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| When Corporations Rule the World (Photo credit: elycefeliz) |
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- Title:
- The role of higher education in the 21st century: collaborator or counterweight?
- Authors:
- Castagnera, James Ottavio
- Source:
- Change; September/October 2001, Vol. 33 Issue 5, p39-43, 5p
- Physical Description:
- Bibliography
- Document Type:
- Article
- Subjects:
- Higher education -- Aims & objectives; Education & politics; Business & education
- Abstract:
- The time has come for higher education to fight for free speech and social justice. The reaction of higher education to commercial challenges, academic liberty, and social justice has been patchy at best. Higher education needs to become adept at moving from collaboration with Big Business and Big Government to confrontation. This must be done even at the risk of losing corporate and government backing and the prospect of litigation. A number of America's several thousands institutions of higher education are gradually, but certainly, showing a willingness to use their virtual global reach to recognize and help rectify the injustices that abound beyond their campus boundaries. It is uncertain whether higher education possesses the collective will to use its influence, however.
- ISSN:
- 00091383
- DOI:
- 10.1080/00091380109601817
- Accession Number:
- 503803232
- Database:
- Education Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
The Role of Higher Education in the 21st Century
Collaborator or Counterweight?
The
December 8, 2000, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reported
that an article in the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy,
in which the authors had criticized the alleged behavior of Boise
Cascade Corporation toward workers in its Mexican facilities, was
withdrawn by the University of Denver after the corporation threatened a
disparagement and defamation lawsuit.
The
report is reminiscent of earlier articles in The Chronicle and elsewhere
concerning "slap suits" against academics whose scholarship is critical
of corporate interests, and other forms of corporate retaliation
against universities that have taken stands against selling sweatshop
goods. As the University of Denver's acquiescence suggests, higher
education's response to such corporate challenges to age-old principles
of academic freedom and social justice has been uneven at best.
The
21st century is no time tot faint-heartedness in higher education.
Rather, this should be a time when we champion free speech and social
justice, even at the risk of our own prosperity. No one else can do it.
In
1967, John Kenneth Galbraith, in The New Industrial State, postulated a
three-legged stool on which the well-being of American society rested:
Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor. These legs kept one another
in check, a sort of socio-political supplementation to the political
checks and balances outlined in the Constitution. Galbraith's thesis was
correct in its fundamental features. But by the 1990s, Robert Reich--in
many ways Galbraith's intellectual successor at Harvard--would express
his concern in The Work of Nations about the failure of that balance,
due to the shift from a manufacturing to a services economy and the
decline of organized labor.
When Galbraith
was writing, in the 1950s and 1960s, labor represented one in three
American workers, and a typical American CEO took home 40 times the
salary of the worker on the shop floor--a sum that, when reduced by our
steeply graduated income tax, amounted to only 12 times the worker's
wages. By 1988, the number of unionized workers in the private sector
had fallen to one in 10, and CEOs were enjoying 70 times more after-tax
income than average workers.
In this brave
new world, Reich concluded, the information manipulators--in his terms
the "symbolic analysts"--are the dominant subspecies. Indeed, this is
true even within the labor movement: The most prominent private-sector
unions in America are those representing professional athletes and
entertainers. Whatever happened to Cezar Chavez? Today's big name on the
border is NAFTA.
A NEW ROLE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
Let
me suggest that higher education should aim at filling the vacuum left
by Big Labor in Galbraith's construct of The New Industrial State. Its
capacity to serve as a countervailing force will rest on one or more of
the following features of the contemporary university:
• Vastly increasing endowments, as we see developing at the Ivies and universities of analogous high quality and prestige;
•
Expanding geographic reach via multiple campuses--for example, Penn
State's 1997 upgrade of 14 of its regional campuses from two- to
four-year colleges;
• Direct competition
with the for-profits, such as the University of Phoenix, in the
distance-education market, which is being more or less successfully
attempted by some large universities and systems; and
•
Consortia of small colleges, and/or small-college affiliations with a
larger (possibly "hub") institutions, a strategy being pursued, for
instance, by a group of small Catholic colleges in eastern Pennsylvania.
This
suggestion and list of features, of course, conjure memories of the
critique of the "megaversity" that emerged from such works as C. Wright
Mills's The Power Elite. Admittedly, "mega" is a part of what higher
education must be if it is to be a co-equal member of the triumvirate
upon which 21st-century American society will rest. The small,
independent college will not be able to play this role except where it
is unusually well endowed or affiliated with a major religion or
consortium.
If higher education is to
perform the crucial task I have proposed for it in 21st-century America,
it must take a page from the history of organized labor in the unions'
heyday. Like Big Labor at its zenith, higher education needs to become
adept at shifting from the right foot of collaboration with Big Business
and Big Government to the left foot of confrontation. It must do this
even at the price of lost corporate and government support, and even in
the teeth of threatened litigation, when the issue is academic freedom
or social justice.
Indeed, many public
university systems are striving to build their alumni support and
endowments so as to gain a measure of independence from the strings
attached to government purses. And many church-affiliated institutions,
especially Catholic universities, are returning to their religious roots
and for the first time in a long while are publicly celebrating--even
marketing--their moral and doctrinal orientations.
What
of the prospects of success for higher education in the
sometimes-confrontational posture I am proposing? In his sweeping survey
in Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto says that the monasteries that survived the Dark Ages
triumphed only by being needed. They also survived by being distinct
from government and the marketplace. The more that colleges and
universities morph to match their for-profit competition, the more they
incapacitate themselves to act as a counterweight to those other
powerful forces.
In a recent article in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia's Arthur Levine listed nine
"inevitable changes" that colleges and universities experience in the
coming decades, such as competing with "more numerous and diverse"
providers of higher education. But the more readily they accept Levine's
nine changes as "inevitable" and collaborate in their coming about
without carefully considering the merit of each--followed by a conscious
decision to accept or oppose it--the less they will be able to function
as free agents influencing American society.
TRUTH-TELLING IN THE INFOTAINMENT AGE
As
David Halberstam observed in The Next Century, America is more than
ever an "entertainment-driven society." A felling example is the
contrast between the media coverage of the Vietnam War and the coverage
of the Gulf War some two decades later. Stanley Karnow wrote of the 1968
Tet offensive, "After years of viewing the war on television, Americans
at home had become accustomed to a familiar pattern of images....The
screen often portrayed human agony in scenes of the wounded and dying on
both sides....[M]ostly it transmitted the grueling reality of the
struggle...punctuated periodically by moments of horror."
By
contrast, the Gulf War was quick, high-tech, and portrayed on American
television as if it were a video game. Satellite photos were combined
with simulations to feed American viewers sanitized images, depicting no
more real blood and pain than a quick game of "Space Invaders."
Thus,
barbarism passed beyond the merely banal to the visually alluring. The
film industry has responded to, and in turn reinforced, its audience's
fascination with the visually unusual and compelling. From George
Lucas's breakthrough Star Wars films of the 1970s and 1980s to The
Perfect Storm last year, special effects--and, increasingly,
computer-generated visuals--are at the heart of most blockbuster hits.
If it can be imagined, it can be depicted.
This
power is potentially hazardous. Severo Ornstein, writing in the journal
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, points out, "Today
the art of simulation has developed to the point that it has become
necessary to identify television simulations as artificial, so we won't
think we are seeing the real thing....When employed for political
purposes, illusion becomes diabolical and deception becomes downright
dangerous."
If higher education must
differentiate itself from business and government in order to serve as a
counterweight to them, one of the fundamental ways it must do so is in
adhering to a strict code of truth-seeking and truth-telling. Even if
particular institutions of higher learning are unwilling to take
unpopular stands on controversial issues, they must share consensus on
this code or run the risk of abrogating their claims to being genuine
educational institutions. Are we not entitled to expect a higher level
of integrity from our universities than we anticipate when we turn on
our TVs?
This expectation of integrity
means that when universities use the power of technology to lie as
governments and businesses do, it seems more scandalous. Witness the
University of Wisconsin's embarrassment when it was "exposed" in a
Chronicle article on Nov. 24, 2000:
The
cover of its new admissions brochure displayed a photograph of happy
U.W. students attending a football game at their home stadium--a
photograph that turned out to have been doctored. The original picture
contained no black faces, but U.W. officials had desperately wanted
their admissions materials to reflect a diverse student body. So, using
photo-design software, the director of university publications and the
director of undergraduate admissions simply asked their staff to add
one.
Coming now full circle, let us
consider in greater depth the University of Denver's decision to
withdraw an article previously published in one of its law reviews, when
faced with a major corporation's threat to sue. Let us begin by
agreeing, if we can, that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. And
let us assume--purely for argument's sake--that the censored article is
inaccurate, or even that it is defamatory. What ought the university to
have done, or offered to do, in the face of Boise Cascade's threatened
legal action? Let us compare what it did do to what Cornell University
did when faced with a similar situation.
In
1998, Professor Kate L. Bronfenbrenner of Cornell's School of
Industrial Relations was sued by Beverly Enterprises, Inc., one of the
nation's largest nursing home chains. Beverly accused the professor of
lying about the company's labor relations record to members of Congress
and in her published scholarship. Bronfenbrenner reportedly told
Democratic Congressmen at a town hall meeting that Beverly had a
"long-established record of egregious labor-law violations in the
context of union-organizing campaigns." The corporation sued her for
defamation. Cornell hired attorneys and successfully defended the suit
on its faculty member's behalf.
In the wake
of Beverly Enterprises, Inc. vs. Bronfenbrenner, faculty around the
country were understandably concerned that "slap suits" would become
more common. At Rider University, the American Association of University
Professors (AAUP) came to the negotiating table in summer 1999 with a
proposal aimed at ensuring that the university would defend any faculty
member who was named in any such "slap suit." The university, to its
credit, agreed to a new provision in the collective bargaining agreement
that will provide such protection, and then obtained the appropriate
insurance to cover any such claims.
In
short, my contention--which I hope is shared by the great majority of my
readers--is that a university must do at a minimum two things to think
of itself as a real university: seek the truth and defend those who try
to tell the truth under the institution's auspices. Absent a strict
adherence to these two baseline principles, an institution ceases to be a
university, no matter how many sports teams it fields, how many
academic programs it offers, or how many campus amenities its students
enjoy. The institution may be an information purveyor or a training
school or a research center, but it has forfeited the right to call
itself a university.
INSTITUTIONAL ACTIVISM IN THE NEW CENTURY
Now
comes the hard part, where I expect that many of my readers and I will
part company. For I argue that the two baseline principles outlined
above are only that: credentials that qualify an institution to call
itself a university. But while a labor union must fairly and vigorously
represent its members, a great union will also put its resources at risk
in order to organize unrepresented workers. A great university likewise
will reach out and actively oppose injustice.
This
is not the view of most universities today. Just as many unions have
long since circled their wagons, emphasizing preservation of existing
power bases over the organization of new constituencies, so too have
many--perhaps most--universities taken the path of cautious
conservatism. Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, former president of Notre
Dame University, wrote in the February 2 issue of The Chronicle,
When
I was a college president, I often spoke out on national issues, even
when they didn't pertain to academic life. Yet nowadays, I don't find
many college presidents commenting on such issues on the front page of
The New York Times or in any of the country's other major news outlets.
Once upon a time chief executives in higher education talked to the
press about military policy in the same breath as the Constitutional
amendment for the 18-year-olds' vote, but I wonder whether we hear them
taking stands on similar topics now.
Father
Hesburgh cites a recent American Council on Education (ACE) report,
which concluded, "[T]he vast majority of Americans rarely hear college
presidents comment on issues of national importance, and when they do,
they believe institutional needs rather than those of the students or
the wider community drive such comments." He offers several reasons why
this has happened. Among them is "that presidents must play an
ever-larger role in raising money for their institutions--and often from
supporters who have strong views on what presidents should or shouldn't
say to the press."
Today colleges feel
free to draw their CEOs from the ranks of development officers, a
practice that to my knowledge was almost unheard of even two decades
ago. In current searches for college presidents, it seems that the
absence of the initials "PhD" after the candidate's name is not
necessarily an impediment if the fund-raising record is substantial.
Our
students, too, have for the most part been quiet since the tumultuous
late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1980s witnessed a rush to law and
business schools for JDs and MBAs, then on to the M&A (merger and
acquisition) practices of the nation's big accounting, law, and
investment banking firms. During the latter half of the 1990s,
undergraduates couldn't wait--and sometimes didn't--to establish their
own dot-com business ventures.
But as the
last decade of the last century of the old millennium came to a close,
there were stirrings in at least some of our student bodies. Students at
universities across the country became energized--at least
temporarily--by the anti-sweatshop movement. Initial corporate responses
to these new stirrings of student unrest included withdrawals of sports
sponsorships. But these punitive reactions were rapidly replaced by the
formation of the Fair Labor Association, an anti-sweatshop consortium
consisting of such major manufacturers as Nike and Reebok and some 140
institutions of higher learning.
The Fair
Labor Association may be compared by critics to the company unions that
proliferated in the early part of the 20th century, before they were
outlawed by the 1936 passage of the National Labor Relations Act. The
Worker Rights Consortium, a more militant anti-sweatshop organization,
operates independently, and--perhaps not surprisingly--has come under
fire from corporate members of the Fair Labor Association. Said a Nike
spokesman of the consortium recently, "It's just parachuting into a
country, conducting a few interviews, and writing a report in a few
days. Thorough monitoring involves culling through records, matching up
pay stubs, getting a sense of the local practices and culture. There is a
lot more involved in auditing and monitoring than what that report
represents."
The important point for my
purposes here is not whether the Fair Labor Association or the Worker
Rights Consortium has got it right about any particular allegation of
sweatshop abuses. What matters here is that the two groups appear to be
engaged in dialogue and debate about the truth behind such labor-abuse
accusations. This is precisely the sort of conversation that is denied
to higher education's constituencies when a corporation threatens to sue
or to withdraw sponsorship and the targeted institution bows to the
threat.
Slowly but surely, however, at
least some of America's several thousand institutions of higher
education are manifesting a willingness to use their virtual global
reach to identify and help address the inequities that proliferate
beyond their campus boundaries.
The record
to date suggests that such initiatives are not nearly as risky as some
may fear. Just as American companies in the 1940s and 1950s reached
accommodations with organized labor because they needed the workers
represented by those unions, so too does the quick creation of the Fair
Labor Association suggest a recognition among apparel manufacturers like
Nike and Reebok that they need big-time college athletics. By
extension, corporations need our graduates, our scientists, our
consultants--in short, our knowledge. Knowledge is capital. As such, it
affords us leverage.
Does higher education
possess the collective will to exercise that leverage? I do not know.
But let me suggest that many big issues of our times cry out for us to
demonstrate that will. Father Hesburgh points to affirmative action and
"developing education programs that seek to improve the status of
women--especially in Asia, South America, and Africa, where many are
second-class citizens"--as issues he would address, were he still a
university CEO. Women's rights, affirmative action, and the
anti-sweatshop movement can all be characterized as battles in a global
struggle to end the exploitation of human beings. Environmentalism,
community outreach, and health research are related issues on which
higher education could also speak out.
A
key question in my view is, How will higher education use its global
reach and knowledge capital, particularly as those have been enhanced by
communication technology, in the 21st century?
To
date, the discourse has been a self-referential one, centered on the
displacement of traditional classroom teaching by distance learning. To
borrow the words of the ACE report, it has focused on "institutional
needs rather than those of...the wider community." Much less discussed
is the potential for the Internet to make American higher education a
force for fair play and human dignity in the international arena. Global
reach brings with it global responsibilities. Knowledge is not only
capital--it is power. Whether that power will be focused upon the narrow
concerns of individual institutions or combined for the good of "the
wider community" is a defining choice for higher education.
RESOURCES
•
Basinger, Julianne. "500 Academics Sign Petition Protesting Lawsuit
Against Cornell U. Professor," The Chronicle of Higher Education, March
20, 1998, p. A14.
• Clegg, Roger. "Photographs and Fraud Over Race," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 24, 2000, p. B17.
•
Ebo, Bosah. "War as Popular Culture: The Gulf Conflict and the
Technology of Illusionary Entertainment," Journal of American Culture,
Fall 1995, pp. 19-20.
• Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, New York: Scribner, 1995, pp. 56-59.
• Galbraith, John Kenneth. The New Industrial State, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1967, pp. 262-282.
• Halberstam, David. The Next Century, William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1991, p. 104.
•
Hesburgh, Theodore M. "Where Are College Presidents' Voices on
Important Public Issues?" The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2,
2001, p. B20.
• Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History, New York: The Viking Press, 1983, p. 523.
• Levine, Arthur E. "The Future of Colleges: 9 Inevitable Changes," The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 27, 2000, p. B10.
• Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite, New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
•
Monaghan, Peter, "A Journal Article is Expunged and Its Authors Cry
Foul," The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 8, 2000, p. A14.
•
Ornstein, Severo M. "Simulation and Dissimulation," Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility, Summer 1989, Vol. 7, No. 3, p. 1
• Reich, Robert B. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
•
Van Der Werf, Martin. "Labor Violations Found at Factory Used for
College Apparel," The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2001,
p. A20.
~~~~~~~~
By James Ottavio Castagnera
James
Ottavio Castagnera is the associate provost and associate rice
president for academic affairs at Rider University. However, the views
expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent
those of Rider or any of his colleagues there.
Source: Change, September/October 2001, Vol. 33 Issue 5, p39, 5p
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