Market Language in Higher Education: Have students become commodities of reality?

Note: This is a paper I presented at a conference in February 2006

When offering my critique of the higher educational system, I believe it is wise to keep in mind the words of Allan Bloom “Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being.” (Bloom 26).
I argue that the market language has been so fully integrated into the higher educational system that it has begun to shape the formative process of education into a mechanistic framework. First I shall analyze the use of this language and its effects on the administrator-faculty level. Second I shall analyze the student-faculty relationship, and how it has manifested concepts inherent in the market language

The Bay-Dole Act was a large step into the era of commercialization. It allowed universities to patent intellectual property created through government funded research. This quickly led to universities opening their own patent offices. A quick change in priorities was noticed in Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing. Stanford, who was ranked one of the nations top producers of licenses (fifty million in 2002) noticed a decrease in teaching pedagogy, as this opportunity presented itself:

“You have to understand—initially the department chairmen and school
deans weren’t thrilled by having this new activity that was diverting the attention of their faculty away from teaching and research,” he said. “So how do you offset that? You make them stakeholders—you make them beneficiaries.” (Washburn 138).

As we can see, the weight of money has begun to corrupt the quality of education. In the three tiered goals of faculty, teaching-research-community outreach, commercialism has shifted the focus into the most pertinent investment—almost completely neglecting teaching pedagogy. Private industry, in an effort to keep an edge on the market, will often delay the publication of research, and forbid their researches to share their information with the pool of their fellow researchers. In 1994, Massachusetts General Hospital conducted a survey of 210 life science companies, finding that 58% of them delayed publication of material for six months (Blumenthal 1224-1228). Worse is the number of researchers that would allow data to be deleted from their research. A survey conducted in the main centers for the university-industry research centers found that 35% were willing to allow companies to delete data from their research (Washburn 76).

A new trend in university “management” is the concept of responsibility center management. The concept is to get a university to run like a firm. Each department is responsible for its own funds. If they make a surplus, they get to keep it. If they end in deficit, they have to pay it back. The results can be fearsome:

At the beginning of each semester, as students signed up for courses,
campus units paraded their wares with the fervor of discount merchandisers. Full-page ads in the Daily Trojan touted courses such as the drama class that required no reading (“Tired of reading Shakespeare? Kill off your [general education] requirement, sit back and eat popcorn, and watch it being performed.”). The behind the scenes rivalries were even fiercer. Schools that had never expressed an interest in the liberal arts were suddenly claiming that their offerings---introduction to real estate, for example---should satisfy the university’s general education requirement. (Kirp 116).

Such was the flurried response of faculty to RCM at USC. Competitions between departments became fierce. Academic cooperation reduced to nil. In one particular case, faculty and staff were allowed to enroll in courses in order to boost their enrollment numbers. Deans were coercing their underlings to enroll in their class, in order to give the appearance that the enrollment numbers of their department was greater. Since the humanities are often unable to produce the same amount of fiscal weight as other departments, their programs often suffer the consequences:

What’s striking about the changes today, however, is the degree to which they are being driven not by intellectual concerns but by financial considerations and pure market demand…Defying traditional academic notions, departments now openly vie for resources. English professors must demonstrate, in essence, that Chaucer pays the bills as effectively as engineering or business classes….Professors worry that creative writing and other courses requiring very small classes will cost their department funding under a system that strictly measure productivity.” (Curry 18). When I see actions such as this, I question that “proponents forget that they are talking in metaphors and start to believe they are really running a business.” (Lazerson et. al. A72).

Is it really still a metaphor? Language is how we choose to express ourselves and our perceptions, and as Donald Stein, a professor at Emory University notes:
Now when you go and look at university business plans, as they are called, students are seen as clients; parents are seen as customers…The question has now become ‘What is going to sell?’ as opposed to ‘What is the right thing to teach?’ Once things take on a commercial, monetary value, the whole academic decision-making structure becomes impacted.” (Washburn 209).
An increasing trend is to hire administrators “who come directly from industry or are recruited for their corporate know-how, not their educational experience.” (Washburn 205). With their increasing corporate backgrounds, is it surprising that administrators rely heavily on categories that can be quantified, such as enrollment and student retention? As Amy Graham and Nick Thompson note, “Teaching…is a net drain on the bottom line—and it is not measured in any of the major national ranking surveys.” (Amy Graham, Nick Thompson). As a matter of fact, very little emphasis is placed on teaching pedagogy because, as Rand economists Dominic Brewer,
Susan Gates, and Charles Goldmain explains:

Prestige seeking promotes excellence on the one hand but can lead to excessive expenditures and unresponsive schools that neglect the needs of some undergraduate students and other customers who don’t contribute to institutional prestige….Further, competition for prestige in the student market does not encourage institutions to improve the quality of educational delivery.” (147-148).

This trend in higher education is apparent when we look at who teaches the majority of undergraduates: Meanwhile, the professoriate has been remarkably silent about the outsourcing of higher education’s most basic function: teaching. The practice of hiring part-time instructors is not usually understood in these terms…adjuncts recruited on a fee-for-service basis are the academic equivalent of temp. agency fill-ins or day laborers. Barry Munitz, the former chancellor of California’s state universities, estimates that in that system more than half of all classes are taught by these disposable workers. (Kirp 114).
With the increase of part-time professors, there also has been a significant decrease in quality of education. Many times, these adjuncts must move between several different universities to make a living. One study performed by the American Association of University professors notes that “liberal arts adjuncts are 50 percent less likely to require an essay exam than full-time faculty, presumably because of the extra time required to read and grade them.” (Washburn 211). Even worse is what the adjuncts learn from the invasion of the corporate model. An adjunct at Columbia notes:
Submitting students to the rigors of learning seemed only to incur the wrath of many of them, which entered the record as my teacherly shortcoming….The business model has taught me that the customer is always right.” (Washburn 209).

The adjuncts are purely evaluated by student response. There is no peer evaluation. As a result, many adjuncts take the easy way out: offering grade inflation to appease his/her students. The way many upper classes are structured, one would not be surprised to find that the university truly is a business. Classes are cancelled if the student demand for them is not high enough. If the course a student wishes to take is not popular enough, the only manner in which he can acquire that knowledge is if the professor is willing to do an independent study, but often the three tiered duty of a professor (teaching, research, and community outreach) does not allow the time for many independent studies. A notable exception is the University of Chicago, which regularly offers one student courses.

I do indeed fear that the administrations of the institutions of higher educations increasingly believe they are running a business. The idea that education is a formative process in which minds are molded has become quaint. “The objective of the enrollment management” William Elliot, vice president for enrollment management at Carnegie Mellon remarks [good bye admissions director, hello corporate speak], “is to improve your market position.” (Kirp 12). In developing the “university product” Michael Benke uses the following marketing concept to “sell” the “learning experience”:
Because consumption is a learning experience, follow-on brands may be
compared with the pioneer brand to their disadvantage if the latter is perceived as ‘ideal’. As a result, the pioneer brand may be viewed as competitively distinct, and making competitive inroads would become difficult for later entrants (Roger Kerin et. al. 35).
In marketing the “learning experience” universities can come to some ethically challenging situations: Bob Massa learned that applicants who come to John Hopkins for an interview—something that all colleges encourage, in the belief that students should see for themselves whether the school is a good fit—are more likely to enroll if they’re admitted. That meant the university could, with relatively little risk, offer them smaller aid packages than their counterparts who had never visited campus. (Kirp 22)

Somewhere between the abstract metaphor of the University that is run as a business, and the concrete reality of the university education, we have lost the idea that education is a formative process, instead of a marketing ploy. Often the faculty are entirely cut from the loop of administrative practice, DeVry University states that: “Decisions are made by the management, by the central office, not by faculty deliberations,” says Meyers, the vice president of Academic Affairs. “The expectation is that [the faculty] will do it like it or not.” (Kirp 248).
We quickly see that the relationship between faculty and administration is often not of dialogue, but a passive command and obey structure. So what is the impact on the internalized lessons of the student who, so often in the eyes of the administrator, is a valued commodity whose education is often formed by the demand of his/her fellow students?
The university student is submerged in a world in which numbers are of the utmost importance. The student wishes to get into the most prestigious school that is ranked as high as possible on the near deified U.S. News & World Report “Rankings of Undergraduate Colleges and Universities” as he/she can afford. The student strives for the perfect GPA in order to attain his pass into that desired school. Classes at these universities are taught on the basis of marketability. With the exception of a few universities (Like the University of Chicago, who taught 173 single student courses in 2003) if the demand is not high enough for the course then it is cancelled (Kirp 49). In this world, the student internalizes the idea that in order to prevail in this academic survival of the fittest, he/she must internalize two concepts: the importance of being able to produce practical proof of their activities (for the student a good grade, for the professor research and grants) and the importance of creating of those numbers that create the demand needed for their education. All too often, the student, instead of embarking upon a quest for knowledge, instead embarks upon a quest for strategies: strategies to “make it through” the curriculum. Students become objectified through the curriculum. In each department, they adapt themselves accordingly. In English, the student adapts to the writing style of the professor. In science and history, the student learns the layout of the course, and adapts his strategy accordingly. In music degrees, often the emphasis is learning to play what is on the page, not true expression. The aspiring high school band director quickly learns that for one’s band to succeed, one must play a direct transcript of what is on the page; forget shaping the phrase according to form. All of this underlies one internalized concept: that the student is an object of reality, not a subject. The entire educational process is shaped in such a way as to expose the student to the academic cynicism to the “inevitability” it is impossible to make an impact on the institutional system. Chomsky notes this process:

One is the breakdown of independent social organization and independent thought, the atomization of people. As we move towards a society which is optimal from the point of view of the business classes-namely, that each individual is an atom, lacking means to communicate with others so that he or she can’t develop independent thought or action and is just a consumer, not a producer-people become deeply alienated, and they may hate what’s going on but have no way to express that hatred (Chomsky 1-4).

Students especially feel the effects of atomization when confronted with a curriculum that is run upon the concept that a course is not worthwhile unless the demand is high enough. Again, there is that perception that if a concept does not show its practical worth, then it is not worthwhile. The student is taught to internalize the sheer importance of numbers. In the educational process, the student becomes alienated from the humanistic side of his existence:
The dimensions with which we deal are figures and abstractions; they are far beyond the boundaries which would permit of any kind of concrete experience. There is no frame of reference left which is manageable, observable, which is adapted to human dimensions. While our eyes and ears receive impressions only in humanly manageable proportions, our concept of the world has lost just that quality; it does not any longer correspond to our human dimensions. (Fromm 119). Through the medium of Fromm’s observation, I argue that the student becomes alienated from reality with his/her higher educational experience. His/her educational experience is lead by quantification: practical learning, grades, and the marketable development of the curriculum. When released from the isolated environment of higher education, the student finds himself embroiled in abstractions: the government transmits its messages increasingly in the use of euphemisms (where prisoners-of-war are called “unlawful combatants, and concentrations camps were called “relocations centers”), government documents often use the flowery language of abstraction, and the way we experience events through abstract terminology (disasters cost the nation millions of dollars, the government via nuclear weapons, has the capability to destroy millions of lives with a single button press, and billions of dollars in the national debt). Is it a surprise that the American Institutes of Research found that 50% of graduates of four-year colleges and 75% of graduates of 2 year colleges lacked complex literacy skills (Feller A3). The survey analyzed three categories of literacy: analyzing news stories and prose, understanding documents, and having math skills needed for checkbooks and restaurant tips. I believe this survey shows that students increasingly find that aforementioned “strategy” to make it through their courses. The students internalize the image of the professors they see: in order to maintain the status of their department, the professors take a shift of perspectives from “scholarship to salesmanship.” (Williams 16), and the students internalize the need to adapt to the world, instead of shaping it (and thus dulling the capacity to think critically).

So, what manner of citizens are our institutions of higher education molding, referring back to Allan Bloom? Higher education, through the advent of the corporate language, has experienced a paradigm shift that has subjugated the role of teaching pedagogy for market principles: the marketability of the curriculum, the objectification of the student body, and the metamorphosis from “scholarship to salesmanship”. In the search for funding the institutions of higher education have allowed some of their academic freedom to be compromised. With half of the four year university graduates failing complex literacy tasks and student-pleasing adjuncts teaching over half the undergraduate body, the American higher educational system is in dire straits. The tense balance between academic objectivity and industrial cooperation has been upset. Students, instead of being challenged to think critically of their social surroundings, are instead being lead to passively accept what is, and give in to the fatalism of the status quo. Do we truly want students trained for the market? Or would be rather have educated citizens who believe in their ability to transform the world around them?

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