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Chronicle of Higher Education
You Can’t Trust the Businessmen on the Board of Trustees
A century ago, Thorstein Veblen explained why
By Nick Romeo and Ian Tewksbury June 30, 2020 PREMIUM
Just over a century ago, the same year that the Spanish flu struck
millions around the world, the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen
diagnosed a malady of a different sort: the control of universities by
businessmen. “Plato’s classic scheme of folly,” he wrote, “which would
have the philosophers take over the management of affairs, has been
turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of
the pursuit of knowledge. To anyone who will take a dispassionate look
at this modern arrangement it looks foolish, of course — ingeniously
foolish.”
It has become a truism to say the coronavirus pandemic will change
everything about higher education. But few discuss who should shape this
change. The faculty? The student body? The public? Or the
business-executive trustees that Veblen believed were destroying the
essential nature of academe?
Veblen was the first sociologist of academe to notice the enormous and
pernicious power wielded by university trustees from the business world.
Many criticize the inflated salaries and power of university
administrators and presidents, but for the first time in recent history
there is a growing recognition that universities should not be run by
the corporate executives who sit on their boards of trustees. Many
academics are perpetually shocked by the depredations of corporate
boards — the defunding of university presses, the adjunctification of
the faculty, and the evisceration of the liberal arts — but Veblen would
not have been surprised. The thesis he defended in 1918 is still true
today: Scientific and scholarly inquiry are incompatible with the
business values of profit maximization, efficiency, and consumer
satisfaction.
Today, Veblen is best remembered for his Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899), in which he coined the term "conspicuous consumption." But we
ought also to remember him for The Higher Learning in America: A
Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, his prescient
study of American higher education, first published in 1918. He observed
the destructive effects of many phenomena that could easily come from
contemporary headlines: extravagant salaries for athletic coaches and
presidents, efforts by administrators to privilege campus amenities and
nonacademic diversions, increasing reliance on underpaid part-time
instructors, the elimination of core requirements under the mantra of
student choice, overreliance on dubious statistical measures of teaching
and learning efficiency, a vast proliferation of bureaucratic
administrators, and the substitution of careerism for the pursuit of
knowledge.
When Veblen published The Higher Learning, wealthy industrial barons
were funneling their fortunes into a new system of higher education, and
the universities where Veblen worked — Cornell, the University of
Chicago, Stanford — were all founded by the wealth of the new American
Gilded Age. Ezra Cornell was a telegraph mogul, John D. Rockefeller an
oil magnate, and Leland Stanford a railroad tycoon. The 20th-century
American university was built by a new type of patron.
Veblen saw that the wealth of industrial capitalism promoted
universities dedicated to advancing business interests. This led to an
irresolvable contradiction between “the pursuit of learning and the work
of preparation for the professions,” since “the training given by these
two lines of endeavor — science and business — is wholly divergent.”
While the pursuit of wealth seeks profit and prestige, the pursuit of
knowledge seeks the fulfillment of curiosity.
This contradiction is what Richard F. Teichgraeber III, editor of the
2015 edition of The Higher Education, calls the “thesis of cultural
incompatibility.” In Veblen’s time, this contradiction manifested itself
in the university’s adoption of new managerial forms of training and
evaluation. Letter grades and course-credits were introduced to provide
precise calculations of intellectual inquiry; the current dominance of
standardized and multiple-choice testing is largely an inheritance of
the same early 20th-century “science” of management that nearly all
universities now accept. Veblen protested the use of letter grades and
statistical appraisals of knowledge or learning; he would randomly
switch As to Cs and vice versa. "My grades are like lightning," he once
said. "They are liable to strike anywhere."
While such protests might appear quixotic, they stem from Veblen’s
decades-long study of the sociology of higher education. Veblen’s
pedagogy, like his scholarship, takes a stand against the
corporatization of the pursuit of knowledge. When boards of trustees are
almost entirely composed of “bankers” and “businessmen,” business values
control the very functioning of the university itself: its financial
structure, the nature of campus life, and its ultimate purpose. Veblen
believed the encroachment of these values must be fought on every front.
Such a sweeping critique of the university might sound anachronistic.
But contemporary statistics tell an alarming story. Today, on the boards
of trustees at the universities where Veblen worked, business
professionals — almost exclusively corporate financiers and
"businessmen," with little to no experience in higher education — make
up over 80 percent of governing boards. Faculty members make up less
than 2 percent of the board of trustees at Yale, Cornell, Stanford, and
the University of Chicago. Corporate financiers and business
professionals outnumber the faculty by a magnitude greater than 100 to
4. Boards of trustees still have almost complete authority to choose
university presidents, determine budget allocations, and set the
administrative structure of the university.
These trustees bring the managerial models of the business world,
prioritizing growth, customer satisfaction, and optics. Thus colleges
are transformed into vocational schools under the mantra of
practicality; undergraduates are entertained with “scholastic
accessories” that prepare them to live lives of conspicuous consumption;
and the university — because it is modeled on the culture of business —
becomes committed to the all-consuming manufacture of prestige,
publicity, and the management of endowments.
Boards of trustees should include undergraduates, graduate students,
community members, and professors from all departments.
Corporate influence also directly affects the nature of scholarly
research. To take just one example, research on psychiatric medication
is routinely funded and shaped by the corporations who sell these
medications. As John P.A. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford’s
School of Medicine, wrote in an article in 2011, “Much research is
conducted for reasons other than the pursuit of truth. Conflicts of
interest abound, and they influence outcomes. In health care, research
is often performed at the behest of companies that have a large
financial stake in the results. . . . This is an embarrassment.
Increased investment in evidence-based clinical and population research,
for instance, should be designed not by industry but by scientists free
of material conflicts of interest.”
In a time of crisis, it’s tempting merely to identify the disparate
symptoms of dysfunction without perceiving a fundamental cure or cause.
Veblen, however, suggests that there is one principal disease at the
heart of higher education — the businessmen who hold near complete power
over the university. If we want to champion a democratic higher
education, we must also democratize the composition of boards of
trustees. They should include undergraduates, graduate students,
community members, and professors from all departments. If universities
want to preserve a distinctive identity based on the pursuit of
knowledge and the cultivation of intellectual curiosity and freedom, the
values of corporate America cannot be allowed to permeate the academy.
Otherwise, the postpandemic university will be shaped entirely in the
image of the boards of trustees. Already, faculty, staff, and students
across the country are being asked to bear the burden of drastic
austerity measures which aim to further restructure higher education.
Veblen teaches us that there is an unavoidable conflict between the
interests of businessmen and the interests of knowledge. The pandemic
will force us to choose which side we are on.
Nick Romeo writes for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and many
other publications. Follow him @Nickromeoauthor. Ian Tewksbury, a
Classics Ph.D. student at Stanford University, researches ancient
philosophy and also writes for the Daily Beast and Newsweek. Follow him
@TewksburyIan.
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