BY NAN ENSTAD

Nearly every day there is bad news about draconian cuts to a college or a university system as the economic emergency prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic compounds decades of crisis in higher education in the United States. We can expect such cuts to continue and worsen unless we change course in how we expect universities to balance their books and govern their campuses. Make no mistake: the way we think about and solve economic problems profoundly shapes the nature of the higher education endeavor. As cuts proliferate, they will fundamentally threaten the ideals of higher education unless we empower faculty and staff to safeguard the educational mission through governance procedures and challenge the power of private corporate partners and neoliberal thinking. Already, the AAUP has launched an investigation of “the crisis in academic governance” because so many institutions have dumped the accepted procedures for declaring financial exigency as well as wider faculty governance procedures.

We can also expect that calls will increase for universities to close their gaping budget wounds by sidling up to large private corporations that have private profit rather than public good as their prime directive. Over decades, the massive decline in state-level funding sent tuition and student debt soaring, but cuts continued far beyond what rising tuition could bear, leaving administrators with few options of how to fund programs. No wonder that the expectation that administrators and researchers become entrepreneurs, peppered with a cultish rhetoric of “innovation,” would seem like the only path forward.

A recent fiscal scandal at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh (UWO), demonstrates that even reportedly well-meaning administrators may become obsequious and unequal partners with private companies, squandering fiscal, cultural, and educational resources. In my new article for the Journal of Academic Freedom, “Why Revenue Generation Can’t Solve the Crisis in Higher Education, or, What’s that Smell?” I took a close look at the UWO scandal and found that it reveals much about perils to the educational mission of some public-private partnerships. The ideal, of course, is that partnership with a private company will generate funds that may be used for university operating costs while augmenting the educational mission with opportunities for students. The danger is that, rather than private industry supporting the university, the university may become another state resource that big business may strip mine for profit and prestige.

In January 2020, UWO chancellor Richard Wells and former vice-chancellor of administrative services and chief business officer Thomas Sonnleitner each pled guilty to one felony (plea bargained down from five) for illegally directing $11 million in public funds from the UWO budget to pay loans on investments in five building projects undertaken by the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Foundation from 2010 to 2014. Two of those investments involved off-campus private businesses that were intended to generate revenue for the University: a manure biodigester for Rosendale Dairy, the state’s largest dairy factory farm, and a major renovation for a downtown Oshkosh hotel. Rosendale Dairy’s manure digester held the largest potential for revenue generation, promised an educational component, and also became the biggest fiasco of the five projects.

Before the illegality of the transactions became public, Wells and Sonnleitner seemed to have achieved the ideal profile of entrepreneur-administrators. Once exposed, the debacle left the UW System—and ultimately taxpayers—holding the bill. Wells and Sonnleitner each paid $70,000 in damages but the UW System was left owing roughly $6.8 million to the banks.

The numbers indicate the high stakes of this deal, but economic value is cultural as well as mathematical. Milk Source, the corporate owner of the Rosendale Dairy, sought the partnership with a respected UW campus to improve its public image, which had been tarnished by controversial environmental practices. University prestige became a corporate public relations product. In the educational components, the corporation responded with hostility to some student questions or projects and banned faculty critical of the company from the premises. As one UWO professor put it, “they weren’t much interested in our version of academic inquiry.” Though just one example, the project reveals the dangers of resting the future of higher education on deals with corporate money makers. In trying to save the public university through playing the neoliberal game, the value of the enterprise—both fiscally and socially—may be squandered.

The solution? A return to an “innovation” of our forebears: public funding for public education. We need a New Deal for Higher Education in the form of federal reinvestment to stem the cuts and put higher education back on track as a public good.

Guest blogger Nan Enstad is the Buttel-Sewell Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a proud member of the AAUP and AFT.

Read the complete volume of the 2020 Journal of Academic Freedom at https://www.aaup.org/JAF11.