of teaching and the role of the professoriate has been transformed. The institutionalization of

Transcription

1 Neoliberalism and Academic Freedom Academic freedom in institutions of higher education has come under siege. The nature of teaching and the role of the professoriate has been transformed. The institutionalization of neoliberal ideology in higher education caused this shift. Short on federal funds but desperate to stay competitive, college administrators adopted the logic of the free-market in order to stay financially afloat. In the name of efficiency, corporate-minded managers undercut professors longstanding traditions of freedom of speech, thought, and action by reducing the full-time, tenure-track labor force. Fragmenting the professoriate has provided administrators with ways to control college teachers. This administrative authority is then used to determine what academics research, write, and teach. Corporate managers disaggregate the professoriate because tenure provides professors with the necessary academic freedom to ask hard questions. The greatest obstacle to the complete neoliberalization of American higher education is the university professor. Academics have strong and influential voices on college campuses and beyond. Professors have been trained to pose difficult, probing questions and the occupational autonomy to ask them. As Steven C. Ward argues in Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education, unchecked and unrestrained college professors are considered too dangerous to corporateminded administrators. As a result, neoliberal reforms attack the tenured professoriate in order to silence them. A prerequisite for complete neoliberalization, according to Ward, is a prostrate and weakened teaching corps. 1 In order to overcome the power and freedom of professors, neoliberal reformers target tenure in order to disaggregate educators into antagonistic blocs. At state-funded universities, in 1 Steven C. Ward, Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education (New York: Routledge, 2012), 31. 1

2 particular, neoliberals rely upon the financial crunch to generate internal squabbles between teachers on various employment tracks. While it is difficult to remove an existing faculty member with tenure, administrators oftentimes choose not to fill the positions of retired faculty members with young full-time, tenure-track scholars. Instead, these jobs go to part-time teachers, adjuncts, or lecturers. Administrators create these different academic hierarchies tenure-track, adjuncts, lecturers, graduate student teaching assistants to dismantle the teaching faculty s common ground. The various levels divide professors. Adjuncts and lecturers want what professors have. Full-time professors, on the other hand, oftentimes want to safeguard their salaries, benefits, and autonomy. Teaching assistants are desperate for any scraps left behind. Cary Nelson persuasively demonstrates that administrators establish multiple tiers for compensation in order to pit faculty members against each other. Oftentimes, professors turn inwards to protect their unstable financial future. Fragmenting the teaching force makes it increasingly difficult for the profession to act collectively since the profession itself was greatly reduced in size, scope, and power. The corporate project is so successful because professors inadvertently contribute to the erosion of their own power by isolating themselves in hermetically sealed employment tracks. 2 Reformers are in the process of dismantling the full-time, tenure track professoriate. Academics resemble the industrial proletariat: poorly paid, easily replaceable, cogs in a marketbased machine. The results are staggering and affect all manner of institutions. In 1999, at Yale University, the tenure-track faculty accounted for only 30 percent of the workforce. Adjuncts made up another 30 percent. Shockingly, graduate students composed 40 percent of the teachers. At New York University in 1999, graduate students taught 54.8 percent of undergraduate classes. 2 Ward, Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education, 57, 62; Cary Nelson, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),

3 A 2012 survey by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce confirms these numbers: only 27 percent of faculty at all American universities is on the full-time, tenure-track. This challenge to tenure is cloaked in terms of efficiency. Destroying this employment protection, reformers argue, cuts costs and removes grizzled, unsuccessful teachers from their posts. In reality, however, parttimers can be controlled. Disaggregation has allowed corporate administrators to wrest control from professors over the content of college educations. 3 Fragmenting the faculty generates a professoriate without academic freedom. Neoliberals argue that professors must be accountable for their teaching. Neoliberal ideology insists that all workers must be held to high standards and produce commodities that benefit the marketplace. All laborers are judged on their ability to achieve this goal neoliberals seek ways to measure performance. Neoliberal policymakers within institutions of higher education implement a variety of mechanisms that measure professors work. Under the guise of improving the teaching corps and cutting through red tape, corporate leaders demand that professors provide tangible proof of the success of their courses. Classes that do not have demonstrable utility are pushed to the wayside. In this way, neoliberalism challenges faculty autonomy and generates an undergraduate curriculum that is beholden to the free-market. Classes and subjects that do not seamlessly dovetail with the corporate world are deemed superfluous and wasteful. Administrators often turn to digital technology to hold professors accountable and measure educational success. Before the introduction of computers and online learning into 3 Ellen Schrecker, The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University (New York: New Press, 2010), ; Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, eds., Steal This University; The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (New York: Routledge, 2003), 66-67; The Coalition on the Academic Workforce, A Portrait of Part- Time Faculty Members: A Summary of Findings on Part-Time Faculty Respondents to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce Survey of Contingent Faculty Members (Washington, D.C.: CAW, June 2012). 3

4 school settings, it was difficult for university leadership to have any idea of what actually occurred in classrooms on a day-to-day basis. Administrators could not attend every undergraduate lecture of every professor. This faculty autonomy concerned neoliberal reformers. Professors, they feared, could say whatever they wanted in their classrooms and engage with any subject (even when it conflicted with the greater mission of the university). Computers solved this problem. In recent years, at public colleges, in particular, professors have been increasingly required to demonstrate that they were delivering the curricular or research goods necessary for the organization to reach the output goals established by the state. Both the state and the university administration adopted constant surveillance policies, which mandated that professors post syllabi, lesson plans, and oftentimes complete lecture notes onto digital forums. Neoliberalminded administrators then can oversee the knowledge delivery on their campuses. Digital communication alleviated the fact that professors were not to be trusted. Managers adopted technologically savvy accountability mechanisms to watch, and control, their labor force. The all-seeing eye of university administration and state managers disciplines professors into tailoring their subject matter to the needs and wants of its employer. Accountability promotes uniformity and standardization. 4 Universities also turn to financial incentives to trade professors for their allegiance. Some faculty members, especially those at major research institutions, surrender their academic 4 Ward, Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education, 8, 9. The use of the word disciplines here is no accident. In fact, Gaye Tuchman s Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University directly references Michel Foucault s Discipline and Punishment in her discussion of higher education s accountability frenzy. Tuchman writes that the accountability regime appears to resemble Foucault s panopticon a surveillance machine akin to a prison constructed so that a jailer can see all of the prisoners, but none of them can see him. Tuchman argues that Administrators seek to audit the behavior of the professoriate; however, the professors cannot see the activities of the administrators, which may be hidden behind the curtain of transparency. Neoliberal managers force adherence to their audit culture by normalizing it. In many universities, professors literally see no alternative other than succumbing to it. See: Gaye Tuchman, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 4

5 independence in exchange for research support. Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie s Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University reveals that neoliberals hold professors accountable by offering them more resources in the form of research money or discretionary time to do their own investigations. Professors are bought off by the neoliberal project money incorporates them into the system. Similarly, professors at a wide variety of colleges accept learning outcome measures in their disciplines in order to qualify for salary bumps based on the performance of their students. Administrators provide incentives through direct awards and recognition in exchange for auditing reports that chronicle classroom activities. Neoliberalism, in short, saps the intellectual autonomy of professors by forcing faculty members into serving the accountability regime. Whereas some institutions coerce professors into demonstrating the behind-the-scenes action of their courses through digital oversight, many other universities bring professors into the fold by offering carrots (money) in exchange for the stick (academic standardization). Either way, professors lose their freedoms. Administrators are able to control them demanding what is taught, how it is to be taught, and what materials can be used. Whether through computers or incentives, neoliberalism manages to insert accountability mechanisms into college classrooms. 5 Quietly, corporate administrators have robbed academics of their academic freedom. American institutions of higher education no longer are bastions of free thought and inquiry. The first step towards changing this unfortunate reality is recognizing that it exists. 5 Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 17, 225; Gareth Williams, ed., The Enterprising University: Reform, Excellence, and Equity (Philadelphia: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, 2003), 31; Ward, Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education, 62. 5