for David and Patricia Brodsky
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 12:05:28 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-To: CSALL@gmu.edu
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From: beth armitage 
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Subject: Useful analysis of university corporatization (fwd)
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from tmoylan

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Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 28 Apr 1996 
17:11:34 -0400 (EDT) From: Richard Wolff 
To: mlg network 
Subject: Useful analysis of university corporatization (fwd)
         The following "speaks for itself"..............................
         Rick Wolff
******************************************************************

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 1996 12:38:55 -0400 (EDT)
From: Margot Backus 
Subject: Useful analysis of university corporatization (fwd)

Friends,

  I am sending you this long but powerful piece of analysis dealing with 
the University of Rochester's "Renaissance Plan" in the hope that, by 
circulating as widely as possible, it may lend inspiration and concrete 
analysis to others who may be confronting similar trends.  Feel free to 
pass it on.

Margot Backus
*******************************************************************
From:
Ali Shehzad Zaidi
Dept. of Modern Languages
University of Rochester


At a time when universities are being remade in the corporate image,
The Rochester Renaissance Plan illustrates what happens in higher education
when corporate power goes unchecked. Partnerships between the University of
Rochester and such corporations as Kodak, have turned the university into a
corporate annex instead of a place of independent inquiry and investigation.
This corporate remaking of a prestigious university is the educational
equivalent of what General Motors did to Flint, Michigan when it closed its
auto plants in order to open new ones overseas, leaving the community to
rot. It is small consolation to know that what is happening at the
University of Rochester belongs to a pattern of disenfranchisement in a
world controlled by corporations that operate largely free from regulations
that governments, whether national, state or municipal, ought to use to
protect the common good. Ultimately, the shrinking imaginative space in our
universities corresponds to the shrinking democratic space in the public
sphere. 
Rochester is a company town. A statement by the CEO of Kodak is
enough to make front page news. While the city depends on the corporations
that have their headquarters here, this dependency has not helped the city
to prosper. The University of Rochester is the citys major educational
institution; and its Board of Trustees consists of executives whose idea of
a university is that of a place which prepares students for the corporate
workforce. The attrition of the humanities which began with the elimination
of the sociology graduate programs, became a massacre with the arrival of
Thomas Jackson as president of the university two years ago. At the request
of the trustees, Jackson, a bankruptcy lawyer by profession, presided over
the dismantling of unwanted programs. Within months of his arrival, the
first round of cuts began. The administration closed the Asia Library, which
student protests had spared several years earlier. It also ended the half
million dollar annual subsidy to the Memorial Art Gallery, and suspended
graduate programs in anthropology. Moreover, it was soon clear from Jacksons
pronouncements that a lot worse was in store. 
In selling the Renaissance Plan to the university community, Jackson 
appropriated a humanists lexicon in order to conceal a corporatist agenda. 
In the months preceding the unveiling of the plan, Jackson spoke of his 
vision for the university, invoking the notion of an intellectual community. 
He also created the psychological climate for the cuts, alluding to the dire 
state of the university's finances, as well as the need to make hard choices 
in tough times. Jackson's new undergraduate curriculum, which he calls the 
very essence of a liberal education, contains a feature which, according to 
Jackson, is a truly nifty and elegant idea, allowing students to devise 
clusters of related courses. While in appearance this allows undergraduates 
to choose their plans of study, in reality students are obliged to choose 
between different packaging of the same corporatism, in a curriculum that has 
been stripped of much of its imaginative content, particularly those courses 
which engage in social and cultural analysis. The state of financial exigency 
that the administration invokes to justify the gutting of such courses simply 
does not exist. During Jacksons first year in office, when the first round of
cuts began, the size of the endowment grew from 624 million dollars in June
94 to 686 million dollars in June 95, a fiscal year in which universities
earned the highest return on their endowments since 1986 (Year of the Bull,
Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 16, 1996: A32-33) Moreover, Jackson was
quoted in the Democrat and Chronicle, shortly after the release of the
Renaissance Plan, as saying that finances were not a primary reason for the
changes. 
In November 1995, the university administration unveiled The
Rochester Renaissance Plan, so called because it represented, in the words
of President Jackson, a virtual rebirth of the university.  Aborted in the
process were the humanities, as the euphemistic name of the plan might well
suggest to one versed in corporate doublespeak. The plan, citing the need to
focus on undergraduate education, hit humanities graduate programs hard,
suspending linguistics and comparative literature, while downsizing
philosophy and history. The plan also targeted those  science departments
out of favor with corporate interests, reducing environmental science and
mechanical engineering, while eliminating altogether the graduate chemical
engineering program, in which Kodak, having moved into digital imaging, was
no longer interested. The administration, in a serious miscalculation, since
it brought national attention, also eliminated the graduate mathematics
program. Over a hundred scientists and mathematicians and at least half a
dozen Nobel laureates wrote letters to the administration protesting the
move. The Renaissance plan increased funding for the professional schools
that give the University of Rochester much of its prestige. The plan was
meant, in the words of President Jackson, to increasingly complement the
distinctions  of these schools, among which is the Simon School of Business,
which, even before the cuts, already granted more graduate degrees than all
the programs in the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as engineering,
combined. 
Before releasing the plan, the administration asked each department
to justify their graduate programs in discussions with administrators. While
the administration made much of the input it had received, it was soon clear
from Jackson's statements what kind of intellectual community was being
fostered, as this statement, which appeared in the special issue of The
Campus Times the day after the release of the plan, suggests: "The impact of
the plan is so dramatic that we'll hit the people we need to hit."  Jackson
revealed the leeway for dialogue and debate at the University of Rochester
in his commentary in the glossy alumni magazine of the university: "... any
attempt to debate the relative importance of subjects such as math, foreign
language, English, western civilization, non-western civilization, or
computer literacy risks derailing the entire reform." That faculty criticism
of the Renaissance Plan should have been rather timid can be attributed to
the foresight of the administration. In a letter to the faculty, Jackson
informed them:

"As the Rochester Renaissance is successful, new resources will be created to
reward those departments that have been most successful in supporting the
new endeavor of the College. Departments... will find new rewards in the
future, in terms of higher compensation, enhanced support for departmental
activities, and ultimately, in enhanced faculty positions allocated to
departments. We wish to make clear that, in the new College environment,
resources will flow more generously to those departments which succeed best
in supporting the overall goals of the Renaissance Plan..."

The reason for the cuts, as nearly as anyone can tell, lies in the
intention of the Board of Trustees, which consists almost entirely of CEOs,
lawyers and tycoons, to divert university resources to corporate research.
During the 1980s, Congress enacted legislation which granted huge tax
write-offs, along with the right to purchase patents derived from academic
research, to corporations that engaged in partnerships with universities.
The result has been a growing number of cooperative ventures between
research universities, corporations and the Pentagon -- ventures that
diminish the educational experience. Universities must build infrastructure
for research scientists who do little teaching but who command much higher
salaries than their colleagues who do teach and who, as it turns out, belong
disproportionately to the departments that are being cut. An example of such
a venture at the University of Rochester is the optics project funded by the
Department of Defense, the university and several corporate partners,
including Kodak. While the resulting developments in optical technology may
improve the night vision systems in Apache attack helicopters and reap hefty
profits for Kodak, little benefit will accrue to students. Tuition at 
universities has been rising at twice the rate of inflation during the past
decade, owing to the growing demands of corporations which, in effect, now
dictate the priorities of those universities. Public resources and student
tuition all too often fund corporate research. As Johanna Lessinger and
Jagna Sharff observe, The corporate reorientation has also provided the
sheer growth in the number of administrators, who attempt to introduce
scientific management to the academic endeavor  in return for salaries
significantly higher than those of most ordinary academics... These
administrators are charged with courting corporate investment, with
destroying or maiming departments judged non-cost-effective, with
dismantling faculty control over curriculum and university affairs, with
defusing the inevitable faculty discontent and with smothering any attempts
to organize around such issues. (Anthropology Today, Vol. 10 No 5, Oct. 94:
14) Their words describe precisely the situation at the University of
Rochester.    
Contradictions abound. Two vice presidents are leaving the
University of Rochester to start an educational consulting firm. Their first
client, at the request of President Jackson, will be the university. This
comes at a time when doctoral candidates in the College of Arts and Sciences
have been socked with a $450 continuation of enrollment fee after the
completion of their coursework. The January 23, 1995 issue of the
administrative newsletter, Currents, contains the news,  on the front page,
of the appointment of a professor to a newly created administrative
position, that of the vice provost for research and graduate affairs. On the
next page of this very issue one learns of the demise of the graduate
programs in anthropology. In the brief piece on this occurrence Dean Aslin
is quoted as saying: But like all institutions of higher learning, the
University has to make difficult decisions as it seeks to use limited
resources effectively on behalf of a wide variety of academic programs --
all of which have considerable importance to us.  
Along with a summary of the Renaissance plan, the administration
released a fifteen page rationale statement by Dean Aslin, for the decisions
to cut or to preserve graduate programs, analyzing in turn their merits and
deficiencies. None of the reasons that he gives for eliminating or
preserving programs, taken either individually or collectively, make any
educational, financial or common sense. Take, for instance, the decision to
preserve the graduate Visual Arts Program. Dean Aslin correctly notes that
this innovative program bridges with English, film studies and womens
studies. He neglects to mention that film studies and womens studies are not
graduate programs, even if they are often taught by Visual Arts faculty. Two
of the graduate programs cut within the past couple of years are vital to
the Visual Arts program. The first is comparative literature, which provides
critical theory courses for the Visual Arts program. The other one is the
graduate program in anthropology. When it was cut, the visual arts students
wrote a letter to Dean Aslin in which they said:

"The Anthropology Department is a crucial resource for many of us who
do interdisciplinary work. We value our fruitful communications with
anthropology graduate students. Graduate seminars in anthropology... have
become a central element of the curriculum for many graduate students in
Visual and Cultural Studies. In addition, we rely on professors in
Anthropology for our individual research. Several of our dissertation
committees include professors from the Anthropology Department. Your
restructuration would cripple these professors ability to support these
projects and halt the vital communications among our graduate programs. In
short, the graduate program in anthropology is an irreplaceable element of
the interdisciplinary environment for which we chose to attend the
University of Rochester. Any cuts to this program will have destructive
effects that reach far beyond that department."


Having eliminated the anthropology program last year, the administration
then cut the comparative literature, effectively castrating the Visual Arts
program and leaving only one graduate program with which it could bridge --
English. However, it did increase the graduate stipends of the Visual Arts
students, claiming that it would enable the Visual Arts program, in the
words of Dean Aslin, to attract the very best graduate students.  Had the
administration been truly intent on attracting the very best graduate
students, it would not have left the Visual Arts program only one graduate
program with which to bridge. The reason why the administration increased
the stipends of the visual arts students while cutting virtually every
graduate program in the humanities, was not, in all likelihood, to attract
good students, but to pacify a feisty group of students in the humanities
that was capable of concerted action, as their letter to Dean Aslin
indicates. 
The corporate system appeals to our greed and, at best, to our sense
of self-preservation, in order to distance us from one another. Those who
attempt to extricate themselves from this enforced isolation are punished by
way of example. The Renaissance Plan was imposed on the students and faculty
in this very manner. During the months prior to the suspension of the
anthropology graduate program, the faculty were told that a certain number
of graduate programs would be cut -- nine was number I heard bandied about.
Because the elimination of the anthropology graduate programs, when it came,
made it more likely for other graduate programs to survive, no faculty
members protested other than the anthropology professors themselves. Not
only do departments not gain by trying to preserve graduate programs other
than their own, but they would harm themselves by doing so. By pitting
departments against one another, the administration deprives them of
support. 
The strategy used by the administration against the mathematics
department is a case in point. The American Mathematical Society sent a team
to the University of Rochester to ask the administration to preserve the
math graduate programs. The importance of math to the other sciences gave
the mathematics department a constituency that might have acted on its
behalf. To forestall this, the administration advanced a proposal that the
math department keep its graduate programs on the condition that other
science departments agree to give up 10% of their budgets to pay for them. 
Moreover, the proposal mandated that the mathematics department would have
to publicly acknowledge the decisions of other science departments that
refused to contribute, and that the math department would also have to
include that information in any external communication that criticized the
administrations decision to cut the program. It was a proposal that the
administration knew to be unacceptable,  a tactic intended to isolate the
math department  from the science departments. 
The graduate programs in comparative literature and linguistics,
attenuated by years of cuts, were easy pickings. These programs both
belonged originally to the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and
Linguistics, which was divided a little over two years ago, making their
elimination all the easier. In the Modern Languages Department, the twenty
or so graduate students in the comparative literature program received a
letter in which Dean Aslin informs us:

"Obviously, this is a painful decision, particularly for you and the current
faculty in the Comparative Literature program. I fully expect you to be
concerned about how the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures will be
valued by the external world. I regret that a decision of this magnitude had
to be made. But in the end, I believe that this decision is correct and that
it will lead to a vibrant Department of Modern Languages and Cultures
dedicated to outstanding undergraduate and Masters level education."

Dean Aslin's depiction of a vibrant department dedicated to masters level
education rings rather hollow when one considers that there is not, to my
knowledge, a single student left in the masters program in Spanish, and, at
most, half a dozen students in the other two masters programs, French and
German. The administrations commitment to graduate education in modern
languages appears to be limited, at this point, to reprinting program
descriptions in the graduate catalogue.
The humanities were not only subverted from without by corporate
pressures, but were also subverted from within by humanists allied to those
pressures. When the new undergraduate curriculum, which eliminated the
foreign language requirement, was placed before the Faculty Council, the
chair of the Modern Languages Department read a statement to the effect that
the department did not oppose it. Besides the faculty, students were also
pitted against one another: undergraduates against graduates, humanities
students against those in business and the sciences. Many undergraduates
remain under the impression, thanks to helpful tips from administrators,
that their tuition subsidizes graduate study. Many undergraduates do not
regard the elimination of graduate programs as an impoverishment of their
own programs of study, even though most graduate courses are cross listed
with undergraduate ones. The Intercultural Council, which was the only forum
for the faculty, graduate students and undergraduates to come together to
discuss curricular issues, was defunded and terminated just when the first
round of cuts began under President Jackson. Without such a forum to unite
the university community, resistance to the Renaissance plan has been
scattered and ineffective. Our isolation is such that we remain unaware of
what happens in other departments, even those in allied disciplines. I have
seen the effects of isolation on the graduate students of my department. In
the instances, among my classmates and friends, of suicide, hospitalization
for depression, nervous breakdown and entanglement in the administrative
meshes of the institution, I see the casualties of the ruthless corporatism
that governs higher education today. 
That the savagery of the market should prevail so completely over
voices of wisdom and understanding, that corporate theft should pass for
fiscal necessity, that the bottom line should pass for vision, that
cowardice should pass for prudence, and that the orders and instructions
that have turned the University of Rochester into a corporate plantation
should pass for the dialogue and discussion of an intellectual community, is
indeed the very measure of our disenfranchisement. We must find common
cause. At the first meeting that brought together members of the university
community to oppose the plan, we learned that not only was the university
rolling back employee benefits, but it was also accepting bids from
subcontractors so as to avoid paying even those reduced employee benefits.
Our goal, whether as employees, faculty or students should be to have a
voice and a stake in the institution in which we work or study and to
participate in the decisions that affect our lives. In order to do so, there
must be full disclosure of the university budget. We should insist on the
appointment of educators as trustees of the university. We should reduce the
exorbitant salaries of administrative officers, who consider themselves, 
and indeed are, a privileged class. The rate of increase in the salaries for
administrators should be tied to the rate of increase in faculty pay; or
better still, to that in graduate stipends. We must stop corporate intrusion
into higher education, the political process and the public sphere. 
By reducing the university community by nine hundred undergraduates
and three hundred graduates, and by envisioning a residential campus on
which virtually all students will live, the Plan will devastate the adjacent
19th Ward, the only integrated neighborhood in Rochester, leaving rental
space unoccupied, reducing land values still further and threatening the
neighborhoods racial diversity. Rochester follows the pattern of other urban
areas, ringed by gigantic shopping malls that cater to affluent suburban
residents and deprive the downtown of commerce. As urban blight spreads and
the city tax base is eroded, the white middle class flees to the suburbs
where zoning laws keep the poor out. The Renaissance Plan will accelerate
that trend by depriving city businesses of the patronage of twelve hundred
students, a reduction that defies the logic of the universitys plans for a
College Town across the Genesee River. In 1980, 25% of the children in
Rochester lived in poverty. Today, 80% do. The university should create
partnerships in the public sector -- with schools, community associations,
cultural institutions and neighborhoods -- which would help to reverse this
trend. The proposed partnership between the Eastman School of Music and the
Rochester City School District, should it materialize, would be a step in
the right direction.
The university has a time-honored mission, which is inscribed, lest we
forget, on the Rush Rhees Library. Above, on the cornice, often looked at
but rarely seen, are the names of a dozen philosophers, poets and
mathematicians. They stand for much more than themselves; together these
names represent what is indispensable to education: the imagination. It is
for this that we must strive: a curriculum that includes not only what is
but also what could be, one that goes beyond the skills needed to survive
and prosper, seeking a poetry of existence that coaxes the objects of a
living universe to reveal their secrets. For an education that is a shared 
adventure, not an ordeal of solitary confinement, restore the imagination to 
our curricula--our lives.







 

  

   
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