>Catherine Driscoll wrote:
>
><< not vanity i wouldn't say -- rather the economic effects of status (a
>kind of cultural capital somehow specific to academic institutions
>which have to differentiate themselves from one another in a market) >>
>
>On the contrary, isn't the growing elitism and corporate
>prostitution of higher education rather predictable from the
>development of the larger capitalist society? What doesn't parallel
>the development of, say, the corporations' power and reward
>structures?
It's not simply a matter of non-profit institutions paralleling "the development of, say, the corporations' power and reward structures." Funding cuts came first, and scrambles for grants, corporate ties, more tuition, etc. began as institutional responses to the cuts (& piecemeal privatization of universities will, in turn, become an excuse for further cuts). See Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, _Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University_ (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997):
***** Academic Capitalism in a Public Ivy
by Cynthia Young
...In case studies of universities in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., Slaughter and Leslie demonstrate that public universities increasingly court corporate money to offset the loss of government block grants. This has occasioned a cataclysmic change in the way public universities operate. Faculty, in Slaughter and Leslie's view, are no longer able to occupy the tenuous space between capital and labor they have held since the Industrial Revolution. Instead they are increasingly becoming direct participants in the market in order to fund their research. As a result, a new breed of academic player has been bred, "academic capitalists" or "state-subsidized entrepreneurs" who "act as capitalists from within the public sector" (AC, 9). They must compete in the public sector in order to make their areas of research or individual departments viable financial entities. This has had numerous ripple effects. Many corporations have closed their research and development departments, using public universities as their state-subsidized laboratories. This technology transfer, in turn, fuels national economic growth.
...The departments most closely linked to industry through intellectual property law and technology transfers are the biotechnical sciences, engineering, law, and business schools. Since the 1970s, money has flooded these departments while money to the humanities and social sciences has slowed to a trickle. Currently, the technoscientists who produce the digital televisions, new microcomputer processors and telecommunications networks are shifting the terms of global, public debate in critical ways. Aware of the growing income gap, humanities and social science departments are increasingly subject to the logic of the market, seeking to strike their own Faustian bargains with capital. Academics vie for prestigious publishers for their books, hoping that will increase the likelihood of attaining tenure (or even a tenure-track job.) Celebrity academics attract donors whose patronage increases the prestige of individual faculty and their departments. Intellectual merit is increasingly determined by one's relation to capital, as much as the worth of one's research or publications. Is it any wonder that presidents at many leading universities sit on the boards of major corporations? As Slaughter and Leslie underscore, "This change in financial structure and relation to industry is radically altering the nature of academic labor: changes in what academics do, how they allocate their time" (AC, 60). The increasing use of adjunct and graduate student labor is a crucial ripple effect of the growth of academic capitalism since it saves down-sizing universities millions and allows tenured and tenure-track faculty more time to pursue their research. Spiraling class sizes are yet another way to cut costs and elevate the needs of university administrators and industry--more research hours or networking time for faculty--over those of students.
<http://www.workplace-gsc.com/workplace2-1/young.html#9> *****
Cuts in funding (for public universities & other state-funded institutions & programs) in turn stemmed from the fiscal crisis of the state (Cf. Jim O'Connor).
Yoshie