The modern university challenged: Higher education between elitism and corporatism

Universities are colonised not only by the Eurocentric ideologies which inform their curricula. With the rise of neoliberalism, the university is now becoming subservient to the market, says Yusef Progler.

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IF we want to talk about 'decolonising our universities', perhaps we have to first identify what has colonised our universities. In some sense, the university itself is a colonised space in terms of curriculum being oriented toward what has been called 'white studies' (Churchill 1981) at the expense of other knowledges. While this is well known and efforts are afoot to redress this curricular imbalance, there is another way that universities are colonised that is not as often discussed.

Nearly 40 years ago, Martin Carnoy (1974) mentioned the idea of 'colonised knowledge', by which he meant not the specific details of curriculum or Eurocentric theories or textbooks and such, but that the overall knowledge system developed in modern universities perpetuates a hierarchical social structure and that the purpose of education within this structure was to provide a channel for upward mobility within this hierarchy without questioning or changing it. In other words, on a more fundamental level than on the level of curriculum, textbooks, methods and theories, we need to focus on the university as a colonised space in terms of the mission and the purpose of the university.

Of course, this sense of colonised knowledge has connections to the more direct and clearly recognisable forms of colonisation. One of these connections is the sense of elitism bolstered by notions of supremacy, in which the university becomes a space for the elite classes to get educated and reproduce themselves, and there is a belief that the knowledge acquired in this way is inherently better than the knowledge outside the university, that managers and researchers are somehow smarter or more worthy of praise than other peoples. So it's not only the notion that the white man's knowledge is better or worse than others that needs to be resisted; we also need to resist this elite university-based knowledge system and the notion that it is better than the knowledge found in communities, such as among agricultural and industrial workers or among the crafts or a host of other fields and areas of expertise and experience outside the academy.

Despite their connections to pre-modern institutions of learning, most modern universities were established and developed according to the needs of the former colonial system and the modern nation-state system that emerged upon the demise of the old system of direct colonialism. The main purpose carried over from one system to the other has been the creation, training and maintenance of an elite class tasked with managing modern societies and thinking on behalf of the public. The elitist ideology behind this system involves expenditures of public funds on higher education in order to produce each new generation of thinkers, engineers, doctors and politicians in the belief that subsidising this elite would provide benefits for the entire society. Despite its origins in colonialism, this system has more or less thrived for the past century in the Global South. However, it has been in steady decline with the rise of neoliberalism, which has led some to lament the 'university in ruins' (Readings 1997).

The corporate university

While the odour of direct forms of colonisation remains in the form of elitism and supremacy, they have been reconfigured in some cases from the national to the transnational in that the university is now becoming subservient to the demands of the market (Miyoshi 1998). This is because we're in a situation now where the demand for a university education is higher than it has ever been. In fact, whatever we might say are the failures of the university, in this sense it has been incredibly successful in convincing ever-increasing portions of humanity that a university education is desirable and valuable. But with this increased demand governments are retracting funding or, where there is still state-subsidised education, tightening up access by way of ever-more difficult exams and other sorting mechanisms.

During the decades that universities have been run with an elitist ideology, increasing numbers of people have been convinced that higher education is the key to success, usually defined as access to well-paid jobs and the accompanying social status. This is fused with a general belief that a university education brings upward mobility for heretofore marginalised social classes. While this might be true in some limited sense, the upward mobility of the few has resulted in the increased marginalisation of the many who have gone through the same lengthy and very costly process only to realise that the rewards at the end are few and far between.

Nevertheless, the hope for success and mobility continues to increase demand for a university education, although the hope is blind to the fact that there is no similar rise in demand for the impending increase of graduates. Therefore, higher education has in many cases simply perpetuated the problem of primary  through secondary national schooling, leaving in its wake ever more of the 'walking wounded' who are graduated into a society that has no need or place for them. At the same time, communities and families acting on the hope of upward mobility and access to wealth and power through a university degree are coming under a greater burden in paying for the education of their children, even while the prospect is often bleak of getting a job that leads to a satisfying position and which provides enough income capable of paying back such a great investment.

One tangible outcome of this increase in demand for higher education has been felt in the financial policies impacting universities, which have been emboldened by the neoliberal ideology coupled with the belief that higher education is no longer in need of public funds that can now be spent elsewhere. This has led to sharp budget cuts for higher education, which has in turn pushed many universities to be run more like corporations in that financial concerns and business slogans are beginning to replace traditional mission statements. What matters now, in a crude economic sense, is survival of the fittest, meaning those that can raise their own funds.

In other words, in many places the corporate university is now replacing the national university. Readings (1997) had identified this as a shift away from the traditional research university to the 'university of excellence', with 'excellence' taken here to be a vapid concept devoid of referential value but indicative of the mindset of the corporation. For Readings, the university of excellence has lost track of 'modernity's encounter with culture'. Others have described this shift in terms of universities increasingly embracing an ethos of entrepreneurialism, with the term 'corporate university', as employed by Aronowitz (2001), referring to a university which has adopted the 'framework and ideology of the large corporation' and which has prioritised the 'application of accounting principles to academic employment and planning'. Distinct from a university run by a corporation, the corporate university is one that is run as a corporation.

In light of this brief outline of the shift from the national to the corporate university, what remains is a consideration of what it now means to be a university student or to work in higher education as a teacher, researcher or administrator. What are we doing in the roles we are playing? What are our expectations and those of students, families and other concerned parties? Considering our personal limitations as well as the unfolding situation, what options are there to effect an active and constructive role in this situation? Shall we envision a utopian system of higher education and work towards that? Or do we want to preserve things the way they were in the past, or perhaps protect the structure while changing the content and curricula?

In his discussion of 'education in spite of postmodernity', Zygmunt Bauman (2001) has noted that while in the modernising countries universities 'may still play the traditional role of factories supplying a heretofore missing educated elite', universities in the West will need to 'rethink their role in a world that has no use for their traditional services, sets new rules for the game of prestige and influence, and views with growing suspicion the values they stood for'. Bauman also observed that universities have become slow to respond to the unpredictable and hyper-changing worlds of 'liquid modernity'. For instance, by the time graduates finish a degree the knowledge they absorb may already be obsolete. Meanwhile, he laments, after the 'scientifically assisted horrors' of the 20th century our faith in the humanising potential of the modern Western sciences 'seems laughably, perhaps even criminally, na‹ve'. While many 19th and 20th century traditions used to be coveted assets for creating meaning in modern research universities, they are quickly becoming liabilities in a more fluid and tentative world. Bauman suggests that universities can develop responses to this emerging global disorder and perhaps maintain their sense of meaning and purpose by developing a diversity of opinions, methodologies and curricula as necessary survival features. However, he does not address what kind of institutional structures might be required to bring this about.

Teaching responses

Recent economic trends in higher education, in which governments have retracted and reduced funding for higher education, have posed challenges for academics. In particular, as corporate universities adopt a 'student as customer' approach to solving financial problems, class sizes and teaching loads are expanding. This has given rise to various strategies employed by university professors tasked with teaching these courses. We can illustrate these strategies through a brief tale of two teachers.

Teacher One creates artificial scarcity by intimidating students to reduce class size and then guiding the remaining small and elite body toward graduate programmes in the Global North, revelling in the ability to gain access for a limited number of students in these elite institutions while at the same time artificially maintaining small class sizes at the expense of his colleagues who end up taking up the slack. This teacher justifies this strategy through recourse to the quality argument. Unlike this elitist colleague, our second teacher accepts the duty to teach hundreds of students in a single lecture, bowing to the quantity demands of the corporate university, but gives them an easy ride by using exams that everybody, regardless of the course content, can easily pass, providing questions in advance, practising social promotion, and creating a new social contract based on mutual agreement to not make waves or require or achieve much.

Despite teaching being one of the main tasks of a university professor today, owing to the increased demand noted above, each position provides relief from teaching one way or another; perhaps we can say that the latter is a populist response and the former an elitist response. As a result, both teachers gain more time for pursuing research interests and chasing grants, with the latter often more highly valued even if the money is often gratuitous and wasteful, especially in the elitist universities. On the point regarding grants, they also have the more insidious feature of inculcating researchers into the money-grubbing culture of the neoliberal corporation.

More importantly, both positions are responses to an emerging trend in higher education that gives pause for reflection on our roles in the academy. Our first teacher laments the 'low-quality' students and seeks to entrench the elitism of the colonised academy, but this position ignores or undermines hard-won gains by women, people of colour and ethnic or religious minorities, or the struggles of the poor and marginalised that have opened the academy doors to a broader cross-section of humanity than ever before in history. This could even be seen as a gain or a victory against the exclusivity and elitism of the colonised university, unless the curricular issues noted above mean entrenching the elitist impulse through demands for inculcating one or another national canon.

Of course, there is one possible way to solve much of this problem, which is to close 50, 60, or 70% of the universities to rebalance the scarcity issue and bolster the elitism. But that would just feed back into the old forms of classical colonisation. Rather than that, some may suggest going in the other direction by opening up the academy completely to everybody, which would solve the quantity problem at the expense of the quality issue. Or, perhaps rather than dichotomising, there needs to be ongoing dialogue between civil society, NGOs, the world of work, families and other institutions and the university, so that the university could become more aligned with those sectors of society.

Actually, this is what Clark Kerr  (2001) proposed in his idea of the Multiversity in the 1960s, a proposal that was roundly despised by university academics of the day and which remains severely criticised even 40 years later. Why? I think it's because a lot of university academics are still operating in the elitist model. But the valid criticism of Kerr's proposal for a Multiversity is that what he really meant were corporations, as a sort of advocacy of a proto- or cryptic-corporate university before we recently named it as such.

But if we broaden that vision of the university being accountable not just to monied corporations but to civil society, to NGOs, to volunteerism and normal employers, then perhaps we can redeem that initial idea of the Multiversity as responsible to society and overlay that with our idea of Multiversity, which is really about re-introducing marginalised voices into the academy, thus redressing both the institutional as well as curricular imbalances in higher education today.

Yusef J Progler teaches Comparative Cultures and Societies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan, where he is also Associate Dean of the College of Asia Pacific Studies and has previously served as academic field leader for a new programme in Media, Culture and Society. The above is extracted from his presentation at the International Conference on 'Decolonising Our Universities' held in Penang, Malaysia, in June 2011.

References

Aronowitz, S. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Beacon Press, 2001.

Bauman, Z. The Individualized Society. Polity Press, 2001.

Carnoy, M. Education as Cultural Imperialism. David McKay Company, 1974.

Churchill, W. 'White Studies: The Intellectual Imperialism of Contemporary US Education', Equity and Excellence in Education, Vol. 19, Nos. 1 & 2, January 1981, pp. 51-57.

Kerr, C. The Uses of the University. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Miyoshi, M. 'Globalization, Culture and the University', in Jameson and Miyoshi (eds.) The Cultures of Globalization. Duke University Press, 1998.

Readings, B. The University in Ruins. Harvard University Press, 1997.

*Third World Resurgence No. 266/267, October/November 2012, pp 29-31