Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: The Corporatization of Academia

this is David Harvey and you're listening to the anti-capitalist Chronicles a podcast that looks at capitalism through a Marxist lens this podcast is made possible by democracy at work welcome back to the anti-capitalist Chronicles uh which uh is uh organized and uh and helped on his way by uh democracy at work and I want to urge all of you to try to become familiar with democracy at work and all that it does and it's struggle to try to create a more Equitable socially just uh society and the two will be able to support us both in person but also financially because uh well we need desperately to try to take the situation that we're now in by the take it by the horns and make it into a radically different uh uh configuration and it's on that theme that I want to reflect a little bit on my life in Academia I've been in Academia since 1960. so you see that I have been there for 60 years and uh people sometimes say to me how different is it from how it was and there are many many things that are really really radically different for example uh the the number of journals that now exist is does exploded uh the number of books being written has exploded when I was a student and I was given an essay to write I would go and I'd find maybe two or three books that were relevant to it but that's all there was so there's been an explosion in the quantitative knowledge and and so on and it's be harder and harder to try to keep up and I think one of the things that's interesting is that you realize over the years that maybe uh 80 or 80 percent of what you're doing or as an academic is your your preserving knowledge uh and only about maybe 20 is about actually creating uh any knowledge now this preserving of knowledge is about to undergo a revolution through Ai and this stuff called chat to GPT or whatever it is and and we're likely to see that knowledge preserved for example uh I had uh my my webmaster look at uh is there a way in which you can get a synthesis of uh some of the books that I've ever written and the answer is oh yes that's very easy to do um and uh therefore uh the the job of preserving knowledge uh less and less impelling so there are technological issues of course a big effect upon on publishing uh how that works uh um the the the way in which the web is used yeah it comes possible to have collaborative Enterprises and so on so many things of that kind where you'd kind of say there's a mirror image inside of Academia uh in terms of everything else that's going on in society and uh there have been more and more attempts to sort of import the corporate model into the universities and it doesn't fit very well partly because in corporations there's usually uh an end product that you have in mind and therefore the efficiency that you're looking for is the efficiency of arriving at that end product uh it's very difficult to know exactly what the end product is of academic work I mean sometimes of course it can lead to Technologies but but these are these are these are the sorts of issues which are surround but there are two ways in which I think there there's a fundamental difference and I I raised this because I think in many respects uh higher education and I think it's not only higher education I think it's also education in general uh and the advanced capitalist world is it is at a crisis moment uh for a for a variety of reasons and I want to to try to identify them the first reason has everything everything to do uh with the the not only the technology but the ethos if you like of what the academic Enterprise is supposed to be all about for example when I became a lecturer I I had my salary was extremely low a very low indeed I mean I was very poorly paid and uh actually you had your pretty poorly paid uh it was position uh for many if you like the first first 30 years of my of my life it was very rather poorly played even though I was going up in in stand in where my status or going from assistant to associate and in fact eventually the full Professor but it was never a highly paid but it was a secure uh kind of uh job um and you had the idea that somehow our early University was paying you to do things well uh now it's got around the other way and I think in many universities you find yourself in a job in which you're supposed to actually earn money for the University and Public Funding has become less and less and even there is largely targeted so that you will get Public Funding coming through uh the National Institute of Health which is targeted towards certain certain hands uh that Public Funding is uh often connected to corporate interests in very specific ways and the idea that somehow or other the university is repositioning in itself in such a way that its main mission is to provide the where with all of the ideas and the backup uh for corporate capital and for big government and I've been in situations where I've seen position papers about you know the mission statements of various schools and then it will pretty much say the same thing my own position all along has been that it is the public interest that should drive what we're doing and the public interest of course is not necessarily the interest that has enough money to be able to support what we're doing therefore that has to come from General taxation well a tendency now is to say no it's no longer taxation it is either the big research foundations which have different kind of political postures uh some of them conservative some of them are you know reasonably Progressive by by liberal standards um so so the whole kind of ethos of what it is you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to do it uh I recall actually in one of the universities as I was working in that though we were sort of singled out as being a department that was in trouble we didn't know we were in trouble because we actually were having a very good record of uh students coming through getting good jobs and all the rest of it and the dean came in and we said well we look at all this stuff he'd done and everything and he said yeah yeah no it's very impressive academically what you've done but and he pulled a dollar bill out of his pocket and he said I'm only interested in one thing and it's colored green and you don't make enough of it and yeah that was a kind of a litmus moment for me where I kind of thought my my God yes I'm here not not you know not to sort of do things that are interesting to me and so on and and or perhaps about I would hope our public benefit I I'm I'm here to earn earn money for the University so so the the so the whole kind of idea of the of the University not as a place of reflection and knowledge and creation and all the rest of it but as a money-making machine becomes see and that connects also to if you like the social structure inside of Academia well what we see right now is in a sense that a class within a class formation uh in an institution like City University of New York uh the majority of courses are taught by adjunct teachers and the adjunct teachers get paid almost nothing and uh then there are the the sort of regular faculty and and then there are other a few a few Stars here and there but uh CUNY is not a good example of this because the real stars if they're worth their assault are going to be Spirited Away to the big universities like Harvard Yale um which are which are business corporations with very large uh endowments uh they're very large corporations they do a lot of the work with corporations and and and and and of course their their Prestige organizations so somebody like the head of Blackstone uh Steve Schwartzman can give uh I don't know how many 150 million dollars or whatever it is to MIT and to Oxford University each to support the humanities or something of that kind so so that we have a completely different ethos in terms of what the expectation is and the expectation that we can somehow rather become money makers and and money makers for the university is is is one of the big shifts that that has has occurred but but parallel with with that is uh another shift which is the the increasing bureaucratization of the University now the great thing about universities is they're very difficult to control um there's there's always this kind of edge where you know this freedom of academic inquiry and while it doesn't necessarily mean everything that you think it might mean it nevertheless is there and people do take advantage of it I have certainly taken advantage of it um but I always rather rather carefully because if you really upset the powers of B you find yourself thrown out and and you know you have to be very careful to be on the right side of them but if you're on the right side of them they have a great deal of leeway in terms of what it is that you might be able to do but then you've kind of find that actually the universities are more and more corporate and they've gone from uh what might be called a sort of a cottage industry kind of uh uh basis uh to more like a large corporation and then finally to a large corporation in a neo-liberal world in in which uh actually the internalization of competition becomes critically important and I and I think this is again something where what's going on inside of the universities there's a mirror image of what is going on outside great been a great deal of centralization of capital there's a great deal of centralization of talent and uh and productive capacity yeah inside of the universities but in the even in those big corporations what we find is the considerable internalization of uh competition for example there's a very interesting book about Dell computers in which there was a search for new Computing and three or four labs are set up in different parts of the country within Dell and they're all in competition with other with each other as to who can come up with the best design for the new computational for computational futures so the internalization of competition becomes terribly important which changes the social relations uh radically because one of the things you start to do is you become proprietary about winter kind of knowledge you control and one of the features that when I first entered University was nobody was proprietary about things that you know if things were were there the people would talk about them and and and freely communicate them and there was a kind of freedom of of people would would take from other people because you know they'd have conversations over coffee and new ideas would come up that way now people are very careful in talking about what they're doing and I've been talking and very careful about you know sort of keeping their knowledge to themselves so that they can be identifiable the knowledge because now to be identified with the knowledge is absolutely absolutely critical and as this becomes more and more a proprietary in the social relation so we start to see a much greater kind of uh concern within Academia uh for what might be called a bureaucracy bureaucratization now this may seem a little odd because you've got the two tender assists side by side which is increasing bureaucratization and at the same time increasing entrepreneurialism and I want to insist that both of those are going on at the same time the increasing entrepreneurialism is that you have to go out and find yourself a niche a niche which you can call your own I'm going to establish a proprietary uh sort of right to the knowledge which is being produced by this kind of research labless researcher and silver schools of thought uh in the humanities that there are schools of uh Labs which were relationships are very hierarchical um so so so this is an entrepreneurial uh model but it's also connected to this increasing bureaucratization the attempt the attempt to sort of Corral uh the freedoms that do exist inside of Academia into such a way that they they can't be uh or that they they can best be Consolidated in terms of a sort of bureaucratic rationale and I I've been in many many universities and I'm talking about you know places where I've worked but also places that I'm in communication with and and the the the push to start to rationalize the educational structure and the great thing is to be in a place where it's not rationalized and if it's not rationalized you have a great deal of Freedom the more rationalized the Things become the less Freedom they come to and part of that rationalization means that somebody has to be put placed in a managerial position so we we so management has become a big big part of what these universities are about when I began in universities it was pretty much the case that the management of a university was a pretty haphazard a kind of affair and it was a it was done in an amateurish kind of way well it's now become professional to be a manager of the university in say 1965 or something like that was not to be paid very well but by the time you get to the 1970 you start to see a payment edging upwards now the fact is that the managerial staff get you know the top managers the Deans and the D and the proliferation of managerial positions with a Dean for this and a Dean for that ah we jokingly at uh Johns Hopkins used to say of some of the deems ah that one is the dean for everything unimportant so it's it so so the management structure uh and and uh the remuneration so the university heads now get paid very much on the basis of uh uh of large corporations and in fact what we see are some of the you know presidents of universities come from corporate capital and they they bring corporate management techniques and and and so on into try attempting to rationalize what the university is about uh Michael Bloomberg for example was that Johns Hopkins Michael Bloomberg became a board of president of the Board of Trustees uh insisted that the university become more divided uh and to cost centers and each cost center was evaluated in terms of its contribution and also it's sir liabilities uh and and and so that ethos started to permeate throughout to the point where every every individual became a cost center I became a cost center to the place and and when they looked at what I did I didn't earn the university very much it didn't matter that I had a great reputation in terms of scholarship and all that kind of thing it didn't matter that I published a lot and all the rest of it oh it didn't matter at all uh what really mattered was I wasn't earning enough money for the University and because I wasn't earning enough money there was always pressure to get me to leave because I was not you know I was I didn't belong in that kind of institution in the end the pressure got so strong that I moved out and I moved out into the the the relative chaos of the of the CUNY Cooney system so so you have a bureaucratization and and uh going on uh the the payment structure is is such that though the the you know the big managers get get big big money the stars that uh which end up in the star universities and uh CUNY is not one of them but uh you know Colombia NYU Harvard Yale all those kinds of things those those the stars get paid very high then there are other people uh in the middle of being paid at say a halfway reasonable rate and then there's a base which is the adjunct teaching where people are poorly so it's like there's almost like a proletariat which is grinding away in terms of the educational system which are being paid almost nothing uh a managerial structure where the management fees are very high managerial salaries are very high even higher than the the the the the the key academic salaries and then big academic salaries frequently go to those who can set up big institutes and and Ghana money either from the corporate sector or from the the philanthropic sector or something of that kind so you have a a very different kind of kind of structure uh emerging but then there's something which is which is you know incredibly interesting to me right now uh my own experience and immediately where where I am is that the the the managerial bureaucratic side of things has become so oppressive that most University environments are not friendly environments one of the things I used to Value was the relative friendliness I mean there was rivalries and people were always arguing about minor things and disputing things and so on but the the social relations were were very different right right right now uh we have administrative officers who are kind of run to the bone in terms of meeting this requirement that requirement we find a kind of legislation about about what we have to do and what we don't have to do some of it imposed by the federal government some of it by local uh State apparatuses and some of it by sort of University volition in itself actually I find I find uh there's a there's a climate of Despair in large areas of university life that is not working well it's in bad shape it's bureaucratized to the point where we're so busy doing the bureaucratic nonsense that we don't get time to do our own work uh the the the the the rate of uh education that we're we're supposed to have larger classes uh we're supposed to work with um more you know in a more integrated integrated way into into distinctive programs uh there are bureaucratic requirements so you have to have your syllabus uh exactly organized before you do it and you have to stick to your syllabus I've always wanted to sort of teach in a free-form way or start somewhere and then start to think about what sorts of things come out of it and then go that direction I I I used to love to do that sort of thing um which which is kind of a bit chaotic in a bit free form but then you would find actually some of the connections you would find would be would be quite Innovative and that's where some of you good ideas come from some of them my best ideas have come out of teaching and I'm in a situation right now where I can teach pretty much what I want so I'm very fortunate but what is happening to a lot of people is that they cannot teach what they want anymore they have to teach what the what they're told to teach the syllabus is set up AI is coming in It's Beginning to be uh you know potentially oppressive in relationship to you know what the conditions of Labor are likely to be inside of universities we're beginning to see for the first time universities going on strike there have been strikes in Britain there have been strikes in California there was strike in and then uh new school in New York um we're beginning to begin to see labor unrest uh the universities are no longer the kind of environment in which uh yeah unionization might be okay but there's no real pressing need for it to to a situation where there is really a pressing need for it but you but but unionization is is also associated with increasing bureaucratization on both sides so what we're seeing is uh if you like the reorganization of uh of of Education uh around these principles of entrepreneurialism increasingly bureaucratic management and and uh increasing monetization in the sense that almost everything which you do has to have some sort of monetary benefit for the institution to which you are attached so these are the sorts of things that are that are going on um I'm not going to argue that somehow rather Once Upon a Time everything was lovely inside of the universities that's not what I'm arguing at all it has always been a bit chaotic and and and and by no means but um by no by no means uh sort of uh uh totally friendly environment it's often been a difficult environment to negotiate with a good deal of prejudice and all kinds of things and and of course a great deal and certainly when I started of class privilege and male privilege and in the University some of that has been whittled away over time particularly the gender distinctions but nevertheless I think that uh so I'm not going to argue we need to re return back to the good old days not at all but what I am saying is that actually uh you higher education and education in general is being driven into a kind of bureaucratic nightmare uh where the organization the principles of uh of understanding are increasingly going to be dictated by conditions on the outside and we see the extreme of this in terms of these arguments as to what books can be in a school library we will soon be in a situation where what topics we can cover in the universities are likely to be also regulated by bureaucratic Fiat and the freedom of uh of inquiry uh always was a bit continuous in lots of ways there was always this system of what I call a repressive tolerance that is uh there was a good deal of uh yeah you can we are tolerated up to a certain kind of level you go beyond that level and you find yourself uh skidding out the door so there's always been there's always been that side side to it so there is a progressive side which I think is very uh significant but it is a currently a in in Dire Straits and I think I would like I would like I would suggest and this is just partly for my own detailed experience but also from talking with with my colleagues in other universities in particular to say that there's a sense of demoralization within the universities a sense of despair that somehow rather things are not going well and there needs to be a radical rethink in terms of what we're doing in terms of Education I say that fearfully because that radical rethink can be taken over by the right wing and may well be taken over the right wing so I'm very I'm very nervous in proposing that but something is going to break because a lot of people I think are leaving Academia and other people are saying with conditions are of educa of Life are intolerable and consider because the conditions of Labor are becoming less and less tolerable I I am in a very privileged position I acknowledge that but for many of the people involved in the University this is not the case and I think that this is something which is going to have profound effects upon a future Society what would be the role of higher education in in a society dedicated to socialist principles and equality and justice and and what would that be there were and have been attempts to sort of start to think that through from the 1970s onwards but more and more we're finding that that is now being buried in this entrepreneurial bureaucratic nightmare which is increasingly taking being taken taking over the management of University structures thank you for joining me today you've been listening to David Harvey's anti-capitalist Chronicles a democracy at work production

Channel: Democracy At Work

Views: 11,573

Keywords: Richard Wolff, democracy, work, labor, economy, economics, inequality, justice, capitalism, capital, socialism, wealth, income, wages, poverty, yt:cc=on, David Harvey, higher education, education, universities, professors, entrepreneurialism, monetization

Id: RnrxJyZ3S-A

Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023