There is strong evidence that, in the era of advanced capitalism, the university has lost its distinctiveness and become just another corporation.
A vast literature has accumulated throughout the past century and into the 21st, which openly decries the intrusion of a normative business model foreign to the deeply ingrained collegial interactions of university life and governance. Ironically, though seemingly every aspect of the process of corporatisation has been exposed, the system has remained resistant to dissent.
More recently criticism is ever more strident as (since the collapse of the Berlin Wall) the corporate university increasingly entrenches itself and is even taken for granted. Worse still, although a critical discourse is firmly established and may be a source of inspiration and consolation for those seeking to comprehend what has happened, academics themselves are generally passive and inactive in the face of a threat to the nature of academic life, at least as it has been understood since the exposition of the university ideal in Germany in the early 19th century, with its clear antecedents at Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge in the early Middle Ages.
That the university should be one of the casualties of corporatisation is distressing, but it might have been expected. This honoured institution could hardly be exempt from a process that has swept across not only the Western world, bound up with its own commitment to “late capitalism”, but also the East, with China and India now taking the lead in the market economy. The profit motive has been naturalised in the postmodern environment and appears to leave nothing untouched.
Given its antiquity — being one of the earliest foundations of modern Europe — and its reputation as an ivory tower, the university has probably held out longer than most other institutions and has more valiantly resisted outside interference. By its very nature as a sanctum of learning, it has been historically distanced from, and ostensibly opposed to, commercial enterprise.
Yet for several centuries, if not throughout its entire history, the university has had to balance its own mandate as the guardian of all “knowledges” against the crude requirements of survival and demands on its functioning as “a public good”. The equilibrium has not always been stable, and there is no doubt that vested interests have influenced and undermined the academy in the past.
This being the case, the ascendancy of capitalism in the present time has found a point of leverage to gain a foothold in the sanctuary. Thus, gradually and insidiously, the “logic” of corporatisation has taken hold of the institution so that seemingly overnight the academic fraternity has woken up to a reality it can barely recognise.
The efficacy of this process has much to do with the erosion of the principle of communality in society, which allows the mechanisms of business to define the parameters of socialised interaction. Collegiality has been fatally imbricated in this altered institutional culture and, thus, even while it continues to be active, has effectively been co-opted and neutralised by the new order.
There would seem to be no place for an ethic that gives precedence to disinterested common purpose. It has been supplanted by a systematised competitiveness that conscripts the individual academic within the university’s profit-based rationale, calling on him or her to enhance not the discipline but career paths and the university’s own market share.
The purpose of corporatisation is to regulate and intensify production to satisfy growing consumer demand and to maximise large-scale profits. On either side of the economic spectrum — selling and buying — corporatisation is driven by acquisition, which holds out to all the opportunity to raise the standard of living, even though this has been accompanied by a corresponding philistinism, which disdains non-acquisitive values and the life of the mind, as in most cases they do not provide a “living” or are not considered “useful”.
The phenomenon can be traced back to the utilitarianism current in the 19th century that made the informing principle of human action the greatest net benefit. In the version of this doctrine that became accepted practice in the West, whatever a person did had to be goal-directed and functional, and the larger the clientele, the better.
Utilitarianism itself drew strength from the growing ascendancy of the rational principle at the expense of the imaginative. Separated from its imaginative origins, shown in the mania for statistics, in the measuring and calculating of outputs and performance criteria (to determine “knowledge production” as “utility”), reason is a law unto itself and is imbued with a brutal instrumentalisation that serves only sectional interests and loses sight of the broader human context.
The rationalist enterprise that has so strongly marked the “progress” of the West is destined to play itself out for good or ill. Faith in rationality has an almost religious hold over the American and European psyche. It is desired for its own sake, as the “miracles” of mechanisation and technology overwhelm intuition and insight, and work-to-order overwhelms creative impulse.
That in the case of South Africa this enduring faith has been imported without qualification is ironic, given the fact that the hard-won liberation of the country from the predations of colonisation calls into question the assumed superiority of the Western mindset, which is obsessed with order and control. The constant invocation of Africa and the insistence on Africanisation in the university are meaningless if an alien model is adopted unconditionally and uncontextually, without any consideration of its appropriateness in a country that has a multiplicity of peoples, cultural allegiances, strong residues of communality and ancient tradition.
Corporatisation is itself like colonialism or the military: everything and everybody must fit into the straitjacket. There is a definite sense of mimicry about a mode of organisation that so lacks an indigenous character, intimating that the university is a clone of commerce, which has simply infiltrated all levels of society. It is also at the mercy of government, which engineers social and educational policy all the more easily through the dictates of management. The goal of transformation — of the redressing of past injustices — is anomalous when it is yoked into a system that has nothing of the genuine quality of transformation about it.
Evidence of an insidious corporatisation is to be seen in the surreptitious importation of rank from the world of commerce, a process that at one time (when trade was low in status) would have been considered offensive. Ancient university positions, offices, bodies, though honoured by time, have been renamed to reflect their new alignment with the marketplace, politically overlaid in turn by way of state dictates. The inscripted stylisation in ‘executive dean” or ‘executive director” marks a deliberate and unambiguous shift in allegiance from collegiate to administration (executors of educational policy).
These fabricated designations, with their earnest signals of managerialism (as though the technocratic ‘executive” or ‘director” has more status and authority than the customary “professor” or “lecturer”), have ample remuneration as their support. In this case, the nomenclature is itself synonymous with the monetary entitlement. This is a tacit acknowledgement of the tawdriness of the new “culture”. Senior university representatives have reclassified themselves as “top management”, and their authority scaled down into the system at every level, so that the chair of department functions as a line manager answerable to superiors, thus removed, technically speaking at least, from the department he or she serves.
The first step in the overhaul of a system is the renaming of the parts. Once the new ideas are verbally instituted, the rest follows suit and a form of closure ensues. A deceptive piggybacking takes place in which esteemed attributes of academic life are siphoned off to serve as corporate emblems and to preserve the trappings of a venerable tradition.
The term “excellence” — congruent with the idea of the university as an arbiter of the truth — becomes a selling point. In this way, the term is denatured, commodified and so robbed of its original signification, appearing as a loaded advertising slogan that has only blurred meaning (you can put into it whatever you like) but which in truth denotes the product offered or taken. In addition to the appropriation of terms that are redolent of humanist thinking, a soulless managerial-speak — the refrain of the bottom line — has infiltrated itself.
The process outlined here amounts to a hostile takeover of the university by a new elite, though branding rather cheaply pretends to disguise this fact. The attributes of the university remain visible as signs and tokens in logos, mission statements, et cetera, all inducements for enrolment and competitive edge, but in many cases with no guarantee of substance.
Paradoxically, collegial values and attainments, authenticated over centuries of scholarly endeavour, are essential to the survival of the corporate model, which parasitically draws on their strength, but at the same time debilitates the host (the collegiate). Essentially, the terms of highest repute in the university are recycled as empty signifiers, their import residing in their saleability.
Professor Alan Weinberg and Dr Greg Graham-Smith are lecturers in the department of English studies at Unisa. This is a condensed version of part one of an article intended for international publication in 2011. Parts two and three will appear, in their condensed versions, in the October and November editions of Getting Ahead