Costs and Benefits of Commercializing Teaching, Research, and Service in the American Corporatized University

Abstract

In the last four decades higher education around the globe has been subjected to a continuous process of reforms as governments have sought to reduce public spending by capitalizing on new commercial opportunities related to education, research, and service in the global knowledge-led economy. Reform efforts have been informed by the dominant economic discourse of neoliberalism originating in the 1970s and the associated discourses of “new public management” from the 1980s. As increased competition represents improved quality in neoliberal discourse a major objective of the reforms has been to implement competition for extramural funding and market-oriented behavior as a way to increase productivity, accountability and control. In the United States in particular, the direction of change has been oriented toward the culture, practices, policies and workforce strategies characteristic of the business corporation which has been seen as an institutional entity providing the basic standards of financial and administrative efficiency. As a result the university is transforming from an educational community with shared governance into a top-down bureaucracy increasingly managed as a traditional profit seeking corporation in which faculty has no meaningful and effective voice. With a focus on the restructuring of higher education in the United States the purpose of this chapter is to examine how the corporatized public research university came about, its distinctive features, and to consider the costs and benefits to the public good of commercializing teaching, research, and service. In so doing the chapter reviews diverse literatures on higher education, academic capitalism, and the corporatized university.