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Keith Knight: The Picasso in my bedroom

Is it possible to educate yourself? Weigh in on self-teaching in the Education area of Table Talk

Confessions of a stair mistress
By Elizabeth B. Krieger
While other students scarf chips, sling back beers and study, a growing tribe of compulsive exercisers pursues the perfect workout
(01/04/98)

Crisis in English
By Christopher Shea
When the Modern Language Association convenes this year, highbrow literary questions will take a back seat to a thorny debate about the ongoing dearth of jobs
(12/24/98)

Zen and the art of employee maintenance
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What is the sound of one hand filing? Or, can the Buddha help the temp workers of the world?
(12/23/98)

The Marxist Wall Street couldn't ignore
By Annalee Newitz
How did an English doctoral dropout like Doug Henwood become the first anti-capitalist pundit for the CNN crowd?
(12/21/98)

Slaves to the game
By Isaac Zaur
Once the violent world of video games seeped into our friendships, there was no going back
(12/18/98)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
ARCHIVE

BARTERING BRAINS FOR BREAD | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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According to Lawrence Soley, a communications professor at Marquette and author of the 1996 "Leasing the Ivory Tower," a corporate mind-set in higher education could lead to a surrender of academic freedom, even higher tuition rates and an indirect subsidy for corporations by taxpayers. Soley also predicts an intellectual rich-poor gap in schools, with professors pulling in money teaching less and less, while instruction continues to be taken over by overworked and underpaid adjunct professors and graduate student teachers. Play these trends out to their logical conclusion, he says, and you are providing companies with state facilities to train future employees and the ability to determine what classes are worthy of teaching. Forget liberal arts, these will be technical schools.

"The indications are that universities are becoming more a part of the commercial marketplace instead of a marketplace for ideas," says Soley. The business logic of the partnerships is impeccable, he adds, but when university chancellors and presidents start referring to themselves as CEOs -- as they increasingly do -- the days of teachers and scholars are gone.

Whether chancellors, presidents or CEOs, the leaders of institutions of higher education, especially public ones, say their hands are tied by recalcitrant state legislatures that tell schools to do more with less. And if the schools want to survive, they have to go trolling for dollars.

University of Kansas Chancellor Robert Hemenway recognized this and has orchestrated a series of moves to combat budget shortfalls during his three-plus years at Kansas: a $21 million, 10-year pact with Coca-Cola for exclusive beverage rights, a $3 million pact with Nike to outfit the school's athletic teams and the introduction of a smart card featuring banking, long-distance, concession and bus services. Hemenway says such deals are carefully negotiated and do not affect the academic integrity of the school. Further, such decisions are the province of the administration, not the faculty.

But Hemenway may be splitting hairs. On Christmas Eve the University of Kansas announced that its school of business and Farmland Industries Inc., North America's largest farmer-owned cooperative (its 1998 sales were $8.8 billion), established an intensive management education program for the Kansas City corporation's middle managers. Farmland paid for it, although the amount has not yet been publicly disclosed. In a twist that illustrates Noble's concerns, for five weeks over 10 months, the institute will use six KU professors and Farmland managers to teach at the institute. Nevertheless, Hemenway says, "We are exploring together new management techniques and achieving a model university-corporate partnership." But no matter what one may think of such a practice, it happens at business schools all the time, and has for years, with little press coverage. It's called "executive education," and most people outside of professional schools have never heard of such a thing.

"The university is not an isolated ivory tower. It participates in the market every day. It buys, sells, negotiates, it is a part of the commercial activity that one would expect having to take place in a $700 million or $800 million enterprise," says Hemenway, who also presided over the creation of a nonprofit corporation to consolidate and streamline the university's grant process and helped transform governance of the school's hospital from state bureaucracy to an independent public authority, thus freeing the hospital to compete in the managed care industry.

"I think it would be disingenuous of us to say we don't want anything to do with corporations because we are this pristine, idyllic and pastoral entity called the university. If you take that position to its logical end, we would be like a bunch of monks in a monastery resisting progress, because we wouldn't have any computers. If we are going to have computing in the university, we are going to have to deal with Microsoft. That is just a reality."

But this thinking is precisely what bothers dissenters like David Katzman, professor of history and American studies at the University of Kansas. It isn't a question of stopping the university from entering into partnerships with companies such as Coke or Nike, he says, but rather to get away from a top-down decision-making process.

"If the deal coincides with the university's mission and values and we insulate ourselves from some of that impact, then it is very appropriate. But when there are strings attached, when it changes our priorities, then it becomes very dangerous to us."

And strings are often attached, although surreptitiously. When Wisconsin signed an agreement with shoe manufacturer Reebok in 1996, hidden deep in the contract was the following: "The university will not issue any official statement that disparages Reebok [and] will promptly take all reasonable steps to address any remark by any university employee, including a coach, that disparages Reebok." Although Wisconsin administrators avoided talking about that specific part of the contract, before the contract went to the Board of Regents for approval, the rider became public. The public outcry over the school's attempt to subvert free speech forced Reebok to withdraw that section of the contract.

Faculty protest at KU about the partnerships had been muted until September, when Katzman gave a public speech decrying the moves as monopolistic, noncollegial and robbing the university of its most cherished asset -- openness.

"We are being made into tools for commercial wars fought in the marketplace," Katzman says. "And we are allowing them to fight those commercial wars here. Is that in our best interest or not? Let's hear about that, let's debate whether that should be the function of the university."

Whether that debate will be heard is another question. As colleges and universities continue to suckle at the corporate teat, they will increasingly rely on spreadsheets loaded with cash to demonstrate that the reliance on a corporate model is the only way to survive. And as chancellors and presidents become corporate yes-men and turn campuses into company towns, the notion of learning and thinking for oneself may become a quaint relic of days gone by.

Intelligent citizenry? Overrated. Student-teacher relationships? We prefer consumer-seller partnerships. The individual quest for knowledge? Been there. Conflict of scholarly (dis)interest? Our lawyers beg to differ.

But don't we risk turning colleges into factories that build workers to company specifications? Don't ask so many questions. And while you're at it, enjoy your Cap'n Crunch.
SALON | Jan. 6, 1999

Mark Luce is a freelance writer in Lawrence, Kan.