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  • Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education
  • Susan Talburt (bio)
Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 370 pp. Cloth: $39.95. ISBN: 0-8018-7949-3.

Have no doubt: Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades's Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education is an original book. It builds on Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie's (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, [End Page 638] as the title's first two words acknowledge. Yet "academic capitalism" in this text constitutes not only "generating external revenues" (p. 256), but

a knowledge/learning regime created by the interstitial emergence of complex new networks of actors within colleges and universities who enter into alliances with groups outside the university to create new organizations, reshape old ones, and redefine the purposes of the university so they articulate more closely with the new/knowledge/information economy.

(p. 256)

The new global knowledge/information economy, the authors argue, calls for a reevaluation of higher educational institutions' relations to society. In a neoliberal state, the new economy focuses not on social welfare but on wealth production and on "enabling individuals as economic actors" (p. 20). Eschewing arguments that the new economy "causes" academic capitalism, the authors detail conditions that orient institutional actors away from a public good knowledge regime, which values "knowledge as a public good to which the citizenry has claims" (p. 28), to constitute an "academic capitalism knowledge regime [that] values knowledge privatization and profit taking in which institutions, inventor faculty, and corporations have claims that come before those of the public" (p. 29). Slaughter and Rhoades do not offer a chronological narrative of succession but rather describe how these regimes coexist.

While the earlier Academic Capitalism studied public research institutions in four English-speaking countries, Slaughter and Rhoades focus here only on (ostensibly) nonprofit institutions in the U.S. The authors move beyond the earlier text's proposal of the "encroachment of the profit motive into the academy" to analyze "the internal embeddedness of profit-oriented activities as a point of reorganization (and new investment) by higher education institutions to develop their own capacity (and hire new types of professionals) to market products" (p. 11).

They thus expand the study of research and technology transfer to include copyrights and trademarks; administrators and trustees; managerialism; student consumption and learning; and networks linking postsecondary institutions, corporations, and state agencies. This book, then, narrates the conversion of the academy into a multiplex of profit centers. Faculty, administrators, managers, presidents, and trustees are not acted on by corporatization but actively incorporate their work and institutions into the new economy. Indeed, the analysis of the blurring of boundaries between state and market, public and private, distinguishes this text from its predecessor (and from the recent spate of texts lamenting the corporatization of higher education).

The book's interrelated studies detail academic capitalism's workings and effects. Policy analyses include federal legislation involving research and development, copyright, trademarks, and student financial aid; state and institutional patent policies; copyright policies' commodification of educational materials; and institutional branding and trademark licensing in the context of intercollegiate athletics and university logos, names, and mascots. Complementary studies of corporate-university trustee networks and of research university presidents' participation in Internet2 point to the creation of shared policy logic across the public and private sectors. Inquiry into local practices includes interviews with faculty involved in technology transfer about their negotiation of the market; readings of union contracts to understand faculty responses to intellectual property policies; and interviews with chairs and faculty to characterize department-level entrepreneurial practices.

Compelling is Slaughter and Rhoades's contention that the changes they document are mutually reinforcing across domains, spanning the commercialization of research, the development of curricular entrepreneurial activities (e.g., creating programs of study for the knowledge economy), and the stratification of students as niche markets. The proliferation of academic commercial activities creates a "need" for an expanded managerial apparatus to administer intellectual property, enrollment management, student life, and the like. This managerial presence normalizes and perpetuates certain...

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