Is Corporatization the Problem?
13th September 2015
Fredrik deBoer, the socialist lecturer at Purdue University who is quickly becoming one of the most interesting commentators on American higher education, has a provocative piece in the New York Times Magazine that attempts to offer a unified theory of what is ailing campus political culture. It’s not, as the right typically argues, left-wing ideological intolerance (though he concedes that this is a problem), nor is it, as the campus left would have it, widespread racism and sexism (though there is progress to be made on this front, too). Rather, deBoer suggests that the real source of the campus insanity that has been circulating in the popular press for the last few years—the trigger warnings, the speech codes, the “Yes Means Yes” rules, the coddling and political correctness—is what he calls corporatization, or “the way universities operate, every day, more and more like corporations.”
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DeBoer is clearly on to something here. Campus bureaucrats, like all bureaucrats, are often more concerned with protecting their institution and advancing their own interests than creating the best outcomes for the people that they serve. Some of what the right sees as left-wing ideological militancy on the part of college administrators—for example, the recent adoption of guilty-until-proven-innocent sexual assault policies at some schools—is actually driven more by a corporate desire to protect the college from bad press than any particular political commitment. (The reverse is also true: some of what campus activists see as right-wing oppression by campus administrators—such as letting athletes off the hook for well-substantiated sexual assaults—has just as much to do with the university’s self-interest as it has to do with the patriarchy). Moreover, the proliferation of administrators who advertise the campus, manage publicity, and cater to their students’ every need is related the decades-long transformation of higher education from a type of public service designed to invigorate American democracy into a private service to be sold in at exorbitant prices.