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March 19, 2005
The liberal university is often criticized by Christian and social conservatives as one of the last bastions of (left) liberalism, a secular humanist culture and public education. However,this kind of criticism overlooks the way that market forces are dictating what is happening in the world of higher education, and causing universities to look and behave more and more like business enterprises.
This means that instead of the public liberal university honouring its traditional commitment to teaching, disinterested research, and the broad dissemination of knowledge, it is now increasingly becoming the research arm of private industry. Faced with declining government funding, the liberal university has embraced its role as "engines" of economic growth. The promise is that the corporate university will help drive regional economic development by pumping out commercially valuable inventions.
In Australia this neo-liberal redefinition of the university can be traced back to the economic reforms of the 1980s. This mode of governance is premised on universities being able to retain the rights to intellectual property stemming from taxpayer-financed research through public grants. This, it is argued, would stimulate innovation and speed the transfer of publicly financed research to industry.
This neo-liberal mode of governance has meant the introduction of the profit motive into the heart of the university, and the transformation of the liberal university into a corporate business.
The quote below is from a review by Gary Greenberg in Mother Jones of Jennifer Washbourne's book entitled University, Inc. The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education. Washbourne highlights the corporate transformation of the liberal university in modernity:
"This insertion of corporate practices into the academy also yielded a new organism, one that has replicated with great success: the American university reengineered as a bottom-line-oriented big business. Jennifer Washburn's University, Inc. is a painstakingly detailed chronicle of how the free market has penetrated the inner sanctum of higher learning. Schools routinely sell off their research to the highest bidder in deals totaling as much as $1 billion a year. Washburn, who first reported on this trend in an Atlantic Monthly cover story five years ago, believes this partnership of the university with industry is a dangerous development. Not only does it divert universities from their educational goals, but it threatens the public welfare by taking scientific knowledge out of the public domain and placing it under corporate lock and key."
Higher education is no longer about the free exchange of knowledge, as the academic community is now treating basic knowledge as a commodity. This is undermining its traditional role as the guardian of the public domain.
In Australia, we are beginning to see the way that commercial forces are beginning to quietly transform virtually every aspect of academic life. The rise of the corporate university has meant the decline of traditional liberal arts education. Corporate funding of universities is growing and the money comes with strings attached. In return for this largesse, universities are acting more and more like for-profit patent factories, while professors are behaving more like businessmen. Secrecy is replacing the free flow of basic knowledge,university funds are shifting from the humanities to more commercially lucrative science labs, and the skill of teaching is valued less and less.
University, Inc. illustrates what is being undermined: the privatisation of knowledge undermines public health and the "knowledge commons" established in modernity. The questions put on the table are: 'Who owns and controls university-produced knowledge? Who should own it, and who should benefit from it?'
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