Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn

1. The Ends of Education

1 The Ends of Education _ h igher education today seems to reside in the two cities of dickensian fame. More students, faculty, and campuses. Bountiful endowments. its own celestial beings. a program for every proclivity. lifelong learning. an abundance of patents, strategic partnerships, and product lines. Whether these attributes make for the best of times or the worst is the subject of considerable debate. the same might be said for escalating student debt, erosion of tenure, commercialization, heightened accountability, and outcomes assessment. the queasy mix of celebratory expansion and fitful proclamations of crisis that comprises the current range of opinion on the topic speaks above all to the challenges of evaluating the purposes of higher education for self and society. What once appeared to be a secure confluence of interest between individual and social enrichment, private and public good, professional and national allegiance, no longer abides the same measures of certainty. the feeling of lack amid such abundance poses anew the question of what education is for. the characterization of our world as a knowledge society where selfmanaged professionals reign would seem to settle the matter once and for all.1 For professionals, knowledge is both raw material and finished product. enlightened management is predicated on ceaseless learning. the rise of a professional-managerial stratum to the leadership of society serves to anchor the university at the central nexus of social class, nation, market, and state. and yet for those very reasons, the university stands as a bellwether of societal fissures and points to the discrepancies between what is promised and what is possible, between what counts as accomplishment and what points 2 • ChapteR 1 to failure. nor does knowledge itself guarantee success, a lesson painfully in evidence when experts responsible for managing a range of disasters from the environmental to the economic report that they could not imagine, let alone model, what actually took place. paradoxically, the number of people who can claim to be university-trained professionals continues to rise. the university measures its success in terms of this expansion, yet both professionals and universities have lost their commanding purchase on the means and end of knowledge production. the professional turn is at once a sign of growth and evacuation, democratization and selectivity, expansion and disorientation in the conditions and applications of knowledge work. self-rule yields to the proliferation of managerial protocols. specialized domains of expertise jostle restlessly with the generalized conditions of information processing and judgment. hence, the university has become more than a strategic industry that explains and encapsulates american global might—or its diminution and decay. it is also key in rendering an understanding of what our society is and is not. if the university is to teach these lessons to either its denizens or detractors , a comprehensive approach is required, one that looks at what education is for, at who decides its contents and delivers its forms, and at what is taught and how. yet any effort at a broad understanding quickly gets ensnared in a kind of double bind. higher education is at once central to the societal enterprise and undervalued for what it offers. its traditional value derives from the fact that it is exceptional in its norms of comportment and exemplary in its excellence. yet it is also increasingly captive to external measures of performance and productivity. higher education is attacked as an ivory tower, yet these parapets can no longer defend it. indeed, the production, dissemination, and evaluation of what counts as literacy is not contained by cloistered walls but suggests a vast industrial complex of communications media, technoscience , and knowledge-based service in which the university is but one node among many. as a consequence, the neat divide between what is inside and outside the university, whether it be between policy and pedagogy, marketdriven instrumentality and education for itself, or worker and student, cannot any longer be sustained. Whither autonomy? in 1968, two sociologists looked at the university in the United states and declared an “academic revolution.” What Christopher Jencks and david Riesman were referring to was not the social upheaval on campus spearheaded by antiwar activists but a shift in the locus of power and authority from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, when trustees and presidents ruled to the advent of a “unified faculty” that had an informal veto. Jencks and Riesman found that “the shape of american higher education is largely the...