Why We Fight: Resisting the Incursion of Free-Market Technique in US Higher Education (An Educator's Manifesto)

(This is a brief excerpt of a paper I'll be delivering in July in France at a colloquium on "Resistance in the work of Jacques Ellul")

We are now being told that a transformation is under way in American Higher Education. This transformation is commonly explained by two major factors: 1] cuts in state support for higher education, and 2] increased competition from non-traditional educational institutions (e.g., on-line “universities” such as the University of Phoenix, Argosy University, and Capella University). Universities have become dependent on tuition due to decreased external (usually state) funding; in fact, nearly half (47%) of the national average institutional cost of educating a student is paid for by tuition,Unprecedented problems confront our campuses. Institutions ignore a changing environment at their peril. Like dinosaurs, they risk becoming exhibits in a kind of cultural Jurassic Park: places of great interest and curiosity, increasingly irrelevant in a world that has passed them by.Many governing boards, faculty members, and chief executives believe that internal governance arrangements have become so cumbersome that timely decisions are difficult to make, and small factions often are able to impede the decision-making process.In response to these systemic economic problems, university administrators across the country have introduced with surprising consistency – to the dismay of faculty and of many staff but with the encouragement of governing boards – sets of policies that, while no two universities may have exactly the same response, still contain a number of curiously similar items: the elimination of tenure, diminution of faculty’s role in shared governance, the remediation of “curricular stagnation,” an increase in (faculty) productivity, the control of costs, etc.
Notwithstanding the sacrifices that have been borne – almost exclusively – by faculty and staff around the US in the last several years (faculty salaries have essentially flat-lined in the last few years and in many cases have not kept up with inflationI believe that US higher education is on the verge of adopting a “free-market” model of higher education, a top-down structure of bosses and workers, a commoditization of information that mirrors the technological society, that focuses not on the needs of students as citizens and people, but on the culturally-derived desires of students as consumers and future functionaries of the free market.


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