$27 billion started by alumni or professors. 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.
Amtzen and Money, are integral to the commercialization of university-based research
themselves at Texas A&M. Amtzen 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 IC7 fellow.
17 Technology Access Report, "University Licensing Continues to Soar," vol. VII, no. 12,
December 1994, p. 1.
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that made the research possible, we may find that these institutions actually lost
money that went to subsidize their corporate partners.
In the absence of direct profits, overhead costs have been huge sources of
funding—goldmines many of the times—for huge "private" universities such at
MTT and Stanford as Congressional investigations proved in early 1991 .^ With
the returns from commercialization still very low, these universities resorted to
profiting from overhead costs charged to society. The crackdown on overhead
costs appeared much earlier in 1983-84 when Reagan called for a massive
reduction in the maximum charge. Although only marginally successful, it set the
stage for pushing the universities further from a guaranteed source of funding to
having to prove their profitability in the market Some call it privatization; I call it
entrepreneurialization. Denied adequate public finances, the universities are
having to become overt profit making businesses, not just sell themselves to
outside corporations as "privatization" implies, or go under.
But if all of these negative incentives have driven the universities to
become more receptive to entrepreneurialization, it has not had the intended affect
of drawing investments to higher education. Corporate research contracts are still
low, leaving huge deficits in campus financing. Estimates for equipment repair
and replacement, placed at least $300 million for emergency efforts and $10
billion in long term help, and tuition and fee increases, that have outdistanced
inflation until recently, attest to the level at which capital still refuses to invest in
the universities, whether it be for high tech or cultural studies.
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, May 20, 1991, p. 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.
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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 centers, low paid
graduate students, unwaged student "interns" that work up to 30-40 hours a
week (such as through the IC^-run Austin Technology Incubator), paid faculty
that do everything from advising to running the companies and state monies in
the form of tech transfer advisory services and centers, R&D grants and financial
incentives.
University of Texas Inc. 19
IC* Meets DoD
The University of Texas at Austin (UT) offers an extraordinary case study of the
entrepreneurialization of a state funded research university. With more than
40,000 students, a share of a $4 billion endowment, and a ranking among the
top university recipients of DoD research money, the entrepreneurialization of
UT-Austin is endemic of other universities its size, offering hints of what is to
come for smaller colleges and universities as well.
The militarization of UT-Austin is inseparable from commercialization. As
we'll see in chapter 4, during the time of WWI, the rationalization of higher
education according to Taylorist principles of industrial organization was
stimulated by efforts to place the universities at the service of the military's needs
for new technology and "manpower." Likewise, during WWII, UT became
incorporated into a federal research system that contributed both to the US's role
in WWH and later the cold war. This reached its zenith, as it was, with the
universities direct role in fighting the Vietnam war as well as contributing to
As a student at UT-Austin, I have undertaken a critical investigation of the
entrepreneurialization of the campus and the UT System which has been published in various
student newspapers and magazines and evolved into my MA thesis and eventually my
dissertation.
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counterinsurgency efforts within the US.20 In effect, the industrialization of the
universities has been inseparably interwoven with their militarization.
Likewise with entrepreneurialization. Although the presence of m ilitary
dropped off during the campus anti-war movement, it took new footing with the
reinterpretation of the Mansfield Amendment and the commercialization of
military research promoted by the federal policy outlined above. UT-Austin
offers a fine case study of the inseparability of militarization and
entrepreneurialization. As one of the largest university military contractors, UT
has relied upon these projects both to service the military as well as to develop
new knowledge that can be commercialized as profitable products and business
ventures.
For George Kozmetsky, chief economic advisor to the Board of Regents
and founder and director of the UT associated IC2 (recently renamed the Institute
for Innovation, Creativity and Capital from 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, just as Stanford stands in the center of what they perceive as a "completed"
“Silicon Valley” technopolis and Arizona State University in a "developing"
2®See Clyde Bairow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the
Reconstruction o f American Higher Education 1894-1928, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin,
1990; David Noble’s America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise o f Corporate
Capitalism, New York: Knopf, 1977;; Gideon Sjoberg and Ted Vaughan, “The
Bureaucratization of Sociology: Its Impact on Theory and Research,” chapter 2 in A Critique of
Contemporary American Sociology, NY: General Hall, 1993; Ann C. Bauer and Harry Cleaver,
"from Student Minority Report on the Stanford Research Institute," in Charles Perrow, The
Radical Attack on Business: A Critical Analysis, NY: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1972, p.
135-149; and Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics o f
Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1990.
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Phoenix technopolis.^^ Through the guidance of IC2 and other close high tech
boosters, Austin (with its low paid labor, 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 U S , 22 could indicate not only the direction further
entrepreneurialization takes, but also how we can stop it.
The remilitarization of the US has been central to Kozmetsky's
reorganization of the university. "Kozmetsky believes that DoD dollars can be
transformed into personal economic wealth and that civilian industry can gain
substantial advantages from the technological breakthroughs of the military and
aerospace R&D programs," explained one w rite r . 23 Using DoD reentry into the
university to bankroll the emergence of a high tech based economy is one of the
primary tactics of entrepreneurialization. A study of Austin would demonstrate
this to be the case: MCC and Sematech along with many other recently arrived
multinationals in Austin, rely on UT to subsidize the costs of research and
commercialization. It is no surprise that two IC2 conferences and the resulting
books are titled: Commercializing Defense-Related Technology and
Commercializing SDI Technology,24 The prime movers in carrying out this
military lead development planning have included a slew of "retired" top ranking
intelligence and military men who have now settled into top level positions at
UT.
21 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
22 Chronicle o f Higher Education, January 17, 1990, reprinted in Education fo r the People
Organizing Guide, 1991, p. 15.
23 Amie Weissmann, "Contract Warriors", 3rd Coast, June 1986, p. 43.
24 Robert Kuhn, (ed.), Commercializing Defense-Related Technology, NY: Praeger, 1986; and
Robert Kuhn and Stewart Nozette (eds.). Commercializing SDI Technologies, NY: Praeger,
1987.
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The stated goal of such "technology transfer" is often portrayed as serving
the general interests of "society." Kozmetsky's coordination of publicly funded
resources of the universities, state and federal governments with that of private
business "to stimulate economic growth," as the saying goes, is often described
in vague, general terms in his and other IC^ writings. However, in a rare
articulate moment, Kozmetsky articulates the inseparability of the university in
the development of a disciplined workforce (seen as human capital resources)
and entrepreneurialization specific to UT-Austin:
As a Texas flagship research university, The University of Texas is crucial to
developing educated people. These are the intellectual resources who, in turn,
fulfill much of Texas' current economic, social, political, and cultural needs.
Among these resources are the UT Austin graduate scientists, engineers, and
managers who sustain and transfer the new knowledge that builds Texas'
economic future based on science and technology. In this respect, The
University of texas at Austin is an intellectual catalyst that helps link technology
with enterprise growth necessary to propel Texas' modem economy forward.25
Entrepreneurialization planners such as Kozmetsky 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
25 George Kozmetsky, "Comment,” Discovery: Research and Scholarship at the University o f
Texas at Austin, vol. 13, no. 1, 1993, p. 2.
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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 1980’s has forever tom the
shroud of ivy from UT. Beginning in 1982, the state began a series of high level
legislative studies and reforms following the federal initiatives outlined above
that established legal and financial incentives for public subsidization of the high
tech industry.
In 1985, the Texas legislature altered the Texas Education Code requiring
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. The Texas Open Records Act was amended so
that any information deemed related to research with broadly defined commercial
potential or already licensed or funded by an outside sponsor does not have to be
released. In addition, the Center for Technology Development and Transfer
(CTDT), was created in the UT College of Engineering. "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".26 This
includes everything from channeling 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 to allow regents
to invest in non- and for-profit companies that have licenses or contracts with
their university. This opened the door to formalizing participation by Regents
and the UT Engineering Foundation Advisory Council (composed of many
26 Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, "Free Market Scholarship: UT, Technology Transfer and
Academic Freedom," Polemicist., November, 1990, p. 4.
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investors and multinational corporations) in the creation of Research Application,
Inc. (RAI) in 1987 in which two recent UT regents, Kozmetsky and a UT
System Vice Chancellor have invested.27
RAI is a private company dedicated to transferring university research into
private hands through the CTDT.28 The Center for Technology Venturing
(CTV) set up by Kozmetsky, the Business School and UT to run the Austin
Technology Incubator (ATI). By 1991 ATI houses 13 companies and has
provided hundreds of unpaid under- and graduate students as employees for
multinational corporations and the state.29
In 1987, the legislature also added three programs to subsidize research in
science and engineering with commercial potential. Run by the Texas Higher
Education Coordinating Board, these programs supplied $246 million between
1985 and 1992 to military and commercial high tech and biotech research
including $3.3 million to the military rail gun program at UT-Austin. The
advisory committee and review panels are a who's who membership of
representatives from 91 universities, defense corporations and the federal
government.
UTInc.
As the largest research institution and centrally tied into the high tech industry,
UT-Austin has become the centerpiece of statewide entrepreneurialization
however incomplete it may be. Nonetheless, its commercial output has been
27 Ibid., p. 4.
2^ Frank McBee, "Comment,"Ducove/y: Research and Scholarship at the University o f Texas
at Austin, vol. II, no. 3, 1991, p. 2. McBee is founder of RAI.
29 See /C2 Institute Annual Report 1989-1990, The University of Texas at Austin, 5-7; or any
of their annual reports for current data.
30 Advanced Research Program, Advanced Technology Program, Preliminary Report, June
1988, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board; "Thirty Two Texas Campuses to Receive
Almost $62 Million in Nation's Largest Competitive Research Program," Coordinating Board
press release, Oct. 26, 1989; and Strategies for the New Texas Economy, Texas Science and
Technology Council, January 1987.
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greatly enhanced by the federal and state programs described above as well as the
use of selective austerity within the campus to rechannel resources away from
unprofitable areas to those that offer commercial potential.
Long touted for its contribution to "economic growth," UT-Austin has
been a central institution in the development of business in Texas and especially
Austin. Since 1988, 33 companies have either relocated or been founded in
Austin. Six of them had direct and indirect ties to UT. Of the 103 small and
medium sized technology based companies in Austin in 1986, 53—or 52%—
have direct or indirect ties to UT.31
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 102 in all by 1991, with 98 total issued patents.
Twenty six licenses were 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 and
is responsible for 41 high tech spin-off companies.32 Of the 31 "significant"
income earning spin-offs or licensing arrangements identified by the UT System
Office of Legal Counsel, six involve UT-Austin, including Astec Industries for
whom railgun researcher William Weldon is director. Weldon is UT's most
entrepreneurial faculty member, holding 20 patents and 16 applications in his
name.33 in 1984, well before the reorganization began, UT-Austin was
31 Gibson, David and Raymond Smilor, "The Role of the Research University in Creating and
Sustaining the U.S. Technopolis," in University Spin-off Companies: Economic
Development, Faculty Entrepreneurs, and Technology Transfer, ed. by Alistair Brett, David
Gibson and Raymond Smilor, 1991, p. 55. This book is a collection of papers presented at a
conference organized by IC^* for whom Gibson and Smilor work for, and its associated
organization, the RGK Foundation.
32 Meg Wilson, "The University Role in Commercializing Technology," date unknown, p. 3;
and Raymond Smilor, David Gibson and Glenn Dietrich, "University Spin-out Companies:
Technology Start-Ups from UT-Austin," Austin: IC^, no date, p. 10.
33 "UT Patents Issued" and "Patent Applications" through 1991, documents provided by
Dudley Dobie of the UT System Office of Legal Counsel.
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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
1987.34 Nearly every state university has established commercialization support
programs and some such as the UT System Cancer Center that has made more
than 100 Licensing deals alone in only a three year period, have been
significant.35
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 program, and $1 billion through a state public bond sale for the
supercollider.
UT is closely connected to many multinational corporations through the
change in its intellectual property regulations. One such partnership is that of UT
chancellor and former UT-Austin President William Cunningham’s holding of
stocks, advisory role and membership on the boards of several Freeport
McMoRan subsidiaries (which is discussed later in this chapter). To solidify the
partnership, the UT Geology Department recruited eight graduate students for a
million dollar grant to map the island. Natural Science's Dean Robert Boyer,
Freeport's President Jim Bob Moffett's' old geology professor and first recipient
of an endowed position he funded at UT explains it away quite honestly:
34 Vision 2020: The University o f Texas System Strategic Plan 1991-1997, February 1991, p.
8.
35 Provine, John, "UTs Role in High Tech Research," Austin Magazine, November, 1984, p.
? At the time, Stanford was making $4 million a year. For UTSCC see Tim Richardson, "No
More Curving the Grades," Texas Business, December 1987, p. 47-52.
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"Everybody from President Bush on down is encouraging partnerships between
industry and higher education, and this is one of those partnerships."
The range of entrepreneurial activities undertaken by UT and its corporate
partners are vast, crisscrossing not only Austin and Texas but stretching globally
as well. The rail gun program 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 recent UT Chancellor Hans
Mark who brought his SDI research programs from the Air Force and NASA 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
Persian 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 in
1990. Harry Fair, one of the key researchers, came to UT after having directed
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Land Warfare
Office. William Weldon is one of UT’s top ten paid professors. According to
Weldon, the mission of the Center for Electromechanics (CEM), which he
directs, is to "develop the required technology base, perform preliminary
investigations of promising applications, and transfer technology to the industrial
sector, working closely with industrial and governmental sponsors to accomplish
these goals."36 Rail gun technology has been put to commercial purposes by at
least six multinational corporations involved in oil drilling, audio tape
production, advanced sparkplugs, and metallurgy to develop their own products
36 Weldon, William, "Kinetic Energy Technology," in Commercializing SDI Technologies,
edited by Stewart Nozette and Robert Kuhn, 1987, p. 148. This book was also collected from a
conference sponsored by IC^. 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.
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and increase their profits. The recently finished $62 million building shared by
the CEM and other new facilities and amenities have come from tuition and fee
money, bond issues, and other university sources.
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 re-appropriate
funds from programs 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 we'll see in this
section. As federal and state funding has been pushed sharply down, each
campus—and within them, each program—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 China to
England to East Germany to Nigeria.
In Texas, austerity has become the order of the day, driven by the engine
of ‘budget flexibility” (and along with it "flexible tuition" which are only flexible
upwards). Between 1984-87 alone more than $300 million was slashed from all
37 Texas 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
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1985.37 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 percent 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 1991-92.38
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 program 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 program further subordinates
itself to the overt needs of the market it is rewarded, as engineering and biotech
have been, with massive support. That these pressures are beginning to have an
effect on areas such as the Liberal Arts at UT is apparent with talk by recent Dean
Robert King’s about it being a "debtor college" in his rationalization of a
doubling in graduate tuition in late 1991.
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. From 1988-90 only a few graduate
schools had their tuition increased and when that was successful, tuition was
raised for all graduate students in 1992 under the guise of paying for insufficient
funding for faculty salaries by the state, a clear case of divide and conquer
between faculty and students. Since 1985, undergraduate tuition has increased
37 On Campus, October 15, 1990, p. 2.
38 These figures are taken from the fiscal Operating Budget for UT-Austin for each of those
years.
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from $4/hr to $24/hr while control over graduate student tuition was given to the
more politically insulated Board of Regents who have increased it to $52 per
hour by 1993—an increase of 1300% between 1985-1993. 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 UT
redirect money from elsewhere. It did not prevent cutbacks, since 1416
publications were slashed due to a shortfall of $260,000, in addition to the net
loss of 1200 more since 1985. Library usage fees were added at the Law library,
book binding eliminated for many new acquisitions and hours slashed.
Financial aid has also faced the knife. While the State Higher Education
Coordinating Board was funneling $246 million to commercializable research, it
refused, despite numerous warnings, to sell $200 million in bonds to fund a state
run guaranteed student loan program through August 1991 that has made a profit
of $75 million by 1991. As a result, 1000 UT students had their aid delayed in
January for months because it 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
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. After students successfully opened
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UT by pushing up enrollment by 15,000 in the 1970s and 1980s, and continue
to threaten to do so through the 1990s, UT has had only minor success in
pushing it down by a percent or so a year. Combined with cuts in aid, attacking
enrollment has worked to weed out those who would be likely to oppose the
university's partnerships with business. With increased pressures for the
implementation of multiculturalism, including further increases in minority
enrollment and faculty hiring, as one student wrote, they don't want to "educate
the pests he [President Cunningham] let in the first place." UT has attempted to
reduce undergraduate enrollment while rapidly increasing graduate enrollment,
often by offering already filled teaching assistant jobs to new applications.
If anything, the crisis has only intensified, but with students, faculty and
staff as the central targets. While the state is set to sell $1 billion in bonds for
even more jails and $1 billion to subsidize the $8 billion superconducting
su p e rc o llid e r, 39 the state used the hype of a $4 billion shortfall in 1991 to justify
massive slashes in higher education. In the end, a $4 dollar an hour tuition
increase emerged coupled with a continuing hiring freeze, layoffs, a failed
attempt to cut AI salaries, and $4 more million in cuts—what they really wanted
in the first place.
“We're Broke" and Other Complete Bullshit40
^9 Which has been proven to have both military and commercial applications. Charles
Schwartz, a UC-Berkeley Physics professor quotes a memo from the Office of the Secretary of
Defense to the White House he received through FOIA: "the SCC project will have many spin
offs for the DoD, especially in technologies required by the Strategic Defense Initiative,
including particle beams, information processing, computer control, pulse power sources, and
high energy accelerators." "Political Structuring of the Institutions of Science," paper presented
at the Symposium on the Anthropology of Science and Scientists, AAAS Meeting, February
16, 1991, p. 4.
40 All the data cited in this data can be found in more detail in Robert Ovetz, UT Inc.:
Austerity and Entrepreneurialization at the University o f Texas at Austin, unpublished master’s
thesis, 1992; and Robert Ovetz, ‘“ UT’s Broke’ and Other Complete Bullshit Or Why UT Can
Afford Tuition/Fee Waivers and Other Grad Student Necessities,” The Other Texan, #1, Fall
1992, p. 5.
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The state and university have attempted to legitimize this austerity by claiming
that they are broke. Yet UT's support for Sematech 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. To begin with, legislation passed in 1989 granted increased budgeting
flexibility to the administration to reallocate money to where they deem
necessary. Since more than half the $666 million L991-92 budget is unrestricted
the administration has a large amount of money to direct to where the financial
returns are the largest.41
To discuss UT finances, no one document can be referred to for a
comprehensive picture. The Operating Budget, published annually, only offers a
breakdown of the money appropriated to the UT-Austin campus by the
legislature for that year of the biennium. The annual Financial Statements which
has a more restricted circulation than the "budget", details the total value of UT-
Austin above and beyond the annual budget and thus outside public oversight.
But even it does not cover the Permanent University Fund (PUF), detailed by the
annually published Permanent University Fund Investments, and other reserve
funds and investments held by the UT System and shared by all the campuses,
detailed in their Bond Issue Papers.
UT has a number of lesser publicized supplementary sources of funds that
can be studied only with access to the later three highly secretive documents. Its
$4 billion PUF shared with the Texas A&M System 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 programs in
engineering. The interest forms the Available University Fund (AUF) which
44 The University of Texas at Austin, Operating Budget, Fiscal Year Ending August 31, 1992.
"Unrestricted" funds refer to monies not specifically designated to particular areas of the
universities and are subject to the priorities of the administration.
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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" paid every student, amounting to $10 million
in 1991, goes directly toward the construction and expansion of commercially
oriented facilities, including $8 million for the 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.42
In an in depth study I conducted for my master's thesis and 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.43 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 other words, UT is not broke.
A Comparison o f the Colleges o f Engineering and Liberal Arts
It is not enough to only promote commercialization of academic activities, but to
ensure a constant, unobstructed flow of resources to support and reproduce it
42 State Comptroller, Texas Performance Review, July 1991, p. ED151; and the University of
Texas System, Bond Issue Paper, February 15, 1991, p. D15.
43 For a detailed breakdown of the location of these funds see Robert Ovetz, UT Inc.: Austerity
and Entrepreneurialization at the University o f Texas at Austin, unpublished master’s thesis,
1992; and Robert Ovetz, ‘“U T s Broke’ and Other Complete Bullshit Or Why UT Can Afford
Tuition/Fee Waivers and Other Grad Student Necessities,” The Other Texan, #1, Fall 1992, p.
5. Much of the data originates from The University of Texas System, Bond Issue paper for
$282,725,000, dated March 8, 1991.
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which is why localized austerity and increased budget flexibility are pivotal to the
entrepreneurialization of UT. We can see how this works by comparing
Engineering and Liberal Arts access to endowment money, bond issues,
corporate funding and overhead. The distinction is very simple: Engineering has
broader access to each of these than Liberal Arts.44
The UT College of Engineering has had the most success in using
austerity to generate entrepreneurialization. Of its entire operating budget, only
25 percent comes from the legislature while 10 percent comes from gifts and its
endowment income. With $56.7 million in research grants and awards to the
college in 1989-90 (up 15 percent from 1988-9) engineering is a proven profit-
making operation. Considering that nearly all the entrepreneurial faculty and staff
originate from this college, engineering is the model of what is planned for the
university as a whole.
Through the Engineering Foundation, the college received $9.6 million in
contributions from its "Industrial Program" and maintained a $69.3 million
endowment.45 Started in 1959 by allowing corporations to give money for
limited consulting services and extension services with Humble Oil (whose
owner was a regent in the 1960s) as the first Industrial Associate in 1961, the
Industrial Associates Program (which operates much like MIT's ILP) received
contributions from 72 (up from 65 in one year) member companies totaling
$2.86 million including Dow, Exxon, IBM, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas,
44 The comparison is made only between engineering in liberal arts because these are the two
programs I am most familiar with and is not intended to detract from the significance of the
effect on other colleges. However, information about liberal arts is available also because
students and faculty there have spoken up and begun to fight and unless others begin to do so
elsewhere they will continue to suffer in silence. The connection between liberal arts and other
programs must be made since disciplines are only used to divide us, but this cannot be done
until others begin to come into the light.
45 The College of Natural Sciences also has the Natural Sciences Foundation Advisory Council
which raises money for the college. Members of its "hall of honor" includes Norman
Hackerman, Donald Carlton, president and CEO of Radian and former Tracor employee, and Jim
Bob Moffett all appointed in 1991-92. On Campus, "Natural Sciences inducts three into Hall of
Honor," April 20, 1992, p. 6.
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Motorola, Shell, Southwestern Bell, and 3M to name a few of the $20,000
grantors. Others include Bechtel, Radian (a Tracor spin off), and Mitchell
Energy and Development (which is a financial supporter of the Houston Area
Research Center with which UT is closely connected). Phillips Petroleum was
even given an award by the college for "Outstanding Corporate Service" for their
support of the program. The Engineering Foundation Advisory Council includes
Phillips (chairman), Monsanto (vice chair), MCC's CEO, Sematech’s CEO, and
3M. "Senior Active Members" include former Regent Louis Beecherl, MCC
founder and former CIA and National Security Agency official Bobby Ray
Inman, and Tracor founder and former UT-Austin professor Frank McBee.46
Created in 1955, the Foundation's chairmen have included high level employees
of Tenneco, Texas Utilities, Texas Instruments, Gulf, Amoco, Shell, Cockrell
Oil, Parker Drilling's founder (who is licensing railgun technology), Fina,
Texaco, Western and MCC’s Inman. With the interest of these large
corporations, the endowment grew from a slim $255,200 in 1977 to $41.1
million in 1986, nearly quadrupling between 1982 and 1985 and growing.
The years 1981-85 were a boomtime for the college with a growth in the
number of endowed positions which totaled 146 new slots. By comparison, after
the Texas legislature changed the manner proceeds from the Available University
Fund (AUF) could be spent in 1981 so that it could be used to create endowed
positions, the number of endowed positions skyrocketed to 700 by April 1984
alone most of them geared to business and engineering. By contrast, Liberal Arts
went from having three chairs worth $300,000 in 1970 to only 70 for $15
million in 1984— only 10 percent of the university-wide total for the largest
college at the time. One of the new chairs in engineering was the Chair in Free
Enterprise, initiated by Frank McBee and others with an initial executive council
composed of the deans of education, business and LBJ. The chair, which funds
46 College o f Engineering, The University o f Texas at Austin, 1989-90 Annual Report, p. 32-
33, 37-39, 42-46.
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the CTDT director, received a $.5 million boost from Virginia Murchson to
launch CTDT’s Stephen Szygenda into the position which Dale Klein, Associate
Dean for Research and former director of the Nuclear Engineering Teaching Lab,
now holds.
It is necessary to examine the growth in endowed chairs from 1985-86 to
1990-91 to understand the way in which emphasis has been placed on certain
disciplinary programs at the expense of others. As chart 2.1 shows, the largest
recipients of endowed positions from fiscal 1985-86 and 1990-91, and thus,
AUF and other institutional funds, have been engineering (140 positions), law
(118), and natural sciences (88)—more than half of the total of 610.
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Chart 2.1—Gift Funded Endowments by College/School,
1985-86 to 1990-9147
College Total # positions
Architecture 13
Business 36
Communication 19
Education 18
Engineering 140
Fine Arts 3
Interdisciplinary 77
Law 118
Liberal Arts 46
GSLIS 5
(Graduate School of Library and Information Science)
Natural Sciences 88
Nursing 8
Pharmacy 4
Public Affairs 4
Social Work _£
TOTAL 584
Liberal arts has been under pressure to follow the route that Engineering
has taken to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency. Expecting a budget shortfall of
$200,000 in 1992, the College of Liberal Arts began "The Annual Fund"
campaign to generate outside private support. The prospected donor is
encouraged that they may "double or triple the value of your gift if you work for
a matching gift company," wrote Dean King in a fund raising letter.48 When
King met with graduate students about the tuition increases in fall 1991, he
referred to this campaign as a way to turn around what he calls a "debtor
college." What he meant was liberal arts will be forced to undergo austerity
47 From Scott Henson, “Gift Funded Endowments By College/School from 1985-86 to 1990-
91," worksheet, 1991, calculated from University of Texas-Austin, Development Office, "All
Endowments Sorted by Name Within Board of Regents," September 1,1985 Thru August 31,
1991, all colleges.
48 Letter from Dean Robert King for The Annual Fund, January 1992.
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unless it can entrepreneurialize and generate the operating capital necessary to
survive. Perhaps his resistance to multiculturalism, discussed in chapter 3,
served this purpose by eliminating those forces resistant to further subordinating
the college to the dictate of the business?
The pressure on Liberal Arts to entrepreneurialize appears to have begun
to generate results if we examine the dramatic increase of outside support since
the mid 1980s. In 1985-86, from the categories of alumni, parents, other,
foundations, and corporations, the college received $379,638 in gifts for current
operations and $2,098,655 for capital purposes, a total of $2,478,294. By 1990-
91, it received $1,509,280 for current operations and $5,281,399 for capital
purposes, for a total of $6,790,680, a near tripling in support. During the same
period, Engineering received $2,556,532 for current operations and $3076,968
for capital purposes in 1985-1986, for a total of $5,633,501, and less than
doubled by 1990-91 with gifts of $4,920,257 for current operation and
$4,569,222 for capital purposes in 1990-91, for a total of $9,489,479.49 The
Colleges of Natural Science and Law also experienced rapid growth in their
private endowments between 1988-89 and 1991-92 while Communications and
Nursing declined.50 It is interesting to note the primary sources of funds for
each college. Corporations were one of the smallest sources of support for
Liberal Arts during both of these fiscal years while they were the largest for
Engineering. Ironically, although Liberal Arts still generates less outside support
it is increasing at a faster rate than engineering.
These figures do not include research money, endowed positions, and
debt financing of facilities and equipment which engineering dominates. During
the 1980s, at least $60 million was spent on construction of labs, buildings,
49 These figures are from the University of Texas-Austin, Development Office, “Gifts to the
College of Liberal Arts” and “Gifts to the College of Engineering,” as reported to the Council
for Financial Aid to Education, for the years September 1, 1985 Thru August 31, 1991.
50 Kevin Williamson, "Private Funding Benefits Some Profs,” The Daily Texan, June 24,
1992, p. 5.
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faculty, and facilities on campus and at the Balcones Research Center (BRC) just
for Engineering.51 The Engineering Teaching Centers I and II finished in 1974
and 1982 cost $25 million together, much more than the estimated $10 million.
The Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Building finished in 1986 cost $20
million and is part of an engineering plant all built since 1958 valued at $51
million. There is also the Center for Electromechanics/Center for Energy Studies
building for $23.2 million and all the other facilities at the BRC that shoot the
total far above $60 million.52
By contrast, since the mid 1980s the College of Liberal Arts, which had
the largest student enrollment for most of the time period, has merely received a
remodeled chemical and petroleum building and E.P. Schoch building for the
economics and anthropology departments. Meanwhile the sociology department
has lost space in Burdine Hall even though there are two fewer departments
located there than were in 1986 when it housed Computer Science and
Anthropology as well as Government. The College of Communications have had
to wait many years until 1992 for the corroded and falling outer metal surface of
one of the communication complex buildings to be repaired while asbestos
continues to fall from the ceilings of some of their classrooms.
From the very beginning, the history of UT-Austin is one of investment in
engineering when the rest of campus is suffering from austerity. The first
classroom building to break out of the original forty acres was Taylor Hall which
opened in 1933. At a cost of $4 million that was generated from the sale of
bonds covered by the PUF that had reached a value of $4 million in only 1925,
Taylor Hall was one of nine new buildings for the college of Engineering and
Architecture. While spending the $4 million in the midst of the depression, UT-
51 The BRC was renamed the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in 1994.
52 Information for the preceding two paragraphs comes from the Commitment to Excellence,
p. 113, 188-40.
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Austin cut all salaries by 25 percent in 1933 and paid a script that local banks
honored for faculty at face value but reduced for everyone else.
Even basic funding per student differ sharply between colleges. Brooks
provided a concise contrast between support for engineering and liberal arts:
Budget and other documents show that, between the fall of 1981 and the fall of
1990, UT spent less on students in the College of Liberal Arts than on students
in the College of Engineering. During this period, enrollment of full-time
engineering students decreased by 3.7 percent while full-time faculty for the
department increased nearly 22 percent. At the same time, enrollment of full-time
liberal arts students rose 2.3 percent while full-time faculty for the department
grew 8 percent. Although enrollment was dropping, spending in the College of
Engineering more than doubled during the period—from $10.3 million to $21.2
million. While enrollment was climbing, spending the College of Liberal Arts
rose 62%—from $20 million to $32.4 million. In 1990-1991, UT spent about
$2,363 on instruction costs per full-time liberal arts student and $5,569 on
instruction per full-time engineering student.53
This demonstrates concretely what students and faculty already knew as
the real cause of so-called "overcrowding" in 1989 when hundreds of students
could not sign up for their required English class. The problem is not one of too
many students, but too little money in certain places. In one sense, the
administration calls it "overcrowding" because it has too many students it cannot
control. Yet, that students in colleges like liberal arts have to take classes with
100 to 500 other students or cannot get any classes at all is the result of planned
underfunding of those programs so that the classes are so overcrowded—and the
working conditions so deteriorated—that it serves as a disincentive for staying in
programs UT-Austin does want to fund. This is especially the case with financial
aid on which many students depend. Although the office received a larger
building the only thing that changed is students can now watch TV while they
wait in line in a larger air conditioned hallway to refile documents the
53 A. Phillips Brooks, "Research is growing in significance," Austin American-Statesman,
February 25, 1992, p. A8.
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overworked staff lost and wait for their money to come months after the semester
started.
In 1991, while raising tuition (and cutting AI and TA salaries as a result),
freezing staff hiring (cutting staff relative wages by increasing their workload)
and cutting faculty supplies, long distance calls and copying, UT-Austin was
investing hundreds of millions in commercializable research as we've seen. Just
as the depressions of the 1930s and of the 1990s can be interpreted as a capital
strike, a refusal to invest in areas with the lowest return (because they serve a
multiplicity of needs antagonistic to capital or face resistance from students and
others), so can the pattern of funding at UT-Austin.54 It is far too simplistic to
frame the problem as education versus research. To do so would only skim the
surface of a much more complex political conflict at work in the universities
between the desires of students and the demands of capital.
Reorganizing the Authority Structure
54 It is interesting to note that the pattern of funding follows the pattern of campus growth.
Soon after Taylor broke from the 40 acres, it was followed by the Schoch and Petroleum
Engineering Buildings located in a line next to Taylor and in front of the ROTC building built
in 1919 during the militarization of UT led by Engineering Dean Taylor during WWI. With
Schoch and Petroleum Engineering now the Economics and Anthropology buildings and the
Nuclear Engineering Teaching Lab moved this year along with the nuke to the BRC, all of
Engineering is located in a complex of recently constructed buildings on the very edge of
campus at 26th and Speedway. Thus as the campus grew, engineering stayed on the very
outskirts, purposely isolated from the rest of campus (e.g. liberal arts) and safe from student
protest, with its old facilities taken over by the "debtor" programs of liberal arts. That is,
Liberal Arts got the hand-me-downs of the entrepreneurial programs. This still happening. If
the Molecular Biology building (located on 24th street a block from the engineering complex)
happens, Liberal Arts will inherit the Biology Lab building. UT is also planning to use
property it is still buying up in what remains of the western half o f the 16 square block
Blackland neighborhood to build administrative office buildings as part of its plan "for the
clustering of professional schools around the periphery of the campus," leaving "key
administrative offices", Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences to let inherit the central campus. This
is clearly a strategy of spatial deconcentration to not only isolate its biggest problem but
protect its entrepreneurial investments from attack. ( See Richard McCaslin and Dean Earnest
Gloyna, Commitment to Excellence: 100 Years o f Engineering Education at the University o f
Texas at Austin, Austin: The Engineering Foundation of the College of Engineering, 1986, p.
35-45 and University of Texas-Austin Strategic Plan, 1994-99, vol. I, p. 105-106.
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Who is making these decisions? This is the question asked by Janice Newson
and Howard Buchbinder in their analysis of the commercialization of Canadian
higher education discussed in depth in chapter 4.55 In the case of UT-Austin,
there is not one locus of decision-making located either in the sponsoring agency
or corporation, the university administration, student or faculty pressure, or the
state legislature. Rather, the fact that decisions affecting the daily operation of
UT-Austin originate from several sources indicates a fundamental reorganization
of the university's authority structure as part of a global process.
Faculty governance structures are no longer a fundamental site of
decision-making. Rather, new bases of unrecognized power are being developed
in order to promote the reorganization of UT-Austin into an overt business. Until
1994 much of this power base is centralized in the Office of the Executive Vice
President and Provost Gerhard Fonken. An entire infrastructure is in place to
compile information about campus research in order to evaluate it for potential
commercialization, marketing and even investment for the creation of start-up
businesses. Vice Provost and administrator for UT-Austin's intellectual property
and licensing program Patricia Ohlendorf explains in detail how it is organized:
The Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost works with the inventor
in market evaluation and in finding a licensee to commercialize the technology
embodied in the intellectual property. Activities regarding each intellectual
property are entered into an electronic data base for monitoring. Prospective
licensees and research sponsors are identified through contacts with of the
faculty researcher, market research done by The University, periodic mailings by
The University to key companies, and contacts made at professional meetings.
We perform due diligence by gathering information regarding companies such as
profiles of specific technical interests, funding capabilities, and the track record
working with universities. We send a prospective licensee model agreements for
55 Howard Buchbinder and Janice Newson, "The Service University and Market Forces,"
Academe, July-August, 1992, p. 14.
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the exchange of confidential information, patent and technology licensing, and
sponsored research as a starting point in negotiations.56
It is important to add that Ohlendorf is also a board member of the Austin
Technology Incubator (ATI) which houses spin-off companies, including those
owned by UT-Austin faculty and the University.57 ATI is jointly run by UT-
Austin and IC2» bringing the influence of the institute on UT-Austin decision
making full circle.
The Executive Vice President and Provost are not alone in this work. In
addition to the Austin Technology Incubator and IC^> this office is joined by the
Center for Technology Development and Transfer (CTDT) and the Office of
Technology Transfer in the College of Engineering. CTDT focuses on energy
related technology, using students in the School of Law and Graduate School of
Business to aid in the commercialization process, "specifically in license
agreement review and the assessment of industry markets ad prospective venture
capital investors," according to Ohlendorf.
This infrastructure not only facilitates the location of research funding, as
is commonly understood, but serves a wide range of roles as an intellectual labor
contractor, locating companies that can use the labor to produce new marketable
products for a share of the proceeds. According to Ohlendorf, after expenses,
royalties from licensing deals are split 50/50 between the university and the
researcher.58 Within the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost there
is a Technology Licensing Specialist whose "responsibilities include evaluating,
marketing, and licensing intellectual property which results from academic and
56 Patricia Ohlendorf, "Pathway from Research to Commercialization: Technology Transfer at
the University of Texas Moves Research into the Marketplace," Discovery: Rsearch and
Scholarship at the University o f Texas at Austin, vol. 13, no. 1, 1993, p. 9.
57 Ibid., p. 10.
58 Ibid.
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research activities."59 Paulette Braeutigam, who held this position as of 1993,
also serves on the University Intellectual Property Committee. The Office of
General Counsel and the Office of Asset Management operate at the UT System
level to also coordinate licensing and commercialization among each of the
campuses.60
Although the UT-Austin Faculty Senate, Graduate Assembly and
University Council retain say over matters of curriculum and academic
disciplines, they are marginal to the actual organization of the campus. Even in
matters of curriculum, such decisions are often made by the presidents office, the
chancellor, provost or even a myriad of vice presidents before they even reach
these bodies. For example, as of October 10, 1994, the Graduate Assembly had
before it a proposal to develop a new master's degree in the Commercialization
of Science and Technology which would have its own department with George
Kozmetsky as the graduate advisor.61 Yet, unaware of the influence of IC^ in
developing commercialization policy and the re-channeling of resources to
support them, the Assembly is unprepared, uninformed and unable to adequately
resist the proposal. What the Assembly is most likely unaware of is the role of
IC^ in developing such policies but that it even exists let alone the fact that IC^
fellows already teach courses in a wide number of departments including
sociology whose chair is a fellow. The ultimate irony is that the faculty are being
asked to formally approve a process of which they are almost completely
unaware.
Even the limited sphere of faculty voice is circumscribed at will by the
administration in instances that directly or indirectly challenge the commercial
mission of the university. As we'll see in chapter 3, although historically an
59 Ibid., p. 11.
60 The University of Texas System, Intellectual Property Policy, 1986, p. 18-19.
6 * "Major Legislation from the Graduate Assembly: Substantive Degree Program Request
Summary, Executive MS Degree in the Commercialization of Science and
Technology,",October 10, 1994, p. 208lb-c.
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internal concern of the department faculty, a proposal to formally restructure the
curriculum of E306 to include issues of gender and racism was struck down by
the upper levels of the administration. In effect, although policies promoting
entrepreneurialization are not subject to oversight, faculty reforms do not have
the power of implementation.
This follows a particular logic. In order to promote the commercialization
of the campus, such initiatives cannot be subject to discussion since they are
predicated on socializing the costs of profits owned by the few and could be
recognized as the source of the financial hardships now commonly faced by all.
On the other hand, traditional faculty self-governance institutions that gave
formal recognition to programs such as Chicano Studies that challenge the very
organization of society must be subject to tighter control and circumvention.
As Daniel Levy and Hugo Aboites demonstrate in the case of Latin
American universities, commercialization efforts must deal with well organized
student, faculty and staff organizations and unions that hold varying types of
formal decision-making control over the campuses.62 As this is not the case in
the US and Canada, university administrators can just change the course of
policy behind closed doors without public oversight, at least until their decisions
become known and the object of opposition.
Another factor to consider is independent wealth of particular segments of
the campus and their influence over campus decision-making. As a two-tiered
structure of the "haves" and "have nots" develop,63 the haves, with their own
independently controlled sources of funds either from donations, endowments,
endowed chairs, research contract overhead income, and corporate sponsorship,
62 Daniel Levy, "Higher Education Amid the Political-Economic Changes of the 1990s,
Report of the LASA Task Force on Higher Education," LASA Forum, PA: Latin american
Studies Association, Spring 1994, p. 3-16; and Hugo Aboites, "Economic Globalization and
the Transformation of the Mexican University," undated manuscript
63 Mark Yudof, "The Burgeoning Privatization of State Universities," The Chronicle o f Higher
Education, May 13, 1992, p. A48. Yudof is currently UT-Austin Provost and Vice President
and formerly Dean of the Law School.
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can block or elude formal decision-making structures that may curtail their own
priorities. For example, the College of Engineering, the wealthiest college on
campus,64 successfully asserted its opposition to the multiculturalism course
requirement (even though it did not propose the addition of a new core course)
because, according to arguments from professors and administrators within the
college, it would detract engineering students from their expected studies. Using
its wealth and status as a profitable academic discipline, the administration used
the college of engineering's opposition as a justification for its own. Such
colleges may circumvent the necessity of formal requests for resources to hire
new faculty or purchase new equipment for example by relying on its own
internal funds or donations from large corporations or even the re-channeling of
PUF monies by the administration and board of regents. Whereas other academic
programs resource requests may eventually become topic for public debate, and
with it their own productivity and service to the market, engineering is not held
accountable for its military and nuclear research projects and its frequent toxic
dumpings into Waller Creek.
This transformation in the authority structure of the university is not
simply that decisions which affect the character of the campus are now being
made outside traditional faculty structures.65 These are not decisions that can be
made or not made in isolation of the global reorganization currently taking place.
Placed into an international context, social institutions within particular national
boundaries face new burdens to demonstrate their contribution to the global
market. Universities, subject to the conflicts between students and faculty and
administrators that have disrupted their service to business, are being pushed
64 However, according to a mechanical engineering Ph.D student I interviewed who works on
solar energy for the Center for Energy Studies at the Balcones Research Center I interviewed in
March 1992, there is a hierarchy within engineering. Those working on solar energy had to
share a building with railgun researchers for many years and did not even have adequate office
equipment
65 Newson and Buchbinder, 1992.
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through austerity to generate a larger share of their operating expenses on their
own. As a result, many universities are becoming partners in business ventures
that transcend specific national interests as is the case with UT and Freeport
McMoRan’s joint venture in West Papua.
This is the case with UT-Austin. Although it is unknown whether faculty
governance structures actually ever had much day to day decision-making
power, today their roles are eclipsed by administrative niches responding to state
and national policies which in return compose the local part of a larger global
picture. The issue at hand is not merely that IC^ or CTDT or even George
Kozmetsky possess unaccountable decision-making power but that many forces
are being organized simultaneously to promote new orientations and emphases
for UT-Austin.
This is also not to say that UT-Austin is simply subject to larger structural
forces over which it has no control. Rather, UT-Austin, representing more than
simply a physical structure, is already and has long been part of the global
organization of society. It not only trains students and employees academics
from around the world and consumes other resources generated abroad, but is
home to research projects that run the gamut from anthropologist Steven Feld's
recordings of Papua New Guinean rain forest people threatened by development
to mapping the other side of the island for Freeport McMoRan.
It is important to place UT-Austin into an international context that is not
one of monolithic control but crisis and conflict. Since other tactics such as the
use of debt and violent repression for restoring control have failed, business is
now looking anxiously to the universities to find new high tech solutions to old
political problems. Yet, the universities have not even resolved their own
conflicts. In this way, we can see in entrepreneurialization only a response to the
success of the campus rebellions of the 1960-70s in creating spaces oriented to
needs other than that of business and control. Likewise, entrepreneurialization is
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not simply a cut and dried policy being carried out in its entirety, but only a tactic
to restore control riddled by conflict and contradictions.
Entrepreneurialization 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
increasing financial hardship.
Much of what is described in the UT System and at UT-Austin is
becoming standard operating procedure throughout universities in the US and the
world as we'll see in chapter 4. 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. "6 6 No clearer can it be said that
entrepreneurialization is being driven by austerity.
66 Scott Jaschik, "State funds for higher education drop in year; first decline since survey began
33 years ago,” The Chronicle o f Higher Education, November 6, 1991, p. A l, A38-39, and
"Cut staffs but not across the board, strapped colleges are advised," February 13, 1991, p. A31.
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The "talents" of the universities are becoming apparent as funds are being
re-appropriated from areas that serve students needs or desires to those that serve
the entrepreneurialization. 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."^
Universities are using publicly funded resources in order to develop
research into marketable products that can be sold directly for immediate profits
or in collaboration with other corporate partners. UT-Austin has begun such
projects in collaboration with a kind of corporate club in which multinationals
pay an annual fee to the College of Engineering for complete access to faculty,
staff, facilities and students. Through joint capital investments in Sematech and
MCC the UT-Austin administration hopes to develop, market and profit from
research conducted in the Philosophy, Computer and Mechanical Engineering
Departments in the further development of artificial intelligence, robotics and
computers. The identification and coordination of such projects for
commercialization is carried out the CTDT and IC^, the later organized as a
collaboration of academics from many disciplines, campuses and countries with
assorted multinational corporate sponsors. Those programs that serve a direct
role in such ventures profit through assured if not steadily rising levels of
funding as well as independently controlled resources and decisionmaking
powers not available to other academic programs just as we saw with the
comparative study of the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Engineering.
However, it isn't working as planned. Although the process of
entrepreneurialization is underway at UT-Austin, it faces many challenges, one
of which being demands of students and faculty to transform the university to
serve the need for radical social transformation. Faced with a well organized and
67 David Noble, "Higher Ed Takes the Low Road," Newsday, Sunday, October 8, 1989, p. 7.
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powerful multiculturalism movement, UT-Austin's reorganization into a
multinational corporation was temporarily held-up in the early 1990s by demands
for additional resources and institutional support for programs antagonistic to
commercialization.68 It is to this conflict that we now turn.
68 In my MA thesis I also discussed in depth how the partially successful demands for more
resources for higher education in the predominantly Mexican-American Rio Grande Valley
offered another conflict disrupting the entrepreneurialization of all higher education in Texas.
(Robert Ovetz, UT Inc.: Austerity and Entrepreneurialization at the University o f Texas at
Austin, unpublished master's thesis, 1992, p. 175-198.)
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Chapter 3. The "Multiculturalism" Movement and the Making of a
Right Wing Counterattack at UT-Austin
Contrary to popular belief, the university campuses never really returned to a
calm quiet state following the rebellions of the 1960s-1970s. Actually, the 1970s
were filled with anti-war activism until as late as 1973, protests against tuition
and fee increases, the organization of nationwide Women’s Studies and Peace
Studies movements, and towards the end of the decade, the ignition of a draft
resistance movement when the registration was restored. By the 1980s,
campuses were increasingly the sight of militant student activism over university
investments in South Africa, campus racism, CIA recruiters, the US war in
Central America and Star Wars research. Although hardly on the scale of the
student rebellions of the late 1960s, as Philip Altbach and Robert Cohen explain,
it made its presence felt. "There has been some activism, and the revolution in
attitudes and values started in the sixties has not completely disappeared."1
From the ashes of the student anti-apartheid movement that reignited in the
mid-1980s rose a nationwide student led effort not just to make the university
accountable for the racism and discrimination in its investments abroad but in its
everyday operation and character at home. Although later dubbed the
"multicultural" movement, in actuality this movement grew from years of
coalition efforts among a diversity of student groups, faculty and nearby
communities. These coalitions recognized the limitations of demanding the
creation of academic resources to study particular ethnic and racial histories and
cultures that were successful in creating Black/African-American, Chicano/a,
Asian and Women's Studies programs and centers on hundreds of campuses
1 Philip Altbach and Robert Cohen, "American Student Activism: The Post-Sixties
Transformation," in Philip Altbach (ed.). Political Student Activism: An International
Reference Handbook, NY: Greenwood Press, 1989, p. 457.
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since the late 1960s and foresaw the need to transform the university in its
entirety to serve these diverse needs for fundamental socio-political change.2
For the first time since the uprisings of the 1960-70s, students and faculty
began to formulate plans backed by widespread direct action to transform the
university as a whole working from a base of what remained of 1). previous
student movement's successes that resulted in the creation of the above
mentioned ethnic, racial and gender focused academic programs and centers and
2). the entrance of many more progressives and radicals into college faculty and
even (although less frequently) administrative positions. Growing out of existing
"single-issue" student movement groups and working from a foundation created
by the efforts of students and faculty in the 1960-70s, the "multiculturalism"
movement was hardly new.
Of the existing student movements, multiculturalism has spread the
farthest and has had the most explosive impact. Most importantly, it is explicitly
both positive and negative in its orientation. Resistance to racism and sexism,
increased "minority" recruitment, multicultural classes, and "ethnic" and
Women's Studies programs and centers all suggest a refusal of sexism and
racism and other forms of hierarchy in the university. At the same time, these
snuggles organized changes that can potentially transform the fundamental nature
of the university itself. Multiculturalism has the potential and in many cases has
been able to transform the university from a social factory into a free space which
students can use for their own purposes whether they be studying about their
heritage and power, creating access to literature, music and people of their
ethnicity and cultures, and developing renewable energy.
As a result, multiculturalism has become one of the most significant
threats to the stable operation of the university. The subversive potential of
2 Although I only discuss these four academic areas in this chapter, I consider multiculturalism
to be broader than the study of different social groups. Rather, if we consider multiculturalism
to be an attempt to diversify the curriculum to include previously excluded topics of social
concern then we must also include programs such as peace studies, gay studies, environmental
studies, etc.
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multicultural reforms is not inherent, there are plenty of cases of attempts to
institutionalize it to make students better workers. However, we can "re-read"
the backlash against these reforms as an indicator of the level of its current or
potential threat to the university.
Since 1991, we have heard much organized opposition to the
multiculturalism movement put in terms of opposition to specific "multicultural"
reforms predicated upon what are perceived to be larger threats to the
organization and function of the universities as we now know them.
Conservative commentator Irving Kristol warned as early as 1986 that "Our
universities as institutions have moved rapidly and massively to the left—and,
more often than not, toward the extremities of the left." Just months before, then
Secretary of Education William Bennett made the threat explicit: "academic
totalitarians are turning our universities into a kind of fortress at war with
society, an arsenal whose principal talk is to raise 'revolutionary
consciousness."’3 Sweeping accusations of "political correctness" made by
opponents to multicultural reforms can be re-read as a pejorative generalization of
the organizational threat of students, faculty and community groups who sought
to refocus the emphasis of the universities from serving business to serving the
needs of the oppressed and exploited.
A number of questions that will be asked in the following critical case
study of the repression of the multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin in view
of both the radical intent of the movement and the opposition. In what ways can
multiculturalism subvert or reinforce the entrepreneurial university? Has the
movement developed an adequate analysis of the contemporary university in
3 Irving Kristol quote from the Wall Street Journal, June 17, 1986; and William Bennett quote
from May 14, 1986 speech to the American Jewish Committee, cited in John Trumpbour,
"Introducing Harvard: A Social, Philosophical, and Political Profile," p. 9, in Trumpbour (ed.),
How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, p. 3-
31.
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capitalism to see through its demands beyond limited curricular reforms or is it
inherendy cooptable?
In light of this case study, we need to analyze both the strengths and
weaknesses of the movement that I find illustrated in the literature of the right
wing counterattack that perceived such reforms as only the tip of an iceberg
slowly pushing the university out of the grasp of capital. Yet, with numerous
efforts by some sectors of business and the government to coopt m ulticulturalism
as their own in order to better manage a diverse and antagonistic workforce, we
also need to consider the inherent limitations of the movement. I do not intend to
imply that all sectors of business and government institutions are any more
monolithic than the multiculturalism movements. No doubt there are conflicts
among the former as among the latter otherwise we would not be seeing the
kinds of resistance to these reforms documented in this chapter. Such conflict
only helps to confirm the persisting subversive potential of such reforms.
As with the case study of entrepreneurialization at UT-Austin, this case
study of the multiculturalism movement must be viewed in light of the
complexity of struggle that has resulted in not only different interpretations and
analyses of multiculturalism but also different actual forms. I do not recount the
creation of the ethnic, racial and gender studies programs nor the wide variety of
free spaces that accompanied the increasing radicalization of the faculty.
Although I summarize the historical context that serves as the foundation for the
multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin, my intent is to detail and analyze the
recent efforts to suppress further expansion of radical free spaces within the
university and how such repression is predicated on the perceived subversion of
the newly entrepreneurializing university. In other words, I ask how the
multiculturalism movement can serve as a source of antagonism to new efforts to
entrepreneurialize the universities.
This chapter examines the content and context in which the
multiculturalism movement has been organized and how it has begun the process
of transformation. The multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin offers a case
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study of both the rise of the movement and the emergence of a counterattack. The
conflicts at UT-Austin will be looked at in light of the right wing counterattack
under the banner of fighting "PC" and how this counterattack is related to the
crisis of the university and the strategy of entrepreneurialization. This will allow
a re-analysis of the movement and how the struggle can be further circulated to
other sectors of the university in a way that will extenuate the crisis. Clearly, the
growing reaction to the multiculturalism movements demonstrates its great if
mostly unrealized potential to transform the university to serve the multiplicity of
desires held by those who use them but to succeed the movement must articulate
an understanding of how it complements other struggles both inside and outside
the university.
From "Ethnic Studies" to Multiculturalism
No concise, let alone comprehensive, analysis of the rise of the ethnic studies
movements in the universities in the U.S. exists.4 What we do know about the
movement is that much of the ethnic studies programs emerged from movements
such as the "Third World Student Front" at San Francisco State University
(SFSU) in the late 1960s that forced the creation of various programs and
cultural centers for Black, Chicana/o, and Asian-American students. The
W omen’s Studies movement grew mostly during the 1970s (as did
Environmental, Cultural, Marxist, and Peace Studies), motivated by the
4 1 will use "ethnic studies" to represent a broad array of struggles-women’s, Black/African-
American, Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, Latin American, Jewish, Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual, Asian-
American (of all types) and Native American—that have no sufficient word to represent them,
and probably shouldn’t. I do not mean to imply a theory of "ethnicity" by its use as if to
suggest race should be understood as ethnicity. It is only a shortcut and as such is limited. For
a detailed historical analysis of the Chicano studies movement see Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth,
Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989; for the women's studies
movement see Winifred, "Scholars and Activists: The Gender Factor in Education," ch. 6 in
On the Move: American Women in the 1970s, Boston: Twayne, 1988, p. 102-126; and for the
current queer studies movement, see Linda Garber (ed.), Tilting the Tower, NY: Routledge,
1994.
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powerful success of the ethnic studies movement in the 1960-70s and the
entrance of many radicals into the universities beginning in the late 1960s.
One characteristic that distinguishes the ethnic studies movement from
multiculturalism is an insistence on a self-proscribed free space for particular
communities of students and faculty. This ranged from an academic center,
program or degree granting program, to cultural centers or houses such as the
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor’s Ujama House which are run by students
and may range from providing employment preparation skills (such as UT's
Minority Information Center) or become a center for organizing struggle. Many
universities that created academic programs soon found that the struggle was
hardly over, as students and faculty continued battling for the university to
provide the resources to attract and keep faculty to teach the classes and the
students wanted access to them.
Because the movement has been organized around demands for free
spaces which it could control and use as it wishes autonomous from the
university as a whole, the offensive struggles that won the programs and
resources were soon turned to the defensive in order to defend them. This
transformation did not take long, since at the time of the movement’s greatest
successes such as at SFSU, capital had already begun contemplating a
disinvestment from the universities (which we'll see in chapter 5). Because these
movements were successful in carving out their own autonomous space within
the universities, they became vulnerable to the pressures of austerity and later
commercialization that used their isolation against them. Since many of the
programs remained relatively separate from the main academic programs as a
whole (there were not required classes etc.) administrations responded to their
success almost immediately by using this as a justification for taking out budget
cuts on them first. This increasingly became the case if these programs were
resistant to the pressures of market demand for research or unable to generate
large grants. While students and faculty have fought this all the way through the
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l970-80s, it did signal a reversal of strategy as a result of the use of autonomy
against them.
Perhaps the most significant distinguishing feature between ethnic studies
and multiculturalism is that the latter offers the potential for transforming the
entire university to serve the multiple needs of every student, whereas ethnic
studies sought to carve out a space of its own for the purposes of specific
groups. While many people have found this distinction to suggest
multiculturalism is integrationist or reformist, it may actually point to an entirely
different outcome. Multiculturalism has had the effect of pushing that remaining
free space out from its current boundaries to incorporate the entire campus. It
aims to transform all the university into a free space under the control of the
faculty and students for their own needs—in a way a realization of the early
ideals of the uni-versity.
The current phase of straggle has become a threat to efforts to transform
the universities into overt businesses because of the movement's ability to devise
a strategy that creates rather than reacts. Instead of just defending the existing
space of ethnic studies—if even that since many programs have already become
institutionalized and commercialized—multiculturalism is an offensive effort to
recreate the university to serve the multiplicity of needs and desires of those who
use it. And because many of these needs and desires are antagonistic to
entrepreneurialization, multiculturalism has come under heavy attack.
The Struggle for Multiculturalism at UT
The "Ethnic Studies" Movement
A nice way to examine what multiculturalism is and what it can be would be to
look at UT-Austin. UT-Austin opened in 1883 under a state constitutional
mandate that it be segregated, free of charge and not require entrance tests to its
albeit "white" students. Another university was simultaneously created to serve
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Black students.5 UT remained a segregated, white only university until 1950
when the Supreme Court ordered the administration to allow Heman Sweatt to
enroll in the law school becoming the first Black to attend classes in the law
school. However, Sweatt was given separate facilities and did not finish. It
didn't take long for those first Black students to launch an attack on racism at UT
after it began admitting Black undergraduates in 1956.
A struggle to force UT to integrate the entire campus was finally
successful in May 1964 after about five years of student organizing. However,
the regent's ruling effectively outlawed minority recruitment because it mandated
that "neither the University of Texas nor any of its component institutions shall
discriminate either in favor of or against any person on account of his or her race
creed, or color." This violated Tide VI of the Civil Rights Act that was passed a
month later and resulted in a decrease in minority enrollment during 1965-66 that
would take eleven more years of struggle to eliminate.6
In only a few years the struggle for integration would evolve into a
struggle for the establishment of ethnic studies programs. In May 1968, the new
Afro-Americans for Black Liberation (AABL) won two new programs: a course
on Afro-American culture and a lecture series on Afro-American history. In
February 1969, AABL presented eleven demands to President Norman
Hackerman. "The demands of the militant students included a Black studies
department, affirmative action in admissions and teaching staff, dismissal of the
Board of Regents, an ethnic studies center in East Austin, the removal of racist
faculty and statues, memorials for King and Malcolm X." The Mexican
American Student Organization (MASO) linked up with AABL by demanding
both Black and Chicano studies programs. While the administration was forced
5 Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: A Nonfiction Play fo r Five Stages, New York:
Norton & Co., 1974, p. 6.
6 Burr, p. 14. Thirty years later, events have come back around in full circle with the
University and federal government ironically on opposite sides. In the summer of 1996, the
Supreme Court ruled the UT-Austin School of Law's minority recruitment policy
unconstitutional putting the future of the University's entire policy into question.
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to create an ethnic studies program that was implemented in the fall of 1970,
none of AABL's other demands were acted upon, especially UT's 1964 policy
banning affirmative action, until much later. At the time there was only one Black
faculty member (hired in 1964) and 1 percent of the students were Black while
they composed 11 percent of the Texas population.7
In the fall of 1971, as a result of further demands by the Mexican-
American Youth Organization (MAYO) and AABL, the Ethnic Studies Program
grew, offering 14 courses in Mexican-American Studies and 15 in Afro-
American Studies. Chicano studies protested a temporary closing of the
Mexican-American Studies program soon after that led to its director, Americo
Paredes, resigning in protest. The students presented a list of demands to
President Stephen Spurr, including ”1) the establishment of a degree program in
both Mexican American and Afro-American Studies, 2) that the new director of
the program be appointed with the approval of Chicano students and faculty, 3)
that the university reinstate PEO and CLEO (provisional admissions programs
which had helped many minorities enter UT) and 4) that more Mexican-American
professors be hired." Between 1972-1974, the Women’s Studies program was
also started.8
In January 1975, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare,
responded to requests from MAYO and the students group The Blacks to
investigate violations of the Civil Rights Act by UT. HEW found UT in violation
on nine counts. Concurrently, members of MAYO, The Blacks, and the Radical
Student Union formed the United Students Against Racism at Texas (USARAT)
which issued 12 demands that were presented to President Lorainne Rogers.
Their demands were ”1). standardized tests be eliminated for minority
admissions, 2). more financial aid for minorities, 3). teaching assistantships
represent minority population of the state, 4). a full-time minority recruitment
7 Ibid., p. 34.
8 P. 51 and 54.
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program, 5). more Black and Chicano faculty, 6). restructuring of Ethnic
Student Services, 7). funds for minority newspapers, 8). more money for
culture centers, 9). minority grievance committee be established, 10). one Black
and one Chicano doctor at the Student Health Center, 11). departmental status
for the Mexican-American Studies and Afro-American Studies Centers, 12). a
new education building be named after Black and Chicano educators."9
To push their demands, ten students took over the president's office on
March 13, 1975 while about 1000 people were rallying on the main mall in
support of the demands. Although the occupiers abandoned the office for a
chance to speak at the regents' meeting the next day, which achieved very little at
that meeting, that summer the regents changed the wording of the 1964 non
discrimination rule so that UT complied with the Civil Rights Act. The phrase
"Either in favor or against" was changed to "against any person on account of his
race, color or sex."10
The Struggle Over "Minority Recruitment"
The ethnic studies movement hardly ended with the 1975 takeover. By the late
1980s, students had begun to expand the discussion of racism beyond just
increasing minority enrollment and faculty to a transformation of nothing less
than the entire campus. In the process, Black and Chicano students began to
articulate plans to implement multicultural reforms while expanding their existing
space through Black and Chicano newspapers, a non-discrimination clause, the
creation of the Minority Information Center and a battle over the reform of a
required English class.
The change in strategy has paralleled a fundamental reversal of advances
made in minority recruitment since the 1960-70s when student struggles forced a
significant increase. In 1950, only 75,000 Blacks attended higher education
9 p. 55; capitalization is repeated from cited text.
10 P. 55.
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institutions in the U.S., rising to 1.1 million in 1980. This rise turned into a
decline according to Manning Marable when "the number of Black students in
higher education decreased by about 10,000 between 1980 and 1987."11 The
Eighth Annual Status Report on Minorities in Higher Education released by the
American Council on Education's Office of Minority Concerns reported
significant drops in minority participation in higher education in 1990.
Participation for low-income Black high school graduates between the ages 18
and 24 (51 percent of which are from families with incomes under $18,581)
dropped from 39.8 percent in 1976 to 30.3 percent in 1988. The rate for low-
income Latinos (45 percent of those attending) dropped from 50.4 percent to
35.3 percent during the same period and low-income whites only rose slightly
from 36.8 to 38.8 percent. Rates for middle-income Latinos and Blacks fell even
further, from 52.7 percent in 1976 to 36.2 percent in 1988 for Blacks and from
53.4 percent to 46.4 percent for Latinos.12 This is matched by the small number
of degrees earned by minority students which is facilitated by low retention rates
due to little support by universities. Minority groups only earned about 11
percent of the BA degrees, 10 percent of the master's and 9 percent of all
doctorates. However, since the explosion of the multiculturalism movement in
the late 1980s as millions of students begin to fight for the diversification of their
campuses we have begun to see this turn around. According to the Department of
Education, "minority enrollment" rose by about 10 percent from 1988-90 setting
records for every group especially Black students who saw the largest gain in ten
years.13
"Minorities" also constitute a small fraction of the full-time faculty in 3300
colleges and universities (including traditionally Black institutions and
11 Anthony Shadid, "Racism on Campus: Students Fight Back,” Guardian, April 5, 1989, p.
10.
12 The Daily Texan, "Study finds dramatic drop in minority college students," January 15,
1990, p.l.
13 U, "Minority enrollment figures set record highs," March 1992, p. 6.
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community colleges—9.6 percent. According to the UCLA Higher Education
Institute, minorities only make up 3 percent of the faculty at all public, four year
institutions.14
UT's progress on increasing minority enrollment is not impressive. Chart 3.1
shows the uneven changes in "minority" enrollment.
C h a rt 3.1 Changes in M inority E nrollm ents, UT-Austin, 1982,
199115
Group___________________1982 enrollment 1991 enrollment
"American Indian" 82 136
"Black" 1,311 1,808
"Asian American" 859 3,403
"Hispanic"________________ 3,822____________________ 5.615
Total M inorities 6,151 10,962
T otal Students 48,039 49,961
Over this ten year period, only the number of what are broadly and mystifyingly
termed "Asian American" more than doubled. None of the other three either
doubled or increased to their levels of population in Texas. Even though then
President Cunningham has bragged that "UT-Austin has the largest number...of
African-Americans and Hispanic students among the 50 flagship state
universities"— ignoring the fact that UT has more students than most state
14 Manuel Justiz, "Population trends challenge national educators," On Campus, December 3,
1990, p. 2; and A. Phillips Brooks, "Diversity key recruiting factor," Austin-American
Statesman, February 27, 1992, p. A8..
^ From The University of Texas at Austin, Office of Institutional Studies, Statistical
Handbook, 1991-1992, p. 6, table S 4. There is no explanation of how "Hispanic" or "Asian
American" are defined, leaving this open to further analysis of discrepancies in representation by
the diverse types of communities that are generalized under these totalizing labels.
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universities except Ohio State making the percentages very small—it is still
inadequate. This is a clever distortion since President Cunningham's comparison
is being made to universities the UT administration likes to compare itself to
rather than to all universities. For example, in Texas alone UT-Austin has a
smaller percentage of minority enrollment than Laredo State, Pan American, UT-
E1 Paso, UT-San Antonio, and Prairie View A&M, not to mention many junior
and community colleges. Although 25 percent of high school graduates are
Mexican-American, they are only 12 percent of first year students at senior
colleges and 60 percent of all college students attend institutions in EL Paso or
the Valley. In fact, not only are the increases in enrollment of Blacks,
"Hispanics", and Native Americans low but the number of students from these
groups at UT-Austin is far below their percentage of the state's population.
"Based on the 1990 Census figures, 37.2 percent of the state's 16.9 million
population is Black or Hispanic. UT-Austin's enrollment is 14.9 percent Black
or Hispanic." In addition, Black enrollment has declined from 1,866 in 1989 to
1,746 in the Spring of 1992, 11 more than spring 1991. Much of this had to do
with the fact that new Black student enrollment was only 358 in 1991, the
second lowest total since 1982.16
The other side of enrollment is retention of minority students at UT.
Twenty percent of Black and Latino students leave after their first year compared
to 16.6 percent of "whites" and 11.9 percent of Asian-Americans. The overall
average in 1990 was 15.2 percent. Within five years, about half of both Black
and "Hispanic" freshman left UT, while about 33 percent of both "whites" and
Asian-Americans leave. Only 35.9 percent of Black and 41.9 percent of Latino
students graduate within five years compared to 53.6 percent for all students.17
^ Brooks, p. A8; and Cheryl Fields, "Hard-dmes budgets for universiues in Southern Texas
perpetuate historic discriminadon, Hispanics charge. The Chronicle o f Higher Education, March
2, 1988, p. A18.
17 A. Phillips Brooks, "Despite progress, minorides sdll find a rough road at UT,” Austin
American Statesman, February 27, 1992, p. A 8; and Office of Insdtutional Studies, p. 29,
Table S 24 (2).
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The administration often reiterates claims that it has extensive services
available to the recruitment and retention of minority students. A look at the fact
shows this not to be the case. In 1991-92, it only spent $11 million of its $666.1
million budget on related programs—less than 2 percent of the total budget. A
list published by Vice President of Student Affairs claims that UT funds 137
different programs to serve this purpose. However, a 1989 Students Association
study found that 46 of these were non-existent. The types of services included in
the list demonstrates UT’s dedication to minority recruitment and retention:
seventeen of the programs list "all students" not just minorities as its target
group; eight liberal arts programs had the same contact person and four of those
are listed separately but are actually the same program; one listed as "Film
Series" only uses money for Spanish-speaking films for an RTF class which in
fall 1990 enrolled students had to pay an additional fee; and a letter to minority
parents and a roundtable luncheon are listed as recruitment and retention
programs.18 "Minority" scholarship programs amount to only $4.5 million
annually, "roughly 6 percent of the University's $66 million financial aid total.
Each year, roughly 1,600 incoming students apply for the 450 new awards."
These programs only serve Black and Hispanic students since UT does not
consider Asian-Americans as minorities.19
The breakdown of the distribution of financial aid is also indicative of
UT's emphasis on minority recruitment and retention. "In 1988, 6.6 percent of
the total financial aid of $95,655,759 went to Blacks, 15.3 percent went to
Hispanics, 6.5 percent went to Asians, and 71.2 percent went to whites." In
addition, only 25 of 2,340 graduate fellowships are reserved for minorities.20
18 Candice Driver, "Minority story evokes anger: Student leaders blame UT for 'sugarcoating'
issues," The Daily Texan, June 29, 1990, p. 1; and Eric Dixon, Shuronda Robinson and Wayne
Marshall, "Affirmative action critics distort facts," The Daily Texan, September 10, 1991, p.
4.
19 Tini Tran, "Why the furor over minority scholarships?," Tejas, May 1992, p. 7.
20 Dixon, Robinson and Marshall; and Brooks, p. A8.
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It is also interesting to note where the emphasis is being placed on
minority recruitment and retention. The Equal Opportunity in Engineering (EOE)
program, created in 1970, has grown from a recruitment service to retention and
scholarship programs run with four full time staff members. In 1990, EOE spent
$150,345 on minority scholarships in engineering alone. This demonstrates that
minority recruitment follows the process of capital investment in education.
While disinvestment is taking place in areas such as liberal arts, ethnic studies
and minority recruitment and retention as a whole, investment is flowing to
selective minority recruitment in areas such as engineering where there is more
control over the student population. However, even in engineering there is little
concern for retention, since only 11 percent of EOE's funds went to retention
while 47 percent of its funds went to financial awards and 22 percent went to
recruitment.21
With much of this information in hand, Dixon, Robinson and Marshall
conclude that "there is no substantive affirmative action program here. A true
affirmative action program attempts to fill the void left in history by getting
minorities in the door and assuring that they do not encounter racial or sexual
discrimination while they are there— thus ensuring that opportunities of mobility
are unhampered. All other cross-racial and cross-sexual barriers such as
qualifications and performance still exist."22
The same conditions that exist for minority students is repeated for
minority faculty at UT. While UT claims the number of minority faculty
increased by 47 percent in the last decade, the actual real numbers are far less
impressive considering that, whether for students or faculty, if the study starts
with low numbers, the high percentages are meaningless.
21 Robert Tindol, "Retention programs bolster success," On Campus, February 18, 1991, p. 3.
22 Dixon, the SA attorney general, Robinson, director of the Minority Information Center, and
Marshall, President of the Cabinet of College Councils, wrote this editorial as a thorough
critique of the Young Conservative of Texas' claim that affirmative action is widespread and
allows "unqualified" minorities to take spots at UT from "whites" and "Asians".
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Chart 3.2 Changes in Minority Faculty, UT-Austin, 1982-83 and
1991-92 (UT-Austin, Office o f Institutional Studies Statistical Handbook 1991-92, p. 94).
Group 1982-83 1991-1992
"American Indian' 4 8
"Black" 32 52
"Asian American" 51 97
"Hispanic"_____ 60 82
TOTAL 2 ,1 8 8 2 ,3 4 1
Of the 2,341 full faculty (including lecturers and instructors) in 1991-92, only
3.5 percent are Latino, 2.2 percent are Black, 4.1 percent are Asian-American,
0.3 percent are Native American, and 89.8 percent are "white". It is also broken
down into 73.8 percent male and 26.2 percent female. Yet, these are increases of
Black faculty from 1.6 to 2.2 percent and of Hispanic faculty from 2.7 to 3.5
percent for example—hardly that great an increase. The gender split on tenured
faculty inched its way up from 1,707 men and 508 women in 1986 of 2,215
faculty to 1,727 men and 614 women of 2,341 faculty in 1990-91.23
There are several factors to take into account when looking at these
numbers. In 1987, when there were 28 Black and 56 "Hispanic" faculty, only 20
and 35 of them were tenured. While the number increased from 55 to 101
tenured minority faculty, minorities were still only 5.5 percent of tenured or
tenure-track faculty. While the actual number of all ranks of Black and
"Hispanic" faculty has increased due to pressures of students demanding the
diversification of the campus, the number achieving tenure has not showing this
increase to be temporary at best. From 1983-91, the number of tenured Black
faculty only increased .4 percent and the number of "Hispanic" faculty by .9
percent. Statewide, for example, "Hispanic" faculty make up less than 4 percent
23 Douglas Holt, "Texas lacking Hispanic professors," The San Antonio Light, May 17, 1991.
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of the state's 13,120 full time faculty, few of whom are tenured. The
administration also plays loose with whom they classify as a "minority," leaving
one student activist skeptical of the administrations claims to success. Then
Students' Association President Eric Dixon uncovered that of the 16 "new
minority faculty [hired in 1991], at least two of the new Black faculty members
on the list are not Americans at all, but foreigners..." and questioned how the
administration defined "Hispanic" albeit with a touch of xenophobia. And even
though the number is increasing there is still a high turnover. "They're bragging
that it’s doubling, but last year [1990] alone during the racial incidents they lost
six Black faculty," explained Dixon.24
Even the funding created to increase minority faculty is not being fully
used. While then President Cunningham set up a fund of $400,000 a year to hire
minority faculty not hired through regular department budgets, only $250,000
was spent per year. But this strategy is liable to the possible marginalization of
minority faculty recruitment by separating the process from the departments,
making it the president's and not their responsibility. For example, if department
recruitment committees perceive it to be the responsibility of the President’s
office to recruit qualified minority as faculty, they will overlook this
responsibility. In addition to other factors such as the lack of support for
minority scholars, this has indirectly contributed to the rejection of some desired
minority who have applied for faculty positions and the departure of those
already here.25 This is apparent in the administration's above responses to the
multiculturalism movements demand for increased minority faculty that such
24 Brooks, p. A8; Adam Hersh, "Minority faculty numbers rising: Further steps remain in
dispute," The Daily Texan, September 3, 1991, p. 1; and Deborah Shoop, "Minority faculty
percent doubled from '83 to ’91," The Daily Texan, April 27, 1992, p. 5.
25 UT-Austin has a national reputation for not only being a site of overt racism but also a poor
record of hiring and supporting minority faculty. For example, since the late 1980s a number of
not only minority but also progressive faculty have left UT-Austin for other campuses in part
for better financial offers but also the repressive political climate. Professors Wahneema
Lubiano and Velma Garcia left promising positions in the English and Government
departments for these reasons.
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efforts have met success. As a result, a conflicting message emanates from the
top levels of the administration that sets up a fund to hire minority faculty that
goes partially unused while offering misleading statistics to demonstrate their
success.
Behind this recruitment strategy lies the assumption that departments can
eventually hire "enough" minority faculty with the aid of special funding. Such
logic relies on the unexplicit use of quotas (such as claims that one, two or three
minority faculty are "enough" for each department) and the generalization of
"minorities" as interchangeable commodities whose presence grants a department
particular credibility. As a result, departments that have successfully diversified
their faculty with what is arbitrarily considered "enough" minorities are punished
in order direct funds to favor those that haven't.
In rare cases, a department successfully diversifies its faculty with
politically outspoken "minorities" who seek to transform the department
curriculum or even the university. This was certainly the case with the backlash
against the English Department documented in this chapter. Minority recruitment
brought in many radical scholars whose proposal for departmental level
multicultural curricular reform and support for UT-wide multicultural reforms
was met with defeat and the splitting up of the English department into two
divisions.
This analysis of the logic of minority faculty recruitment at UT-Austin
does not seem so far fetched when one examines the details of the right wing
backlash against the multiculturalism movement documented later in this chapter.
Without the benefit of an opinion poll, one can speculate that one of the reasons
for the eventual faculty vote against the proposed reforms and the widespread
ambivalence among students to the issue of racial discrimination was the
common misperception that since an effort to recruit minority faculty existed it
was enough and perhaps dangerously too much. Supplied with percentages
instead of real numbers and locked out from the behind closed doors meetings of
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faculty recruitment and hiring committees, many people came to perceive of these
efforts as sufficient.26
No doubt many faculty have worked diligently and sometimes
successfully to recruit more minority faculty on local departmental and college
levels. Facing great odds, it is their efforts with occasional student support that
has result in success. Despite affirmative action programs, without these faculty
and student efforts to push for more minority recruitment, possibly nothing
would have been accomplished. Although the number of minority faculty
recruited to UT-Austin during this period seems small to supporters, they are
increases nonetheless, increases that can only be attributed to their struggles. To
opponents and stubborn administrators, these increases have been accomplished
too rapidly and even too dangerously. The danger lies in allowing student and
faculty pressure to alter rigid institutional master plans that often result in the
hiring of new scholars not only sympathetic to these movements but by
introducing even more students to a diversity of perspectives. Armed with this
new knowledge, more and more students begin questioning the organization of
not only the university but society. In the process we discover that every bit of
ground given in compromise to demands for change are used to make even more
demands. Rather than solving the crisis, such compromises can feed the fires of
rebellion.
It is not surprising that much, of the struggle for multiculturalism, as for
ethnic studies before it, has focused on minority student and faculty recruitment
and retention. In fact, minority recuiting policies are now being challenged in the
26 This is apparent from a reading of articles, editorials and letters to the editor of The Daily
Texan, The Austin-American Statesman, and observations of rallies in support of these reforms
which dwindled to non-existence even as the proposals faced fraudulent balloting and eventual
defeat.
I would like to reiterate how I conducted my analysis of "textual" sources. Because it is
difficult to impute intention to someone’s writings, it is important to test the validity of my
interpretation against their actions which are either observed firsthand or documented in one or
more journalistic accounts, written memos, letters and reports garnered by Open Record
Requests. Following the old adage: "actions speak louder than words," I flowcharted a person's
actions until the repetition of their actions indicated a close fit with their written comments.
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US Supreme Court resulting the temporary dismatling of policies in California
and in 1996 at UT-Austin. While these demands frequently are posed in terms of
numbers for the purpose of increasing access to positions within the power
structure, it frequently has opposite and even antagonistic outcomes. At many of
the protests I attended and student newspapers and pamphlets I read (such as in
The Griot and Tejas newspapers and the PRID E, ONDA and Q U EERS
programs discussed in this chapter), increased minority recruitment and an
expansion of access were not always demanded with the intention of climbing
the socio-economic ladder. Rather, these demands were made with the foresight
of providing access to resources at UT for others who would otherwise be
excluded because of what was called "institutional racism." By expanding access
these students can contribute to the further transformation of the university into
something that can serve not only their own diverse needs but those of a wide
diversity of local and global communities. This is demonstrated by the ethnic
studies movement's ability to open access to other minorities, many of whom did
not intend to train themselves to work but spent a lot of their time studying their
own histories, cultures and power and utilized this information to make further
changes from affirmative action to divestment from apartheid.
Minority recruitment is part of the uncontrollable process of the crisis:
minority recruitment means letting in a never-ending flow of students and faculty
who will continue to make demands for change. University of Califrnia at
Berkley sociologist Troy Duster has deconstructed counterattacks against
minority recruitment that are made with charges that minority students are
segregationists by suggesting that these counterattackers fear less possible
segregation than "the challenges that the growing numbers of Asian, Latino, and
African-American students pose to the faculty once they find their ancestors'
histories and contributions largely ignored in the classroom."27
27 Troy Duster, "Understanding self-segregation on the campus," The Chronicle o f Higher
Education, September 25, 1991, p. B1-B2.
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While students have been winning battles over recruitment and retention,
some forces within the university have been resistant out of fear that letting in
more minorities will not be the end of the organized challenges. The increases in
recruitment that have occurred can only be attributed to the students and faculty
that have fought all along for it. But this struggle has gone much deeper than just
playing a numbers game. It has never been separated from struggles against
racism, sexism and homophobia and demands for the transformation of the entire
education system.
Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism at UT
During the late 1980s, while UT was under heavy criticism for its poor
"minority" recruitment and retention record, renewed attacks on racism, sexism
and homophobia were being made by students. Through financial support from
the Students Association (SA), the Minority Information Center (MIC) was
opened in 1989 to serve the retention needs of Black and Chicana/o students.
During the movement that would ensure in 1990, MIC became a fundamental
resource for organizing. SURE Walk (Students United for Rape Elimination),
also created by the SA in the mid 1980s, evolved for a while into a force for
fighting sexism on campus as University NOW had been for some years,
especially incidents of sexual assault that were reported in 1990 to have occurred
at fraternity parties. University Lesbians successfully won an inclusion of sexual
preference to UT's non-discrimination clause in 1990. This group's efforts were
rooted in years of organizing by Gay and Lesbian students to come out of the
closet, fight Gay-bashing, sponsor SA funded events and their Friday happy
hours that offered a weekly free space. Disabled students have also been on the
move. In 1989, ABLE (All Bodies Learning Equally) protested their lack of
access to the shuttle buses by being carried on and off a couple buses during the
height of campus traffic. They quickly won when UT was forced to not renew
the contract with Laidlaw and chose Capital Metro that had lifts. ABLE has
continued fighting for ramps and access to classroom and buildings.
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Anti-Racism
In the midst of these resurging struggles, UT attempted to devise a racial
harassment policy. The six month long Ad Hoc Committee on Racial
Harassment, chaired by then UT Law School Dean and current Provost Mark
Yudof, offered a recommendation in 1989 which was later adopted as university
policy. The nine member committee had only one Black student member. Rather
than addressing institutionalized racism at UT such as its poor minority
recruitment and retentions, statues of Confederate Civil War politicians on the
South Mall, toxic pollution of and expansion into Blackland, South African
investments or "hate crimes" on campus or by students, faculty and staff, the
committee and its resulting recommendation leaned toward heavy punishments
for verbal harassment. In effect, because it focused on punishing individual
actions—effectively censoring—such as what people can say, it faced heavy
opposition from students such as the BSA (Black Student Alliance) who
otherwise would have supported a harassment policy.28 Ironically, the policy
turns student challenges against racism into a means for pitting student against
student by redirecting the focus to the students themselves while ignoring the
organization of the university. The advocacy of a harassment policy was
originally guided by an attempt to restore in loco parentis under the terms of
students needs by students themselves. Unfortunately, like many other
universities have done, the committee transformed it into a source of university
control over even more of students' lives and a tool for dividing students based
28 Dane Schiller, "BSA unhappy with harassment policy," The Daily Texan, December 4,
1989, p. 5. Also, Schiller, "Harassment task force proposes racial policy," The Daily Texan,
November 29, 1989, p. 1-2, outlines the main facets of the recommendation. Based on a
definition of racial harassment a s " extreme or outrageous acts or communications that are
intended to harass, intimidate, or humiliate a student or students on account of race, color or
national origin that reasonably cause them to suffer severe emotional distress," the policy is
clearly aimed at individual actions. In order to handle complaints, a Race Relations Counselor
was created in the Office of the Dean of Students which devises the punishments.
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upon the false assumption that minority students want censorship of others
activities.29
While heated debate was taking place over the recommendations in Spring
1990, racial and sexual violence within more fraternities triggered an offensive
by the movement On April 12, 1990, more than 1000 students marched through
campus, to downtown and to a fraternity house to protest two acts of fraternity
racism that occurred within a three day period. On April 9, a car used by Delta
Tau Delta fraternity during the Round Up parade was found outside its house
smashed up and sprayed with two racist insults. The march was organized after
Phi Gamma Delta (the "Fiji's") fraternity was found selling t-shirts with a
"sambo" caricature face on basketball player Michael Jordan’s body. The
fraternity used the caricature in the past as its official mascot, "Fiji Island
Man."30
29 James Szablewicz and Annette Gibbs, "Colleges’ Increasing Exposure to Liability: The New
In Loco Parentis," Journal o f Law and Education, Vol. 16, No. 4, Fall 1987 is an interesting
discussion of the return of in loco parentis due to harassment, rape, anti-discrimination, and
other policies as well as university responsibility for protection from rape and other crime.
They recognize that "What distinguished the in loco parentis of the 1980s is that it is limited to
protection of student safety. Missing is the complementary power of colleges to police and
control students' morals...” This represents a growing power of students: "...the student-college
relationship may not be so one-sided in favor of the college afterall. When students rejected
college supervision and protection, the courts responded. And now when students ask for
protection, but not supervision, the courts are responding again. Thus students may be able to
shape the student-college relationship through the judicial system." (p. 465)
But what they do not recognize is the disdnction from in loco parentis that was crushed by
student resistance that began as early as the 1950s, is that today these policies are being dictated
and imposed upon the universities by students themselves to serve their own needs. In
response, the universities are desperately attempting to use them in ways antagonistic to their
original intent, such as UT has done with the harassment issue. However, a fundamental
limitation of these demands is that they give responsibility to he university rather than students
empowering themselves to take control. This is the case, for example, with resistance to sexual
harassment: "By according too little value to student-run efforts and too much to university
resources, these feminists [fighting sexual harassment] have obtained narrow reforms at the cost
of extending university control over students lives-empowering the institution, not women.”
(L.A. Kaufman, How Political is the Personal," The Nation, March 26, 1988, p. 419-20).
30 In 1989, three Phi Gamma Delta were arrested after along with three other men assaulted a
Latino family resting in a van outside a Congress Avenue bank building where there were
janitors. Matthew Canton, "TU [Todos Unidos] angered by assault,” The Daily Texan,
November 21, 1990, p. 5.
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On Friday, April 13, President Cunningham was met by about 1000
angry students as he attempted to make a press statement about the week's events
on the West Mall. Unannounced to but a few faculty and students who
Cunningham invited as his entourage and the press, the students listened for a
few minutes until it was clear he was not addressing popular complaints and then
surrounded him. After a few minutes, Cunningham nervously retreated to the
main mall where he began to give a statement to the press. However, the
students soon followed and chased him into the tower. After a short rally at the
main entrance, BSA President Marcus Brown opposed any further action and
broke up the protest suggesting more organizing meetings that never
materialized.
Outrage against President Cunningham's press conference reverberated
for a couple more weeks. He had invited two Black basketball players and
minority faculty, including professor and current chair of the sociology
department John Butler, to stand behind him while he made his speech. While
some of the faculty were hounded by students for standing at his side, the
athletes began to realized they had been used and mislead. Assuming they had
been invited by Cunningham to speak, "Panama" Myers, one of the players,
soon realized that "an illusion was created by my standing behind Cunningham
that I agreed with what he said...I felt used."31 On May 2, about 100 student
athletes, including the two misled to stand by Cunningham, marched through
campus to a rally of more than 750 students on the West Mall. Many athletes also
formed the Student Athlete Coalition to break down the division between
students and athletes and endorsed BSA's PRIDE.
PRIDE and ONDA
31 Quoted in Shaun Jordan (a UT swim team member), letter, "Tokenism on podium," The
Daily Texan, April 20, 1990, p. 4.
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The following week after the racist fraternity actions, a coalition of about 15
Black student groups presented six demands to the university, four of which deal
specifically with the incidents. The most significant demand was the immediate
adoption of PRIDE (Proposed Reforms to Institute Diversity in Education)
which had been in the works for a few years and parts of which had already been
presented in the past. PRIDE is composed of six proposals from which I
summarize:
1. The African and Afro-American Studies Center should have
independent hiring and firing of faculty and staff, have a separate budget for
student sponsored projects that does not reduce the center’s budget, and the
director should be chosen by faculty, students and scholars familiar with the
center.
2. Curriculum Diversity should be implemented at each state institution by
requiring each student to complete three hours (one course) in African or
African-American history to graduate and the creation of a center or department
of African and African-American studies.
3. Curriculum Diversity at UT would be implemented at UT with the 3
hour requirement that would also include cross-listed courses.
4. Faculty: double the Dedicated New Minority Faculty Position Fund and
retain prominent faculty, sponsor racial awareness seminars for faculty, allow
students to challenge "scholastic racism" without academic penalty, and hire
more tenured and tenure-track Black faculty.
5. Establish an African-American Student Cultural Center with a $50,000
budget and university space for the facilities.
6. Specifically, the College of Liberal Arts should hire faculty to teach
diverse courses on the impact of slavery, increase the percentage of African and
African-American faculty in each department, and allow English 314L (African-
American Literature) to be a substitute for English 3 16K and hire an African-
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American faculty member to teach the course, replacing former Assistant
Professor Wahneema Lubiano.32
After a seven month delay by the administration in responding to PRIDE,
the administration outlined its position in a report presented to BSA on
November 2, 1990. These responses were not only questionable in their
sincerity and the amount of time it took to generate them, but also an attempt to
decentralize authority over each proposal to diffuse the efforts of the movement.
The administration's reasoning in responding to each part of PRIDE were
problematic:
I. Independent authority over faculty for the Center were denied claiming
that "no campus unit has 'independent authority' to appoint and dismiss faculty
and staff." This is questionable however. Do not the Institute for Advanced
Technology or Center for Electromechanics have control over which faculty and
staff will work for them because they are engaged in research potentially
profitable to UT? Are not faculty appointed to endowed chairs and granted tenure
by a vote of their department (with final approval by the President) thus giving
the department nearly "independent authority" to appoint and dismiss? An
independent budget for student organized activities was also denied with the
suggestion that to do so would not fulfill the center’s mission as an
"interdisciplinary academic studies unit." It also lists about a dozen general
university programs (the libraries, Dean of Students, and the President's Office
for example) that sponsor Black cultural programs. None are shown to provide
money for student run programs (except the Student Union, and even it requires
"adult" supervision) however. Control over the selection of the director was
denied. The response reiterated the structure of the selection process that includes
the Dean of Liberal Arts selection of a committee of any eight faculty and five
students who recommendation are subject to veto by the dean and president. The
32 This comes from "PRIDE Update is presented to students by administration," On Campus,
November 5, 1990, p. 1,4, and 6. The administrations' responses to PRIDE that follows also
appears here.
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executive officers of the administration denied responsibility for the entire
proposal by directing it to Liberal Arts Dean Standish Meacham.
2. The administration also denied responsibility for the curriculum
diversity proposal for all state universities by directing it to the state legislature. It
claimed that "it would be inappropriate for the University administration to
comment prior to consideration by that body."
3. The administration responded to the multiculturalism requirement for
UT students by suggesting that it be presented to the Faculty Senate's committee
on multicultural education that was formed on September 10, 1990 and the
University Council’s Committee on Multicultural Education that was formed on
September 17, 1990. Clearly, whether or not it was orchestrated to create these
committees during the seven month delay, the administration used the initiatives
of the faculty senate and university council to dismiss its own responsibility. The
report also suggests presenting the proposal to "relevant departmental faculties
and college curriculum committees". The illusion of decentralized responsibility
(a similar strategy used to impose austerity) appears as an administration concern
for diverse interests. In effect, it disperses the energy and focus of the movement
in many directions in order to refract the concentration on the administration that
developed in the Spring of 1990. It was also suggested that Dean Meacham be
addressed about cross listing courses.
4. The administration offered to increase the $400,000 annual fund to hire
more minority faculty if it was able to locate enough candidates since "relatively
few Black students are continuing their academic studies to complete the doctoral
degree." Such a claim is rooted in the administration's narrow classification of
"qualified" minority faculty. The university refuses to consider hiring faculty
who have received their degrees from or have taught at historically Black
universities and other universities that are not considered as "first class." As a
result, the administration's narrowing of the field significantly reduces the
available faculty to choose from, most of whom are already courted by many
other universities that do the same. In 1989, two Black faculty candidates in
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Anthropology and one Chicana in English were not hired.33 Of the 12 offers to
Black faculty candidates in fall 1990, only five accepted. Of course, the issue is
not to be narrowly construed as these candidates being refused employment due
to race alone but in combination with other factors such as their politics. The
recruit most likely to be hired is one most suitable to those making the actual
hiring decision up the administrative ladder. Often those few hired tend to leave
soon after their arrival because of many reasons, including the lack of support
and continuing racism. Six Black faculty members left'UT following after the
events of spring 1990 alone.
The administration also created racial awareness workshops for some
faculty and newly admitted freshman during summer orientation in the summer
before it made a formal response. One of the seminars conducted for faculty and
administrators is run by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B’rith, a
group that fights discrimination against Jews. The choice of the ADL is
questionable, since it assumes that Jews are a race and also because the issue of
anti-semitism, although prevalent and related, was not an issue of the thousands
protesting and organizing against racism. No Jewish student organizations were
even involved. The implementation of these workshops "conveniently excludes
the very groups who originally submitted detailed proposals for the
multiculturalism awareness initiative," according to a statement of 12 faculty and
student groups.34 PRIDEs concern about "scholastic racism" were dismissed
with a vague concern for "academic freedom" and "free speech" with the
suggestion that these issues be raised before the new committees, deans and
faculty groups.
33 "Minority Faculty Hiring/Retention and Its Connection to Student Retention: What is at
Stake?," June 1989, flyer. Although no author is credited it was handed out at an event
organized by the Black Student Alliance.
34 Chris Barton, "Multiculturalism to be taught by outsiders," The Daily Texan, July 27,
1990, p. 1.
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5. The request for a student center was denied because of the claim that it
would lead to "resegregation". Behind this assumption is not only a racist
distinction between demands for Black autonomy as "segregationist" and "white"
segregation as "separate but equal." The administration's refusal to provide
money for student organized activities and a student center demonstrates a fear of
providing resources to students who would once against use them to further
expand their struggles, as happened with the "ethnic" studies movement of the
1960-70s and continues today with multiculturalism.
6. The proposal for curricular reform in liberal arts was also reflected to
departmental faculty and course and curriculum committee of the college.
While the administration attempted to delegate responsibility for
implementing these proposals in an apparent attempt to dissipate and diffuse the
movement the struggle had the momentum and was able to circulate the struggle
throughout the university. That summer, students began to expose UT's
connections to Freeport and Gay and Lesbian students fought for inclusion in the
discrimination policy. PRIDE also received support from Chicana/o students
who devised their own multiculturalism plan, the University Lesbians and Asian-
American students. Four new progressive faculty groups (Chicano Faculty
Caucus, Black Faculty Caucus, Progressive Faculty Caucus and FACT: Fight
Racism (the Faculty Ad-hoc Committee to Fight Racism)) were also organized
not only to support PRIDE but to get faculty organized for some later battles in
the English department and to stop the Gulf War.
Todos Unidos (TU), a coalition of Chicana/o organizations and
individuals formed in 1990 and later proclaimed their support for PRIDE in
April. TU members formulated a complementary proposal to PRIDE called
Orientaciones Nuevas para la Diversificacion de la Academia (New Direction for
the Diversification o f Academia or ONDA) and began to organize around its
implementation. There are 10 parts to ONDA that focus around student and
faculty recruitment and retention, the Center for Mexican American Studies
(CMAS), and curriculum reform.
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ONDA has the following 10 chapters and five appendixes from which I
summarize:
1. Social Problems—Suggests that UT identify racism, sexism and
heterosexism as social problems, conduct research on them, document "hate
crimes" that occur on campus, and identify these problems in the Strategic Plan,
1992-1997. Mechanisms should also be put in place to hear and investigate
complaints of discrimination.
2. Admissions—Admissions criteria should be reformed. ONDA suggests
norming each ethnic/racial group and selecting the highest scorers if GPA and
tests scores are not replaced with unbiased criterion. Also, recruitment should be
conducted with geographic criteria and culture-based reference tests. A minority
affairs position is also suggested for the office of admissions to aid students at all
class levels.
3. Recruitment—UT should expand recruitment of Chicana/os in junior
colleges and in areas with high Chicana/o concentrations. Also one minority
graduate student should be included on each department's graduate admission's
committee, minority outreach centers created on people of color communities,
assist public school students to attend college, and increase minority involvement
in summer orientation.
4. Retention—UT should create a centralized retention program for all
students and faculty. Additional new programs are suggested such as a
comprehensive tutoring program for minority and low-income students using
graduate students as tutors, increasing minority graduate fellowship funding
from $350,000 to $1 million offering multi-year packages, reduce competition
for the provisional admissions program and provide tutoring and counseling
support, reopen the English Department Writing Lab, increase minority mental
health counselors and increase cost free visits.
5. Faculty and Staff—A Vice-President for Minority Affairs should be
created. Faculty and administrators should be actively recruited at Chicana/o
scholars conferences. Also, two Latina/o law faculty should be hired who teach
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immigration law and test case courses and faculty multicultural sensitivity
workshops should be required.
6. Curriculum—Every college should be required to offer at least one
course on Chicana/os, except Liberal Arts which must offer one per department.
Emphasis should be given to the Chicana and at least four courses a year offered
on Latinos. A master plan should be developed to integrate multiculturalism into
the curriculum by implementing it at the institutional rather than departmental
level. The American History and Texas Government course requirements must
be reevaluated to include a multicultural content. Students should be required to
take a multicultural course within the US and world contexts. Also Government
and History 314 classes should be expanded to each semester and English 314L
(Introduction to Chicano Literature) should be substitutable for English 316K.
7. University Publications—The Minority Advisory Group of TSP should
be upgraded to an standing committee; funding should be increased for Tejas and
Griot; and more distribution boxes should be made available for alternative
publications.
8. Financial Aid—The Office of Student Financial Aid should expand its
hours at the start of the semester, eliminate the GPA requirement, provide
alternative sources of aid for students on academic probation and create a
scholarship database.
9. Center for Mexican American Studies—CMAS should receive a new
facility that is accessible to the disabled and has more space. Funding should be
increased for a student run Chicana/o cultural center and other student programs.
10. Fraternities and Sororities—A policy and means to investigate sexism,
racism and heterosexism by members of the Greek system should be established
under the VP for Minority Affairs. Mandatory multicultural awareness programs
should also be established.
ONDA also includes further expands on these programs in the following
five appendixes:
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1. The Excel Tutoring Program—The program would serve low income
undergraduates by hiring low income graduate students as the tutors, matching
up minority and female students and tutors.
2. Equal Opportunity Program (EOP) & Young Scholars Program
(YSP)—EOP would admit and mentor minority and/or economically
disadvantaged applicants who are not admitted. YSP would mentor sophomores
from "high risk" urban or rural high schools and guide them to admission to
college.
3. New Administrative Structure—Established VP for Minority Affairs
and details responsibility over multicultural reforms, recruitment and retention
programs, Excel, EOP, YSP, and investigate and report racial, sexual and
homophobic harassment and violence.
4. The Faculty Development Plan—Five additional faculty positions
should be established on a two year trial basis for each in which funding will be
shared by the department and administration. Three of the positions will be filled
by Chicana faculty and the search and selection committee will be composed of
three members of the Chicano Faculty Caucus (CFC), two members of the
department and one graduate or undergraduate student appointed by the CFC
chair. One visiting Chicana/o faculty position should be funded along with two
Chicana/o Faculty Fellowships and six additional Latina/o graduate students as
research assistants to support Latina/o faculty.
5. CMAS—An Advisory Committee of four faculty members, two
undergraduates, two graduate students, and director should be created to define
its goals and objectives, plan the curriculum and participate in hiring. Among the
changes suggested are: create an annual orientation program, write an annual
report, provide access to resources by Chicana/o students, expand the number of
offered courses, offer and activist oriented course, fund faculty and student
research, create a student advisor position, fund student attendance for
conferences, create a Chicana/Latina Studies Unit, offer a post-doctorate in
Chicana Studies, begin a working paper series, expand TA and RA positions and
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establish fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students who combine
community activism and scholarship.35
Although ONDA was presented to the administration in April 1990, they
did not receive a response until early December 1990 just as the semester was
ending. The responses to both ONDA and PRIDE were coordinated by Lewis
Wright, assistant vice president for administration. Not surprisingly, the
responses are almost identical in their strategy of decentralizing responsibility for
the proposals or touting current administrative programs. According to one
Todos Unidos member, eight of the nine pages are spent "advertising" the
current programs while using the last page to answer the proposals. For
example, the vice president for minority affairs was rejected and the curriculum
proposal was delegated to the University Council Committee on Multicultural
Education as was PRIDE?6
The movement for multiculturalism is made complex by its two
fundamental aspects: expanding enrollment and faculty recruitment and totally
revamping the way we learn and what we learn to include a multicultural, even
international, perspective. At UT, both PRIDE and ONDA place their emphasis
on a massive increase of the recruitment of students and faculty and institutional
support so that they continue to graduation. They have answered the attack on
accessible enrollment with demands for not only increased enrollment but
resources to support them, thereby confronting the issue of income used against
students with austerity. The most important resource demanded is the hiring of
many Black and Chicana/o faculty in every department not only in their own
specialized departments.
These demands had the unintentional affect of undermining the very
purpose of enrollment management: weeding out students the university doesn't
want. UT administrators were simultaneously faced with polar opposite
35 Todos Unidos, Orientationes Nuevas para la Diversification de la Academia, 1990.
36 Matthew Canton, "Todos Unidos faults administration for slow response," The Daily Texan,
December 10, 1990, p. 1.
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pressures: top-down legislative mandates to reduce enrollment and bottom-up
student and faculty pressures to open up enrollment for specific groups of
students. Over time, this movement threatened to grow on the strength of
participation from students who gained entrance and studied with the new faculty
hired as a result of the movement and continued the straggle. I summize that this
is why the administration took so long to respond to these proposals while
attempting to cover up its own overt fraudulent inaction concerning campus
racism and in the end needed a right wing backlash to slow down the
movements. More worrisome is when students begin to link up with faculty,
which is common in the multiculturalism movement. As the role of faculty as
mediators for the administration and implemented of restructuring—as in the
case of the promotions of two Black faculty to administrative positions: George
Wright to Vice President and John Butler to Sociology Department Chair and
endowed professor—are attacked by students, control over the faculty becomes
even more tenuous. The formation of the autonomous Black and Chicana/o
Faculty Caucuses since late Spring 1990, later joined by the formation of the
Progressive Faculty Group and the American Association of University
Professors, is evidence that when challenged faculty are capable of coordinating
their straggles with students rather than serving as mediators between students
and the administration.
The Struggle Widens
Neither the delays nor the denial of administrative responsibility stopped the
movements even if they have derailed them temporarily. In fact, PRIDE triggered
the circulation of the multiculturalism movement throughout the university. The
Indian Progressive Action Group endorsed PRIDE, proposing a multicultural
requirement that includes coverage of contributions by Blacks, Asian-Americans,
Latina/os and Native Americans as well as intensified faculty and student
recruitment. The Native American Student Association was formed as a support
group and to expand the number of courses on Native Americans. The
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University Lesbians and the Gay and Lesbian Student Association also publicly
supported PRIDE and efforts have even been made to establish a Gay Studies.
The Korean Language Promotion Committee is attempting to establish a Korean
language program in the Department of Oriental and African Languages. A group
of students and faculty is attempting establish a degree granting Peace and
Conflict Studies program and submitted a draft of a proposal to the Dean of
Liberal Arts in 1994. Even during the Gulf War, the anti-war movement included
the adoption of PRIDE and ONDA in its list of demands to end military and
corporate oriented research and funding among other things.37
That summer, the University Lesbians won the inclusion of Gay and
Lesbian students to the university's anti-discrimination policy. In January, the
law school had been requested by the Association of American Law Schools to
add sexual orientation to its list of prohibited forms of discrimination as do all its
member schools. When Dean Yudof petitioned President Cunningham for
advice, University Lesbians sprang into action with demonstrations, blocking
traffic on Guadalupe street with a street festival and a march on the ROTC
building to protest its discriminatory policies. In all, 37 campus groups endorsed
the petition for inclusion in the policy. This time it took only a few months for
the clause to be approved which it was in August. In 1985, President
Cunningham "lost" and essentially vetoed a similar proposal.38
Soon after the victory, a coalition of five groups—GLSA, UL, Law
Graduate Students for Gay and Lesbian Concerns, University NOW and
University ACT-UP organized events during the first two weeks of classes in
fall 1990 to present their plan QUEERS: Queers United in Envisioning an
37 Heather Wayment, "Native Americans adjust to UT life: Underrepresented minority fights to
learn strange customs, culture," Die Daily Texan., December 10, 1990, p. 6; David Miller,
"GLSA supports BSA plan," letter, The Daily Texan, May 2, 1990, p. 4; and Indian
Progressive Action Group, "Indian Group supports PRIDE," letter, The Daily Texan, April 24,
1990, p. 4.
38 Candice Driver, "Cunningham’s inaction echoes ’85 reply to anti-bias plan,” The Daily
Texan, July 23, 190, p. 1.
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Egalitarian Restructuring o f Society. QUEERS demands that UT acknowledge
domestic partner status for Gay/Lesbian students and employees, including
access to married student housing, health insurance and other benefits; sexual
orientation policy apply to all off campus organizations that use UT facilities;
create a Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies and recruit Gay and Lesbian faculty;
fund sensitivity workshops for dorm residents and RAs; establish a multicultural
panel to advise the Student Health Center; and adopt PRIDE and ONDA.39
Even though the new sexual orientation policy has many problems, it was
only the beginning to further expanding the movement. However, while UT is
now prevented from discriminating, outside organizations and corporations that
use UT facilities such as ROTC, are only "encouraged" to adopt the policy. This
is unlike the University of Califomia-Los Angeles which has a mandatory anti-
discrimination policy. It also only "refers to access to facilities, programs and
services. It does not mention harassment," Jessica Selinkoff of Austin ACT-UP
points out. As a result, Gay and Lesbians are unable to come out about their
sexual preference to outsiders on campus without a threat of discrimination.40
For three straight years, the Coalition for a Diversified Law School has
participated in a nationwide law student strike to protest the composition of the
law faculty, students and course content. By 1990, the faculty was composed of
50 "white males" (84.7 percent of the total), 6 white females (10.2 percent), 2
African-American males (3.4 percent), one Asian-American male (1.7 percent)
and no Hispanics (0 percent). During the first National Law Student Strike in
1989, students at 38 law schools boycotted classes and rallied. In Berkeley, 90
percent of the students struck and 43 were arrested when they occupied the
admissions office. At UT, 25 percent of the students boycotted classes and about
a third showed up for a rally in 1989.
39 Dinica Quesada, "QUEERS plans programs on gay, lesbian concerns," The Daily Texan,
August 28, 1990, p. A6.
40 Matthew Canton, "Students air concerns at meeting," The Daily Texan, date unknown;
Deanna Roy, "For UT homosexuals, the fight against discrimination continues," The Daily
Texan, October 18, 1990, p. 1.
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The Coalition's demands in 1990 included four areas:
1. Recruitment and Rentention—disclosure of faculty hiring criteria and
methods to students, increase student participation in hiring process and allow
students on appointments committee to publish a report for students, and
increase the number of first year classes taught by minority and female faculty.
2. Recruitment and Retention of Diverse Law Student Body—makeup
should reflect state demographics, and increase annual minority orientation
program.
3. Changes in Placement Office—Recruiters must be prohibited from
discriminating based on sexual orientation.
4. Suggestions—Create at least three endowed chairs for Mexican-
Americans, African-Americans, and Women, create a fellowship for minority
and female students planning to teach, recruit minority and women faculty to
teach at UT, and hire more minority and female adjunct professors immediately.
In 1991, the Coalition, which includes 11 law student groups and a
Graduate Student "Support the Boycott" Committee, stopped boycotting classes
after participation declined in 1990 and turned the protest into a party to celebrate
since the law school was forced to give into their demands. In 1990-91, the law
school hired four women, one of them Latina, increasing the total number of
women faculty to nine of 60. Only a month before, a group of law students
created The Texas Journal o f Women and the Law to "focus on legal, social and
political issues affecting women." The journal is not strictly focused on academic
legal issues but will include first person accounts and papers delivered at
symposiums.41 At the same time, UT was being sued by "white" applicants for
41 Coalition for a Diversified Law School, "Protest the Lack of Diversity at the UT Law
School; Support the Boycott of Classes at the UT Law School," April 1990, flyer, Madhawi
Kuckreja, "Law school students take affirmative action," Guardian, April 19, 1989, p. 5;
Michael Margolis, "200 attend rally at UT law school; Turnout low compared with ’89,” The
Daily Texan, April 6, 1990, p.l; Aaron DaMommio, "Diversity rally takes lighter vein," April
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charges of "discrimination" in their efforts to enter the law school. In 1996, they
were eventually successful in having the US Supreme Court strike down its
minority recruitment policies.
Fightingfor Institutionalization at the University Council
In the midst of these diverse struggles being fought around multiculturalism,
PRIDE and ONDA were transformed into a recommendation by the University
Council Committee on Multicultural Education which was chaired by journalism
professor Wayne Danielson. After nearly a year of deliberation, the final
proposal was made in the fall of 1991 and passed the University Council in
October. The recommendation called for the approval of a 3 hour multicultural
requirement beginning with fall 1992 and increased to 6 hours by fall 1996.
Before 1996, the student may chose between a U.S. or international
multiculturalism course. In 1996, this would change to one of each. Foreign
language courses that are not primarily grammar oriented can be used to fulfill
the requirement. The main thrust of the recommendation comes with a
suggestion that currently existing multicultural courses be allowed to count as
credit: "The Committee encourages each college and department to seek ways
that the multicultural requirement can overlap with other course work required
for graduation, thus allowing as much flexibility as possible in planning their
schedules."42
However, when twenty two faculty members wrote letters of protest to
the University Council in October, the proposal was required to be approved by
vote of the entire faculty instead of going directly to the board of regents for
approval. After letters of opposition from 17 faculty members were received, the
non-curricular recommendations (minority student and faculty recruitment,
5, 1991, p. 1; and Fabienne Labourey, "Students create law journal for women,” The Daily
Texan, March 20, 1991, p. 6..
42 Paul Kelly, "University Council approves multicultural proposals," On Campus, October
28, 1991, p. 2-3, italics mine. This is die minutes of the debate during the UC meeting.
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cohort registration, sensitivity workshops for faculty and staff and a student run
cultural center) were also brought to a vote of the General Faculty (that is, all the
faculty) after they were approved by the University Council. At its only meeting
of the year in October 1991, the General Faculty did not achieve a quorum and
was unable to vote. Although, all the non-curricular changes were approved by
the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Multicultural Education and the University
Council, the recommendation was sent back again to the University Council.
After a mistake on the Council's faculty list in January, about 432 faculty
members (two-thirds of whom were assistant professors and lecturers) were
unable to vote by mail on the multiculturalism requirement and were asked to
come to University Council Secretary Paul Kelly’s office to vote in person,
which only 63 (15 percent) did. Of 2,077 faculty, 1,193 (57 percent) voted on
the proposal: 434 (36 percent) voted for the proposal and 759 (64 percent) voted
against it. Of the 432 who did not receive mail ballots, 30 (48 percent) voted for
it and 33 (52 percent) voted against the proposal.43 Because the margin of defeat
is smaller than the number of those who did not vote in person, the vote has
come under heavy fire as illegitimate.
Opposition to the plan was clearly organized by a small group of self
described ideologically conservative faculty, most associated with the National
Association of Scholars (NAS) through the Texas Association of Scholars
(TAS), and entrepreneurial engineering and science faculty. Although many
struggles are organized by mainly a small group over a long period of time, this
group differs from most activist groups since it had access to alumni and high
ranking administrative officials in another effort to block the E306 reforms that
we'll see next. This small group of senior faculty were able to dislodge and
block a desire for reform demanded by thousands of students in marches and
protests and thousands more who voluntarily sign up for multicultural courses.
In fact, a University financed survey of UT students conducted in March 1991
43 Jeff Rhoads, "UT faculty rejects multiculturalism proposal," March 3, 1992, p. 1.
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by a graduate journalism class found that 57 percent of all 432 students surveyed
by phone said UT should require a multiculturalism course.44
Student and faculty opponents however attempted to recast the required
course as a burden to students in an attempt to utilize popular anger against rigid
course requirements that leave no space for a student to take classes in other
areas of interest. While all students have little room for taking diverse courses,
such a strategy was aimed especially at appealing to engineering students who
have almost no allowance or time to take outside courses. Lyle Clark, one of
seven engineering professor who filed letters of protest, used this strategy:
"Engineers don’t have many electives anyway. If you require six hours of
multicultural courses, you're taking away the right to take music, art and some of
these other things." This was echoed by engineering professor Dale Klein 45
Engineering Dean Herbert Woodson, who is integral to the entrepreneurialization
of UT, based his opposition to the course on the claim that it may "cease being a
writing course."46
What is clever about this strategy is the very faculty that are imposing the
rigid and overworked schedules on engineering students are the ones suggesting
that diversifying their coursework would take away what little extra time they
already allow them. The very faculty who are denying students free time in the
structuring of their degree program opposed multiculturalism under the guise that
it would do what exactly that: deny them free time. Opposition also came from
other elite faculty such as Steven Weinberg, a physics professor who helped
bring the later aborted Superconducting Supercollider to Texas. Weinberg and
computer science professor Robert S. Boyer, stressed a lack of time and
44 Erica Shaffer, "UT survey shows students support multiculturalism," The Daily Texan,
September 5, 1991, p. 6.
45Brian Anderson, "Faculty concerned about multicultural proposal," The Daily Texan,
December 4, 1991, p. 5.
46 Katherine Mangan, "University of Texas' Postponement of Controversial Writing Course
Kindles Debate Over Role of Outsiders in Academic Policy," The Chronicle o f Higher
Education, February 20, 1991, p. A18.
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suggested requiring the "masterworks of literature" such as Greek tragedies.
Classics professor Karl Galinsky also touted the virtues of "Western culture" and
suggested more time to study the matter by sending the proposal to the Faculty
Senate's Committee on the Undergraduate Experience or the Educational Policy
Committee—the latter of which he is a member.47
This attempt to justify their opposition based on multiculturalism reducing
space for electives took place even though the UC recommendation specifically
calls for overlapping course requirements so that even the already required
foreign language courses can count doubly. Paul Woodruff, professor of
philosophy, even opposed an amendment that would allow the humanities
requirement to be fulfilled by humanities courses with multicultural content.
Woodruff "believed that the multiculturalism courses should be courses taken in
addition to not as a part of, the present requirements."48 Because students can
already fulfill more than one requirement with a single course, multiculturalism
may have had little or no impact on courseload size. Thus, there must be another
explanation for opposition to the recommendation. Opponents wanted to make it
appear to increase the amount of required schoolwork to generate opposition.49
When it was clear that this may not be the case, some like Woodruff attempted to
make sure that it would. Although the reasons for its defeat are unclear, the
opposition's strategy appeared orchestrated around an attempt to turn
multiculturalism into more work in order to strip it of both its support and its
potential antagonism to the function of the university to teach us to work. This in
47 Kelly, p. 2-3 and Robert S. Boyer, "Western ideas transcultural," The Daily Texan,
December 4, 1991, p.4; and Karl Galinsky, "Committee's report flawed," The Daily Texan,
November 7, 1991, p.4. Galinsky is a member of NAS.
48 Ibid.,, p. 3, italics mine. It is surprising that Woodruff was chair of the faculty Senate's
Committee on Multicultural Education.
49 This was the strategy even weeks after the UC had approved the overlapping. For example,
Daniel Bonevac, chairman of philosophy and TAS member, was still arguing that "if students
do not combine requirements, time will be added to already overburdened programs." Holly
Wayment, "Multicultural requirements hit new snag," The Daily Texan, November 14, 1991,
p. 1.
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mind, it is hardly surprising that the most opposition came from engineering and
the sciences since these disciplines are fundamental to re-imposition of control
over the universities.
Even though the proposal was temporarily defeated, it has done nothing to
slow the implementation of multicultural reform. Classes are still being organized
and taught by students and faculty such as E376 by Elizabeth Femea, professor
of English, tided "Multicultural Approaches to Literary Studies." Two Plan II
students created a conference course tided "Views of World Cultures" that offers
a series of lectures by UT professors. Students are also still fighting to increase
minority faculty hiring in department such as sociology where the Sociology
Graduate Student Group (SG^) did a survey of what graduate courses have been
unavailable and which of these as well as others graduate students would prefer
to take. Multicultural topics ranked among the top five. All the colleges except
Engineering and Natural Science have established committees to evaluate
multicultural reforms or have attempted to do so. The College of Communication
held a faculty seminar to brainstorm on introducing multiculturalism into teaching
and research, the School of Social Work has a committee that evaluates if
courses are culturally diverse, the College of Business Administration attempted
to require a three hour degree requirement in either a foreign language or
international studies but was rejected by the University Council, the College of
Fine Arts has been creating multicultural courses for several years in areas of
ethno-musicology and non-Westem music, and the College of Education has
established a committee as well.50 According to a guide by the Office of the
Dean of Students, there were 33 multicultural courses in 1991, although six dealt
with societies outside the U.S.51 While these efforts may have accomplished
little of the comprehensive demands made by students, it is impossible to charge
that nothing is changing.
50 Jenny Huang, "Schools' multicultural plans vary," The Daily Texan, June 13, 1990, p. 5.
51 Office of the Dean of Students, A Multicultural University Resource Guide, 1991, p. 5.
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The movement has forced the administration to deal with student demands
and has resulted not only with these decentralized efforts but also expanded
minority recruitment of students and faculty, new retention programs by the
Dean of Students Office, awareness seminars for the administration, and the
Faculty Senate and UC’s approval of most of the important proposals included in
PRIDE. Even without formal admission, the uprising has resulted in a
tremendous victory in forcing an increase in the hiring of minority faculty.
Between 1989 and fall 1991, the number of minority faculty was increased:
women increased from 559 to 614, Blacks from 40 to 52, and "Hispanics" from
70 to 82 while "Asians" only increased from 96 to 97 and Native Americans
remained at 8. In all, while the total faculty increased from 2,273 to 2,341, the
number of minority and women faculty increased by 72.52 While this is hardly
the spectacular 45 percent increase the administration would have us believe—it
is actually only .85 percent between 1989-91 when women are included—it
would not have happened even at this level without the spring 1990 uprising and
all the other facets of the multiculturalism movement that have complemented it.
The uprising gave strength to the many decentralized departmental struggles for
minority faculty recruitment and multicultural reform.
Paradoxically, the administrations' diffusing of responsibility for
multiculturalism has backfired against it since many departments, colleges and
students have continued to quietly but powerfully transform the university
without interference from a centralized power. Decentralization has resulted in
some defeats, which I will discuss regarding E306, but it has also enabled
students and faculty to maintain their own distinct needs in transforming their
programs, something that would be difficult if something like the ONDA's VP
for Minority Affairs (which would oversee all the changes) were created.
52 Holly Wayment, "Official: Number of minority faculty at University has increased," The
Daily Texan, November 12, 1991, p. 6.
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The Counterattack Against Multiculturalism at UT-Austin
Along with the defeat of the UC recommendations, opposition also arose over an
attempt to reform English 306 and Tejas newspaper. The opposition developed
as the result of organizing by the Texas Association of Scholars (TAS), Students
Advocating Valid Education (SAVE), the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT)
and a coalition of national backers that began in 1990 following the spring
uprising and victories that began to follow with the sexual orientation clause, the
attack on the UT-Freeport McMoRan connection, and the law school strike
victories.
E306: A Lot of Hype About Basic English
The Lower Division English Policy Committee (LDEPC), chaired by professor
Linda Brodkey, was appointed to reorganize E306 in time for fall 1990. Because
ATs were given inadequate instructions on how to organize the course and
leeway in selecting texts and developing the syllabus, many ATs had already
begun diversifying the content of their E306 courses on their own.53 LDEPC
was only an attempt to begin institutionalizing what was already being done. The
committee added two new features to the course which was renamed "Writing
About Difference": readings from Supreme Court decisions about civil rights and
Racism and Sexism, written by Paula Rothenberg, as a main textbook.54 After
internal opposition arose from three English professors over the Rothenberg
book, its assignment for the class was canceled on June 26, 1990 and parts of it
selected for the reading packet. Only a small part of the book was originally
intended to be used in the course.
The internal opposition came from professors Alan Gribben, James
Duban and John Ruszkiewicz, all of whom were members of the policy
53 Margot Fitzgerald, "Students, AIs deserve changes in £306," The Daily Texan, August 8,
1990, p. 4 and Susan Dauer, "E3Q6 opponents should leam how to support arguments," The
Daily Texan, October 4,1990, p. 4. Fitzgerald and Dauer as well as the 19 other cosigners of
Dauerts editorial are English AIs.
54 Paula Rothenberg, Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, NY, 1988.
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committee. Shortly after the Rothenberg book was dropped, Duban and
Ruszkiewicz both resigned from the committee on July 18. Only three days later,
President Cunningham and Gerhard Fonken, executive vice president and
provost, met with Liberal Arts Dean Standish Meacham to discuss the course.
On Monday, July 23, Dean Meacham announced that the course changes would
be postponed a year.
Although President Cunningham has claimed that "the dean [Meacham]
made the decision" there is evidence that the decision was made from the highest
levels of the administration. President Cunningham's response to a letter
received from a Dallas woman concerned about the course on July 9 bears this
out. Cunningham responded in a July 11 letter that "After careful consideration,
the Department has decided that the course will not be modified this fall." This
decision to postpone the course was supposedly not made for almost another two
weeks. Although Cunningham has defended the letter by suggesting that it
should have included the words "with the Racism and Sexism textbook" added
to the end of the sentence, the letter from the Dallas woman never mentions the
•
textbook. With this in mind, English professor Kurt Heinzelman may have been
correct in concluding that Cunningham and Fonken were responsible for
postponing the course. According the Heinzelman, "Before the weekend [July
20], Meacham and Kruppa were ready to start the course, and after the meetings
with Fonken and Cunningham, Meacham reversed his position."55 Soon after,
Meacham announced he would not continue as dean and was replaced by his
predecessor, Robert King.
LDEPC kept working after the postponement and devised a new syllabus
that still utilized Supreme Court decisions on civil rights cases and parts of the
Rothenberg book. However, although the committee reviewed a 46 to 11 vote of
confidence from departmental faculty and a proposal to create a oversight
55 Christopher Anderson, "E306 questions go unanswered: Cunningham dodges inquiries,” The
Daily Texan, September 18, 1990, p. 1. The letter was uncovered by the Polemicist.
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committee was defeated 30 to 27, the committee resigned in early February 1991
when a second syllabus was also rejected.
Cunningham was not the only one who had received a letter concerning
the course. Anne Blakeney, a Dallas resident and member of the UT Liberal Arts
Foundation Council (many of whom donate about $1000 a year to the College of
Liberal Arts) wrote Gribben after reading his editorial in the Dallas Morning
News. As one internal opponent to the E306 changes, Gribbens response to
Blakeney on July 9 indicates a sense of defeat by a powerful multiculturalism
movement that could not be stopped without top level administrative
intervention—that would come only 12 days later. Gribben suggested to
Blakeney that:
♦The English department should be placed in receivership indefinitely, with
someone like Donald Foss (chairman of the Psychology department) as its
director for several years; and then be governed by a new English chairman
appointed directly by Gerhard Fonken, executive vice president and provost; and
♦During this period of receivership the department faculty should be divided into
a Department of critical Theory and Cultural Studies and a Department of
Literature and Language. This division of the radical theorists from the remaining
traditional scholars would give the latter the freedom to offer a true literature and
writing program. Or
♦Barring the accomplishment of these steps, the two University-wide required
English courses (E306, E316K) should be abolished, thus ending the necessity
of hiring additional English professors at the rate they have been recruited from
the most radicalized (but prestigious) graduate programs across the nation.
Most vital of all will be a comprehending College of Liberal Arts dean with nerve
and a determination to oversee the recruiting policies and decisions of the English
department, which has lost all sense of tradition, direction, civility and academic
freedom in the classroom.56
While there is an irrational level of paranoia and conspiratorial planning in this
letter, too many people failed to take what it says seriously. Although it has not
56 Gribben's letter was printed in entirety by The Daily Texan, August 6, 1990, p. 4.
Professor Donald Foss has denied knowing or ever meeting Gribben. Soon after this letter was
published, Gribben resigned to take a position at Auburn University.
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been placed in "receivership" the English Department's nearly twenty year old
Executive Committee governance structure was soon after abolished by interim
dean Robert King who returned as a "comprehending" dean to the college as
Gribben had hoped. Although Fonken did not appoint a new English Department
chair, he was apparently involved only twelve days latter in reversing the
LDEPC decision on E306. The abolition of the executive committee by King
fulfilled much of Gribben's plan to divide the department into two departments in
order to isolate the "radicals" because only senior (and most likely more
conservative) faculty are members of the budget council whereas all faculty can
vote in the executive committee. In May 1992, President Cunningham
announced a plan to follow through on Gribben’s plan to split the department by
creating a division of rhetoric and composition.57
Gribben's fear of the snowballing success of the multiculturalism
movement was quite explicit. The "most disturbing trend I have observed here in
the past 10 years," he wrote Blakeney, "would be the selective recruitment of the
new faculty members with an expectation that they will bring with them an
ideologized sense of advocacy—radical feminism, Marxist analysis, militant
'ethnic' studies—to influence students inside and outside the classroom."58
(italics in original)
Gribben's letter and the intervention of the administration and other
outsiders were reactions to the continuing successes of the movement. One
possible explanation for the failure to generate support outside the department
until after it was delayed may be that proponents of the reforms neglected to
emphasize the strength of the movement and instead focused on the supposed
57 This was suggested in the report of the Committee on Undergraduate Education chaired by
sociology professor Frank Bean, which was the third committee appointed by President
Cunningham to examine undergraduate education. Since the recommendations of the Erst two
were ignored it seems Bean's committee figured out that it needed to say what Cunningham
already planned to do. (Kevin Williamson, "English department could be redesigned,” The Daily
Texan, June 10, 1992, p. I.]
58 Gribben's letter, italics in original.
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power of opponents and the administration. Simply, the struggle was not
circulated sufficiently to others fighting the same battles elsewhere in the
university. 0
This was especially true in the case of students. The terms of debate over
E306 were about whether or not it was scholarly or was about writing but rarely
whether it was what students wanted. While both sides were busy debating
whether the course was ideological "brainwashing" or writing, students only
entered into the discussions as presumably passive and susceptible to
manipulation. This underlying assumption is paradoxical considering that it was
students who initially demanded and protested for multicultural reforms. In the
end, just as E306 was taken out of the hands of the English faculty,
multiculturalism was taken out of the hands of students who created and
demanded it. This is still the case with the movement at large whose discourse
about itself remains at the level of the struggle over theory rather than the
struggle over the way we live or even the university itself.59
The Hatchet Man
Could it be coincidental that Robert King was selected to replace Dean Meacham
so soon after Gribben's letter calls out for what would soon be done not only to
the English department but other programs as well? Gribben and King have
crossed paths at least once before. In 1985, when King kicked students off the
59 This is the case in many of the pieces I have already cited but especially Linda Brodkey and
John Slatin, "New E306 keeps commitment to writing," The Daily Texan, September 4, 1990,
p. 4 which accepts the terms of debate over whether it is a writing course; Brodkey and Shelli
Fowler, "Political Suspects," Village Voice, April 23, 1991, p. 3-4; and various other
editorials by faculty, AIs and the Polemicist that so rarely even mention anything about
students-who are required to take the course. Only professor Robert Solomon of philosophy is
keen enough to recognize that "UT students seem remarkably immune to indoctrination,
especially in required courses. If anything, they develop an immunity...toward the subject
matter forced upon them." ("Recruiting diverse faculty requires long-term commitment," The
Daily Texan, June 5, 1990, p. 4. This inadequacy of discussion about the movement can be
further seen later in the chapter during discussions about the nature of the movement itself and
the counterattack.
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Freshman English Policy Committee, Gribben was "disappointed" and opposed
to the students taking out an ad in the Daily Texan to publicize the action.60
Almost immediately, King moved to abolish the executive committee and
impose a budget council over the expressed consent of the faculty due to a claim
that the department had become "dysfunctional", the only reason permitted by the
UT Handbook o f Operating Procedures for changing a department’s governance
structure. According to professor Kurt Heinzelman, such a claim was grounded
on the misperception of a crisis and antagonism perpetuated by professors Duban
and Gribben. For example, Gribben claims that he was driven out of the
department and UT because he lost a vote of 41 to 1 to create an MA in what he
calls "Third World Studies." The vote was made by the Graduate Studies
Committee—which Gribben chaired—and he was even allowed to vote even
though it is prohibited by the rules for the chair to vote. Duban has also cited
"factionalism" as justification for praising King's threat to change the governance
structure, a move Duban never brought up publicly before the department
faculty.61 In fact, no evidence of the department becoming "dysfunctional" was
ever presented.62
On February 22, 1991, the English department voted 80 to 1 to retain the
ten member elected executive committee (which has five full, three associate, and
two assistant professors). On June 26, King notified Kruppa that he is "inclined
not to approve a continuation of the Executive Council mode of governance as
the Department has proposed" and instead suggests its replacement with a budget
60 Kevin McHargue, "Recomposition: Confusion reigns in the world according to Gribben,"
The Daily Texan, July 20, 1990, p. 4.
61 Kurt Heinzelman, "Cries of factionalism in English Dept, come from sore losers," The
Daily Texan, July 30, 1991, p. 4.
62 A July 24, 1991 letter from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to
Dean King, suggested that "Absent compelling reasons for not providing...approval, such as
evidence that a department has become dysfunctional in its operations, generally accepted
principles of collegial government would call upon the administration to respect the decision of
members of the department to continue the mode of governance under which they have been
operating." (in Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, "On the Attack: Bob King opposes autonomy,
collegiality in Liberal Arts," Polemicist, September 1991, p. 3).
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council consisting of "all and only the Full Professors in the Department." On
July 9, the faculty once again vote 34 to 11 to reaffirm their support of an
executive committee. King never responded directly to this resolution nor to a
proposal by Kruppa to set up an outside committee to study the governance
question until the Executive Committee’s term expired in February.63
Rather than moving against disfunctionalism, King actions indicate a
pattern by which he acted to undermine a governance structure that significantly
increased recruitment of minority faculty, initiated E306 and began to transform
the rest of the curriculum. According to Heinzelman, who resigned in September
as chairman of the English Department recruitment committee, a memo from
King asserts that "our recruitment practices have long troubled him." "During
our two years without King, the English Department hired women and minorities
with unparalleled success, and the first action King takes when he is back in
office is to suspend the departmental agency that made those appointments."
Coincidentally, the change to a budget council also excludes many of these new
hires since there are only three female and two minority full professors in the
department. Soon after the governance change chairman Joseph Kruppa was
informed that only four of nine available faculty positions could be filled due to
budget cuts. King had suspended hiring once in 1989 noting his discomfort with
the increased recruitment of faculty with "non-traditional approaches to literary
interpretations" according to a memo to then department chair Bill Sutherland.64
King continued to disrupt other academic programs for a few more years
until his retirement as dean. When he replaced Meacham in June 1991, he
refused to honor an agreement made between Meacham and sociology professor
Susan Marshall to head the Women's Studies program. Marshall had been
offered certain support provisions including a small pay raise, a larger budget to
63 Scott Hanson and Mary McGlynn, "The facts tone down the English Department 'soap
opera"'. The Daily Texan, October 29, 1991, p. 5
64 Francine Bosco, "Dean King’s ’threat’ cited in resignation,” The Daily Texan, September 9,
1991, p. 1-2; and Hanson and McGlynn.
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hire its own staff, time off for the summer and a reduced course load to carry out
administrative duties. When King refused to allow these provisions, Marshall
refused and King offered the position to other members of the Women's Studies
Steering Committee who turned him down. One of those candidates, Carol
Mckay, an English professor, said she was offered the position "while Marshall
thought she was still negotiating with Dean King." A few months later Marshall
accepted the job without a reduced course load and a promise to maintain the
same low level of support (e.g. not to cut the budget).65
King's relationship to the program reflects a deeper conflict between the
administration and the Women's Studies program. Women’s Studies is neither a
department or a required course for any of the UT curriculum. English professor
Jane Marcus (who left the university in 1990) notes that "There is a 10- to 15-
year gap in funding Women's Studies at UT compared to other comparable
universities." Even though six Women's Studies faculty finally received Regents
approval for the "Proposal for a Special Concentration in Women's Studies" in
1987 after years of struggle, students must take 21 hours of cross-listed courses
to qualify for the concentration—while most minors in other fields only require
about 12 hours—and write a thesis. When they complete this, they'll receive a
handmade certificate and their concentration will not show up on their diploma.
UT's refusal to adequately fund the program is quite explicit. According to
Catherine Cantieri, "Women's Studies' funding for printing information and an
occasional lecture comes from the LAIP's [Liberal Arts Interdisciplinary
Program] $74,308 share of the more than-$600 million UT budget. And that
$74,308 is shared with African-American Studies, Mexican-American Studies,
and European Studies. The money allocated for Women's Studies is so small
that Marcus takes $3,000 out of her salary each year and donates it to the
program."66
65 Shai Tsur, "Compromise sees new head of women’s studies program," The Daily Texan,
July 25, 1991, p. 1.
66 Catherine Cantieri, "We’ve still got a long way to go,” Utmost, Winter, 1990, p. 8-9.
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Marcus reasons that "It appears that the opposition [to Women's Studies]
comes from above." "Under Dean King, [1980-1989] Women’s Studies was
built by volunteer faculty members who had no time off or extra pay for building
the program. The only thing we got in return [for the volunteer efforts] from the
university was occasionally money for speakers, but no women's center...or
meeting place...[which would] make the program comparable to [other studies at
the University]," says Marcus. Even though 800-1000 students register for
Women's Studies cross-listed courses each semester, the program ranks far
behind the University of Alabama, for example, which has a center and official
program. When Marcus took it into her own hands to generate outside financial
support for Women’s Studies by speaking at a house of a UT alumna with prior
permission from King, and raised thousands of dollars, she felt the weight of
opposition. According to Catherine Cantieri, "when she took the checks to King,
[according to Marcus] 'he was furious and refused to allow any more fund
raising’ because such efforts were 'earmarked for other projects...that were
considered more important.'"67
King's handling of the selection of the new Humanities head was almost
identical. King would not recognize Meacham's offer of a small pay raise and a
reduced course load to Michael Stoff to head the program. Although King gave
Stoff until July 15 to accept his offer, on July 10, King notified Stoff by letter
that he had already offered the position to Norman Farmer of English. Farmer is
a close ally of King’s, having written a letter of support for a budget council to
King just before his appointment. Farmer was also one of only seven English
faculty to sign the TAS "Statement of Academic Concern" opposing E306
reforms and has publicly warned of the "politicization" of the English
department.68
67 Ibid., p. 8-9.
68 Henson and Philpott, p. 16.
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The situation concerning the replacement of Ian Manners as Director of the
Middle Eastern Studies Center has also been tainted by Dean King. Although
Meacham appointed Elizabeth Femea as director, King rejected the decision and
instead chose a geographer, Bob Holz, as the new director. While Femea is a
respected M ddle Eastern scholar and has served as the center’s undergraduate
advisor and on its executive committee, Holz has almost completely inadequate
experience. Holz speaks no Middle Eastern languages and his primary area of
research does not concern the Mddle East. He has never served on the executive
committee and has only minor involvement with the center. Although he has
used his satellite mapping technology for research in the M ddle East, his
research interests do not appear equivalent to Femea's. Other reason's for
King's rejection of Femea may have to do with her outspoken support of the
E306 revisions and her membership on a committee to formulate multicultural
curriculum proposals for the College of Liberal Arts appointed by Meacham and
participation in the publishing of two books on the subject.69
As Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, King demonstrated the extremities
of the backlash against not only multicultural reform proposals but institutional
academic programs and established academics aligned with the multiculturalism
movement. Although the attack on the E306 reforms utilized various explicit and
subtle methods to defeat its implementation, King stood out in his use of swift
repression.
Tejas: the (Un)Free Press
Soon after it published a scathing cover article—"Rattle of a Very Curious
Dean"—in its May 1990 issue on psychology professor and TAS president Joe
Horn, indicating his race based theories of intelligence and calling for him to
resign as associate dean of Liberal Arts, the Chicana/o student newspaper Tejas
came under heavy fire from SAVE (which was formed by members of the
69 Henson and Philpott, p. 16.
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YCTs) in 1990. Horn, the faculty advisor to the University Review (formerly the
Texas Review), a self-described conservative newspaper funded by the Institute
for Educational Affairs (which we'll discuss more late in the chapter) has also
been a faculty mentor of SAVE and spoke at their first meeting in April 1990 and
other meetings of the YCTs. SAVE was formed by members of the YCTs and
College Republicans and its first president and vice president was Geoff Henley
(Daily Texan editor 1992-93) and Scott Gaille of YCT.70
SAVE began their counterattack by writing a letter to the vice provost
charging that Tejas violated state appropriations code that prohibited state
agencies from using state money to bring attention to state employees or
officials, in this case Horn. Although Patricia Ohlendorf, associate vice president
in the office of the provost, disagreed, she cited Tejas in violation of a "UT rule
banning publications the University funds, but does not control." This is
certainly no exaggeration, since UT tightly controls each of the media entities it
funds through oversight by Texas Student Publications, reyas is produced by a
journalism class and is funded through the Center for Mexican American
Studies. Dean Robert Jeffrey of the College of Communications, endorsed
Ohlendorf s ruling to cut off Tejas' CMAS handing, claiming that "without this
policy, any professor on campus with a political interest could gather students,
offer them an independent course, and produce a newspaper expressing his
political views. Obviously we can't have 100 papers like that on campus without
70 Some YCT members attempted to register for the Tejas production class but failed when it
caused an overload and delayed registration. (Henson and Philpott, "Tejas: The Attack on
Diverse Press," Polemicist, September 1990, p. 5, cite an August 1, 1990 article regarding this
failed attempt to take over the class). The YCTs have collected information and infiltrated other
groups in the past and continue to do so. According to a YCT agenda, they have an
"intelligence" branch of the organization, "YCTs equivalent to the CIA...Intelligence members
monitor other campus groups and professors by attending meetings and classes and infiltrating
groups." (Christopher Anderson, "'Infiltrating' meetings part of YCT agenda," The Daily
Texan, October 5, 1990, p. 1.)
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any University control.”'11 (emphasis added) Jeffrey is evidently aware of the
lands of reporting that can and has been done without administrative oversight.
After Ohlendorf and Jeffrey banned Tejas a barrage of national media
attention on the action and support from students, faculty and Texas Senators
forced them to back off. Jeffrey allowed Tejas to publish but with only enough
money to print copies for each student in the class and journalism faculty—
although with newsprint the cost is nearly identical since much of the expense is
in set-up. Jeffrey believed that the only value in the project was in its production
not its distribution. A few months later Tejas had been able to generate enough
outside financial support to continue publishing regularly and distribute campus-
wide.
Tejas has continued to report on a wide range of issues concerning
Chicana/os and other students at UT, including stories concerning racism at The
Daily Texan, the disproportionate funding of higher education in South Texas
and UT's minority recruitment policies. It has been joined by a number of other
alternative student papers that have developed over the last four years. While the
Griot, a Black student paper, was already in existence, Tejas, the Polemicist,
The Women's Alternative Times (no longer publishing) all began in the late
1980s. There have also been other publications formed since then or published
on a sporadic basis by graduate students, environmental organizations,
architecture students, and even classes. Many of these publications have devoted
considerable critical attention to UT and have provided information about UT's
entrepreneurial and other activity that students cannot find elsewhere. Some like
Tejas receive funds from the university and most don't. Clearly, Tejas' frontal
attack on one of the primary faculty member of the counterattack on
multiculturalism figured significantly in a failed attempt to eliminate it. This
71 Candice Driver, "UT policy halts funding for Tejas'", The Daily Texan, June 7, 1990, p.l,
italics mine.
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counterattack on Tejas, unlike most of the rest of the alternative student press,
was possible only because it received UT money.
Planning a Nationwide Counter-Movement
The counterattack on the multiculturalism requirement, E306 reforms, and Tejas
newspapers at UT-Austin are not isolated local occurrences but only a node in a
larger well-financed campaign to stop the multicultural transformation of US
based universities. Many of the organizations at UT-Austin that have acted to
block these reforms—the University Review, Young Conservatives of Texas
(YCT), Students Advocating Valid Education (SAVE), and the Texas
Association of Scholars (TAS)—are part of a network of corporate-backed
organizations that have figured in the "PC" media blitz that has translated in some
places such as UT to material counterattacks against the gains of the student
movements. It is no coincidence that many of the financial backers of these
organizations also hold significant interests in the entrepreneurialization of the
universities and have come under siege for their support of Central American
Death squads and contribution to toxic pollution and environmental destruction.
The connection between opponents to multiculturalism at UT and these
national organizations are explicit. College of Liberal Arts Dean Robert King, at
a lecture given in September 1991, elucidated his concern for a rising insurgency
on campus by utilizing the code phrases of the movement's opponents. He noted
that the threat to free speech, "the pressure to conform, to not even mention
certain topics, is coming down from the professors and students and not from
outside the University."72 By claiming that such pressure is "coming down,"
King reverses the source of the real power to suppress "free speech" from the
higher levels of the administration and rich supporters who control the university
72 Jenny Lin, "Political correctness assailed by UT dean," The Daily Texan, September 23,
1991, p. 1.
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to that of a movement that seeks to open spaces in the universities for those who
have been prevented from speaking there.
King's lecture was sponsored not only by the College of Liberal Arts and
the Philosophy department (which was chaired by TAS member Daniel
Bonevac), but SAVE and the University Review. Together with TAS, these
student organizations have been fundamentally supported by the Madison Center
for Education Affairs and the NAS, two organizations that have led the charge on
multiculturalism.73
TAS, which sponsored placed a "Statement of Academic Concern" in The
Daily Texan as a paid ad on July 18, 1990 attacking the revisions of E306 signed
by 56 faculty members including Duban, Galinsky, Farmer, Gribben, Horn,
King, and Ruszkiewicz, is a chapter of the NAS.74 NAS grew out of the
Coalition for Democracy (CFD) which was formed with the assistance of Midge
Decter, a board member of both the Heritage Foundation and Institute for
Educational Affairs. CFD was chaired by Herbert London, who is closely
associated with two organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and its
president was Stephen Balch, a City University of New York professor. In
1987, CFD evolved into the National Association of Scholars, chaired by
London and with Balch as president. Its board of advisors include Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and former UT Arts and Sciences Dean and Boston
University President John Silber. London has written for The World and /, a
large glossy monthly published by Moon. London is a member, along with
former CIA official Ray Cline, of its editorial board. He has also written for the
now defunct Moon-owned New York City Tribune and currently edits NAS'
73 Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, "E306: Chronicle of a Smear Campaign: How the New
Right Attacks Diversity," Polemicist, September 1990, p. 4.
74 Although TAS collected the money and wrote the check for the ad, its name does not appear
anywhere on it. In fact, "When contacted later, the majority of the faculty we [Henson and
Philpott] talked to who signed the ad weren't associated with TAS, and non-members weren't
told that TAS had coordinated the effort" (Scott Henson and Tom Philpott "E306: Chronicle
of a Smear Campaign: How the New Right Attacks Diversity," Polemicist, September 1990,
p. 4.)
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journal Academic Questions. Decter, who directs the Committee for the Free
World and is married to Norman Podhoretz, also publishes Commentary which
featured an article by Balch and London in October 1986 that fretted about a
"Marxist" take over of the universities.75 In this article they break with the
tactics of Accuracy in Academia, which has similar concerns as NAS about the
internal transformation of the universities.
NAS works closely with the Madison Center for Educational Affairs
which was formed in 1990. The Madison Center was the product of a merger
between the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), formed in 1978 by former
Nixon Treasury Secretary William E. Simon who was then head of the John N.
Olin Foundation, and writer Irving Kristol, and the Madison Center, founded in
1988 by writer Alan Bloom and former Reagan education secretary and drug czar
William Bennett. IEA began a program to fund and provide logistical support to
right wing student newspapers such as the infamous Dartmouth Review. At the
time, the Review's staff, which included then editor Dinesh D’Souza, hung a
Black effigy by a tree and quoted Hitler on its front page in an issue that
appeared during Yom Kippur in 1990.
The program, called the Collegiate Network, began in 1980 with five
papers increasing to 61 by 1991 at a cost of $330,617. IEA was spending a total
of $1 million on all its projects in 1990.76 The Collegiate Network not only
provides hands on assistance, but a toll free hotline, semesterly grants, and an
advertising consortium that sells ads to businesses and requests that the papers
run them for a share of the money. Some students have even been placed in
internships with prestigious publications or politicians. Madison internships in
1990 "included full-year positions for MCEA editors at The New Republic and
Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. MCEA
75 Stephen Balch and Herb London, "The Tenured Left,” Commentary, vol. 82, October 1986,
p. 41-51.
76 Sara Diamond, "Corporate interference: Endowing the right-wing academic agenda," Covert
Action Information Bulletin (CAIB), Number 38, Fall 1991, p. 47; and the Madison Center’s,
Annual Report, 1990.
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editors also interned at the Office of the Vice President of the Goerge Bush
administration, The Bradley Foundation, The National Endowment for the
Humanities, NBC News, and Policy Review, the theoretical organ of the
Heritage Foundation."77 Some papers have gotten even more funding from
other organizations—some of which also back the Madison Center and NAS.
The Dartmouth Review alone received about $800,000 alone in support between
1987 and 1990 from William Buckley Jr., $150,000 of it from the Olin
Foundation in 1989.78
Madison is involved in various projects including a reference guide of US
universities for parents and students. Madison spent $120,930 to prepare the
guide which is based on a 36 page questionnaire sent to NAS members in 1990.
Prepared by a group of outspoken opponents to multicultural reforms including
Chester Finn, former Reagan appointee to the Department of Education, Leslie
Lenkowsky, Stephen Balch, and David Bernstein, editor of Diversity, the survey
asks if there "are any groups on campus critical of the core curriculum? If so,
which groups and why?" "Do homosexuals comprise a vocal, active interest
group on campus?... What are their objectives?" "Are there minority and/or
Women’s Studies centers on campus? If so, what is their role?" "Are many
courses used for indoctrination?" Cast in apparent innocuous language about
"partying," tuition costs, "undergraduate education," housing, and
entertainment, the guide consistently steers back to coverage of the status of
radical professors and students and multicultural programs, concluding with a
recommendation of attendance based on whether the campus is wracked with
conflicts. Although the information is being gathered as intelligence for use in
battling the multiculturalism movement, it is not well researched and provides
few concrete details to be of much use for any purpose than to scare away
77 Henson, "Circle the Volvos: Building a 'Grassroots’ Political Newspaper," Polemicist, July
1991, p. 10.
78 Henson and Philpott, "Charge of the right brigade against multicultural education,"
Guardian, October 16, 1991, p.7; Henson, July 1991, p. 4; and Theresa Bergen, "PC
windmills: Right wing money on campus," NLNS, packet 2.1, September 3, 1991, p. 5.
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parents worried about "PC" from allowing their children to attend certain
campuses, a veiled threat of disinvestment.79
Besides the member papers of the Collegiate Network, another group is
also using this information to their advantage. Sponsored by the Madison
Center, the Student Forum is organizing Black and "Hispanic" students to
oppose multicultural reforms on their campuses. The Forum can be traced back
to a group of Black students brought together by the Republican National
Committee who wanted to form a student organization for Black republicans.
This evolved into its present "multi-ethnic" composition of minority students
who, according to its coordinator, would prefer to be treated as "individuals" and
"americans" rather than Black or "Hispanic." In conjunction with the Student
Forum, Madison has begun publishing Diversity, a magazine devoted to issues
of race.80 The strategy behind this effort mirrors that of the counter-movement
as a whole; they deny race is the issue with one hand while waving it around for
legitimacy with the other.
Madison is continuing DEA's support of in-depth research as well by
adding a $50,000 grant to IEA's $150,000 for D'Souza to write Illiberal
Education. Early on, Kristol suggested that IEA publish "outstanding work by
recent Ph.D.'s in order to give their work impact and promote their careers." In
1980, IEA bankrolled a large study by the.Ethics and Public Policy Center
(EPPC) of the role of church groups in the boycott of Nestle’s promotion of its
infant formula to Third World families. EPPC was formed in 1976 as a think
tank that would help respond to growing criticism of corporations. Ernest
Lefever laid out its purpose in a 1978 memorandum that noted "US domestic and
multinational firms find themselves increasingly under siege at home and
abroad...They're accused of producing shoddy and unsafe products, fouling the
79 The Common Sense Guide to American Colleges 1991-1992, Charles Homer, Executive
Editor, Charles Homer, Madison Center: Lanham, 1991. Interestingly, although the
information was provided by a large number of students and faculty, few are given credit
80 Sara Diamond, "Madison Ctr. tries affirmative action," Polemicist, May 1991, p. 3.
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environment, robbing future generations, wielding inordinate power, repressing
peoples in the Third World, and generally of being insensitive to human needs."
Lefever suggested that the role of organizations like EPPC would be to provide
"meticulous research and assessment [on] the attack on the multinational firms by
university groups and so-called public interest lobbies."81
Madison’s budget overwhelmingly favors the Collegiate Network.
According to its 1990 annual report, its total budget was $1,035,457, of which it
spent 32 percent on the student newspapers, 12 percent for the college guide, 7
percent to editorial internships, and 23 percent for its grants to scholars program.
It carried over unspent $565,000 into 1991.
These projects would be impossible without large scale financial aid from
many foundations and multinational corporations. IEA began with start-up grants
of $100,000 from the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family Trusts, the
J.M. Foundation, and the Smith-Richardson Foundation. They also established a
list of primary donors that included Bechtel, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Ford
Motor Company, General Electric, K-Mart, Mobil and Nestle.82 Madison
received funding from 54 donors in 1990, including the Committee for the Free
World, Adolph Coors Foundation, Dow (whose board chair is board chair of the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI)), Lilly Endowment Inc. (the Eli Lilly & Co.
chair is also on the AEI Board), Milliken Foundation, John Olin Foundation,
Olin Corporation Charitable Trust, Pfizer, Inc. (whose employee Edmund Pratt
has been on the AEI board), Sarah Scaife, Smith Richardson Foundation, and
Warner-Lambert Company.83 Some of these same donors also funded the NAS,
including the Olin Foundation which gave it $85,000 in 1988 and $125,000 in
both 1989 and 1990. Olin also gave IEA $89,782 in 1989 for its campus
journalism program and $153,000 to Madison in 1990. Many of these
81 Diamond, CAIB, p. 46-47; Institute for Educational Affairs, Annual Report, 1980; and
Ernest Lefever, "The Corporation Project," unpublished memorandum dated July 18, 1978.
82 Diamond, CAIB, p.46; IEA; Annual Report, 1980..
83 Henson, July 1991, p. 4; Madison Center, Annual Report, 1990.
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foundations are motivated by similar political intentions. According to Sara
Diamond,
In 1989, the Olin Foundation alone dispersed nearly $15 million to about 200
different institutions, including both public and private universities and several
dozen 'independent' think tanks. A similar array, but smaller number of
organizations received a total of $4.8 million from the Smith-Richardson
Foundation's Public Policy Program in 1989. The Scaife Foundation spends
about $8 million annually, mostly on private right-wing think tanks, the largest
recipient being the Heritage Foundation. The Earhart Foundation disperses about
$2 million per year, and makes relatively small ($ 10,000) donations to scores of
individual professors, mostly in departments of economics, philosophy and
political science. These are only some of the best known right-wing foundations.
Others include Coors, J.M., Bradley, Gates, Kirby, the Lilly Endowment...84
Smith-Richardson has been with the NAS since at least 1984 when it was CFD.
A confidential memo written by Roderic Richardson in late 1984 would establish
a new tactic that would latter become fundamental to the PC counterattack. In it,
he distinguishes between "deterrence activism" and "high ground articulation" in
fighting the campus left. Deterrence activism, he explained, is at most an
uninteresting reaction to the left, "at best it is a form of cheerleading that can
focus some attention on stirring media events." "High ground activism," on the
otherhand, is "the attempt to steal one or another high ground away from the left,
by...doing things like insisting on rigorous discussions and debates, setting up
political unions, battling divestiture and other causes, not by calling their goals
wrong...but by proposing better ways of solving the problem. Student
journalism is a high ground approach. It is...an approach geared to long run
success."85 Such as strategy can be seen in the shift of groups at UT who have
84Diamond, CAIB, p. 47-8; Olin Foundation's, Annual Report, 1989; Smith-Richardson,
Annual Report 1989; and Sarah Scaife Foundation's ERS Form 990-PF, 1987 and Earhart
Foundation's IRS Form 990-PF 1988. See also Henson and Philpott, p. 9. Bergen cites the
John Olin Foundation 1988 annual report's figure of $55 million in grants, (p. 5)
85 Ibid., citing Inter-Department Memo, December 20, 1984, "The Report on the
Universities". This tactic has also been explicitly discussed elsewhere. At a 1982 conference
sponsored by IEA, Madison, and The American Spectator to help students start their own
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attempted to turn the issue toward positive suggestions (e.g. SAVE suggested
expanding the multiculturalism requirement to "Western" cultures) and alternative
solutions instead of only criticizing. Although this has not always been the case,
it has become noticeable.
Many individuals serve with more than one of these organization. Some
are even affiliated with the National Endowment of the Humanities such as NEH
chair Lynne Cheney who writes for Newslink, the Collegiate Network's
newsletter. NEH board members Hillel Fradkin is vice-president of the Bradley
Foundation, Edwin Dellatre is on the NAS Board of Advisors, Harvard
government professor Harvey Mansfield is on the Madison Center board and
Carol Iannone, who was rejected by the Senate for the NEH board, was the
NAS vice-president.86 The connections between these corporations and
foundations with Madison, IEA and the NAS extend beyond their role in
attempting to block the multicultural transformation of the universities.
Smith-Richardson "has had a history of sponsoring CIA-linked media
projects and leadership training programs for CIA and DOD personnel. It was
also privy to some of the covert operations conducted on behalf of the
Nicaraguan Contras," says Diamond.87 Smith Richardson's president Leslie
Lenkowsky left the foundation in 1983 to take an interim appointment as deputy
director of the U.S. Information Agency which is well known for working with
the CIA. Lenkowsky was denied a permanent appointment by the U.S. Senate
which charged him with blacklisting liberal speakers at USIA.88 Ideally,
Lenkowsky took over IEA in 1985 and one year later expanded its support of the
student newspapers with "editorial and management advice", including the toll
free hotline, clippings, story ideas, tips on selling ads and writing stories as well
newspaper, a speaker suggested "If someone accuses you of being a racist or a sexist, accuse
them back of McCarthy tactics."
86 Mark Hager, "The real orthodoxy network," Z, April 1992, p. 59-60.
87 Ibid., p. 48.
88 Henson, p. 4.
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as holding training conferences and renamed it the Collegiate Network. He is
now president of the Hudson Institute.
The Bradley Foundation was formed in 1985 following Rockwell
International's, a multinational weapons builder, buyout of the Allen-Bradley
Company which works on "fuzzy logic" (another name for computer programs
based on case based "human reasoning") among other high tech projects. The
foundation provided $500,000 in seed money in 1989 to establish the Madison
Center and another $93,000 in 1990. In 1989-90 IEA also received $255,000
and NAS $177,178.89
The Sarah Scaife Foundation's president, Richard Mellon Scaife,
provided seed money along with Joseph Coors in 1974 for the Heritage
Foundation. William Bennett "joined the Scaife board this summer, just before
the foundation funded his new position as 'culture czar’ at Heritage." Scaife
worked with Joseph Coors to help found the Heritage Foundation and is still a
primary backer giving it $800,000 in 1990. From 1973 to 1984, Scaife gave
more than $37 million to conservative causes and institutions.90
Richard Mellon Scaife also ran Forum World Features in London, one of
his many news services, from the late 1960s to mid 1970s. However, "Scaife
shut down Forum in 1975 shortly before Time Out, a British weekly, published
a purported [sic] 1968 CIA memorandum, addressed to then director Richard
Helms, which described Forum as a CIA-sponsored operation providing 'a
significant means to counter Communist propaganda.' The Forum-CLA tie,
which lasted into the seventies, has been confirmed by various British and
American publications." Scaife also funds Accuracy in the Media, Freedom
House, and the Committee on the Present Danger and gave NAS $50,000 in
1988 and $300,000 in 1989.91
89 Henson and Philpott, p. 9.
9° Louis Wolf, "Accuracy in media rewrites the news,” Covert Action Information Bulletin,
number 32, Summer 1989, p. 20.
91 Henson and Philpott, p. 9.
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Some of these associations also bear out ties to Moon and death squads in
Central America. Although they differ in tactics, Accuracy in Academia (AIA), a
spin-off from Reed Irvine's Accuracy in the Media (AIM), formed in the mid
1980s to compile information of professors they called "left-wing
propagandists."92 According to Diamond,
AIA's president John LeBoutillier...was then [1985] a leader of the World Anti-
Communist League (WACL), as were three other members of AIA's initial
advisory board. Irvine had at one time been prominent within WACL and served
on its "Psychological Warfare Committee." At the time of AIA's founding in
1985, WACL was one of the most important coordinating bodies for death squad
activities in Central America and elsewhere. While AIA was busy collecting field
data on campus "subversives," the group's Latin American counterparts were
among those blowing up schools in Nicaragua and systematically assassinating
progressive students and professors in El Salvador and Guatemala.93
NAS and AIA cross paths through the activities of Herb London, co-founder and
the first chair of both CFD and NAS, and D'Souza, who spoke on "race,
gender, and class issues on campus," at AIA's July 6-7 1991 conference.94
Both London and AIA have documented working relationships with various
organizations established by Rev. Moon. According to Daniel Junas, who is
writing a book about the Unification Church, "WACL grew out of the Asian
People’s Anti-Communist League, which had been founded by Taiwan and
South Korea in 1954. Two key behind-the-scenes players in WACL were
Moon's patron [Ryoichi] Sasakawa, and Ray Cline, who was CIA chief of
station in Taiwan from 1958 to 1962 when plans were laid for WACL." Moon
first met Sasakawa during his first missionary trip to Japan in 1958. Sasakawa,
92 Although AIM is not immediately involved, it is supported by many of the same forces
including William Simon who has served on its advisory board, the Scaife Foundation which
has given it about $433,000 from 1977 to 1984, Mobil which gave it about $40,000, and
Texaco, Exxon, Chevron, Getty and Phillips. (Louis Wolf, p. 20.)
93 Diamond, CAIB, p. 48.
94 D’Souza's speech is noted by Scott Henson, "Dinesh D'Souza," New Liberation News
Service, packet 2.1, September 3, 1991, p. 12.
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who is known as the "godfather" of the Japanese right, had been imprisoned by
the US occupation force after WWII for his explicitly fascist organizing as a
suspected Class A war criminal. Sasakawa, along with another suspected war
criminal whom he befriended while in prison, assisted Moon in forming the
Japanese chapter of WACL, the Internal Federation for Victory Over
Communism, in 1967.95 In 1991, Sasakawa gave the UT Business School $1
million. He has also given money to a few other universities, including the
University of Houston which named a space research center after him. His offer
to Columbia was rejected after mass protests by students however. He plans to
create $1 million endowments at 50 universities worldwide by 1996.96
Another of Moon's organization, the Collegiate Association for the
Research of Principles (CARP) which was formed in 1962, was soon expanded
to the U.S. in 1973 to counterattack the student left in the U.S. as it did in Japan.
"In the early 1980s, CARP conducted a smear campaign against the Committee
in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, accusing it of 'Marxist ties.' More
importantly, CARP aided the FBI’s illegal investigation of the Committee in
Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) by spying on the solidarity
organization and providing information on CISPES' campus activities to the
Bureau. CARP is certainly not alone in its role in counterinsurgency on our
campuses. Young Americans for Freedom, which was founded by William F.
Buckley, Jr. in 1962, disrupted anti-war protests in the 1960s, released a
pamphlet titled "List of Un-American Organizations on Our College Campuses,"
in 1989 and supplyed the FBI with information on CISPES. The YCTs at UT-
Austin have also spied on and kept records of student activists, including
9^ Daniel Junas, "Rev. Moon goes to college," Covert Action Information Bulletin, number
38, Fall 1991, p. 22-3.
96James Allen, "UT accepts controversial grant," The Daily Texan, June 11, 1991, p. 1-2.
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academic transcripts, photos and clippings which they have provided to various
state and local agencies.97
Olin, a huge chemical and conventional weapons builder for DOD, and
partner in the Yale Research Park, has also been a primary backer of these three
organizations providing an estimated $600,000 between 1988-90 alone.
However, Olin has not only relied on them alone for only indirect influence over
the organization of higher education, but has also intervened directly in an
attempt to guide various academic programs as well as even establish the Yale
Park. The foundation gave $55 million in 1988 alone to university programs, "to
strengthen the economy, political and cultural institutions upon which...private
enterprise is based." Olin Foundation's president is William Simon, a co-founder
of DBA.
Many university law and economic departments get big Olin grants. Last
year, the law schools at the University of Chicago, Stanford University and
Harvard University each got close to $1 million and the University of Virginia,
Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT receive about a half a
million dollars each for their Olin "Law and Economics" programs. These
programs provide rationales for right-wing policies, and promote government
laissez-faire in the business realm. Most of the Foundation's $55 million in
grants, according to its 1988 report, is "intended to strengthen the economic,
political, and cultural institutions upon which...private enterprise is based.” In
1985, after trying out the Olin Program in Law and Economics for one year,
UCLA rejected the program because according to the law school’s curriculum
committee, Olin was "taking advantage of students' financial need to indoctrinate
them with a particular ideology" according to the law school's curriculum
committee. Students recipients of the fellowships were required to attend lectures
by Olin funded faculty. They were also required to attend talks by such notables
97 Ibid., p. 25. See Theresa Bergen concerning YAF (p. 6) and Christopher Anderson. I was
one of the students the YCTs were discovered to have a file on in 1987.
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as Robert Bork, who was rejected by the Senate for the Supreme Court, and
current justice Antonio Scalia. However, two other professors in economics and
management have accepted $1 million to establish the Olin Center for Policy at
UCLA's Graduate School of Management. Yale Law School's George Priest
takes in about $1.5 million for fellowships, lectureships, journals and other
programs he administers including $464,000 for himself.98
The Foundation is also backing other big name conservative academics
such as Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 book The Closing o f the American
Mind, who is getting $3.6 million to run the University of Chicago's John M.
Olin Center for the Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy. Samuel
Huntington is receiving $1.4 million to establish the Olin Institute of Strategic
Studies at Harvard, and $618,000 for the Olin Program in National Security
Affairs and another $100,000 for his own Olin Research Fellowship for a total
of $2.1 million.99 Peter Collier and David Horowitz, two sixties radicals turned
right-wing, have received $200,000, and conservative Catholic theorist Michael
Novak received $163,000. It gave a $75,000 fellowship to Robert Leiken to do
research on the "media treatment of the conflict in Central America" at Harvard's
Center for International Affairs. And Irving Kristol, and AEI board member,
received $376,000 as the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor at the New York
University Graduate School of Business Administration. The National Interest,
edited by Kristol, also grabbed another $1 million from Olin.
Olin has been a primary financial backer of Dinesh D'Souza, giving
$150,000 to the Dartmouth Review, provided D'Souza $30,000 in 1988 through
a grant to IEA, and increased its support of the American Enterprise Institute in
1989 when D'Souza joined the staff.100
98 Bergen, p. 5; and Jon Weiner, "The Olin money tree: Dollars for neocon scholars," The
Nation, January 1, 1990, p. 12-13.
" Jon Weiner, p. 12.
100 Scott Henson, New Liberation News Service, p. 11-12; and Mark Hager, "The real
orthodoxy network," Z, April 1992, p. 59.
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Multicultural ism: Against Entrepreneurialization and for Our Needs
While Sara Diamond has stressed the material connections between the "PC"
counterattack and the war in Central America for example, she and others have
neglected to explicitly demonstrate how students can capitalize on these
relationships in order to circulate the struggle for multiculturalism to other
movements. Much great work has been done to uncover the workings of this
counterattack, but little has been done to trace out its cause and how it can be
fought. Contrary to the information overload about the size and wealth of NAS,
IEA and Madison's backers, little has been said about the potential power of the
multiculturalism movement and how the counterattack stems from the threat to
entrepreneurialism that it poses. Charges of "PC" appear to be yet another in a
long line of tactics to reimpose control over the universities in order to
demonstrate a stable arena of investment.
That "PC" is a reaction to the threat the multiculturalism movement offers
to entrepreneurialization is no more evident than in the words of its organizers.
In his 1978 best selling book, A Time fo r Truth, William Simon lays out his
concern for the crisis state of the universities: "Business must cease the mindless
subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economics,
government, politics and history are hostile to capitalism and whose faculties will
not hire scholars whose views are otherwise." His greatest fear is that "in the
universities of which I speak, capitalism is no longer the dominant orthodoxy" in
the universities which instead are "churning out young collectivists by the
legions."101 Simon's declaration, hardly the rash polemic of a political outsider,
appeared nearly concurrently with the first stirrings of federal policies promoting
entrepreneurialization. Since its publication, Simon has headed or helped
101 William E. Simon, A Time fo r Truth: A Distinguished Conservative Dissects the
Economic and Political Policies that Threaten Our Liberty—And Points the Way to an
American Renaissance, NY: Reader’s Digest Press, 1978, p. 231-232.
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organize IEA, Olin Foundation, and Madison Center—the three central
organizations behind the "PC" counterattack against the multiculturalism
movement.
Fustrated that capitalism is helping to create those very forces that will
destroy it: "it is through the very generosity and tolerance of capitalism that the
enemies of capitalism have come to dominate our campuses today," Simon
suggested initiating a counterattack that today composes the two fundamental
components of entrepreneurialization: austerity and further subservience to the
market. "Now that they [the enemies of capitalism] have achieved dominance,"
Simon generalizes "there is no longer any reason for capitalism to support them,
and it is ridiculous for them to claim (as they loudly do) some sort of
'entitlement' to support from a system which they openly despise and lose no
opportunity to disparage." "Business money must flow generously to those
colleges and universities which do offer their students an opportunity to become
well-educated not only in collectivist theory but in conservative and Libertarian
principles as well."102
Roger Kimball would make similar sweeping charges about the threat to
knowledge and university curriculum by a ragged bunch of Marxists, feminists,
and assorted deconstructionists in his recently widely received Tenured
Radicals—which he dedicated to no less than the Olin Foundation and IEA.103
Kimball, like Simon, accurately recognizes the multitude of free spaces carved
out in the universities by the student radicals of the 1960s even if he does
overstate their success. Now professors and sparsely distributed administrators,
these former student radicals are taking aim at fundamentally transforming the
university from within:
102 Ibid, p. 231-232.
103 Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, NY:
Harper & Row, 1990.
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The truth is that when the children of the sixties received their professorships and
deanships they did not abandon the dream of radical cultural transformation; they
set out to implement it. Now, instead of disrupting classes, they are teaching
them; instead of attempting to destroy our educational institutions physically,
they are subverting them from within. Thus it is what were once the political and
educational ambitions of academic renegades appear as ideals on the agenda of
the powers that be. Efforts to dismantle the traditional curriculum and
institutionalize radical feminism, to ban politically unacceptable speech and
propagate the tenents of deconstruction and similar exercises in cynical
obscurantism: Directives encouraging these and other radical developments now
typically issue from the dean's office or the Faculty Senate, not from students
marching in the streets, (p. 166-67)
Although he obscures the role of student movements as a power base for faculty
advocates of multicultural reforms, Kimball attempts to draw attention to the
subtle challenges to the corporate university. "The radical ethos of the sixties has
been all too successful, achieving indirectly in the classroom, faculty meeting,
and by administrative decree what it was unable to accomplish on the
barricades." (p. xv) The terrain of struggle for Kimball remains ideological and
confined to the existing academic disciplines. Kimball’s emphasis on the
challenge to and displacement of the literary and theoretical canons, which is
resulting in the "crisis" of thought itself—now that infinite interpretations are
possible so are infinite realities beyond capitalism—must be placed in context.
The delegitimization of the canon (e.g. capitalist ideology), which is presumably
responsible for the undocumented rise in student militancy, is taking place
currently with the further entrenchment of the university onto the business track.
At this junction, the clash of entrepreneurialization and multiculturalism is
the very source of the continuing crisis of higher education. This is where I part
company with the right. If this is one of the sources of the continuing conflict, it
needs to be made explicit among radical students and faculty and used to our
advantage in order to accomplish the fundamental transformation of the
universities we advocate. Unfortunately, this is not presently the case. For
example, in Debating P.C., a volume of writings from the left and the right
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concerning multiculturalism and "PC" not one contribution is from a student.104
Moreover, not one article discusses the participation of students let alone the fact
that the multiculturalism movement sprang from student mobilization.
No doubt, the relationship between the growth of Gay and Lesbian,
Black, women, and other forms of multicultural student activism has been the
motivating factor behind Madison's survey and student guide and Student Forum
which is attempting to use the right skin color to legitimize it politics. The
rhetoric of a rising left control over the universities is a reaction to the growing
power of students and faculty with diverse interests and desires who are further
deepening of the crisis by carving out spaces on the campuses in order to
concentrate on them.
The real fear shrouded behind rhetoric of a "New McCarthyism" is no
more than a fear of a university being rapidly transformed by students to serve
the desires of students. John Taylor's "Are You Politically Correct," in New
York magazine demonstrates the fundamental transformation of the universities
taking place.
There is an experiment of sorts taking place in American colleges: directed at
changing the consciousness of this entire generation of university students. The
goal is to eliminate prejudice, not just the petty sort that shows up on sophomore
dorm walls, but the grand prejudice that has ruled American universities since
their founding: that the intellectual tradition of Western Europe occupies the
central place in the history of civilization. In this context it would not be enough
for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she
would be expected to 'affirm' their presence on campus and to study their
literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke. This
agenda is broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists
and Gays. It is also the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up
in the '60s and are now achieving positions of academic influence.105
104 Paul Berman (ed.). Debating P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College
Campuses, NY: Dell, 1992.
105 John Taylor, "Are You Politically Correct?", New York, January 21, 1991, p. 32-40.
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While Taylor is resorting to some hyperbole (not everyone would require that
these literatures and cultures be studied but to at least recognize their place and
contributions in the U.S. and the world and allow those who wish the freedom
to do so without repression) the thrust of his argument is clear: it is students,
followed by radical professors, who are changing the universities as we know
them. However this was not clear enough for Michael Berube who sought to
deny students any role in the struggle and crisis of the universities by suggesting
that Taylor’s article "provides us with a rogue's gallery of intolerant students,
muddle-headed administrators, misguided activists, and the occasional
'extremist' (i.e. 'Afrocentrist'), but it really winds with very little to say about
the academic teachers and critics its purports to attack.’’106 Berube, like others,
dismisses students as the source of tension and conflict that has given rise to the
"PC" counterattack and media charges of McCarthyism.
As D'Souza accurately charges in his 1991 Atlantic Monthly article
"Illiberal Education" that the debate "has so far been passionately superficial,
posing false dichotomies...and missing the underlying principles that are shaping
the dramatic changes in universities."107 While D'Souza is far from innocent of
his own charges, he has identified a fundamental pattern among the whole
debate: while the right mystifies a threat to the universities as we know them as
"a revolution from the top down,"108 the left has persisted with its own
mystification denying any threat exists whatsoever.
Like William Simon, D'Souza not only recognizes the threat he is quite
explicit about what capital should do about it. "An academic and cultural
revolution has overtaken most of our 3,535 colleges and universities. It’s a
revolution to which most Americans have paid little attention...It amounts,
106 Michael Berube, "Public image limited: Political Correctness and the media's big lie,"
Village Voice, June 18, 1991, p. 35.
107 Dinesh D'Souza, "Illiberal Education," Atlantic Monthly, March 1991, p. 51-79.
108 Donald Kagan, dean of arts and sciences at Yale, quoted without citation in Dinesh
D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics o f Race and Sex on Campus, NY: Free Press, 1991,
p. 15.
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according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala, to 'a
basic transformation of American higher education in the name of
multiculturalism and diversity,"’ he writes. D'Souza attributes this "academic
and cultural revolution" in the university to both students and faculty. "It should
come as no surprise that many sensitive young Americans reject the system that
has nurtured them," he says almost mimicking Simon. Universities in the US are
no less than "the birthplace and testing ground for the enterprise of social
transformation."109
These students who are demanding and winning "redoubled preferential
recruitment of minority students and faculty, funding for a new Third World or
Afro-American center, mandatory sensitivity education for whites, and so on,"
are doing so in their own autonomously organized groups and "theme houses,"
as D'Souza writes, from which they launch their attack. D'Souza's fear of this
autonomous base of organizing scares him so he attributes it to the creation of "a
kind of academic apartheid" while ignoring that which already exists.
However, what makes these students even more powerful is for the first
time, they have a large number, rather than a scattered few, of faculty behind
them, faculty who having fought in the 1960s with few faculty on their side,
know the strategic importance of their alliances with students—the same students
who fought to get and keep them there. D'Souza clearly recognizes and fears this
strategic alliance. He cites an English professor who explains that "After the
Vietnam War, a lot of us [students] didn't just crawl back into our library
cubicles. We stepped into academic positions...Now we have tenure, and the
work of reshaping the university has begun in earnest."110
This alliance also provides historical continuity between struggles of the
1960s and today, something students did not have during the 1960s since there
were few radical faculty to draw the connections with the 1930s. As Asian-
109 Ibid., p. 13.
110 Dinesh D'Souza, "The visigoths in tweed,” Forbes, April 1, 1991, p. 84.
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American scholar Shirley Hune points out, “multicultural education has grown
from a demand in the late ‘60s for separate programs to today’s emphasis on
‘mainstreaming’ or ‘balancing the curriculum,’ with readings and courses on the
formerly excluded.” (p. 63) This strikes at the very nature of the university since
the original demands for a free space—that have frequendy been isolated and
attacked—have developed into demands for the transformation of all o f the
university into a free space quite similar to the view of university "autonomy" in
Mexico and Argentina now under attack as well.
Much like Simon, D'Souza does not hesitate to demonstrate the threat to
capitalism posed by the radical wing of the multiculturalism movement, asking if
"the new policies in academia [will] improve, or damage, the prospects for
American political and economic competitiveness in the world?" (p. 15) Unlike
Simon, Kimball, Bennett and Kristol, D'Souza emphasizes the mutual threat
from both radical academics and student activists whose actions have stimulated
formal multicultural reform plans some of which were successful in part at more
than 27 major public and private research universities, (p. 16-17) Although
D’Souza has been one of the primary contributors of outright lies, distorted
historical facts, unsubstantiated evidence and vague sources, and mystifications
concerning multiculturalism not to mention denials of discrimination in the
universities,111 he has repeatedly emphasized that student radicals (with whom
he battled while a student himself at Dartmouth) compose the actual base of
power upon which radical academics rely in their attempts to institutionalize
multicultural reforms.112
111 While too many to list and analyze here, one of D'Souza's most glaring lies and distortions
concerns Stanford's multicultural course requirement. In the text of his book, D'Souza lists
supposed topic categories and authors from which the syllabus must draw, warning that "this is
not a mandated list." However, buried deep in the footnotes is the harsh truth that this list was
developed prior to the actual initiation of the course with the disclaimer that "it is fairly typical
of the texts actually assigned so far." (p. 70 and 274)
112 Examples of radical student actions resulting in partial multicultural reforms mostly
concerning the curriculum abound in his book. For examples, see D'Souza, 1991, p. 136-37.
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The shortcomings of separate "ethnic" programs has been fundamental to
PRIDE and ONDA's recommendations which request student and faculty from
ethnic studies control over appointments and the functions of the centers. Black
students have charged that the ethnic studies centers have strayed from their
original goals. Former UT-Austin student activist Toni Luckett explained that
"the centers, which came out of student movements in the late '60s and early
70s were to do research like African-American culture. But it was also a center
to support students who came here. Those centers have now become dedicated to
complete research," making the same simplistic dichotomy between teaching and
research. Yet, her point reflects a larger criticism raised by other students that the
centers are focused too narrowly on academic issues rather than the struggles that
created them. PRIDE proposes student and faculty control over appointments as
a way to redirect the center back to the needs of students. "Because the
University's Afro-American studies field is not a department, professors who
come to the university to teach classes for the center must be hired by another
discipline. Furthermore all tenure decisions are made by the department in which
the professor is hired."113 Although PRIDE proposes the creation of a student
run cultural center, it would take place in conjunction with the imposition of
student control over the centers and the transformation of the core curriculum as
a whole. In other words, PRIDE and ONDA, as have other student proposals on
other campuses, take advantage of what current space remains from victories of
the ethnic studies movement in order to launch a broader foray into the university
as a whole.
While multiculturalism grew out of the struggles to create Black and other
special departments of study, it goes beyond them. Chicana/o students have
critiqued CMAS as a strictly research oriented institute outside of the control of
students and cut off from the campus and community struggles. Where some in
113 David Loy, "Panel decries multicultural efforts," The Daily Texan, October 5, 1990, p. 1;
Scott Stanford, "Butler Did It: Multiculturalism has a long way to go," The Daily Texan, June
22, 1990, p. 4.
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the movement during the 1960s-70s saw the need for separate departments and
research as part of active organized struggle, they were mostly conceived as
autonomous free spaces within the university. Those universities that were
forced to concede to these demands turned this space against them by forcibly
cutting them from the rest of the campus. Recognizing this development,
students are demanding faculty and student control over CMAS not as a free
space but as a means for transforming the rest of the university and society. "The
Center for Mexican American Studies should serve as a focal point for Chicana/o
student, staff and faculty activism...[and] should help facilitate the full
integration of Chicanos and Chicanas into the university community.” 114
ONDA demands that Chicano faculty be placed throughout the university with a
role in CMAS and answerable to students. Winning these departments and
programs gives the movement the strength to demand a total transformation.
Their resulting institutionalization as research centers required that students
demand nothing less than the total reorganization of the university.
Demanding the integration of a multiplicity of perspectives into the
curriculum can be more than reforming the curriculum, it could mean the
reorganization of not only the university but of society as a whole. Hune is very
explicit about this:
Asian American studies is part of an effort to change education in all its facets,
with an emphasis on making it more equitable, inclusive, and open to alternative
perspective...It is transformative in that Asian American studies looks to both a
restructuring of education and an expansion of knowIedge...their teaching and
research will play a role in countering the cultural domination of the existing
Euro-American knowledge base taught in American colleges; they hope to
produce the kind of scholarship and students capable of resolving injustices and
creating a more equitable society.115
114 ONDA, p. 20.
115 Shirley Hune, "Opening the American mind and body: The role of Asian American
studies," Change, November/December, 1989, p. 59.
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Hune's strategic connection between the ethnic studies movement and
multiculturalism is a source of dispute among radical faculty. Carlos Munoz, a
Chicano student activist in the 1960s and now a professor at UC-Berkeley, not
only denies the existence of an evolutionary connection but that they are even
complementary. "I see it as a continuation of the 1960s, although at that time we
didn't call our goal 'cultural diversity.' We demanded Chicano studies, ethnic
studies programs, and the admission of students of color not for ’diversity' but
for empowerment.... We didn't even talk about 'affirmative action'—we talked
about power, taking over things. Now, 20 years later, the struggle for cultural
diversity appears to be reformist, at best...." He has "no optimism that the
cultures requirement or the diversity movement is going to result in any kind of
radical change. If cultural diversity or affirmative action is going to work, there
has to be access to the corridors of power where they decide who gets hired and
fired," he explains, retaining an orthodox perception of power and change
residing in formal existing institutions. Ignoring the radical origins of the
movement in the student movement, Munoz sees multiculturalism as a one-sided
top down imposed policy: "Berkeley, along with other university centers, has
made it clear that 'cultural diversity' shall be a capitalist-approved substitute for
dealing with the ugly realities of racism."116
Nonetheless, the parallels are still significant. Today, as during the 1960-
70s, the multiculturalism movement has the university administrations off
balance and on the defensive. Winifred Wandersee, who has documented the rise
of Women's Studies during the 1970s, explains that "the demand for reform that
characterized the politics of education in the decade after 1965 undermined the
authority of schools and universities to control their own affairs. Educational
116 Elizabeth Martinez, ”A Chicano Left Perspective on Berkeley—An Interview With Carlos
Munoz,” Z, July-August, 1990, p. 39-40. Since Munoz wrote a book about how the Chicano
Studies movement was a project of the Chicano student movement of the I960, it is ironic that
Munoz would ignore the conflict between the radical projects of the student movements that
created the multiculturalism movement and later watered down trace elements formally proposed
as university policy.
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administrators found themselves embroiled in power struggles with students, the
courts and civil rights agencies, faculty and teachers' unions, and political action
and special interest groups."117 With the authority of Title VI of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 in hand, these groups forced the federal government into the role of
enforcing antidiscrimination laws by threatening to withdraw funding. "Since
federal funding for education at all levels expanded rapidly after 1965, the
threatened cutoff of these funds was an impressive weapon," Wandersee
suggests. Perhaps, it is a fear of a similar process taking place that has stimulated
the fierce counterattack against multiculturalism.
Far from aiding the implementation of multicultural reforms, federal
intervention has come to the aid of those against such reforms. Hune points out
that the resistance to multiculturalism as a means of liberation has come from
those, such as the National Association of Scholars and then US Secretary of
Education William Bennett, who Hune explains value education as an
“instrument of social control to perpetuate the culture and produce the next
generation of citizens and workers.” (p. 62) Because multiculturalism is an
extension of the struggles that launched the crisis of the university in the late
1960s, it too has come under attack.
Recognizing the power of this revolution in the universities, D'Souza
makes a valiant stab at attempting to divide and conquer: student against faculty,
radicals against concerned but hounded moderates, and liberal arts against
science students. For instance, although he clearly attributes the threat to both
students and faculty struggles, he uses a rhetorical sleight of hand: "Who is
behind this academic revolution, this contrived multiculturalism?,"118 a question
he answers with the above quote about radical faculty reshaping the university.
This enables him to demonize the faculty, committing his own self-described sin
of "false dichotomies" and superficiality.
117 Wandersee, 1988, p. 103.
118 Dinesh D'Souza, "The visigoths in tweed," Forbes, April 1, 1991, p. 81-86.
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Likewise, D'Souza posits these multicultural reforms as "imposed upon"
students who have mostly liberal views about race. He cleverly tries to turn a real
problem that the movement has been unable to admit exists into a solid example
of divide and conquer, a strategy that lay behind the entire "PC" hype: "These
liberal attitudes are sorely tried by the demands of the new orthodoxy: Many
undergraduates are beginning to rebel against what they perceive as a culture of
preferential treatment and double standards actively fostered by university
policies."
Finally, D’Souza sees to it that the interests of science students are
antagonistic to that of liberal arts students—a tactic we saw repeated at UT-
Austin:
Yet, a student can still get an excellent education—among the best in the world—
in computer technology and the hard sciences at American universities. But
liberal arts students, including those attending Ivy League schools, are very
likely to be exposed to an attempted brainwashing that deprecates Western
learning and exalts a neo-Marxist ideology promoted in the name of
multiculturalism. Even students who choose hard sciences must often take
required courses in the humanities, where they are almost certain to be inundated
with anti-Western, anti-capitalist view of the world, (sic, p. 86)
Certainly, it appears that multiculturalism threatens the one sphere of the
university that capital maintains relative control over: the hard sciences. The
overwhelming resistance from engineering and the sciences to E306 reforms at
UT demonstrates the very threat multiculturalism poses to entrepreneurialization.
Multicultural reforms offer to open up the horizons of students otherwise being
narrowly tracked into long lives of specialized technical work.
This threat to entrepreneurialization lies at the heart of Simon's,
D'Souza's and others counterattack against multiculturalism. Simon and
D'Souza concur on both the source of the threat and what should be done to
defeat it. D'Souza skips right over trying to rally students or forcing campus
administrations to resist the transformation. Apparently recognizing the growing
financial dependence of the university upon market activity due to growing
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government cutbacks and austerity, he suggests continued disinvestment. Calling
upon parents, alumni, corporations, foundations, and state legislators to backup
the "outgunned campus resistance to the academic revolution" that "sorely needs
outside reinforcements," he recommends that "the best way to encourage reform
is to communicate in no uncertain terms to university leadership and, if necessary
to use financial incentives to assure your voice is heard."
There is little doubt that they [campus administrators] would pay keen attention
to the views of donors on whom they depend. By threatening to suspend
donations if universities continue harmful policies, friends of liberal learning can
do a lot.... The illiberal revolution can be reversed only if the people who foot
the bills stop being passive observers. Don't just write a check to your alma
matter; that's an abrogation of responsibility. Keep abreast of what is going on
and don't be afraid to raise your voice and even to close your wallet in protest.
Our Western, free-market culture need not provide the rope to hang itself, (p. 86)
It is no coincidence that many corporations who are entering into entrepreneurial
relationships with the universities are also bankrolling resistance to
multiculturalism. FMC (Ford Motor Company), Pfizer, Olin, Mobil, Wemer-
Lambert, Lilly, and other corporations are replaying their moves when their
investments are threatened abroad by class warfare: they are bankrolling a
counterinsurgency apparatus to fight class struggle inside the universities. Olin is
a prime example. Expecting a return on its investment in Yale Research Park and
its military contracts, it is in its interest to finance those forces that can defend
these investments. The same can be said for Bechtel, whom as we've seen has
come under tremendous fire for its many activities and is currently allied with
IC^ in the technopoiis program that requires the reimposition of control in the
universities. D'Souza has been useful to capital because he recognizes the role
disinvestment can play in disciplining student struggles which is why he
suggests his own benefactors use it to protect themselves.
Robin Templeton of the National Coalition of Universities in the Public
Interest (NCUPI) suggests that "we must recognize this attack [on so-called
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political correctness] for what it is: propaganda for the military/corporate drive
for campus control, and a clearly successful attempt to shift the terms of the
educational debate away from the central, material question of who controls and
benefits from the universities." However, what is being played out with PC is
much more concrete than a propaganda ploy to control the debate over education.
Rather, it is capital's attempt to save education itself; to maintain its usefulness in
disciplining and managing us. A more useful interpretation of what lies beneath
the PC counterattack is a battle "for the image of the university as a stable arena
for investment," as two writers interpret Alan Gribben’s corporate strategy to
request outside intervention into the English department so that it can be
reorganized to provide a promising return on investment.119 Such an analogy
touches the heart of education as part of the process of capital accumulation and
its pending destruction in the face of class straggle.
D'Souza’s analysis should suggest to us that the movement is yet another
chapter in more than two decades of straggles that have thrown the universities
into a crisis that capital has failed to bring under control even through austerity
and entrepreneurialization. The strength of multiculturalism then is integrally tied
up with each of the other straggles taking place inside the universities that also
seek to transform it by subordinating it to the wide-ranging needs of those who
use them. What it requires then is intensified efforts to understand how each of
our straggles can complement each other while respecting our own distinct needs
for autonomy and to circulate these straggles. The multifaceted connections of
those opposing multiculturalism to entrepreneurialization, racism, sexism, toxic
pollution, the war in Central America, the CIA and a host of other struggles
offers a tremendous opportunity to make these connections and strengthen our
ability to transcend not only the present university but the way in which we live
as well.
119 Robin Templeton, "The war on campus," Education fo r the People, Volume 2, Number 1,
fall 1991, p. 1-2; and Liz Henry and Kathy Mitchell, "Gribben, colleagues make English
department a battlefield. The Daily Texan, August 13, 1990, p. 4.
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These connections can help block the goal of the counterattack to preserve
the university—and its commercial activities, military production, intelligence,
biotech, high tech research, and environmental destruction—against articulate
demands of students that it be subordinate to their many diverse projects and
desires.
Answering the Charges
Two questions arise regarding the so-called "PC" counterattack. First, do the
charges of "PC" have any existence in reality? And second, how can the
movement respond in a manner that would not only defend its ground but also
allow it to expand its space by circulating the struggle to other areas of the
university and society?
There have been three types of denials in responses to charges of "PC".
As I've already briefly noted, some responses have been restricted to analyzing
the academic activity of the faculty while ignoring, and thus disempowering, the
role of students. By omission, many intellectuals and academics deny students
are even involved. Second, many responses deny that any radical change is even
occurring inside the universities. Although this is frequently used as an answer
to hysterical charges of a "leftist takeover" of the universities, at the heart of the
response is a denial any change whatsoever is even occurring. Lastly, an equally
self-destructive response has been to outwardly deny the existence of what is
commonly referred to as "PC" activity.
The second denial, that any struggles are taking place in the universities,
ignores the wide range of movements—environmentalism, graduate student
unionization and anti-austerity—that currently exist in the universities. While
such a claim may be a purposeful exaggeration in order to refute charges of a
leftist takeover, it too has the effect of disempowering those who have been
fighting to transform the university and subverts efforts to circulate the struggle
to others. Only one of many examples is a piece written by UT English professor
Evan Carton in mid 1991. Carton makes a fascinating analogy between the Gulf
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War and the PC War: "While they obviously differ in innumerable respects,"
writes Carton, "Operation Desert Storm and, if you will, Operation Campus
Storm both respond to internal challenges to the traditional character of the
American union and the ostensible unity of the American self in the 1990s."120
Yet, Carton who was a fundamental member of the E306 battle denies that the
struggle has accomplished anything at all: "Operation Campus Storm pillories a
veritable juggernaut, a takeover of the academy by minorities, leftist professors,
and PC courses. The truth, though, is that universities have undergone no radical
change, and that administrative power still resides elsewhere." Thus, we are hit
with a triple whammy by those who are a part of the movement: students play
only a minor role, nothing has changed, and control over the university is
external. With an attitude like this who would want to participate? Presumably
the strategy appears to be to deny much struggle exists and that little has been
accomplished in order to answer undocumented and hysterical charges that a
McCarthyite takeover is occurring. In the process, Carton and other likeminded
"defenders" overlook the point that the interests of the power elite are being
protected because they are under attack.
This strategy, applied to charges of threats to free speech, has also been
self-destructive. What is clear from the rhetoric surrounding the PC counterattack
is an attempt to use occasional examples of authoritarian activity on the part of
the student and faculty left so as to taint and delegitimize all the activity of the
student and faculty movements.121 Yet, denying that any of this activity exists
only feeds their charges since many people who has participated in student
120 Evan Carton, "The self besieged: American identity on campus and in the Gulf," Tikkun,
July-August, 1991, p. 40, italics mine.
121 Berube provides an excellent critique of many of the mainstream press coverage of PC by
demonstrating that they almost completely lack evidence to make their case. He finds that they
rely on a handful of examples such as the teaching of Rigoberta Menchu's I Rigoberta Menchu
and another professor's viewing of The Godfather in class to demonstrate the immorality of
capitalism. This is certainly a blessing, since the right has hardly discovered many worse
examples of authoritarian behavior that do exist.
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movement activities have experienced one form or another of authoritarian
relationships.122
There are innumerable cases of one group of students attempting to
impose their interests over another group of students. It may be that so-called
"white" students attempt to speak for everyone on campus (which many did
during the anti-apartheid and anti-CIA movement) or even Black and female
students fighting a similar related battle. Since the 1960s, this attempt to
subordinate the interests of others to one's own has been fought by autonomous
organizing by Black, ethnic, female, graduate and all types of students. The
success of a movement has often depended on figuring out ways for many of
these groups to work in ways that both complements and retains their own
4
autonomy. At UT-Austin, this took place with the election of Toni Luckett to the
symbolic position of Students' Association president in 1990 by a wide range of
student groups. Although nothing came out of her presidency (and nothing
should have been expected to since it would only subordinate a multiplicity of
interests through one hierarchic organization and one person) it established a
means for these groups to continue working together for another six months on a
few other issues.
However, far too often attempts by a group or groups to "lead" or
represent many other diverse people still occurs. This has been true of many
diverse types of student movements but it has become an especially troubling
problem over the last five years. For example, many students who worked to
elect Luckett believed that as a "Black Lesbian," she is somehow more
legitimately radical and should lead all students who wanted change.123 Such
hierarchicalization of exploited groups is common among the U.S. left, as we'll
see in chapter 5. When this did not materialize, those like Henson and Philpott,
co-editors of The Polemicist, who were part of the initial small group who put
1221 found this to be the case among many of the students I interviewed since 1990.
123 Although never put into print, this argument was made to me by three student activists at
the time.
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her up to running (Henson had run the previous year), later remorsed that it was
her fault but not a result of the refusal of students to be spoken for by one
student. Many times, "white" students attribute a special character to minority or
female students and abdicate control to them whether they want it or not.
Ami Chen Mills, an anti-CIA organizer in the Progressive Student
Network, summarized the ideas of much of the "white" student activists in the
US: "Oppressed groups often resist working with male, white and/or more
privileged activists because they don’t see these activists confronting oppression
at home, nor do they see a willingness on the part of white activists to give up
leadership or establish a multicultural or tolerant atmosphere within their
organizations."124 In other words, while she has a legitimate concern for
whether groups make the connection to home about their own or others racism,
she generalizes all "white" students as presumably privileged, ignoring entirely
the role of the university in capitalism, and abdicates her own autonomy to
another who she perceives as more oppressed and/or less privileged and thus
more capable of speaking for her.
Sometimes, minority students welcome the authority and power granted
by white activists. Trayce Matthews, an anti-racism activist at Michigan State
who works with the Ella Baker-Nelson Mandela Center for Anti-Racist
Education, suggests that "whites have to be willing to accept leadership from
people of color..."125 While she is correct to demand that they work with people
of color from the beginning rather than as an afterthought, she still assumes a
priority for groups of what she refers to as predominantly "whites" to
subordinate their needs to the issue of racism. Barbara Ransby, an organizer at
the University of Michigan, explains that "the second major obstacle to forming
lasting multiracial coalitions is the refusal of many whites, especially men, to
124 Ami Chen Mills, CIA O ff Campus: Building the Movement Against Agency Recruitment
and Research, South End Press: Boston, 1991, p. 54-55.
125 Cited in Barbara Ransby, "Black students fight back,” The Nation, March 26, 1988, p.
412.
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accept leadership from Blacks and other people of color," an apparent
contradiction since it would hardly be a multiracial coalition if certain groups—
white or Black—are running it. However, Ransby's point is succinct and often
ignored: rather than "white" activists taking over a movement of students of color
and imposing their priorities, they need to understand "how racism relates to
’their’ concerns" and use it as a basis for circulating the struggle to autonomous
movements already being organized by students of color.126
For some reason, a glaring double standard persists within the student
movements: after decades of struggles the autonomy of people of color, women
and Gay/Lesbians are now accepted as valid demands but the autonomy of
everyone else is denied. For example, at the second Students Against War
(SAW) meeting shortly before the bombing of Iraq began, a small group of
activists wrote an agenda in private that began with a mandatory self-criticism
section on racism and sexism in the movement—an antiwar movement that did
not yet even exist. In another instance, Luckett and three other women—all but
one of whom had never even been to a meeting—showed up an hour into a SAW
meeting late in the spring and interrupted the meeting to chastise the group for
being almost all "white" and the male members for talking too much and talking
over the women. After the chastisement, they immediately walked out without
allowing any discussion about their criticisms and only one returned a few
minutes later. Although their criticisms were legitimate, the manner in which they
presented them violated SAW’s own autonomy. Certainly, three men or "whites"
could not walk into a Black Student Alliance meeting and chastise them for
something without it being immediately obvious that they had been authoritarian
and insulting. In the same way, Luckett’s entourage, three of whom had never
participated or even discussed these matters with those in the room prior to that
meeting, was illegitimate in its action. Did they assume that they were the
authorities on racism and sexism? Where they there to give orders or to discuss
126 Ibid.
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and work out the relationship between the anti-war and anti-racism and anti
sexism movements? In addition, they insulted the desire of those people of color
who may have chosen to work against the war in their own organizations, as had
Todos Unidos, a Chicano student organization. Even some women members
reported feeling insulted that the entourage had failed to note the women's own
responsibility for speaking up for themselves and instead disempowered them by
blaming it all on the men.127
In other words, actions like these suggest that some "white” and minority
activists believe there is one way to organize and one set of issues and needs.
While demanding their own autonomy, that of others who may be working on
different but related issues are denied. Rather than struggling to find ways to
relate to each other and discover the ways in which many diverse struggles may
complement each other while maintaining each's autonomy, sometimes activists
attempt to impose a totalization of struggle that subsumes the needs and desires
of many to that of a few—whether "white" or otherwise.
This is hardly standard operating procedure among student radicals. In
fact, as D’Souza keenly observes in an attempt to pit students against each other,
many students will not put up with this kind of muscling for long and drop out
of the movements; one of the sources of what is often blamed for the high
"turnover" of student activism.128 Paradoxically, this is exactly what the "PC"
counterattack assumes: students whose needs have been run over by
authoritarianism on the left will either drop out or turn against them. While there
are no documented cases of students coming out on the right after being involved
in student activism, no doubt many become disgusted by the authoritarianism
and lose interest. A Jumpcut editorial recognizes this as well: "It’s not surprising
127 This came up in the discussion that followed the appearance of Luckett's entourage and my
later interviews of three women members of SAW.
*28 Philip Altbach, "Perspectives on Student Political Activism," in Philip Altbach (ed.),
"American Student Activism: The Post-Sixties Transformation," in Philip Altbach (ed.).
Political Student Activism: An International Reference Handbook, NY: Greenwood Press,
1989, p. 3-4.
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then that many students today are profoundly skeptical of and sometimes hostile
to the rhetoric of progressive movements from the past. Though our causes are
still just and our grievances still active, we have lost much mass support."129
However, without admitting that this problem even exists—which the editorial
fails to do—we can only fail to grasp the root of the problem, leaving us open to
ingenious ploys by those like D'Souza who attempts to not only divide and
conquer but block any possibility of circulating the struggle.
The "PC" hype has been a well planned and well financed attempt to
capitalize upon a sense of fustration and disillusionment by student and faculty
with leftist forms of organizing and struggle. Charges of PC is a twisting of
student alienation from movements that have far too often subverted their own
autonomous multiplicity of desires and needs in favor of the desires of those
presumed to be more "exploited" or "less privileged." In many cases, autonomy
is subverted by essentializing people as "white, "Gay" etc. while ignoring their
own diverse needs and identities. The essentializing of Blacks or Gays, for
example, as "the most oppressed," which presumably qualifies them to lead
everyone else, in effect also denies these Black and Gays students their own
autonomous diverse identities. "'Radicals' seem to think that all homos
experience oppression in the same way," writes Derek Robert a UT student who
participated in ACT-UP. "Refusing to associate homos with anything bad,
'radical' homos privilege all homo men and women as being above greed,
racism, sexism and homophobia; afterall, straight people are responsible for
everything bad. 'Radical' homos seem unwilling to fight homophobia or other
forms of oppression without essentialist notions of 'what it means to be Black,
Woman, or Gay/Lesbian.’ Instead of starting with a desire for a movement
l 29 John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julia Lesage, "'P.C.' hysteria," Jump Cut, number 36,
p. 127.
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against racism, sexism, homophobia and class exploitation, they insist that
identity comes first."130
Thus what we have not outwardly recognized is that "PC" capitalizes on
the existence of a very real debilitating problem among the student movements
and exaggerates it geometrically in a way as to delegitimize every struggle. It is
up to those involved in these struggles to face up to the existence of these forms
of authoritarianism that undermine the very foundation of multiculturalism: a
recognition of the autonomous existence and innumerable experiences of every
person and social group.
This requires that we not only recognize the multiplicity of non-western
and non-"white" peoples but that we also acknowledge the multiplicity of what is
too often dismissed as simply "white" or "eurocentric".131 As Christine Stansell
fascinatingly points out,
To use "Eurocentric" as a term of derision, as earnestly rightminded students too
often do, cedes much of the territory radical scholars have worked hard to claim
in the last twenty years. The Europe that radical scholarship has revealed is one
o f Jews as well as Christians, peasants as well as lords, laundresses as well as
ladies, the slave trade and imperial conquest along with constitutionalism and
popular sovereignty. "Eurocentrism" as slogan seals off "Europe" in its own
category and plays into he conservatives' ideologically driven, untruthful
depiction of Western civilization as a tidy island of Christian prosperity, cantatas,
and cathedral building, interrupted only periodically by acts of God and national
conflicts orchestrated from above.132
If multiculturalism is to mean recognition of diversity it must apply that same
standards to all social groups in a search of histories, desires, and identities that
have been mystified, smothered, repressed, distorted and exploited no matter
130 Derek Robert, "Homo essence is sexual, not political," The Daily Texan, January 28,1991,
P i 4-
131 This the reason that I have placed quotation marks around the word "white" each time it
appears and why I do not capitalize "black”, Latino" etc. By not doing so I believe I prevent the
totalization of these groups that capitalized words and labels often entail.
132 Christine Stansell, "Liberated loutishness," Tikkun, July-August, 1991, p. 53.
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what its origin. By looking at even Europe as a terrain of conflict and diversity as
Stansell suggests, we can strive to uncover a different Europe and thus dismiss a
misrepresentation that has harmed peoples of Europe as much as peoples of
Africa. Two members of the UT department of Germanic languages demonstrate
this in the case of Franz Kafka, who while writing in Germany originally came
from Prague and had a strong interest in the Yiddish language and its theater.133
Their article can be seen as much a demystification of the goals of
multiculturalism as a retort to those who have their own class or other interests
placed above another’s. Sometimes the dominance of a perceived monocultural
west is swapped for its African twin. They continue: "The use of Eurocentrism
has also bred a troubling version of what a non-Eurocentric curriculum might
look like: ’Afro-centrism,’ for example, with a celebratory emphasis on the
dynasties of Africa, especially the male dynasties, as if the triumphs of African
monarchs rather than the heroic struggles of common people—African peasants
and Afro-American farmers and laborers—provided the most salient history for
young Black people."
Rather than pitting "privileged" against "oppressed" and "western" against
"non-western" we need to slice through the mystifications of the multiplicity of
existence and experience and forms of oppression that characterize each of them
in different, yet inherently related ways. Instead of accepting the distinctions
given to us we need to try to establish relationships between us that cross and
conflict with these racial and cultural distinctions while acknowledging the
autonomy of those covered by them. For students, that means not dismissing
students or "whites" as "privileged", but struggling to understand that they too
have needs and desires to eliminate the exploitation they suffer and create new
ways of living as do others. It is this dire need to trace the relationships of the
straggles of "people of color" and "whites" and students and non-students that
133 Kit Belgum and Irene Kacandes, "Tales of German monoculture ring false," The Daily
Texan, April 29, 191, p. 4. They note that Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are examining
Kafka's "linguistic synthesis as a multicultural project."
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has motivated my research. We have come over the last two decades to
acknowledge this for people of color, women, Gays and Lesbians and others but
this accomplishment is hollow without recognizing this for all.
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. Those in the movement who have yet to
understand how multiculturalism is addressed to their own communities,
whether as “whites,” or of European ethnic ancestry, need to articulate it in a
way that brings out the fact that the university serves the needs of neither those
who want to learn about themselves and others who don’t. Since students do not
control the university they are unable to study the cultures, societies or whatever
else we would like. Likewise, those who may have no interest in this are also
suffering from increasing tuition and fees, class shortages, weeding
mechanisms, etc. because they have no say over how education serves their
needs. They’re channeled into boring classes, with inattentive and overworked
faculty, and are hounded by grades, tests, and second and third jobs. Education
means nothing more to them than jumping through hoops without catching the
ring and having a nervous breakdown or even committing suicide. The
relationship between overworked engineering students who are denied the
opportunity to study renewable energy and maybe how other societies have used
it instead of nuclear power and students seeking a multicultural education become
complementary struggles as both come to understand how the organization of the
university conflicts with their own desires.
We need to speak to the fact that the university serves to process and
prepare each member of all groups for a lifetime of work. This means
entrepreneurialization occurs at the expense of Black students learning about their
own communities as poor students who cannot afford school and have to get
second and third jobs to pay increasing costs and combinations of both. Making
this connection means linking together how these various struggles are
complementary. And through this complementarity, express how others not
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interested in or afraid and confused by multiculturalism are a part of it and can
grow from it. This means organizing our own communities in struggles that can
be mutually complementary with, if not eventually one part of, a struggle for
multiculturalism that radically transforms higher education but all of society.
Which Way for Multiculturalism?
The question has inevitably been asked whether multiculturalism is simply a
minor adjustment, a reform, or whether it has the potential to contribute to a
larger transformation of the university and maybe beyond. Too often a false
dichotomy is drawn between "reform" or "revolution" that precludes one from
the other. This has generated debate for decades which is unnecessary to
replicate here. However, suffice it to say that reform cannot contribute to a
greater transformation, a reconstitution of the way we live, if it is an end in itself.
Reform is revolutionary if it sets a groundwork for further reform and classwide
insurgency. One other factor comes into play as well. If we perceive revolution
as catastrophic or apocalyptic, in which it happens at one definable moment, then
reform is precluded from being revolutionary. However, if we understand the
transformation as revolutionary, then reform, if it is not used to block further
reform, can be a vehicle of revolution.134 These are the questions we must ask
about multiculturalism.
I have attempted to demonstrated how multiculturalism has expanded the
disruption of the university’s role in the accumulation of capital by subordinating
its function to the diverse needs of students. By reading through the rhetoric of
the PC counterattack this appears to be a primary concern of its corporate and
elite organizers. However, there are measures being taken and internal
134 This was the very concern of Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution?, NY: Pathfinder,
1970, her analysis of social democracy in pre-WWI Germany, and Toni Negri in Marx Beyond
Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. translated by Harry Qeaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio
Viano, edited by Jim Fleming, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1984.
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contradictions that may turn multiculturalism into more work for students, dead
end reforms turned upon those who made the original demands for change.
Numerous views of what multiculturalism is within the movement exist
making it almost undefinable—perhaps a positive attribute. Within the
movement, much of the reason for these conflicts can be attributed to significant
class differences that are still being fought. For example, upper class Mexican-
Americans frequently want multiculturalism in order to climb the ladder, while
Chicana/os want it to transform society, although admittedly even this is not so
clear cut. For Todos Unidos member Catarino Felan, this is all part of the class
antagonisms that cross racial (and gender and sexual orientation) lines: “when
class lines are drawn, racial equality falters and dies.”135 As a result, one of the
main thrusts of the movement has been to increase enrollment and retention.
Sometimes it is made as part of the struggle to transform society by helping to
bring in other potential student allies. Other times, it is an explicit demand for
inclusion into the ranks of capital’s management elite or the creation of a separate
racial capital.
Some business executives and educational planners have visualized
multiculturalism as a mechanism for learning to cope with an increasing diversity
of the labor force and turning it to their advantage for generating more
productivity and efficiency from their workers. Frank Newman, author of the
famed Newman Report and president of the Educational Commission of the
States. Newman recognizes a need for a more "educated" and "flexible"
workforce which must be accomplished "while facing, as a country, this,
massive effort of learning to deal with cultural diversity."136 Opponents have
resisted, recognizing that giving a little space will only lead to demands for more
and deepen the crisis.
135 Catarino Felan HI, "Hispanic decade," Tejas, December 1990, p. 6.
136 Quoted in Richard Bonnin, "Newman urges education reform for U.S., Soviets," On
Campus, November 19, 1990, p. 10.
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A significant conflict in tactics has arisen around the primary demand of
most sectors of the movement, such as at Stanford where it was successful, to
require one or more classes from a multicultural perspective for all students. This
tactic has been met with opposition or mostly indifference by students who are
not necessarily opposed to multiculturalizing the university but resist
multiculturalism that, once in the university’s hands, becomes yet another course
with more imposed schoolwork to struggle through. This, as we’ve seen has
been used to divide students. Recognizing students resistance to school/work,
the countermovement has gone to great lengths to taint multiculturalism as
creating more work. They are mostly right since turning it into a required course
makes it just more schoolwork for many students. Demands for required courses
reproduces the organizational structure of education by reducing multiculturalism
to work which will inevitably be despised and resisted by students who might
otherwise want to participate in efforts to transform society. Even though the
UT-Austin Faculty Senate and University Council framed the requirement in a
very flexible way so as to allow existing courses to overlap in credit, thus
making it almost meaningless, science and engineering faculty ignored this and
continued to demonize the reform as more work that would distract their students
from what they wanted them to learn in preparation for waged jobs.
Requiring classes is only one tactic of many but it is becoming the most
successful with courses required at a number of universities. This success needs
to be thoroughly reevaluated. Of all the PRIDE proposals why did the required
course come closest to being realized? Probably because that proposal follows
the logic of higher education that divides our experiences into courses, grades
and grade points, manageable segments of information. As multiculturalism
increasingly becomes limited to being required, another hoop for us to jump
through, it will become increasingly stripped of its subversive potential.
Changing the content without transforming the form cannot help but reproduce
the existing organization of the university. It is not enough to learn something
different but to learn it differently as well. If we continue to define education as
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capitalist, racist, etc. by what rather than how we learn instead of both, then we
have not progressed anywhere. Requiring multiculturalism is the 1990s version
of the left's strategy for dealing with the universities, as we'll see in chapter 5;
"after the revolution" the content is changed but the university remains.
The limits inherent in requiring multiculturalism courses are being turned
against those who are fighting for it and those who can use it. If multiculturalism
only means more work then we have not realized our goal of further making the
universities a space for studying ourselves and the ways in which we've lived,
loved and fought. It becomes something more to do to raise one's future income.
Corporations and educational planners have begun to recognize this new
institutionalized role as well. Companies are increasingly turning towards it for
understanding diverse parts of society and the world that they have not been able
to in the past. As the birthrate of "white" workers declines and their refusal of
work increases, businesses are becoming increasingly vulnerable to their reliance
on workers who it does not understand and cannot control. "Companies like
Kochman Communications use the 'management of diversity' catchphrase to
promote their high fee services. According to Kochman's brochure, 'If you
don't recognize varying cultural differences then you run the risk of
underutilizing employees.' Like a growing number of others, this company
offers help in changing employees' bad attitudes toward authority; developing
flexible disciplinary styles and diversity management. Profit provides motivation
for understanding others, promoting cultural knowledge as a management
tool."137 Although multicultural education can teach many antagonistic groups
to struggle together it can also be used to make them work together and to train
Black and brown managers who can control a rapidly increasing Black and
137 Carmen Valera, "Multiculturalism: Big business in small souls," Tejas, December 1990,
p. 2.
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brown workforce. The American Institute for Managing Diversity Inc. based at
Morehouse College is taking the lead in offering such services.138
The supreme nightmare may be that multiculturalism could also become a
means for regaining control over the universities. Carmen Valera draws the
connection to UT-Austin: “as recently racially motivated events on campus
demonstrate, universities may prove harder to govern.” To do so, UT brought in
the Anti-Defamation League, who opposes affirmative action, to give racial
sensitivity workshops to administrators. The question that must be asked is
whether multiculturalism will be presented in such a way that it can be easily
assimilatable as just more schoolwork and a mechanism of reimposing control or
whether it is part of a broader struggle to reorganize the campus and society.
Whether or not the multiculturalism movement is successful depends on
whether it can produce reforms that can strengthen student struggles to
subordinate the university to their needs or can be used against them. This turns
upon apparent inconsistencies in how schoolwork relates to multiculturalism. Is
multiculturalism only another type of schoolwork, with tests, grades and a
degree? Are students resisting schoolwork that processes them as homogeneous
workers only to demand more that will train them as “diverse” workers? Is
multiculturalism no more than an extension of the left’s claim that more studying
creates a more class conscious worker who will then begin to struggle? Or is
multiculturalism a coalescence of the long resistance to school as a disciplining
for work and the struggle to reorganize society so that embraces a multiplicity of
ways of living?
One way to resolve these apparent conflicts is to address the expected role
of students in capitalism, which is only beginning to be done. We have seen how
multiculturalism can be used to manage. What is the connection between
multiculturalism and student income and austerity? ONDA addresses, along with
138 Julie Nicklin, "Helping to Manage Diversity in the Workforce," The Chronicle o f Higher
Education, September 30,1992, p. A5.
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demands for more faculty and student enrollment, the difficulty of working class
and “minority” youth to afford higher education by proposing the creation of
paid tutor/mentor positions for Chicano students to assist other Chicano
students. The connection between the hardships of being an unwaged student,
loan debt, disinvestment of the universities and the demand for multiculturalism
is made quite brilliantly: “the insufficient number of TA, RA, and grader
positions force many such graduate students [with little support other than loans]
to register only part-time and some to drop out. The creation of a tutoring
program can meet these needs by paying low-income graduate students to tutor
low-income undergraduate students.”139 By implication, it seeks to make the
university pay for helping “politicize” new students: “these tutors will also serve
as role models and assist in the socialization process of undergraduate students
into university life.”
Beside demanding more fellowships, scholarships and financial
opportunities for “minority” and other working class students, ONDA connects
financial aid to access. It recommends that UT “eliminate the GPA requirement to
receive financial aid. Students ‘at risk’ are among those who would be least
burdened with the responsibility of having to work while simultaneously raising
their GPA’s. The university should provide alternative financial aid for all
students on academic probation.” (p. 12)
These demands impressively call for breaking the relationship between
how much work one does— measured by ones' grades, progress and wage— in
the form of financial aid. The connection between schoolwork and subsistence
would be severed by replacing "aid" with a guaranteed income or wage that is
not measured by how much work one does. By demanding more grants and
scholarships, while the latter is still on a competitive basis, there is an expressed
refusal of debt and the extra work it requires. We have here the seed of a new
analysis of income missing from student struggles and coincidentally how
139 ONDA, p. 15.
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cutbacks have worked to force us out of the university faster or prematurely,
turned us into cheap labor while in school, and divided the movement. While a
similar analysis has been articulated by Black students it needs to be fleshed out
and circulated throughout the campus.
ONDA's connection between income and multiculturalism suggests one
manner in which efforts to institutionalize the movement can be headed off.
Multiculturalism is more than just learning about Black or brown cultures but, as
ONDA would seem to indicate, a means for allowing broad access to the
resources and social spaces of the university which can be used for many diverse
purposes. Perhaps this may be further served by an explicit demand for wages
for schoolwork, which I will examine in the last chapter, that would give
students an autonomous resource to confront the use of money to keep them out.
Not the Conclusion
I have attempted to reexamine the motivations for the PC counterattack in terms
of the crisis of the university and the use of entrepreneurialization and austerity
as a mechanism to reimpose control. This is evident in D'Souza's analysis as I
have demonstrated above who suggested disinvestment as a weapon against
multiculturalism. Likewise, it is implicit in the UT-Austin based University
Review's (a Collegiate Network member) attempt to explain multiculturalism in
terms of a cut in student's standard of living: "The cost of the extra tuition [for
the multiculturalism requirement]—and in most cases, the extra semester in
which to take the courses—is more than the average student can handle in
today's hard times."140 Such an analysis attempts to portray multiculturalism as
a cost rather than a change that can be used to serve needs that are being blocked
from realization. It is a similar tactic utilized by UT-Austin faculty who played
140 The University Review Editorial Board, "An appeal to University of Texas faculty
members, from the University Review of Texas," University Review, February 1992, p. 11.
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upon student dissatisfaction with degree programs that allow them little time to
pursue other academic interests.
Deep down multiculturalism isn't about required courses, awareness
seminars, and recruitment and retention as much it is a question of what students
do in and with the university, what the university is and its role in the broader
global society. If we recognize that being a student is to be trained to accept work
as an interchangeable mass part in the machine of accumulation, then
multiculturalism is an expression for multiplicity and refusal to be reduced to just
being students. Just as Harry Cleaver has suggested that "most workers have
struggled to cease being defined as workers as they have sought a richer, more
multilateral existence," so have students struggled against being defined as
students trained to spend their lives working and have sought, through demands
for multiculturalism, new ways of living.141
Because it has served as an experimentation with new ways of living and
learning, multiculturalism offers an element of "self-valorization" to the other
struggles against entrepreneurialization, environmental destruction and m ilitarism
on the campuses. Combined, these struggles have rattled the operation of the
social factory and have played with new social formations. In this sense, each of
the movements I have examined are complementary. It is for this reason that a
well planned and financed campaign to defeat the multiculturalism movement is
in operation. It is no coincidence that the same corporations that have participated
in the reorganization of the universities to make them more subservient to the
interests of capital accumulation have pinpointed multiculturalism as its greatest
threat. Students have begun to look directly at the universities and themselves
and have decided its time for a change.
141 Harry Cleaver, "Notes on the Argentine Gauchos and the nature of the working class: from
a letter to George Rawick," Common Sense, number 10, May, 1991, p. 59. Cleaver continues:
"From this point of view, to call such workers part of the 'working class' is almost insulting,
it implies their failure to avoid having their lives reduced to work. To be a worker, for such a
person, is to be a loser. Who wants to be a worker?” I plan to expand further on this theme in
the last chapter.
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The crisis of the universities that the multiculturalism movement threatens
to extend is being reproduced throughout all of capitalist society. Then UT-
Austin Dean of Liberal Arts Robert King laid out his own opposition to
multiculturalism as a local expression of larger socio-political crises in capitalist
society:
The problem today—and this is society’s problem as much as it is the
university’s problem— is that no one can agree on the common good.
Everywhere factionalism rages like a mad, insatiable beast of prey. All the horses
are pulling in opposite directions. Think of your local school board. Think of the
terrible disagreements about theology that have factionalized religion in this
country and throughout the world. Think of the irresolvable disputes about the
environment. Think of the battlelines that are drawn in the legislature at the
beginning of the biennium. Think of our own university, where a great noble
entity—The University—has to an ever sadder degree been replaced by
competition among great and powerful fiefdoms...Too few people want to pull
together. That's why multiculturalism causes such problems: nobody trusts
anybody; there's too little spirit of compromise.142
The crisis of the universities and of society as a whole demonstrates a grave
danger to the existence of the current dialectical organization of life which is
temporarily determined by the accumulation of capital. For Michal Foucault, this
crisis was reflected in thought itself which has undergone an explosion of
multiplicity evading all efforts at a totalized and unified logic.143 This rupturing
of the dialectic is coming about because of the multiple forms of struggle that are
taking place international against work, the international debt, development,
environmental destruction, and most importantly in our case, against education,
concurrently with the pursuit of the infinite desires and needs of life and
existence. Whether a new dialectic will be imposed or we can break away into an
142 Robert King, "Community and factionalism," The Texas Observer, November 29, 1991,
p. 14, italics mine. This appeared as a paid ad by American Income Life Insurance Co. whose
Chairman of the Board and CEO is current UT Regent Bernard Rapoport
143 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology o f Knowledge and Discourse or&Language, NY:
Pantheon, 1972.
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infinite forms of social organization cannot yet be determined but if the struggle
around multiculturalism is any indication, we are right now taking part in the
organizing of multiple futures in the present.
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Section III. The University and Students in a Capitalist Society
C h a p te r 4. A T heory of the E n tre p re n e u ria liz a tio n of the
U n iv ersities
There are two primary strategies currently in use for restoring the manageability
of US universities in the face of the two decade long crisis of higher education.
A manufactured fiscal austerity (including increased costs, cutbacks, and
disinvestment) is joined by a comprehensive reorganization of the very nature of
the universities—which I call entrepreneurialization—that has been in the works
since the early 1980s. Entrepreneurialization is the process of reorganizing the
universities into overt businesses whose primary mission is to profit directly
from the intellectual activities taking place on campus. Austerity is a key aspect to
the transition process because money is rechanneled into profit-oriented projects
and ventures. Each aspect of the university is put under pressure by austerity to
generate its own operating funds. As a result, those areas resistant to or unable to
generate revenues through adapting its mission to making and selling new
products undergo rampant austerity. Over time, commercially promising
programs and activities come to dominate the operation of the university.
Entrepreneurialization is the latest stage of reorganization of the
universities following their industrialization into businesses from 1894-1928 and
their integration as part of the military-industrial-academic complex beginning
with WWI but formalized during WWII.1 Industrialization proceeded through
1 For industrialization see: Barrow, 1990; Upton Sinclair, The Goose Step: A Study o f Higher
Education, Pasadena Ca.: self-published, 1922; David Noble, America By Design: Science,
Technology and the Rise o f Corporate Capitalism, NY: Knopf, 1977; and Thorstein Veblen,
The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct o f Universities by Business
Men, NY: Sagamore Press, 1918, 1957. For militarization see Committee for Non-Violent
Research, Going fo r Broke: The University and the Military-Industrial Complex, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 1982; Noble, 1977; Howard Ehrlich, "The University-Military Connection," Social
Anarchism: A Journal o f Practice and Theory, nos. 8&9, 1985, p. 3-21; Robert Krinsky,
"Swords Into Sheepskins," Science for the People, Jan/Feb, 1988, p. 2-5; David Wilson
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standardization of the activities of each campus in order to analyze them in terms
of productivity and investment potential, their final product being ideological
control and disciplined intellectual labor power.2
Such standardization has facilitated entrepreneurialization by providing
information that has come to guide academic policy-making to the point where,
short of resistance, "unprofitable" activities are disinvested from in favor of
profitable high tech areas. However, entrepreneurialization is more than a change
in investment but a fundamental shift in the organizational impetus of the
university itself. The university is increasingly being organized around the
commercialization and marketing of profitable activities while cutting and
discontinuing those areas that do not successfully begin to commercialize or are
antagonistic to commercialization. During the process of industrialization, the
university was subordinate to business and the state which applied and profited
from their research, few universities doing so themselves due to federal
restrictions and limited capital. With entrepreneurialization, the university no
longer only serves to discipline labor power but also to use that labor power in
the production o f new commodities and the direct accumulation o f capital. As we
saw in chapters 2-3, universities are beginning to privately patent and
commercialize publicly funded research, knowledge and technology as products.
These products of the university "enterprise" are then marketed by university-
and faculty-owned "spin-off' companies germinated in university owned
business parks and small business incubators, and coordinated by university-
owned foundations posing as non-profit institutions. That only small aspects of
each university have been entrepreneurialized since the reorganization began in
(volume editor), The Annals o f the American Academy o f Political and Social Science,
"Universities and the Military," Newbury Park: Sage, Vol. 502, March 1989; Sheila Slaughter,
The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics o f Higher Education Policy Formation,
Albany: State University of New York, 1990; and Barrow, 1990.
2 Barrow, p. 82-83.
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1980 can be attributed to overt and everyday forms of resistance by faculty,
staff, students, and neighboring communities who have stood in the way.
This chapter briefly examines the industrialization of the universities
beginning during the late 1900s in order to demonstrate that the de
industrialization of the universities—like the economy as a whole—came about
as a response to class struggle within the universities which took the form of the
student revolts of the 1960-70s. My focus, however is on analyzing how this
reorganization has come about both on the day-to-day organizational level of the
university and its role in capitalism. Taking the form of entrepreneurialization,
the universities, like capital as a whole, are now focused on the development of
high tech development and commercialization in order to reduce their dependency
on unpredictable human labor. In response to their inability to discipline
uncontrollable students into docile workers, the universities too have become
capital intensive, developing new high tech tools for automating production,
war, and even biological reproduction. While still serving to generate new
workers, the universities have a new primary focus—selling directly for profit
what they create. This very reorientation makes it clear for the first time that the
universities are not only a part of capitalist accumulation but central to it.
Inversion of Class Perspective
Taking the starting point that the universities are a productive part of capital,
Clyde 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, 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).
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Such a class analysis is useful for re-reading the voluminous materials
generated to facilitate and plan industrialization and attempts to entrepreneurialize
the universities. Since little critical analyses exist it is necessary make use of
these materials to understand not only what capital ("composition of capital") is
doing but the "political class recomposition" which gave impetus to
restructuring. Once we understand the composition of capital, "we can...reverse
our perspective and examine the phenomenon from the point of view of the
people whose productive activities are being subordinated."3
This dissertation is an effort to carry out the two tiered task of examining
the current conflict over the composition of capitalist power in the universities
(chapters 2 and 4) and analyzing the recomposition of the working class as it
specifically deals with student struggle (chapters 3, 5 and 6). Cleaver makes
clear the distinction and the interrelationship of the composition of capital and the
recomposition of the working class:
While it can be said that capital seeks a 'class composition,' i.e., a particular
structure of inter- and intra-class power which gives it sufficient control over the
working class to guarantee accumulation, it is also true that workers' struggles
repeatedly undermine such control and thus rupture the efficacy (from capital's
point of view) of such a class composition. Such a rupture occurs only to the
degree that workers are able to recompose the structures and distribution of
power among themselves in such a way as to achieve a change in their own
relations of power to their class enemy. Thus the struggles which achieve such
changes bring about a 'political recomposition' of the class relations—
'recomposition' of the intra-class structures of power and 'political' because that
in turn changes the inter-class relations.4
While they are abstract concepts, the composition of capital and the political
recomposition of the working class are an attempt to view empirical day-to-day
interplays of antagonisms. During periods of class insurgency, new means are
3 Harry Cleaver, "Marxian Theory and the Inversion of Class Perspective in its Concepts: Two
Case Studies," draft paper, April, 1989, p. 6.
4 Cleaver, p. 5.
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devised to restore control by putting people back to work. If these new methods
of control are successful, they rarely last long as new eruptions of class struggle
disrupt their operation leading again to new efforts of organizational control.5
Since the turn of the century, the universities have become a fundamental means
for restoring control by helping to devise new means of social organization. As
we'll see, during a period of world revolution, the industrialization of the
universities provided efficient means for producing more disciplined workers
and a new technological means of production that concurrently became the
organizational principle of higher education. Likewise, entrepreneurialization
follows another period of international student rebellion that ruptured human
capital management of higher education.
"The concept of political recomposition theoretically articulates the central
role of working class struggle at the heart of technological change and the
concepts of class composition and decomposition provide vehicles for rethinking
issues of technological domination in terms of capital's efforts to cope with an
autonomously active, and opposed, historical subject" (Cleaver, p. 5). Such an
inversion of class perspective allows us to understand how the industrialization
and entrepreneurialization of the universities are fundamental technological
responses to class struggle. Such an approach guides the work of others
investigating higher education besides Barrow. Noble views technological
change as a social process for organizing society although overlooking any
5 Cleaver writes: "The introduction of new technologies, of new organizations of machinery
and workers, if successful, results in the undermining of workers' struggles and their reduction,
once more, to the status of labor power. But whatever new 'class composition' is achieved, it
only becomes the basis for further conflicts because the class antagonism can only be managed,
it cannot be done away with. Thus, these three new concepts, one static and two dynamic,
provide guides to the analysis of what have come to be called 'cycles of class struggle,' wherein
the upswing in such a cycle involves a period of political recomposition by workers and the
downswing, however much the workers win or lose, a process of class decomposition through
which capital reestablishes sufficient control to continue its overall management of society." p.
5.
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existence of resistance;6 Sinclair offered a strategic analysis of students and
faculty as part of the class struggle through their struggles for academic
democracy during industrialization; and Ahoites, Slaughter, Newson and
Buchbinder all recognize current restructuring as rooted in the political crisis that
began in the 1960s and still characterized by conflict.7
Ironically, as factories, the universities are producing new technologies of
automated production (better known as CAD/CAM or Computer Aided Deign)
for responding to working class re-organization. From biotechnology to
automation, assembly lines of university researchers are designing the means for
continuing production and warmaking but without human workers. Describing
the University of Michigan's Center on Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing
(CRIM), John Schloerb points out that automated technologies "can perform a
variety of manufacturing tasks with more precision—and less chance of
striking—than volatile human workers."8 At the same time, these technologies
also become the means for automating the university through interactive CDROM
and televised classrooms for example. As discussed further in the conclusion,
the university is not simply "participating in the creation of the 'factory of the
future’ or 'the automated factory'," as Slaughter found many university
presidents acknowledging the role of the universities, but is itself a proto-type
6 Noble, 1977, p. xxii: "An essentially human phenomenon, technology is thus a social
process; it does not simply stimulate social development from outside but, rather, constitutes
fundamental social development in itself; the preparation, mobilization, and habituation of
people for new types of productive activity, the reorientation of the pattern of social
investment, the restructuring of social institutions, and, potentially, the redefinition of social
relationships.”
7 Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics o f Higher Education
Policy Formation, Albany: State University of New York, 1990; Janice Newson and Howard
Buchbinder, The University Means Business, Toronto: Garamond, 1988; and V. Hugo Aboites,
"Economic Globalization and the Transformation of the Mexican University," undated
manuscript
8 John Schloerb, "Which Way CRIM? The Military, Industry and Academic Enquiry," in
Committee for Non-Violent Research, Going for Broke: The University and the Military-
Industrial Complex, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982, p. 11.
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(p. 124). Such research is not only the socialized cost of the reorganization of
reproduction due to class conflict but is the impetus for the reorganization of the
universities motivated by internal conflicts as well.
The Industrialization of the Universities
The industrialization of the universities was preceded by the establishment of
"land-grant colleges" through the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 and
finalized in 1887 by the Hatch Act. These acts established the purpose of what
are known as "land-grant colleges and universities" to serve in the development
of agriculture and manual training. Although some publicly funded universities
already existed, the land-grant universities marked the federal governments first
intervention into higher education in a three-fold effort to train workers, expand
colonization and develop new agricultural technologies. From the very beginning
of the land-grant universities, the role of the universities in organizing society
around work—"practical studies"—was clear: "The founders of the land-grant
colleges, in keeping with historical thought and experience, acknowledged the
essential importance of work, as they dedicated their institutions to helping the
industrial or working classes better their lot in life."9
Although land-grant campuses were created throughout the country (37
states authorized campuses within the first eight years), their establishment in the
western half of the country coincided with the long running "Indian Wars."
Likewise, the Morrill Act passed on its second attempt while in the midst of a
failing Union Army eight months into the Civil War by requiring military cadet
training. Since land-grant campuses were required to offer cadet m ilitary training
programs10 and existed mostly in regions of the country that had not been
9 David Madsen, "The Land-Grant University: Myth and Reality," chapter 3 in G. Lester
Anderson (ed.), Land-Grant Universities and Their Continuing Challenge, Michigan State Univ.
Press, 1976, p. 24, 34-35
10 Barrow, p. 134.
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completely colonized, they went hand in hand with the militarization of the west
where few government institutions other than Army forts existed.
These military responsibilities point to the militarization of the universities
beginning largely before WWI as is commonly assumed.11 In the big picture,
the universities were one of a number of tools crafted for the purposes of
colonization. The same month the Morrill Act was passed, Congress also passed
the Homestead Act which granted 234 million acres to encourage rapid settlement
and colonization and provided 181 million acres to the railroads to make their
way across the country.12 As colonists drove Native Americans and Mexicans
off their lands with Army assistance and federal recognition of their homestead
claims, the land grant universities were looked upon to provide not only trained
cadets but also the workers and technological know-how for agriculturally
exploiting it. From their very inception public universities were a primary force
of primitive accumulation, aiding in the subduing of resistant Native American
tribes, removing them from access to their traditional means of subsistence and
placing them at the mercy of the US government. The creation of militarized
universities and colonization went hand in hand. The universities' early role in
the process of primitive accumulation, that is reducing Native Americans from
autonomous communities to people who were forced to work to survive, was
their first contribution to capital accumulation—by helping to create a class of
people reduced to workers.13
At the same time, the land-grant universities became a significant terrain of
struggle between independent farmers, so-called "white" subsistence farmers,
and large growers and, by the 20th century, large industrial capitalists, for
11 See Barrow, 1990; and Noble, 1977.
12 Richard Abrams, "The US Military and Higher Education: A Brief History," in David
Wilson, 1989, p. 16; and David Madsen, p. 32.
13 The concept of primitive accumulation is discussed by Karl Marx in the last chapter of
Capital: A Critique o f Political Economy, vol. I, NY: Vintage, 1977. Carey Eskridge and I are
currently exploring this argument in our research.
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control. This conflict mirrors the university's role in primitive accumulation.
University extension agents and experiment stations, which were mandated by
the 1887 Hatch Act in response to the National Grange, Farmer’s Alliance and
Populist investigations and criticisms, soon fell into service to agri-business in
developing new technologies that undermined subsistence fanning and served to
place tighter control over farm laborers, many of whom would increasingly
become waged workers after losing their land.
But the Morrill Act’s influence was not limited primarily to agriculture. Its
passage led to a rapid increase in engineering programs in the 1870s and
eventually engineering stations by the turn of the century although they received
one-twentieth the funding of agricultural stations even in 1925 (Madsen, p. 44).
As Barrow, Veblen and Sinclair note, university governing boards became
overwhelmingly dominated first by large growers and then industrial capitalists,
displacing the clergy as the predominant group from which trustees were
chosen.14 The transition of formal control from first the clergy and then from
agri-business to industrialists corresponds with the changing class relations of
the universities and their integration into industrial capital.15
Although university professors began conducting research in coordinated
efforts with corporations in the telephone, electrical, and chemical industries, for
example, and private contracting began in 1910, it was another decade until the
universities became fully integrated into the industrial structure (Noble, p. 128).
These efforts were far from federally supported or organized policies. Aside
from the creation of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
14 Barrow documents that agri-business composed between 43-50% of the membership of
midwestem land grant university boards of trustees until the early 1900s. (p. 56) Their
domination was often challenged by the Grange, Farmers’ Alliance and Populist Party
movements who actively resisted their control and ran opposition candidates, at one point
actually composing 29% of these boards during the period 1881-1900. (p. 58)
15 Barrow argues that "This shift constituted an opening through which businessmen acquired
an institutional capacity to reconstitute dramatically the intellectual labor process with
modernizing policies." (p. 60)
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(CFAT) in 1906 and the Rockefeller Foundation/General Education Board in
1903, there was little coordinated effort to carry out this integration. It was the
founding of the National Research Council during WWI to organize university
resources for the war effort that signaled the first federal effort to consolidate a
coherent relationship between the universities and industrial production, its
primary focus after the war (Noble, p. 154). In effect, the industrialization of the
universities is inseparable from their militarization.
Although the extent of industrialization was not limited to simply formal
relationships and service between universities and business, it signals the
existence of a more substantive reorganization of the universities. For Noble,
this reflected not simply the socialization of the costs of private corporate
research, a common critique of commercialization even today,16 but the
transformation and subordination of all of science to the needs of capital (p.
147).17
The substantive transformation of the universities into a sector of
industrial capital came about as a result of more than simply the creation of
corporate foundations and corporate control over boards of trustees and research
projects. Such connections were not without resistance, as was agri-business'
previous domination, and a number of well documented critiques were made of
industrialization, a few American Federation of Teachers locals formed, and the
AAUP created in 1915 to defend tenure.18 The heart of the transformation of the
16 Slaughter offers this interpretation. Corporate executives "development strategy turns on
'privatization,' or socializing the costs of development, maintaining profits, and hoping that
prosperity will expand to include the majority of the citizenry. The public is asked to spend
increasing amounts of tax dollars to underwrite university-industry agreements." (p. 46-7)
17 This process has occurred much later in Mexico, for example. Aboites argues that the
current reorganization of Mexican universities is an attempt to undermine the use of the
universities for those in areas of society other than business, (p. 22)
18 Lightner Witmer, The Nearing Case, NY: B.W. Huebsch, 1915; Veblen, 1918; Scott
Nearing, "Who’s Who Among College Trustees?" School and Society 6, September 8, 1917;
Faculty of Colorado College, Report on College and University Administration, General Series
no. 94, Colorado Springs: Colorado College Publications, 1917; J.A. Leighton, "Report of
Committee T on the Place and Function of Faculties in University Government
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universities into a central component of industrial production came about as a
result of the application of business principles to their everyday operation, more
specifically, the rationalization of academia.
As with entrepreneurialization, industrialization was a process of
reorganization that mirrored the contested class relations of the time period. As
Barrow notes:
The modernization of American universities, as well as the emergence of the
professional academic intellectual, coincided with the industrial revolution in
America. The structural patterns associated with capitalist development reappear
in a series of quite similar events that also revolutionized the American college
and labor process. The transformation of the traditional American college into the
modern university followed the same pattern of institutional change:
concentration of the means of mental production, centralization and
bureaucratization of administrative control, the construction of national academic
markets, and the rationalization of market relations between competing
institutions, (p. 31)
Barrow provides intricate detail of one of the fundamental means of
industrialization: the application of quantitative surveys to higher education to
evaluate productivity and efficiency. Following his observation that the
university is coming to "more and more conform in its administration to the
methods of the business corporation," the Carnegie Foundation's first president
Henry Pritchett contacted Frederick Taylor in 1909 to conduct "an economic
study of education."19 Taylor put Pritchett in contact with his disciple Morris
Administration," Bulletin oftheAAU P 6, March 1920, p. 17-47; Sinclair, 1922, p. 454-459;
and Barrow, 1990, p. 88-94 and 180-182. A good example of such resistance occurred with the
defeat of a corporate initiated bill to establish engineering experiment stations modeled after
agricultural stations because of opposition to public subsidization of industry. (Noble, p. 136)
From its very inception the AAUP, however, accepted the corporate control and organization of
the university and attempted to work within it to defend tenure while also participating in their
militarization. (Barrow, p. 130-131, 171-173 and 255).
19 Henry Pritchett, "Shall the University Become a Business Corporation?" Atlantic Monthly
96, September 1905, p. 289-99; and Pritchett quoted in Kenneth Trombley, The Life and Times
o f a Happy Liberal: A Biography o f Moris Llewellyn Cooke, NY: Harper, 1954, p. 6-11.
(Cited in Barrow, p. 66-67)
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Cooke who a year later completed his groundbreaking analysis, which was
published by the Carnegie Foundation. The power of Cooke's study was that he
"translated the ideals of corporate capitalism into a practical strategy for
educational reform" (Barrow, p. 74).
Cooke went about this by applying principles of business to a strategy for
managing the universities. He attempted to reorganize the various activities of the
universities so that they could be compared in terms of their so-called
productivity and efficiency. In an effort to standardize these operations, Cooke
recommended numerous structural reorganizations and measurement tools that
are not only still with us as today but taken for granted as indicators of learning.
He suggested the creation of academic departments, budgetary cost-benefit
accounting of expenses, line item budgeting, annual financial reports, centralized
management of facilities and physical plant, and clearer hierarchic distinctions
between faculty and the administration. At the time, few universities had separate
departments, faculty could teach in nearly any area they chose, and faculty
dominated most day-to-day decision-making. Many presidents still even taught
classes. A more distinct hierarchy or division of labor was required in order to
make this analysis. Once departments were created, they could be compared with
the use of standardized statistical methods.
While management had to be differentiated and analyzed, so did the
workers. Various means were suggested and implemented to measure the
productivity and efficiency of faculty by measuring the same of students. In
order to compare the productivity of departments and faculty, Cooke suggested
the creation of student-hours and an analysis costs per student hour. The
CFAT's Mann Report later recommended standardizing the engineering student
workload like that of waged workers, restricting it to eighteen hours or less per
week.20 The logic behind these measures was to manage the labor of faculty
20 C.R. Mann, "A study of Engineering Education," Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, Bulletin No. 11, 1918, in Otis Lancaster, "The Future of
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who Cooke explicitly recognized faculty as workers, overlooking students as
workers.21 Although the measure of student workloads were central in
evaluating faculty labor, Barrow focused on the proletarianization of professors.
He summizes that "The theoretical effect of this new measurement was to focus
attention on professors as mental workers for the first time in their history. If the
university was conceptualized as an economic unit of production, the role of the
professor as its chief producer was altered as well" (p. 70).
Cooke emphasized a need to transform the labor of professors by
suggesting an attack on the guild organization that preserved faculty power
through inbreeding and tenure and advocated national searches and competition
among candidates. Criteria for appointments and wages were changed to
emphasize specialization, efficiency, and productivity. Today, these are
measured at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) by annual reports and
other departmental requirements that faculty report their number of published
articles, books, grants, and awards in order to demonstrate their productivity and
qualification for tenure, promotion or raises. Specialization was conceived by
Cooke as a means for standardizing and making the labor of professors
interchangeable. Specialization and Cooke's "elective system" idea worked hand
in hand to make courses "standardized, interchangeable parts with precise and
predetermined specifications with which students could be assembled" (Barrow,
p. 72). His suggestion that standardized lecture files be created is today a
fundamental means by which introductory courses are taught by constantly
changing graduate students and part-time faculty. Cooke devised the means for
measuring faculty time use and other techniques for measuring faculty
productivity.
Engineering Education in Land-grant Universities, ch. 6 in G. Lester Anderson (ed.), Land-
Grartt Universities and Their Continuing Challenge, Michigan State Univ. Press, 1976, p. 110-
111.
21Moms Cooke, "Academic and Industrial Efficiency," CFAT Bulletin no. 5, Boston:
Merrymount Press, 1910, p. 21.
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Cooke’s reforms carried with it the power of the corporate foundations.
Since there was little federal and state financial support for higher education, the
foundations were able to use access to their endowments and faculty pension
funds to impose a new industrial order. "By linking the availability of increased
financial resources for higher education to the adoption of a corporate reform
program, the foundations could use material pressures to reinforce the appeal of
their proposed policies" (Barrow, p. 75). Access to Carnegie pension funds was
mediated by the requirement that the university follow the procedures laid out in
its Standard Forms for Financial Reports, and the Rockefeller General Education
Board sent out "field representatives" to assist the campuses in their
reorganization and published a manual for standardizing fiscal management
(Barrow, p. 77). Combined, CFAT and the GEB's pension fund and
endowment totaled 26% of the existing college and university endowments. That
most of the money went to only a few handful of about 1000 institutions
indicates that existing resistance to industrialization and the influence of the
foundations in implementing it may have caused problems in implementing these
reforms.
A number of additional standardization processes came about as a result of
WWI. In 1917,20% of the universities switched to a quarter system to speed up
the graduation of students into the military. The ROTC was created in 1916
under another title, the first selective service law was also passed that year and
the draft changed to allow technical students to allow to finish school first
(Barrow, p. 128). Techniques used to sort and manage soldiers were applied to
the universities in the form of placement, guidance, honors programs, tracking,
entrance tests based on IQ tests given to draftees (Noble, p. 233). For Barrow,
the "the nationalization and standardization of university administration was one
of the war's [WWT] most obvious results. The necessity of conducting constant
inventories of personnel and plant for national agencies hastened the diffusion of
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standardized measurements developed by the educational engineers. It promoted
internal reorganization as an adaption to national directives" (p. 146).
It was no accident that a number of top ranking CFAT and GEB
administrators were instrumental in government war preparation commissions
that consolidated and organized the universities' participation in the war. Sam
Capen of CFAT, who conducted the first survey of universities based on
Cooke's study, served on a commission to expand ROTC and an academic
militarization commission during WWI, became the first director of the American
Council on Education which was formed to centralize the role of the universities
in manpower training and industrial research according to national policy
(Barrow, p. 147). WWI provided the impetus for widespread adoption of
standardization that the foundations and surveys alone could not accomplish.22
Higher education became the focus of the foundations not simply for
intellectual resources but for disciplining of new labor power, that is, the creation
of new workers, as well. Behaviorist psychological methods created in the
universities and first used during WWI, became the basis of what Noble called
the "the science of education." The same "manpower" techniques applied to the
utilization of college students as soldiers became fundamental to the organization
of students as waged workers. "The conceptual lens through which this proud
new breed of 'scientific' educators viewed the 'process of education' was
identical to the one through which the personnel directors of the science-based
industrial corporations viewed it earlier in the century: education was one side of
the corporate 'personnel problem'" (Noble, p. 253).
The "personnel problem" was studied and researched by the NRC, GEB
and ACE who devised new sorting mechanisms such as distinguishing "gifted
students" who were tracked into "honors programs" based on ability, sifting
22 Although much attention has been focused on the effects of WWII on the universities, they
can be seen as simply extensions of the developments that took place during and after WWI.
Contrary to prevailing historical accounts, the subordination of the universities to the state,
national policy-making and planning did not begin with WWII but was deepened by it.
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them out through exams, vocational placement and career counseling.23 The
introduction of labor planning to students, as measures of productivity and
efficiency were applied to faculty labor, implies an implicit recognition of
students’ unwaged labor contribution to future profits. Today, in Australia for
example, standardization takes place in the form of a focus on "competency" in
education "in which the outcomes of education are defined in terms of
transparent, observable, and measurable qualities of an individual." "The
reorganization of education to produce competence is the latest and most effective
of a long line of policies designed to ensure that the kind of people produced in
education are centered on work."24
For advocates of "progressive education," questions of reform became
questions of how to better discipline new workers. In 1923, Harvard professor
George Mirick explained that "the power of the machine is determined...by
measuring the amount of work it can do, and this amount can be stated in what
are called foot-pounds or horse-power. It is in this direct way that mental abilities
are measured. A human being is a machine. This machine is moved by nervous
energy... As in the case of an electric or steam machine, the quantity of the
human energy and the quality of the human machine can be perceived the
quantity and quality of the work that it does."25 Rationalization of higher
education was merely the latest means by which to chum out productive human
workers.
23 Noble, p. 233; and Veblen , p. 73-77.
24 Simon Marginson, "Competent for What?," Arena Magazine, date unavailable, reprinted in
Processed World, no. 31, Summer-Fall, 1993, p. 48-49. This is an analysis of educational
reforms in Australia.
25 George Mirick, Progressive Education, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1923, p. 202, 306. See
also John Trumpbour, "Blinding Them with Science: Scientific Ideologies in the Ruling of the
Modem World," in John Trumpbour (ed.), How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service o f
Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, p. 231. Trumpbour documents numerous Harvard
professors promotion of Taylorism with the strange claim that universities resisted the
implementation of scientific management for fifty years.
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President Clinton's Labor Secretary Robert Reich recognizes
standardization as analogous to organizing the schools as assembly lines. Since
"the only prerequisites for most jobs were an ability to comprehend simple oral
and written directives and sufficient self-control to implement them," Reich
explains, US public schools mirrored mass production.26 "Children moved
from grade to grade through a preplanned sequence of standard events, as if on
factory conveyor belts. At each stage, certain facts were poured into their heads."
From there the children were sorted according to productivity and discipline.
"Children with the greatest capacity to absorb the facts, and with the most
submissive demeanor, were placed on a rapid track through the sequence: those
with the least capacity for fact retention and self-discipline, on the slowest."
Eventually, "standardized tests were routinely administered at certain checkpoints
in order to measure how many of the facts had stuck in the small heads, and
’product defects' were taken off the line and returned for retooling. As in the
mass-production system, discipline and order were emphasized above all else."
A similar process of standardized production was also applied to teaching.
It was 1930s education theorist El wood Cubberly who draws Reich's
analysis to its ultimate conclusion: "Our schools are, in a sense, factories in
which the raw materials are to be shaped and fashioned...and it is the business of
the school to build its pupils to the specifications laid down."27
For Noble, standardization of education did not passively reflect "outside"
industrial organization but was part of a process through which it stimulated
social reorganization; it meant militarization, industrialization and education were
interlinked for the first time and incorporated into national planning. "Fresh from
their Army experience in personnel classification and officer training, the
educational reformers in the engineering schools had begun to envision
cooperation on a grand scale: industry as a whole would furnish the job
26 Robert Reich, The Work o f Nations, NY: Vintage, 1991, p. 59-60.
27 Cited in Reich, p. 60.
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specifications and employment requirements the schools demanded, and the
schools would provide the complementary testing, training, selection, and
distribution of manpower for industry," Noble explains (p. 234-5).
Standardization and managerial reorganization was required for not only
running the university like a corporation but in order to integrate it into the
industrial process. By reframing academic activities in terms of efficiency,
productivity, labor use, outputs and inputs, the foundations could better
understand how to utilize the universities. As Barrow explains for CFAT, "the
initial absence of standardization between institutions had presented an immediate
investment dilemma" (p. 83). This process reflected the underlying class
tensions at work within the university:
The accumulation of capital as a purely quantitative measure of academic
efficiency was closely related to administrative anxieties about a school's
prestige. Social efficiency—or the functional integration of institutional roles
under the leadership of a managerial expert—was measured by the relative
peacefulness of industrial relations within the university. A good administrator,
therefore, ’made determined efforts to keep the peace within his own institution,
since if it appeared disunited it would lose prestige and influence' and,
ultimately, the capacity to attract additional capital. Thus, new texts on university
administration generally advised 'that quarrelsome debate, including that based
upon conflicts among academic ideals, must be minimized or suppressed
whenever it became threateningly serious.'28
Internal class conflict over the changing nature of the university coincided
with the rising class antagonisms throughout not only the US but internationally.
Carnegie and Rockefeller founded CFAT and the GEB as part of an effort to
devise new technological responses to the widespread class upheaval occurring
at the time. Marietta Baba identifies the industrialization of the universities as the
first of four periods during which new university-business relationships were
28 Barrow, p. 79. Quotes from Laurence Veysey, The Emergence o f the American University,
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1965, p. 308.
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created. "Each of the four invention clusters occurred during periods of intensive
international competition and/or crisis, and during times noted for pronounced
technological change."29 The second period occurred during the depression
(1929-1933), during and after WWD (1943-1954) and from 1967-1985.
If we understand technology, as Noble suggests, as more than simply
machines but a social process for organizing society, the application of
"manpower" planning from the military and business to the universities and the
extension of university-industry cooperation is a reflection of capital’s attempt to
deal with class struggle. Each of these periods of reorganization took place
during times of intense class conflict during which time new means of
technology were sought to respond to the effects of insurgency and regain
control. As Richard Lyman, former Stanford president put it, "Our traditional
method of handling both graduate education and research has been to provide a
burst of support in reaction to a national crisis—to the Cold War, to the health
crisis, to Sputnik, to the environmental crisis..."30
That Baba identifies 1967-1985 as the most recent period is indicative of
the role of entrepreneurialization as a strategic response to class antagonisms at
work inside the universities and throughout society. Her chart listing
"university/industry linkage models" demonstrates a fundamental change in the
nature of these models over the four periods from consulting and research
contracts, to incubation, research parks and eventually "direct" (e.g. spin-off
companies owned by the universities themselves) and "indirect investment" (e.g.
venture capital funds) (p. 200).
29 Marietta Baba, "University Innovation to Promote Economic Growth and
University/Industry Relations," chapter 11 in Pier Abetti, Christopher LeMaistre, Raymond
Smilor and William Wallace (eds.) Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: The Roles
o f Industry, Small Business Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and the Universities, Austin:
IC2, no date, p. 201.
30 Richard Lyman, witness to US Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor,
Special Subcommittee on Education, "Student Financial Assistance/Graduate Programs, State
Programs and Grants," 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, June 4, 1974, p. 17.
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The differences between the forces surrounding industrialization and
entrepreneurialization reflect the class relations of the time period in which they
took place. Whereas industrialization was initiated as a response to class
antagonisms outside the universities in order to integrate them into production,
entrepreneurialization was a response to class struggle from within by students, a
struggle which disrupted the human capital investment strategy of the 1950-
60s.3 1
That the universities were a business and a productive part of the capital
accumulation process was without question during industrialization. Not only
did Cooke's study assume the businesslike organization of the universities, the
foundations conceive of them as businesses for investment, and the faculty
recognized as laborers on an assembly line, but Henry Pritchett was already
publicly asking "shall the university become a business corporation?" in an
article published by that title in Atlantic Monthly in 1905.32 Not only were critics
like Sinclair and Veblen calling and analyzing the universities as businesses, but
so were those attempting to reshape them into businesses and running them.33
Samuel Chapen possibly put it more succinctly than anyone since during his
inauguration as chancellor of the University of Buffalo:
The people of the United States have a great national industry which is never
mentioned in the summaries of the productive enterprises of the country. It is the
3* See testimonies of two university presidents concerning the crisis of higher education and
the student revolt; A. Bartlett Giametti, witness, US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Labor
and Human Resources, Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities, "Basic Skills,
1979," 96th Congress, 1st Session (February 13, 1979), from document attached, Giametti,
"Sentimentality," Yale Alumni Magazine, (January 1976), pgs. 39 and 40; and Wesley W.
Posvar, witness, US Congress, Senate Committee on Human Resources, Subcommittee on
Health and Science Research, "National Science Foundation Authorization Legislation," 95th
Congress, 1st Session (March 3, 1977), p. 147.
32 Henry Pritchett, "Shall the University Become a Business Corporation?"," Atlantic Monthly
, September 1905, p. 289-99.
33 Noble, quotes Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Buder in 1916 and
University of Buffalo chancellor Samuel Chapen in 1922 who were quite explicit about the
university being a business, (p. 145-6)
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industry of building universities. The industry has absorbed an extraordinary
amount of creative energy...It now represents an invested capital of
$1,250,000,000. In cash it has never paid a penny on the investment, which
accounts for its common omission from the record of those productive
undertakings that add visibly to the wealth of the nation. But indirectly what has
been the return? Scientific discoveries and the application of scientific knowledge
to manufacturing, to commerce, to agriculture, to engineering processes, to the
prevention and cure of diseases which are responsible for a large part of the
actual profits of the nation's business. Wipe out the contributions made by the
universities during the last fifty years and the industrial life of the nation would
shrivel up to insignificant dimensions.34
The Strategy of Entrepreneurialization
The student rebellion of the 1960-70s not only undermined the human capital
strategy of investing in the reproduction of labor power in order to increase
productivity and profits, but it set off a crisis of control and management that still
reverberates today.35 Disinvestment was soon recognized as a temporary
response to the disruptions caused by the rebellions. New efforts to retool the
universities so that they could contribute to restoring manageability and profits in
the economy as a whole led to efforts to reorganize the universities themselves to
deal with their own internal problems. Using austerity to weed out academic
programs that served needs irrelevant or antagonistic to business forced
administrators to devise new means of raising operating funds to cover
shortfalls. Facilitated by changes in federal intellectual property laws regulating
expensive publicly funded research, the universities began looking internally at
their own activities as sources of profits. As federal and state funding for all but
commercially oriented high tech research shrinks, these activities have come to
dominate not only the operation but the very nature of the universities.
34 Samuel Capen "Inaugural Address," October 28, 1922, Capen Papers, State University of
New York at Buffalo Archives.
35 The human capital investment strategy will be more fully examined in chapter four.
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The entrepreneurialization of the university takes places on two levels:
formal campus decision-making comes to be dominated by commercially
oriented forces within the university and the overriding function of the university
becomes transformed from disciplining labor power to using that labor power in
the pursuit of direct profit. 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.
Internal Reorganization
Potentially profitable activities within the university gain priority by being
separate from the formal decision making structures of the universities. After two
decades or more of intensified efforts to strengthen university collaboration with
business, entire new separate administrative infrastructures are created. Offices
for technology transfer, research grants and support, intellectual property,
business relations and development exist in many universities as high as vice
president, chancellor and advisors to trustees. Actual research infrastructures
such as spin-off companies, university foundations, research parks and centers
and commercialization think-tanks have come to carry much of the informal
decision-making power of the universities. We've seen this demonstrated in the
case study of UT-Austin in chapter 2. In their extensive studies of the
reorganization of Canadian universities into businesses, Janice Newson and
Howard Buchbinder find these new sources of power not only parasitic but an
emerging transformative force changing the very nature of the universities.
For Newson, these infrastructures are not simply "’parasitic’ off the
universities which host them, insofar as they draw on the resources of the
university to accomplish their activities without being subject to these practices in
their own operations." These have a much more substantial impact:
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these new structures also provide the political means for transforming both the
practices and the programmes and goals of their host institutions. Limited
resources are increasingly allocated to these new structures and to the academic
work that is carried out within them, through procedures other than those
governed by academic fora like senates, faculty councils and local departments.
Moreover, these structures initiate new programmes and insert them into the
university's agenda, again without following established academic
procedures.36
Whether these new structures may come into being for matters of expediency
(formal collegial structures are too "rigid" and "slow" or occur on a departmental
level through personal contacts with a funding agent, for example) or in secrecy,
in the context of austeric pressures to find new sources of funds, they not only
reproduce themselves but grow in influence. However they may come about,
these structures "have separate boards and are not accountable for their actions or
initiatives to the collegial decision-making bodies of the host university. The
creation of centers and similar special units undermines accountability to
academic peers and the wider academic community, while permitting the needs
of corporate partners to define research goals—all without any form of public
scrutiny."37
Systematic Transformation
Newson and Buchbinder do not delude themselves with the idea of somehow
"preserving" the non-existing self-managed "academic community" from the
36 Janice Newson, “The University of the 1990s: Harbinger of the Post-Industrial State,”
presented at the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association Meetings, May-June 1992,
at the University of Prince Edward Island, p. 21. See also Janice Newson and Howard
Buchbinder, The University Means Business, Toronto: Garamond, 1988, p. 81 and 85; and
Howard Buchbinder and Janice Newson, "Corporate-university linkages in Canada: transforming
a public institution," Higher Education, 1990, n. 20, p. 368-69.
37 Howard Buchbinder and Janice Newson, "The Service University and Market Forces,”
Academe, July-August, 1992, p. 14.
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threat of intrusion38 but attempt to demonstrate how far from that ideal the
universities have become. They are also not simply decrying business influence
over the universities. For them, the focus is on the changing social relations of
the university as the context in which the "service university"—which serves
only the interests of capital—is being realized. Simple business influences,
"although having considerable bearing on certain aspects of academic
functioning, did not generally affect the kind of knowledge that was developed
and taught nor the process of its development and dissemination. The kind of
corporate linkages that have been advocated as part of 'the service university'
over the past decade directly intervene in the knowledge-seeking and knowledge-
sharing process" (Newson, 1992, p. 7).
The production of knowledge is characterized by the relations of
production. These relations change as the university becomes governed by
efforts to directly profit through immediate integration into production. The
source of change is not simply from one type of business to another but how
they do business, using student, faculty and staff labor directly. "Universities,
like industrial companies, are corporations that require labor and capital to
operate," Leonard Minsky proposed. But until now they have had no tangible
product. This has all been changed by a new patenting law that essentially makes
business the university's business."39 Minsky is partially correct in saying they
have had no "tangible product" because the universities have long produced
disciplined workers although they were not sold directly for a profit. As
emphasis is now placed on biotech and computer technologies, for example, the
university becomes the site of production and sale using the very labor it
disciplines, not simply an adjunct to another corporation that transfers ideas into
38 This is the extent of Derek Bok's critique. Liz McMillen, "Quest for Profits May Damage
Basic Values of Universities, Harvard's Bok Warns," The Chronicle o f Higher Education, April
24, 1991, p. Al-31.
39 Leonard Minsky, “Greed in the Groves: Part Two,” Thought & Action, Fall 1984, vol. 1,
n. 1, p. 46.
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production and new products.40 The site of creation, production and sale, the
university’s mystified role in capital accumulation is stripped away once and for
all.
On a day to day level, academic work becomes increasingly subordinated
to an administrative apparatus that perceives of intellectual labor as a commodity
to be bought or sold. All aspects of the university become rationalized in terms of
whether they can contribute a return on investment. "Individual academic units,
and even the individual member of the units, are treated as mini-cost centers,"
write Buchbinder and Newson. "The university can not only monitor their
expenditures against the income they generate, but can also require them to break
even or produce a profit. Academic units are thus made dependent on targeting
their activities to a clientele that will generate enough income—either directly or
through government support—to sustain their activities" (1992, p. 15). With the
rapidly predominance of part-time teaching staff and the attack on tenure, faculty
become interchangeable workers hired or fired based on their contribution to the
university enterprise. For those that are more difficult to remove, a hierarchy
forms within the university between the "haves" (the commercially viable) and
the "have nots" (the resistant or irrelevant). The former not only receive the bulk
of operational funds, equipment and physical plant but establish the guidelines
by which the latter are to be evaluated.
Even the business activities of the universities are transformed. Henry
Morgan shows how real estate is now being strategically used "as an investment
in income producing property" by the creation of research parks. This is
combined with the use of endowments and university foundations transforming
40 Former Stanford president Donald Kennedy explained that with "the commercialization of
gene splicing...the value added part of the process has somehow shifted from the applied phase,
usually conducted in an industrial setting, into the university laboratory." We could also add,
the applied phase occurs within the cell itself which has become a biological factory. (Quoted
in Nicholas Wade, "Gold Pipettes Make for Tight Lips," Science, vol. 212, no. 19, 1981, p.
1368.]
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the university into "a venture capital investor in its own right" as he describes
Boston University's Community Technology Foundation, and the
transformation of intellectual property into income producing products.41 His
analysis offers a view of the university as a prototype of capital itself using the
very labor power it generates to create profits that it reinvests to continue the
process. While the university has long been a business, until recently it engaged
in a number of diverse business activities which may not have been central to its
function.
Likewise, the "haves" are even under pressures to demonstrate
commercial applicability of their research and academic work. Exploratory (e.g.
basic) research becomes subsumed by commercial pressures engendered by
profit driven administrators and funding agents. The size and skills of one's
research staff is directly related to levels of funding. The more contracts or
licensing income the more staff and graduate student researchers are assigned,
creating mini-assembly lines generating commercially viable technologies that
can be patented, licensed or even marketed by already existing companies or new
ones created by the universities called "spin-offs”. Since few universities have
actually generated large direct profits from entrepreneurialization in the form of
royalties or sales, income is often calculated indirectly through overhead costs,
grants or contracts revenues. However, as we saw in the case study of UT-
Austin, there really are not any profits.42 Returns on entrepreneurial projects
hardly measure up to publicly funded resources expended on them, amounting to
a socialization of costs.43 It is a misnomer to call this process "privatization"
since only the profits are "privatized" while the costs are "socialized", that is,
4* Henry Morgan, "Pickled in Brine: The Possible Costs of Speculation," Academe,
September-October, 1990, p. 22-26. Surprisingly, Morgan is dean emeritus of BU's School of
Management.
42 For further detail refer to my unpublished MA thesis: UT Inc.: Austerity and
Entrepreneurialization at the University o f Texas at Austin, December 1992.
43 For more on the socialization of costs see David Noble, "Higher education takes the low
road," Newsday, October 8, 1989, p. 7; and Slaughter, p. 46-7.
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borne by society. In addition, privatization refers only to the change in formal
ownership. Instead, I devised the term "entrepreneurial-ization" to reflect the
process in which knowledge undergoes in becoming a product; the suffix
hopefully making it clear that we are dealing with a process and not an absolute.
Perhaps David Noble has done the most to document and oppose this
process by offering a number of case studies of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) as an example of the reorganization of US universities.
Reflecting on MIT's Industrial Liason Program, that enlists 300 corporate
partners full access to any of the intellectual and physical resources of the
Institute for an annual fee, Noble finds that
ILP activities reflect the unprecedented commoditization of science which has
occurred in recent years, in the wake of the so-called "knowledge-based" high
tech multinational gold rush. What is for sale here is not simply the products of
research but the research itself, reflecting the transformation of the intellectual
endeavor into intellectual capital. Despite high-sounding rhetoric about the free
exchange of scientific ideas, what is going on here is the buying and selling of
goods, the proprietary control over which has all but put an end to the free
exchange of scientific ideas....The Program is designed to serve neither the
needs of the scientific community nor the end of public enlightenment; it is a
closed consortium of corporate clients whose sole purpose os to secure exclusive
control over the precious new commodity, intellectual capital.44
Such a process underlines a more fundamental transformation of the
character of the university, "once intellectual endeavor becomes intellectual
capital, it soon becomes also intellectual property, and government policies of the
last decade—well reflected in ILP activities in patent licensing—have guaranteed
that such property will fall into private hands," Noble warns, reiterating the
implications of the Patent and Trademark Act of 1980 (p. 22). Rapidly becoming
44 David Noble, "The Multinational University," Zeta Magazine, April 1989, p. 22. This
article retains less of a nationalistic bent than his earlier work. In this article, his warnings of
US-Japanese corporate collaboration is retorted with warnings to academics in Japanese
universities undergoing similar pressures to submit to pressures of commercialization.
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a central force of capitalist production, the universities are concurrently becoming
an active part of multinational capital. As Noble explains, "Over the last decade,
these institutions have once again undergone a structural transformation. Now
the 'oil wells' of 'intellectual capital,' central to the new multinational high-tech
political economy, they have become integrated as never before within the
multinational corporate structure: multinational universities serving global but
still narrow, ends" (p. 17).
For more than a decade, Noble's emphasis has been on demonstrating the
socialized costs and privatized profits of the commercialization of the
universities. Like my work on UT-Austin, Noble demonstrates how tuition and
fees have served to fund entrepreneurialization and has helped document the
"conflict of interest" between public subsidization of private profitmaking
ventures.45
Unfortunately, like the other critical analyses of commercialization
reviewed above, Noble's analysis is limited to an expression of a so-called
"conflict of interest" between the socialization of costs and the privatization of
profits. If we acknowledge the university's role in capital accumulation, there
can be no conflict of interest: the universities are intended to serve capital. The
conflict they do overlook is that between those who wish to subordinate the
universities to the needs of business or other needs of social movements
perhaps. In fact, Noble does not recognize the existence of such conflict in
America By Design until page 321 of 334 pages of text.
The socialization of costs is characterized through the implementation of
austerity as standard operating procedure. Funds and resources are rechanneled
45 David Noble, "The Selling of the University," The Nation, February 6, 1982, p. 1, 143-48;
Noble and Nancy Pfiind, "The Plastic Tower. Business Goes Back to College," The Nation,
September 20, 1980, p. 246-252; David Noble, "Science for Sale," Thought &Action: The
NEA Higher Education Journal, vol. 1, no. I, Fall, 1984, p. 25-40. Agreeing with David
Noble, Elliot Negin found rising tuition funding corporate research projects fueling the
commercialization of the university. (Elliot Negin, "Why College Tuitions are So High," The
Atlantic, March, 1993, p. 32-34, 43-44.)
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from resistant or irrelevant academic areas to income producing ones. Although
funding continues to rise, in the case of UT-Austin, the declining percentage of
public sources of funding becomes a justification for selective austerity by
passing the costs of commercialization onto faculty and staff through increases in
workloads and decreases in real wages and onto students through increases in
workloads (overcrowded classes) and increased share of the costs through
higher tuition and fees. Ironically, these increased costs do not actually go to
"general appropriations" but are used to bankroll entrepreneurialization.
Because entrepreneurial projects are funded outside traditional decision
making structures, university administrations are able to cry poverty without
actually being broke. There is no public oversight over entrepreneurial activities
and since few are even aware that they exist let alone understand how they
operate, austeric measures are often not only implemented without much
resistance but genuinely accepted as part of the "collegial responsibility" by
students and faculty who sometimes actively participate in localizing their
implementation.
Bracero Graduate Students
The globalization of the university is not limited to simply the international
activities of particular institutions but also their student composition. Universities
are training more than the future elite of other countries, but a sizable part of the
US and international professional workforce. With slowly rising student
resistance to the imposition of austerity, such as the resurgence of graduate
student unionization and strikes in North America since the late 1980s,
universities have looked increasingly abroad for graduate students. Since the
threat of deportation to their home country with the possibility of imprisonment
for their activism, international students serve the universities as supposedly
“docile,” “cheap” labor. The university’s corporate partners also receive high
quality research at a fraction of the costs of hiring a highly educated engineer or
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researcher or hire them later as temporary workers at a fraction of the cost.
According to Harvard lecturer Dorothy Zinberg, “The majority of foreign
students study science and engineering. They remain in the United States filling
junior positions, particularly in engineering departments that without them would
have to close and jobs in industries that until the most recent economic downturn
would have been crippled without them.”46
Since graduate students often serve as inexpensive teaching and research
staff, the gradual increase of international graduate students has served to subvert
graduate student demands for higher pay, less work, better working conditions,
and abusive faculty-student relationships. International graduate students have
become a covert pool of scab labor used against the demands of other graduate
students and professional researchers currently being laid off in droves by the
computer and defense industries. The use of this divide and conquer strategy
leaves international students highly vulnerable to exploitation.
This is borne out by the numerical growth of international students in US
universities. In 1989-90, the number of international students grew 5.6% to
386,000, the largest increase in seven years. It was also the third consecutive
years in a row that Asian students composed more than half of all international
students, increasing 9% to 208,110. In fact, eight of the top ten countries of
origin were in Asia, with China at the top of the list47 By 1991-92, the total had
increased to 419,585, with 59% coming from Asian countries, a 7% increase in
one year. Ten of the top 12 countries of origin were Asian, with China leading
again.48 Not surprisingly, most international students are concentrated in large
research universities in business, engineering and the hard sciences. In 1991-92,
46 Dorothy Zinberg, “Don’t Tie Foreign Students to Black Ph.D. Drop,” letter to editor. The
New York Times, May 12, 1992.
47 Robin Wilson, “Foreign Students in US Reach a Record 386,000,” Chronicle o f Higher
Education, November 28, 1990, p. Al.
48 Beverly Watkins, “Foreign Enrollment in US Colleges and Universities Totaled 419,585 in
1991-92, an All-Time High,” Chronicle o f Higher Education, November 25, 1992, p. A28.
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56% were in these areas alone, 72% of the total focused on research and 68.8%
received support from universities most likely in the form of employment.49
UT-Austin ranked very high in the number of international students
during both years. In 1989-90, UT-Austin was ranked third in 1991 and first in
1992.50 In fact, as undergraduate enrollment is being pushed down and graduate
enrollment pushed up, the number of international graduate students is rising. In
1982, 15.9% (1,675) of UT-Austin graduate students were international,
increasing to 21% (2,717) in 1991 although for all students these figures rose
from 6.1% (2,934) to only 8.3% (4,137).51 These percentage figures are
deceptive though because the actual increase in the total number of international
students is much greater. In 1991, seven of the ten largest source countries are
in Asia accounting for 63% of all international students, rising from 41% in
1981. 73% are concentrated in business, engineering and natural science.
International students are congregated in engineering and the hard sciences where
they work long hours with little pay and intellectual recognition (such as patents
or co-authorship of articles). As UT-Austin explicitly attempts to reduce
undergraduate enrollment while increasing graduate to become strictly a
“research university” international graduate students have become their primary
source of cheap labor.
International students are part of the international working class, seeking
better working conditions and pay while fleeing repression. Like any
multinational corporation, universities profit from the use of students fleeing
repressive political conditions, since such repression reinforces their exploitation
in university labs. International students live under the constant fear of the
49 Watkins; and Anthony DePalma, “As Black Ph.D.’s Taper Off, Aid for Foreigners is
Assailed,” The New York Times, April 21, 1992. In comparison, 41.8% “american” students
received support from universities.
50 Watkins.
UT-Austin, Office of Institutional Studies, Statistical Handbook, 1991-1992, p. 10, 13-14,
and 33-34.
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university and US government rescinding their job and visa for their political
activity resulting in their deportation and possible punishment back home. This
makes it easier for universities to overwork and underpay international students
in isolated, dangerous high tech research labs and low quality, overcrowded
married student housing.
There is another, more positive side to this labor flow. International
students bring with them the knowledge and experience of struggles from home
that they circulate to american students. The Korean student rebellion, which
received much media attention in the mid to late 1980s, heavily influenced the
anti-apartheid and anti-CIA student movements in the US. Unfortunately, this is
often muted by politically motivated divisions between international and american
students such university quotas and “English Only” requirements for teaching
assistants and assistant instructors. These divisions have yet to be successfully
overcome by graduate student unionization efforts or other student organizers.
Im-mobile Campuses
Universities have not simply increased recruitment of international students to
attend US based campuses, but have invested abroad to directly train students in
their home countries. Like multinational corporations, a few universities are
beginning to flee the US where their investments are realizing low returns by
disinvesting from all or select parts of their home campuses and investing
abroad. In effect, just as corporations flee well organized workers and
unsympathetic political conditions, so are universities beginning to flee so-called
unproductive students (i.e. those who resist schoolwork which is discussed
further in chapter 6) and now with NAFTA, overpaid academics.
It is no accident that a common analogy is made between the amount of
work done by students in the US and Japan. Business attempts to pit American
against overworked Japanese students in order to make American students work
more both in school and in waged work. At the same time that they impose
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austerity in their US based campuses, some universities are opening campuses in
Japan, where like any business, they expect more work at less cost from their
students. Currently, twenty three universities and colleges including Texas
A&M, SUNY, CUNY and Boston University have campuses in Japan.
But do universities have the mobility of multinational corporations?
Following David Noble, Jack Trumpbour notes a fundamental limitation of the
entrepreneurial university: "Universities may have made one serious
miscalculation in their newfound eagerness to replicate capitalist enterprise.
While capital is notoriously mobile, able to pick up stakes and flee entire nations,
universities are inherently immobile and, still heavily dependent on public
funding, unable to take flight in the midst of sustained political challenge."52
This limitation is inherent only as far as universities are understood mainly
as physical structures rather than social relationships. Universities are capable to
responding to turmoil with flight even though those means are much more
limited than those at the disposal of corporations. A few have opened up
branches in other countries and increasingly financially unstable campuses are
being shut down, merged, or sold. Some universities are even closing entire
departments and colleges such as at the University of Michigan, University of
California, Yale and Washington University. Universities are just beginning to
develop means of mobility so we cannot assume it is impossible. It may take
different forms than we realize such as internal mobility by re-channeling capital
away from unprofitable to profitable programs and/or building separate
campuses for research (from Liberal Arts to the Balcones Research Center at UT
for example) which is happening on a wide scale. Computerized and televised
extension courses are another form mobility is taking, totally transforming what
we have come to accept as a university from a physical structure to analog or
digital space. And even then we should not overestimate the power of either
52 Jack Trumpbour, "How Harvard rules,” Z, November 1989, p. 54.
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corporations or universities to flee unhindered from conflict. The next few years
of struggles over tuition and commercialization may demonstrate the power of
students to block such financial mobility.
Yet another possible form of mobility is beginning to be realized as a
result of NAFTA. As we saw above in the case of UT-Austin and Monterrey
Tech's collaboration, universities are just beginning to take advantage of highly
educated and skilled Mexican academics and businesspeople at a fraction of the
cost of doing so at home.53 Through joint research, exchange and training
programs, universities are developing a new way out of relying on inflexible and
well paid researchers in US universities. While the more commercial areas of the
campus are being spun off into independent units, as the Solomons explain, in
the event of renewed campus upheaval, these ventures may potentially even be
moved abroad or supplemented by what is perceived to be a more manageable
intellectual workforce.
Ivory Tower or Overt Business?
The idea that the universities are a productive part of capital is hardly new
theoretically, Veblen and Sinclair having made the argument more than 70 years
ago. 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. Nonetheless, in 1918 Veblen was already critiquing the emerging
"new practicality" as C. Wright Mills came to call it,54 businesslike operation
and organization of the universities. ""By force of the same businesslike bias the
boards unavoidably incline to apportion the funds assigned for current expenses
53 Hugo Aboites, "Integracion Economica y Educacion Superior. TLC y Educacion Superior en
Estados Unidos y Mexico," draft manuscript, Octubre, 1993, discusses other efforts by Harvard
and the University of California at Berkeley as well.
54 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, p. 95-
6.
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in such as way as to favor 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.55
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.
There are a few other useful though less thorough analyses of aspects of
the reorganization of the universities. Sheila Slaughter has found that as the
result of the fiscal crisis stemming from the rebellions of the 1960s, the
universities have begun to be reorganized through the military to emphasize
entrepreneurial activities that can produce profits.56 Even Arthur Stinchcombe
did a study of the utilization of research space and teaching loads based on the
55 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.
56 Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics o f Higher
Education Policy Formation, Albany: State University of New York, 1990.
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analogy of the university to banks since "both banks and universities are
fiduciary institutions."57
As students begin to confront the effects of the fiscal crisis and resist their
being passed along to them, some have engaged in in-depth investigations. At
least two two other case studies and a number of shorter analyses of
entrepreneurialization of US universities have been done. Charles Betz' case
study of entrepreneurialization at 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.58
Austerity is central to the reorganization since it allowed resources to be
rechanneled to where the largest, most profitable return could be gained.59 In
analyzing this attempt to transform UM into a "global academy", Betz found a
conflict between the university's traditional mission for producing new labor
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
57 Arthur Stinchcombe, "University Administration of Research Space and Teaching Loads:
Managers Who Do Not Know What Their Workers Are Doing," chapter 9 in Information and
Organizations, Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1990.
58 Charles Betz, Restructuring the University, unpublished BA Thesis, University of
Minnesota, 1991.
59 Charles Betz and Kurt Errickson, "A Question of Focus: The University of Minnesota Has
Big Plans for the Future—But They Have More To D With Courting Business and Government
Research Contracts Than Educating People," City Pages, August, 1991, reprinted in War
Research Information Service, No. 2, August-September 1991, p. 32-4.
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financing higher education and pressures to commercialize.60 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 programs 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 substantive 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.61 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.62 Jonathan
Feldman analyzed the role of the universities and their multinational chemical
company partners in the war in Central America and the dependence of
60 Marc Kenen, UMassachussetts in Crisis: Budget Cuts, Military Spending and the
Privatization o f a Public Research University, 1990.
61 Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex, New Haven: Yale
University, 1986.
62 Jaron Bourke and Robert Weissman, "Academics at Risk: The Temptations of Profit,"
Academe, September-October 1990, p. 15-21.
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agriculture on bio-engineered seeds and pesticides.63 The reemergence of the
military in the universities since the late 1970s is also detailed.
Writing without mention of any specific university or particular event,
Robert (a UT-Austin philosophy professor) and Jon Solomon, offer their
critique of the corporate university. Borrowing the theme of the no longer
existing alternative student newspaper, The Polemicist, the Solomons view the
university as a huge profit-making corporation:
In the present scheme of things, the university is clearly not administered for the
benefit of undergraduate education. It has become a multimillion-dollar
corporation that thrives on much, much more than receiving tuition and issuing
baccalaureate degrees. In addition to tuition, the university requires hundreds of
millions of state tax dollars, but this still feeds only part of its voracious appetite.
The university survives only by attracting more hundreds of millions of state
dollars from the federal government, private donors, the local pizza parlor,
Fortune 500 companies, and anywhere else it can. It demands one fee after
another from students, solicits donations from faculty, shamelessly sells its logo
on T-shirts and shot glasses. It sends fund raisers overseas to court foreign
capital, markets it research products, and solicits huge sums for investment
purposes. No university, it seems, ever has enough buildings, and many
universities now seems to be in the real estate business.
Seeing through these myriad of business activities, the Solomons hone in on the
most fundamental function of the university: the disciplining of new workers.
Because the university mission has become so business oriented, the university
views students as part of its business, the purpose of which is to supply the
corporations as well as the state and federal governments with a commodity—
trained employees. Education, accordingly, becomes training. It is the process of
providing skilled, disciplined, narrowly knowledgeable technicians, managers,
and professionals, (p. 16)
63 Jonathan Feldman, Universities in the Business o f Repression: The Academic-Military-
Industrial Complex and Central America, Boston: South End Press, 1989.
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In addition to the disciplining of new workers, the universities are
themselves beginning to operate as overt businesses. "Many universities, like
some of our largest and most successful corporations, have overextended
themselves, gone into debt unnecessarily, and gotten into ventures they should
have never undertaken." When real estate investments, research and building
projects go bad, the "universities, like some corporations, have spun off their
most profitable divisions, putting them into the hands of those who are quite
indifferent to or unsympathetic with the aims of education, like newly merged
corporations, have insisted on keeping the unhappy halves of a hostile merger
together, with all the consequences of a bad marriage" (p. 33-34).
Recognizing that the university's entrepreneurial activities may cause
financial ruin, the Solomons accurately recognize that in the end, it is the
students that pay, either through the sacrifice of learning, creativity and personal
growth as well as resources.
When the university turns out to be an expense instead of a profitable
investment, the corporations and communities that find themselves facing
shortfalls try to soak the university and its students for immediate gains, through
increased student taxation and tuition, reduced academic services (e.g. fewer
tutorials, remedial classes, and other aids for weak or disadvantaged students),
and by way of renewed corporate favors and financial deals, (p. 17)
Unfortunately, the Solomons' analysis of the university becomes derailed
into solipsistic game-playing and reactionary proposals that only reinforce the
current entrepreneurialization of the university. For example, suggesting it will
contribute to "student control", they advocate hiring undergraduates for $6/hour
as tutors, a measure endorsed by the UT Students' Association and Dean of
Students as cheap replacements for better paid graduate teaching assistants at the
very time graduate students were actively engaged in two unionization efforts. In
addition, they denounce multiculturalism as "silly" (p. 184), advocate the
abolition of tenure and replacement with short-term contracts (p. 243), and
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endorse increased hierarchy of campuses that reflect the productivity of students
(p. 78). Ironically, each of these measures, rather than "Re-Creating Higher
Education in America" as the subtitle of their book would suggest only reinforces
various efforts to downsize various areas of the campus in order to undermine
the limited strength of faculty, graduate students, and student activists. Rather
than allying themselves with active efforts to resist the reorganization of their
campuses into overt businesses, their book is no more than a thinly veiled
endorsement of that very reorganization—such as UT-Austin into a business.
Their critique is consistently vague, never mentioning a university,
administrator, or event by name. Most disheartening is their refutation of the
myth that entrepreneurial projects actually cost the university more money than
they make. Ignoring the very research by the Polemicist —which they thank in
their acknowledgements—that uncovered the costs of entrepreneurialization, the
Solomons plead for the university administration to open their books because
"we do not have either the accounting skills or access to the numbers" (p. 283).
The Solomons critique abdicates responsibility to the truth by refusing to provide
the very empirical common knowledge about at least one of the very universities
that employ them!
Although sociology has been one of the first disciplines under attack for
its general failure to 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.64 The
dominance of the natural science model during WWH 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
64 Ted Vaughan, "The Crisis in Contemporary American Sociology: A Critique of the
Discipline’s Dominant Paradigm," and Gideon Sjoberg and Ted Vaughan, "The
Bureaucratization of Sociology: Its Impact on Theory and Research,” chapters 1 and 2 in Ted
Vaughan, Gideon Sjoberg and Larry Reynolds (eds.), A Critique o f Contemporary American
Sociology, NY: General Hall, 1993.
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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 nearly useless to those who manage and to those who resist.
Promoting Entrepreneurialization
While these case studies remain marginally known to those engaged in active
resistance to one aspect or another of entrepreneurialization, the most compelling
evidence of the university’s reorganization into a profit-making business comes
from those carrying it out
There has been much written as to the so-called "positive" aspects of the
process.65 Ironically, while some critics continue to debate whether or not the
university is a productive part of capital, business is articulating a strategy for
using the universities to transform the basis of the economy to high tech and
biotech and restore accumulation. The transformation of the university into a vital
sector of capital is put quite directly by James Fairweather. He explains that
federal and state technology transfer programs "clearly demonstrates an
expectation for colleges and universities to do more than indirectly affect
economic development through training the work force and through basic
research. Colleges and universities are beginning to affect industry and the
populace actively and directly in the development of new work habits, new
technologies, and new industries."66
65 Nicholas Wade, The Science Business: Report o f the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force
on the Commercialization of Scientific Research, New York: Priority Press, 1984; and Robert
Johnston and Christopher Edwards, Entrepreneurial Science: New Links Between Corporations,
Universities and Government, New York: Quorum Books, 1987. For a critical assessment of
documents produced by the Business-Higher Education Forum see Slaughter, ch. 6-7.
66 James Fairweather, "The University's Role in Economic Development: Lessons for
Academic Leaders," SRA Journal, Winter, 1990, p. 5.
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IC^, the driving force behind the entrepreneurialization of UT which is
discussed in more detail in chapter 3, advocates a theory of the "technopolis" in
which cities would be reorganized around a particular high tech industry,
generated by the universities, government, and other local institutions.67 At the
heart of this technopolis, of which Austin is a "developing technopolis", is the
commercialization of publicly funded university research. As we saw in chapter
3, IC^ founder George Kozmetsky recognizes the integral relationship between
the development of disciplined intellectual labor and entrepreneurialization lies in
the formers' development of commercializable research.68 Gibson and Smilor,
two top officers of the institute, explain in their book University Spin-Off
Companies69, the role of the universities:
The research university plays a key role in the fostering of research-and-
development activities, the attraction of key scholars and talented graduate
students, the spin-off of new companies, and the attraction of major technology-
based firms; it serves as a magnet for federal and private-sector funding and as a
general source of ideas, employees, and consultants for high technology and
infrastructure companies, (p. 36-7)
They also pinpoint the fundamental business activities characterizing
entrepreneurialization:
Universities also team with developers, or become developers themselves, in
undertaking projects to provide industrial or commercial space and incubator
facilities. Some universities have established affiliates directly or by joint venture
to conduct research and to provide specialized services to industry. These may
67David Gibson, George Kozmetsky, Everett Rogers, and Raymond Smilor, The Technopolis
Phenomenon, Austin: IC^, 1990.
68 George Kozmetsky, "Comment,'’ Discovery: Research and Scholarship at the University o f
Texas at Austin, vol. 13, no. 1, 1993, p. 2.
6^ David Gibson and Raymond Smilor, "The Role of the Research University in Creating and
Sustaining the US Technopolis," p. 31-70, in Alistair Brett, David Gibson, and Raymond
Smilor, University Spin-Off Companies: Economic Development, Faculty Entrepreneurs, and
Technology Transfer, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
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have the effect of accelerating innovation while reducing the costs to companies
supporting the research program. It also creates revenues and develops
properties—such as research parks—adjacent to the universities, (p. 37)
IC^, a UT funded think-tank, could very well be the most articulate
advocate for the entrepreneurialization of the universities in the US although they
have little direct with few campuses other than UT. They have held many
conferences and published volumes of reports and books demonstrating the
central role of the universities in high tech development. In the process, they
outline the process for commercializing the universities themselves through
"technology transfer" of publicly funded research, the creation of "spin-off
companies" to commercialize this technology, and the various interdependencies
of multinational high tech corporations and the universities. Since much of the
federally funded research money originates from the Department of Defense,
such entrepreneurialization is inseparable from the remilitarization of the
campuses. This is made explicit in early IC^ research focusing on the
commercialization of military technology in the universities, especially SDI. In
fact, IC^'s founder and director George Kozmetsky made his fortune by
founding the multinational weapons corporation Teledyne.70
There are numerous reports and studies funded or carried out by business
organizations, corporations, universities, foundations, and government agencies
extolling the virtues of what is often described as "stronger ties between business
and the universities." While many go as far as to examine commercialization of
the university, few do so in detail or with originality. Many are no more than
position papers detailing numerous useful examples of commercialization
involving specific universities, state and federal programs and policies, and
70 Commercializing SDI Technologies, ed. by Stewart Nozette and Robert Kuhn, NY: Praeger,
1987; and Commercializing Defense Related Technology, ed. by Robert Kuhn, NY: Praeger,
1987. They are collections of presentations from IC7 sponsored conferences.
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corporations to justify its continuation. This is evident in the majority of IC^'s
publications and articles.71
There are some unusually well done studies too. Nicolas Wade's study,
commissioned by a business backed Twentieth Century Fund whose board
disagreed with his sparse analysis, argues that "science" and the university are
endangered by commercialization through biotech. His conclusion, while mildly
critical turns on adherence to science and the university as somehow separate and
objective, threatened by outside forces.72
The most unique of such analyses is offered by Richard Anderson who
while recognizing the reorganization of the university into an overt business is
taking place, endorses rather than resists it. Anderson explains, as well as
Newson and Buchbinder do, that there "is the belief that colleges and universities
can relieve financial stress by acting more businesslike—with 'businesslike'
being defined in entrepreneurial terms. As a consequence, colleges and
universities have become real estate developers, venture capitalists, and even
impresarios." "The pursuit of commercial activities is a fundamental strategy
change and must be considered in that way," Anderson explains overtly as
capital's new tact in responding to the crisis created and continued by student
demands. However, he concludes not by opposing entrepreneurialization but
endorsing it cautiously so as to be successful without generating opposition. One
7 * A few examples of how much useful detail is available although lacking any substantive
analysis: Robert Johnston and Christopher Edwards, Entrepreneurial Science: New Links
Between Corporations, Universities and Government, NY: Quorum Books, 1987; Stephen
Szygenda and Meg Wilson, "Technology Transfer Commercializing University Research,"
Proceedings o f the 1987 Fall Joint Computer Conference, 1987, p. 696-700; Meg Wilson and
Stephen Szygenda, "Promoting University Spin-Offs Through Equity Participation," undated
manuscript; Stephen Szygenda and Clint Murchison, "Technology Commercialization: A
Model," College of Engineering, UT-Austin, manuscript, December 1987; and Meg Wilson,
"The University Role in Commercializing Technology: Building New Relationships,"
manuscript. Center for Technology Development and Transfer, UT-Austin, date unavailable.
72 Nicolas Wade, The Science Business: Report o f the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on
the Commercialization o f Scientific Research, NY: Priority Press, 1984.
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has to wonder why he’s writing for the American Association of University
Professors, a faculty union magazine?73
UT-Austin Law School Dean Mark Yudof has also expressed concern
with the privatization of state universities at the same time he was a candidate for
UT president.74 He recognizes a growing gap between the corporate funded
"haves" and the "have nots" that is resulting in the creation of "two universities,
one reasonably financed and the other starving for funds” and undermining the
"historical mission" of public universities. Contradicting himself, he writes that
"I am not troubled that markets influence educational priorities within public
universities" and advocates austerity—one of the key aspects of
entrepreneurialization—and a return to increased state funding.
Ironically, such positive analyses of the commercial potential of the
universities make a stronger case for understanding the productive relationship of
the universities to other institutions of capitalism than do most critical and even
radical analyses. One of the least subtle ironies is that while students and the
universities are understood to be "marginal" to capitalism by radical theorists as
we'll see in chapter 5—an analysis widely adopted among students themselves,
especially among student activists—they are recognized as a productive nexus of
capitalism by those attempting to reorganize them into overt multinational
businesses.
University Inc.
The combined strategies of manufactured austerity and entrepreneurialization are
beginning to indicate fundamental changes in the organization of US based
universities on the levels of institutional organization, resource allocation, and
research and teaching agendas. As each of these areas are affected by pressures
73 Richard Anderson, "The Advantage and Risks of Entrepreneurship," Academe, September-
October 1990, p. 9-14.
74 Mark Yudof, "The Burgeoning Privatization of State Universities," The Chronicle o f Higher
Education, May 13, 1992, p. A48.
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to commercialize, the university as a whole gradually comes to operate
increasingly as a business in which each activity is evaluated and undertaken for
its potential profitability.
Institutional Organization
Just as policies encouraging entrepreneurialization do not come from one source,
the implementation of campus-wide reforms do not originate merely from the
shadowy confines of the administration. As we've seen in the case of UT-
Austin, such reforms are being devised and implemented by combined coalitions
of multinational corporations, local businessmen, entrepreneurial faculty, UT
regents, IC^, the Executive Vice President and Provost's office, the Center for
Technological Venturing, technological transfer professional organization and
lobbies, the state legislature, state agencies, federal agencies, and international
business demands. In effect, these various coalitions have had the effect of
strengthening certain areas of the UT-Austin administration such as the Executive
Vice President and Provost, Vice President for Development, the Vice President
for Business Affairs and the Vice President for Research over traditional
academic governance structures such as the University Council and Faculty
Senate.
Separate offices are being created and certain existing offices strengthened
within the universities that operate outside the traditional academic process to
restructure the campus according to the dictates of the market. On many
campuses there exist an "Office of Technology Transfer" (the equivalent at UT-
Austin would be the Vice Provost) that maintain records of faculty and staff
research funding, consultancy work, patents, licensing, revenues from licenses
and marketing, faculty start-up companies and provide this information not only
to the administration but to outside business to encourage collaborations. Such
offices not only retain information but actually evaluate campus research for
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marketable potential, assess industry markets, evaluate and file for patents, and
negotiate licenses and joint ventures.
Such offices wield tremendous power at a time when all areas of academia
face pressures to "serve the needs of the market." Marketability is rapidly
becoming a central standard for evaluating efficiency and productivity of faculty,
departments, colleges and even graduate students. They are replacing existing
calculations of teacher-student ratios, faculty rank, publications, and even
grades—all of which rely on the static assumption that teaching (or the
disciplining of labor power) is the primary activity of the university. As the
primary evaluators of campus efficiency, these shadowy, informal bases of
power are indirectly controlling increasingly more areas of the universities such
as funding allocation and with it teaching and curriculum priorities.
One does have to look far to see this formalization taking place in the
curriculum: IC2 has been able to gain approval for the creation of a Ph.D.
concentration in Technology Transfer, MBA concentration in Management of
Technology and Entrepreneurship,75 and a new master's degree and Department
of Commercialization of Science and Technology for whom Kozmetsky will
conveniently be the graduate advisor.
During a time of manufactured austerity, such activities are being pointed
to as avenues for reversing declining real wages, budget cuts, and even a
resource for supporting graduate students. In turn, many faculty and academic
departments and colleges, unaware of the questionable data presented to them
demonstrating the need for austerity, are reevaluating their priorities and shifting
their research and teaching agendas to serve business.
Meanwhile, the informal decision-making power of these groups within
the university go unchecked and unhindered by faculty and students in the
Faculty Senate, Students' Association and University Council consumed by
trivial and narrow issues of curricula. The informal power of these offices and
75 Kozmetsky, p. 6.
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groups promoting entrepreneuriaiization has eclipsed the decision-making power
of faculty over the campus. Faced with assumed financial hardship, faculty are
two versions of the same choice— how to accept cutbacks and reach out to
business to offset them.
Resource Allocation
Across the campus and within colleges and departments, two tiers of the "have1'
and "have nots" are becoming increasingly entrenched. As we’ve seen at UT-
Austin, across the campus, fields such as engineering are faring increasingly
better than liberal arts (not to mention traditionally commercially viable areas
such as business and law) in faculty hiring, endowed chairs, research money,
and administrative financial support. Just by entering any engineering building
on campus, the reason becomes clear. Many class rooms have engraved signs
indicating corporate sponsorship of that space. However, the reasons are much
more fundamental. Funding flows increasingly to academic areas more
successful and willing to submit and reprioritize their activities to serve the needs
of business. For example, many of the older buildings composing the main
campus that mostly serve the liberal arts and natural sciences continue to carry
asbestos while tens of millions of dollars are spent to construct new state of art
facilities for the College of Engineering.
Campus priorities reflect the commercial viability of particular academic
programs. This is increasingly becoming the case even within departments. In
the Department of Sociology, for example, the Population Research Center,
which conducts mostly quantitative demographic studies, is heralded for its
successful collaborations with government agencies, research funding, and
support of graduate students as research assistants. As a result, a split is being
engineered in the department between the "demographers" and the "theorists,"
the later whom are called upon to behave more like the former. As a result, the
department is increasingly finding itself under pressure to further subject its
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research and teaching to the needs of business. For example, those faculty and
students lacking outside or UT research support end up subsidizing necessities
of their work such as photocoping, faxes and 800 WATS line use from their
own salaries.
Research and Teaching Agendas
Since the mid-1980s many students have openly criticized UT-Austin for putting
too much emphasis on "research" rather than "teaching". Such a criticism
overlooks that both are integrally related in the university’s mission to deliver
well-trained and disciplined skilled workers. In fact, this cry could be interpreted
as the complaints of those who want to be trained that they are being ignored.
Perhaps the critique is not as simple. As the university becomes to operate more
and more as a business, those areas of teaching and research receiving adequate
administrative support are those that best demonstrate their commercial potential.
Such potential is not limited only to the development of new technologies but
also in the transferring of basic skills such as statistics and writing necessary for
training as a researcher. The Sociology Department, although its has very few
undergraduates, receives much of its funding based on outside undergraduate
enrollment in statistics courses taught by demography faculty. As a result, the
department is financially rewarded for its service to more commercial academic
programs.
The key trend is departments, colleges and research centers engaging in
the training of students with skills desired by companies and research leading to
the development of new profitable products do not face financial hardship. Those
programs that do not successfully serve their interests or outright resist serving
them face the brant of a manufactured austerity that restricts their flow of funding
and research support. As a result, many of these areas reprioritize their teaching
to create classes that pass along basic work-related skills rather than abstract
critical thinking or the examination of scientific issues or technologies useful so
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other sectors of society. Again, this is the case in the Sociology Department
which requires all Ph.D program students to take two courses in quantitative
methods whether studying it or not and has a larger abundance of faculty
concentrating on those areas than others.
Those faculty and students engaged in research and study in commercially
profitable areas are rewarded with not only funding, but smaller and accessible
classes, research money, and employment. On the other hand, students and
faculty continuing to pursue knowledge for their own curiosity face budget cuts,
tuition and fee increases, overcrowded classes, and increased workloads—not
to mention decreasing power to affect how the university is being run.
Yet, these changes reflect only the effects of entrepreneurialization at the
institutional structural level. The picture is incomplete. When we take into
account the historical context of global socio-political conflict that gave rise the
crisis of control over the universities and the continuing struggles of students to
also reorganize the universities to serve their multiple needs,
entrepreneurialization appears to be a process of change characterized by conflict,
antagonism and struggle.
From Analysis to Resistance
As we saw in chapter 3, the most significant vulnerability of student resistance
movement has been not simply their inability to recognize the university as a
productive part of capitalist social relations but to fight it as such.76 Offering an
a-historical critique of university collaboration with business and the military
cannot help us to understand what is happening all about us. The point is also
not to ensure that everyone reaches the same level of "consciousness" about what
76 I do not intend to exclude others inside the university but to focus on that which I know
best as a student and participant of student movements. I wish to contribute to Barrow,
Newson, Buchbinder, and Aboites’ excellent complementary analyses by understanding the
relationship of students in the process.
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is happening, only understand better what we are facing and fighting and that we
are not alone on any given campus or even inside arbitrary national borders.
This analysis of entrepreneurialization is not to simply decry the soiling of
the university by capital but to demonstrate that it 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."77 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 and further destablized not simply changing those who control
it. For example, if in the process of entrepreneurialization, US universities are
blocked from fully participating in the global economy by militant student and
faculty protest movements, these universities will lose or default on billions of
dollars of investments causing a financial collapse on the level of at least the S&L
banking crisis.
Perhaps Alain Touraine best perceived the inseparability of the
entrepreneurializing university and the changing relationship of the student
movement in class struggle, asking: "If it is true that knowledge and technical
progress are the motors of the new society, as the accumulation of capital was
the motor of the preceding (industrial) society, does not the university then
occupy the same place as the great capitalist enterprise formerly did? Thus, is not
77 Matt Feuer, "Sell Out? Or the Production of the Student," Coup De Tete, September 1993,
9-10. Feuer is responding to this very type of critique of commercialization that advocates
student control and restoration of the ideal university.
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the student movement, in principle at least, of the same importance as the labour
movement of the past?"78
I disagree that the university and the student movement are somehow
displacing the "great capitalist enterprise" and the traditionally conceived labour
movement but rather recognize the need to reevaluate their ever-changing
relationship. US based universities are going through the beginning of what m a y
fundamentally transform their relationship to other sectors of society. While
these relationships change so do the relationships of those affected by them. As
the universities become overt businesses, students, faculty and researchers will
need to be reevaluated not only to understand the extent to which what they do is
productive labor but also to recognize the ways in which they resist further
subordination to work and the market brought about by entrepreneurialization.
For this reason, chapters 5-6 is an intervention into this ongoing theoretical
discussion by attempting to reevaluate the conflicting relationship of students
within the universities.
78 Alain Touraine, "Naissance d'un Mouvement Etudiant," Le Monde, March 7 and 8, 1968,
translated and quoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, "The Meaning of the Student Revolt," Student
Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, edited by Alexander Cockbum and Robin Blackburn,
Baltimore: Penguin and London: New Left Review, 1969, p. 26. Although Jones acknowledges
that "student radicalism may be a new social movement at die core of the new forces of
production, "he denounces Touraine's thesis as "scientifically incorrect and politically
reactionary." (p. 27)
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C hapter 5. M arginal No More: Student R esistan ce to
Entrepreneurialization as Class Conflict
One mistake radical students have been making in relating to the worst aspects of
the multiversity's academic apparatus has been their avoidance o f it.
—Carl Davidson1
Davidson's critique also applies to most critical observers of the university: in
attempting to discuss the university, they have ignored the university. A lot has
been written about the presidents, regents and businessmen who run them,
income characteristics of students and the various assumed ideals which drive
student protest. Far and few between are there actual attempts to understand the
causes of the breakdown of the universities and what part students have played
in them as students.
As the entrepreneurialization of US-based universities offers evidence of
the productive relationship of the university to capital accumulation, it requires
that we reevaluate our understanding of what students mean in a capitalist society
and student political organization. Are students merely "privileged," "workers"
or a combination of both and more? Is student political activity, to the extent that
it disrupts the operations of the university, a subsidiary or complementary part of
class conflict?
Studies by the Brookings Institute and the Committee for Economic
Development in the 1960s showed that higher education was related to one-half
the growth rate in the 1950-60s, one-fifth was the direct result of the increased
quality of the labor force from education and one-third from "advances in
knowledge" applied to the production process.2 Considering the widespread
1 Carl Davidson, The New Radicals in the Multiversity and Other SDS Writings on Student
Syndicalism, Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1990, p. 35.
2 Edward Denison, The Sources o f Economic Growth :The Alternatives Before Us,
Supplementary Paper No. 13, NY: Committee for Economic Development, 1962, pgs. 67-79
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manufactured disinvestment from higher education since the late 1960s, I am
compelled to ask what happened? Since the 1950s much attention has been
focused on the contribution of higher education to economic growth in the
development of disciplined intellectual labor according to theories of investment
in "human capital." With the campus rebellions of the 1960-70s, the focus
shifted to ongoing discussions of the university's generation of new marketable
technologies, start-up of new high tech companies and direct role in the global
economy.
While little critical commentary has been offered regarding the productive
economic activity of the university in a capitalist society, even less has been
offered concerning the dynamics of the internal conflicts and struggles taking
place during the transition of the university into an overt multinational business.
Critical commentators on the university still hold to the notion of the universities
being organized to serve only the development of disciplined labor while
ignoring the more direct participation through the process I call
entrepreneurialization. The changing "class composition" of the universities has
been almost entirely ignored.3
Our failure to investigate the class composition of the universities is a
direct result of the theoretical failures of our understanding of student political
activity. This chapter analyzes the two most common views of students as either
"middle class" and "privileged" or working but not part of the working class that
is most common among contemporary student activists. As we'll see, both
theories rest on an identical assumption of the university as a marginal and
unproductive institution in capitalism—the very assumption this dissertation
and 229-255; and Edward Denison, Why Growth Rates Differ, Wash. DC: Brookings
Institution, 1967, pgs. 78-108 and 279-295.
3 By "class composition" I mean the way in which institutional organization changes in
response to ongoing internal class conflict in an effort to restore manageability. See Harry
Cleaver, "Marxian theory and the inversion of class perspective in its concepts: Two case
studies," first draft, April 1989.
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seeks to refute by documenting the continuing reorganization of universities into
overt profit-making businesses.
This debilitating assumption has been taken for granted among many
student activists, as we saw in the case study of multiculturalism and the right-
wing counterattack in chapter 3. Although student activists lacked a thorough
analytical critique of the university in capitalism, the repression was predicated
upon the threat of the multiculturalism movement to the university’s role in
capital accumulation. In order to better understand why the movement lacked
such a critique we need to look at the theoretical underpinnings that has informed
nearly every radical study of students and higher education since the 1960s.
Ironically, the more the managers of higher education have indirectly and
sometimes directly attributed the breakdown of the universities to the struggles of
faculty and students, the less credit we receive from the left. On the left, there
have been a few recurring themes that define the way many look at the
universities and students. These themes have received much agreement between
a diverse array of theorists and activists who may agree upon little else. The first
seems to be a vulgar idea that students are "privileged" because of their location
in the university or because of their parent's income level. Such labels as "petit
bourgeois" or "middle class" often explicitly or implicitly resound in discussions
of students. This one-dimensional thinking has great parlance among students
themselves as well who have come to believe that their roles as students are
insignificant because of a presumed privilege and thereby prefer to identify with
other groups (waged workers, "minorities," black South Africans etc.) who are
perceived to be more exploited or less privileged. It is vital to understand how
this dynamic is rooted in theories of students as middle class.
Some have attempted to deal with these theories by looking at how
students do fit into the working class. "Fit" is the key word here, since students
are seen to be part of the working class only because of their work role whether
in or after school rather than for their self-activity. As we'll see, many times the
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working class is boiled down to a category in the strictest sense in which being a
worker is to have a specific type of job, level of salary or even a salary itself.
Students are then forced into this category since they are being trained to fit into
these functions. However, the activity of students as students is neither
perceived as productive to accumulation nor are their forms of refusal recognized
as class struggle.
Given the reorganization of the universities into overt businesses, students
can be understood as unwaged workers—to the extent that they do the work of
disciplining themselves to work. Expanding upon the analyses of the "Wages for
Students" movement of the 1970s, I argue that student struggle, both against
being unwaged workers and in pursuit of their own autonomous projects within
the university antagonistic to work, is not subordinate to other sectors of class
struggle.
This chapter concludes with an analysis of how these theories implicitly
informed the multiculturalism movement at the University of Texas at Austin
(UT-Austin). In what way did the student organizers failure to develop a critique
of UT-Austin as a business in organizing their struggle contribute to the
movement's inability to respond to the attempts to coopt and institutional limited
demands as well as the repressive countermeasures? In light of my case study of
the multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin, a class analysis of the university
and student movements can benefit student resistance to entrepreneurialization.
The Myth of Students as Middle Class
Richard Flacks, an early member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
has spent much of his academic career critically investigating student and youth
rebellion. In Youth and Social Change (1970) Flacks contends that the student
movements of the 1960s grew out of a structural breakdown generated by
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technological change A Student movements and other "generational revolts occur
when societies undergo processes of cultural breakdown" according to Flacks.
Such cultural crises have typically been evident when traditional values,
meanings, and norms appear to be obsolete, retrogressive, or incoherent to an
increasing number of members of society. Usually these crises are symptomatic
of the fact that technological change has rendered traditional practices and
institutions irrelevant and has generated a spreading pattern of new hopes,
expectations and demands. These new aspirations are, however, not met by
existing institutions and by the established structure of authority. Indeed, they
are often actively resisted and repressed by those who have power (p. 18).
Flacks assumes that these movements grow out of a structural-functional
breakdown of the dialectic.^ The existing values and norms are no longer
suitable due to technological change, the motivation for which is unexplained,
that then triggers dissatisfaction. These norms, transferred to the youth by their
^ Richard Flacks, Youth and Social Change, Markham Publishing Co.: Chicago, 1971. He
also makes a Freudian argument in the text that these middle class students partially developed
their radicalism by identifying with their highly educated, liberal mothers in revolt against their
materialistic fathers. This injection of the Oedipus complex into explaining the student revolt
of the 1960s could easily be the weaponry of the right. Not only is it premised on the deluded
imagination that these movements engendered only male desires whatever that may be (women
were subordinated but not powerless) but that there is an instinctual, human rationality that
governs our behavior.
5 Clark Kerr testified to the rupture of the dialectic in the universities as a result of the refusal
of students: "Should the model of the university be based more on productive conflict or on
doctrinal unity, on the interaction of disparate entities or on the integration of fully compatible
parts? The multiversity is based more on conflict and on interaction; the monistic university
more on unity and integration" (p. 140). And consider "It [the multiversity] worshipped no
single God; it constituted no single, unified community; it had no discretely defined set of
customers. It was marked by many visions of the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and by many
roads to achieve these visions; by power conflicts; by service to many markets and a concern
for many publics" (p. 136-7). There is no doubt about the importance of this conjecture in his
repeated reminders that the university has never developed by any coherent plan but by
haphazard, crisis decisionmaking when needed, whose cause is never admitted, that is constandy
blocked by faculty and student insolence (p. 166, 177). Paradoxically, the left grasps to preserve
capital's dialectic capital itself admits, in mystified terms nonetheless, its devastation in the face
of struggle (Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, Harvard Press: Cambridge, 3rd ed., 1982).
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parents, become irrelevant and leave perceptions of "declining expectations" to
repeat in "middle class" jobs and communities. Yet, with the new requirements
of technological change, these students no longer have the possibility to continue
as middle class (e.g. petit bourgeois), but are in turmoil due to their
unpredictable future and "receptive to new values, meanings, and identities" (p.
35).
As a result, the universities appear to breed radical criticism at the same
time they are preparing the new managers, a "vanguard" group of middle class
intellectual youth who come to be caught between the deterioration of the petit
bourgeois and the demands of technological change (p. 52-54). Spurred by the
civil rights movement, this vanguard began to perceive of themselves as agents
of social change and sought to realize the radicalizing potential of the
universities.
They shared with their parents a reverence of the university; like their
parents, they found organized religion an inadequate source of values, and
perhaps even more than their parents, they identified the university as the sole
institution in the society that could facilitate the search for new values and
meanings and help define a morally coherent and humanistic way of life. Far
from wishing to destroy the university, Flacks sees radical students as among the
most committed to its fulfillment as a central institution in their lives (p. 79).
More than making education the "new religion," as Ivan Hlich called
education in the west,6 Racks portrays the university as the final synthesis of the
capitalist dialectic, resolving political crises by transferring new values and
behavior to the alienated vanguard. Isolated from "the rest of' capitalist society,
the universities could serve to resolve the cultural contradictions of technological
change.^ The university
6 Ivan Qlich, Deschooling Society, NY: Harper & Row, 1971, p. 15.
7 o f course, this appears even more ridiculous when takes into account the struggles around
race and gender that erupted in the 1950-60s that Flacks totally ignored.
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provided a kind of freedom virtually unavailable elsewhere in society. First, time
was relatively free and unsupervised. The university student was at once free
from the supervision of parents and the regimentation of work situations. His
time was his own and he need not account for it to either his parents or his
employer (as he would in a work situation), (p. 40)
With all the talk of freedom, Flacks has apparently overlooked the central aspect
of school that makes it useful to business: self-managed discipline for work.
Work at the university can be more vicious than at a waged job because it has no
set work hours or evident boss. Since no one looks over the shoulder of a
student or pays for the work, work can conceivably go on all day long—there is
no end to the work day. These invisible means for regulating and regimenting the
work day defies any universal claim that "his time was his own and he need not
account for it" or that it is "free and unsupervised," as Flacks suggests.
Of course, it is not so clear cut. Flacks overlooks the conflicts between the
unwaged work of self-discipline and the ideal of the "free and unsupervised"
student from which the pursuit of autonomous social projects can emerge when
students resist the imposition of self-discipline. At UT-Austin I have found this
antagonism quite strong. Many students feel the pressure to work but relay it by
accomplishing the most in the least amount of time and effort possible by taking
classes that give credit for what they would do anyway, cheating, cooperation,
absenteeism, purchasing or trading notes, attending part-time, staying longer and
dropping out and back in. With their "free time" carved out by refusing such
discipline they have been able to pursue a multitude of projects from publishing
alternative newspapers, starting a radio station, playing music, traveling, or
organizing protest movements.
Using a structural-functionalist approach, Flacks argues that student
rebellion is determined by technological change that renders the traditional social
structure irrelevant and raises social expectations. When these expectation are not
realized student and youth rebellion limited to aspirations of the middle class
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results.8 The crisis of the universities originates in capital's need for new
technology. Not only are these developments not explained in terms of the
disruption of their usefulness to capital accumulation (which primarily is the
accumulation of a class of workers^) but it even determines a possible
resurgence of activism.10 Nonetheless, his theories do not fit. If students are
"free and unsupervised" within a space that allows for critique how is their
rebellion structurally determined? Ironically, although Flacks was a member of
one of the students movements that created the crisis, he finds the crisis
originated in a structural-functional process of social change.
Jurgen Habermas carries this theme of psychological disruption a bit
further in his commentaries on the West German student movement in Toward a
Rational Society. * Like Flacks, Habermas locates the motivation of the student
movement in the breakdown of the university's function of transmitting the
"dominant culture".
Habermas finds the 1960s generation to have been the first to have grown
up under less burdensome economic conditions and is psychologically less
subject to the disciplinary compulsions of the labor market. He hypothesizes a
context on the basis of which we can explain the singular sensitivity of young
activists: They have become sensitive to the costs for individual development of a
society dominated by competition for status and achievement and by the
bureaucratization of all regions of life. These costs seem to them
disproportionately high in relation to the technological potential, (p. 29)
Put another way, the breakdown of parental authority and the spread of
permissive educational systems "make possible experiences and promotes
8 Flacks, p. 18, 35.
9 This is one possible interpretation of section eight of Capital volume I made by Harry
Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, Univ. of Texas Press: Austin, 1979.
10 Flacks, p. 18.
*1 Jurgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
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orientations among children that necessarily conflict with the standards of the
perpetuated ideology of achievement while simultaneously converging with
technologically available, although socially enchained, potential leisure and
freedom, gratification and pacification" (p. 30).
There is little difference between Habermas and Flacks on the cause of the
movements and their analysis of the role of the universities in a capitalist society.
Habermas identifies three functions of the university: to efficiently instill skills
and abilities, transmit the dominant culture, and form the political
unconsciousness of students (p. 2-4). The crisis erupts as a result of
technological imperatives, the student rebellion grows from the structural
technological imperative that stirs middle class values of extended leisure. With
rising development in the Western countries "the problems of structural social
change...once again find in the formative processes of the rising generations a
correspondence with psychological development." (p. 30)
Once again, student movements rise out of structural maladjustments of
the accumulation process, posing a crisis of values to the middle class youth.
Studying the role of education in the production of labor power is forsaken in
favor of a superficial articulation of the accepted ideology. Habermas and Flacks
never question the myth that education is a "privilege" and not a virtually costless
means for developing a potential labor force. In turn, student movements are not
struggles against the hidden process of production but a searching for new
middle class values of consumption. To them, students organize movements not
to realize their own articulated needs and desires, but to defend their narrow
middle class interests so as to bypass the psychological disruptions of economic
reorganization.
Education is seen as subordinate to production, not a part of the process
of circulation., a "use value", of "exchange values" writes Habermas (p. 48). It
is no more than a distribution system of social status that is challenged in the
process of conflict, not a hidden part of production. Habermas' failure to apply a
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class analysis to education itself leaves his analysis looking much like the
Carnegie Commission’s,12 by calling for the development of more critical
professionals, subordinating research to popular needs, and equalizing access to
the status rewards of the university (p. 47-48). When he dismissed the student
movements' claim that students are workers, even going so far as to say that the
movements are entirely unrelated across national boundaries, it is not shocking to
read that he disagrees that student movements are a part of international
circulation of class struggle (p. 35). This conclusion is easily reached by
dismissing any significant meaning of the universities in capitalist society except
as a functional institution. If students have no strategic place to play his call for
student/faculty councils to run the universities would eventually backfire. If
students are socially insignificant, then such a strategy would be no more than
sloganeering designed to allow the faculty, who like him have rejected any
suggestion that the student movements have ruptured accumulation, a foothold in
what they have long abandoned.
Instead of using the university for "pseudo-revolutionary adventures,"
Habermas argues, "the movement should aim at creating for it an institutional
framework that would make it possible to undo the interlocking of instruction
and research with power and privilege inside and outside the university" (p. 46).
Aside from proposing that the struggles inside the universities could and should
speak for those outside it, he attests to the need to preserve not just the
universities but make them more efficient in their tasks. Thus, turned against the
students who seek to bum the universities down, Habermas offers a fire
extinguisher. Now the universities are not only linked to "outside" struggles as
I2 The Carnegie Commission's proposals for reform are described in The More Effective Use of
Resources: An Imperative fo r Higher Education, A report and Recommendations by The
Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, McGraw-Hill: New York, June 1972, and
Priorities for Action: Final Report o f the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education,
McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973.
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their vanguard but are made even more efficient in their calling to resolve
structural complications.
So too does Robert Paul Wolff, in the Ideal o f the University, set aside
the student movements in the U.S. in favor of preserving his ideal university.13
Rejecting the movement's analysis that students are workers in the corporate
universities (p. 44-45), Wolff from a counterview of faculty as the actual
workers, with the students acting as a consumers, investing in their own human
capital (which we will soon discuss in relation to Gary Becker) to the universities
being an assembly line for the production of "establishment man", which are
really no more than middle level managers14 (p. 50). In fact, by the end of the
book, the university appears as neither. Instead, it has become a place of "free
inquiry" (p. 56) that is being corrupted by outside forces that have imposed on it
arbitrary rules and regulations such as grading, admissions and sorting
mechanisms. ^ While the university is far from neutral, Wolff pines for the old
days when the campus was a community and an assembly line left to "intellectual
maturation" (p. 150).
Like Habermas, Wolff hypothesizes the taking power by the university
student/faculty community with the goal of returning to his self-described
utopian campus of intellectual pursuits. "Utopian" may be a misnomer for his
vision since the Carnegie Commission's reforms look quite like W olffs
community of scholars. Some of their reforms are even identical: reduce the
undergraduate education to three years, abolish the Ph.D. and replace it with a
*3 Both books by Habermas and Wolff were published by Beacon Press in 1970.
14 Vladimir Escalante disputes the case that students are consumers, a myth he finds reinforced
by "a legal system that tends to view the relation between student and university as a contract
for services,” ignoring the fact that students are a disenfranchised sector. (Vladimir Escalante,
"A History of University Labor Struggles," in Trumpbour, 1989, p. 205).
The gravest absurdity behind the claim of "autonomy” is that Kerr himself recognizes that
the universities have always been shaped by outside influences (p. 49), and by the time he
wrote The Uses o f the University would find "the boundaries of the universities are stretched to
embrace all of society" (p. 115) becoming entrepreneurial corporations in themselves, (p. 58-9)
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three year professional degree for college teaching. While some of his other
reform ideas were not replicated by Carnegie (abolish grades, sever the
professional schools and create random admissions) functionally they serve the
same purpose of institutionalizing student's limited demands for reforms to
reimpose control over the campuses. In the meanwhile, the universities could
keep churning out "establishment men," Wolffs term for students.
The same problem can be raised with W olffs analysis as well as
Habermas’ and Flack's: the universities reproduction of labor power is never
challenged and students resistance to that reproduction is nonexistent. Instead,
Wolff sees the assembly line as something imposed from the outside on the
university (p. 53), which is seen as marginal to economic production, totally
divorced from its pursuit of profit through the imposition of work. Without
recognizing the centrality of the university in the sphere of circulation, Wolffs
ideal reforms are easily complementary to capital’s dire need to reestablish
control inside them. His analysis speaks to capital's search for an answer to a
crisis wrought by student and faculty struggles—ironically it is even
complementary to National Association of Scholars' current proposal for
returning to the classics —not to students desires to transform or even explode
the university. The class content of the struggles are gutted in favor of restoring
the universities role by resolving supposed structural-functional crises generated
by changing capitalist imperatives. Flacks' analysis has come full circle, choking
the necks of the student movements like a noose.
Implicit in Wolffs characterization of the assembly line rolling off new
units of "establishment man" is the concept of education as consumption. Rather
than seeing education as producing labor power, leftist consumptionist theories
accept the notion of human capital that education is an investment in oneself that
later results in a higher standard of living without questioning its fundamental
basis. In other words, because a student is consuming and paying to do so,
education must be a privilege restricted to only those who can afford to do so.
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Ironically, not only is this the mask spread over education, but it is dated even by
common knowledge that the expansion of higher education in the late 1950s was
seen as tied to economic growth. Even today, neo-classical economics uses
education to account for residuals in growth that cannot be specifically accounted
for.
Yet, even in the face of such evidence that education is a source of growth
and profits, the left still persists in calling students consumers. Michael Miles
writes that "the position of students is not the role of the proletariat but, on the
closest analogy, the role of consumers.
The outputs of the higher educational system is educational credentials, which
determine the holders' place in the labor market on the presumption that they
represent mental skills and intellectual training. In this enterprise, the major
universities certify the elite cadres, while the lesser institutions turn out trained
manpower. Although these degrees and credentials are the main products of the
educational institutions, students are in a sense not only consumers of the
products but the products themselves.^
A few years later Gintis and Bowles would subscribe to a similar model of
education which they called the "correspondence principle" which suggests, as
Miles does, that education mirrors ones position elsewhere in the economy.
The irony of the theory of students as consumers is that it fetishizes
credentials and status in the form of degrees and grades in the same way the
universities present them as rewards. Each of these supposedly indicate the
promised students' future standard of living and status in society. However,
what is ignored is the means in which grades and degrees are used to measure,
channel, and divide students among themselves and serve labor planning. The
difference between universities and community colleges are not strictly the
graduates' wages as much as the work they do in school. Low entropy students
Michael Miles, The Radical Probe: The Logic o f Student Rebellion, NY: Antheneum,
1971, p. 125.
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generally make it up the educational hierarchy while the slackers are kept below.
Even university students are subject to such evaluations that are used to channel
them from "state" to "research" or "undergraduate" to graduate" universities.
Grades indicate both the amount of work a student has done and the quality, or
the extent to which the students fulfill the expectations of the authority structure.
Grades hypothetically lead to a degree which indicates to a potential university or
employer that the individual did the required amount of work in the prescribed
amount of time and has the potential to do so again. According to the rhetoric,
grades serve like company script which can be turned in upon graduation for a
certain wage.
Left theories of students as consumers shamelessly fail to recognize how
what are described as beneficial are actually used against them as forms of
control and work. The student as consumer reinforces the ideology of education
as privileged access to a piece of the socio-economic pie. However, as the
percentage of people who attend college rises and employment opportunities dry
up due to automation, telecommunications and capital flight, these pieces are no
longer guaranteed. Students may not graduate with a guaranteed step on the
ladder but they are stamped with the assumed seal of quality self-discipline that
will contribute to their productivity and their employers profits in a waged job.
This is especially so in the case of the draft which ranked students based
upon grades and area of study. According to a document liberated from the
Selective Service, deferments were used as a means to channel youth into
various types of work, including school. The term "deferment" is used
to describe the method and means used to attract to the kind of service considered
the most important, the individuals who were not compelled to do it. The club of
induction has been used to drive out of areas considered to be less important to
areas of greater importance in which deferments were given, the individuals who
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did not or could not participate in activities which were considered essential to
the defense of the Nation.*'
In other words, for the Selective Service, students were no more than
labor power being driven to areas of training that were most needed by business.
"The psychology of granting wide choice under pressure to take action is the
American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign
countries where choice is not permitted," the planners wrote themselves. By
exposing the use of grades, degrees, deferments, and wages as part of a process
of labor distribution and control, the notion of free choice that lies behind
theories of students as consumer is shattered.
Another twist to the student as consumer argument is the view that
students are a product. In the absence of an understanding who does the work of
producing the student and what exactly is produced, such an approach frequendy
becomes reduced to a view of students of as tabula rasa, blank slates to be
written upon at will. Not only is this hardly been the case since the mid 1960s,
but to see students this way is to disempower them by reducing the process to a
one-sided passive activity.
These theorists abandonment of the class struggle inside the university left
open a space for Ernest Mandel to charge through with The Revolutionary
Student Movement: Theory and Practice.*8 Giving ideological lip service (with
slogans like "revolutionary youth") to a role for students in revolutionary
struggle, Mandel attempts to capitalize on the theoretical vacuum on the left to
insert the student movement into an effort to build a vanguard party. Dismissing
claims that students are workers, Mandel easily finds student self-activity
*7 "Memorandum from National Headquarters, Selective Service System," July 1,1965,
reprinted in The University Crisis Reader: The Liberal University Under Attack, Volume I,
edited by Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr, Random House: New York, 1971, p. 195,200.
*8 Ernest Mandel, The Revolutionary Student Movement: Theory and Practice, NY: Young
Socialist Publications, pamphlet, April 1969.
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insufficient as long as it remains confined to a struggle against the university (p.
5). Student struggles over the conditions and content of education are a dead
end; "the mainspring of the revolt would persist even if these material conditions
were corrected (p. 7). "Student power" is meaningless since the root of the
problem for students is the capitalist economy that has invaded the universities.
Seeking a "transitional slogan" to draw in those students who have not seen the
priority of the larger struggle "outside" the universities, student power is limited
because it "would not change the roots of alienation of students because these do
not lie in the university itself but in society as a whole" (p. 9).
Dismissing the claim that students are workers as "bourgeois," he posits
the university as Flacks and the others do as separate and margin to the
economy. In his passing critique of liberal reformers, Mandel suggests that they
would only serve to further the invasion of business in the universities (pgs. 7-
8). Likewise, the students themselves may begin their struggles by resisting the
universities and seek to change them but that in itself is limited. While it is valid
to attack any idea that the university is isolated from other sectors of capitalist
society, Mandel abuses this to suggest the reverse: that rather than isolated, the
universities are a subordinate institution: "The structure of the bourgeois
universities is only a reflection of the general hierarchic structure of bourgeois
society, " he writes (p. 6). Thus, what is required is that the movement "spill
over the limits of the university" to achieve its revolutionary subjectivity.
This "spill over" is suggested in order to establish subordinate links with
Third World Liberation movements (p. 9-10) and the industrial working class (p.
25). At this point can students gain revolutionary consciousness by studying
Marx and socialism, finally offering a contribution to the revolution (p. 18). It is
at this point that the struggle has transcended the limits of the struggle against the
university and raised the necessity of the party.
Like the others we've discussed, Mandel places the university on the
margins in order to save it. He begins by prompting students to "spill over" in
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order to distract them from burning them down so that they can return later to
work in them after the revolution. Certainly, the university are important, Mandel
implies, even if students themselves are not—especially if they do not pledge
their allegiance to the waged working class. Here raises the unresolved
contradiction of left theories of the university: the universities are important—if
only marginally—but students themselves are not. Only the worst mind games
can hide this, but never any better than the planners who utilize the same myth of
the insignificance of students to maintain the unwaged reproduction of labor
power.
Much of Mandel's analysis has become the commonly agreed upon
analysis of higher education for many "white" radical student activists. Groups
such as the Progressive Student Network, the Student Environmental Action
Coalition and many local independent "progressive" campus groups have
accepted the notion that students themselves are insignificant in absence of their
service to struggles outside the university or those of waged university
employees or people of color who are perceived to be more oppressed. As a
result, many student movements that gained ground in the 1980s such the anti
apartheid, anti-CIA and anti-intervention movements did so at the expense of
circulating the struggle to millions of other students fighting their own struggles
against school/work, austerity, cutbacks, and for enlargened social wages and
protection from sexual violence. While these movements have contributed to the
continued disruption of the universities, they have self-circumcised themselves
by ignoring their relationship as students to the university itself and the
relationship to a host of other struggles taking place alongside them but with
hardly any public exposure.
Working But Not Workers
One of the problems with these theories of students as the middle class, Carlos
Munoz points out, is that "it is generally not placed in the context of class
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conflict."19 Some attempts to answer the charge that students are part of the
middle class posited students as part of a "new working class" yet not as
workers themselves, as those who see the school as a social factory have
attempted to do.
Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, who were also active in SDS for a few
years, attacked the idea that students are middle class as destructive to attempts to
relate student struggles to those of other parts of the working class. Not only do
they attack the "Old Left's" demand that students subordinate their struggles to
that of industrial workers (which were assumed to be the real proletariat) but it is
blind to the real role of the multiversity in the transformation of the labor force
and the training of a new and vitally important sector of the work force to fit the
needs of the new technology, but it was attempting to enforce false
consciousness within one group in the society—a group which was beginning
to develop a revolutionary class conciousness of its relationship to the means of
production. Old Left ideological categories centering on 'the industrial working
class' hindered rather than aided the development of socialist consciousness
among students. In calling students 'middle class,' the Old Left was promoting a
false picture of class relations in the society—a false picture which was precisely
the same as that promoted by the governing ideology.20
Michael Spiegel, former SDS National Secretary, is cited by Neiman and
Calvert as an extension of their attack. Clearly, the concept of students as middle
class does not grow out of the expressions of students themselves, but has been
imposed from elsewhere, creating a schizophrenic disruption between experience
and ideology. Spiegel explains that
A consciousness which defines students as members of the elite is obviously
destructive not only to the establishment of our own identity as radicals but also
to our ability to become a vehicle for the challenging of ruling class values. We
19 Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989,
p. 14.
20 Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New
Capitalism, Random House: New York, 1971, p. 24.
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cannot see ourselves building a totally declasse movement of people who stand
outside of the classes of society as pure revolutionaries. One may be able to build
a cadre who perceive themselves in that way, but not mass movement. A mass
movement must grow out of the experiences and oppression of people’s lives.
An organization must see itself as being able to speak for a group of people out
of a set of values, but to accept the false definition of the role of students in this
society denies us the ability to build anything more than a small organization of
guilty, alienated youth who see themselves as 'denying class privilege' (an
unheard of basis for building a mass movement).
Spiegel's analysis is quite prophetic today. Because the student movements were
not able to heed his warning that they base themselves on the experiences of
students, much student activism since the 1960s has been based upon "guilt
politics" where "white" activists act not so much because it is an expression of
their own resistance to their oppression as students but because out of a rejection
of privilege that contributes to the oppression and exploitation of others. In a
sense, the notion of students as middle class has served to not only keep students
divided from the rest of the working class by tainting them as inflictors of
exploitation but has perpetuated a paternalism within the working class generated
by those perceived as privileged aspiring to dedicate their lives to serving those
perceived to be more exploited and thus powerless.
Spiegel rejects this paternalism and intra-class division by examining the
actual social relationships of students. While Spiegel does not conceive of
students as oppressed, he does offer a substantial methodology for relating the
struggles of students to other struggles, something few other theorists of student
struggles have been able or willing to do.
A class is defined by its relationship to the means of production: by whether or
not it control those means and has the power to direct their course. As students,
it would be difficult to say that we are oppressed—but our class situation is
certainly not one of control over the means of production (or of eventual control
over them)— at least this is true for the vast majority of students. Thus our
interests lie with others who have the same relationship to the means of
production (for most of them, their material condition is also much worse than
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students—they are more clearly "oppressed"). The values of a student struggle
must be seen as part of a broader class struggle against the ruling class. (Even
though the other elements of the struggle may not have emerged yet, the values
must show implicit support of other potential struggles.)
A correct understanding of our own consciousness in these terms makes
it possible for us to not only "fight our own battles," but also to link up with
other groups of oppressed people (in determining values, conscious strategy and
direction, if not in tactical or strategic coalition.) If we are to direct our struggle
against the oppression of all people, we must first be clear about our own
relationship to the class structure of America. No organization ever succeeded in
building a strong movement for social change out of guilt—by building the
consciousness of a movement on the motivation that one is in fact a member of
the class of the oppressors and must salve that guilt. If we are to go beyond the
politics of alienation, we must be able to present students with an analysis which
does not motivate them to move out of guilt produced by false consciousness. In
this respect, the widespread use of the concept of manpower channeling when
working with draft resistance has been very important...Manpower channeling is
no replacement for a class analysis by destroying the self-concept in middle class
students that they are members of the ruling class and that their interests are thus
tied to that class.21
However, this attempt to articulate a relationship between students and
"workers" turns into a strategic dead end because Calvert, Neiman and Spiegel
are all unclear on exactly what students mean in a capitalist society. Students are
neither workers nor are they part of the middle or ruling class. It appears that
they desire to destroy the idea of students being privileged but are afraid to call
them workers. Such ambivalence becomes apparent when Calvert and Neiman
dismiss calling students middle class as a myth perpetuated by the ruling class
"to obscure their real position in society" as "pre-workers, trainees for the new
jobs created by advanced industrial technology" needed to run the empire (p.
56). While the university creates these pre-workers and serves the repressive
needs of the military to control the empire, and perpetuates competition between
students and reproduces the ideology of capitalism, being a student itself never
Michael Spiegel, "The Growing Development of a Class Politics," Outgoing National
Secretary’s Address, New Left Notes, June 10, 1968.
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factors into the equation capital accumulation, from Calvert and Neiman's and
Spiegel's points of view. In fact, students are only workers once they leave the
universities and become waged workers.
While Calvert and Neiman attack the Marxist-Leninist position that
students are not a revolutionary force as students and must subordinate
themselves to the waged industrial class to be part of that force, they are also
unable explain what makes students revolutionary as students. The only
difference with Marxist-Leninists they attack, is students are revolutionary only
because they will be waged workers after they leave the university. But students,
the "ghetto poor", unemployed and rural poor, are "peripheral" to the means of
production because they do not have jobs and are not a force of "socialist
revolution" (p. 99). In effect, while they suggest we examine the conditions of
students, they fail to do so themselves. For them, their lack of a formal wage
indicates that they are not really workers and do not contribute to the
accumulation of capital.
This analysis is replicated by David Smith in Who Rules the
Universities.22 Smith explains that with the reorganization of higher education
following WWff to begin training working class youth, an expanded conception
of the working class became necessary. With the new technological imperatives
discussed above, these working class students are trained to become low level
managers and skilled workers that can be described as part of the "new working
class" (p. 12). What is unique to his approach is that students need to be
considered as part of the working class, if not for what they do as students as
much as kinship or as future members of it.
Similar to Gintis and Bowles efforts in Schooling in Capitalist America,
Smith begins by offering a long account of monopoly capital's invasion into the
universities that were under the control of the churches and aristocratic elite.
22 David Smith, Who Rules the Universities: An Essay in Class Analysis, NY: Monthly
Review Press, 1974.
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Ignoring that the universities have long since served the purposes of business
through research and the training of a selected capitalist elite, Smith demonstrates
that with the rise of the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations the new
focus of the universities became the development of technology and workers (p.
119). Nearly mimicking Mandel and Wolff, Smith ascertains that the universities
were invaded by business: "The systematic organization of the universities thus
mirrored and contributed to the systematic [sic] organization of capital itself
taking place during this era [turn of the 20th century] "23 (p. 139-140). In the
drive to capture the universities, Smith also portrays "monopoly capital" as
entirely in control of a passive working class.
While recognizing that "the principal relation between higher education
and capitalism resided in the production of a new type of labor power," John
Beverly surprisingly finds that "higher education cannot be considered a branch
of capitalist production per se" (p. 69, 75) . 24 Rather, "higher education [is] a
dependent and subsidiary institution of capitalist society involved in particular
with the training of certain areas of the labor force and (as in the past) with the
elaboration of the technical and ideological practices that permit the maintenance
of the capitalist system" (p. 75). Students are found to be part of the working
class as far as their families (read: waged relatives) are or, confusingly, as far as
"their work as students in higher education increasingly takes the form of an
apprenticeship for wage-paid labor." (p. 74) In short the absence of the wage
means students are not workers. Ironically, although seeing universities as "large
socialized workplaces" and calling for a class analysis of the crisis he can only
2^ This is also the thesis of David Noble’s America By Design: Science, Technology, and the
Rise o f Corporate Capitalism, Knopf: New York, 1977, who brilliantly documents the role of
capital in reorganizing higher education in order that it may serve its needs for producing highly
skilled labor. However, like Smith, Noble seems to imply that capital invaded the universities,
thereby subordinating them to accumulation rather than the universities already being a part of
accumulation.
24 John Beverly, "Higher Education and Capitalist Crisis, Socialist Review, no. 42, vol. 6,
November-December, 1978, p. 67-91.
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recognize class struggle occurring within the university among waged workers.
Nonetheless, he analyzes strategic relationships between struggles within and
outside the university and rejects the subordination of the former to the latter (p.
86).
Gintis and Bowles, however, see a different history of education, one
wracked by class struggle. "The organization of education...has taken distinct
and characteristic forms in different periods of US history, and has evolved in
response to political and economic struggles associated with the process of
capital accumulation," they write in what could be taken as a retort to Smith
(p. 12). Gintis and Bowles make this clear: "The three turning points in U.S.
educational history [land grant colleges, progressive education and the growth of
the universities] which we have identified all corresponded to particularly intense
periods of struggle around the expansion of capitalist production relations" (p.
234). While Gintis and Bowles nearly abandon the implications of recognizing
that the struggles of the working class have shaped the structure of education as
business has sought to control them, it lays the groundwork for understanding
the contemporary crisis of higher education discussed above (chapters 2-3).
In fact, by understanding how the organization of education follows the
class struggle, the current crisis can be placed in an historical context. A study
sponsored by UT-Austin's Institute for Innovation, Creativity and Capital (IC^)
of the form of university-industry connections found that there have been four
clusters of activity since 1900. The author suggests that "Each of the four
clusters occurred during the periods of intensive international competition and/or
crisis, and during times noted for pronounced technological change."25 These
four clusters occurred during the 1880-90s, beginning with the creation of Johns
^5 Marietta Baba, "University Innovation to Promote Economic Growth and
University/Industry Relations," p. 201, in Technological Innovation and Economic Growth:
The Role o f Industry, Small Business Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and Universities, ed.
by Pier Abetti, Christopher LeMaistre, Raymond Smilor, and William Wallace, University of
Texas at Austin: IC^, 1987.
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Hopkins University in 1875, between 1910-WWI, during WWIt, and following
1967. What is interesting to note is that each of these clusters follow or begin
during intense periods of working class insurgency and drop off as a new cycle
of struggle begins. This is demonstrated in chart 5.1 that shows a rise of
innovative linkages during 1880-90 that drops off during a period of
international revolution at the start of the century and begins recovery with
WWI.26 The next decline occurs a little before the 1960s but falls to zero during
the 1960s (chart 5.2) and begins to rise in the 1970s, a period of austerity and
cutbacks. In other words, these new university-industry links are necessitated by
a need to decompose existing working class insurgencies. This also indicates that
although many of these forms (chart 5.3) have existed for decades, in some
cases "direct investment" and "indirect investment", that is, the university using
its own capital to invest in spin-offs, limited partnerships etc., did not occur until
1981, the start of a significant transformation of the university from a
subordinate to an overt business discussed in chapter 2 .
Chart 5.1 Frequency of Innovations (5 Year Moving Average)
FREQUENCY OF INNOVATIONS
(5 YEAR MOVING AVERAGE)
50 yrs
60 yrs
Date
26 All charts from Baba, pgs., 200, 202-203.
252
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Chart 5.2 Invention of University/Industry Linkage Models
INVENTION OF UNIVERSITY/INDUSTRY
LINKAGE MODELS*
IQ
2 -s
n
? !
i
Z 1875 1900 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
♦Excludes gifts or donations
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Chart 5.3 Date of Invention or Early Prototype of University/Industry Linkage
Models
d a te o f in v e n tio n o r e a r l y p r o to ty p e or
U N IV ER SITY /IN D U STRY LIN KA G E M O D E LS
1900 Consulting*
1903 Industrial Expansion Service
1906 Industrial Fellowship*
1901 Contracts*
1912 Third Party Technology Brokerage
1913 Independent RoearchInstitute
1916 Untvarsity>Be*cd Institute*
1929/30 University*Bsscd Technology Brokerage
1930 CoUcctive Industrial Action
1930 Cooperative Research Center
1932/33 Reseveh P a*
1943 Industrial Training/Retraining
1943 Interdisciplinary Institute
1943 fenonnel Interchange
1943 Shared Equipment or Facilities
1954 Small Business Training
1949/50 Industrial AnUiates
1967 Incubation Center
1961 Entrepreneurship Training
1973 Innovation Cmtcr
1974 Partnership Contract
1977 Technology Council
1951 Direct Investment
1952 Consulting Practice Plan
1912/53 Indirect Investment
•Traditional lin k ag e Forms
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According to David Noble, beginning in 1900 research became a
coordinated effort by corporations in the telephone, chemical and electric
industries to name a few and formal private contracting of university professors
by large corporations began soon after in 1910.27 This industrial activity was
predated by the creation of the agricultural extension and experiment services at
Land Grant Colleges in 1862 with the Morril A ct, its extension in 1890, and the
1887 Hatch Act that set up extension offices and programs throughout the
country to transfer agricultural technologies straight from the university
laboratories to the fields. In fact, the Morril Act also called for the teaching of
"mechanic art" or engineering, it never worked as well as its agricultural segment
because it never received support for extension and research. Increasing industry
relationships with the universities in the early part of the 2 0 th century were
modeled on the agricultural extension program and began to coalesce around
many institutions that were created during WWI such as the National Research
Council and engineering and technology research programs at various
universities such as MIT's Division of Industrial Cooperation and Research in
1920 which became the Division of Sponsored Research after WWII.
What appears to have driven capital’s turn to higher education by 1900
was the rupturing of accumulation by frequent waves of class insurrection that
began in 1848. The frequent periods of insurrection in the 1840-50s, 1870s, and
1890 by both industrial and agricultural workers resulted in massive
uncontrollable collapses in production and depressions. The Hatch Act for
example, was devised soon after the abolition of slavery, which eliminated a
source of unwaged labor, and at the same time the agriculture industry was
importing large numbers of asian workers to undermine strikes by developing
and applying new technologies in the field that could increase productivity and
control while reducing the need for human labor. The same can be said for
27 David Noble, p. 110-117.
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industry's interest in university research in the 1910s which also happened to be
a period of mass revolution throughout the world including the US.
Andrew Carnegie's new attention to education immediately followed his
long inability to crush the Homestead strikers short of military attack. In the
process, business sought to raise the organic composition of capital (e.g. the
process of substituting technology for labor, or automation) by developing new
forms of technology and planning that could be used against the working class
struggle .28 Best known from this period were of course the development of
Taylorism and its time-motion studies, social welfare planning, housework
efficiency studies, and mass public high school education that is still with us in
similar form. With the waves of international struggles between 1910 and 1920
and 1930-1940s, higher education was reorganized by combined efforts of
corporations, private foundations and the state in the search for a means of
disciplining workers in the universities and developing further increases in the
organic composition of capital. Thus, the massive new involvement of the
federal government in the universities marked the extension of state capitalist
planning to the university as a source of disciplined labor. Following the civil
rights and urban inner city insurrections in the 1950-1960s, yet another strategy
was devised to invest in the reproduction of labor power as a means to channel
the power of the working class for struggle into energy for work. Of course, we
need to also take into account the rise of elementary and kindergarten schools in
the late 1800s as well.
In all, it appears that with each cycle of class struggle that taken the form
of resistance to work by fighting for and winning shorter working hours, day
and lifecycle, the amount of school work increases. Marx himself recognized this
connection early on in volume I of Capital .29 He found that as workers fought
28 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique o f Political Economy, vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes,
London: Penguin, 1976, especially chapter 25.
29 Ibid.
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successfully to have their children removed from the workplace and to have time
and resources to leam, business distorted their demands by putting the children
into rooms they called schools located in the factory in order to hold them until
they could work their shorter shifts or leam to obey authority.
The last period of reorganization of the university that began in the late
1950s and lasted until the late 1960s was guided by a theory of human capital.
Growing out of the Keynsian recognition that labor was not just a cost but a
factor of growth, human capital theory attempted to apply this idea to education.
"The basic reality, for the university," wrote Clark Kerr "is the widespread
recognition that new knowledge is the most important factor in economic and
social growth," ironically calling knowledge the "invisible product."30 Gary
Becker, in Human Capital, attributes education as contributing to future earnings
and views it as an investment made by the individual student.^ 1 No doubt
Becker's approach mystifies education to appear as a privilege, since it offers
payoffs to the individual down the road in terms of higher wages.
In reality, the largest return on the investment goes to the employer, which
Becker almost entirely neglects. The return is no more than the resulting higher
productivity from a worker that comes from years of disciplining oneself as a
student with grades, homework, papers, exams, etc. which translates into a net
loss of wages. According to one estimation,
The financial opportunities forgone to pursue these [Ph.D.] studies are immense.
These losses are never recovered...To use Electrical Engineering (EE) as an
example, EE Ph.D graduates earn an average salary of $57,800 while EE BS
graduate earn $43,700. Taking $8,000 as an average GSE salary [graduate
student employee] and 5 years as the average program length, one finds a total
opportunity cost of $178,500 while in a graduate program. After graduation
however, the EE Ph.D graduate earns $14,100 more per year. Using a 7.75%
30 Clark Kerr, 1983, p. viii.
3 1 Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Specific
Reference to Education, 2nd ed.. New York, 1975.
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discount rate, one finds that the Ph.D graduate recovers the lost funds only after
53 years of employment (long after retirement).32
Human capital theory turns out to be no more than the application of the
productivity deal (i.e. that wages rise with productivity) to education in terms of
future wages. The work put into preparing oneself to work for the rest of one's
life is what is valuable to an employer. The degree itself is evidence that one has
done a lot of bullshit and is willing to do more. This what Jerry Farber meant by
"student as nigger": that being a student means learning to internalize authority
and endless w o r k . 33
Yet, there is a catch: the return on capital's investment in education is not
always accessible; students aren't always willing to spend the rest of their lives
working. This is one way to interpret Becker's fear that human capital is
"illiquid" and "uncertain" (pgs. 77-78). Human capital cannot be used as
collateral because unlike constant physical capital, paying for a worker's capacity
to work does not mean that she will actually work. If there's one problem that
has haunted business from day one it is that people are unpredictable. This has
showed itself most of all in the universities during the 1960-70s and is the root
of the disinvestment from human capital investment
Ironically, if Becker and other human capital theorists could foresee the
productive relationship between education and profits, neither Smith nor Gintis
and Bowles could. Smith identifies the class relationship of students in their lack
of control over their working conditions, the domination of the universities by
business, and the incomes of their parents and future labor (p. 229-231). But
one's existence as a student itself is not important in a class analysis of the
32 Graduate Professional Association, "The Case for the Restoration of Graduate Student
Employee (GSE) Insurance Benefits," no date (estimated to be 1988), Austin, Texas, p. 9.
33 Jerry Farber, Student as Nigger, reprinted in The Movement Toward a New America: The
Beginnings o f a Long Revolution, assembled by Mitchell Goodman, Pilgrim Press:
Philadelphia, 1970, p. 303-304.
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universities. There is a possibility that Smith might go further however when he
reproduces a passage where Marx explained that "no longer the individual labor
but rather the socially combined labor power becomes the actually agent of the
collective work process" concluding himself that "the proletariat as a whole must
be viewed as the agent of productive labor" (p. 213). Yet, in his discussion of
housework, he finds that although it contributed to production "indirectly" by
serving to prepare the waged worker for work, it is not productive. This is never
pursued in any understanding of the work students do.34
A lot of this has to do with his confusion around the meaning of value.
Smith offers a fetishized definition of "value" as some magical essence passed
only by the working class and "surplus value" as being the amount of that
essence retained by the capitalist "above the wages paid to the worker". Without
getting into a drawn out argument, it could be said that value is simply an
abstraction for explaining the organization of capitalist society around work.
There is no such thing as value. It only represents the centrality of putting people
to work for maintaining capital's control over the organization of society. In
turn, surplus value is an abstraction for the surplus amount of work business can
extract from a person above what the working class can be forced to do.
This is an important distinction to be made; Smith offers us a definition of
value, rather than an understanding of the social relationships of capitalist society
it represents. By explaining that students are part of the working class because of
their or their parent's salaries is a classification, not a class analysis of the
content of education. Students are not understood to be workers because they
34 Strangely, he develops his analysis of housework from the works of Wages for Housework's
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, who actually come to entirely different conclusions
from Smith. Not only do they aim to dispute any claim that housework is anything but directly
productive to capital, but they even extend their analysis and conclusion to all forms of
unwaged labor —including education - which for some reason Smith decided to ignore. Instead,
Smith fetishizes the "productive" question, which Wages for Housework set out to put to rest
by showing how the continuing unwaged labor serves to reproduce the internal hierarchy of
power of the working class. This will be further discussed in chapter VII.
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actually do work without being paid for it (Becker claims they are paid back
later). Rather, they are workers because they will be waged workers. This is
explained in his analysis of housewives and state workers who are not workers
because they do not directly produce commodities for sale (p. 219). Class has
been reduced to just another category, stripping it of its value in understanding
the relationships of class struggle.
Strategically, these problems compound themselves. While Smith
brilliantly argues that as part of the working class, students—as other sectors of
the working class (i.e. housewives, people of color, etc)—cannot be
subordinated to other sectors. Joined by Carl Davidson, Carol Neiman, and
Greg Calvert, Smith launches a critique of the left's subordination of student
struggles still applicable today, which we'll discuss further in the final chapter.
He proposes that "what this means is that students must no longer confine
themselves to supporting struggles of other sectors of the international working
class but must work among students; in order to truly support other branches of
the working class and make a shared revolution possible, students must be an
organized force in their own right," echoing the strategies of Wages for
Housework (p. 248).
Yet, this all falls short in his long run strategy, for a couple reasons. First,
student autonomy, while important, lacks an explanation of the source of intra-
class domination through the wage in the first place. Considering that the
subordination of students has been rationalized by their absence of wages to
prove their usefulness to business (as if the wage were a reward) Smith strips
autonomy of its strategic importance: to demand an independent source of power
to counterbalance the wage.
Secondly, Smith sees the potential for radical organizing growing from
rising unemployment and continued job dissatisfaction. Like Flacks, the potential
for struggle among students results from education's provision of higher
consciousness, giving them a "special role to play" in spreading that among other
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w o r k e r s . 35 (p. 279) In the long run, the struggle is carried beyond the
universities where it has the most value. Whether inside or out, workers are
reacting; to unemployment, alienated schoolwork, unsatisfying jobs, capitalist
regents. Nowhere in Who Rules the Universities?: an Essay in Class Analysis is
there a class analysis of how students struggle. The overproduction of college
graduates that leads to unemployment and radical struggle is only a structural
side effect of the capitalist system. These same college graduates for whom no
jobs exist is never seen as a counterattack for their refusal to be disciplined in the
universities in the 1960s. Rather than seeing unemployment as an attempt to
prevent them from carrying their struggles into the waged workplace, Smith fits
the recession of the early 1970s into an overproductionist framework. In the
schools, students are trained for work, outside they do the work. The unwaged
exploitation of students is resolved with the waged work outside the universities.
Never does there appear the duality of the class struggle: teachers and university
administrators trying to make students work and students resisting homework
and term papers in order to put out an alternative paper, take over a building or
have a party. From a wide angle, students are part of the working class because
they are trained to be not because they struggle against being workers and for a
different way of organizing society.
35 This is also Bettina Aptheker’s argument in The Academic Rebellion in the United States,
New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1972, where she argues that because of technological and
structural changes in capitalism that have subordinated the university to the needs of
production, intellectuals are automatically part of the working class. Because of the resulting
alienation from this subordination, a rebellion will occur that will restore scientific reason to
the university by removing the irrationality of capitalist imperialism. As one can imagine,
Aptheker's analysis is a virtual regurgitation of orthodox Marxism. However, beneath the
vulgar theoretical posturing is the basic ignoring of students, mystification of the role of the
university itself to capital (other than capital's formal control through military research as she
documents) and a dire struggle to save the university from those who wish to destroy both it
and science (p. 165).
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This same approach to analyzing education is repeated in many ways by
Gintis and B o w l e s . 36 in debunking the idea that education contributes to
equality and liberty in the form of higher incomes, they perceive of education as
separate from and subordinate to the economy, explaining that "the pattern of
economic inequality is predominantly 'set' in the economy itself' (p. 102). The
school itself is set in an analogy to the workplace, "mirroring" and
"corresponding" to many aspects in the form of grades, rules, threats and
hierarchies (pgs. 12, 125, and 131). Yet, never does education appear as part of
the productive circuit of accumulation. Never is the school a workplace.
This is no mistake, but follows their long run reforms for the US. While
the US., they argue, is democratic in its political institutions, the economy is
undemocratic. It is the economy, with its alienating, powerless jobs that need to
be changed first. Education is seen as separate from the rest of capitalist society
("the economy" for them) because it is determined by it: "the sources of
repression lie outside the school system. If schools are to assume a more humane
form, so, too, must jobs" (p. 252). From this easily follows their defense of
education as essential to production in their vision of a democratic socialist
economy. It would serve to train youth to not only work but accept a new type of
authority that resolves the contradiction between the needs of the hypothesized
community for workers and our needs (or desire not to work, I would argue) (p.
269-272). The construction of their new society differs little from capitalist
society: work is the defining activity of life and school services the need for
obedient w o r k e r s . 37 it is no surprise then that the authors never take their
36 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform
and the Contradictions o f Economic Life, Basic: New York, 1976.
3^ The extent to which they go to defend the value of social control is downright chilling: "The
majority of individuals with senses tuned to the realities of everyday life will take pleas for a
release from the bonds of authority for what they are: poetic fancy" (p. 272). As we've seen
they have no qualms about authority, considering how it is necessary to put people to work:
"Differences must not lie in the absence of authority but in the type o f authority relations
governing activity." The new type is none other that the old by a new name.
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analysis of education any further than the issue of whether it actually offers
equality of opportunity to each worker. That the schools serve to reproduce our
one-dimensional role as workers is never questioned, but is actually reinforced
under democratic socialism. While education arose as capital's response to
periods of class struggle, as they brilliantly note themselves, it serves their
functions in a socialist state capitalist system.
Gintis and Bowles' correspondence principle is applied by John and
Margaret Rowntree in their analysis of students and soldiers as workers.38 The
Rowntrees argue that although school is a full-time unpaid job, students
themselves are not productive: "Students absorb surplus that has already been
produced; and they refrain from producing more surplus product that must be
disposed of profitably; instead they labor but do not produce a tangible product."
However, two sentences later, they cite the U.S. Council of Economic advisors
figure that estimate that "earnings forgone by students would be between $ 2 0
and $30 billion a year" and "would have increased 1966 GNP by 3.5%." This
3.5 percent along with the 6.5 percent of the GNP invested in education, they
suggest, shows that students "in effect absorb the economic surplus that they
refrain from producing." Instead of arguing the obvious: that the investment of
6.5 percent of the GNP results in a 3.5 percent increase in the GNP as the result
of school/work by students, the Rowntrees instead accept capital’s ideology that
students are only consuming and not working.
While they try to suggest that students and soldiers are workers (although
unproductive) because of the work they do, in reality their analysis is grounded
in something else entirely: the sheer number of people engaged in particular
activities. Because the defense and education industries have absorbed two-thirds
of the total increase in 18-64 year old in the working population (which I assume
38 John and Margaret Rowntree, "The Political Economy of Youth,” Our Generation, number
6, 1968, p. 155-190.
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only accounts for waged workers), they suggest that students and soldiers are
workers.
While they seem willing to call students workers, one has to ask whether
they actually mean they are workers in the sense of what social relationships they
are a part of or whether they fall into the right category. It would not be
adventurous to suggest that they are not really sure what about school makes it
work, which is surprising since they immediately dismiss it as unproductive.
They even suggest that "studying has lost any trace of the self-directed activity
that it may once have been" ignoring that the essence of school/work is self-
imposed labor without anyone looking over one’s shoulder and describe the
passing of bourgeois education which foster "maturity" or "self-direction" with a
socialized workplace that builds docile workers while "simultaneously promotes
proletarian consciousness" (p. 175). With their extensive use of data, it appears
that most of their argument rests on a strictly quantitative understanding of the
working class based upon predefined notions of productive labor. This is
especially clear when they suggest that Canadian youth are not a class formation
because the number of Canadian youth in the universities or the military is only
half that in the US. (p. 184).
However, the Rowntrees are able to make some significant insights into
the issue. They briefly attack Richard Flacks and others theories of "youth
exploitation" as a mystification of the class nature of education. Even though the
Rowntrees appear to be trying to define a "youth class" they look at it in
occupational rather than ideological terms.39 For them, the ideology of youth
oppression
39 Irving Louis Horowitz and William Friedland do so much more abstracdy in The
Knowledge Factory: Student Power and Academic Politics in America,” Aldine: Chicago,
1970. They argue for students and youth as a social class (a "politicized generation class")
involved in inter-generational conflict. However, this is more a rigid categorization based on the
arbitrary gauge of age rather than real social relationships. Not only are youths and students "no
longer functional participants in the economic and political structure of industrial society; they
have no formal role in the world of work and politics." (p. 120, 125) The class formation is not
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functions to explain the discontent and anti-social attitudes of young people in
terms of their personal problems (as the poverty of the working class was
attributed to their defects of character by Social Darwinists). This ideology seeks
to obscure the emerging class straggle between youth and the dominant forces of
society by discussing the "conflict of generations" as if age were the significant
source of the conflict, (p. 174)
They also raise the issue of student struggles moving from being a youth
class-in-itself to a youth class-for-itself. This is explained in terms of black youth
and white youth whose "Communities also offer laboratories for the
development of communal, life-affirming forms of living, eating, sharing and
participating in public activities." (p. 177-78) This is an especially unique insight
since they find youth and students doing more than struggling against their social
position but also creating new ways of living, which was widespread during the
1960-70s in the form of housing and food coops, communes, festivals, music,
underground newspapers, health clinics, free universities, etc.
In addition, the Rowntree's strategic analysis of student autonomy
precedes but is complemented by Calvert and Neiman. The Rowntrees reject the
notion that the idea that the university is not an integral part of the system and
that students should be radicalized "in terms of their future rather than present
class roles." They explain that "Increasingly, however, youth are understanding
that they must mobilize for their own liberation as oppressed youth before they
are ready to join other oppressed groups in revolutionary action," they write.
specific to any self-activity of students and youth or even the Rowntree's rigid occupational
categories. For Friedland and Horowitz they are a social class because of their intuitive
expression of desires for political power within the university for example which excludes them
from decisionmaking and violates their rights to "full fledged citizenship" in the "university
community.” (p. 135) Their ambiguous analysis evolves into a strategy of reinstating these
rights in order to heal the university. Without a critical analysis of the role of the university, in
the end they simply suggest including students in decision making but not even going so far as
to allow one person-one vote or student votes on governance committees to run the university
but rather to just consult them in advance and set up a governing senate of the different groups
as Wolff also suggests (pgs. 211-217).
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Exposing the relationship of the university to corporations and the war machine
"has made an increasing number of young radicals ready to disrupt and even
destroy it [the university], if they can" (p. 182, italics in original).
This is hollow praise since they earlier flesh out their intention to preserve
the university—and thus the work—while changing only the content.
But we do not want to abolish broad based mass education anymore than we
would advocate abolishing mass production because the factory system of
capitalism is alienating to the workers. Socialists have never been machine
wreckers; but just as the socialist order will change the product of the factories,
ending the production of fanciful packages for inferior detergents, so will the
content of education change, ending college courses that are merely cold war
indoctrination. The students have become proletarians and the class rooms their
workplaces in the mass education systems of the United States. Ironically,
dialectically, the highly touted growth of mass education, the "best" feature of
liberal capitalism, will be a major engine of the destruction of the system.
Once gain, we find the identical perspectives shared among these diverse
group of theorists. One main theme holds them together: that the universities
should be preserved. They would not let them be burned down as the Irish
immigrants continually did to the one school the Lowell School Board kept
building in their neighborhood in the mid 1800s. The inadequate analysis of the
role of education in the sphere of accumulation is no accident, but the outgrowth
of the ideological imperatives of these writers. By attributing a potential to the
student struggles to rupture the process of accumulation would mean
reevaluating their whole understanding of capitalist society and the working
class. It would also mean acknowledging that these antagonisms would continue
in the state capitalist systems they favor where education still serves to discipline
youth for work. In an ironic way, this thesis is a child of their failings.
Offering insight into the false dichotomies often utilized by many of those
we have discussed, Gareth Stedman Jones suggests that "any characterization of
students as a social group must simultaneously encompass student origins, the
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student situation itself, and the social destination of students. It is the unilateral
insistence upon any one of these factors to the exclusion of the others that has
resulted in lopsided or reductionist theories of student consciousness."40
Unfortunately, these are not the standards Jones holds to his own analysis.
Failing to defend his argument empirically, he rejects the idea that the university
is a central productive institution in capitalism and the strategic placement of
students as part of the working class as "scientifically incorrect and politically
reactionary" (p. 27). Rather, he concludes that "students are not a class, but a
temporary occupation: they are apprentice intellectual workers..." (p. 35).
Carl Davidson's quote at the start of this chapter critiquing student
activist's avoidance of the university itself is just as applicable to those who write
about it. While he calls most students "workers-to-be, i.e. trainees or
apprentice", what he describes is students as unwaged workers. "It is important
that we recognize that many students share many of the social relations and
conditions of production with many of the skilled workers of large-scale
industry"41 (p. 18). Those conditions, he continues, is that the universities "are
deeply involved in the production of a crucial and marketable commodity—labor
power. It is this aspect of the university that is most crucial for the political
40 Gareth Stedman Jones, The Meaning of the Student Revolt," p. 25-56, in Alexander
Cockbum and Robin Blackburn (zds.),Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action,
Baltimore: Penguin and London: New Left Review, 1969.
41 At this point I am not going to raise any comment on his analogy to "industry" since I
believe he means and says that the connection exists to work as a whole. Others however have
made a similar point about the university being a factory. Besides the ones we've already
discussed, Veblen, Sinclair, the Rowntrees and Nicolaus have also made this argument. Martin
Nicolaus, for example, finds that the university is an assembly line: "One person, a teacher,
takes a batch of students...and runs them through a predetermined, standardized routine with
textbooks. These are the methods of industry; you recognize them as the method of Taylorism,
of scientific work management; you recognize in the process the principle of the highest output
at the least cost, least wages and least educational investment" (Martin Nicolaus, "The Iceberg
Strategy: Universities and the Military-Industrial Complex," SDS: The Radical Education
Project, 1967). However, this is taking the "industry" analogy a bit structurally, without
examining the content of the work process or motivation for implementing Keynsian planning.
Students appear to go right along the assembly line without ever working. They are just
products churned out to keep running the system.
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economy. The production of an increase in socially useful and necessary labor
power is the new historic function of our educational institutions that enables us
to name them, quite accurately, knowledge factories"^2 (p. 19 ). With the
recognition of the university as the knowledge factory comes the antagonism of
the class relations: the resistance to work. "But it is not enough for the
knowledge factory to produce skilled labor power in the form of a raw material.
The commodity must be socially useful as well" (p. 21). Quoting Clark Kerr that
"the well-behaved advance even if the geniuses do not" 43 Davidson locates the
root of the crisis of higher education: our resistance to being disciplined as
workers. "Our rough edges must be worn off, our spirits broken, our hopes
mundane, and our manners subservient and docile. And if we won't pacify and
repress ourselves with all the mechanisms they have constructed for our self-
flagellation, the police will be called" (p. 21). And if that doesn't work,
disinvest.
To begin to understand the crisis of the universities, and in turn the
meaning of the struggles that created them, Davidson's perspective entices us to
read the managers of education own explanations of the rupture of the system. It
is here, with a little demystification, that Davidson's analysis proves political
42 it was easy for Kerr to deny he ever called the universities "factories" in his 1972 postscript,
but the fact was that he was analyzing a factory. While describing the growing role of the
federal government in the university based high tech research following WWII, he notes that "it
all becomes a kind of 'putting out' system with the agency taking the place of the merchant-
capitalist of old. Sweat shops have developed out of such a system in earlier times and in other
industries" (p. 60). It would be hard to get any more explicit.
43 it is enlightening to consider the full passage: "it is also part of the process of freezing the
structure of the occupational pyramid and assuring that the well-behaved do advance, even if the
geniuses do not. The university is used as an eggcandling device; and it is, perhaps, a better
one than any other that can be devised, but the process takes some of the adventure out of
occupational survival and does for some professions what the closed shop has done for some
unions" (p. 111). With the student insurgence, he concern soon turned to the immanent threat
to this whole hierarchy (p. 133). According to Caffentzis, the entire first rung of the ladder was
soon abandoned by the early 1970s. This is what the Carnegie Commission meant by letting
"reluctant attendees" leave. It was also echoed by reformer John Holt during the 1960s who
feared the purposeful damage and costs wreaked by the "angry and resentful prisoners" (John
Holt, "School is Bad for Children, “Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1969).
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useful by indicating how the crisis is a development of the class antagonisms of
the multiversity. But before we can do this reading, a new theory of students as
workers needs to be developed.
Class Struggle in the Classroom: Students as Unwaged Workers
and the University as Social Factory
We have traced a recurring theme that appears throughout many radical and left
theories of the universities and student struggles: the insistent refusal to analyze
either students or the universities in terms of their antagonistic relationship to the
interests of maintaining the social organization of capitalist society. However,
there is something even more fundamentally inept in the methodologies of the
theorists discussed above.
These and many other writers have attempted to examine the universities
and students without even specifying the particular class composition of students
or the working class as a whole at the time they are writing. This is especially the
case in each of the works we have examined so far with the exception of the
Rowntrees. Every other study has either abstracted or ignored the issue of the
class composition. This problem is not unique to these writers. While speaking
specifically about left theorists of public education, the following critique is
equally applicable to studies of the universities:
There is a gap here between class struggle understood theoretically (an important
first step) and class struggle understood in terms of revolutionary practice.
Without a practical grasp of the class struggle the Monday morning chapters
[which explain "what is to be done" in a mere 20 or so pages at the end of the
book] assume the general significance of educational struggles when this can
only be demonstrated c o n c r e t e ly .44
44 Hugh Lauder, John Freeman-Moir, and AJan Scott, "What is to be done with radical
academic practice," Capital & Class, number 29, Summer 1986, p. 89. Ironically, the authors
ignore that academics themselves are workers and are engaged in struggles within the
universities ("the context in which they teach and do research is removed from the real interests
of groups engaged in political struggle") and even suggest that students are part of the "new
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What is at stake here is understanding how education functions and is
griped by conflict and crisis created by student (or teacher) struggles so these
struggles can be extended and circulated. This is the fundamental failure of
abstract theories that neither grow organically out of existing struggles nor can be
appropriated by them.
It appears difficult to undertake an analysis of the crisis of the university
without examining both the forces that gave rise to and have extended their
breakdown. It is my intention to avoid this shortcoming of previous and existing
theories of the universities by not only examining the cause of the crisis but the
very student struggles that have deepened it and how the ongoing recomposition
of class struggle within them threatens the very existence of the universities as
we know them.
Henry Giroux points out another fundamental inadequacy of left
educational theory which may explain why this work remains so abstract. Many
educational theorists, especially on the left, view the schools as a location of
absolute capitalist power and domination, rather than a terrain of conflict and
struggle. Giroux contends
There are, on the one hand, radical educators who collapse human agency and
struggle into a celebration of human will, cultural experience, or the construction
of "happy" classroom social relations. On the other hand, there are radical views
of pedagogy that cling to notions of structure and domination. Such views not
only argue that history is made behind the backs of human beings, but also imply
that within such a context of domination human agency virtually disappears. The
notion that human beings produce history—including its constraints—is
subsumed in a discourse that often portrays schools as prisons, factories, and
administrative machines functioning smoothly to produce the interests of
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domination and inequality. The result has often been modes of analysis that
collapse into an arid functionalism or equally disabling p e s s i m i s m . ^
Giroux suggests that there is a duality at play in the schools, a contestation
between the power and desires of students and teachers and that of business.
"One of the most important theoretical elements missing from the hidden
curriculum literature is a view of schools as sites of both domination and
contestation...In other words, domination is never total in this perspective, nor is
it simply imposed on people." (p. 62-3) The power of the dominant society and
culture "is not simply inscribed or imposed in the consciousness or ideologies of
the oppressed. It is always mediated—sometimes rejected, sometimes
confirmed. More often than not it is partly accepted and partly rejected. The issue
here is that class and power intersect in the form of lived experiences that
accommodate and contest the dominant school culture in a complex way." (p.
66)
Needless to say, this is not evident to nearly all the theorists of higher
education we have examined. In fact, it could be said that their failure to
recognize education as a terrain of conflict and resistance is responsible for their
failure to offer a strategic analysis that takes into account current straggles or any
strategizing at all. As Giroux suggests, for some to transcend their bleak view of
totalizing capitalist power over the schools and mention the existence of
resistance and struggle would be a monumentous task out of their reach.
This inadequacy spins off a much more serious problem: there has very
little work on developing a theory of students as part of class straggle that may
offer us a methodology for recognizing and strategizing about the everyday
middle class.” (p. 99) By doing so, they too fall prey to their own critique that left educational
theory fails to provide "serious strategic analyses" that can be used by struggles within
education.
^ Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy fo r the Opposition, Mass.:
Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1983, p. 4.
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contestations that occur in education. Without such an understanding of the role
of students and the university in capitalist society, the same mistakes in
understanding the political significance of the continuing crisis of education will
be dangerously continued. As Giroux perceptively warns:
The issue here is that the current withdrawl of resources from the schools and the
redefinition of the curriculum in watered-down pragmatic and instrumental terms
cannot be viewed as problems solely due to demographic shifts in the population
and short-term recessional tendencies in the economy. Such a position not only
abstracts the current crisis from its historical and political roots, it also uses the
existing economic crisis to legitimate conservative modes of pedagogy and to
silence potential critics, (p. 44)
Rather than understand that the crisis lay in the conflicts and antagonisms
within the schools, it has been perceived in structural terms as the result of
functional maladjustments or other maladies. As a result, students, faculty,
courses of study and research, funding and other spaces that have been opened
through struggle over the last twenty years have been exposed to the threat of
austerity, entrepreneurialization, and counterattacks from the right. What is
needed is an analysis of the university as a terrain of conflict within capitalist
society in which we recognize entrepreneurialization as a counterattack against
continuing efforts to expand those spaces that have subverted the university's
production of disciplined labor and prolonged the crisis.
A Class Analysis o f Education
For the past few decades, a theory of "social capital" has been elaborated that
analyzes capital's attempt to turn all of society into a social factory.46 Inside the
social factory, "all of human activity outside the sphere of production would be
46 See Harry Cleaver, 1979; and Mario Tronti, ’’Social Capital,” Telos, number 17, Fall,
1973, reprinted from Operai e Capital, Turin: einaudi, 1966, 1971.
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subordinated to the reproduction of life as labor p o w e r. "47 Tronti analyzes how
"capital" replaces the concept of the workday by expanding work into the sphere
of reproduction. As he says, "the social work-day functions directly within the
process of production of social capital. Within this process of production it
produces, reproduces, and accumulates new labor power" (p. 101). This
extension of the work-day into the sphere of reproduction, which was once
understood as "unproductive" by both capital and Marxists alike, serves as the
"maximum degree of socialization of capitalist production, socialization of labor
power and, therefore, socialization of capital" (Tronti, p. 101).
The social factory grew very early to incorporate education into the social
workday. In the 19th century, capital was forced to respond to worker's
demands to reduce the length of the work day and working week, and to remove
children from the sphere of direct production, by colonizing the resulting free
time won by these struggles to serve the reproduction of labor power for work48
(Cleaver, 1979, p. 122). It is important to note that from its outset in the US,
education has been characterized by conflict and struggle, from its beginning
which was forced upon capital by factory workers, to the burning down and
attacks on schools in Irish and other ethnic neighborhoods, the creation of
summer vacation in response to farmer’s children refusing to attend during
harvest, to today with its high drop-out rates that belies an inability to make
youth go to school.
47 Hairy Cleaver, "Marxian theory and the inversion of class perspective in its concepts: Two
case studies," first draft, April 1989, p. 11.
48 My use of the word "capital" to indicate the characteristics of capitalist society refers to this
theory of "social capital" and is not simply an alternative label. Although the word may seem
at first to humanize a non-human political system, from my perspective, it explains how
through waged and un-waged work humans are organized systematically. Once in place, such a
method of organizing society is insistent in the exploitation of living people to give life to a
cold, dead system. When used to capacity (e.g. retirement or death) these people join the ranks
of what Marx called "dead labor" in which their labor is embedded in the infrastructure (e.g.
machinery, buildings, knowledge) in which others work (1976).
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Attempt to colonize various spheres of social life outside of the factory
(such as housework, the peasantry, prison, the unemployed, etc.) is an effort to
make these areas productive for the needs of business. People involved in
activities such as housework, schoolwork, sex, unemployment, among others,
are therefore part of the working class to the degree that capital has been
powerful enough to use their activities to reproduce them or others for waged
work. When it has been successful in turning it into work, it hides it with the
absence of a wage.
The Wages for Housework movement has explained how the service of
the wife (or partner) in reproducing the spouse for work is work for capital
which is hidden by the wife's dependence on the wage of the spouse.49
Similarly, the wage of the parent hides the work of the child and student for
capital as that sibling is (or may be) dependent on the wage of the parent. The
demand for wages for housework is part of a greater strategy to destroy this
veiled hierarchy to show how these unwaged workers are a part of the working
class and that their struggles are those of the class. Forcing business to pay a
wage for housework is seen the first step to achieving autonomy by providing
houseworkers with a wage which can then be used as a source of autonomous
political power (what they call a political wage) and destroying the
waged/unwaged hierarchy of the class. Although we will further examine this
demand for wages in chapter 6, it is important to note that this hierarchy of the
wage is critical to capital's control over the social factory by maintaining intra
class divisions among the working class. When this hierarchy and division
crumble these newly autonomous sectors may contribute to a recomposition of
working class power.
49 For English language perspectives see Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici Counterplanning
from, the Kitchen: Wagesfo r Housework, A perspective on Capital and the Left, NY: Wages for
Housework Campaign, 1975; and Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework, NY: Wages for
Housework Campaign, April 1975; and Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power o f
Women and the Subversion o f the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972.
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While many have accurately examined the role of education in disciplining
workers, they have fallen very short of perceiving this as productive unpaid
work. Moreover, the controversy on the left surrounding the analysis of students
as workers is especially perplexing when economic planners frequently examine
the relationship of education to growth, productivity, and even taxes
scholarships and fellowships as income. While it would be easy to explain this
by overt ideological bias to students, in turn it is rooted in inadequate and narrow
frameworks that are for the most part uncognizant and unrelated to any struggles
taking place within the schools at best and ignore students and the universities
themselves, at worst.
When Marx wrote that "capital is not only the command over labor...it is
essentially the command over unpaid labor" he was referring to capital's ability
to extract surplus value from the waged work he was documenting.^ This
analysis has allowed us to see how capital's control over unpaid labor may occur
both with and without the wage form. While Marx did not perceive this
command over unpaid labor in the school he agreed with Robert Owen that the
"germ of the education of the future is present in the factory system" (p. 614).
The Factory Acts were recognized as the first attempt to successfully combine
"education and gymnastics with manual labor, and consequently of combining
manual labor with education and gymnastics" (p. 613). These acts were an
advance over previous legislative acts that resulted in the four-walled circuses
used to control youths freed from factory labor. Business, unable to use children
in the sphere of direct production, began using children in the sphere of
reproduction. In the words of one capitalist at the time, it became clear that "the
secret of producing efficient workpeople is to be found in uniting education and
labor from a period of childhood" (Marx, p. 613). By the turn of the century,
compulsory education became the mechanism for the development of workers
50 Marx,, p. 672.
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who would be willing to accept a life of w o rk .5 1 Rooted in the ideals of the
"progressive education" and its best known theorist John Dewey, the
schoolplace has become integral to capitalist accumulation by creating the means
for the reproduction of labor power.
"Children work for capital to the extent that they produce their labor
power for future roles as workers (waged and unwaged), but they are not
directly waged," explains Cleaver (p. 165). From the time one starts school it is
made clear that one must work to survive and that the amount of schoolwork will
supposedly indicate one’s future level of pay and thus the "quality" of adult life.
Pink Floyd puts it rather simply in the song Another Brick in the Wall: "if you
don't eat your meat/How could you have any pudding?/ How can you have any
pudding/ if your don't eat your meat?" The greater the amount of self-discipline a
student develops, the more valuable the student's labor power will be to capital
and will, supposedly guarantee a higher future wage. While this process
certainly does not go unchallenged by these unwaged workers, as will be
shown, some fundamental aspects of school, such as homework, extend and
reproduce this unending work beyond the classroom into the evening, the
weekend, and even vacation.
The role of school/work in accumulation was understood by human
capital theorists but articulated in terms that mystified the actual relationship as an
individual rather than social investment. At the level of the individual, this
investment is made to appear as resulting in a later payoff in one's wages while
glossing over the return to business. In order to understand this, it is necessary
to read through the rhetoric to understand the actual social relationships at work.
"Capital shaped 'public' education, not for the 'enlightenment' of workers’
children, but to meet its own needs for particular skills, for new technology, for
51 John Holt launches an attack on compulsory education, not because it disciplines children to
accept work, but because it breeds resistance to work. Abolishing compulsory education. Holt
contends, would actually reduce tensions since the unsatisfied could leave and force die schools
to improve their preparation of students for a life of work (Holt, 1969).
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new social control strategies, and above all, to inculcate discipline."52 This
discipline is intended to make the worker more productive, thus increasing the
surplus value produced in the waged workplace given that all else is constant.
"The more work students do in the school, the less value must be invested in
their training and disciplining for the factory (or the home)" (p. 122). This is
what lies at the heart of human capital investment. School insures that this
discipline is instilled in students with endless school work. Students do the
unwaged work of developing their productiveness that would ordinarily be paid
in the waged workplace.
Grades, like the diploma, are supposed to serve as a standardized
measurement of the "quality" of the student and her potential usefulness to a
future waged employer. It is grades that offer a bridge along the continuum from
unwaged work in school to waged work elsewhere. Cleaver suggests that,
We are not just talking about analogies here. At the heart of the clear historical
parallels between grade inflation and price inflation, lies the basic homology
between grades and wages. As a general rule, wages are the monies workers get
in return for working for business(whether directly in industry or indirectly in
the state, whether in Stanford's industrial park, or on campus). The harder they
work, they are told (often fraudulently), the more wages they will earn. Grades,
on the other hand, are supposed to be IOUs on future wages. Good grades now,
'educators' promise, will mean good wages later. Grades, like the university
diploma, are both an index of work performed and an indicator for business of
an individual's willingness to work in the future.53
As Henry Giroux reminds us, this process can be easily exaggerated to
paint schools as hegemonic without conceptualizing how they are complex
terrains of struggle. Cleaver uniquely notes that one of the fundamental lackings
of Marx's work was an analysis of the struggle between capital and the working
52 Cleaver, 1979, p. 122.
53 Harry Cleaver, "Worried About Grade Inflation? Abolish Grades!,” special to The Stanford
Daily, May 31, 1994, p. 3.
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class over the content of free time (1979, p. L21). For example, higher incomes
resulting from struggles over the wage were transformed into a Keynesian
strategy for turning consumption into a source of economic growth and thus
more instead of less waged and unwaged (such as housework) work.
It is insufficient to restrict an analysis of education to its role in capital
without seeing how this process is far from automatic and monolithic. Once we
see how business profits from students as unwaged workers it becomes
necessary to see how students struggle not only against school/work and the
subordination of their youth to work, but also fo r expanded free time to pursue
their own needs. While Cleaver has begun to do this, there are still empirical
gaps to be filled in order to understand how these struggles are the source of the
ongoing "education crisis" to be laid.
Throughout Reading Capital Politically, Cleaver examines how the
unwaged have figured centrally to the accumulation of surplus value. His
analysis is the most extensive to date, and has many insights which we will
review. It is necessary, however, to test his analysis in the context of schools
today and explain how these mechanisms of control have continued to fail as a
response to student straggles against schoolwork.
As in the waged workplace, many types of hierarchical divisions other
than the wage began to be adopted before WWI from Morris Cooke's
recommendations discussed in chapter 4 in the universities as a means to ensure
the imposition of work and control. At first, one may find it difficult to recognize
these divisions, because we have been long trained to accept the structures of
school without question, but they do exist as Cleaver points out:
The division of labor in the university is structured partly along disciplinary
lines: economics here, anthropology there, etc. and this departmental division
helps the university to rule its workers, professors and students alike. Professors
are pitted against each other within and between departments over allocation of
money, prestige, etc. Students are mobilized around liberal arts versus practical
sciences, etc. Within the classrooms and courses the students are always
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organized hierarchically by grades, there are good students and bozos and
everybody knows it. And the interests of one are not those of the others.
Computers are "personal" and students are to work as individuals most of the
time, pitted against each other in the struggle for grades (IOU's on future
income). Even when they work as teams it is one team against another. The
competition is reinforced in reproduction as students are divided and organized in
competitive sports, fraternities, and sororities, etc. These divisions serve to keep
students pitted against students and undermine efforts to build united student
movements which could press for issues of concern to all students, or at least to
all who don't want to play the game according to current capitalist rules."54
The Wages for Students collective found that these divisions are used as
tools to divide students so as to better train them as workers. "Grading and
tracking are ways of measuring our productivity within the school-factory. Not
only are we trained to take our future 'position in society’ we are also being
programmed to go to our 'proper place.'"55 Grades can serve to separate out
uncontrollable workers, those making Ds and Fs for refusing (which is often
assumed to be because the can't) to do their schoolwork, from those who have
shown their willingness to work. Mediations are used to divide students among
themselves to ensure that work is imposed upon them. Both parents and teachers
are used to mediate the relationship between business and students. Teachers
make sure students work while in school and parents make sure that students
work on their home/work. One need only examine the many proposals suggested
for improving "the quality" of students to find recommendations for more
attentive teachers and parents to spend more time at home with their children. It
is their job to ensure that students are kept working hard and that this is rewarded
while avoidance of work is punished.56
54 Harry Cleaver, Introduction to Marxist Economics , packet #2, p. 94.
55 The Wages for Students Students, Wages fo r Students, Amherst, 1976, pamphlet, p. 4.
56 Martin Nicolaus discusses disciplinary hierarchies in terms of their usefulness to capital's
needs rather than the need to manage conflicts within academia. "The reason we have
departments in the first place, other than for administrative convenience, is because industry
needs 'economists' or political scientists.' Industry needs people with job classifications that
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In theory, these mediations are reproduced throughout the social factory to
fulfill its need for control over the working class in abstencia. Since it is a system
that organizes society around work, access to those who can continue the
imposition of work is essential. Thus the need for mediations between business
and the working class is satisfied by attempting to use one part of the working
class to mediate and eventually, by taking on that role, that group acts as part of
capital (Cleaver, p. 159). Parts of the working class are used to force other parts
of the working class to work. This takes place throughout society with the use of
race, sex, sexual preference, wages, age etc. that are not only used to divide and
conquer but to turn one sector of the working class to manage and discipline
another. The other forms of domination are hardly new with capitalism but have
been appropriated by it in new ways.
Within the schools, teachers and students are used to mediate at different
times and in different ways. Teachers are used to mediate between students and
the school administration or state legislature and students are used to mediate
between teachers and the administration/legislature. In some cases, graduate
students are used to mediate undergraduates and blacks mediate whites, etc. As
teachers mediate between university administration and students, so as to serve
the process of work discipline, students may also do the same for teachers who
refuse this task by inflating grades, calling in sick or striking. "The
administration mediates the relations between students and professors through its
institutional structures, from class structure to the use of police" (Cleaver, 1979,
p. 160). Not uncommonly, the administration is composed of members of the
managerial sector of the capitalist class and so their interests lie with ensuring the
disciplining process of the school. Unruly students are punished by teachers
are standardized, rationalized, and computerized" (Nicolaus, 1967). This is echoed in his
discussion of grading: "you will see that the people with the higher grades get the better jobs.
Industry needs a better grading system in the knowledge industry in order to know who to hire
in the top position and who to hire in the less important positions; to know who to pay and
where to feed people into industry."
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who refuse to allow them to make up missed work while they were taking over
the president's office and were hurried off to jail. Teachers who refuse to
succumb to competition, massive workloads, and undisciplined students by
striking are attacked for letting thousands of uncontrolled kids ran free in the
streets. Teaching evaluations by students, merit pay scales and other mechanisms
are some of the subtle uses of students as watchdogs over faculty work levels.
However, mediations are needed as reactions to conflicts in order to generate
additional forms of control to supplement institutional means that have been
attacked and subverted. These mediations are most commonly rejected when
teachers go out on strike over their working conditions, rejecting claims that they
are letting down their students, and students attack the administration, regents or
legislature rather than the teacher or each following level of mediation (Cleaver,
1979, p. 161).
These mediations are strengthened by the wage hierarchy within the
schools. Students appear to be marginalized from the sphere of accumulation
because they lack a wage. Teachers appear lumped in with the administration,
and other waged workers on campus such as those in the cafeteria, the dorms, or
the physical plant appear as workers because they receive a wage. Graduate
students employed as teaching assistants (TAs) and assistant instructors (AIs) are
isolated from graduate students on financial aid or fellowships, faculty and
undergraduates. All of these particular group's interests, we are told by the
administration, are separate and antagonistic. This is especially the case among
students: those who have to work to make it through school, because they are
unwaged, are used by employers antagonistically against waged workers by
paying them less to undercut the power of the waged. The use of underpaid
desperate students serves as a mechanism to control and manipulate waged
workers. Unemployed graduate students are held out as replacements for
recalcitrant RAs, TAs and AIs. The unwaged status of students is used as a
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means for not only controlling students but waged workers and those few
students who have wages.
Parents are looked upon to insure the imposition of work on students at
home when teachers have failed. Because they lack a wage, students are
frequently dependent on a waged worker such as parent or spouse, further
undermining the autonomy of the student. Rather than a wage, they receive an
allowance contingent on the satisfaction of the demands of the benefactor. The
"sibling wage" is comes with many strings attached as even the highest paid
sibling will testify. Parental expectations to "graduate in four years, go to
medical school and date the right boy or girl" is a form of parental control in the
absence of, or in addition to, the disciplining of the school.
Yet, this dependency is also turned the other way in order to use the
student against the waged benefactor. The parent or spouse is restricted in their
range of activity because losing their job or taking a pay cut would negatively
affect their dependent. They could also be threatened by competition with
unwaged desperate students who may be willing to replace them at a lower wage
and higher productivity. In effect, the unwaged status of the student turns
dependency on a waged supporter into a mechanism of control over that
person.^?
Whether as a requirement of financial aid, the sibling wage or as a
calculation of future wages, the use of grades is used to measure the amount of
school/work performed and what wage it justifies. In a sense, before the 1970s
period of rising unemployment and wage reductions, the grade served as a wage-
productivity deal modeled after Keynesian productivity deals between unions and
business. Grades provide a way for potential employers to measure the
development of labor power of students and how likely it can be used by in
57 Tim Grant, "Student as Worker: Wages for Homework,” the sheaf, March 26, 1976, p. 4,
explains this relationship very well as does Cleaver (1979).
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waged work the way productivity of waged workers is a measurement of the
amount and intensity of work a business can get out of them.
There are two primary aspects to grades. Assu m in g that they are accurate
indicators of both work performed and futures wages to be received, they can
either function in a fascist or democratic m a n n e r . 58 The latter form takes the
place of what we perceive as choice: no one has to do their homework, only not
doing it means low grades and possibly being kicked out of school into the
welfare lines or to a more tedious and underpaid job than you had expected. T his
explicitly underlined the strategy of the Selective Services use of deferments to
manage the flow of labor. Democracy is equated with choice: "if you don't like it
here then go somewhere else." This choice is only an illusion. Sure, leaving
school may mean going home with your tail between your legs but putting it in
this manner only distracts the focus from seeing how students are trained to
internalize this work discipline in order to intimidate students into endless
studying. Since, in capitalism, work and money are used as the means social
control by forcing one to work to survive (Cleaver, p. 189), we can perceive of
this choice as nothing but a serious threat to those less able or willing to both
produce and keep reproducing one's ability and willingness to work (Cleaver, p.
175). School obviously involves something more than consumerist choice.
Homework is one of the training grounds on which a student cuts his/her
teeth on the production of self-imposed labor. Cleaver has related homework to
piecework in that the grade one receives for work performed is gauged not by
actual time in hours worked but by the piece. If the other hierarchies are
successful in pitting student against student, then fierce competition can drive a
1 point to Montano's supposition that capital can use either democracy or fascism
interchangeably to reimpose control over workers to make them work, as applicable within
schools (p. 51). One only has to look at the use of fascist tactics in the schools to reimpose
work, such as the bat wielding principal Joe Clark, swatting, and riot police that takes place
besides joint student/administration committees and student affairs offices to perceive their
flexibility in tactics of control (Mario Montano, "Notes on the international crisis," Zerowork,
Number 1, December 1975).
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student to do more and more homework in quantity and quality while in pursuit
of the ever-reduced value of the grade. The more work that students do, the
lower the value of the work all of which leads to an ever upward spiral of forced
work.
Homework is an important example of how schoolwork can be seen as
abstract labor. It is not the content of the work that is significant, but the act of
work itself. Each college bound student has it deeply ingrained in their
consciousness that once they get to college no one will order them when to get
up and when to do homework. This becomes solely the work of the student.
Those that can best teach themselves to internalize work as a primary activity will
be able to consistently do their homework and get the grade which, in theory,
will prepare them for the job of their choice. Homework is the test of this
abstract ability to work. The hardest thing, students will tell you, is getting over
that procrastination to start on their homework. This is what is meant by
"abstract labor." The everyday experience of students is a struggle to get out of
bed and to class on time; a struggle against this self-imposition of work. Going
to the lake, listening to the stereo, or having sex instead of going to class or
doing homework is a rejection of this work. Since homework is linked to
grades, the threat of failing school and being thrown into the welfare lines or fast
food sweatshops are hammers students raise above themselves to force
themselves to work. Those who refuse to do this have escaped and undermined
the disciplining of the schools.
Understanding the use of mediations, grades, homework and the wage in
this way differentiates schools very little from any other workplace. For this
reason, Wages for Students and others have expanding their understanding of
the social factory to include education. Carl Davidson sums up these work
relations of education quite succinctly.
What does the interior of the new knowledge factory look like? Where are the
workshops? Specifically, these are to be found in the classrooms, the faculty
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offices, the study rooms in the libraries and homes, the psychological counseling
offices and clinics, the conference rooms, the research laboratories, and the
administrative staff offices...The machinery of knowledge-production pervades
the university. And, despite its apparent invisibility, it is no less real or tangible.
The productive apparatus consists of grades, exams, assigned books, papers,
and reports, all the curriculum and scheduling requirements, non-academic in
loco parentis regulations, scientific equipment and resources, the mechanics of
grants and endowments, disciplinary procedures, campus and civil police, and
all the repressive and sublimating psychological techniques of fear and
punishment. (’...' in original, p. 2 0 )
If these mediations offer a commonality to the repressive features of
waged workplaces, they also demonstrate commonality as means for managing
terrains of conflict. As we’ll see in the conclusion (chapter 6 ), grades, tests, and
other measures of student discipline and productivity are daily subverted through
cheating, skipping class and other everyday forms of resistance.
Although they recognize these forms of mediations as hardly absolute and
subject to the antagonisms of struggle, these theorists tend to overemphasize the
repressive features of education and exaggerate its success in order to make their
case that students are workers to the extent that they do the unwaged work of
being a student. But in what ways do students resist being students? This is a
question they often cannot answer, although they would not dispute it. To see
students as workers is to implicitly acknowledge to power of capital and the
failure of people's struggles to transcend a life of work.
Nonetheless, the knowledge/social factory has been forced to take a
backseat on the left in favor of guilt politics that romanticizes struggles of waged,
black, female and other workers. Ironically, even today, when struggles of the
so-called "new social movements", which are frequently struggles of the
unwaged such as peasants, the unemployed and women, are being recognized on
the left, the struggle of students have been sacrificed. The left is no less than 30
years behind in understanding the transformation of education into unwaged
work. And in doing so, the crisis of higher education that has been ignored and
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the attempted reinvestment in the universities by business and the state as a
means to resolve the crisis of accumulation has gone unanswered by all except
students.
Rethinking the Crisis of Higher Education
The two great new forces o f the 1960's were the federal government and the
protesting students.
—Clark Kerr59
One thing that stands out in the Carnegie Commission's reports is that they
perceived the underlying problem inside the universities to be the uncontrollable
struggles of students to transform the universities. If we are to understand their
focus on runaway costs as a result of the student movements for new programs,
more grants, etc., then their proposals to cut spending by 20 percent by 1980
and holding growth in expenses to 2.5 percent a year rather than the average of
"inflation+3.5%" of the 1960s should be seen as an attempt to decompose those
struggles. That higher education is wracked by perpetual class warfare with
students becomes clear in their research reports. The language may be in terms of
efficiency and GNP, but at its heart is the inability to manage the universities.
Civil rights pressure and growing concern over equality of opportunity led
to substantial increases in federal funds, and also to significant increases in funds
from state and private sources, for student aid. In addition, civil rights pressure
stimulated the development of "ethnic studies" programs, while more open-
admission standards created a need for expanded resources to serve the needs of
larger student populations. "Other forces, such as growing concern over urban
issues and environmental problems, led to the development of new programs.
Also contributing to rapidly rising expenditures were the...tendency to expand
59 Kerr, p. 132.
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student services, expenses associated with episodes of student unrest, and rising
security costs."^
One could say that during the 1960s we moved from Kerr's "multiversity"
to "Crisis U." In the Carnegie Commission Final Report, chapter 1 begins with a
section on "The Political Crisis", pointing out that "in recent times, students and
faculty members in unprecedented numbers have engaged in political activity,
some of it illegal, against dominant policies and institutions in the surrounding
society. Campuses have been tom apart; relations with external groups seriously
damaged. Dissent is an essential aspect of academic life and there was much to
dissent about; but the disruption was excessive" (p. 4). A sense of collapse
loomed over the education planners.^ Kerr asked himself "will 1870 to 1970
have been the century of the rise and the beginning of the decline of the American
university?" (p. 128). The Carnegie Commission added its own fearful
prophesy: "Will higher education," collapsing under the weight of strikes and
rebellions, "follow the course of the railroad industry?," disbanded by business
and the state since it could no longer serve its need for growth (p. 7-8). Then
comes the second section, "The Financial Depression," warning that higher
education has gone from "genteel poverty to genteel poverty in one decade" (p.4)
as the assembly line was ruptured by the student insurgency and disinvestment
Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, The More Effective Use o f Resources: An
Imperative fo r Higher Education, June 1972, McGraw-Hill: New York, p. 28. Kerr recognized
the growing turmoil was brewing in the early 1960s. "What are the current concerns?" There
are: "problems related to cost...Mler utilization of the calendar, excessive numbers of courses,
mechanization of instruction; problems related to the vast numbers of young people already
knocking on the doors; problems related to public service-cultural programs, urban extension.
Additionally, there is the general public concern with ’morality’ on the campus; with the so-
called beatniks, with the young radicals, with cheating and with sex..These ’moral’ concerns are
filling the incoming mailbox of the administrator" (p. 106). As we can see, there was no limit
to the form and content that forbode crisis to the planner.
61 Priorities fo r Action: Final Report o f the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education,
McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973. Considering that the biggest names among them—Kenneth
Kenniston, David Reisman, Norton Simon, Kerr, and Nathan Pusey—sat on the Carnegie
Commission and did the research and writing—Earl Cheit, Philip Altbach, Seymour Lipset and
Andrew Greeley—their research is quite representative of their varying management strategies.
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as rates of return fell. Looming over the dark horizon were very hard times.
Aside from purposeful mystification, the planners discovered what the left has
been incapable or unwilling to do: the rupture of the universities could be traced
to the struggles of students inside them.
This was explicitly understood by former Vice President Hubert
Humphrey in 1969 who, much like William Simon and Dinesh D'Souza would
later repeat, not only credited the student rebellion with the crisis but warned of
coming austerity if order could not be restored. "The time has come for men and
women who prize civil liberties and academic freedom to take a public stand
against the coalition of destruction that is terrorizing American classrooms and
campuses. It is time to act," Humphrey trumpeted. "Because of the excesses of a
hard-core minority of recalcitrant radicals, the entire structure of federal, state,
and private financial support to institutions of higher learning is now
imperiled. "62 Jn no clearer terms was the threat of disinvestment from the
universities laid out. Humphrey was echoed by then Yale University President
A. Bartlett Giametti who is cited in chapter 4. In her provocative analysis of
Gaimetti's testimony, higher education historian Sheila Slaughter explains that he
held the student 'revolution' generally accountable for problems encountered by
the university. He saw what he regarded as the excesses of the 1960s portrayed
most clearly by the betrayal of language, which in turn undermined the university
by creating bad thinking, a loss of discipline, a preoccupation with feeling, or
sentimentality, and a loss of the notion that we should work hard and submit
ourselves to the rational and precise discipline embodied by language and the
basic curriculum once central to elite colleges.63
62 Hubert Humphrey, "Repression's Gaining Speed," Nashville Tennessean, May 18, 1969.
63 Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics o f Higher
Education Policy Formation, Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1990, p. 119; and A. Bartlett
Giametti, witness, US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Labor and Human Resources,
Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities, "Basic Skills, 1979," 96th Congress, 1st
Session (February 13, 1979), from document attached, Giametti, "Sentimentality," Yale
Alumni Magazine, January 1976, pgs. 39 and 40.
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The crisis turned out to be the rupture of use of education since the late
1950s to stimulate economic growth. This began at the end of WWII, as the GI
Bill opened up a new source of massive funds for the university, providing
students "an explicit wage for school work as training for a new post-war labor
market."64 This is also what Becker calls "forgone earnings," which as we've
seen is the unpaid wages for school work. Throughout the 1950s funds
stagnated at about one billion dollars. During the 1960s, this investment grew
from one billion to almost seven billion in 1970s (Caffentzis, p. 130). Clearly,
the function of the university became evident to business. At the heart of this
new direction in Keynsian planning was an extension of human capital
investment to the universities as a means for stirring growth. Caffentzis
pinpointed this new strategy beginning with the Kennedy administration: "if
increased 'growth', hence increased rates of profit and exploitation, were the
order of the day, then increased investment in university both for general R&D
work and the training of its working class on a mass scale must be instituted" (p.
131). What has become common terminology today was being derived in the
mid 1960s:
...automation and the changing patterns of consumer wants have greatly
increased the importance of investment in human beings as a factor in economic
growth. More investment in plant and equipment without very large increases in
our investment in human beings seems certain to enlarge the surplus of
underdeveloped manpower needed to design, install and man modem production
facilities.^
This investment strategy transformed education from being seen as a cost
to an investment; which is why education became a "return on investment". It is
64 George Caffentzis, "Throwing Away the Ladder The Universities in the Crisis," Zeroworlc,
No. 1, December, 1975, p. 130.
65 C.C. Killingsworth, "The Effects of Automation on Jobs," in B.R. Cosin, Education:
Structure and Society, NY: Penguin Books, 1972, p. 94.
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worth quoting Caffentzis at length here because the implications of this new
investment planning of higher education is fundamental to understanding the
crisis:
It constitutes the capitalist recognition that merely planning the level o f constant
capital does not automatically lead to appropriate changes in the composition o f
the working class. The working class does not merely follow along with the
level and kind of investment, as in the Keynsian supposition, but must also be
explicitly planned. And so investment in the university system got pushed
through Congress as part of a more general strategy to deal with this new aspect
of class struggle. Thus in class terms investment in human capital arose when
capital had to begin to take into account in an explicit way the whole social circuit
of capitalist society in which labor power is produced, qualified and reproduced.
In this attempt to plan social capital in both its constant and variable parts, the
previously "non-productive" relations and institutions of capitalist society had to
be recognized as productive. The Keynsian integration of the whole reproductive
cycle of labor power which could no longer be left to chance, the "automatic"
market forces, or ideology. Consequently, the previously "costless" (for capital)
and "wageless" (for the working class) work began to change in status for social
capital (p. 132, emphasis added).
It cannot be emphasized enough that no matter what the plan, the working
class does not necessarily follow; this is an unintended interpretation of what
Becker meant by human capital being "ill-liquid" and risky" and not even worth
its weight as collateral. By the late 1960s this became so very clear to those who
hoped the unpaid studies of students would season them as labor power for
endless waged work. The students would have none of it.
After graciously caving into student demands for expanded enrollment and
financial aid, the universities were incapable of dealing with the circulation of
student insurgency throughout them. Students were doing more than fighting the
Vietnam war at home or skipping class to devise a counterculture but were also
organizing alternative universities, putting together underground newspapers,
and campaigning for "ethnic studies" programs. They also fought for better
working conditions in organizing for better dorm food and housing conditions,
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and against racism, sexism, in loco parentis (which actually began in the 1950s),
grades, heavy workloads, and enrollment and sexual restrictions. The vitality of
these movements were their at once decentralized yet established local and
international complementary c o n n e c t io n s . 6 6 As Caffentzis explains, they "used
the money from the very investment funds meant to turn students into human
capital against the plan of development" (p. 133) by using not only their financial
aid to bankroll these struggles but also university resources by d e m an d in g new
subjects of study and more free spaces. For Caffentzis, the apex of this rupture
of the human capital management of the universities came with the defeat of the
use of grades as a devise to channel students into the jungles or the waged
workplace. The massive resistance made the whole system of grades as a means
of control "an object of refusal in a way that the previously ideological attacks
never could" (p. 133).
The ensuing fiscal crisis of the universities, Caffentzis posits, was not a
misdirection or mistake; the imbalanced books indicated an "inability to deal with
the class struggle. The financially endangered universities of 1970 and 1971
were the weak links in the previous development strategy" (p. 136). The "high
risk" and "ill-liquidity" of human capital were no longer abstractions. For
Becker, the rates of return on investments fluctuated tremendously between 13
percent and 25 percent. The reason is apparent: it depends on both whether
students were actually doing any work in the schools and if their labor power
could be accessed in the workplace. That the investment in education is not a
66 Katsiaficas argues that the New Left (including the student movements) were international
and triggered by a basic human desire for justice (a "human species consciousness", p. 11) and
the creation of a future way of living in the present (George Katsiaficas, The Imagination o f the
New Left: A Global Analysis o f 1968, Boston: South End, 1987). On the other hand, Cleaver
rejects any notion of a youth, class or human species consciousness and suggests that the
student insurgence was comprised of numerous multidimensional projects of "self-valorization"
that at once subverted capital's subordination of life to work and attempted to realize multiple
futures in the present. Nonetheless, even though he does not attempt to deal with students or
universities in terms of capital, Katsiaficas provides the most comprehensive and exciting
documentation of the international youth and student rebellion that I have found.
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sure thing is also the reason education is still lumped into the residual left over in
calculations of growth.
The relationship between student insurgency and crisis is quite explicit in
Earl Cheit's The New Depression in Higher Education that listed the most
important characteristics of a school not in crisis being 1) less affected by
campus disorders, 2) good fit between aspiration and program, 3) having high
community regard, 4) smaller student aid costs, 5) defined program and
controlled growth, 6 ) lower faculty costs, and 7) efficiency.67 Then the d ilem m a
for administrators was to stop the movements (although today the sources of the
crisis are not always as obvious as student strikes) or risk financial destruction.
Once again, Caffentzis puts the predicament quite sharply: "what had to be
reintroduced was a wholly new relation between state investment, university
structure and labor market with a wider restructuring of capital in the crisis, for
the previous relation just could not guarantee control over the reproduction of
labor power" (p. 137).68
Central to this restructuring was the use of money as a means of control to
impose the discipline of schoolwork. The wage-productivity deal established by
human capital investment—increased productivity in exchange for low tuition
and fees and financial aid for students and increasing wages for faculty—had
been ruptured. Financial aid was increasing along with tuition, faculty salaries
were rising 1 percent faster than the rapidly increasing salaries of the rest of the
working class, and spending on the whole was outstripping productivity
(Carnegie Commission, 1972, p. 4). In response, the use of money appeared in
many forms in the Carnegie plan to decompose the struggles inside the
universities. Spending to fulfill massive student demands for new programs, aid
67 Earl Cheit, The New Depression in Higher Education: A Study o f Financial Conditions at
41 Colleges and Universities, A General Report of the Carnegie Commission on Higher
Education and the Ford Foundation, NY: McGraw Hill, 1971, especially chapters 3 and 6.
68 This is reinforced throughout the literature of the crisis. It would also be my theoretical
motivation for developing this thesis as an extension of Caffentzis' analysis.
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and other reforms would have to be cut by $10 billion a year or 20 percent
(1972, p. 1). The cuts were hardly abstract: 50 percent would have to come from
reducing time students spent in school (just hanging around, not working was
apparently their primary concern), and the other 50 percent by reducing the
increase in annual costs per student from 3.4 percent to 2.4 percent, of which,
12.5 percent would be by increasing the faculty/student ratio (breaking the
productivity deal) and 12.5 percent by reducing faculty salaries during the
1970s. (1972, p. 151-152) Tuition would be increased; every tub would have to
be put on their own bottom, selling themselves out to raise their own funds;
Ph.D. programs would have to be cut; undergraduate degrees should be sped up
to three years; community colleges should be expanded to siphon off
unproductive students; faculty productivity measured; enrollment controlled; and
most importantly "reluctant attendees" should be allowed to exit the campuses
where they have stirred up trouble. The Carnegie Commission plan was explicit:
to end the crisis students, staff and academics will have to pay with more work.
The one sure link between a degree and a job and higher standard of living
was ruptured. With crisis, all deals were off. Kerr's pyramid tossed out its base
from necessity. "Discipline over students is not accomplished with the old
schoolmasterish ways (grading) but through connecting in a very explicit way
work in the university with waged work: the job," writes Caffentzis (p. 138).
Unemployment, recession, insecurity were the result of business’ and
government's disinvestment from employment of a growing restless work force
arriving from the universities to join the already recalcitrant work force.
Caffentzis' titled his article appropriately: capital was "throwing away the ladder"
that higher education served as into the higher rungs of waged work pyramid.
School administrators would soon seek to institutionalize some
innovations such as the open classroom and alternative universities as "informal
classes" or attempt to outright crush them. If enrollment would increase and
more "minority" students would enter, income would serve to divide and pit
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students in competition with each other in the face of a growing a shortage of
aid, classes and services. This would be the fundamental turning point of the
restructuring. Control over the reorganization and crisis of the university would
pass by the early 1970s from the students to capital. The failure of the student
movements to articulate the position of students in capital would prove to be
cause of long-term defeat. "Since the student movement did not take the question
of income in its most general form—wages for schoolwork—capital could
simultaneously accede to its partial demands while using the imposition of work
to silence it. Capital takes the initiative in recognizing school as work and begins
to wage it on its own terms''^ (p. 139 ). And silence us it did—for more than a
decade.
Caffentzis utilized an analysis of the university as a social factory, finding
the crisis of higher education rooted in the struggles of students against school as
work and for lives filed with a multiplicity of desires and needs. By analyzing
the very theories and empirical research of educational planners, he was able to
demonstrate that austerity in higher education during the late 1960s and 1970s
was no more than the current tactic for repressing students activism within the
universities and restoring control.
69 This statement cannot be taken for granted. Business not only has recognized school as work
as we've seen, but has even devised various tactics to use wages to raise productivity. Gary
Becker, a recent Nobel Prize winner in economics, is the first to suggest paying wages for
schoolwork as far as I can tell. He argues that since "forgone earnings" contribute a larger cost
than tuition charges, poor students would be more likely to attend college if they could do so
without the cost of forgone earnings—that is, if they were paid their supposed higher wages
while in school (p. 155). This is not surprising, since as a result of discrimination in the
universities and job market women and "minorities" will receive a lower return (i.e. lower
future earnings in exchange for the same effort), he notes they should be enticed to sharpen their
productivity discipline by paying them to attend (affirmative action scholarships). This has
been reproduced numerous times with ploys to pay for grades, offer trips and prizes for
attendance, and cut the number of required classes or years of school in exchange for high grades
or test scores (Business Week, "Special Bonus Issue," 1989, has some fine examples of this in
a special advertising section).
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Multiculturalism, Student Struggle and the Crisis: The Case of UT-
Austin
Caffentzis' analysis can inform our own attempts to transform the university by
recognizing the class nature of not only austerity but entrepreneurialization as
well. The crisis outlined by the Carnegie Commission reports has hardly been
resolved and control reimposed. Rather, entrepreneurialization reflects a new
international offensive by business and educational managers not only to restore
control but to transform the university into an overt business itself that offers a
stable arena of investment.
Such analysis of the political context of such reforms is entirely among the
radical advocates of multicultural reforms.70 Although it is taken for granted that
the universities have much in common with large corporations, this almost never
appears as part of their analysis. Professors advocate multiculturalism and offer
retorts to charges of "PC" by focusing almost completely upon issues of
minority enrollment and the curriculum, ignoring how what we now call
multiculturalism originates in the demands of students for the reorganization of
the university into an institution that no longer perpetuates various forms of
domination and discrimination while at the same times servicing the needs of the
oppressed in their efforts to transform all of society. This is especially the case
with Debating P.C., a collection of writings from the left and right that not only
completely excluded student writers from the volume but ignored how the
multiculturalism movement was created through radical student mobilization.71
Inversely, radical student advocates of multiculturalism often accept the
university as a place of privilege for a select few from the middle and upper
income groups, a generalization of some of their own backgrounds to all
students. The university is seen to participate in the reproduction of racial,
70 Paul Berman (ed.), Debating P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College
Campuses, NY: Dell, 1992.
71 Ibid.
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gender, ethnic and other forms of domination but how these contribute to larger
social processes are rarely examined since the university is presumed to be
marginal to society as a whole, a carry over from the non-academic left. Issues
of class and capitalism are subsumed to these other concerns in response to
decades of overemphasis of class above other forms of repression. In some
ways, this reprioritization stems from the motives and backgrounds of the middle
and upper class students who see racism and sexism for example as barriers to
their own potential successful careers and ambitions. As a result, the university's
businesslike operations are often ignored, although this is not always the case.
Unlike the substantive critiques of the university's role in maintaining and
building an international empire during the Vietnam War, few students make a
connection between the business activities and multiculturalism as we saw Robin
Templeton doing in chapter 3. Unconcerned by the widespread austerity and
entrepreneurialization of all aspects of the campus, the multiculturalism
movement is unprepared for the impact these changes will have on whatever
reforms they succeed in forcing the university to adopt and the forces of
repression that will seek to block them. Rechanneling resources to commercially
oriented operations, university administrators justify their refusal to adopt
multicultural reforms with cries of poverty. Those they do eventually adopt not
only run through so many layers of bureaucracy that they hardly resemble the
original ideal but are funded by rechanneling resources from other related
academic programs or student and faculty populations or even from the students
themselves through higher tuition and fees or even additional course
requirements. In essence, university administrators utilize a divide and conquer
strategy to generate new unforeseen conflicts among potential allies in order to
destablize the movement. Without an analysis of the university as a corporation,
the movement finds itself unprepared to resist the formalization and
institutionalization of their demands into the academic enterprise or even their
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marginalization, repression and subversion through selective reshuffling of
resources to fund them.
Just as importantly, the multiculturalism movement has failed to analyze
the university in an international context—quite ironic considering the co m m on
goals of the movement are to further understanding of diverse groups of people.
The restructuring of the university does not stop at the border but has become
formal policy in the US, Canada, Mexico and Latin America we saw in chapter
4. Entrepreneurialization in the US is only the local facet of a global restructuring
effort that picked up speed during the 1980s. Without recognition of this
process, the multiculturalism movement is unprepared for both the repression
and efforts to coopt its goals in order to better manage an undisciplined and
diverse international population.
We still have much to learn from the history of previous student
movements. Carlos Munoz finds the ultimate vulnerability in the Chicano Studies
movement was its limitation to rechanneling resources to the needs of the
Mexican-American community without an analysis of how to go about radically
restructuring the university. Lacking a critique of the university in capitalism,
Munoz finds that the movement was woefully unprepared to defend its position:
A critical look at the nature and structure of the university and, in particular, its
role as perhaps the most important institution in the shaping of dominant societal
values and ideology (the kind of ideology needed by those who rule) would have
provided evidence that the opposition met by Chicano Studies, and similar
programs, was inevitable, for in final analysis the university has been created
and shaped by those with the same general economic, political, and cultural
affinities as those who rule.72
Without an analysis of the university's role in capitalism the
multiculturalism movement has been unprepared for the repressive counterattack
72 Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989,
p. 165.
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launched by the right-wing from within the government and through various
corporate financed foundations. Unaware that the university is in crisis due to the
continuing creation of free spaces that subvert the disciplining of new labor
power—to which they contribute—the multiculturalism movement has not
expected such incursions motivated by a threat to capitalism posed by their
demands. Since the university appears as marginal to capitalism, such concern
was unexpected. Caught by surprise, many mainstream advocates of
multiculturalism have seized the moment by suggesting that multiculturalism is
hardly a threat but actually a potential source of profit for businesses by offering
the necessary knowledge for controlling a diverse and antagonistic workforce. It
is no surprise that when student demands for multiculturalism finally undergo
formal consideration, as happened at UT-Austin, they become reframed in terms
of how they can be legitimized as new forms of knowledge within existing
academic disciplines.
Efforts to legitimize multiculturalism academically is not limited to the
center but is often a side effect of efforts by academic radicals as well. Munoz
reminds us how this same process of legitimation occurred once Chicano Studies
programs were up and running. "In the absence of a strong student movement,
however, most of these [Chicano movement] intellectuals have assumed roles in
institutions that reinforce the dominant values of capitalism. The critiques of
'ivory tower intellectualism' that characterized the militant period of the
movement are often not heard today, and certainly do not carry the sting they
once had." Without the force of a militant student movement reminding faculty
allies that the issue is not one of institutionalization but radical transformation,
the goals of the movement cannot be realized. "Without a strong student
movement," Munoz notes "it is not always easy to distinguish between the
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professionalism and sophistication required to compel social change and the
professionalism used to maintain the status quo."73
Munoz' critique applies to the movement at UT-Austin detailed in chapter
3. To some extent, the silence of the student multiculturalism movement at UT-
Austin during the process of formalization as a course requirement demonstrated
an overall lack of understanding of their own power in not only initiating the
demands but implementing them. That PRIDE and ONDA became nothing more
than a proposed curriculum change reflects not only the defensive posture of the
movement once the repression began but the abandonment of responsibility to
faculty allies to see them through. What is unclear are the reasons the movement
quieted down once the process of formal adoption began. The demands were not
for entirely new changes but an expansion of isolated spaces that already existed
to the university as a whole. For example, the proposed English 306 reforms
were mostly already in place, quietly initiated by the Assistant Instructors (AIs)
who already taught the course. In essence, the class had already been
restructured. Yet, once the effort to formalize those changes within the English
Department began the movement failed to publicly voice its position. With every
defeat, little or no student response was forthcoming. As a result, not only was
the space opened by the AI’s shut down but the department split up.
Unaware of the corporate character of UT-Austin, the movement was
unable to counter both the corporate backed backlash that eventually defeated
even the watered-down distant relative of their plans and insist on militant
reforms originally advocated. Instead, ONDA and PRIDE became merely a topic
for debate in the Faculty Senate and the newspaper and no longer a demand of a
the movement in the streets and on the West and Main malls.
The academic professionalism that has developed in programs such as
Chicano Studies has become the target of criticism among black and Chicano
73 Ibid, p. 97.
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student activists as we saw in chapter 3 at UT-Austin. However, the same
critique could be applied to the multiculturalism movement as well. By abdicating
control over the implementation of multicultural reforms by allowing it to take
place through formal academic decision-making channels, the movement severed
student control before the reforms ever got off the ground. Munoz explains how
the realization of Chicano Studies also meant the almost immediate exclusion of
students from control over the programs:
Students had supported the efforts to make the [Chicano Studies] programs an
integral part of the institution. However, once programs became part of the
institution they came under the general rules and regulations governing all
academic programs. In the case of Chicano Studies, this meant exclusive control
of curricula by the faculty was expected to ensure conformance with university
policies. Students thus could no longer expect to play an influential role in the
further development of Chicano Studies programs unless 'understandings’ were
reached with the program faculty. Although some programs did make efforts to
allow students a direct role in decision making, the usual outcome of
institutionalization was the gradual decline of student participation in the
governance of the programs, (p. 89)
Unprepared and uninformed about how the university operates and
functions, the movement's success was short-lived. As long it fails to develop a
radical critique of the university, the multiculturalism movement is only an
implicit threat to the entrepreneurial university. As long as it continues to fail to
offer a critique of the university in capitalism and recognize the autonomous
power of students it will continue to be subjected to cooptation,
institutionalization and repression.
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Chapter 6. Conclusion: Turning Resistance into Rebellion
Entrepreneurialization, although still quite new, is rapidly becoming national
policy through the US. Hardly complete or entirely successful, restructuring
faces numerous forms of overt and implicit forms of resistance. Nonetheless,
this resistance is limited by a failure to directly challenge the university as a
multinational corporation in an international context. Student and faculty activists
have demonstrated an inability to conceive of the university as a factory in which
peopie are expected to work and prepare themselves to work but don't. Few
conceive of the university as a terrain of conflict beyond the contestations created
by formal protest movements. For some, this failure holds dire consequences for
continuing efforts to radically reorient the universities to serve the needs and
desires of people rather than control and exploitation.
In conclusion, I examine efforts to move beyond resistance by creating
new and expanding existing spaces within the universities. My purpose is not so
much to offer detailed documentation but to raise questions as to the possible
relationship of such resistance to the continuing crisis of higher education in the
US. There are many questions to be asked in future research into
entrepreneurialization. How do these spaces relate to formal student movements?
Do such forms spaces have implications beyond the conceptions of those
engaged in them? Do these implications have a place in an analysis of the
continuing crisis of higher education, the crisis of capitalism, and the current
strategy of entrepreneurialization?
However, these spaces cannot exist independent of the universities even
as they transform them from within. Eventually, much like the ethnic studies and
multiculturalism movements, they will undergo conflicting pressures of
institutionalization, commercialization and demands that they serve the diverse
needs of student, faculty and local communities. Without an analysis of the
universities in the context of international capitalist society, such efforts may not
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withstand the weight of institutionalization and pressures of
entrepreneurialization. A "wages for students" perspective may offer a starting
point for developing an analysis from which we can both resist
entrepreneurialization while defending and expanding such spaces. Such an
analysis begins by articulating the conflict between school being unwaged work
that served current and future employers—the very foundation of
entrepreneurialization—and the pursuit of our own autonomous projects.
While there are many more aspects of students and the university that
require critical attention such as the relationship between "everyday forms of
resistance" and existing student movements, the international dimensions of
entrepreneurialization, and the international circulation of struggle against
NAFTA, GATT, and university development projects, I have decided to focus
on entrepreneurialization of US universities in order to offer a case study that can
help launch further efforts. I conclude with a look at the existence of spaces
within the entrepreneurial universities that can tell us something about how
people are already attempting to reorganize the universities to serve needs other
than those driven by profit and control. Knowledge of such spaces offers a
foundation for organizing broader movements beyond simply responding to
austerity, entrepreneurialization, and repression to transforming or transcending
the university as we attempt to transform all of society to serve our own diverse
needs.
Moving Beyond Resistance: The Greening of the University
Alongside the multiculturalism movement lies a growing effort to refocus many
facets of the universities on documenting, studying and attempting to resolve
aspects of the "environmental crisis" of our planet while transforming the way
we live in ecologically sound ways. Although many know of student recycling
and anti-CFCs campaigns that have been adopted by many universities
administrations as a result of legislative mandates, little is known of a wide range
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of efforts being directed at investigating the environmental impact of university
operations and research and development projects, identifying threatened species
or sensitive marshes and recharge zones, the development of alternative
renewable energy sources and even the documentation of the music and customs
of endangered human societies. While most of these efforts exist outside formal
academic programs and departments and are carried out by individual faculty and
students, they span the academic spectrum from the biological sciences,
geography, liberal arts, music, and even mechanical engineering which is better
known for its military research. However, some universities and colleges are
beginning to embrace such research activities by creating environmental studies
departments and even student centers far transcending the mere collection of
office paper and soda cans.
Much of the emerging concern for environmental issues in the universities
is rooted in low-profile student cooperative housing movement that emphasizes
an ecological transformation of living space, diet, consumption, self-education
and even decision-making. Since the late 1960s, cooperative housing, as well as
cooperative grocery stores, have offered a base for not only the current
widespread environmental action in society as a whole but even throughout the
universities. Lee Altenberg suggests that such "ecological living groups" have
played a powerful role in the reorganization of the universities and for
establishing an autonomous foundation for the student movement. "Students
form a group that takes control of their living situation—including running their
own meal plan and housekeeping—so they can express their ecological interests
not just as an extra-curricular activity, but as the very fabric of their college life."
These houses become laboratories for the direct utilization of appropriate
technology such as solar energy, vegetarianism, composting, recycling and
consensus living arrangements. "By giving environmental activism a literal home
on campus, a culture of ecological skills and experience can be transmitted from
one year to the next and can keep evolving. Campus activism can change from a
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pattern of disconnected projects that are accomplished and soon forgotten, to one
of continuous history where students can leave a legacy that future students will
benefit from." 1
Such ecological living groups have long been positive complements to a
vast assortment of student movements, including those resisting the university's
role in environmental destruction. Ecological living groups provide experiments
with new forms of social relationships that may give us a glimpse into some of
the many possible ways we may live in the future. Unlike a commune, these
living groups are tightly wound up in the everyday activities of the universities
while it both subverts its function as a corporation and transcends beyond it.
There are numerous examples of ecological living groups that exist between the
interstices of even the most entrepreneurial universities. Synergy House was
established in 1972 at Stanford, home for more than 500 students throughout its
lifetime. Qumbya Co-op was formed by 15 students at the University of Chicago
in 1987. There are also houses at UC-Berkeley and the University of Michigan
where the North American Students of Cooperation, which assists students in
establishing co-ops with financial and other resources is based. In Austin, during
the 1970s-80s, the Ark served as a center of radical political organizing. House
of Commons (HOC) is still known as a social space for those trying to establish
new ways of living, although financial hardship has eliminated the Inter-
Cooperative Council's (ICC) policy that house members have a consensus vote
on new members, thus providing HOC with a diverse collection of members
which sometimes results in conflicts over basic intentions for living there.
Ironically, ICC officially insists upon a policy of being "non-political" ignoring
the inherent political nature of co-ops.
Since many of the residents are students, these cooperative living
experiments have gradually begun to have an influence on academia itself. Some
students have attempted to use the structure of the university in order to create
* Lee Altenberg, "The ecological living group," Threshold, October, 1991, p. 21-2.
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unstructured degree programs, student-run courses, and environmental studies
centers and degree programs. These efforts demonstrate a tactical move from
simply resisting to efforts to reorganize the university, creating numerous future
ways of learning and living in the present.
At a growing number of universities students are organizing their own
courses dealing with the environment. Altenberg, who has been working on the
creation of student run courses at Duke, explains that "the most potent
instruments students have devised to empower their activism is the student-run
course. Students can create their own full-credit courses in which they can do
research on the urgent political and social problems of the day, as part of real
world campaigns to address them ."2 This idea is hardly new, since it is
motivated by the movements of Black, female, Chicana/os and Asian-American
students in the 1960-70s to create their own studies programs and "free
universities" outside or overlapping the campuses. In fact, as "ethnic studies"
faced cutbacks and the free universities disappeared, many students began to
look to spreading out their interests to the entire university, giving rise to the
multiculturalism movement that spans nearly every program and department of
the universities.
Student-run courses are a predominant occurrence in the university.
Students at Stanford and UC-Berkeley fought for and created pro g ra m s where it
can be done for full credit. At UT-Austin they may take the form of conference
courses in which students with a project in mind work one on one or in groups
with a professor of their choice. Students may do their class projects or papers
on topics that interest them, thereby indirectly redesigning the intent of the
course. A few schools go even further than individual courses. Evergreen State
University in Washington has an option for students to spend much of their
2 Lee Altenberg, "The student-run course," Threshold, September, 1991, p. 21, 23. He includes
a helpful list and addresses of programs at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill,
University of Oregon-Eugene, Florida State University-Tallahassee and UC-Davis where similar
programs already exist.
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undergraduate years designing their own degree program. UC-Santa Cruz has a
heavy emphasis on environmental studies and is organized with on-campus
housing dedicated to cooperative living integrated with academic studies.
Goddard College in Vermont hosts the Institute for Social Ecology which offers
summer undergraduate and master's degree programs. Even the new UC campus
in Monterey Bay has a public service requirement that will heavily emphasize
political activism rather than charity work.3
No matter what form they take, student-run courses are fundamental to the
reorganization of the university. Altenberg suggests that student-run courses may
"integrate students' academic program with their social concerns; provide a
means to channel the university's immense resources toward the urgent political
and social issues of the day...; [and] create 'free social space' where ideas and
aspirations that are unsanctioned and inadmissible in other social situations
(classrooms, dorms, on the job, in the media, churches, political discourse, etc.)
can be openly broached, shared, reflected upon, acted upon, and where new
understandings can be developed among a group of people, who learn to work
together, and can continue to work after the conclusion of the course."4
Concern for the environmental crisis has begun to influence the direction
of scholarly research projects as well. The original UCLA environmental audit,
that has served as a template for many similar environmental committees, was
first undertaken for a master’s thesis by two architecture students.5 At numerous
campuses, students and faculty are reappropriating class time—and their time in
3 According to Professor Doug Foley, UT-Austin, who was on the original planning
committee who designed the campus, in conversation with the author.
4 Altenberg, p. 23.
5 UCLA Environmental Study Group and Earth Day 1990, Campus Environmental Audit: A
Student Guide to Campus Environmental Change, 1990. The UCLA audit, In Our Own
Backyard: Environmental Issues at UCLA, Proposals fo r Change and the Institution’s Potential
as a Model, was a thesis project for the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at
UCLA released in June 1989. This has now been republished as a handbook. See April Smith
and The Environmental Action Coalition, Campus Ecology: A Guide to Assessing
Environmental Quality and Creating Strategies fo r Change, LA: Living Planet Press, 1993.
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school itself—intended to train us to work to study the environment and
sometime the university itself.
The Student Coalition for Clean Energy at the University of Minnesota-
Twin Cities, decided to challenge the renegotiation of the 25 year, $1 billion
energy supply contract by organizing an Environmental Summit and doing
research into alternative energy sources in a graduate school energy policy class.
Their research demonstrated that UM-TC is the state's 20th largest source of
sulfur dioxide, the main cause of acid rain, and has repeatedly violated its state
issued air permit. The Minnesota Pollutions Control Agency charged that the
monitoring equipment has been broken for over a year, that the university had
failed to make many required reports and violated its opacity limits over 35
times. The coalition has distributed a petition, signed by people from 18 different
organizations and academic departments, which was submitted to the regents
calling for a switch from coal to natural gas. Making the connection to living
conditions, they held a press conference at a "family student housing site next to
one of the university's coal burning steam plants, where residents live in the
shadows of a huge coal pile and are exposed to noxious coal dust." Much of the
research that informed the movement was conducted by graduate students who
used a required class to study the use of coal and alternative energy sources on
campus and issued a report that seriously questioned campus energy policy.6
Students at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville won a long
standing battle over the environmental impact of university development projects
in Spring 1992. After fighting the campus administration's proposal to destroy a
large part of a mature deciduous forest on campus land known as the Sweet
William's Trail area since 1990, the local SEAC group signed an agreement with
the administration to form an environmental oversight board that would make
6 Robert Hogg, "Students fight against coal at the University of Minnesota," Threshold,
October 1991, p. 27-8.
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recommendations to the Vice President for Administration. The board will have
an environmental audit committee and a recycling committee.7
Students at Oberlin College of Ohio organized the "Biosphere Project" that
not only asks about trash and recycling but also the use of pesticides and
herbicides, the amount of pollution (Oberlin creates about 15 tons of C 02 per
student per year), where the food is purchased and what kind of companies it
invests in.8
At many campuses, environmental studies is far more than low-key
individual efforts of students and faculty but are actually becoming integrated
into the structure of academia. By one rough estimate, there are nearly 200
environmental studies programs at US universities, many of which are
outgrowths of student initiatives. There are also environmental studies centers at
the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of New Hampshire and the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln. UC-Boulder's Environmental Center was
central to the organization of the 1991 SEAC Common Ground conference.
Students also created the UNH Environmental Center that holds a library and
serves as a clearinghouse for information and worked with the UN-Lincoln
student union to establish a resource center for environmental research.9
Aside from its numerous hypocrisies and capital's attempts at
institutionalization, Earth Day 1990 exposed a vast concern for the earth that
already existed but one that existed on nearly every college campus—both
universities and community colleges—throughout the U.S. That year, an
advertisement was placed in Greenpeace magazine by students at the University
of North Carolina-Chapel Hill asking if there was interest in establishing a
student environmental organization. After receiving a tremendous amount of
responses, the Threshold conference was held on their campus, attended by
7 Cathy Zeman, "Environmental quality boards as a first step toward campus environmental
reform,” Threshold, May 1992, p. 15.
8 "Making Your Campus a Model," Cool it Connection, v. 3, n. 1, 1991.
9 SEAC, p. 52-3.
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more than 1,700 students and the Student Environmental Action Coalition
(SEAC) was bom. After their next conference, Catalyst, in Champaign Illinois,
drew about 7,600, SEAC became not only the largest environmental student
organization but the largest student organization since SDS with about 33,000
members at 1600 campuses in 50 states, including 750 high schools, and 16
countries by late 1991.10
The main current running through SEAC revolves around environmental
groups intent on "greening" their campus by implementing paper, aluminum, and
other forms of recycling, establishing carpools, cutting consumption by the
campus administration, replacing styrofoam with reusable plastic cups and
planting trees on or near campus. A smaller but growing current are intent upon
conducting "environmental audits" of their campus that encompass an
examination of not only the amount of waste generated by the campus but also
the universities role in the building of incinerators, toxic dumping, the
destruction of natural habitats, and local and international pollution and
sometimes corporate and military ties.
While environmental audits have the potential for examining the
entrepreneurialization of the university, it has mostly served to indirectly help
university administrations problems with "waste management" and "energy
efficiency" for example rather than creating new ones. Yet, environmental audits
have provided a base of information about the university that SEAC is attempting
to expand further to include research into the curriculum, corporate, military and
other types of research and connections as well as the political implications of
their investments both in the US and internationally. SEAC took a broad step by
participating in the formation of A SEED (Action for Solidarity, Equality,
Environment and Development), which was developed by international students
who attended the Catalyst conference and have since set up offices in five
countries. Originally linking up the struggles of students in numerous countries
10 SEAC, p.6.
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in preparation for the Youth '92 meeting in Costa Rica to prepare actions at
UNCED, Brasil, ASEED continues to focus on the international dimensions of
the student movement and university development projects.
Carving Our Spaces at UT-Austin
While UT-Austin is being reorganized into an overt profit-making
corporation, it faces challenges from within and without by people with different
visions of what the university should and could be about, not only in regards to
environmental issues such as solar energy research and cleaning up toxic wastes
but also in emerging cultural forms, creating alternative learning centers,
newspapers and even radio stations. Throughout the campus and UT System,
people are silently and not-so-silently working on their own projects, many of
which are antagonistic to the administrations entrepreneurial priorities. Below the
surface of everyday events there appears a growing conflict between the
commercial ambitions of the UT-Austin administration and its corporate partners,
and students and faculty who have entirely different ideas about what the
university should be. These "alternative" projects are quietly disrupting the
mission of the university, which seeks to discipline students to spend the rest of
our lives working on meaningless and redundant tasks.
I want to highlight only a few of the recent positive projects on campus—
by undergraduates, graduates, faculty and staff—projects that are thriving
despite entrepreneurial activity and austerity. In the process of fighting against
austerity, we need to recognize the many projects going on throughout campus
and their implication for demonstrating the possibilities for transforming UT-
Austin to serve our needs and desires.
Many of these activities fit neither the neat categories of "education" and
"research". A common mystification exists about the concept of “research”. The
problem is not that research is squeezing out “education” (assuming the latter is
somehow “better” than the former) but that certain kinds o f research —primarily
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military and commercially-oriented—are taking priority over all else. Neither
research nor education in themselves can serve the needs and desires of people
for changing the way we live: “education” can serve to either produce obedient
workers or empower people to take control over their own lives while “research”
can either reproduce the existing systems of power or provide knowledge that
can help empower people. Contrary to popular myth, empowering research
exists side by side with empowering education.
Empowering research has a long history at UT-Austin. In the 1960s
architecture and botany students used a class to study the impact of then
Chairman of the Board of Regents Frank Erwin’s planned destruction of a grove
of trees to expand Memorial Stadium and law students spent time investigating
then Governor John Connally’s role in profiting from the construction of UT-
San Antonio and the LBJ School.11 In 1990, an architecture student wrote an
historical analysis of the use of architecture at UT-Austin to manage and control
student struggles.12
Since the 1960s, similar kinds of research has continued throughout the
campus without quite as much publicity or direct impact. Some engineering
students and faculty are engaged research on toxic waste cleanup and
environmental technologies. A couple of groups in the Center for Energy
Studies, which ironically shares a building with the military funded Center for
Electromechanics, are working on solar energy panels and the removal of toxic
chemicals from water. Likewise, others are studying pollution in the Galveston
Bay Estuary and other waterways. Engineering students annually design solar
powered cars even though their research is being sponsored by GM and slated
for commercialization.
11 Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: A Nonfiction Play for Five Stages, New York:
Norton & Co., 1974, p. 96-9 and 284-5.
12 Mark Macek, "The Politics of Campus Planning: How UT Architecture Restricts
Activism," Polemicist, May 1990, p. 3-5.
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In Civil Engineering, professor Earnest Gloyna conducts research on
“supercritical water oxidation” which may be able to destroy waste, sludge and
toxic substances in water. Gloyna’s work may soon be commercialized by some
of the worst polluting companies and is part of a Defense Department toxic waste
cleanup project. Moreover, Gloyna’s research would ironically help reverse the
environmental destruction perpetuated by the military research of his colleagues
such as Ben Streetman, A1 Tasch and J.K. Aggarwal, who develop computer
technology for automated weapons systems. Although Gloyna’s military backing
raises the possibility of spin-off applications for cleaning up areas devastated by
chemical weapons to allow troops to move in, the military would have
completely neglected clean-up of its toxic waste had activists not exposed the
widespread pollution and ecological destruction it has caused in the US alone and
forced Congress to mandate cleanup.
The law school is home to some alternative projects as well. There are
student groups involved in environmental protection law and civil rights.
Professor Elvia Arriola studies civil rights, sexual harassment and discrimination
on the job and feminist legal theory. In fact, Students for a Diversified Law
School organized strikes in 1990 and 1991 to push for multicultural reforms, and
a law journal called The Journal of Women and Law was formed a few years ago
by a group of students. A professor even coordinates a student lawyer legal
assistance program for people who cannot afford a lawyer, although it has
received complaints for providing uncaring and inadequate services.
In the College of Liberal Arts, there are an endless number of research
projects that exist just below the surface, financed out of the pockets of faculty
and students due to the lack of administrative support or downright opposition.
Anthropology professor Thomas Hester coordinates a summer field school
which conducts archeological digs on upper Barton Creek unearthing hundreds
of artifacts of hunter and gathering societies that once lived there. Such research
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can demonstrate the vital importance of preserving Barton Creek from
development projects such as that being pushed by Freeport McMoRan.
There are wide range of other spaces in existence throughout the College
of Liberal Arts. There are study groups in “Autonomist Marxism”, labor history,
and Chicano/a studies that have been in existence for a number of years.
Economics professor Harry Cleaver has been building an archive of books,
articles, zines and other publications of what he calls “Autonomist Marxism”.
Sociology professor Les Kurtz and a group of students and faculty have
coordinated a proposal for a Peace Studies Program and organize an annual
conference. Students working with the Minority Information Center have
organized the “Women of Color Conference”, and in 1993 a number of people
organized a conference on “Women and War” which featured panel discussions
concerning the Gulf War and its effects on women and social movements in the
US and the Middle East. During the Gulf War, the Progressive Faculty Group,
the Chicano/a Faculty Caucus and the Black Faculty Caucus organized a couple
of teach-ins on the war that were attended by hundreds of people as well as daily
teach-ins by professors and anti-war organizers. Classes on AIDS,
Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual culture, and a number of other topics originally began as
study groups that became classes.
Philosophy professor Doug Kellner and Frank Morrow of the College of
Communications have been doing a show on ACTV cable access since the late
1970s that offers alternative analyses of world events. The Center for Mexican
American Studies is producing Latino USA, a weekly radio show for Mexican-
Americans, that is being aired nationally on NPR. Anthropology professor
Steven Feld has recorded the sounds and music of Papua New Guinea tribes
while drawing connections to the destruction of the island’s rainforests which
threatens their way of life. His last recording, Voices o f the Rainforest, was
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done in conjunction with Michael Hart of the Grateful Dead.13 Anthropology
professor Elizabeth Femea produced a documentary on peace movements in
Palestine and Israel that was aired on PBS last Spring and has published a
companion book. History professor David Montejano has served as an expert
witness on the League for United Latino American Citizens in their successful
lawsuit against the Texas state for its discrimination in funding higher education
in South Texas. Government professor Anne Norton is involved in research on
sexual harassment at UT-Austin.
Graduate students in Management Science and Information Systems of the
College of Business Administration are conducting a study to find patterns of
discrimination in the location of toxic pollution. To date, they find that minorities
are most likely to live in areas badly polluted with industry and waste dumps.
Dave Sullivan, a business graduate student, recently served on a UT committee
to investigate campus recycling and conservation. A business professor
conducted a study of the economic impact of the Save Our Springs Ordinance
finding that the effect of restricted development on Barton Creek would not
negatively affect the local economy.
The College of Natural Sciences is teeming progressive projects as well.
Zoologist Mark Kirkpatrick has been a driving force behind the effort to have the
Barton Creek Salamander listed on the US Endangered Species Act list. As of
1995, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has refused to accept its own staff
biologists recommendation that it be included on the list leading Kirkpatrick and
the Save Our Springs Coalition Legal Defense Fund (which has been fighting
development on Barton Creek) to file a suit in federal District Court.14
Astronomy professor Edward Nather does not need his own telescope to study
the universe, he shares with others around the world. Nather’s Whole Earth
13 Voices o f the Rainforest: Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, field recordings by Steven Feld,
compact disc, Rykodisc, 1991.
14 Robert Bryce, "Bunch Sues," Austin Chronicle, November 3, 1995, p. 20.
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Telescope links up about a dozen major observatories worldwide by telephone
and electronic mail in the study of a star 24 hours a day. While UT is planning to
build a new $12 million telescope in West Texas next to the already existing
McDonald Observatory ($1.5 million of which will come from student paid
general fees), Nather is helping to create a network of astronomers that can share
equipment and research rather than waste millions of dollars building more
telescopes which destroy the environment in the process.
Joe Frost, early childhood education professor, is internationally know
for his work on playground equipment safety. He has done an extensive
evaluation of Austin playgrounds which found “dangerous features on most of
the city’s 78 playgrounds.”15
In the College of Communications, journalism professor Wayne
Danielson was part of the fight among faculty in the Faculty Senate and
University Council to implement multicultural reforms outlined by Project
PRIDE and ONDA (which were written by the Black Student Alliance and Todo
Unidos). Department of Radio-Television-Film chairman John Downing is
known for his work on underground and alternative media, having written a
book on the subject, and edited another collection of articles about films in the
“third world”. Journalism professor Mercedes de Uriarte has been the faculty
advisor for the Tejas newspaper which is produced by “minority” students and
dedicated to minority student issues.
Although students are important partners in many of these projects, there
are others that are strictly student initiated and operated. The recycling drums
seen in many buildings is coordinated by the Students for Earth Awareness who
recycle cans, bottles and paper on campus, eventually pushing UT-Austin to take
responsibility for recycling newspaper a few years ago, which it dropped in late
1991 without telling anyone because they didn’t make enough money and then
15 RU Steinberg, "Playscapes: Are Our Playgrounds Safe?", Austin Chronicle, August 28,
1992, p. 1-8.
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reinitiated by legislative mandate. The slate of multicultural reforms, some of
which are still under consideration, (although the multiculturalism requirement
was voted down by faculty), was almost entirely initiated by the efforts of the
Black Student Alliance and Todos Unidos.
If it was not for the efforts of a group of student parents and graduate
students in the mid to late 1980s, there would still be no childcare. A few years
ago, a group of student parents formed the University Student Childcare
Association (USCA), offering inexpensive daycare for 236 student families from
3 to 10pm Monday through Friday and 6 to 11pm on Saturdays. USCA has
recently expanded their hours of service. While providing daycare, the USCA
along with other student groups fought to force the administration to establish a
daycare program. USCA and Council of Graduate Students were involved in a
committee formed by the administration that eventually led to a UT run service in
1990, in addition to the efforts of USCA.
For about four years students have been running the KTSB cable radio
station that features music unheard on the commercially dominated airwaves. In
1992, the FCC ruled that KTSB must share 91.7 FM with a local cooperative
radio station called KOOP. However, a number of station bureaucrats and the
Texas Student Publications board have long refused to work out a cooperative
agreement, delaying KTSB’s FM debut for three years and spending about
$100,000 in student fee money on legal costs in order to control the whole
frequency. Although KOOP has offered to negotiate a time sharing arrangement
with the student staff—who have not been included in recent negotiations—for
more than two years, they have been repeatedly rebuked, although some staff
members pushed for negotiations. KTSB, now KVRX, eventually went on the
air in Fall 1994 in a time-sharing agreement with KOOP. Students also formed
Texas Student Television (TSTV) fought unsuccessfully to get an access channel
on ACTV, and is now aired on channel 9.
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The independently produced film Slacker is not as rare as one might be led
to believe. Every semester, Film I, II and graduate film students screen their
semester and thesis projects in Burdine. All types of independently produced
films, from animation to spoofs of students trapped in the UT-Austin
bureaucracy are featured, each one written, produced, funded and organized by
students and their friends. Music students also hold concerts each semester to
perform their music, while art students exhibit their works in the student gallery
as well as participants in a number of performance art revues and events
throughout the city.
Throughout the College of Fine Arts students are exploring and
challenging accepted conceptions of not only audio, performance and visual
forms but dealing with substantive political issues through reappropriated or
newly devised mediums. Students now have their own space to exhibit their
creations in the Student Gallery. Long limited to token spaces in the Huntington
for selectively chosen students, the student gallery features much more than
paintings but also pieces that incorporate video, lighting, film, audio, clothes,
and live performance.
Music and theatre students also conduct performances of the pieces they
have written and coordinated all semester or even longer. Although the College
of Fine Arts has cut back the availability of resources to students to conduct full
presentations in favor or practices that appears geared to prepare them for jobs
rather than allow them to follow their desires, many productions still go one both
through the college and a few new theatre groups. There is a Symphony
Orchestra, ensembles for experimental, Brazilian, Caribbean, and other kinds of
"world music" which any student can join by signing up for the class. There are
also dance troupes, opera groups and a number of experimental and student-run
play companies such as the Shadowland Players, the Weetzahs, the Barefoot
Players, and The Broccoli Project.
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Over the last five years there have also been many new student produced
newspapers, comics, and magazines. A. journalism class writes and publishes
Tejas, which is devoted to the concerns of minority students and community
members. The Black Student Alliance publishes The Griot periodically and
includes many articles and poetry concerning black students and community
concerns. A few former UT students (who also work on Liberated Learning)
produced the Polemicist (now The Hot Blast), which provides in-depth
investigative news coverage of community issues and UT-Austin affairs. The
Polemicist was later followed by The Other Texan, an investigative newspaper
published by graduate students and more recently (sub)TEX. There is also the
University Review which covers UT and national issues from a moderate to right
wing perspective. The University Democrats infrequently publish Foresight,
which is mostly devoted to elections. At any one time there can also be found a
few music zines as well, like Powerball and No Reply , which are free. There
has recently been a warm breeze of new independently-published local comic
books, a number of which are done by former and current Daily Texan
cartoonists. There also have been two compilations of local comics recently
published, such as JAB, a testament to the overwhelming talent and interest
around town.
There are other student projects only partially connected to UT that take
place all over Austin. One of the best known was the short lived “free
university”, Liberated Learning, allows anyone to teach or take classes in
whatever interests them. Classes are offered on any topic if there is a group of
people interested in learning about it. Liberated Learning also owns a press that
anyone can use after taking a class to learn how to operate it. Thousands of
zines, fliers, and posters have been printed on it by students and local residents
for only the extremely low costs of supplies.
For a few years, Club Whatever could be found in full swing on the West
Mall on Friday evenings. The Club offered bands a place to play for free,
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without the hassles of moneymaking clubs and bouncers. The Renaissance
Market on Guadalupe Street is a city-run market that features a slim but
interesting collection of pottery, jewelry, and clothes. Each merchant can only
sell what they actually make themselves. This limitation has spurred the growth
of a number of other people selling clothes from Guatemala, perfumes, locally
made incense, and even books on black consciousness and history. Every Friday
a Food Not Bombs group serves dozens of people free wholesome vegetarian
food on the Drag. On the last Friday of every month a hundred or so bicyclists
take to the campus and city streets to promote awareness and cooperation with
bicycle riders. Hundreds of students are also involved daily in running their own
cooperatively organized and operated homes. There are two different cooperative
housing groups that feature vegetarian meals (House of Commons is entirely
vegetarian with vegan options), and a couple with swimming pools. There are
also a few independent coops, including one in North campus, and there was
even one on Dancy Street in East Austin called Guff House for about three years.
There are also many students involved in performing music both on the
streets and in many of Austin's clubs. On almost any day, there are at least a few
people, some of whom are or were students, playing guitars or having drum jam
up and down Guadalupe Street. Many local bands that play at the Cavity Club,
the Cactus, Liberty Lunch, the Black Cat, or Emo's also feature students.
This is only a small sampling of projects, happenings and lifestyles
ranging from the building of a solar car in engineering to housing cooperatives in
West Campus in motion on and around campus. Although it receives the
disproportional amount of campus resources, corporate and military research are
merely one of many of the wide diversity of events and activities going on
everyday.
Some people take varying amounts of time and effort to search out these
free spaces in the university and some make them the focus of their lives at UT.
This applies to both undergraduate and graduate, full and part time students
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(although we’re all really students whether we enroll or not). And if you can’t
find something you like, you can always start your own project.
Although many of these activities are little known, their existence
demonstrates that more is at work in and around UT than what we’re expected to
do: study, research, worry about grades, stand in lines, and isolate ourselves
from each other in preparation of a "life" of endless work. Aside from the
alienating, irrelevant formal activities of UT, many people are spending much of
their lives carrying out fulfilling and positive interests.
That a wide variety of independent academic and non-academic projects
thrive at UT-Austin raises a number of questions for further investigation.
Regarding those spaces focusing on environmental issues, in what ways do they
differ or complement the ethnic studies, women’s studies and the multicultural
reforms movements of the 1970-80s? Can these spaces further complement
grassroots student movements to block environmentally destructive research and
development projects? Will environmentalism be turned into another academic
discipline and schoolwork? Or will further integration into the academic
structures and even the development of degree granting programs institutionalize
such projects? I have found these questions unique not only to multiculturalism
and environmentalism but all such attempts to carve out spaces within the
universities. As we saw with multiculturalism, to the extent that these
movements fail to act with an analysis of the university as a productive institution
of capitalist society, they will fail to either resist institutionalization, repression or
the withering away into mere reform movements.
For instance, we find that some of these independently organized
ensembles, troupes and newspapers are allowed to persist but when integrated
into the formal organization of the university, those involved find themselves
increasingly funding them out of their own pockets through new fees and higher
tuition. To pay for them, they are forced to take on waged work that in turn
drains them of time and energy often resulting in burnout and the demise of the
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project. The unwaged status of students makes such projects vulnerable to the
pressures of entrepreneurialization.
Overlooking this process has resulted in the fundamental theoretical
shortcoming among student activist movements since the 1960s that inspired this
research. Overcoming this failing means reconceiving the relationship of students
and universities to other areas of capitalist society.
Rethinking Our Strategies
In changing the way we look at the universities, it is important that we identify
the sources of mystification that have crippled our theoretical, methodological
and strategic development. By overcoming such shortsightedness, we can
articulate the everyday relationship of austerity and entrepreneurialization to a
wider audience of students than simply activists in efforts to both resist
commercial reorganization while sowing seeds for our own reorganization or
elimination of the university. I am not advocating that we need to change every
student's perception only that we change our own.
Rethinking our strategy could begin with the issue of student income, a
primary concern of nearly every student and in turn an excellent starting point to
organize a movement. Whether one receives support from parents, financial aid,
or works for wage, students daily confront the issue of income as a means of
domination and control over their own activities albeit choice of study, whether
"to go out" or study, and even whether to drop out or stay in. The long term
promise of pay-off from working hard in school often also dictates much of a
students' life. In attempting to organize students to confront certain issues and
advocate change we overlook the force of income on a student's decision to
participate. Having to choose between speaking up or going broke, many
students repeatedly choose the former. Unfortunately, rather than reevaluating
our organizing strategies many activists simply write off these students as
apathetic and continue to preach to the converted and often the financially secure.
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Wagesfor Students as a Tactic
As long as the left and student movements neglect to openly deal with the status
of students in capital accumulation, they will remain vulnerable to the use of
austerity and income as a weapon of control, including the use of explicit wages
tied to the work. In the 1970s, a movement arose in Italy with allies in the US
and Canada articulating a demand of "wages for schoolwork", a demand for an
independent source of income that is not tied to work but can be used to
strengthen the refusal of work. The welfare movements of the 1960s
demonstrated that receiving social wages from the state does not necessarily
result in the imposition of work since that money was used for many purposes
other than what they were intended. Wages for students can be undertaken as
such a demand that can offer a starting point for organizing a widespread student
movement that could eventually transcend the issue of income.
While there are few examples of what could be consider "wages for
students" tactics today, Todos Unidos' demand that the minimum GPA
requirement to continue receiving financial aid be eliminated and alternative aid
be offered to students on academic probation so that they do not have to take on
other work for a wage demonstrated a concern for the issue of income in
organizing a broader movement. Focused on expanding enrollment and hiring of
Mexican-American students and faculty and a reorganization of Chicano Studies
and UT-Austin as a whole as part of the multiculturalism movement, Todos
Unidos' ONDA confronted the issue of income in order to establish a common
concern among many Mexican-American students.16 A common cause around
income could become a starting point for organizing a movement with even
wider concerns by ensuring that its participants continue receiving financial
16 Todos Unidos, Orientaciones Nuevas para la Diversification de la Academia (ONDA),
Austin, Texas, 1990, p. 12.
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support if their activism should prevail over grades. Unfortunately, this
insightftd tactic never really took hold, nor was it picked up by other students.
The aim of demanding wages for schoolwork is not simply a demand for
money, although that is one concrete outcome, but more a strategy to expose the
unwaged status of students that allows business to profit from it. As Silvia
Federici succinctly explains regarding wages for housework,
...to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we
will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want
money for housework is the first step toward refusing to do it, because the
demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable
condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as
housework and its more insidious character as femininity.17
No work is the strategy while the tactic is the wage.
In 1970, Irving L. Horowitz foresaw the student movements of the 1960s
beginning to deal with the issue of income and wages as they recognize that
"students are the only members of the American academic community who are
not paid for the work they perform." However, he foresaw that rather than
becoming a resource for struggle, wages for students would conservatize the
movements as they begin to refocus on "economistic" issues of money that will
subjugate them to a reliance on federal research money.18
Although it is impossible to say what would have happened if the students
movements had begun to confront the issue of income, we can say that their
failure to do so allowed the universities to use the lack of income against them.
Facing rising tuition and fees and other forms of austerity, students began to
redirect their interests from transforming the universities and society to getting a
degree and income that would keep them above poverty and allow them to repay
17 Silvia Federici, "Wages against housework," in Malos, p. 217-223.
18 Irving L. Horowitz, "Postscript: The trade unionization of the student seventies," in Irving
Horowitz and William Friedland, The Knowledge Factory: Student Power and Academic
Politics in America, Aldine: Chicago, 1970.
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their massive debt. Without confronting the issue of income, the student
movement did not become conservative or economistic—it was defeated.
We still cannot ignore the possibility that Horowitz could have been
correct, that while facing the issue of income, students began to exchange the
money for discipline. Without combining a demand for wages with a refusal of
work, such demands are bound to backfire and become a demand for more work
linked to a wage. Yet, the wage itself is less important than the strategy of
exposing and refusing the unwaged work of being a student. To demand wages
for students is to refuse the work of being a student in order to make explicit the
unwaged status of students.
As the Wages for Housework movement demanded a wage without
working in the home, by refusing to do that work, it "opened for the first time
the possibility for refusing forced labor in the factories and in the home itself."19
It was not a wage that recognized the work they do, but a refusal, a struggle
against work. We can leam from this in our struggles. Too many students take
on outside waged work to make it through school. Demanding wages for
schoolwork is a refusal of this extra work necessitated and hidden by our
wagelessness. Grant explains how wages for schoolwork exposes the endless
workday student face: "Like housewives, when we are not paid for the work we
do, the state doesn't care how many hours we work a day. But when we demand
wages for schoolwork, we make visible all the unpaid work school involves,
and we can begin to struggle, like other workers, over how much of our time we
are forced to submit to schoolwork for how much money."20 Demanding the
wage is to demand less work with pay. It can shift the use of grades as
piecework IOUs on future wages to the payment of wages now for every minute
of work done, not for each piece or their quality. It is an identical tactic used to
19 Selma James, p. 18, italics in original.
20 Tim Grant, "Student as Worker. Wages for Homework," the sheaf, March 26, 1976, p. 4
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end the same exploitation by piecework struggled against and almost eliminated
by the working class over the last few hundred years.
Making the unwaged work students do visible, as Federici suggests as the
key to the demand for wages, exposes the fact that capitalism is based on
unwaged labor. Surplus value, which Karl Marx discusses a length in Capital, is
no more than the amount of unwaged labor that can be forced upon a worker.
The waged workday itself is divided cleanly between that part which a worker is
paid and that which is not. As workers have progressively fought to reduce the
length of work over our lifetimes, the year, week and day, thus reducing
absolute surplus value, businesses have responded with a myriad of actions one
of which was to increase relative surplus value (the intensity at which we work).
Although Marx discussed this in terms of weavers being made to tend ever more
and more machines as they increasingly pushed down absolute surplus value (the
length at which they worked), his analysis is still useful for our purposes. As
class struggle has succeeded in reducing the amount of work while pushing up
wages (and fighting for holidays, health benefits, safe working conditions, and
keeping the school year short) social leisure and outside work activities have
increasingly been integrated into the circuit of accumulation.
During the 1920s Taylorism began to be increasingly applied to
housework activities in order to understand how they could be managed so as to
better reproduce the labor power of waged workers. Keynes' premise that labor
was an investment rather than a cost of production became the means for
managing the international economy during the 1930s. What made this possible
was the ability of millions of unemployed men and women who demonstrated
and rioted to successfully force the state to pay for their reproduction of labor
power even in the absence of work. The application of Keynsian economics to
welfare established a formal productive role for the reproduction of labor power
in the accumulation of capital. Reproduction was now recognized as contributing
to the production of profit by increasing a workers' capacity to work. Although
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Keynsianism was also being applied to public education in the 1920-30s, it was
not until the 1950s when it would be extended to the universities. Otherwise
known as "human capital" theory originating with Gary Becker and others,
education became explicitly acknowledged for its role in production.
Housework, education and other reproductive activities (such as sex or
shopping for example) have become fundamental to Toni Negri and Harry
Cleaver's concept of the social factory in which all activities, waged and
unwaged, are productive to capital. The fundamental importance of unwaged
labor to business becomes explicit in cases where workers are able to reduce the
amount of work they do (thereby increasing the ratio of waged to unwaged work
assuming intensity remains constant). Businesses will seek to transfer the work
more to unwaged or lower waged workers by moving to another location within
the US or another country where they can receive more unwaged work for the
same or lower cost.
Entrepreneurialization is a prime example of this process. High tech and
biotech companies, facing high wages, vast benefits, computer viruses and
hackers, rising environmental opposition, and increasing scandals (which can be
interpreted as caused by unproductive workers), are downsizing their in-house
research and development and shifting that cost to the universities where it can be
done by unwaged engineering and science students in university funded
facilities. They are fleeing the antagonisms of the traditional workplace to the
universities where they can presumably extract more unwaged work making
apparent the function of entrepreneurialization as a response to class struggle.
This use of unwaged students against waged workers can be directly combated
by exposing the unwaged nature of school/work through the demand for a wage.
Demanding and getting a wage is also a refusal of the parent/teacher/wage
mediation. It puts students closer, powerwise, to waged workers. With a wage,
students have an independent source of power to refuse subordination their
struggles to those of parents, teachers or other waged workers. What Selma
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James writes for black and "white" women in their struggle for the wage is
applicable for students: "we need the autonomy that the wage and the struggle for
the wage can bring...."21
The student movement "must confront the capitalist strategy of control in
the university crisis which is predicated on the wagelessness of students.
Students can only attack their wageless status through a demand for wages for
schoolwork. ”22 The struggle for a wage becomes a struggle against the use of
students against waged workers and division of students from each other. It is a
demand for student autonomy within the working class via other more powerful
sectors and in relation to capital. It is also a complementary struggle to those of
waged workers such as parents who are under pressure to work harder and
longer, and even mothers to take another job on top of unwaged housework, in
order to support their unwaged children. Wages for students would also
complement waged workers who are put into competition with poor students
who would accept their job for less pay. Until the power of the wage or the lack
of and the resulting absence of autonomy is appreciated, not only will students'
role in class struggle will not be fully appreciated but the class will suffer as a
whole.
Summing Up: Entrepreneurialization, Student Autonomy and Class
Struggle
This resulting autonomy can only strengthen the autonomous struggles of
students over the past three decades. Student movements have been stubbornly
resistant to attempts at centralization, left or "worker" domination, and for one
group to speak for another or many. It could be suggested that autonomy has
been the underlying characteristic most agreed upon by student movements even
if they have not always worked in practice as they have in theory. However,
21 Ibid., p. 17.
22 Caffentzis, p. 141, italics in original.
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autonomous organizing must be accompanied by a sharpened analysis of the
universities as a productive sector of capitalist society if our isolated efforts are to
be transformed into widespread movements.
Two published discussions among various UT-Austin student activists
demonstrates the conscious reworking of the relationships between groups and
hierarchies based on class, gender, sexual preference and race. Kathy Mitchell,
former editor of the Polemicist, an alternative student newspaper at UT-Austin,
recognized that a new strategy is evolving:
the more people who are speaking from different sites, the more we learn about
how all those sites are interconnected. And that’s different from trying to create a
general agenda because that is going to subsume somebody’s interests....When
you have multiple sites and people connecting what they’re doing to what other
people are doing, then you have a real powerful force for change, for mobilizing
people.23
This reworking of the connections between these different struggles have
implications outside the university for the working class as a whole. It is a
reworking that is occurring throughout society: in the few remaining factories,
but also offices, bedrooms, kitchens and even dance floors. The intra-class
hierarchies are under attack. As women, “people of color”, youth and students
fight for and win their own autonomous sources of power and forms of
organization the struggle as a whole is strengthened. It has become very difficult
to use one group to undermine a weaker or subordinate group. This is quite
apparent through many movements, where women, gay and lesbians, and others
have refused to have their interests ignored or subordinated to “greater issues” or
"wait until after the revolution".
23 Utmost, "Who Does the University Belong to Anyway," Winter 1990, p. 33-37. Mitchell,
as we’ve seen, apparently only recognizes this in theory but not practice. The other group
discussion was published as "Women and leadership: Interviews with UT women leaders,"
Polemicist, December 1990, p. 6-7, 13.
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This is coming to characterize the struggles at UT-Austin. Black,
Chicana/o, Lesbian, Gay and Asian-american students have been organizing
autonomously—no longer for only their own programs and departments to study
their histories, spaces that have over time been isolated from the rest of the
campus—but to demand that the entire structure and content of the university be
reorganized to encompass their participation and contributions. In the process,
multiculturalism offers a capability for refusing the left’s formula for class
consciousness deriving from more study and unwaged schoolwork, and in the
defense of the university as a social constant. We can see elements of the refusal
of schoolwork and study of which a rejection of knowledge for the sake of
control is only a part. Students are still not studying but struggling—
transforming society by creating many “futures in the present.” This is the
potential of multiculturalism. It is still a viable one. It has yet to be coopted in
but minor ways.
In less than two years, the nature of dominant forms of student struggles
have passed from agitation solely around international issues such as apartheid in
South Africa, made “distant” by students' own inability to connect the issues or
even themselves to the campus. The "new" movements have favored
autonomous self-organization over the party-like hierarchic organizing of the
student left and analyze the student both in terms of the university and
internationally. No longer will Black students allow so-called “white” activists to
attempt to lead divestment movements they started, "whites" to let Black people
speak for them, or Gay and Lesbians allow straights to speak for them. It is an
embrace of multiplicity, a recognition that society cannot be transformed by one
group for everyone else. There can be no liberation until all are free from all
forms of domination. By breaking down a significant source of the conflicts
within the working class based on the wage, wages for students should
complement this desire for autonomy.
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But what does it m ean for our purposes for resisting
entrepreneurialization? The contemporary environmental, anti-militarism and
multiculturalism movements all have in common their need and demand for
autonomy. This needs to be not only defended but further developed and
expanded. Autonomy is the starting point for relating each of these movements
so that they are complementary and continue to be autonomous. Concurrently, a
class analysis of students and the university would help maintain the autonomy
of students as a sector of the working class in relation to waged sectors,
something that does not now exist. These movements have a great opportunity to
not only coordinate their struggles and deepen the crisis of the universities but
also become an explicit part of the class struggle thus concurrently deepening the
crisis of capital as a whole as well.
However, to focus simply on overt expressions of resistance is not only
incomplete but a strategic mistake. Everyday forms of resistance is occurring on
a wide enough scale to disrupt the smooth operations of the universities. When
students emerge undisciplined, unproductive and unsatisfied with the prospects
of a lifetime of work, this too has a disruptive impact on all areas of capitalist
social organization. While overt student movements confront the content and
apparent public aspects of the corporate university, everyday forms of resistance
contest its day-to-day forms. Complementary connections need to be made
between the two levels in which the refusal of work discipline is acknowledge
for its political implications. By utilizing a class analysis of the university as a
productive part of capital accumulation and students (to the extent that they work)
as unwaged workers, such connections can be made with ease.
Why demand "wages for schoolwork," that is, utilize a class analysis that
demonstrates the unwaged character of school/work? Failure to so in the past
has prevented the veil of wagelessness from being lifted and allowed students'
newly won social wages to be turned back upon them as more work, preventing
the evolution of the social wage into the political wage. New areas of studies
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carved out in the schools have been made programs of study and alternative
tracks for schoolwork, grades and waged work. The Free Universities of the
1960s have become university controlled "informal classes" that serve in offering
relaxing extracurricular activities for students that prepare their minds and nerves
to do more schoolwork. These examples of capital's cooptation of student’s
newly won free spaces show us that without exposing schoolwork as capitalist
work, the vehicles used to impose work on students cannot be fully destroyed.
Students are already struggling for these social wages, but by explicitly
demanding a direct wage for the work they do they can destroy the mystification
of student's role in capitalism. In the wake of numerous recruiting scandals in
college sports there is some stirring for student athletes to be paid as a way to
prevent manipulation of dependent athletes, compensate them for their work in
generating vast revenues for the universities they attend and acknowledge college
sports as an ad hoc minor leagues.24 This has not caught on among student
activists who tend to write off athletes as pampered and well supported by the
universities, ironically overlooking how they too are exploited. Past student
struggles have never gone as far as to demand a wage or concern themselves
with the issue of income and have paid dearly. Increases in student aid and
resources for their own projects have been attacked since the early seventies.
Now in some places students are placed in the position of defending past
victories before being able to move on to expanding them. These resources can
be siphoned off because it was never made explicit that these were wages for the
work students. Once the fruit of struggles, they are now mystified as "favors",
"privileges", or "fringe benefits".
Demanding a wage does not precede the struggle against work but flows
from it. The current struggles students are fighting have brought forward the
need to raise the demand for a wage. Without wages entrepreneurialization will
24 Ricky Dotson, "Sociology Teacher Says Paying Student Athletes Makes Sense," The Daily
Texan, May 9, 1989, 1.
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continue unabated on the backs of tuition and fee increases, wage cuts for
employees and faculty and other forms of austerity that result in more work.
Even today, universities are resisting demands for multicultural reforms,
environmental cleanups, and an end to military and corporate work with claims
that they do not have the money to make these changes even all the while they are
funneling millions of dollars into commercialization projects. The cutbacks
bankrolling entrepreneurialization are legitimized by mystifying the cause of the
crisis as structural-functional in nature rather than the outcome of more than two
decades of student rebellion. Articulating a demand for wages can serve to
demystify this reorganization by exposing the nature of the universities role in
capital accumulation and not only student's role as unwaged workers but also
their resistance that has created the crisis. When students are finally recognized
for having created the crisis, the nature of entrepreneurialism as a weapon against
students will become clear. Without such an analysis students are once again
vulnerable to massive tuition and fee increases, financial aid cuts, and other
measures that will further intensify their poverty in an effort to intensify
competition between them and put them back to work.
Demanding to be paid has the potential for turning around the use of the
crisis against us by the universities. Since the crisis is rooted in the refusal of
school/work and the organization of self-valorizing activities, wages would
provide us the means to generalize these activities. Wages would be demanded
because students refuse to subsume their lives to school/work. More resources
means the ability to expand projects of self-valorization, projects that are
inversions to work and lie outside and against it.
The demand for wages verbalizes the struggle against work by attacking
the mediations of the grade, teacher, the antagonisms between students and
against waged workers by eliminating capital's ability to use student's lack of
income as a way to divide and conquer. There could no longer be a division or
conflict between waged workers and students based upon the mystified notion
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that students aren’t workers because they are not paid a wage. So many conflicts
generated by whether someone receives a wage or not would be easily overcome
allowing many diverse movements the ability to figure out how they can
complement each other based on substantial concerns and issues rather than the
trivial existence of a wage. By doing so, demanding and getting the wage can
help move us ever closer to a society whose members can organize
autonomously around life and their own pleasures and not around work.
Is not a demand for wages for schoolwork only a limited reform that can
be easily granted in order to ensure students keep working? Could wages just
become a new source of control and manageability? Possibly. But "wages for
schoolwork" is not a demand but a perspective. If the end goal is not to be paid
to work but to abolish work and reorganize society in which we are free to
pursue our own needs without want then the demand for wages is merely a
tactic. As Sylvia Federici explains in her defense of the "wages for housework"
movement, the demand is an analytical perspective that helps to make visible that
which we wish to abolish.25 When we identify the extent to which education
serves to reproduce an oppressive social system we can better understand how to
reorganize learning so that it serves a diversity of needs and desires freed from
work
What I hope to have accomplished is to examine how the crisis of the
universities is rooted in the struggles of young people who demand to live as
they please, organizing their lives around pleasurable self-fulfilling activities that
allow them to form new social relationships that are antagonistic to and transcend
capital's attempt to reduce all of life to work. By looking at how the crisis has
transpired at UT-Austin, where I have been a part of many types of these
projects, I hope to offer some ideas for how students can better understand not
only what business has in store for them but what they have in store for
business. Of course this is not to say that I expect to see millions of students
25 Federici, p. 217-223.
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rioting or partying in the streets (if they are not already after football games and
during festivals and greek "rush") but that students are hardly the "apathetic"
minions of the establishment many "activists" make them out to be. There is
something beautiful brewing just barely below the surface ready to explode
unexpectantly and uncontrollably like the LA riots (and North American riots for
that matter) or the massive outpouring of enjoyment from the brash rebellious
punk of the band Nirvana or rapper Ice Cube that circulated through the
airwaves, magazines and conversations of our generation.
This is becoming in increasingly so. The autonomy of students and the
recomposition of working class struggle that it is a part of is not limited by
national boundaries and threatens the international capitalist system as a whole.
Student struggles are circulating internationally thanks to media coverage, the use
of fax machines, computer networks and other vehicles. According to Peter
Moore of Inferential Focus, a marketing intelligence firm that investigated
international student and youth struggles most likely to sell to businesses: "Many
protesters in one part of the world actually gain strength for their struggles from
news reports of similar struggles elsewhere. The Nepalese, for example, gained
momentum in their battle with the royal family from stories about youth protests
in other parts of Asia and Eastern Europe. That type of linkage makes the
concept of a worldwide generation gap even more apropos. Further evidence of a
developing global youth gap comes from Western industrialized countries, which
have recently experienced unusual rumblings from the young."26
Moore warns of a increasing tendency to what Toni Negri calls self
valorization:: "Some US youth have responded to this diminishing economic
picture by establishing new priorities—for example, trying to focus more on
happiness than material wealth. Others have taken to the streets and, like those
who harbored the free-floating anger that precipitated the London riots, they
26 Peter Moore, "The rise in the revolutions of the young," Los Angeles Times, May 30,
1990, p. D3.
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represent a constant threat to the social order."27 He suggests that the nature of
the conflict is different from that of the 1960-70s since it focuses more on
economic and cultural than political issues, something we can interpret to mean
are still obviously inherently political otherwise it would not concern him. "The
new worldwide generation gap reveals the large spread between those inside the
system and those who would enter in the near future," he points out with a much
weightier concern in mind: "In some Western democracies, youth protests reflect
alienation from the institutional process and the first stage of what could be more
violent conflicts ahead." Capital has already recognized the rising power of
student and youth struggles even if we have not yet.
It is time to abandon the rigid and archaic notion still commonplace among
student activists that the university and students are somehow "isolated from the
rest of the world". Then-SEAC Threshold editor Chris Kromm expressed this
all-to-common self-destructive sentiment when he wrote: "Part of what makes
college a hotbed of dissent are their isolation from the marketplace, with a
constant flow of ideas and (for many) ample leisure time. This closed reality,
however, also separates students from the real world."2i
This dissertation was written with the explicit intent of dispelling such a
myth. By recognizing the gradual, conflictual process of entrepreneurialization
going on throughout US-based universities it is apparent that the universities are
no longer on the margins of "the real world" but rather emerging as productive
multinational corporations making essential contributions to maintenance of
capitalist society. Since the 1960s revolution supposedly ended, inside
University Inc. students have fought, protested, blockaded and taken over
buildings to make themselves heard, stop activities they perceive destructive to
27 Moore; Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. translated by Harry
Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, edited by Jim Fleming, Mass: Bergin & Garvey,
1984.
2®Chris Kromm, "Twenty Five Years After the Revolution," Crossroads, Special Issue:
"Youth and the Future of the Left," September 1993, no. 34, p. 8; italics added.
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students, local communities, the campus, and society. Students have stopped
corporate, military and CIA recruiters, organized cooperative housing, opened
up the curriculum, diversified student and faculty populations, and increased
financial aid. Students have created underground theatre and music groups,
newspapers, radio stations and organized environmental studies centers. We
have fought, played, cheated, marched and danced. Now we must continue to do
all of that while also demanding wages for students. To do any less could mean
defeat once again.
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