There’s a great profile of Robert Nisbet’s prescient skepticism about the changing character of American universities in the post-1945 era in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Nisbet argued that capitalism in American society primarily provided another avenue for individuals to seek power within corporate organizational structures and the state, at a cost to the deeper commitments of a democratic civil society, and that the aggressive intrusion of an entrepreneurial ethos into the university via research posed a specific threat to the integrity of the university as an institution. As the profile notes, what he warned against has substantially come to pass, spurring many subsequent critiques.
The profile makes for a great pairing with another story (also in the Chronicle as well as elsewhere) that has provoked a lot of commentary on social media, namely, Michigan State’s administration asking faculty and staff to volunteer their time working for dining services due to a shortage of paid workers. Pressed for an explanation, the senior vice-president who made the call hid behind a spokesperson, who simply noted that this wasn’t any different than helping out with welcoming first-year students to the dorms, that it was just a gesture to show appreciation for the students.
The problem is that as universities have adopted corporate models of organization, they’ve tried to retain a sense that they are also “a community” driven by vocation, by a sense of mission, by ideas of mutual responsibility and care. (Corporations have also, as many critics have observed, tried to use this kind of rhetoric to attract naive younger employees, dampen internal criticism and hamstring demands for better working conditions.)
You don’t get to have it both ways. Communities that come together through shared values and mission are, or should be, radically democratic in many respects. The mission rises up from the people who have convened in its name, and they have to share in deciding how to enact it.
The “efficiency” that many boards and executives envision in the adoption of a corporate form does cut two ways, at least in theory. Generally boards and executives only see that efficiency in terms of the ability to terminate employees, close positions, dictate the limits of compensation, control costs by fiat, and outsource services. But as employers at small and large businesses are discovering in 2021, the efficiency of understanding your organization as providing a service via a market to customers means that when labor markets somehow slip the leash and recognize how much they’re underpaid and how badly they’re being managed, you (in theory) are going to have to fix that to attract and retain the labor you need. All up and down the economy, including in corporatized universities, you get the sense that neoliberal styles of labor management and organizational structure have so relentlessly assumed that they could infinitely squeeze more blood from stones that they scarcely know what to do now that it’s not working. (Michigan State’s spokesperson in the Chronicle article rather hilariously posits that improving wages and working conditions would be a time-consuming prospect because of “union negotiations”; yes, unions are famous for stonewalling on unilateral offers by management to raise wages.)
That confusion explains why a desperation play like “please volunteer to serve food” ever becomes an official plea. What it accidentally suggests is that university management is only too aware of the amount of uncompensated work they already rely upon and of the deep reservoirs of habitus it comes from. But the wells are going dry. If you want to refill them, you have to unravel the organizational choices that have been in fashion for decades now and reinvent or create new organizational structures and imperatives that are imbued with the democratic and participatory ethos that “mission” requires. If you don’t want to do that, pay people well for the work they do and stop asking for anything more. Only chumps do volunteer work for a corporation.
Image credit: "1962 ... cafeteria for doomsday!" by x-ray delta one is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Truth,Tim.