The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (review)

The economic and political dimensions of universities have become a very hot and contested topic of late—especially within scholarly organizations affiliated with the humanities. It is not uncommon now to find, for example, standing room audiences at the mla (Modern Language Association) or acla (American Comparative Literature Association) for presentations about the job market or the fate of tenure, while sessions devoted to subjects such as comparative arts or Chaucer have more empty seats than full ones. Indeed, one of the major contributions of the rise of cultural studies in our profession is the normalization of metaprofessional scholarship, particularly among committed humanities professors. While the profession of literary studies has by far been the loudest and most articulate voice in this discussion (bolstered in part by Cary Nelson, an English professor, who now serves as president of the aaup), other humanities disciplines such as philosophy and history have not been far behind.

What is important to recall is that prior to the rise of cultural studies in the late 80s and 90s, discussion of the metaprofessional dimensions of the university were nowhere as dominant as they are today. Philosophy professors used to research and write about philosophy, and English professors about literature. These were the hot topics at scholarly meetings, while metaprofessional subjects such as the job market, academic publishing, and tenure were primarily discussed in the lounge over coffee (and even cigarettes). While students and professors definitely had strong opinions on these subjects and shared many of the same concerns that are in vogue today about the job market, salaries, job security, and publishing, they were not things that were widely regarded as fair game for conference presentation let alone scholarly publication.

We’ve come a long way though over the past of twenty years. The publication of books like Bruce Wilshire’s The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation (1990), Stanley Fish’s Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995), and David Damrosch’s We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995) opened the door for taking these discussions out of the coffee lounge and into the scholarly forum. If major scholars in our field, e.g., Wilshire in philosophy, Fish in English, and Damrosch in comparative literature, were publishing scholarly works on the economic and political life of the academy, then the rest of us could—and should—too. The book, however, which kicked the door down—and radically altered the nature of metaprofessional discourse—was one by a relatively unknown associate professor of comparative literature at the Université de Montréal.

Bill Reading’s The University in Ruins, which came out in 1996, turned the discussion of the academy by humanists decidedly more political and economic. And his book, more than any other from this period, established the role of the market in the administration of universities as a central topos in our metaprofessional deliberations. Soon the phrase “corporate university” came to be the central signifier for everything that is wrong with universities in America. Excellent recent books such as Derek Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace (2003) and David Kirp’s Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line (2003) continued to hammer home this point over the next ten years. These and other recent studies inform us that universities in America have been and continue to be run more like businesses or corporations than—well—universities. The realization that economic motivations—and not academic ones—have and continue to temper much of the administrative decision-making in universities has been of late a tough pill for many in the academy to swallow, particularly for those who categorically oppose all things corporate or associated with the world of business.

Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University is an excellent primer for those just entering this metaprofessional foray. Donoghue’s book fairly succinctly provides a lot of historical background concerning the...