The Limits of Culture: Latino Studies, Diversity Management, and the Corporate University

A new set of possibilities—for some, an ominous set—confronts Latino cultural studies in the age of globalization, migration, and the corporatization of the university.

Growing minority enrollments, led by Latinas/os,¹ have prompted many colleges and universities to expand services and courses related to multiculturalism; administrators are reportedly worried they won't be ready for the increasingly diverse student populations predicted for coming years. There are new commitments to expand access to higher education for Latinas/os, often in conjunction with private monies. In June 2000, for example, President Bill Clinton announced the formation of the 2010 Alliance, a partnership of corporate, foundation, and community leaders that will seek to double the number of Latino students who graduate from college over the next ten years. In describing the program, Clinton was careful to not lay the blame for low retention rates on Latino students but rather on structural questions of access (Kiviat 2000, A39). In September 1999, Bill and Melinda Gates pledged to spend $1 billion over twenty years to send twenty thousand low-income minority students to college; the Hispanic Scholarship Fund will help administer the program.

Unfortunately, these commitments come with an agenda that seems antithetical to the activist roots of Latino studies: the articulation of multiculturalism to job training in the global economy. Chicano studies and Puerto Rican studies grew out of the nationalist movements of the 1960s; movement leaders were skeptical of the university as an institution but also hopeful that it would serve as a space of critique of the military-industrial complex as well as a site of knowledge production that would benefit local Latino communities. Now it would seem, however, that the university

2—given its increasing alliances, even conflation, with big business and government—is no longer really available as a site of critique. Although these alliances always existed to some degree, they have now multiplied; previously a source of embarrassment, they are trumpeted as indicators of success. At the summer 2000 meeting of the National Governors Association held at Pennsylvania State University, Alan Greenspan (2000), chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, credited the “free flow” of information between universities, business, and government for U.S. economic growth:

If we are to remain pre-eminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, the U.S. system of higher education must remain the world's leader in generating scientific and technological breakthroughs and in preparing workers to meet the evolving demands for skilled labor…. In a global environment in which prospects for economic growth now depend importantly on a country's capacity to develop and apply new technologies, our universities are envied around the world. The payoffs—in terms of the flow of expertise, new products and startup companies, for example—have been impressive. Perhaps the most frequently cited measures of our success have been the emergence of significant centers of commercial innovation and entrepreneurship where creative ideas flow freely between local academic scholars and those in industry.

In the 11 July 2000 edition of the Penn State Newswire, the university used the conference, held at its Research Park, to publicize its own status as the “number 2 university in the country in industry-sponsored research.” As Bill Readings argued in his 1996 The University in Ruins, the decline of the nation-state and the ascendancy of the transnational corporation have transformed the university's mission from one of citizen production for the nation-state to worker production for the global economy. Indeed, we have reached the rather unusual historical moment when big business joins forces with universities to defend affirmative action in the interest of developing a diverse and well-trained workforce. Corporate support figured significantly in the University of Michigan's recent court victory in a battle over its affirmative action admissions policies; a federal judge ruled in favor of the policies and cited, among other...