The second installment of my
short series on major trends in postsecondary education will briefly explore
the commercialization on campuses. With the cuts to federal and state funding,
it is little surprise that universities have had to look at other sources of
raising revenues. These have included 1. Higher tuition, 2. Less direct aid
(thus more student debt from loans), 3. Seeking additional research funding
(meaning more control over research from the major foundations and government
sources), 4. Attempt to fund revenue-earning research – like patents (focusing
research on tangible outcomes, undermining humanities and critical research) 5.
Moving from tenured to non-tenured faculty (mirroring the general attack on
labor that neoliberalism is founded on), and 6. Commercialization. The last
item is but a small part of the new college experience, but it slowly gaining
steam.
UCLA is infamous as the most
commercialized campus in the country (and thus probably the world), with
sponsors selling products at the bookstores, chains providing food and goods, a
computer store, corporate-sponsored events, the selling of the email list, etc.
But we can also include the money major universities pay for sporting
facilities, the selling of student demographics, allowing businesses to sell
products on campus, renting campus space for commercial purposes and a host of
other strategies to allow the increased infiltration of the business world into
schools. But could this just be the beginning? Fernando Fragueiro, the
President of a private college in Argentina called Austral University,
certainly thinks so, with his plan to use the “Google business model” to make
higher education free of tuition, in returning for the pure commodification of
that institution: Inside
Higher Ed.
And why not? The average
American already sees more than 3,000 distinct ads every day. What’s a few more?
The plan involves companies paying to advertise their physical products
(laptops, for example) and services (keg removal, perhaps) to students during
their course of study, helping to eliminate the need for fees. Companies
hunting for new talent could also pay the university for detailed information
on how its students were progressing – allowing them to cherry-pick the best.
Sounds like a great plan and who wouldn’t want a free education?
So what is the problem? One
could argue, of course, from an idealistic perspective that it undermines the
integrity of the institution and certainly calls into question its original mission
to be an independent source of knowledge creation and transmission. But that
doesn’t seem to hold for the for-profit colleges that are sprouting up across
the globe, providing specialized instruction with little to no research, no
tenure-track positions and little of the intellectual and social enticements of
their older, more respected public and private brethren. Beyond this, is there
any problem in selling to kids? Let’s consider a few other arguments:
2. An overly commercialized
campus merely reinforces the notion of the commodification of education and the
sense that schooling is little more than the acquisition of a credential. One
reason too few consider when considering the rampant cheating that now occurs
is the way it relates to the general disregard for education and learning in
America. Corporations and even small businesses on campus undermine the
earnestness and lofty ideals of the college experience, undermining attempts to
counteract our general anti-intellectualism.
3. Students might be happy to be freed of
student loans that can follow them around for years and encumber them to the
market economy and capitalist system before they can make any real life
choices, but what will they think of their very identities being sold to the
highest bidder? Is it too idealistic to think that people should have choices
as regards their privacy? One wonders if this generation even believes in the
idea, given their sharing of every detail of their lives on Facebook, twitter
and the other social networking sites. But a certain fatigue to the constant
selling certainly appears to surround the most marketed to generation in
history. Shouldn’t universities provide some shelter from the world of their
youth and the future to come?
4. Would universities become
even more encumbered to their sponsors, who already often have a say in
research, program funding and campus initiatives? The answer would probably be yes, putting
further strain on “useless” majors like those that fill the entire humanities.
Would those sponsors want the curriculum reflecting their needs? That seems
reasonable. And ideologies? Well, corporations are quite good at getting those
they fund to reinforce their hegemonic positionality.
So while the idea of a free tuition certainly
appeals to any sane person considering a degree, the proposition comes with a
number of costs and potential side effects that might not only devalue that
free education but the very institution that provides it. Smaller scale
commercialism is already leading us on that path – reinforcing the notion that
corporations are everywhere and we should just accept their everyday presence
as part of la nouvelle vie quotidienne. I’d prefer to pursue a different path.
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