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Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University

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Gaye Tuchman's detailed ethnography of a 'university in transformation' is funny in many places, but mostly sad. The author herself is clearly not pleased with the general direction she describes, and so, while the book concludes that the university was successfully 'transformed', this cannot be regarded as a particularly happy ending. The 'transformation' the university is undergoing is from being a more or less average state university to one of the top twenty-five. Societal judgments on what distinguishes a university--above all, rankings in US News and World Report--are more or less accepted at face value. The focus of her work is the relationship between the administration and the faculty in the course of this process. Thus topics like student life and classroom dynamics are mostly absent. The general trajectory of Wannabe U is to become a more auditable university, with ever more measures of how faculty, and the university in general, is doing. In particular, a market orientation is introduced. The value of faculty, measured in how many grants they attain, becomes more quantifiable and important, as does the value of the university to the state economy and the private corporations based there. The latter is epitomized by a more assertive policy towards patents at the university, which, when achieved, sometimes result in such financial gain for faculty that they are able to purchase McMansions on the same streets as administrators. Gone are the days when scientists at universities used to look down at those based in private industry on the grounds that the former produced knowledge available for the general advancement of science, while the latter did not.
The administrators of Wannabe U belong to a mobile class ever in search of a better position. They are far more familiar with the judgment of their peers, and the administrative challenges of running a large organization, than with deep philosophical questions about the nature and purpose of universities. Thus, they sometimes jump from fashion to fashion, announcing that the university is now focused on 'teaching and learning', or later on 'research', creating confusion and demoralization among much of the faculty (even when teaching is supposedly being emphasized, Tuchman wryly notes that it is meted out as punishment for underperforming faculty). What the administrators are able to pursue more singlemindedly is the centralization of authority in their hands and the weakening of the faculty's role in running the university. Additionally, faculty are progressively forced to be more 'productive' (more students taught, more grant money attained, etc). Although this process suffers a few setbacks, for the most part it is successful. It is undertaken in a gradual enough manner that the faculty never quite get a handle on what is going on. In general, the faculty are more concerned with the approval of their nationally dispersed peers than with the dynamics at Wannabe U. Important meetings are not well attended by faculty. Not unlike the administrators, the faculty often have one eye on using Wannabe U as a jumping off point for a better job, weakening their interest in campus politics. For these reasons, Wannabe U is successfully transformed into a higher ranked, but more administratively centralized and hard driving university with little to no resistance from the faculty.

Many aspects of the picture painted in Wannabe U will be familiar to faculty at American colleges and universities, particularly the ever expanding production of 'audits' such as 'teaching portfolios'. As noted above, Tuchman observed no grounds for effective resistance to the direction mapped out (sometimes not fully consciously) by administrators attempting to live up to an imperative to make Wan U more valuable to the state's economy. I think part of the reason, in addition to the narrow focus of faculty which she described, is that any sustained resistance to the transformation in general (rather than to a fragment of it, such as, say, increased teaching loads) would require questioning the logic of aligning the interests of the university with the interests of the 'economy' (i.e. the alliance of the state and corporations). And this questioning could not advance without broad questioning of the nature of the economy in general. In other words, the process of transformation is simply bringing the university in line with values (market driven, auditable, etc) pervasive throughout American society. Answering 'what's wrong with that?' involves either implausibly suggesting special privileges for universities (already viewed with some suspicion by much of the population) or generally challenging those values, which increasingly appear as a natural element of society, given their pervasiveness. In other words, the gnawing dilemma of how does one begin to critique capitalism when its logic seems so widespread appears once again. Perhaps at a subconscious level, awareness of just how difficult this would be helps to scale faculty demands down to some managable element that will not challenge the fundamental direction. The admiration of their peers, rather than a sustained interrogation of what they or the institution for which they work is doing, provides a more or less fulfilling goal.

This is a wonderfully perceptive (if dispiriting) examination of how public universities are scrambling to conform to a simplistic and untested "market model" of excellence that in actuality kills curricular diversity, critical thinking, and self-governance. Tuchman is especially good on the rise of an auditing culture that pretends to be about monitoring student success and retention but actually aims at Taylorizing teaching and deprofessionalizing the professoriate.

If you work at a second-tier public university and your administration is talking about "transforming" itself to better prepare students for the job market and establish a "flagship" reputation, read this book immediately!

This is an insightful scholarly review of the changes that occurred at a large public university, Wannabe U. Whether out of a desire to raise their ranking in a mass-media publication, or to emulate so many others, the author demonstrates how this representative public university changed, especially with respect to their administrators and management approach. The author maintains a level of objectivity that is rare. She notes how the changing relationships between faculty and administration have affected the academic environment as a whole. Many details of the changes that the author discusses, with respect to Wannabe U, match the stories from other large public universities. The author has gone to great lengths to hide the true identities of the administrators and college itself, although there is an online buzz as to the true identities. It might have been better if true identities had been used, but the approach is understandable in light of today's litigious society.

This is an interesting book, interesting in large measure because it is so different. The book purports to be a case study of an anonymous, public, research university that is being `transformed' by corporatist presidential leadership. The study, however, is presented in narrative form, with personal details of the major players, comments from `interviewees' and so on. Our initial impulse is to see the book as a satire on current managerial practices and the ways in which they are making our universities more `accountable' but also more corporate, more `efficient' but also more empty, more `fiscally responsible' but also less academic and more putatively responsive to customers (the individuals formerly known as students) but actually striking Faustian bargains with them. The leaders in this gray new world are job-jumping opportunists, glad-handing centralizers, individuals who would be unrecognizable to the generations of academics who were, first and foremost, members of the faculty, proud of their teaching and proud of their research, "doing administration" as a duty or a penance but always attempting to focus on core functions rather than mouthing corporatist cant.

The more we read, however, the more it seems as if this is not so much a thinly-veiled satire on current practices, as embodied in a single example (most likely the University of Connecticut) as it is an actual documentary. One might also say a `mockumentary', except for the fact that there is little exaggeration here. Everything which the author recounts is entirely plausible. Indeed, it is all quite familiar. This is the way things often now are. The question is, why?

The book offers good answers. With the dramatic erosion of state funding for public education universities have adjusted. They have raised tuition. They have taken in more foreign students and out-of-state students, who pay full, higher tuition. They have invested heavily in big-time athletics, both to attract attention and provide entertainment. They have done all in their power to increase grant funding and, where possible, patent income. They have developed corporate partnerships. They have raised money through billion-dollar development campaigns. They have erected massive bureaus providing `student services', built athletic facilities with rock walls and other emoluments, provided bandwidth for the downloading of music and film and they have shaped their institutions in such a way as to maximize their opportunities for enhanced ratings in USNews and the National Academy's ten year (fifteen year- most recently) surveys of graduate programs.

As a result the book is unlike any Swiftian satire or Christopher Guest mockumentary, because it is unrelievedly sad. There is an occasional smile of recognition but no laughter here. Fortunately, all public universities are not quite like this yet. They may share the same problems and they may be forced to utilize the same strategies to develop revenue streams, but some portions of their academic souls have remained intact. At this point the pendulum for `running the university like a business' and being more `accountable' has not finished its swing. We are at the point where many voices, both academic and populist, are raising cries of alarm. When students and parents recognize that the current corporate university requires too many academic sacrifices and, ultimately, does not serve students well, the pendulum will swing back. At least it is pretty to think so.

The author is able to adopt the methods of primatologist Jane Goodall, who was able to calmly infiltrate the world of chimpanzees and meticulously observe their behavior and social organization. As in Goodall, the subjects of this study are given pseudonyms, here mostly somewhat conventional WASPy names. The university is also given a very clever cartoonish pseudonym, but except for that, the book is not at all a lampoon. The book is typeset in small font and meticulously detailed, without value judgments about the observations. There is no overt attempt to condemn, praise or prescribe remedies. What is amazing about this book is how all the details from the "field study" at the Connecticut University also apply to my own. The body language, the vocabulary, the quality of the food at the receptions, the metrics used in the audits, the values professed, and the rise and fall of various innovations. It was enlightening to learn about how the administrators have their own network of conferences and their own path to mobility and stardom in an inter-University network that is quite distinct from the professional network that an academic participates in.

The characters in the study are not just administrators, but also professors and students. Thus the author is rightfully a subject of study too. The book occasionally goes into a first person narrative, and the author's own behavior is cited. Admirably, she does not allow her own values and rhetoric to appear any more sensible than those of the other characters. For example, on the penultimate page: "Here and there, my expectations will prove wrong. Perhaps the Senate group pushing for renewed emphasis on multiculturalism and diversity will succeed". At other places in the book, the author points out that the "diversity" metric is not competing well with other metrics used in the corporate university. The logic for the "diversity" metric is that if an academic or student is a member of a successful cultural or ethnic group, then their contribution to the success of the university will be lessened, and thus the individual should be provided with fewer opportunities for being admitted, hired, promoted or funded. One might think that the use of such a metric would be very popular within a corporate university: the metric can be gathered about an individual at first sight, with no need for annual updating and reading of forms, and with no easy way to pervert it by a glut of inconsequential publishing, and so on. Yet despite that virtue of the metric, and the well-crafted language used in its promotion, evidently "diversity" is not competing well against other metrics for productivity and success.

Professor Tuchman has written a wonderful book detailing the transformation of the university from an academic institution into a business.Other books have been written on this phenomenon, but none are so concise and engaging.Wannabe U should be read by everyone who is interested in higher education today.

Wannabe U describes how universities have changed from what they were in the middle of the last century to the present time. It is a sobering transformation and, in almost every respect, regrettable. Businesses are a perfectly legitimate social institution--as are the courts, political parties, families, and organized religion, for example--but, until recently, education was not a business. Universities were organized for the purpose of disinterested research, the dissemination of knowledge, and the cultivation of arts. These are perfectly rational objectives, but they are not the objectives of a corporation. The corporatization of the university constitutes the demise of one kind of social institution,the research university, and the birth of yet another business.

The transformation of the university into a business, I would contend, needs to be understood within a wider context of public funding and philosophy and, quite possibly, a private agenda by some to reverse the mechanism of upward mobility in our nation. Tuchman's book rarely touches on these matters. In addition to Wannabe U individuals who are interested in higher education in the US should also read the Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class, by Christopher Newfield. This book deals with the systematic underfunding of public education, even when the US economy was strong. Most of his examples come from California, but the trend is national in scope.

Public universities were once seen a public good, deserving of public (tax dollar) support. Public support made education affordable. Several generations of Americans graduated from college without any substantial debt because of tax-payer support. Today, public universities (many of which receive only 10% of their funding from the state) are regarded as a private good that do not merit public funds. Newfield's book presents a very clear overview of this transformation along with an argument that this transformation was quite intentional.

Another book that needs to be read is Save the World on Your own Time, by Stanly Fish. For many centuries a college education was viewed as a means of improving society generally and not merely the individual. A university education imparted some particular skills and knowledge, but more importantly, a university education enabled one to better understand the world and one's place in it and one's obligation to improve it. In the 19th Century it was traditional for the President of a college or university to teach the course on moral philosophy, which tended to deal with concrete issues of the day. As the title of his book so clearly expresses, Professor Fish is adamantly opposed to this philosophy of education. For all of his rhetorical flourishes, Fish's position is largely main stream today. The idea that purpose of education is to improve the world and to serve humankind and the planet is today largely regarded as old-fashioned and moralistic. The business of education, most contend, is not to change the world but rather to impart skills and information that can used however an individual chooses to employ them. (I believe that Fish has radically overstated the degree to which most university professors devote any time at all to "saving the world" and, more importantly, his contention that such concerns are inappropriate in the classroom.)

The funding, purpose, and organization of higher education are all aspects of one complex issue. If the purpose of higher education is not beneficial to society then education is not a public good and hence does not merit public support. And if higher education is a private good, then arguably it should be run like a private corporation.

The vast majority of university professors, as Tuchman notes, are not much interested in the topic of higher education--their concerns are largely limited to their own research, their salaries and, in some cases, teaching. The broader topics discussed by these three books fall outside their concerns. Most students and their parents are also not much interested in this topic. Their interests, understandably, tend to be limited to tuition and course availability. And the general public tends to be interested only in universities being well-managed and inexpensive--"accountable" and "accessible" are the buzz words of this discussion. Universities, it is widely assumed, must find a way to do more with less. (More what is not always clearly defined short of graduate more students.)

Wannabe U is an important book that deserves a wide audience. Buy it, read it, and pass it along. Transforming universities into business has had, and will continue to have, wide social consequences. A public discussion about the nature and purpose of higher education (and then about its organization and funding) is long overdue.

Tuchman ably combines scholarship and writing ability to describe what is going on as universities become more like their corporate brethren and less like the institutions we loved as students, alumni, faculty, staff, and administrators. Several friends have also read the book; all of us agree that it is an apt description of any wannabe institution. A good read.