The Twenty-First-Century University and the Market: What Price Economic Viability?

In the fall of 1999, I co-taught a graduate course on the future of U.S. universities. We addressed a number of volatile topics in this course--the possible abolition of academic tenure, the challenge that poststructuralism poses to objectivity, the ascendance of technological and professional subjects over the liberal arts core--but of all the subjects we introduced, the one that most alarmed our students was the discussion of university finance. More specifically, what horrified our students was the idea that U.S. universities might be sacrificing the cherished ideals associated with academic freedom for the market values that come with corporate sponsorship.

Since the seminar ended, changes in university finance have become a topic of national debate. At a conference on the Future of the City of Intellect that I attended in February 2000, for example, David Noble blew the cover on UCLA's agreement to market its continuing education courses through UNext.com--without, Noble pointed out, the consent of either the University Board of Regents or the professors who developed the course materials for in-house use. That same month, Richard Ohmann published an essay in Academe that attributes the corporatization of the university to the global march of capitalism and the political right's revenge against sixties radicalism. In the March 2000 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn exposed what they call the "kept university," and, also in March, an op-ed piece by Arthur Levine, published in the New York Times in support of potentially lucrative distance learning, drew a firestorm of responses from people who advocate face-to-face education, despite its expense. Even more recently, on 3 April 2000, Columbia University announced the formation of its online, for-profit partnership with the New York Public Library, the British Library, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the London School of Economics, and Cambridge University Press (Arenson). When interviewed about whether he would contribute to Fathom.com, the distance-learning venture, the historian Simon Schama said that he was too busy making a sixteen-part series on the history of Britain for the bbc, which is also to be delivered online, but that "one day," he'd love to be a part of Fathom.

Given the volume of discussion now appearing in the press, it is impossible for me to cover all of the components of this complex subject. Instead of trying for coverage, I will address the subject of university finance by providing partial answers to three questions: (1) how has the prevalent model of university finance changed in the last two decades? (2) what kinds of responses have U.S. universities offered to these changes? And (3) how is the future of the university linked to the fate of its least economically productive unit, the humanities? While I have statistical data to back up much of what I say here, in the last section in particular I rely on theoretical assertions and my own personal convictions to make my case. I turn to theory and feelings in the end for reasons that are both historical and theoretical: at this historical moment, I argue, a constellation of factors makes the university's openness to corporate sponsorship seem unproblematic. In this context, in which values associated with the market have pervaded even the institution where critical theory is produced, we have no choice but to assert the imperative of an alternative to the market if we are to save the possibility of critique.

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The subject of university finance is complicated by the wide range of institutions that make up the university system in the U.S. In addition to the 125 institutions that the Carnegie Classification system designates "research universities," the system of tertiary educational institutions includes four-year liberal arts colleges, two-year community or local colleges, and a...