This review has been accessed times since May 2, 2004 Bok, Derek. (2003). Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pp. xi + 233 $22.95     ISBN 0-691-11412-9 Reviewed by John Rothfork Northern Arizona University May 2, 2004 Derek Bok has taught law at Harvard for nearly fifty years. He has been the Chair of Common Cause for the last five years (http://www.commoncause.org/publications/bok_pr.htm). For 20 years Professor Bok served as the 25th president of Harvard (1971-91). A Publisher’s Weekly review of another of Bok’s recent books, The Trouble with Government (2001), says his “reasoning is generally persuasive, impressively informed and deft at unearthing root causes” of problems (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/BOKTRO_R.html). Professor Bok is a deft writer and I am hesitant to casually criticize such an august and accomplished colleague. Nonetheless, I must say that I believe Bok belongs in the company of such luminaries as Lee Iacocca and Bill Bennett as someone who made his way to the very top of his field, reigned for a considerable time, and now imparts paternalistic management advice about a large sector of American culture. In her review, Erin O’Connor blames Bok for “focusing almost exclusively on athletics and corporate-funded research” as the culprits for commercializing higher education without regarding the current restructuring of higher education “that on many campuses” leads to employing “undertrained, underpaid graduate students” and part-time instructors to teach almost half the undergraduate courses (O’Connor). At community colleges, adjuncts teach 65 percent of the classes (http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/oct02/tower.html). In the composition area of the English curriculum, “as little as 7 percent of the teaching is done by tenure-stream faculty” (Bousquet 4). It is interesting that the endorsements appearing at the publisher’s Website (Princeton University Press) are from university presidents rather than faculty (http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/quotes/q7484.html). Coaches, Doctors, Professors As a rhetorician I am always interested in audience. Who is this book written for? College presidents and administrators? Despite the topic, the book title, and the publisher, I do not think the work is aimed at an academic readership with first-hand knowledge of how their college or university works. Instead the book offers a vicarious opportunity to imagine exotic problems involved in managing a famous university. Consider that Professor Bok’s list of problems is highly elitist and largely ceremonial because the problems are so intractable. It is sometimes difficult to separate marketplace forces that threaten the autonomy of the university from groups within the university that a president finds recalcitrant. Bok lists three nefarious forces that university presidents cannot control. The worst seems to be big time football and basketball programs that employ coaches for multi-million dollar salaries to lead fanatical alumni and boosters who make “sitting presidents feel that they are trapped in a system they are powerless to change” (p. 51; also see: http://www.utwatch.org/oldnews/chron_coach_12_16_02.html). The second area out of control is the medical school “where the dependence on corporate support has reached such a point that it will be difficult for medical schools to free themselves of industry influence” (p. 206). Notice the implication that like coaches the deans of medical schools are beyond the president’s control. Somewhat incredibly, Professor Bok says that the third ungovernable component of the university is “senior faculty” who “are likely to hold the whip-hand” (p. 95) and to “passively resist efforts to innovate and experiment with new methods of instruction to improve the quality of education” (p. 191). The question is, at how many American colleges and universities is academic integrity threatened by big-time sports programs, by pharmaceutical companies attempting to buy control of the medical school, or by a cabal of academic stars who threaten to defect to other famous universities, if they are not properly cajoled by the president? I am sure these are problems somewhere, but they are not the problems that administrators and faculty struggle with at most of the country’s thousands of post-secondary schools. Bok’s problems contribute more to writing a best selling book than to struggling with the common and unglamorous difficulties of shrinking support from state legislatures for public education, the restructuring of higher education to replace professors with an army of adjuncts, the clamor to develop online classes delivered by adjuncts, and yes, the siege by commerce against the university to turn it into a consumer service as training or entertainment. To be fair, Professor Bok does address these problems in passing but he does not consider them to be as important as reigning in coaches. This leads us to ask, how relevant is Bok’s crème de la crème academic experience to bread and butter education in places like Oregon or Alabama? Who controls the university? There are 126 medical schools in the U.S., which enrolled fewer than 17,000 students in 2003 (http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2003/2003summary.htm). As professional schools, they and their associated research budgets—large as they are ($28 billion for NIH and $5.6 billion for NSF in 2004)—remain at the elite periphery rather than the homely center of higher education. By contrast, in 2002 there were 16.5 million college students (http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/school/cps2002/tab10-1.pdf). Professor Bok’s near fixation with big time college sports and his characterization of star professors as having the “whip-hand” suggest that Bok has distinctive views on what the university is and who controls it. Traditionally, or ideally, the university has been defined by its faculty. When General Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University, addressed the faculty as employees of the university, the famous physicist I. I. Rabi interrupted him to say that the faculty were not employees of the university; they were the university (http://www.smu.edu/facultysenate/pcomment/hopkins9899.htm; there are other versions of the story). Even though he is a faculty member, Bok’s experience as a lawyer, administrator, and celebrity places him in the management community where he recognizes that the chief responsibility of university presidents is to find “the funds their institutions need to survive and prosper. Balancing the budget is not enough.” Administrators must be more creative and aggressive in seeking to lead rather than simply cope. “Driven by these financial needs,” Bok says, university presidents “rarely encounter any constituent pressures or procedural safeguards strong enough to force them to conduct their search for funds with a consistent respect for academic values” (p. 186). If fiscal exigency consistently trumps traditional academic values, doesn’t this suggest that in an operational sense, if not in a policy sense, university presidents have already capitulated to the marketplace; that they are advocates of marketplace values? Perhaps a reluctant advocate, Professor Bok worries that “in the long term, reliance on management as the driver tends to choke off academic development” (p. 192). But as the president of Harvard for 20 years Bok almost had to be committed to the model of the managed university. Professor Bok suggests that four groups contest for control of the university: coaches, physicians (with pharmaceutical companies as a lobby), professors, and administrators. The first two groups present administrative aggravation but they are not the advance guard of the marketplace that threatens to redefine higher education as a service provided to consumers. Proposing this list, however accurate, suggests a deeper problem that Professor Bok does not explicitly raise about who controls and thus defines the university? Obviously it is not the coaches. Almost all professors will applaud Bok for saying, “Educational institutions have absolutely no business operating farm systems for the benefit of the National Football League and the National Basketball Association” (p. 125). But they do exactly that with no support from professional sports; and because they do, I. I. Rabi’s suggestion that the faculty control the university is a contested claim. Can a capitalist society tolerate, much less support, any institution that claims to be exempt in some measure from the invisible hand of the marketplace and from the principle that the customer is always right? Is America nothing more than a marketplace? If so, the university is anomalous. From the view of the marketplace, the university appears to be in need of management as a “kind of anarchy, ill-suited for any purpose other than securing the comfort and convenience of the tenured professors” (p. 21). Models of the university In the Renaissance fiction of Rabelais and Boccaccio, the idea of the university was revolutionary. It was proposed as the central Renaissance institution to replace the other-worldly monastery where the chief products were discipline and prayer. Rabelais joked that in contrast to some pious motto about salvation, the gate of the university would proclaim it as a place where students are invited to “do what thou wilt.” Bok suggests that today the university is threatened with being redefined by the marketplace as simply another consumer commodity because our capitalist society has lost an understanding of what the university is as an institution and an understanding of why it is valuable. Bok nominates the proto-Marxist Thorstein Veblen as the spokesman of the traditional view that the university is the sum of faculty interests, which are apparently only impeded by the management whims of university administrators. Velben is more forthright than Isidor Rabi in saying that “The academic executive and all his works are an anathema and should be discontinued by the simple expedient of wiping him off the slate” (quoted in Bok, 4). After all there were no deans or president in Boccaccio’s idyll of the liberal arts college, which he proposed as a refuge from the Black Death of the 14th century. Humanities professors provide Bok with another fanciful and erroneous view of the university as aimless. Bok says that “it is not surprising that” humanities professors, “most widely accused of having lost their intellectual moorings . . . see a similar aimlessness as the cause of other ills that have overtaken the academy” (p. 5). An early 20th century Marxist economist and drifting postmodernists in the English department are not serious threats to subvert the nature and mission of the university. Bok’s other two forces are more plausible. Although he is too specific in identifying “the businessmen and lawyers who sit on boards of trustees,” Bok does identify the trend “to ‘commodify’ education and research, reduce the faculty to the status of employees, and ultimately, make the university serve the interests of corporate America.” More accurately, he recognizes this as a perspective voiced by “critics from the left” (p. 6). Perhaps we should expect a lawyer to identify specific responsible parties, such as regents or state legislators, who advocate views and policies and who seem to thereby control institutions. In addition to the law, this technique of identifying responsible individuals is also part of the capitalist management model. Perhaps Veblen and postmodernists are meant to serve as straw men to allow Bok to dispense with all theory except that of classical management. Nonetheless, Cornford and Pollock, in addition to many others working in Foucault’s shadow, are convincing when they suggest that administrators do not transcend the institutions they manage; and that like other institutions, the historic university results from struggle and negotiation among many agents. It is also plausible to recognize that it is influenced by beliefs and commitments grounded in other discourse communities that the university cannot control, including government, which Bok identifies as a fourth power that seeks to define the university. In its fiscal support government has offered a negative incentive since the 1970s to suggest that the university should seek to find support in the marketplace as a commodity or service (p. 8). Workforce education Ironically, Bok implies that the underlying cause for commercialization of the university can be found in the increased relevance of education to the marketplace. “What made commercialization so much more prevalent in American universities after 1980 was the rapid growth of opportunities to supply education, expert advice, and scientific knowledge in return for handsome sums of money” (p. 10). Why weren’t these opportunities previously available? The answer is found in the advance of technology. A century ago, when Eastern universities were still devoted to Latin and Greek, higher education had comparatively little direct workforce involvement. Today jobs, services, and even consumer products are directly supported by many forms of postsecondary education. It is the “more technologically sophisticated, knowledge-based economy” that entices the university into the marketplace where the distinction between education and training is blurred (p. 15). This promises to be a far more insightful study than castigating coaches and physicians, but Bok passes it by because it conflicts with management theory. Professor Bok contributes to blurring the distinction by appropriating business jargon to write about how university administrators can “achieve greater efficiency” and how they can “learn from business … the value of striving continuously to improve the quality of what they do” (pp. 24-5). This may work for training, but it exterminates creativity. Always the lawyer who knows that there are two sides to every issue, Professor Bok recognizes that “efficiency is not a very helpful guide for teaching and research.” DeMarco and Lister tell this story in their popular book PeopleWare. One day at Bell Labs “Wendl was staring into space, his feet propped up on the desk. Our boss came in and asked, ‘Wendl! What are you doing?’ Wendl said, ‘I’m thinking.’ And the boss said, ‘Can’t you do that at home?’” (p. 67). Bok quotes James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, who is reputed “to have remarked: ‘To encourage real creativity, you need to have a good deal of slack’” (quoted in Bok, 31). Crick and Watson first announced their discovery at Cambridge’s Eagle Pub, which seems to have been nearly as important to them as their university lab. The point is that academic values are not business values and in running a university like a business, what you are likely to get is a business not a university. I suppose it is good to know that “the percentage of university R&D devoted to basic research has remained fairly constant since the late 1970s” and that “while corporate support has grown, it still makes up less than 10 percent of all university research” (p. 60). Perhaps because of Professor Bok’s ivy league background and legal profession, he ignores the concern of the 1960s and 70s of how the military-industrial-complex was suppose to corrupt university science, if not the university itself, by turning it into a weapons lab. I think Professor Bok is correct when he says that “for almost all academic scientists, the respect of colleagues and the satisfactions that come from making important advances in knowledge continue to count above all else” (62). He is too polite to say that many basic science researchers virtually have an aristocratic contempt for what they consider mindless money grubbing and political glad-handing. Bok’s concerns for life science research and the influence of pharmaceutical companies on research are recognizable as a lawyer’s concern for the details of a contract. Distance Education Because I develop and teach online classes, I was especially interested in Professor Bok’s assessment of distance education. I am more sure here than elsewhere of Bok’s administrative Brahmanism. Needless to say, Professor Bok is a very bright and very hardworking scholar, but there is a difference between studying a community with the intent to manage it by policies and working in a community to know its concerns first-hand. As any good administrator would, Bok first suggests the stakes. “By the year 2000, education via the Internet was already a $2 billion business, growing by 40 percent per year” (p. 87). Today “more than 75 million adults receive some form of continuing education every year; the money spent annually on developing vocational skills alone amounts to more than $40 billion” (p. 90). Such huge sums perhaps make it plausible for Bok to claim that the “expense of developing quality Internet instruction” can cost “up to $1 million for a single course” and involve “a team of up to twenty people” (p. 92). Although he doesn’t say so, Bok is alluding to the NYU fiasco that Maeroff says squandered “up to $1 million per course” (p. 123). Another report blames the failure on NYUonline’s inability to “break from its academic roots to operate as a business” and the fact that “many of the courses were taught by adjuncts” (“Debating the Demise of NYUonline,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 Dec. 01: http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i16/16a03101.htm). NYU wasted $25 million to produce seven courses. Even worse cases involved Cornell University, which committed $36 million to its online venture (see http://www.ecornell.com/advantage/about.jsp) and Columbia University, which spent almost $30 million on a portal that is largely about branding and advertising (see “Report from Columbia University’s Senate Sharply Criticizes Spending for Online Venture,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 April 02: http://chronicle.com/free/2002/04/2002042501u.htm). The point is that this is venture capital invested at the dizzyingly heights that Bok represents. The money goes to consultants and infrastructure to buy the right look as well as the technical wherewithal. By the time distance education gets down to the faculty level at more plebian schools, the cost of getting “the average online course up and running” is $10,000.” This reflects a development stipend given at the University of Nebraska, which is higher than most (Maeroff 206). At West Texas A&M I received $500 for attending weekend training to produce online courses. At Northern Arizona University I received an extra $5,000 to produce a half dozen Web courses. The money came from a special state appropriation to encourage distance education. Faculty who spend a great deal of time developing online courses are likely to suffer in annual reviews being told that their work is interesting but irrelevant to the benchmarks used to measure professional growth (see Landow). The final indignity comes when the course is delivered by an adjunct for a few hundred dollars. As a professor, if not as an administrator, Bok should have more insight into the “thick description” of what is happening in university distance education. Instead he seems as excited as a small town mayor opening a new Wal-Mart when he announces that “Already, as distance learning shifts its emphasis from how to teach to how students learn, new firms entering the field are employing cognitive psychologists to help design courses and testing each segment with focus groups in a manner unknown to conventional college teaching” (92). Academic labor Bok acknowledges reading some of the literature defining faculty concerns about the emerging entrepreneurial and managed university by writers like David Noble and Gary Rhoades (p. 94). His response is stunning in its elitism. He says, “In fact, Professor Noble’s prediction” that “universities will transform their professors into hired hands and make them subordinate to producers and other authorities who exploit their labor” (p. 94) “seems plausible only in universities where the administration is indifferent to whether its professors stay or leave” (p. 95). I am sure that it is true that research “Professors are the life-blood” of institutions like Harvard but they are simply interchangeable academic labor at thousands of homely schools. The kind of professor Bok has in mind is a nationally prominent researcher and mentor who is not going to answer email or respond to discussion posts in Blackboard classes. His suggestion that “Professors who teach subjects with commercial potential, such as business and engineering, will have opportunities to teach on-line for other providers at very high rates of pay” is ridiculous in the context of schools like Rio Salado, a Phoenix, Arizona community “college without walls” that offers 300 Web courses (http://www.rio.maricopa.edu/ci/college_desc.shtml) to 20,000 students (http://www.rio.maricopa.edu/atAGlance.shtml). Rio Salado employs 26 full-time faculty (http://www.riosalado.edu/ci/faculty/) and “over 700 adjunct instructors each semester” (http://www.riosalado.edu/ci/faculty_services/). Bok acknowledges online education is likely to use “part-time faculty at low rates of pay,” but he says, “If the pay seems low, the root problem is probably that too many students have attempted to earn a Ph.D.” (p. 96). In other words, let the invisible hand of the marketplace decide who offers “the highest quality product” and “Good courses will drive out bad” (p. 97). Elsewhere Professor Bok recognizes that consumer judgment does not accurately assess the value of education, saying that “students often flock to courses with superficial appeal or to institutions with established reputations even though the education they receive is only mediocre” (p. 161). He ends his shallow look at distance education by asking, “what is the alternative? If universities do not enter the field, refusing to cater to consumer and vocational tastes, other providers, such as the University of Phoenix, will do the job for them, with even more blatantly commercial results” (p. 97). It seems clear that Bok believes the marketplace, not professors, have the whip-hand in developing distance education. Progress is our most important product Equally disturbing, Bok often talks about improving education as though it were a simple consumer service that could be made more efficient by adopting new management and pedagogy techniques, as in this instance: “As for the Internet and the quickening interest of private investors in distance education, might not competition and the lure of profit be the only forces powerful enough to break through the thick crust of faculty inertia and bring about some real progress in university teaching and learning?” (p. 102). Are the professors in various fields really this uncooperative, self-interested, and inept in regard to teaching the skills of their discipline? Academic readers expect the antagonism between administrator and professor that Bok cannot hide. I am less forgiving of Bok’s talk about educational progress. The context of his vision is management and the marketplace. In the humanities, for example, there is only a kind of stipulative or metaphorical “progress” that is possible in reading Homer, Plato, or Henry James. Professors and students can read texts written by these authors more deeply or more broadly, but there is no sense in which their works can be read more quickly or efficiently by relying on some better version of Cliff Notes or by developing an entertaining computer game based on the Trojan War. The talk about progress (and the associated enthusiasm for assessment) is itself an instance of the commercialization of higher education. Just as we notice Bok’s digs at professors who are “passive” or stubborn because they are not professionally dedicated to the values of the communities of law or management, we also notice Professor Bok’s sneer at “philosophers, literary scholars, and other humanists” who are “most widely accused of having lost their intellectual moorings” (p. 5). Bok does not have experience as a literary scholar and consequently doesn’t share our community’s understanding of what constitutes excellence and education in this field. When he suggests that there are universal instruments and objective methods to measure education progress, those of us in a field like literature respond by saying that we have our own professional instruments. These are novels, plays, essays, and critical works. If the administrator insists that these must give way to different measurements that are rooted in some other profession we object that this is a commercialization or colonialism that erodes the standards, methods, and judgments of our community. We understand that we must make an accommodation with management, politics, and the marketplace. But that does not mean accepting their values in toto, which would require us to abandon our profession. Conclusion In the end, Bok remains equivocal on many issues. For example, he knows that in distance education, “simulations, case-method discussions, games, and other means of provoking discussion among students and instructors” are not only desirable but also “the most expensive type of distance education” that “will probably cost as least as much as conventional campus courses” (p. 170). On the other hand, he knows that administrative, management, and economic interests promote disaggregating teaching skills to deprofessionalize the activity so that adjunct academic labor can deliver courses. “The profit motive will lead universities to offer inferior instruction by trading on their reputation and on the gullibility of their students” (p. 171). So, we ask Professor Bok, what should we do? He offers some token advice about sports programs and money offered by pharmaceutical companies, but his major point is disappointing. He suggests developing an improved version of ranking schools and programs the way U.S. News and World Report currently does as though there were not already accrediting agencies for both colleges and professions, such as ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology: http://www.abet.org). The problem with Professor’s Bok’s suggestion is traceable to the cultures of law and management. He wants universal and objective measures “instead of having to rely on student judgments or other indirect measures.” This is problematic because while Bok believes in objective measurements, those of us in other communities see that these measurements are grounded in the techniques developed in some specific professional culture that cannot pretend to be universal. They are the techniques of management, economics, or some other social science. They are instruments that will, we fear, misunderstand and distort what we do as scholars. Professor Bok has no new answers or policies. Instead he offers the truism that “By compromising basic academic principles, universities tamper with the ideals that give meaning to the scholarly community” (p. 206). Perhaps it is surprising to find a Harvard president who expects the government to protect and support the university as a refuge from the marketplace. Bok warns “that reasonable financial stability is the ultimate guarantee against irresponsible entrepreneurial behavior” (p. 197). In these warnings we recognize three discrete and autonomous communities: those of commerce, government, and education. At the beginning of the Renaissance all three communities fought for autonomy against a totalitarian or hegemonic church. The marketplace with its tacit capitalist values now seems to threaten a new hegemony. While not being exempt from this new ecology, elite research universities will continue to better negotiate what they do; to be discontent with loutish coaches and beastly medical school deans. There seems to be little hope at the other end of the education spectrum for mere teachers where adjunct success is illustrated by Ruth who reports making $90,000 per year as “an adjunct professor of business and management at four institutions.” On Mondays and Tuesdays she spends “14 hours a day” in front of her monitor. She says, “I don’t mind working 60 hours a week” (Carnevale). References Bousquet, Marc, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola, editors. Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2004. Carnevale, Dan. “For Online Adjuncts, a Seller’s Market,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 30 April 04: A31-2. Cornford, James and Neil Pollock. Putting the University Online: Information, Technology and Organizational Change. London: Open University Press, 2003. DeMarco, Tom and Timothy Lister. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd edition. New York: Dorset House, 1999. Landow, George P. “Educational Innovation and Hypertext: One University’s Successes and Failures in Supporting New Technology,” Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age, edited by Ilana Snyder. London: Routledge: 2002: 101-115. Maeroff, Gene I. A Classroom of One: How Online Learning Is Changing Our Schools and Colleges. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Noble, David F. Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. O’Conner, Erin. “Selling Out: Are Universities Turning into Corporate Enclaves?” (Review of Universities in the Marketplace). Wharton Online (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&ID=915). Jan. 14, 04. Rhoades, Gary. Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor. Buffalo: SUNY, 1998. About the Reviewer John Rothfork English Department Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ 86011 John.Rothfork@nau.edu John Rothfork teaches online courses in a graduate certificate program in professional and technical writing at Northern Arizona University. His Website is at http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/. ~ ER home | Reseņas Educativas | Resenhas Educativas ~ ~ overview | reviews | editors | submit | guidelines | announcements ~