The Corporate-Linked University From Social Project to Market Force

Volume 23, Number 1, 1998 Back to the Table of Contents © Canadian Journal of Communication The Corporate-Linked University: From Social Project to Market Force Janice Newson York Univ

Volume 23, Number 1, 1998

Back to the Table of Contents

© Canadian Journal of Communication

The Corporate-Linked University: From Social Project to Market Force

Janice Newson

York University

Janice Newson is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York (Toronto), ON M3J 1P3 E-mail:

janewson@yorku.ca

Abstract: Recently, Canadian university campuses have begun to display

signs of increasing corporate influence in their affairs In spite of the

recent appearance of these signs, the foundation was laid in the early

1980s for this increasing corporate influence through the shift in

government policies and the political effectiveness of groups like the

Corporate-Higher Education Forum, the Business Council on National

Issues, and the Canadian Manufacturer's Association However,

universities themselves have neither been passive nor helpless in relation

to these external pressures They have been active agents in a process of self-transformation in which budget-based rationalization and corporate linking have been their means of institutional survival As a consequence, universities are now functioning less as institutions whose essence derives from their educational and scholarly commitments and more as businesses that deliver educational services and produce knowledge-based products

Résumé: Récemment, les campus universitaires canadiens ont commencé

à manifester dans leurs affaires les signes d'une influence commerciale croissante Bien que ces signes soient récents, les bases de cette influence

commerciale croissante furent jetées au début des années quatre-vingt en conséquence d'une modification dans les politiques gouvernementales et

de l'efficacité politique de groupes comme le "Corporate-Higher

Education Forum" ("Forum entreprises-universités"), le "Business Council

on National Issues" ("Conseil d'affaires sur les questions nationales") et l'Association des manufacturiers canadiens Cependant, les universités elles-même n'ont été ni passives ni impuissantes face à ces pressions externes En effet, elles ont joué le rôle d'agents actifs dans un processus d'auto-transformation dans lequel la rationalisation des budgets et les alliances commerciales ont été leur moyen de survie institutionnelle En conséquence, les universités sont en train de fonctionner moins comme des institutions dont l'essence provient de leurs engagements éducatifs et savants que comme des entreprises qui livrent des services éducatifs et transforment le savoir en biens commercialisables

A new word corporatization has been coined to identify a significant trend in university development Physical manifestations of

corporatization began to appear with increasing rapidity on local campuses

in the 1990s not only in Canada but also in a variety of advanced

industrial and developing societies, including Australia, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand, Western Europe, the United States, Mexico, China, and Malaysia These manifestations are many and diverse, some

apparently superficial and relatively harmless in and of themselves, and others raising questions and concerns about their implications for the continued independence of universities and their ability to serve the broader public interest In some cases, they have instigated student sit-ins, campus demonstrations, and academic staff strikes

``Corporatization'' encapsulates at least two related yet distinct aspects of the university's changing relationship to the private corporate sector One aspect concerns new kinds of contractual relationships in which some level of financial support to a university program or research project is exchanged for an opportunity for corporate donors to exercise influence over and /or benefit from specific research and /or educational activities This aspect of corporatization is exemplified by (among other things) research projects specifically designed to produce knowledge that will lead to the development of marketable products under patent or license agreements with a corporate partner; displaying the corporate logos of donors on multimedia and on-line courses as a form of advertisement; donations of high-tech equipment (often as loans rather than outright gifts) for use in university facilities, to generate a market for additional

equipment within the institution and among student users and to ``show-case'' equipment to other clients; naming new buildings, programs, and chairs after corporate donors; designing new programs and units according

to the desired objectives or ``demands'' of a corporate donor; and securing representation in curricular planning and course design in exchange for a corporation's financial support.1

The second aspect of corporatization concerns the adoption by universities

of the modus operandi, criteria, and objectives of private sector

corporations In the extreme case, rather than standing out as an institution whose essence derives from its distinctly educational mission, the

university becomes undifferentiated from a business corporation engaged

in the delivery of educational and research ``products.'' This aspect is signified by campus malls designed to attract commercial business and earn the university profits from products sold and /or commercial rents;

``for profit'' on-campus research units that bid for research contracts from public and private sector clients; in-house private research companies in which the university and entrepreneurial faculty members own shares; the provision of academic support activities through designated cost-units that offer their service to other campus units on a fee-for-service basis; and various kinds of trademarked courseware products developed by and licensed through faculty members or university-based companies

These changes in universities' relationships to corporate clients and in the associated commercialization of their practices are seen by critics as indications of a growing corporate influence over higher education that has ominous implications As well, both critical and supportive

interpreters and commentators on these trends often assume that the corporatization trend has arisen out of the distinctive political and

economic conditions of the 1990s In Ontario, for example, critics often attribute manifestations of corporatization to the neo-conservative agenda

of the Harris government Relatedly, it is also often assumed that the political and economic ``causes'' of these changes are external to the university itself

This representation of the relationship between the university and society

as one of the external causes that produce internal effects is not new to these times In fact, the organizational literature on the university, which greatly expanded after World War II when government began to invest increasing funds in higher education, has predominantly represented the relationship between the university and society as a one-way relationship

in which society ``affects'' the university and the university ``reacts'' or

``adapts'' to the constraints and demands of its external environment This view of the university as a social institution which reacts and adapts to externally produced social, political, and economic forces is not just the analytical stance adopted by academic commentators and researchers It also appears in public political discourses including ``higher education policy'' discourse which tie the future of the university to the high-profile issues of the time: government deficits, a globalizing economy, and new ``information-highway'' technologies

Such a representation of the university's relation to its ``outside'' is both disempowering and mystifying It is disempowering because, in a practical

sense, adapting to external pressures rarely offers much if any room for challenging the pressures themselves It is mystifying because it

camouflages the extent to which the university itself is implicated in the very social, political, and economic forces to which it then ``must''

accommodate The mystification escalates the sense of powerlessness How is it possible to exercise an initiating, as opposed to a merely

adaptive, agency when faced with processes over which we have no control processes that are located ``elsewhere'' or even ``nowhere''? It is not surprising, then, that rhetoric that advocates the imperative of the university's adjustment and accommodation to these external pressures tends to represent the pressures as inevitable and to argue that failure to accommodate to them will lead to the university's demise

The discussion of corporatization which follows challenges this

disempowering and mystifying characterization of the university's relation

to society It will attempt to show that changes in the university's own institutional practices significantly laid the ground for, and greatly

facilitated, the aspects of corporatization described above I argue that these changes in university practices constitute a potentially, if not already

realized, significant transformation in the raison d'être of the university:

from existing in the world as a publicly funded institution oriented toward creating and disseminating knowledge as a public resource social knowledge into an institution which, although continuing to be

supported by public funds, is increasingly oriented toward a privatized conception of knowledge market knowledge.2 The university will not be displayed as mechanically adapting to government policies and other external political, economic, and social pressures Although these

pressures form part of the story, the university will be represented as actively engaging with them, often giving them concrete form and

substance and thus providing the means for carrying them forward Rather than appearing to be mysterious and inevitable, these processes of

transformation are displayed as arising from the concrete interventions and actions of social agents who participate in social practices that can be identified

Two projects of the post-World War II

university

In Canada and elsewhere, the expansion of higher education in the late 1950s and 1960s was justified primarily in terms of two societal needs On the one hand, massive financial investment of public funds was premised

on the need for a highly skilled and well-educated work force to contribute

to the economic health of the country On the other hand, it was also emphasized that universities should play a democratizing role, not only by promoting opportunities for social, political, and economic mobility in

society at large but also by providing an example of a public institution whose structures and practices conformed to democratic principles of governance In fact, some commentators of that period refer to the

university as a democratic social movement (see, for example, Zaslove, 1996) At least, it is arguable that a kind of rapprochement was achieved between these two roles insofar as there appears to have been a politically workable agreement on the idea that the expansion of higher education was a good thing (see Newson & Buchbinder, 1988, chap 1)

No doubt, the dramatic growth of universities through this period in terms

of student enrollment, faculty, and staff size contributed to the dynamic and upbeat quality of university life and the sense that on the campus was

``the place to be.'' With its prevailing doctrine of ``meritocracy,'' the university of the 1960s and early 1970s could be viewed as having staged

a contest between the two objectives of serving the needs of the economy,

on the one hand, and contributing to the political project of advancing democratic sensibilities and practices on the other If anything, the

democratic project of the university held a degree of pre-eminence over the purely economic project, at least in the interplay of political and cultural struggles that were taking place on campus By ``political and cultural struggles'' I am referring to struggles to assert a particular version

of academic culture whether a hierarchical culture based on academic status or a participatory culture based on representation in academic decision-making bodies of the various campus constituencies and even of nearby off-campus communities And I am referring to related struggles concerning the independence of the academy from ``external'' social, political, and economic pressures Expressions of these struggles were reflected, for example, in attempts to ensure the exercise of academic freedom as a right of faculty members, in institutional claims to autonomy, and in the insistence that the university must exist at arm's length from the

``military-industrial complex,'' which is also to say that the university should be wary of being tied to the market Together, these struggles contributed toward the relative success of institutionalizing the idea of

``collegial self-governance.''3

However, the salience in university affairs of the democratizing project and its apparent equality with the economic project of the university no longer describes the political and cultural situation of and within the academy Something has changed for some observers and participants, imperceptibly, but nevertheless quite dramatically in the relative balance between these two projects Like many faculty members of my generation,

my biography is significantly interwoven in the shift in balance between these projects Since the early 1980s, I have been trying to make sense of

my experience of this shift in the academy over the past 20 to 25 years, and to provide an interpretative framework not only for my experiences, but also for experiences4 that have been reported to me in the course of

doing research on the university in Canada, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere In searching for this ``sense-making'' framework, I have not been simply interested in developing a polemic even though I strongly oppose the re-alignment of the university that I perceive to be reflected in these events and materials Because of my interest in intervening in the process, I have been much more concerned with understanding how such a remarkable shift in orientation could have been accomplished and is being accomplished from within the academy itself

The shift toward the market

It is not a small matter that the shift to which I am referring has taken place during the course of my own career within the academy It therefore

is a shift that has involved many of the same colleagues with whom I collaborated in the 1960s as a graduate student, demanding revised senate and departmental constitutions that were more democratic and inclusive and insisting upon the need for the university to maintain a critical

distance from the political and economic powers of the time; the same colleagues with whom, in the 1970s, I helped to organize our faculty association into a certified union in order to ensure that the collegial decision-making bodies of the university would not be dismantled by an increasingly aggressive university administration

Today, along with many of these same colleagues, I find myself in

departmental and faculty meetings engaged in debates over how we can re-shape our academic curricula to better accommodate the demands of

``the external market.'' We attempt to justify our pedagogical strategies in terms of measures of efficiency and cost-effectiveness; we re-formulate our research interests to fit into the most recently announced policy objectives of various government ministries which are closely paired with (if not embedded in) SSHRC, NSERC, or MRC funding program

guidelines; and we try to define the ``products'' of our intellectual

activities, whether teaching or research, in ways that will attract and serve the needs of potential corporate clients or that will fit into a prescribed market ``niche.'' Perhaps most perplexing, we find ourselves within collegial bodies of various kinds often bitterly divided over how decisions

in the academy should be made: whether we should orient our actions toward our faculty union and insist upon following procedures that are spelled out in collective agreements and senate handbooks; whether we should orient ourselves more toward an agenda that is set into place by central administration and by-pass or even abandon collegially based fora like departments and faculty councils as places in which to debate

academic policy; whether students should continue to be treated as

participants, and retain rights of citizenship within the academy, or

whether they should be treated more as ``consumers'' of our products or even as the products themselves

As I listen, hear, and see myself in these situations, I have come to

understand that our responses to the so-called pressures of these times do not merely reflect ``a change of mind'' although, certainly, our discourse reflects a way of thinking that differs significantly from a way of thinking that would have found expression even ten years ago I perceive our responses, more importantly, as reflecting significant changes in the institutional relationships in which we and our practices as academic workers are embedded These changes in networks of relationships changes that involve the dismantling of one set of relationships at the same time as another set is being put into place are what I have been trying to unravel

The changes to which I am referring are not limited to the institutional interior of the university; in fact, they significantly involve changes between and among universities and university-based academics and

``external'' bodies like granting agencies (NSERC, MRC, and SSHRC), private-sector corporations, nationally and internationally based research consortia, and so forth As Claire Polster (1994) argues, they transcend the boundaries of discrete institutions like universities or government agencies and therefore cannot be fully comprehended as arising from, or limited to,

a single site However, for the purposes of this essay, I will focus on the university as one site in which these relationships are being re-constructed, and the implications of this reconstruction for the university and its role in society

From collegialism to managerialism

One dimension of this reconstruction is the shift from collegial

self-governance to managerialism as the dominant mode of institutional

decision-making Some commentators and scholars conceptualize

``managerialism'' as an issue of personal style attributed to a powerful senior administrator, such as a president,5 or of a cultural style shared by those whose positions within the institution are classified as

``administrative.''6

I, on the other hand, conceive of managerialism more in terms of the institutional practices that are employed for making decisions, whether the decisions are made by people who technically occupy ``administrative positions'' or by members of the faculty, the support staff, the student body, or a combination of these As described by Marguerite Cassin & Graham Morgan (1992), this shift from collegial functioning to

managerialism is reflected ``in the appearance in the universities of a certain way of thinking, a particular kind of language beginning to be applied [the content of which] implies judgement and evaluation'' (p 249)

To be sure, this change in language and ways of thinking have arisen in a context not necessarily chosen by those who now employ them This context includes the fiscal pressures that began to be felt in Canadian universities in the early- to mid-1970s, when the publicly funded

expansion of higher education which characterized the postwar period gave way to a prolonged period of underfunding that has continued into the 1990s Initially, bouts with funding shortfalls were viewed from within the academic community as short-term, requiring strategies that would bridge between the difficulties of the present moment and a not-too-distant future moment when funding would return to previous levels During this period, government officials often justified their ``cutbacks'' by arguing that university budgets had sufficient ``fat'' to allow for improved

economies in their operations without jeopardizing either the quality of their programs or their ability to meet the increasing demands for

accessibility The actions taken within local institutions tended to reinforce this viewpoint Universities continued to function with the appearance that little damage, if any, had been done to the integrity of programs, even though internal cuts had been made to meet budgetary shortfalls

However, as fiscal restraint began to assume a chronic state which

universities were expected to live with into the foreseeable future,

different kinds of responses and justifications emerged The earlier idea of

``fat'' in the budget extended to a more general diagnosis that universities are being insufficiently managed ``Restructuring'' has become a recurrent theme in policy discussions both at the level of local institutions and at the level of entire systems of higher education, ``restructuring'' in forms that will secure increased efficiency in the delivery of educational and research programs and greater value for the public tax dollar Moreover, that a one-time experience of fiscal restraint had been a ``good thing'' in forcing institutions to think through priorities was often promoted, even from within the university, as the basis for inserting an agenda of financial discipline and budgetary centrality into university decision-making

Hence, fiscal restraint has provided the opportunity for a significant shift

in the procedures and criteria for making decisions within universities The activity of administration centred around the management of increasingly constrained fiscal resources has moved to the centre of institutional decision-making The more ``democratized'' governing structure, which was largely achieved under the conditions of expansion, has now come to be seen as cumbersome, indecisive, and, above all, ill equipped to deal with budgetary matters In fact, from the 1970s and on into the 1980s, books written about the university tended to emphasize these aspects of organizational inefficiency and to implicitly if not

explicitly characterize both ``collegialism'' and ``democratization'' as

``part of the problem.'' The face-to-face talk and lengthy debates of

academic senates and faculty councils are assessed, not in terms of

democratic representativeness or collective decision-making, but rather in terms of their effectiveness for making ``the tough decisions.'' The

argument for ``a more managerial approach'' has been premised on a need

to transcend the local interests of departments and faculties, something that can be accomplished best through a purportedly neutral body the central administration which will give primacy to meeting budgetary constraints rather than to preserving academic territory

As ``managerialism'' moved to the centre of decision-making, academic decision-making moved to the margins This does not mean, of course, that academics are no longer involved in decision-making practices On the contrary, as they have remained involved they have acquiesced to, or actively participated in, a process of change in which academic

considerations have taken a secondary, or even tertiary, place More

``objective'' and strategically sensitive means of allocating increasingly limited resources are being employed For example, at the highest level of university functioning, decisions about enrollment levels, admission standards, advising and registering students, hiring policy, and research priorities are more often made and justified in terms of budgetary criteria and parameters that have been predefined in written documents like mission statements and five-year plans These documentary forms of decision-making have largely displaced or made redundant the face-to-face debating of policies and practices within academic bodies like

departments, faculty councils, and senates through which various

groupings of the faculty, sometimes in alliance with students, and even groups of students alone were once able to exercise considerable influence over institutional policy Although academics and various collegial bodies may have input into this documentary process, it is highly centralized and less open to scrutiny and intervention It is more difficult for campus constituencies to subsequently question or challenge the parameters within which their own individual and local activities take place They appear to

be able to make choices but these choices are about less and less

significant things, the bigger issues having been resolved ``elsewhere.'' More recently, ``performance indicators'' have been introduced into Canadian universities (and into the functioning of the three research granting bodies, SSHRC, NSERC, and MRC) as a means of making

``objective'' and budgetarily sensitive decisions about the allocation of resources within departments, faculties, and the university as a whole While it is true that indicators have been employed in universities for some time as a means of assessing various aspects of academic quality, the purposes to which these indicators can be put is significantly changed in the context of managerialism and the process of budget-based

rationalization which it serves In fact, as a managerial technology,

performance indicators provide the opportunity for greater co-ordination

of the internal activities of universities from outside, at provincial,

national, and even international levels.7 Perhaps most important, through these new means of resolving decisions about how, and on what basis, to allocate resources, criteria such as ``efficiency,'' ``productivity,'' and

``accountability'' are becoming embedded in the routine day-to-day decision-making that takes place in ``local'' units throughout the

university They are utilized as the operative if not valued criteria for

assessing and deciding how to carry out a wider and wider range of academic activity initiating new courses and phasing out others, putting forward new research projects and deciding which ones to support, and so forth Cassin & Morgan summarize this process as follows:

The over-riding managerial consideration is for

``effectiveness.'' This concern is applied increasingly to the

various aspects of work of the professoriate, requiring that

the products of the work and the extent of the work be

described in standardised ways using standardised criteria

``Effectiveness,'' therefore, depends upon methods of

describing and quantifying those aspects of the

professoriate's work that are deemed capable of

accountability, and deemed ``relevant'' to the mission of the

university [T]he managerial predilection is to encourage

and support those activities in the university that can most

readily result in reducing costs and /or increasing revenues

(1992, p 253)

It is therefore of little consequence whether academics themselves are or are not active through the traditional collegial bodies in this form of making Not only do the structures and processes of decision-making provide a greater voice for ``management'' but, also, the very criteria that have relevance for decision-making subordinate academic and professional judgments to the discipline of the budget

From social objectives to market objectives

Managerialism has not sprung up within the university from nowhere In fact, the managerial practices that have been increasingly applied to the interior operations of universities have been long associated with private sector, profit-oriented businesses and corporations It is not surprising, then, that the second major institutional shift has involved the university's relationships with private sector corporations

Initially, the idea that universities should develop closer relationships with the private corporate sector was presented as a means of alleviating some

of their funding difficulties Through this collaboration, universities would acquire new sources of funding to counteract the effects of government underfunding and corporations would gain much needed expertise a