Henry Heller on IP-Based Capitalism at Universities

There’s a short piece in the Times Higher Ed by Henry Heller in which he outlines the transformation over the course of the second half of the twentieth century of American universities from publicly supported institutions working for the good of society as a whole to standard neoliberal corporations.

The upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s may be seen in retrospect as an extension of the success of the 1950s, as university enrolments and funding continued to expand, and as the social and political role of universities assumed new importance. Universities became important sites of conflict over foreign policy, racism, gender equality and democracy, both within and beyond the campus. A new ideological cosmopolitanism emerged on campus as a result of the emergence of the first serious Marxist scholarship in the US, especially through the renewal of a historical perspective in anthropology, sociology, literature and history proper. Feminists opened up new opportunities for women in academe and began to create new theory around the question of gender. Most importantly, the very purpose of academic knowledge and research was questioned, especially in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

 

But from the 1980s onwards, so-called academic capitalism took hold, and universities increasingly redefined their mission to be serving private business and they themselves became, as far as possible, profit-oriented in operation and objectives. And thus was born the so-called neoliberal university, marked by the decline of the humanities and social sciences, cuts in public financing, enfeeblement of faculty and student roles in governance, increases in tuition fees, reductions in tenured faculty and increasing use of adjunct professors. Capping off these changes are the growth of for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix, and the growth of mainly business-backed massive open online courses, which augur a decline in the need for permanent faculty and investments in fixed capital.

The article coincides with the publication of his new book, The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States, 1945-2016, which looks like a must read for anyone who cares about the history, and the future, of academia.

This post is a perspective of the author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Ronin Institute.

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