Abstract
In this paper, drawing on magazines read by US academic leaders, we explore the spread of commercial language into the world of higher education. We ask whether commercial codes are taken for granted, considered routine, and common sense in academic settings. We develop a multidimensional approach, considering two practices, strategic planning and patenting, and two identities, consumer and product, which come from the world of commerce. We ask: to what extent does the university community considered commercial developments legitimate or illegitimate? In what ways has the legitimacy of commercial developments changed over time, and to what degree are different commercial developments embraced or rejected? Our analysis suggests that the commercialization of US higher education is a complicated, uneven, contradictory, contested, and multifaceted process, rather than a single monolithic outcome state. We find that the extent to which commercial practices and identities are viewed as legitimate varies across time, by institutional type, and by an actor’s social position. We also find that different commercial developments received different amounts of opposition. We use our analysis to contribute to recent thinking in the “new institutionalism” in organizational analysis and to ground our thoughts about political efforts to preserve certain qualities of higher education.
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Notes
Later named Trusteeship.
In selecting these two periodicals, we informally surveyed a group of university vice provosts and other mid-level academic administrators nationwide who participate in an informal national network. We asked what they regularly read and what those for whom they work regularly read to keep up with news, ideas, and changes in higher education. These two periodicals came up as consistent choices among our informal sample. While our two magazines have limits as evidence, they do provide insight into what academic leaders were thinking and talking about between 1960 and today.
Both magazines encourage unsolicited manuscripts, although surely the editors seek particular perspectives as well. Editorial policies at the magazines undoubtedly affect article content, but this usefully permits us to capture the perspectives of two leading organizations of academic leaders.
To complement our search for “intellectual property,” we also searched for “patent,” “royalties,” “licensing,” and “technology transfer,” and our measure in the section devoted to intellectual property combines all of these codes.
Important distinctions exist within the legitimate category and within the illegitimate category. Our original coding scheme reflected these distinctions and had five categories instead of three. Thus, on the legitimacy side, for example, we distinguished between w cases where authors called student consumers in a way that suggested that the identity was common sense both to the author and the reader and where authors explicitly advocated for the identity, suggesting that student as consumer was legitimate to the author but not necessarily to the audience. We ultimately decided to collapse these distinctions creating one legitimacy category. There were simply too few cases to use these distinctions meaningfully.
A good quotation demonstrating a legitimate orientation is as follows: “the bottom line is that it’s hard to identify an industry other than higher education that has as many satisfied customers but is as reluctant to talk about outcomes in concrete terms” (Ward and Hartle 2003: 11).
A good example of an uncertain or tentative orientation is as follows: “Because students make payments to the institution, one is tempted to compare them to the customers of a business corporation. To some extent students are the consumers and purchasers of a service or “product” - i.e., knowledge and skills - offered by the university. But the comparison must end here, for unlike customers students are themselves one of the “products” that the university offers. There is no parallel to this group in business, just as there is no parallel in business for the tenuous control of university management over its faculty” (Besse 1972: 14).
A good example of an illegitimate orientation to students as consumer is the following: “the slogan ‘the customer is always right’ is absolutely inapplicable to the situation. Undergrads are not customers and colleges are not merchant markets. The student does not bring to the choice of an academic program the experience that guides a mature purchaser of material goods. The college catalog can give no precise analysis of its offerings and can furnish no guarantees. Education is not a commodity that can be measured out and bought by the pound or the yard” (Distler 1964: 114).
A Chi Square test demonstrates that there is a relationship between and legitimacy category (chi-square=52; df=2; p<0.01). Writers in AGB Reports were more likely than writers in Liberal Education to identify students as consumers.
A Chi Square test demonstrates that there is a relationship between periodical and legitimacy category (chi-square= 13.49; df=2; p<0.01). Writers in AGB reports were more likely than writers in Liberal Education to identify education as product.
Given the nature of our data, we are not in a position to assess statistical significance.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Elizabeth Popp Berman, Steve Hoffman, and Steven Vallas for their thoughtful engagement with this project. Funding supporting this endeavor comes from the National Science Foundation (SES-1026516) and the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation gift).
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Kleinman, D.L., Osley-Thomas, R. Uneven Commercialization: Contradiction and Conflict in the Identity and Practices of American Universities. Minerva 52, 1–26 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-014-9248-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-014-9248-z