Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment by Ian Angus (review)

Angus, a professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, considers the dramatic changes that are occurring to universities in post-Fordist, neoliberal western societies. In the first three chapters of this short book Angus presents his view of what a university is, the concept of education as enlightenment, and a brief history of the university. Chapters 4 through 6 present a shifting model of the university from its traditional roots to one as a corporation [in its pejorative and legal senses] with knowledge becoming a commodity and individualized product. Two notes follow the chapters and clarify Angus’s use of the term “enlightenment”: “humans’ attempt to inform their lives through relationship with thought” (134), and the integration of technology and science, which he calls “techno-science.”

Economic considerations are primary drivers of the modern neoliberal university rather than an “impractical” traditional liberal arts education – a place of enlightenment. The university has become a place of imbibing the individualistic discourses of commodification and corporatization. Historical social and public purposes of the university are being abandoned for a new focus on knowledge transmission, instrumentalism, and corporatism. Universities are simply becoming another public-private partnership with information transmitted to students for credential, career, and individual marketing purposes, not for the love of enquiry itself.

As a corporation, the university includes five groups: owners (taxpayers through government), managers (university administration), workers (faculty and students), products (students with credentials), and support staff. As different classes of universities are created (research and training) different classes of university instructors have also emerged (techno-science research, liberal arts and professional, and sessional). Indeed, in the United States 70 per cent of the professoriate consists of untenured, low paid, part-time, or sessional contract workers. These classes of the university professoriate command different levels of salary, funding, and resources and ultimately impact the status of the university on an increasingly globalized postsecondary education marketplace. Angus responds to class rankings by calling for professors to unionize.

One of the major forces in university education is workers’ belief that “the confinement of a worker’s education to job training … is undermining the university.” (58) Using classic Marxist analysis promoted by the student movements of the 1960s the university was viewed an agent for the bourgeoisie to maintain class rule. Angus argues that the use of universities for job training “overwhelms higher self-fulfilment and self-knowledge” (58) that will forever be kept from the working classes if the trend towards training continues.

The drift towards for-profit and corporate universities in the United States is worrying. Vestiges of private universities are appearing in Canada. The two drivers leading towards the corporate university are underfunding and the corporate world’s efforts to appropriate university investment in technological infrastructure by using public money to supplement or replace expensive investments in research and development. Extending the argument, university research and development centres “sponsored” by corporations become corporate instruments created to increase profit making. Increasingly, publicly generated and readily available knowledge is becoming privately owned and controlled. (71) Corporate involvement in universities is encouraged by governments through the reduction in corporate taxes paid and tax write-offs for research and development. As public funding is removed, universities do not serve the public but operate within the national economy producing a product for the market – essentially privatizing the work universities do.

Underfunding is caused by the state withdrawing public funds that have traditionally supported universities and the liberal arts in particular. Corporations have moved in offering much needed dollars for research in the techno-sciences. Indeed, in the recent 2013 Canadian Federal budget $37 million in annual university grant funding will be made available to support research partnerships with industry, promoting increasing corporate involvement and marginalizing funding for liberal arts initiatives. Corporate brands appear, naming rights to buildings and institutes are prominently displayed, and product monopolies are granted, “effectively appropriating the needs of students, faculty and staff as a private source of income.” (80)

If university administrators are managers then students are consumers. The...