The Associate Vice Provost in the Gray Flannel Suit

Administrative Labor and the Corporate University

Bibliographic Data

ID12162340
AuthorsJeffrey T Nealon (corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume19
Issue1
Pages92-109
Publication date2006-12-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueRethinking Marxism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0893-5696 • E-ISSN: 1475-8059
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/08935690601054563
OpenAlexW2060870308
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited13

This article argues that if leftists want to take the university back from corporate forces, perhaps we should take our inspiration not from cultural conservatives but from economic ones, who'd teach us to “take over” higher education by severely trimming and streamlining the administrative ranks of middle management, and disgorging that excess cash back into the “core business” of education and research. Keywords: Corporate UniversityAdministration I've delivered proto-versions of this essay at the MLA conference, the Humanities Center at Grinnell College, and the Society for Social and Political Philosophy. Thanks to Rosemary Hennessy, Alan Schrift, and Hasana Sharp for offering those venues. I'd also like to thank the following folks who've offered valuable comments along the way: Michael Berube, Drucilla Cornell, Doug Henwood, and Evan Watkins. Finally, the readers and editorial staff from RM—David Ruccio, Vin Lyon-Callo, and Peter Tamas—offered incisive criticisms and suggestions that vastly improved the essay. Notes 1Perhaps the best general overview of “the corporate university,” its history and practices, can be found in Slaughter and Leslie (Citation1997) and Slaughter and Rhoades (Citation2004), though perhaps the most widely cited book on the general crisis is Readings (Citation1996), discussed below. There's a vast critical literature on “the crisis of the corporate university,” and it's probably best understood as a general term for a series of related subissues. For example, for a specific history and critique of technology transfer (the making of the American university into an R&D wing of industry), see Miyoshi (2000a, 2000b). On the part-time and contingent labor situation, see Nelson and Watt (2004), and the collections Chalk Lines (Martin Citation1998), Steal This University (Johnson, Kavanaugh, and Mattson Citation2003) and Tenured Bosses (Bousquet, Scott, and Parascondola Citation2004). On the general relation between academic labor and the recent changes in other U.S. labor markets, see Watkins (Citation1989, Citationforthcoming). On the culture wars and their relation to the university, see Berube and Nelson (1995). For the latest fronts in that war, opened by David Horowitz et al., see Berube's blog, michaelberube.com (especially the entries for 8 December 2004 and 25 February 2005). On the academic star system, see Williams Citation2001, a collection of essays in the Minnesota Review. 2In the era of development, when the university endowment is king, this “nonprofit” status is becoming increasingly suspect. In this context, one wonders about Harvard's decision to appoint former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers as its president—insofar as it gave the impression that Harvard was nothing other than its $20 + -billion-dollar endowment. In other words, Summers’ appointment risked exposing Harvard as a mutual fund that had found the ultimate tax loophole—nonprofit university status. Not to mention the fact that Harvard's, like many university's endowments, is a mutual fund that looks increasingly like a ponzi scheme—getting donors to pay in money at the “bottom,” which is then disgorged in multimillion-dollar salaries to those running the fund at the “top.” In 2003, the highest-paid people in all of academia were the top two investment managers at the Harvard Management Company, who earned $69 million dollars ($35.1 and $34 million dollars, respectively) in fiscal year 2003 (Basinger 2004). The number three man at Harvard Management had to settle for a paltry $17.3 million for the year. 3Gordon's book questions whether there ever was any substantive downsizing within the management ranks of American business in the wake of the 1980s. Among other things, he points out that American business was so “fat” with managers going into the 1980s that downsizing would have had to go a long way indeed to make it “lean.” He points out that American businesses average three times more “managerial and administrative employees” than German or Japanese firms (in 1989, 13 percent of all employees for U.S. firms compared with 4.2 percent for Japan and 3.9 percent for Germany) (Gordon 1996, 43). Given this initial managerial heft, even substantial downsizing wouldn't necessarily make an organization svelte: “A fat corporation would still be a fat corporation” (51). Likewise, he points out that many of those targeted by the high-profile downsizings of the 1980s and 1990s found similar jobs in smaller firms—spreading management obesity throughout the economy, even as it thinned within some large corporations (55). Depending upon how one understands the numbers, then, it may be that the increasing management hiring in academia actually follows—rather than contradicts—a certain “fattening” of management in American business. 4These are full-time employment numbers taken from the NEA's Update publication (4.3–4, May and September 1998). Delving into the numbers a bit more, the NEA points out that “executive and administrative hiring” is the only sector of academic employment to experience any increase at all in “newly hired full-time staff” for the past twenty years: “Overall, the number of newly hired full-time employees decreased by 35% from 95,939 in 1977 to 62,091 in 1995 ... The number of new hires increased only in executive and administrative and other professional jobs” (Update 4.3: 5). By comparison, faculty full-time new hires are down 17 percent over that time period, with physical plant and clerical staffs both off more than 50 percent in full-time new hires since 1977. 5And let's not even talk about salary. From NEA Update 9.4 (2003): “Over a 30-year period, the average salaries (in constant 2002-03 dollars) for full-time faculty on 9/10-month contracts increased a dismal 4.6%, with professors and instructors accounting for the increase. Nonranking faculty, assistant and associate professors showed a decrease in spending power by as much as 13.8%. The average salary for women still remains lower than men.” This over a time span when presidents and provosts saw their pay rates climb to CEO-like heights (see Basinger 2005), and the hiring boom in the academic administration ranks brought higher salaries there as well. According to the 2004–5 salary numbers reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education (Citation2005), about 90 percent of all job titles classified as “executive” and “academic administration” had a median salary higher than the nationwide average faculty salary for 2004–5, $68,505 (see Smallwood Citation2005). 6Given the intensification of fund-raising by presidents and provosts, it's easy to forget the extent to which “quelling internal dissent” remains a key function in the corporate university. In 2004, for example, there were high-profile firings of a tenured professor at Penn State-Altoona and two professors at the University of Southern Mississippi. The reason given? First, that faculty members were critical and unsupportive of their programs: the Penn State professor of sixteen years, named “an excellent classroom teacher who is quite popular with her students” (Ward Citation2004) by the very committee that fired her, dared to question whether her Altoona campus theater program was in fact “Your Ticket to Broadway,” as the program was supposedly sold to students. For their part, the tenured professors from Southern Miss conspired, among other sins, to question the credentials of an administrator: they (truthfully) pointed out that a dean at Southern Miss claimed in her curriculum vitae and on the university Web site formerly to have been a tenured professor at the University of Kentucky. She had in fact never worked there, but at Ashland Community College in Ashland, Kentucky (same difference, the administrator said, and she went on to have the accusers’ e-mail monitored, while any faculty member would have been summarily dismissed for such misrepresentation). On the Penn State situation, see Fogg (Citation2004) and Ward (2004); regarding the Southern Miss case, see Smallwood (Citation2004). 7This argument is advanced most persuasively in my own discipline by David Laurence, the director of Associated Departments of English, to whom I owe the pithy phrase “fewer seats in a more comfortable boat.” See Laurence (Citation2002) for his take on the disciplinary “crisis” supposedly brought about by the death of a “coherent” core curriculum in English. 8One finds a bit of a numbers problem when turning back to Nelson and Watt's (2004) critique. If, as they write, “for every person earning $50,000 to $100,000 or more for teaching a course there are hundreds more earning about $1000 or $2000,” it's hard to see how taking down the tenured fat cats would make things substantially better. Rhetorically inflated though they may be, let's simply take their numbers at face value. For every $100,000 per course star, let's say that there are 200 part timers making $1,000 per course. So, we'll simply pool the money and split it evenly: that's $300,000 for every 201 teachers, or around $1,500 per person. Crisis not averted.This blame-faculty-first line of reasoning also mirrors a bill of goods consistently offered by crackpot politicians and right-wing ideologues: someone somewhere is in fact making this mythical $100,000 primarily for teaching an arduous three—or six, nine, even twenty—hours a week, when K–12 teachers do it fifty hours a week for half the pay (and these are hardworking folks who don't teach courses on music videos and porn). As Watkins (Citation1989) definitively demonstrates in Work Time, academic “work” and its socioeconomic effects extend far, far beyond the hours spent in the classroom, but these kinds and sites of work often remain invisible in debates surrounding the university, just as the economic costs of obtaining a Ph.D. (an additional decade of debt-ridden apprenticeship taken out of your working life, not to mention the heavy psychic tolls paid along the way) too often remain equally invisible in discussions of “exorbitant” faculty pay rates. 9See, for example, the sentiments of Richard T. CitationIngram, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, responding to faculty concerns (expressed by James T. Richardson, president of AAUP, and Cary Nelson) over AGB's mission statement: “it underscores the need for the board, the chief executive, and appropriate stakeholders to clarify the authority delegated to the faculty and other participants in the governance process ... It calls on boards and chief executives to be certain to include appropriate stakeholders in discussions when their participation is relevant ... Its principles and standards can help restore the voice of faculty members in their areas of expertise and primary professional concern” (1999, 10). So, if the board of trustees ever finds itself discussing Adorno, I suppose we can expect a call. But in the meanwhile, we can only take such language as a not-too-subtle invitation for faculty to butt out of the university's governance. 10In the end, it may well be that a robust faculty union movement will be the only way to perform this revitalization of faculty sovereignty in the university. And while I am certainly sympathetic to calls for faculty unionization as the fix for the corporate university—who doesn't love sentiments like Nelson and Watt's “Keep on Truckin’ and Fighting the Good Fight” (2004, 136) —in this essay I'm trying, as a kind of thought experiment, to think within the (admittedly cramped) space of contemporary corporatization, rather than primarily against or outside it.While unionization presently lies far outside the thinkable spectrum for the theory and practice of corporatization, I should note that there is a growing literature in mainstream economics showing faculty tenure (often criticized as the ultimate in union-style job entitlement) to be “good” (which is to say, rational and maximizing) for the corporate university. For an overview of mainstream work on the positive economic effects of tenure, see Royer (Citation2005). For a specific “proof” of tenure's maximizing worth to the university, see Chatterjee and Marshall (Citation2001)

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