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By Root 696 0

higher education should attach prices to individual facts. Desks could be equipped with credit-card-swipers. As a professor provides a fact, students swipe their credit cards. Of course, since there is no expert here, the idea is that anyone could conceivably provide the facts to students. No need to hire fancy Ph.D. types to do such menial work. On this view, knowledge, though cast as a commodity, is nothing more than lists of facts. To capitalize on this product line, Stephen even envisions that facts be assigned different prices: charge one price for showing how to start a dangerous chemical reaction, he says, and charge an even higher price for showing how to end it. Of course, none of this is possible unless we privatize higher education. We simply have to make it conform to the marketplace, and the only way to do that is privatization.

So, how does higher education get privatized? Here’s how. In Universities and Corporate Universities, Peter Jarvis notes that beginning in the 1980s:

[The] neoliberal monetarist government [of the U.K., decreased] the funding levels of the universities so that they had to become more competitive. This has resulted in many of the traditional universities [in the U.K.] assuming a more corporate form and functioning more like businesses. (Stylus, 2001, p. 96)

Jarvis cites Aronovitz, who locates the decreased funding of universities in the U.S. at the end of the Cold War, under Reagan, which aligns time-wise with the assault of the U.K. universities, under Thatcher. The idea is to first get the government to reduce funding. Once funding is cut low enough (or it’s simply non-existent), privatization is all but official—that’s assuming that the institution has survived the transition. It’s important to understand that “for public colleges and universities, privatization involves becoming more like for-profit corporations.”195 That is, in not funding public education (which turns out to be the same as privatizing education) corporatization is inevitable. Jarvis goes further to point out that in addition to his and to Aronovitz’s assessments of universities becoming more corporate-like, some newer universities in the U.K. have in fact been founded by corporations. Huh? You heard me. As Jarvis notes: “The churches and then the states and civic authorities founded the universities, and now it is the corporations” (p. vii, my italics), where students are no longer students, but are cast as “consumers,” “clientele,” or “captive markets.” The most famous college accredited university in the U.S. founded by a corporation (McDonalds) thus far is Hamburger U. Top that, England!

U.S. colleges and universities, then, have (starting under the Reagan administration) become increasingly corporate-like. Marketers and advertising executives are hired to establish “brands” to increase marketing success with the aim of reaching more potential consumers—that is, potential students and their families. According to Slaughter and Rhoades, in a recent book titled (of all things), Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, “By 1995, university trademarks were generating billions in external revenues.” In these authors’ view, the university isn’t really wanting to become privatized, rather it simply wants to act like it has been privatized while remaining not-for-profit. Here’s how to do it:

Academic capitalism does not involve “privatization”; rather it entails a redefinition of public space and of appropriating activity in that space… . These new configurations and boundaries change our conception of what “public” means. (2004, p. 306)

So, how does one act like one is in the private sector while one is really in the public sector? Easy. You redefine what it means to be public. Simply redefine “public” to mean the same as “private” and—voilà!

Look at how the corporatizing of colleges and universities is cast by Slaughter and Rhoades:

The theory of academic capitalism moves beyond thinking of the student as consumer to considering the institution as marketer… . Colleges and universities [should]