What was once only a delusion is now a dominant agenda - the subordination of higher research and education to the for-profit goals of transnational corporations. More and more evidence indicates that higher education is being subserved to one master goal - turning universities into research and market sites for big corporations.
You can't replace the learning of ages and scientific civilisation by the goals of commodity development and consumer functions overnight. It happens step by step. First there are wholesale government cutbacks to education funding. Then there's forced partnerships with commercial industry and rich donors to fill the gap. And all along ever-rising student fees turn the next generation into debt-slaves to banks.
Who can stop the juggernaut? If you can redirect funding in the name of "accountability" to market demands, you can redirect the future of education and its resources. If governing political parties and position-hunting administrators collaborate every step, even public education becomes the servant of the corporate agenda with a once critical intelligentsia dancing at the end the new funding strings.
The public relations line for all this is now a tired refrain. Public and university education "must achieve new efficiencies" (ie., imitate the methods of for-profit corporations). "Universities must serve the new knowledge economy"(ie., devote their research and training to business imperatives).
With faculty as "human resources", students as "consumers", and corporations as "the private sector" directing the "new knowledge delivery systems", even universities can be restructured to serve an anti-educational agenda.
What happens to the university's defining mission to independently advance knowledge and disseminate learning free from control by private power? It is ignored and overridden by endless mantras and fiats to "compete in the global marketplace".
Steering the Corporate Campus
New government funding mechanisms fronted by public relations slogans like "foundation for innovation", "centres of excellence", "millennial chairs", "e-learning", and "corporate-university partnerships" are the channels for the control and redirection of university funding. Continual financial reviews of "academic units" provide the mechanisms for internal restructuring.
A recent book, William Bruneau's and Donald Savage's Counting Out the Scholars: The Case Against Performance Indicators, explains the now-standard international device of "PI's" for market-style financial organization of universities. The President of King's College in Halifax, Colin Starnes, has recently reported in the CAUT Bulletin (the publication of the Canadian Association of University Teachers) how Canadian public funding of university operating budgets has declined by over 25% since 1988 - with new funding dominantly tied to marketable applied sciences and facilities which increasingly develop such products as corporate pharmaceuticals and genetically altered foods.
As elsewhere, a saturating propaganda machine of transnational media, corporate-funded story feeds and administrative newsletters spew out interminably false claims of "breakthroughs", "more accountability" and "necessary reforms". In truth, our universities are being made into tools of the same global corporate agenda that makes wars on poor societies to unlock their assets for transnational global corporate exploitation.
Waking Up
Before going to sleep in the new dogma, we should connect the dots. New funding measures for universities have little or nothing to do with funding better or more accessible higher education. They are structured to serve or imitate the market and to subsidize for-profit corporations - of which the university is in danger of becoming a branch plant variation. The avalanche slide of faculty into "contingent academic labour" - now carrying over 65% of York University's undergraduate teaching load - is the blunt end of the invasion by the agenda of a completely unqualified corporate-market model.
The only way such an agenda can succeed on campus is if threshold numbers of the professoriate and bureaucracy are preoccupied with their own careers in bland denial, with a noisy cohort privately financed as advocates of the university's conversion into a market instrument. Yet still thinking faculty, students and citizens increasingly see and confront the occupation on home ground.
A senior administrative faculty member I recently challenged on the issue - specifically on our university's promotion of industrial agribusiness which contributes to climate destabilization - surprised me and others when he "agreed with basically everything you say". My own university's long-serving president has just completed a very sound government-commissioned report on education funding. Canada's public health system has been overwhelmingly endorsed against corporate medicine by Canadians and the bellwether Romanow Commission. People are beginning to recognise that the corporate market program has not worked on any level, least of all with education.
John McMurtry PhD, F.R.S.C. is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His recently released book, Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy is published by Pluto Press of Great Britain.