Irish Studies and the Corporate University

In academic year 2010-2011, the University of Oregon, after adopting a budgeting system borrowed from corporate America, "Responsibility-Centered Management" or RCM, defended its choice by trumpeting its supposed virtues or "fundamental principles" on the web.¹ Bullet-pointed claims on the university's site assert that RCM will guarantee "Transparency—everyone knows the rules and has access to the information they need"; "Accountability—decision makers have clear lines of responsibility"; "Equity—everyone is playing by the same rules and is held to the same standards"; and "Predictability—the rules don't change without broad discussion and lots of warning."²

When updated in 2010, the Oregon website provided the uninitiated with an overview of RCM institutions, which included the "University of Toronto, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, and University of Indiana [sic]"—along with a list of titles for further reading, one of which is a report from my home institution, "RCM at Indiana University Bloomington 1990-2000." This list is not entirely accurate, and "University of Indiana" is not its only mistake; the University of Michigan, for example, has drastically revised its implementation of a version of RCM. As it happens, the report from Indiana that the site recommends clearly explains that the principles or goals identified by the Oregon committee are difficult both to attain and to measure. For example, in the twenty years of RCM at Indiana University, the projects of transparency and equity have scarcely been realized; indeed, as a department chair for five years and an associate dean for four more, I have attempted to plumb the depths of RCM several times, never entirely confident that my understanding of its operations is adequate. It is always possible that I lack sufficient analytic ability to attain this stage of enlightenment, yet, when asking my fellow administrators (one of them a senior economist) to review my conclusions, I have received little by way of correction or refinement. One thing, however, is certain: RCM works with "predictability," for it is predictable that the opacity and inequity it produces—or, at the very least, exacerbates—will continue.

Still, Oregon's promotion of the "fundamental principles" of RCM is useful to consider, as it serves as a kind of emblem of the corporatization of the contemporary university and its negative impact on the humanities and the qualitative social sciences: that is, the same disciplines that constitute Irish Studies. To put it bluntly, Oregon's and others' praise of RCM confirms the insight of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his award-winging 2005 book, that "One of the most salient features of our culture is that that there is so much bullshit."³ Let me outline the basis of this indictment.

While the University of Oregon was announcing its implementation of RCM, on the other side of the country during the same academic year, another committee in Gainesville, Florida, was mucking the same stall: rationalizing RCM as a prelude to adoption. As a committee at the University of Florida deliberated RCM's feasibility, it posted numerous PowerPoint slides online, including one in 2008 that asked the question, "Why change budget models?" It adduced several answers, including increased self-reliance, the promotion of innovative and entrepreneurial activities, and thus, the generation of new revenue sources to offset a sharp decrease in state support.⁴ This is a familiar litany: with declining support for public universities in California, Florida, Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere, academic units must become more business-like and, finally, more profitable. Even in those halcyon days of 1990 when the adoption of RCM at Indiana was accompanied by an assumption of "annual increases in state funding" to the campus, innovation and entrepreneurship were privileged as benefits of the system leading to increased grant-writing activity, to a greater participation in online course development for new "markets" of students, to a more engaged relationship with alumni, and so on.⁵ RCM, according to the 2000 report of the review committee at Indiana, encourages "more attention to mutually advantageous partnering opportunities," motivates the "review of inefficient or outdated programs," and reallocates resources "to higher...