Cinema Journal

Basically, I just want to say to your President, the Board, that the stories I've heard tonight baffle me. [voice breaking] I have a personal story, but I'm not going to share it with you because you've heard enough personal stories. I had no idea this problem was an issue. I talked about it with my (student council) president. She had no idea. We students rely on teachers. We rely on them being there. We rely on their service—and they provide it! I've had part-time teachers, many part-time teachers. I'm in a professional/technical program, and they give you service. They put in more hours than they ever get paid for. Twelve-thousand-dollars makes me sick! Oh-my-gosh.

I—I didn't even know how to react to that. Teachers going from one campus to the other? Four and five different colleges? What is this country coming to? Where is this school— I know it's not just at PCC, I know it's across the nation—but it starts at one school. We can, we can start a trend for other schools. We can make a difference. I mean—[applause] Just think about, think about everything you've heard tonight, because—it made a difference to me.

—Melanie Serrou, student, addressing an administrative hearing on contingent faculty pay at Portland Community College, October 2005

Administrator: Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste. I go by many names. Doctor, Boss, Sir, Chairman, Gentleman, Scholar, Dean, Pillar of the Community, Cheap Bastard, but you can call me the Administrator.

—Joe Camhi, "Screw U, a play in one act" performed at Portland Community College

Because the mission of higher education is under assault from so many different directions, there are many ways of understanding what we mean when we speak of the "corporatization" of the university. One valuable approach focuses on the ways campuses actually relate to business and industry in quest of revenue enhancement or "cost containment": apparel sales; sports marketing; corporate-financed research, curriculum, endowment and building; job training; direct financial investment via portfolios, pensions, and cooperative venture; the production and enclosure of [End Page 97] intellectual property; the selection of vendors for books, information technology, soda pop and construction; the purchase and provision of nonstandard labor, and so forth. Through these activities, most individual campuses and all of the various "independent" or "self-governing" institutions of the profession are "commercialized," inextricably implicated in profoundly capitalist objectives, however "non-profit" their missions. Included in this line of analysis are diverse bedfellows. Its unabashed right wing comprises those celebrating commercialization, especially the seventeen-billion-dollar-a-year for-profit education industry itself. The left wing of this approach is led by Campus, Inc. and University, Inc., respectively Geoffrey White's scathing collection of exposés of "corporate power in the ivory tower," and Jennifer Washburn's monograph on the "corporate corruption of higher education." ¹ There is also a "center" to this discourse, comprised of such widely read recent efforts by prominent university administrators like the former Harvard president Derek Bok (Universities and the Marketplace) and the acting Dean of Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, David Kirp (Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line), who claim no alternative to "partnership" with business and "making peace with the marketplace." ² It is distressing more than a few unions of the tenure-stream faculty have adopted a position similar to those of Bok and Kirp, accepting the necessity of "partnership" with corporate enterprise and adopting the protection of tenure-stream faculty "rights to intellectual property" as a higher priority than, for instance, addressing the installation of a radically multi-tiered workforce.

An important alternative understanding of the transformation of the university focuses not on commercialization, but on organizational culture. Among the best-known examples of this approach include Bill Reading's study of the ideology of "excellence," in connection with the active effort by university administrations to transform institutional culture, and Slaughter, Rhoades, and Leslie's examinations of "academic capitalism," the...