BY HANK REICHMAN

Today I was on a Zoom call with someone who only half-jokingly referred to the periodical Teen Vogue as the country’s leading socialist publication.  While the magazine still focuses on “fashion, beauty, and entertainment news for teens,” its coverage of politics–and of higher education–has been remarkable.  Take, for example, this piece published online today: “Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards,” by Asheesh Kapur Siddique, an assistant professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst.  The piece argues: “The corporate capitalist regime that controls American university boards today has manufactured the current crisis of higher education by inflating tuition to compensate for state funding cuts while passing on the debt to students; hiring contingent rather than tenure-line staff to pay teachers less while withholding the security of academic freedom; and appointing administrators who are ultimately accountable to the regime [hyperlinks in original].”  Some might quibble with the term “corporate capitalist,” perhaps opting for “neoliberal” or “academic capitalism,” but, the diagnosis seems pretty spot on.  In fact, I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Here are the first four paragraphs of the story:

Do American universities lack ideological diversity? Are they bastions of left-wing thought and hostile to conservatives? In early April, the Crimson, the student newspaper of Harvard University, published an article asserting that the university’s conservative faculty are “an endangered species,” which quickly animated establishment concerns about the alleged lack of ideological diversity on American college campuses. But the right is not underrepresented in higher education; in fact, the opposite is true: The modern American university is a right-wing institution. The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education, and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.

Conservatives continually cite statistics suggesting that college professors lean to the left. But those who believe a university’s ideological character can be discerned by surveying the political leanings of its faculty betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how universities work. Partisan political preferences have little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university — including what happens in classrooms. There is no “Democrat” way to teach calculus, nor is there a “Republican” approach to teaching medieval English literature; anyone who has spent time teaching or studying in a university knows that the majority of instruction and scholarship within cannot fit into narrow partisan categories. Moreover, gauging political preferences of employees is an impoverished way of understanding the ideology of an institution. To actually do so, you must look at who runs it — and in the case of the American university, that is no longer the professoriate.

Faculty once had meaningful power within higher educational institutions. In 1915, faculty at American universities organized themselves into the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which championed academic freedom and significant faculty participation in the administration of appointments, peer reviews, and curriculum — a principle that came to be known as “shared governance.” Though it was resisted by administrators and boards of trustees for much of the early 20th century, the shared governance model was cemented within the modern university in the post-World War II era. This was especially apparent in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, issued jointly by the American Council on Education, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the AAUP, which specified that faculty, administrators, and boards of trustees formed a “community of interest” that should share responsibilities to produce well-governed institutions.

But from the mid-1970s on, as the historian Larry Gerber writes, shared governance was supplanted as the dominant model of university administration as boards of trustees and their allies in the offices of provosts and deans took advantage of public funding cuts to higher education and asserted increasing control over the hiring of the professoriate. They imported business models from the for-profit corporate world that shifted the labor model for teaching and research from tenured and tenure-track faculty to part-time faculty on short-term contracts, who were paid less and excluded from the benefits of the tenure system, particularly the academic freedom that tenure secured by mandating that professors could only be fired for extraordinary circumstances.

And here are the two concluding paragraphs:

The decline of faculty governance and the corresponding ascendancy of corporate dominance of higher ed undermines the long-repeated canard about radical dominance of the university. Additionally, there are the recent right-wing efforts to undermine or revoke tenure at public universities, as the Texas legislature is currently considering, and the budgetary challenges facing higher education that have been heightened by the pandemic. It’s clear this is a harrowing time for colleges and universities nationwide.

What is the left to do about the corporate capture of the modern university? First and foremost, it must support and spread labor organizing across the country, building on the momentum established this spring with the strike by graduate workers at Columbia University. Second, relentlessly push the Biden administration toward canceling all student debt and supporting free public college for all. Third, assert shared governance on campus and work toward building a democratic university that secures labor protections and fair wages for all faculty, especially contingent and graduate workers. If we don’t act, the corporatization of universities will destroy American higher education.