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March 21, 2008
In his review of Bill Readings The University in Ruins Dominick LaCapra says that the contemporary academy is based on a systemic, schizoid division between a market model and a model of corporate solidarity and collegial responsibility. Firstly:
The market model is employed in the prevalent idea that undergraduates subsidize research and graduate education and that they are not getting their money's worth, notably at a time when tuition is very high and has been outpacing the general rate of inflation. The market model has also played a significant role in the establishment of criteria for teaching and reward in departments and in the setting of salaries and perquisites for individuals. The idea here is that a department, to be competitive nationally, must conform to national criteria, for example, with respect to faculty that it is trying to recruit. And major increases in an individual's salary or other perquisites have typically depended on the reception of an outside offer from a peer institution.
By contrast there is also the belief that the university is a community made of smaller communities guided by non-market-oriented norms and values.
On this model, departments and individuals should be bound by the value of dedicated service to the institution independent of market considerations, even if such service is not directly rewarded in material ways. The solidaristic-collegial model is particularly prominent in the idea that faculty have a special if not quasi-priestly responsibility for the education of nation's youth. Here to complain about tendencies in the academic system may be tantamount to saying that it has become overly aligned with the modified market mechanisms operative in the rest of the economy and society.
LaCapra says that Readings stresses only the way in which the university has become a corporation in the modern, market-oriented sense, and for Readings this market model is hegemonic to the point of creating but one dominant identity for the modern university. For him the older corporate or solidaristic idea is anachronistic, as is the so-called university of culture that was its cognate. Readings is not unhappy about the end of the university of culture and all that it presumably stood for, but neither is he happy about its market-oriented replacement.
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