BY HANK REICHMAN

The following is the text of a talk delivered at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) on May 20, 2019.  My thanks to the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment for hosting the talk as part of its colloquia series and to the UCLA Faculty Association and Professors Tobias Higbie and Michael Meranze for their support.  Portions of the text are taken from The Future of Academic Freedom.

I want to start by reading a story with which I begin chapter 1 of my book, The Future of Academic Freedom:

On September 7, 2016, Nathaniel Bork, a part-time philosophy instructor at the Community College of Aurora near Denver, drafted a letter to the school’s accrediting agency.  He was concerned about a new curriculum imposed on the faculty, which he believed was watered down and not appropriate for a college course, but first he submitted the draft to the school’s administration to ensure that his letter did not contain factual inaccuracies.  Two days later an administrator visited his class, and on September 13 he was summarily dismissed from his position. The college would claim that a routine, coincidentally timed classroom observation revealed instructional deficiencies so severe that they necessitated Bork’s immediate removal, but an AAUP investigating team concluded that such a rationale “strains credulity.”  He had, the investigation pointed out, previously received numerous stellar evaluations from peers and students alike.  As a part-time adjunct off the tenure track, Bork had no access to a  grievance procedure. Indeed, the AAUP investigation found “a total lack of due-process protections” for the school’s part-time adjuncts, who constitute 80 percent of its faculty.

In many respects the Bork case encapsulates some of the gravest and increasingly widespread threats to academic freedom.  First, Bork was dismissed because he exercised his right to institutional criticism.  If academic freedom and shared governance are to survive, much less flourish, faculty members must be free to call their administrations to task and to speak without restraint to trustees, politicians and accrediting agencies.  That freedom is all too frequently abridged.

Bork’s dismissal also highlights a growing and dangerous trend in which curriculum is imposed upon faculty members in ways that not only violate their academic freedom but may endanger learning itself.  To be sure, instructors are not always at liberty to determine which subjects they will be assigned to teach or even, in multiple section courses, which textbook they will use.  But responsibility for these decisions must at minimum reside collectively with the faculty in the discipline concerned.  Yet in Bork’s case it was an administrative committee, with a few hand-picked faculty representatives from outside his discipline, that made the decision.  These kinds of efforts are typical of the emerging trend to encourage “student success” by enacting “reforms” that violate faculty rights and often “dumb down” course material.

But by far the most important implication of the Bork case is how it highlights the often near-total lack of academic freedom and job security for the growing army of so-called “adjunct” faculty.  Indeed, had Bork not been summarily dismissed, had his contract simply not been renewed at the close of the semester, the AAUP would have been in a much weaker position to intervene.  Yet that is the situation faced by the majority of those currently teaching in higher education.

First and foremost among the many challenges the professoriate faces today is the search for ways to protect academic freedom in a world where a growing majority of teachers are employed in what are essentially “at-will” positions.  At present, only about one-fourth of all those who teach in higher education are included in the tenure system.  As of 2017, some 40 percent of 1.6 million teaching positions were part-time, with only a handful tenured; another 14 percent were graduate student employees.  It is not only the explosion of part-time appointments that is to blame.  Since 1993, a majority of new full-time appointments have also been off the tenure track.

Some claim the tenure system is outdated, but it remains critical to the defense of academic freedom.  The point, however, is not simply to “defend” tenure, especially if such defense is understood as limited to those already blessed with this increasingly infrequent status.  The point, instead, is to expand considerably tenure’s reach, much as the AAUP’s founders did a century ago.  Can non-tenure-track positions be converted to tenure-track ones?  Of course they can; as Hans-Joerg Tiede has documented for the 1930s, a period also marked by “the prevalence of contingent faculty,” our predecessors did it.

There is a rightful place in the academy for some temporary part-time appointments, but compelling allegedly “adjunct” faculty to cobble together the semblance of a career from a series of part-time jobs is not only an unconscionable abuse of those colleagues but also an ominous threat to the academic freedom of all faculty members and, indeed, to the integrity and quality of higher education in general.

The explosion of contingent appointments is symptomatic of even broader systemic challenges.  It is difficult not to recognize that, in key respects, the present situation is painfully reminiscent of that faced a century ago by the AAUP’s founders.  The AAUP was created in the context of the expanding economic and social inequality and concentration of corporate power associated with the Gilded Age.  Conditions today are eerily similar.  Economic inequality has reached a level not seen since the 1920s or earlier.  The expanding influence of wealth on politics, society, and culture cannot be ignored.  Moreover, if those who founded the AAUP were justly concerned, as are we, about the untoward influence of corporate and business interests on higher learning, today’s universities—and many smaller colleges too—now function increasingly like business enterprises themselves.  Governance at these institutions is progressively more hierarchical, and the focus is more and more on “the bottom line.”  What Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades have labeled “academic capitalism”—of which the decay of tenure is but one symptom—has increasingly subordinated higher education’s dedication to the public good.  As a consequence, “market behaviors have come to permeate almost all aspects of colleges and universities, from research to instruction.”

Academic capitalism—or, as many term it, “corporatization”—is arguably the most important development in higher education over the past several decades.  As the Indian writer Arundhati Roy put it, “America has taken the lead in confusing universities with business enterprises.”  Or, as Sheldon Wolin was already warning some fifteen years ago, “the great ‘research universities’ have become interlocked with corporate interests and with the propaganda machines represented by well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations.  As a result the critical independent intellectual seems an endangered species.”

Academic capitalism has greatly impacted academic work and the ability of the faculty to unite in defense of professional norms, including academic freedom.  As Rhoades notes, “At the core of the growth categories of academic employment is deep job insecurity and an almost total lack of due process, which fundamentally compromises academic freedom.”  But it is not simply that the faculty is now divided between those diminishing few on the tenure track and the new majority with contingent, often part-time appointments.  Disciplinary divisions—between professional and academic, STEM and humanities—have expanded as well.  Faculty work is also increasingly segmented, with an expanding bifurcation between teaching and research, and growing tension over the emergence of new nonfaculty academic professions that also claim expertise in teaching and learning, especially as instruction has incorporated new technologies.  At the same time, academic capitalism’s stress on measuring, assessment, and quantification has yielded what David Graeber colorfully called “the bullshitization of academic life: that is, the degree to which those involved in teaching and academic management spend more and more of their time involved in tasks which they secretly—or not so secretly—believe to be entirely pointless.”

In short, in one sense the greatest threat to academic freedom under the regime of academic capitalism is—as it was back when the AAUP was founded— the expanding and corrupting influence of money.

Attacks on academic freedom are often assumed to arise from external threats, most often originating at the extreme ends of the political spectrum.  But such attacks are most dangerous when they come from entrenched power.  And on college and university campuses that means the administration, the trustees, and (at public institutions) politicians.  It matters less for academic freedom if these forces can be labeled “Right” or “Left”—although sometimes that is clearly both possible and necessary—than that they have the power to implement policy and take action.  As the late conservative intellectual Peter Augustine Lawler put it, “The most pervasive trend opposing higher education in America is complacently bipartisan.  It is facilitated by administrators academic and otherwise, foundations, bureaucrats, and experts.”

The need for resources has always posed challenges to the principles of  academic freedom.  How much sway should donors, granting agencies, and governments have in how colleges and universities make use of the resources they provide?  When must an institution and its faculty simply say “no” to offers of funding that carry constraining conditions?  These questions are at least as old as the AAUP itself.  But as colleges and universities grow increasingly dependent on outside largesse, concerns about the abuse of such influence are mounting.

Two recent news items highlight the situation.  At first glance there would appear to be little connection between George Mason University’s appointment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to a visiting professorship—he will teach a two-unit summer session class in England—and the recent college admissions scandal in which one family paid as much as $6.5 million to get their child into an elite school.  Yet both developments highlight the larger long-term impact of repeated public funding cuts to higher education, which have been central to the emergence of academic capitalism.

George Mason, where Kavanaugh will teach, is a public institution, but decreasing state support has led its administration, like many others, to rely increasingly on philanthropic donations.  At George Mason that philanthropy has had a distinctly political coloration.  The conservative Charles Koch Foundation has donated nearly $100 million to the school since 2005—nearly half of that between 2011 and 2014.  In 2016 the Koch Foundation gave George Mason’s law school $10 million, which was paired with a $20 million donation from an anonymous donor affiliated with the conservative Federalist Society, resulting in the school’s renaming in honor of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

University leaders assured a skeptical faculty senate, which had expressed “deep concern” about the confidential terms of the donor agreements, that nothing was untoward.  But last April documents released in response to a FOIA request revealed that since 2016 the Federalist Society, which supported Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court appointment, had been inappropriately influencing faculty hiring and student placement, redirecting scholarship money to favored programs, and even reorienting the school’s judicial law clerk programs to place law students associated with the society in influential clerkships.

The Kavanaugh appointment is therefore hardly a surprise.  His position was already bought and paid for.  But what is unusual about his appointment is that unlike nearly every other part-time faculty member Kavanaugh actually has lifetime tenure—not as a professor but as a Supreme Court justice.

George Mason is an extreme case, to be sure, but the pressure on university administrations to replace state support with external donations is universal.  Across the country government support for higher education has been declining.  Analysis from the Delta Cost Project shows that between 2003 and 2013 state support for public research universities declined by 28 percent on a per-student basis, falling from over 30 percent in 2001 to 17 percent in 2012.  In 1980, states contributed 54 percent of total higher education spending.  By 2014, this had dropped to 37 percent.  In 1992 tuition accounted for slightly less than three-tenths of the total educational revenue for public colleges and universities.  But by 2017, tuition supplied nearly half of the total revenue, with tuition revenue exceeding public appropriations in twenty-eight states.  Since the 2008 economic crisis, the decline has been especially steep.  In 2017, only five states spent more per student than in 2008, with the average state spending $1,448, or 16 percent, less per student in 2017.

Between 1970 and 2000 alone, the share of university research funding from private sources tripled, with less than 1 percent of institutions receiving nearly 30 percent of gifts.  The Koch network and other ideologically motivated donors have taken advantage of this to offer funding for programs that reflect their ideologies, too frequently in ways that bypass or even undermine accepted standards of university governance and faculty control over research and curriculum.

And despite all the hue and cry over alleged left-wing domination of campus culture and the denial of free speech to conservative speakers, right-wing donors have also spent astonishing amounts to support sympathetic speakers.   For one example, the Young America’s Foundation spends millions each year on organizing and promoting campus speaking tours by over ninety prominent conservatives.  There has been no comparable effort by liberal groups.

This is the context as well for the admissions scandal.  Few would deny that a hefty donation may be one road to elite college admission, as the case of Jared Kushner, whose father donated $2.5 million to Harvard not long before his son’s admission, illustrates.  Of course, the Koch Foundation and similar donors have more ambitious and far-reaching goals.  But how to explain the bribery scandal, in which money was paid not to the institution but to corrupt individuals?  As public higher education is increasingly weakened by privatization of cost, the nation’s commitment to basic equality suffers.  If we once sought to allocate roughly similar resources to institutions across the board, now funds are increasingly concentrated on elite institutions, whose access to the tuition dollars and charitable donations of the wealthy far outstrips that of less prestigious schools, public and private.  This intensifies competition among applicants for a shrinking number of prestigious slots just as it has intensified competition among institutions for scarce resources.  But if acceptance to an elite school was supposed to depend on ability and achievement, or “merit,” the definition of those qualities has been increasingly shaped by wealth.  As Christopher Newfield, a discerning critic of our educational funding system, concluded, “Meritocracy not only didn’t keep plutocracy from happening: it collaborated with it.”  Or, as Eva Swidler recently put it, “The structure of academia is morphing to mirror the deferral to status, conspicuous consumption, increasing polarization, and degraded economic stability of society at large.”  And, I should add, to society’s growing toleration of personal corruption, from the White House on down.

*         *         *

Some forty years of public defunding, privatization, and economic stratification have yielded declining quality, decreased access, burgeoning student debt, and now corruption.  The implications of all this for academic freedom are multiple and profound.  First, the decline in public support has accelerated trends toward privatization and academic capitalism.  Foremost, there is the privatization of cost.  Perceived less and less as a public good, education is increasingly seen as a commodity to be paid for by its consumer, the student, via higher tuition and fees, financed more often than not by loans.  Moreover, the more students are viewed as “customers” and “consumers,” the greater the pressures to accommodate their immediate desires, however narrow and shortsighted these may be—and not just the desires of any students, but those of the students most capable of paying.  These must inevitably also erode institutional commitments to academic freedom, as service to students as “paying customers” displaces dedication to “the common good” by which academic freedom is justified.

Research universities not only seek arrangements with private interests to fund activities but may also themselves seek to become more “entrepreneurial.”  So, for example, endowment management has become a form of financial-academic capitalism in which, as one study concluded, “universities engage in market activities to generate profit in order to secure advantage over competitor institutions by amassing wealth.”  Such an approach is a “contributing factor to the steep and persistent stratification that characterizes higher education in the U.S.”  For instance, a 2010 decision by the University of Michigan to cut the spending rate from its nearly $11 billion endowment kept more than $30 million a year inside the endowment rather than doing more to help keep tuition low, hire more faculty, and update classrooms.

Perhaps more threatening to academic freedom has been the growing number of research universities claiming the right to control what has historically been the faculty’s intellectual property, hence restricting the faculty’s academic freedom to control the results of research.  In 1993 UC Berkeley, in negotiations open to neither the university community nor the public, granted the biotech firm Novartis “exclusive license to commercial research” conducted by members of its Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, even if Novartis did not fund that research, including projects supported by public taxpayer-funded agencies like the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation.  The agreement was unprecedented and highly controversial—a committee of the California legislature held a hearing on the deal—and it raised profound questions about academic freedom and shared governance.

Until relatively recently, research universities generally have been seen as a public good where unfettered investigation pushes new boundaries with results readily available to the public.  Valuable patents and copyrights have typically been held by individual faculty members.  But increasingly—especially after the 1980 passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which encouraged technology transfer—“much of what can be assigned as intellectual property in higher education is being claimed by its institutions, with the interests of the public being harmed in the process,” to quote Jacob Rooksby, dean of the law school at Gonzaga University and author of the definitive study of the intellectual property issue.

Sheila Slaughter cautions that “as segments of the professoriate align themselves with the market and make great personal gains from the synergy between their university work and their corporate endeavors, their claims about the need for buffers from external pressures ring less true, undermining their historic stance as disinterested scientists and experts, which is the foundation on which the claim of academic freedom rests.”

In its 2011 decision in the case of Stanford v. Roche, the US Supreme Court ruled that a faculty member’s rights to patents and other intellectual property belong to that faculty member unless specifically signed over to the university.  In response, some research universities now compel faculty members to sign over these rights in advance, as either a condition of university support for research or a condition of employment itself.  Sometimes they even falsely claim that Stanford v. Roche requires them to do so. In short, they have begun to act as if they were corporate businesses whose employees produce works made for hire.

One such institution, I should point out, is the University of California.  In 1943, UC adopted a policy that stated clearly, “Assignment to the Regents of whatever rights the inventor or discoverer may possess in the patent, or appointment of the Board as the agent of the inventor or discoverer, shall be optional on the part of the faculty member or employee.”  In the wake of Stanford v. Roche, however, UC now requires all newly hired faculty members to sign a patent acknowledgment agreement, in which the faculty member is compelled to

acknowledge my obligation to assign, and do hereby assign, inventions and patents that I conceive or develop 1) within the course and scope of my University employment while employed by University, 2) during the course of my utilization of any University research facilities, or 3) through any connection with my use of gift, grant, or contract research funds received through the University….   In the event any such invention shall be deemed by University to be patentable or protectable by an analogous property right, and University desires, . . . to seek patent or analogous protection thereon, I shall execute any documents and do all things necessary, at University’s expense, to assign to University all rights, title, and interest therein and to assist University in securing patent or analogous protection thereon….

Of course, it is elementary contract law that those already hired cannot be compelled to sign such a document, although many voluntarily and perhaps ignorantly have done so.  Among those who declined, as a matter of principle, was UC Santa Cruz professor of psychology Eileen Zurbriggen, a nationally renowned researcher on gender and sexuality.  But when Zurbriggen applied for an NIH grant the university refused to sign off on the proposal until she agreed to sign the patent acknowledgment, even though the likelihood of Zurbriggen’s research leading to a patent is all but zero.  The AAUP wrote in protest, but the UC administration refused to budge and, sadly, the Academic Freedom Committee of the UC Academic Senate has so far failed to confront the issue.

Curiously, the form on which newly hired UC faculty members must agree to assign their patent rights is the same form on which they must also agree to the state’s loyalty oath, a vestige of the 1950s.  That oath originally violated academic freedom by requiring all faculty members to declare they were not Communists, resulting in the dismissal of 31 faculty members, including future UC President David Saxon.  Their positions were restored, however, when the Supreme Court struck down the anti-Communist pledge, leaving a statement of loyalty to the U.S. and California constitutions as a vestigial holdover, now linked, apparently without irony, to the patent pledge.

*         *         *

It has always been the case, at least since the late 19th century, that college and university governing boards have been dominated by business interests, with little to no direct faculty involvement.  But such boards have been largely constrained by the principles of shared governance, articulated most fully and clearly in the 1966 joint Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities.  However, the rise of academic capitalism has increasingly eroded previously prevailing governance standards.

So, for instance, at the University of North Carolina the faculty senate chair declared that “the Board of Governors is acting in ways that interfere with faculty prerogative on curriculum, on research, and on service.”  As UNC law professor Gene Nichol ruefully concluded, “governing boards stacked with political operatives and potential high-dollar donors are not great candidates for the protection of core values of academic freedom and independence.  Nor are the chancellors, provosts, and  presidents that they choose to employ.  University academic independence has disappeared in North Carolina.  It was easily surrendered.  It won’t readily return.”

A related development has been the growing tendency to view college and university presidents as equivalent to corporate CEOs, supported almost without question by compliant boards that regularly approve ever more astronomical executive salaries.  So, for example, when faculty members at USC called for the resignation of that institution’s president—whose salary exceeded $3.1 million—in the wake of a series of embarrassing scandals involving sexual harassment and administrative misbehavior, it took only an hour for the board chair—who once called himself the president’s “servant”—to voice unconditional support for the besieged executive, who resigned several days later anyway.  The increasingly common practice of conducting presidential searches in secret, with little to no input from faculty or students, has been decried by the AAUP and others.

And it’s not just large institutions.  The impact of academic capitalism extends to smaller liberal arts colleges as well.  Pomona College professor John Seery commented acidly that such college presidents more often than not “don’t know what they are talking about, and yet they talk as if they do.  As a class of professional liars, they shouldn’t be trusted with the truth-seeking institutions with which they’ve been entrusted.  They are to promote the college as a place of teaching.  But they are not teachers.”

Seery continued,

The real reason tuitions are skyrocketing and educational integrity has been compromised is because administrators, not educators, now run the show, all across America.  They call the shots. They build the fancy buildings.  They call for and approve the costly amenities.  They fund what they want to fund.  They hire the people they want to hire and pay them top dollar. They make the decisions about branding campaigns, and they set the agenda for student affairs staffs.  They fund the kind of curriculum they want.  They control the purse strings.  They hold the power.

That pyramidal model in which intellectual labor is transferred from the faculty to the president and his administrators and their strategic plans systematically siphons money and attention and purpose away from what matters most, the classroom. . . . It doesn’t have to be this way.

Yes, it doesn’t have to be this way.

My talk today has not been optimistic about the current condition and imminent future of higher education and academic freedom under academic capitalism.  But if there is a silver lining, it is that more faculty members have grown more alert to the dangers they face, and many are organizing to respond.

“Nothing will serve but organization,” wrote the Marxist literary scholar Granville Hicks following his 1935 dismissal from the faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which was investigated by the AAUP.  “Conditions in education, if left to themselves,” he wrote, “are not going to become better but worse.  If teachers do not want to be reduced to a nauseating, boot-licking slavery, they had better start organizing now.”

That warning remains timely.

Thank you.