The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University (review)

As the title suggests, Ellen Schrecker's The Lost Soul of American Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the American University, is hardly a dispassionate analysis of the status of American higher education as we complete the first decade of the twenty-first century. Professor Schrecker is a faculty member (as is this reviewer); this is not the best of times to be one; and she speaks unabashedly from that perspective. The volume advances a bold and clear thesis in two parts: (a) U.S. higher education, defined most especially as the research university committed to the unfettered pursuit of truth, is threatened with irreparable damage, and (b) the source of that threat lies in a unique confluence of two developments: (1) escalating threats to academic freedom from the political right, largely in protracted response to the campus activism of the 1960s and (2) the concomitant restructuring of higher education over the past generation reflecting at once the triumph of academic capitalism and the detenuring of the faculty.

Following a chapter that overviews the concept of academic freedom and explains its centrality to the work of the university, Schrecker devotes four chapters to the documentation and analysis of threats to academic freedom during the McCarthy era, the volatile 1960s, the neoconservative backlash in the 1980s and the post-9/11 period. Having completed her survey of academic freedom threats, she devotes the last two chapters to the restructuring of higher education more generally, and of the traditional academic profession, in particular. She explains the increasing market-orientation of colleges and universities in response to an array of potent developments: the massification of higher education and the attendant expansion of institutional demands including a new emphasis on undergraduate teaching; changing federal student aid policy (moving student aid funds from institutions to students and their parents, redistributing market power); the twin economic dislocations of nationwide inflation and state government disinvestment in higher education in the face of competing, and compelling, demands from K-12 education, healthcare and correction; the expansion of administration, etc. In the face of such market-abetting adjustments, the faculty has been largely marginalized, reflected most pointedly in the decline of tenure and the increasing resort to part-time and full-time, non-tenure-track faculty to staff the instructional program.

Schrecker's account and analysis of academic freedom threats over the past half century, especially those post-9/11, provide a much needed follow-up to her pioneering work on the McCarthy era first reported in No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. In particular, she provides a much more comprehensive and systematic assessment of academic freedom controversies in the post-9/11 period than can be gleaned from the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education—the primary source, I fear, of information on the post-9/11 period for many of us. The major limitation of her analysis is the very expansive conception of academic freedom with which she is operating. Virtually any attack on the utterances of a faculty member is treated as ipso facto an attack on academic freedom itself—irrespective of whether it be media criticism of impolitic off-campus utterances, the sensational charges of a Bill O'Reilly against someone who happens to be faculty member, actual direct attempts at interfering with classroom teaching or scholarly publication, or violations of faculty prerogatives in academic governance. As Schrecker herself puts it:

While academic governance is a less clear cut component of academic freedom than teaching or research, it is equally crucial. Without a say over the conditions of their employment, professors cannot exercise the autonomy they need in order to fulfill their professional obligations. If the educational quality and intellectual integrity of their institutions is to be maintained, faculty members must participate [End...