Working Paper - Draft Version
Universities and the Crisis Situating the American University System in a Time of Empire
In 1905 there were few colleges and universities in the United States. Only 23,000 students were served by these institutions, most of which were privately funded, administered by churches, and located along the Eastern seaboard. The primary purpose of higher education during this era was to prepare the sons of the American elite for their inheritances, and to develop the still formative natural and social sciences and the humanities. Universities were for the most part sites of conservative thought and reactionary action. They served a small slice of the population and remained somewhat aloof from the hectic world of national and geo-politics.As of 2005 there are approximately 1600 public and 2400 private colleges and universities across the United States. Some 15 million students attend these schools, taught by 1.1 million total faculty. 1 in 20 Americans either attends or works at a college or university.
The U.S. system of higher education no longer serves only a small wealthy minority of the population. The university is one of the most pervasive institutions in our society. Most schools are, or have become, sites of secular thought, in addition to the religious traditions that many maintain. The purposes of the university have dramatically transformed in the past 100 years with particularly dynamic and profound changes having occurred in the latter half of the 20th century. Higher education now serves to train a considerable segment of the workforce, to instill a spirit of civic and political participation, to share new ideas, to create new technological and scientific processes and tools, and to develop law and scholarly literatures among a myriad of other things.
In some respects the modern university is, in the words of the University of California’s 12th President, Clark Kerr, “a multiversity”. The multiversity is the model university that opens itself up to the needs of the society that supports it. But the modern university is more than just this. Kerr’s multiversity was extremely limited. It was only “multi” in the sense that it served the multiple interests of the state, major corporations, and the military; the three traditional spheres of power in modern America. It was opened to these interests, its people and products were made available for these missions, but not to any of those outside of the power elite, especially to those who would challenge the principles of profit and power. The multiversity was effectively a corporation of its own, to be run by a directorate drawn largely from the ranks of these three central institutions of the power elite (especially the realm of business).
The multiversity was the university made central to the production of knowledge for the interweaving agendas of political, military, and corporate power. Kerr’s multiversity model was severely critiqued by the students of his own campus, UC Berkeley. Mario Savio’s famous and oft quoted observation of the university’s new purpose remains prescient and worth repeating: “…If this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material!”
The multiversity was identified and critiqued as it was taking shape. Its multiple orientations all pointed toward the prime institutions of modern power. Kerr’s multiversity signified the centralizing role of the university in the process of capital accumulation, the consolidation of political hegemony, and exercises of military strength. It was to be a university located firmly within the iron triangle of state bureaucracy, the Pentagon, and the corporation.The period of social unrest emerging from the 1950s in the free speech movement, Civil Rights and other anti-racist movements, the anti-war movement, and the New Left was a foil to this vision.
Students, faculty, staff, and allies succeeded to a considerable extent in changing the university, in creating room within it for the needs, desires, and dreams those who would challenge the powers that be. They created spaces within the “multiversity” and thereby transformed it into what could be called the “polyversity”; an institution that would include many peoples and many visions, seeking not just profit or progress, however defined, but also peace, justice, and an ethically grounded system of democratic education. New fields of study were formed, radically new ideas prospered, and the university became a source of empowerment for the marginalized and disenfranchised.
Colleges and universities have become vitally central institutions in all facets of social life. This centrality is exhibited in various contradictory ways. On the one hand the university remains an institution fostering critical thought and political engagement with the world. On the other hand the university can exist as an insulated shell wherein scientists and technocrats work away at their crafts with little knowledge and no concern for how their creations will impact the world at large. We can find scholars and students ranging the whole political and philosophical spectrum within the university because of the relative autonomy afforded to institutions of higher education. The polyversity is home to many outspoken critics of power and exploitation, but also home to the organic intellectuals of the power elite. The polyversity provides the human species with the knowledge to live cooperatively and work sustainably, while it simultaneously prepares the technological and social-economic tools for intensely destructive and exploitative projects.
The university exhibits all the internal dysfunctions of late capitalism that we encounter in our larger political and economic systems (No doubt this is due to the near total reliance of the corporation and state apparatuses on the functions and products of the university system). Often times the university is even more dysfunctional and punitive than the modern business corporation, the state bureaucracy, and the military establishment. The university’s labor policies can be more draconian and unfair than most corporations’. It’s inefficiency and insensitivity can be more stifling and harmful than state repression. Its wealth is perpetually reinvested in unconscionable enterprises. Its elitism, segregation, and lack of genuine diversity can be as stark and unjust as that between our dark inner-cities and great white suburbs, our patchwork of reservations, our barrios and gated bourgeois enclaves. Navigating its admissions process is to many deserving young women and men as formidable as crossing the militarized southern border. Its organizational tendency to capitulate and apply itself towards ultimately violent and destructive goals can be (and literally is) as inhuman and ignorant as those of the grossly bloated military establishment and the armaments industry it enables. In our universities we see the realities of inequality, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and violence magnified through a grotesque lens that all at once proclaims “fiat lux,” or “veritas.”
We see in our universities that when truth be told, when light is shed upon the scene, the savage inequalities scream, silent and desperately as testament to our present human needs, needs that are increasingly being excluded from and unmet by higher education and scientific research in the United States.The past sixty years has been a history of contradictory developments, gifts and curses in the ivy halls of academia. One can, depending on what the university is being judged on, say that much progress was made, but would need to add that the problems have also become more entrenched.
On the one hand higher education has been opened up to millions of students - women and minorities who have historically been excluded from academia. The massive expansion of the educational establishment has also come to serve numerous beneficial purposes in thousands of communities (for instance, economic development, medical centers, extensions, vocational education, enrichment, and intellectual stimulus). On the other hand the university system remains rather elitists with only the wealthiest families able to afford the best education while the poor are largely siphoned off into the large inadequately financed community colleges. Universities have been the centers of medical and technological developments of great humanitarian importance. However, the primary role of the military establishment in the funding of U.S. academic research has over the past half century skewed American science toward fields of no great significance in relation to meaningful human development, indeed, it has guided our disciplines down rather poor and distorted paths to knowledge in a holistic epistemological sense. And the university’s labor policies remain unrealistic, unfair, even punishing for those who maintain the halls and classrooms, who keep the records, and administer the institution.
But is this where we now stand? Is this the university system of today; a polyversity of contradictions in which many different visions will continue to grow? It appears not.
The multiversity model is making a strong comeback, not that it ever went away. After all, the polyversity is nothing more than the multiversity pried open and occupied by social movements. The drastic transformation of universities we are now enduring, described in various ways as corporatization, privatization, and militarization, is a renewed effort to purge the university of those who would challenge the principle interests of capital and state. It is a certain kind of purification of the university’s faculties, a homogenization and categorization of the students, and a commodification of all things it creates. The closing of the university is a revanchist project to dismantle and undermine the polyversity (for all its flaws) and to resurrect the multiversity: the university solely in service of capital, the privileged classes, and the warfare state. This counter-movement is steadily rolling back the key victories that students, faculty, and the public fought for in the name of free speech, peace, and a more democratic society.
This assault on the polyversity has three fronts: Privatization, militarization, and intellectual homogenization. These are, admittedly, artificial distinctions, for all three are in fact part of a singular process. I have separated them out for analytic clarity, however.The basic role of the multiversity is outlined below in diagram 1. Financial funding comes in through several sources. Funding increasingly takes the form of student fees and tuition, alongside state and federal funds and private or corporate money for specific budgetary needs. Flows of knowledge, products, and people primarily benefit capital and the military. The enduring linkages between the warfare state and the university, and the now burgeoning fields of technology transfer, intellectual property rights, and university-industry partnerships points the way toward greater restructuring of the university to serve private economic interests and the state apparatuses that facilitate this form of monopoly capitalism. To what extent the public good is served by the university, whether its faculties and flows go toward projects aimed at goals which cannot be quantified in ledgers or body counts is questionable.
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| Diagram 1. |
Privatization
Privatization of the university system is taking several forms. The most obvious involves the cut-back of state financing for higher education. It is argued that states are facing dire fiscal crises, and that the only way to “save the state” is to reduce spending. Reductions in spending are being coupled with reductions in important forms of taxation at state and federal levels, primarily taxation of capital and wealth. Without adequate state revenues, the financing of higher education is increasingly borne on the shoulders of students, a shift in monetary terms that is being accompanied by a shift in language: students are increasingly being referred to as “consumers” of higher education. An accompanying shift in language is the perpetual talk of state fiscal crises. We are continually told that there is not enough revenue to go around, that we must “balance budgets.” Thus states find themselves in perpetual cycles of fiscal crises where there is simply not enough money for education, welfare, and social programs. But, rejoins the privateer, the privatization of wealth will accomplish all the same things formerly accomplished by the state.
The fiscal crisis of the state is a purposefully constructed situation. More than enough wealth exists to fund higher education in the United States, in fact, enough wealth exists to drastically expand the university system and improve the quality of education in every respect. The growing burden on students to finance the educational system – for the poor and middle classes this means going deeply into debt – is inversely related to the decline of state funding. The fiscal crisis of the state is caused by a complex and reinforcing interaction of popular tax rebellions, gross spending on the military, the isolationism (flight and blissful ignorance) of the American upper classes, and most of all by the massively regressive system of taxation and misguided forms of state welfare spending.The steady withdrawal of state money for higher education began in the early 1980s and continues unabated to this day. Due to the expansion of a more regressive tax code at federal and state levels, governments have been facing increasing shortfalls in their budgets along with pressures to further reduce rates of taxation. The equally steady rise of tuition and fees (essentially taxes on students) began slightly earlier in the late 1960s. In 1979 state governments financed approximately 32% of all budgetary expenditures at U.S. colleges and universities. By 1996 this share has fallen to 23%. Concomitantly, student fees and tuition now account for 28% of all revenues, whereas in 1979 they accounted for 21% (see diagram 2. University funds by source 1919-1996). This is the total picture of all colleges and universities, public and private. When we separate out public schools from private schools the privatization of education becomes even more apparent.
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| Diagram 2. The steady decline of state funding for higher education and the responding increase in student tuition and fees is readily apparent. The spike in federal funding in the early 1940s is due to massive outlays of research funding from the department of defense, an exercise in federal funding that institutionalized the role of federal funding in higher education and scientific research. A similar spike can be seen corresponding with the peak of the Vietnam War until federal outlays level off in the early 1980s. This by no means implies a leveling off or decline in military funding for universities, however.v |
According to the College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges, the last year in which tuition and fees were reduced for students was 1980. Since 1980 tuition and fees at public colleges and universities have increased by and average of 4.6% each year. The last two years, 03-04, and 04-05 have seen the largest increases in the history of the College Board’s survey, 11% and 9% respectively.
This shift from states to students shows no sign of slowing. The last ten years have seen explosive increases in tuition and fees in public higher education. Costs have risen by 58% at two-year community colleges, and by 90% at four year public universities. The growing burden on students has been paralleled by the decline in state funding so that even as state budgets have grown, the share of state funds earmarked for higher education has decreased.The decline of state funding and the massive increases in student fees and tuition points not toward an inevitable fiscal crisis of the state, but rather toward a political victory on the part of big capital. According to the Congressional Budget Office, corporate taxes as a share of federal revenues has declined by two-thirds, from 21% to 7% from 1961 to the present. This shortfall in revenues has been filled by individuals and small businesses who in 1961 provided for 77% of all federal revenues, and now provide for 90%.
At the state level similar picture emerges. According to the California Budget Project:“Over the past two decades, the burden of funding state services has shifted from corporate to personal income taxpayers. The personal income tax is forecast to provide 54.8 percent of state General Fund revenues in 2002-03, up from 34.8 percent in 1980-81. Corporate tax receipts are expected to provide 7.6 percent of General Fund revenues in 2002-03, down from 14.4 percent in 1980-81. New, increased, and expanded corporate tax breaks are responsible for the decline in the share of state revenues provided by the corporate income tax.”
The political victories of capital and the upper classes are being consolidated in state and federal tax codes, thus figures similar to California can be found for most states.
Militarization
See http://www.fiatpax.net
Intellectual Freedom
Intellectual freedom is a clumsy concept that roughly encompasses the totality of what is at stake in the perpetual transformation of the university. Intellectual freedom refers to a system that fosters divergent opinions, supports various oftentimes conflicting agendas of research, and that protects the ability of all to pursue knowledge, no matter what their object and subject might be. Intellectual freedom presupposes conflicting forms of knowledge. It is as near the process of the synthesis of contesting ways of knowing the world and ourselves as we are capable of practicing. It is everything up to the actual synthesis itself. For these reasons it cannot be reduced to a simple code or dictum or law. Intellectual freedom requires debate and engagement with everything in perpetuity, even its own epistemological status.
As the saying goes, “freedom isn’t free.” It is a process of conflict and instability in the process whereby human beings come to know the world. An institution that is guided by notions of intellectual freedom is one that provides a forum for debate and inquiry. The polyversity is an institution with a relatively high commitment to the concept of intellectual freedom. The multiversity is not. No other institution in human history has shown such a radical ability to bring together the tumultuous cauldron of human thought under one roof. Indeed, the success of the university in this regard is entirely beyond comparison with our other major institutions, especially the business corporation, the church, and the political party, all of which require some kind of dogma.
The science and scholarship of the polyversity are predicated on a system that reaches toward intellectual freedom. This does not mean that all ideas and perspectives are of equal value or substance –the process of peer review will determine this – rather it provides that all ideas and perspectives are equally free to be proffered and debated without censorship. Intellectual freedom means inclusion rather than exclusion, debate rather than dictate. It is the dilation of the mind. This is why the closure of thought and imagination so prevalent in our other institutions is so destructive a force. It is censorship, influence, and guidance toward goals of profit and power, it is the rigid construction of what is “possible” and the punitive preemption of what is “undesirable” according to the powerful. The possible shrinks, the radical is deemed undesirable and made painfully impossible for others to seek out. Thought closes in upon a circuit of knowledge that expands the ability to realize greater sums of profit and power, but that makes no purposive efforts toward peace, democratization, sustainability, or health, and therefore only guarantees the former.
Closure of intellectual freedom can be seen clearly in the privatization and militarization of the university. It can also be seen to some degree in the conservative countermovement to censor and shut down voices of radical dissent in the university.Present campaigns by conservative forces within and outside of the university to “restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge” are assaults on intellectual freedom in two key respects. Firstly, such movements overwhelmingly bemoan “liberal” and “leftist” bias in academia.
The primary targets of this small but vocal conservative countermovement are scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Rather than engage the ideas of those they label as leftists, or to build up the body of conservative scholarship as a counterpoint to works of a critical nature, as the model polyversity allows, the objective of these reactionary groups is to shut down and censor the ideas and opinions of the professoriate.
The second way in which this countermovement threatens intellectual freedom in academia regards their very notion of what science and scholarship are. The poster organization for this countermovement, Students for Academic Freedom, states that:“The central purposes of a University are the pursuit of truth, the discovery of new knowledge through scholarship and research, the study and reasoned criticism of intellectual and cultural traditions, the teaching and general development of students to help them become creative individuals and productive citizens of a pluralistic democracy, and the transmission of knowledge and learning to a society at large.”
These sound like noble goals for the university indeed. However, the flaw in this reasoning is that there is no “Truth.” The conservative assault against the progressive professoriate and the critical disciplines within the university is a revanchist attempt to re-center Truth, to identify the one true knowledge over supposed ideologies. It is a desire for the university of old where professors were presumed to be disinterested men seeking Truth, totally detached from the needs and desires of any specific social group, a university that never existed except in the minds of the privileged classes who solely benefited from such and ideology and such a university. Attacks on feminist scholarship, anti-racist theories of racism, queer studies, anti-capitalist theories of capitalism, theories of non-violence are all motivated by a conservative ideology that increasingly finds itself incapable of debating or theorizing for its own sake in an intellectual atmosphere of pluralism.
The de-centering of knowledge has created a severe crisis for the formerly privileged perspective. Such ideology, characterized by its patriarchal, Eurocentric, pro-capitalist tones has since the 1960s found itself on the defensive side of a burgeoning atmosphere of subjective critiques. The conservative ideology is no longer held to be the one and only Truth, thus its varied adherents are waging an assault on the legitimacy and ability of other truths and other perspectives not on grounds of scientific or theoretical validity, but on grounds of their very existence. That all knowledge is pursued by human beings with biases, interests, and desires is entirely lost on the conservatives propelling this countermovement.
Notes
For detailed statistics and demographics in U.S. higher education see - U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), Spring 2002. (This table was prepared September 2003.)
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d03/lt3.asp#c3a_1
Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. 5th Edition. Cambridge Mass.:Harvard University Press,2001.
The “power elite” are a social group composed of the owners of capital, the military leadership, the politicians and powerful bureaucrats of the state, the celebrities and stars of mass media. See – C. Wright Mills. “The Power Elite.” Oxford University Press, 1956.
Savio, Mario. Speech before the FSM sit-in. Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley. December 3, 1964
What’s good and what’s bad about the modern university is of course a normative discussion. For the sake of honesty I will state my particular vision of the multiversity, what it should be and what it should not be. I believe the university should, first and foremost, foster democratic thought and action. This entails a radical commitment to accessibility, freedom of speech, assembly, and diversity. As an institution for the promotion of the public good, the university should remain first and foremost a public institution. Privatization and militarization of universities should be balanced out by equal amounts of socialization and democratization in the very least. My personal stance is that private economic interests and the enlistment of knowledge for war-making are antithetical to democracy and should be opposed to the fullest extent possible.
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Biennial Survey of Education in the United States, 1929-30 through 1959-60; Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS), Financial Statistics of Institutions of Higher Education, 1969-70 through 1985-86; and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, "Finance" surveys, 1986-87 through 1995-96. (This table was prepared October 1998.)
College Board. “Trends in College Pricing: 2004.” http://www.collegeboard.com/research/home/
Hovey, Harold A. “State Shortfalls Projected Despite Current Fiscal Prosperity.” The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. February, 2000.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdoc.cfm?index=4985&type=1Congressional Budget Office, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2005 to 2014,” January 2004, Table F-3. “Individual Taxes” includes income, social insurance (payroll), excise, and estate taxes. “Other” includes customs duties and miscellaneous receipts.
California Budget Project. “Who Pays Taxes in California?” April 15, 2002. http://www.cbp.org/
See the website of Students for Academic Freedom. http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/
Students for Academic Freedom. “SAF Handbook: Appendix Appendix A: Academic Bill of Rights.” http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/
