What Role Do Faculty Play in the Corporatization of Higher Education?

Yesterday, I wrote a post about recent claims that administrators in higher education increasingly have corporate backgrounds. This trend, it has been argued, explains a range of phenomena related to the corporatization of higher education, such as treating students as customers and hiring adjuncts. I challenged this argument in two ways. First, I gave reason to question the idea that administrators increasingly have corporate backgrounds. We don't actually have data (to my knowledge) that confirms this. Second, I suggested that while presidents are easy targets, responsibility for the corporatization of higher education does not fall on the shoulders of a single actor. Instead, I offered that all of us in the academy are complicit.

David Perry, an academic and writer whose work I admire, read the post and took issue with this last point. He tweeted:

@kevinrmcclure Again, I'm with you on not simply blaming presidents.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) September 16, 2014

@kevinrmcclure I just think the "we're all guilty" needs more exploration if you want to make the claim.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) September 16, 2014

In particular, he thought the argument would be more compelling if I could cite concrete examples of faculty contributing to the corporatization of higher education. So, I decided to think on it and write this post. What role do faculty play in the corporatization of higher education?

First, let me get all dissertation-y and provide a working definition of corporatization. I think of corporatization as an example of privatization within higher education (as compared to privatization of higher education, in the sense of state liberalization of a largely public higher education sector to allow for private providers). Bruce Johnstone provided one of the most comprehensive definitions of privatization within higher education. It's a good working definition for this post. He wrote:

Privatization...refers to a process or tendency of colleges and universities (both public and private) taking on characteristics of, or operational norms associated with, private enterprises. Although the term is not a precise one..., privatization connotes a greater orientation to the student as consumer, including the concept of the college education as a "product"; attention to image, competitor institutions and market "niches"; pricing and the enhancement of net earned revenue; and aggressive marketing. Priviatization also suggests the option of management practices associate with private business, such as contracting out, or "outsourcing"..., aggressive labor relations and minimization of payroll expenditures, direct decision-making and "top down" management, widespread use of audits and accountability measures, and an insistence that units...contribute to profitability.

Scanning through this definition, most of the practices seem far removed from what we typically associate with the academic profession. Faculty members push against any effort to think of students as customers, they lash out against "top down" management and promote shared governance, they question the utility of many of the products purchased to improve workflow, and they frequently don't champion accountability measures (think of post-tenure review). So, at first glance, my colleague is probably right to say that faculty should not bear responsibility for changes they did not enact. If anything, many faculty should be recognized for their efforts to oppose corporatization. Such opposition helps explain the irrefutable and mounting tension between faculty and administrators.

Yet, I still had the nagging sense that pointing the finger at administrators--and often a single administrator--is too simplistic. So, I offer here some tentative explorations of how faculty share some responsibility for corporatization. These ideas, many of which are inspired by higher education research, have been in my brain oven all of 12 hours, so feedback is heartily welcomed. I'll state here and reiterate that my position is not that faculty are to blame for corporatization. Here we go...

1. Faculty are administrators, administrators are faculty - Despite claims of the CEO-as-administrator, many leaders in higher education still follow a trajectory that started on the lowest rungs of tenure-trackdom. The administrators that are so heavily critiqued by faculty were often once faculty themselves. This means that either: a) some dramatic transformation happens when faculty become administrators that alters their thinking and precludes any identification with faculty or b) conditions in higher education create challenges and constrain possible solutions, meaning corporatization arises as faculty-administrators try their best. In any case, the point is that it's difficult to draw a clear line between faculty and administrators.

2. Faculty are people, people like nice things - This may rub a few people the wrong way, but the amenities arms race has been going on for a longer period time than many faculty realize. I wonder if opposition to new buildings was as vociferous when funding was more generous. I've heard plenty of faculty complain about their offices and classrooms. I think many would welcome the opportunity to work in new facilities, even if this required a tuition or fee hike. I went on a campus tour with new faculty once, and they were just as giddy about new recreational facilities and Starbucks in the library as students. In other words, faculty enjoy and come to expect amenities on campuses just like everyone else.

3. Faculty research, research requires money - Faculty are status addicts. The one activity that almost universally delivers status in the academy is research. In order to fund their research, faculty have courted corporate donors. Now, this is not true of all faculty. I'm in education - ain't no corporations funding my work. Select faculty members have also oriented their research to intersect with market demand. They view their discoveries as intellectual property that can be protected through patents. And they look to license these patents or use them to create spin-off companies. Although we are still probably talking about a minority of faculty at certain institutions, data shows that the number of faculty-entrepreneurs is rising (shout out to Slaughter and Rhoades).

4. Faculty are no strangers to adjuncts - To say that the adjunctification of the academy is a purely administrator-driven process is ludicrous. Faculty vote on professional degree programs taught by adjuncts. Faculty buy out courses knowing the courses will be taught by adjuncts. Faculty become department chairs and even hire adjuncts. Faculty marginalize adjuncts. (All the preceding, it should be noted, creates a distinction between "faculty" and "adjuncts." I don't agree with this distinction, viewing all faculty as faculty, but I use it here for clarity.) I've read article after article about how faculty know about the treatment of adjuncts, realize the number of adjuncts is rising, and do nothing.

These are just a few ideas. Again, my point is not that faculty are to blame for corporatization. Rather, my position is that this has been a group effort, born of a pervasive mindset--what many have called neoliberal governmentality. We can think of corporatization as a car speeding down the road. Faculty aren't in the driver's seat, and they may even be in the back urging the driver to slow down, but they are still in the car with everyone else. A response to my argument might be that faculty are simply reacting to conditions they did not create. There is validity to this response, but I think it too easily absolves us all of some part in the changes to higher education. Others might suggest that while faculty are complicit in corporatization, just like administrators, students, parents, and staff, they have played a smaller role. I think this is also true but doesn't take them out of the show altogether.

If we want to prevent the corporatization car from speeding down the road, we can't simply point a finger at the driver. Nor can we swap out the driver and put a faculty member in their place. It'll require a group effort because it was a group effort that led to the journey in the first place. In the words of the late Howard Zinn: you can't be neutral on a moving train.

The Frontiers of University Administration

Last week, David Perry highlighted a striking trend in American higher education: the expansion of administrative positions at colleges and universities and the simultaneous "fall" of tenure-track faculty. Two quick caveats are required to understand this trend before getting to the crux of my post.

First, some call this growth "bloat," which fails to acknowledge that a chunk of the additional personnel were hired to meet enrollment demands and spur completion. In other words, as Perry acknowledged, not all administrative expansion should be thought of as excessive. Second, "administrative" is an umbrella term that disguises precisely where growth is happening. In my experience, certain areas have massified to a greater extent than others. For example, when I was job searching a few months ago, it was impossible to miss the plethora of new positions in development and fund-raising. I had to learn a whole new vocabulary just to understand the job descriptions.

Although I recognize that the number of administrative positions is relevant and intersects with the the state of the academic profession, I don't think it captures the major transformations currently afoot in administration. If you want to learn about the relationship between administration and corporatization, keep your eyes fixed on two increasingly widespread phenomena: 1) efficiency-based restructuring and 2) contracting with private companies to develop administrative technologies. These practices are remarkably under-studied, and they are often absent in conversations related to the nature of change in higher education and the advent of disruptive innovation that's all the rage these days.

Starting with the first phenomenon: efficiency-based restructuring. Many institutions are looking for synergies between units that justify cost-cutting mergers. An example of this at my own university was the decision to create a center for innovation in teaching and learning by combining the center for teaching excellence and an e-learning office. A few experts in big data will be hired in the process, but the move also frees up office space and reduces the need for some administrative positions. Efficiency wasn’t the only objective in this process—it was a signature initiative for the provost who, like many chief academic officers, seems to be gunning for a presidential appointment.

Another example of efficiency-based restructuring is a model of shared services being explored at the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin. Not coincidentally, both universities were advised by the consulting firm Accenture LLP, which is not the only consulting firm cashing in institutions' pursuit of organizational efficiencies. A friend at Booze Allen recently told me that his team is getting into higher education consulting. The shared services model looks to identify and eliminate administrative redundancies, typically through the centralization of certain administrative functions that are shared by many units. This model has been hotly contested by faculty at both institutions, partly because it oversimplifies the work done by many staff people and could result in substantial loss of grant money. So, rising numbers of mid-level managers in higher education is not the only example of failed corporatization. Many constituents at colleges and universities oppose the type of lay-offs required to achieve the efficiencies proposed in restructuring. 

The second phenomenon is contracting with private companies to develop or implement technologies that improve the administrative functioning of campuses. Right now, our university has a number of contracts with companies in order to digitize paperwork, streamline the collection and analysis of information, and measurably cut the bureaucratic red tape that is said to inhibit change. One of these products is an online portal that collects information on faculty in order to facilitate annual reporting to the state, generate standardized CVs, and eventually streamline the promotion and tenure process. Other products are designed to replace the antiquated applications that were created in-house to manage student information, course registration, and financial aid. A booming business has emerged to capitalize on various administrative functions in higher education. We don't have any sense of how much money is being spent on these and similar products, or if they even work as advertised. It seems rather odd that a research university with some of the brightest minds on earth would rather pay a company than encourage its own people to develop new technologies.

Why don't we hear more about these phenomena? Higher education's reform-industrial complex has not nearly been as concerned with administration as instruction. Innovation and disruption, it seems, are solely applied to teaching and learning. Frequently, innovation revolves around cutting costs by putting students in front of a computer, instead of in a classroom with others. I have yet to see a panel, summit, or conference dedicated to “re-imagining” administration. The reality is that many of the innovation evangelists have no experience in administration and may not have a strong sense of where to introduce new ideas. Administration is also less politically-charged and sexy than how much students are learning and whether tenured faculty are superstars or deadweight. Thus, these two phenomena are largely occurring under the radar.

In thinking about administration in higher education, we should set our sights on more than just counting the number of administrative jobs. There are major shifts taking place in administration, and they represent the frontier of university operations—we know little about them, how much they cost, or whether they work. And these trends are just as important and say more about corporatization than the number administrators. 

The Non-Death of American Manufacturing and Its Role in University Decision-Making

Last year, I spoke with a range of university executives for my dissertation. Because of the nature of my project, we frequently spoke about the state of the U.S. economy and what it means for their decision-making. One theme in these conversations was that the economy had shifted from production line manufacturing to information processing. We were, as one executive put it, in the midst of a new industrial revolution with information technology. Some called this the knowledge-based economy.

In the knowledge-based economy, the jobs for which universities prepare students are quite different. Many of the manufacturing jobs, they argued, have been sent overseas. Increasingly, students need to train for jobs of the future, like cybersecurity and data management. This shift in the economy was cited as a reason for training students to become entrepreneurs. The goals were to teach students how to make a job, not take a job. To think creatively and not be afraid to change jobs or start anew. And to embrace a “free agency kind of employment.”

When I heard these statements, I didn’t reflect on them much. On some level, I must have agreed that the American economy is knowledge-based, signaling the death knell of manufacturing. However, I have come to realize that university executives were not reading regular updates on the manufacturing sector. They really had no substantive experience with the labor market outside of the university. Most of them had spent their lives in academe. In other words, I came to suspect that these executives were making decisions based upon a priori understandings. They operated according to assumptions about “the economy” that they either self-generated or, more likely, recycled from a grand narrative related to innovation, prosperity, and higher learning.

Let’s take a look at the status of American manufacturing. It is the case that America’s share of global manufacturing has declined, and China’s share has increased. Data also shows that the number of manufacturing jobs overall has fallen, and the contribution of manufacturing to GDP has declined. However, as many observers have noted, these metrics are not sufficient to argue that American manufacturing is dead. Many would instead argue that the manufacturing sector is in transition. Some industries are faring well, while others are struggling. There is a small revival of manufacturing, and the sector continues to produce at high rates. Nevertheless, current trends do not suggest that the number of jobs created in this revival will replace the millions lost in the economic crises of the past 15 years. 

President Obama has been quick to capitalize on the notion that advanced manufacturing can be nurtured to create new middle-class jobs. In fact, his administration has announced that it will create three manufacturing institutes that bring together resources from corporations, universities, and the government. One of these institutes is currently being created in the research triangle of North Carolina and will focus upon the creation of energy-efficient, high-power electronic chips. The Department of Energy is investing $70 million in the initiative. Overall, we can say that manufacturing is alive in America, but it is likely the case that good jobs in manufacturing sector will never fully recover.

The university executives with whom I spoke weren’t entirely wrong in believing that manufacturing jobs are gone. They may not have nuanced knowledge of the place of manufacturing in the American economy, but they seem to be reacting to a real trend. However, there is something to be said for the fact that many higher education institutions, at least those oriented to research and prestige-maximization, have not been training students for manufacturing jobs in a very long time. So, we can question the relevance of manufacturing jobs in their assessment of the economy and its impact on their decision-making.

Briefly, let’s turn to this idea of “free agency employment.” Again, university executives were not closely following mobility or flexibility trends in the labor market. Otherwise, they probably would have realized that they are among the worst perpetrators of inequitable, contingency labor practices. I’m talking about the adjunctification of academic labor. Setting this issue aside, university executives clearly believe that students should be prepared for a volatile labor market. It is frequently said that Americans now change careers as many as seven times over the course of a lifetime. As it turns out, this widely cited number appears to have little basis in research. The Bureau of Labor Statistics even says on its website that this is a thorny empirical question because no consensus exists as to what constitutes a career change.

What I’m proposing here is that assumptions, beliefs, and perceptions about the status of the economy are vitally important in university decision-making. This proposal throws a bit of a wrench in higher education research, particularly a popular branch of organizational theory that attributes institutional behavior to external factors. Many "open-systems" researchers today see a rather direct relationship between how institutions operate and the nature of economic change. While I don’t dispute the influence of the economy in higher education restructuring, I think we need to reveal the a priori knowledge about the economy that drives some decision-making.

It is possible that closer scrutiny of this a priori knowledge shows that there are certain economic tropes onto which university executives latch. Such tropes may originate in a set of powerful institutions, such as the OECD, and may help higher education institutions demonstrate their value to an economy structured around knowledge production. By repeating these tropes, and making decisions upon them as if they are fact, universities serve an important role. They don’t just reflect some discrete, external economic reality. They bring that type of economy into existence. This point bears repeating because it is woefully under-represented in research: higher education institutions are not merely responding to the economy, they are making the economy what it is.

We can extend this line of thought into multiple arenas. We can look at how the creation of degree programs effectively validates certain types of knowledge and leads to the establishment of new industries. We can look at how universities don’t just “place” graduates in the labor market. They co-create the labor market. We can look at how universities institutionalize and normalize contingent labor and encourage mobility. The possibilities are multiple and critically important, I think, in understanding the relationship between higher education institutions and “the economy.”

Saving the World with Cash and Prizes

This is the story of a student-founded organization at my university. I won’t reveal their name, but the curious reader could quickly find it through an online search if they cared enough. The reason I’m focusing on this organization is not to criticize what they do. This is a bunch of extremely bright and passionate students doing courageous work. I’ve met with the founder of the organization and respect his drive. The organization is merely a conduit to reveal some of the strange happenings in the realm of higher education, particularly its craze for entrepreneurship.

The university's new marking campaign encourages students to market their "fearless ideas."

In 2011, a group of forward-thinking students noticed that their university dining hall was throwing away perfectly good food. Tons of it. They devised a plan to collect that food and donate it to local shelters. The plan was a resounding success, and soon they started an organization to systematically donate food that was otherwise destined for the dump. I’ll call the organization Save the Food, or StF, for the sake of clarity.

In a different era, one might consider StF a socially-conscious student club. It might even be labeled a form of community service. Over time, with a little financial backing from the university or a grant, it might grow into a thriving non-profit organization and serve many people in the community. As it turns out, StF has accomplished this latter objective. However, the path it took differs from markedly from what anyone in higher education would have predicted 5 years ago.

StF decided to call itself a “social enterprise” and harnessed the vast resources the university poured into entrepreneurship. They started entering business pitch competitions and winning cash and prizes. Between on campus and off-campus contests, the organization raked in around $40,000. In order to sell itself as an example of social entrepreneurship, StF had to carefully consider how it was incorporating concepts borrowed from business, namely scalability and sustainability. Scalability essentially refers to the ability of a company to move beyond the “mom and pop store” and grow into something that truly disrupts the market. In the case of social entrepreneurship, the goal is to address the underlying causes of problems in society. Sustainability is a cleverly phrased way of saying that they also earn income so that they can continue their work without recourse to handouts.

Innovation Fridays is a weekly program where students can meet with entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas.

Scalability was achieved by launching new chapters of StF at other colleges and universities. In order to respond to the need to be sustainable, they developed what they termed “income models” that involved selling food donation certifications to restaurants. Thus, being a social enterprise required commoditizing the service they were providing to the community. In fact, the community took a back seat to what the organization considered their true “customers”: donors. Ironically, the biggest donor of the organization—at $150,000—turned out to be the Sodexo Foundation, which is the charitable arm of the French multinational corporation. Sodexo specializes in food services and manages the dining halls of many universities. It has been subject to nine boycotts at campuses nationwide for the treatment of its employees and low wages.

By the measures of success employed in campus entrepreneurship, StF has been wildly successful. They have won numerous competitions and received national media attention. The university has become attuned to this success and, as part of its marketing campaign, displays StF in television commercials and on advertisements adorning the sides of city buses. The university is in the midst of rebranding itself as a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, and StF perfectly suits its new brand vision. Accordingly, the university has provided StF with additional resources, including mentoring and office space. StF has become the poster child of the university’s entrepreneurship movement.

None of this has detracted from the organization’s main accomplishment, which is donating an unfathomable amount of food to local shelters. So, you might ask, what’s the problem? The first problem is that the organization’s success has been predicated on thriving in a prize-based entrepreneurial culture. They would not have been able to grow as quickly as they did without winning business pitch competitions. In order to win these competitions, the organization had to cater to the centers and judges that ran them. Most of these centers are housed in the business or engineering schools, and the judges are often wealthy alumni. Inevitably, in order to be competitive, the organization had to speak the language of business and spin what amounts to a non-profit organization into scalable, sustainable “social venture.”

Business pitch competitions contribute to and tap into the already highly competitive and consumer-driven culture at colleges and universities. They suggest that complex social problems can be solved with an iPhone app and channel student passion for addressing social ills and effecting change into the creation of a business whose benefits often accrue to individuals—and the university—just as much, if not more than, the community. It amounts to the gamification of student activism. In the new era, social problems aren’t solved through public institutions or policy change. That’s so 1990s. Instead of changing the system, students are encouraged to profit within it. And if they can make a job, not take a job, in the process, all the better.

There is very little recognition of the many tensions and ethical dilemmas that can arise in social entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship itself is a concept laden with meanings and practices from the for-profit sector, only some of which are appropriate for a non-profit organization. Of course, the for-profit sector is also responsible for many of the social problems that organizations like StF are trying to solve, which is a tension no one seems to acknowledge. Lastly, there does not seem to be meaningful conversations about ethics of accepting money from foundations that acquired their wealth from questionable means. Should students be launching non-profit organizations with money from corporations that have shady track records?

The point is not that StF is evil. They have simply capitalized on what the university has provided and intelligently acted upon the cultural cues of America today. Entrepreneurship is sexy. Why become the local community organizer when you can be the Steve Jobs of food donation? I direct my critique and questions at my university and its abandonment of what I believe to be a more balanced and responsible approach to encouraging student activism. We may have cultivated an excellent poster child for our rebranding effort, but we may also be laying the groundwork for a generation who thinks the first step to saving the world is winning cash and prizes.

"Innovation" and University Legitimacy

A recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has written an economic development plan that turns all 64 campuses of the State University of New York into tax-free zones. This means that companies that move into these zones would pay no sales, property, or business taxes for 10 years, and employees would pay no income taxes. The rationale for this idea is that it would encourage businesses to set-up shop around the state’s universities and drive the translation of research into products, thereby promoting economic growth. 

North Carolina's Research Triangle Park 

New York is not alone it attempting to place universities at the center of regional innovation hubs, which might be defined as institutionalized partnerships between public universities and private industries to capitalize on their respective expertise and assets for economic value creation. These public-private partnerships are not simply linking two discrete sectors, as suggested by the hyphenated name, but rather represent a new structure in academe, with its own jargon, goals, rationales, resource base, and specialized workforce. The collaborative process not one in which university researchers sit in their labs and churn out knowledge products that a nearby company buys and develops. Rather, private companies use funding to set the research agenda; faculty members build careers around the needs of spin-off companies; and universities own equity in ventures they helped to launch. The line between university and business, public and private, non-profit and for-profit is intentionally made obsolete. 

The National Science Foundation supports the establishment of innovation hubs by funding what they call I-Corps Nodes, which they say “work cooperatively to build, utilize and sustain a national innovation ecosystem that further enhances the development of technologies, products and processes that benefit society.” The University of Maryland, Virginia Tech University, and the George Washington University received $3.75 million to become nodes in a regional innovation network. According to a news release about the award, the goal is to “find the best entrepreneurial student and faculty researchers and help them bring discoveries to market.” NSF is thinking even bigger, funding many nodes and facilitating many networks as “the foundation of a national innovation ecosystem and focus on the front-lines of local and regional commercialization efforts."

In some ways, university-based innovation hubs are an exciting development because they may just be responsible for making discoveries that tackle some of society’s biggest problems. However, there are also several downsides to these arrangements to consider, starting with two assumptions that underpin the whole notion of marrying university research and business creation. The first assumption is that problem-solving is best accomplished through the private sector and taking ideas to market. The second is that the private sector is the source of solutions and not the origin of problems. This assumption is particularly tenuous in light of the myriad products developed for the defense industry. Both assumptions have an ideological basis in the effort to discredit government as inefficient and ineffective, positioning corporations in negative relation to the bureaucratic welfare state. In this way, we should not think of innovation hubs as entirely distinct from other forms of privatization.

Privatization is clearest when we consider Gov. Cuomo’s plan. Of course, a tax-free zone is a monumental incentive to locate a business near a university. However, it effectively means that the private sector can harness the research and development (R&D) capabilities of universities, some of which are publicly funded, without giving money back through taxes. The reduction in costs by outsourcing R&D and not paying taxes certainly facilitates the accumulation of profit, but questions remain about whether there is any presence of the “public” in the objectives, processes, or outcomes. There are also lingering questions about who or what, precisely, stands to benefit. Universities may generate some revenue from licensing intellectual property and equity ownership, but it is hard to tell if this revenue amounts to much because we don’t have a good sense of how much is being spent to build and administer innovation hubs. There is also some research suggesting that only a handful of institutions (e.g., MIT, Stanford) make much money from their entrepreneurial ventures.

Why, then, are universities seemingly so eager to partner with the private sector and position themselves as innovation hubs? Positioning, I think, is a key part of the decision. Far more lucrative than money to universities is the symbolic value of showing that research money is not being wasted—that universities are relevant and even necessary to propel economic growth. In an era when people are regularly critiquing universities for their inability to control costs, their inefficient preoccupation with traditions, and their lack of success at creating and transferring usable knowledge, it is no stretch to claim that public higher education is in the midst of a legitimacy crisis.

Universities are desperately seeking legitimacy, and what better way to do it than by orienting what they do to innovation? The legitimating logic, then, for many institutions has been to constantly extoll their contributions to business growth, job creation, and national economic competitiveness. It is no coincidence that the I-Corps Node news release quoted Congressman Dan Lipinksi: “given the size of the federal investment in research—$60 billion annually—the American people should be getting even more new companies and jobs for their money. I-Corps represents a low-cost way to get us across the much-discussed ‘Valley of Death’ that separates laboratory discoveries from profit-making companies that boost economic growth and American competitiveness.”

In its drive to be seen by taxpayers, consumers, and other stakeholders as legitimate, universities have symbolically and structurally emphasized anything that connects them to the “economic imaginary” of the knowledge-based economy. At every turn, university presidents are highlighting the businesses created at their institutions, and organizational change is justified with language of “innovation and entrepreneurship.” The legitimacy conferred by these efforts may be an important short-term survival mechanism, but the long-term returns could be marginal and forever change the philosophical moorings of higher education and the key actors involved in its governance. Once the “innovation ecosystem” is in place, it may be impossible to tell where the campus ends and corporation begins. It's possible that the campus-corporation distinction was myth to begin with, but if there ever was purposeful distancing between the two, a drastic new approach is being taken, and I venture to guess many of us who work, teach, and study at universities, while perhaps somewhat conscious of it, do not fully grasp its pervasive influence. 

Incubate Your Dreams, Invent Your Future

Today, my university played host to what has become one of the largest non-athletic events on campus: the Cupid’s Cup business model competition. The event is funded, in part, by alumnus Kevin Plank, the founder and CEO of Under Armour. The name of the event reflects Plank’s first business venture, which involved buying roses wholesale and selling them cheaply to students around Valentine’s Day, undercutting nearby retailers. This is not the only business model competition on campus. In fact, many of the competitors seemed to have circulated all of the various opportunities on campus for securing seed funding and other resources.

Nevertheless, Cupid’s Cup is one of the largest and has garnered national attention, largely due to its presence in the corporate spotlight. The day started with a business and innovation showcase, where local and university-based start-ups can present their products and services to potential investors at conference-like booths. Attendees voted on their favorite booths, and the winners were presented with cash prizes of $2,000 each. The main event, however, was a competition in which six teams of student entrepreneurs from around the country pitched their ideas to a panel of judges. The teams essentially have a few minutes to tell their entrepreneurial story, complete with props and multimedia, in the hopes of winning $50,000 and access to Plank’s expertise and network.

As an interested onlooker and researcher, this was an illuminating experience for a number of a reasons. First, there was clear evidence supporting the idea that entrepreneurship permeates my university’s institutional culture. In one short afternoon, I observed the culture’s heroes (e.g., Plank, the epitome of the enterprising student turned entrepreneur), codes (e.g., “the special sauce,” referring to intellectual property, or what makes a product or service unique), and symbols (e.g., the marker board, signifying the constant need for daring ideas and curiosity). When the Dean of the business school spoke, he proclaimed that “we live and breathe entrepreneurship every day in the halls of Van Munching [Hall].” Dr. Wallace Loh, President of the University of Maryland, made it clear he wants this to be a university-wide occurrence, declaring his ambitious goal that all 37,000 students to be exposed to innovation and entrepreneurship education.

Second, I was immediately struck by the resources required to produce an event of this magnitude.  Of course, much of the money was put up by donors, which included AOL and BB&T Bank. Still, the event was largely planned and implemented by university staff in the business school, particularly its two entrepreneurship-related centers. There are scholars who link the rise of entrepreneurship in colleges and universities to the search for new money in the face of declining state and local appropriations. Although at least one of teams competing was marketing a product whose intellectual property belonged to the university, I could not help but wonder if more is being spent promoting and teaching entrepreneurship than is being brought in through licensing royalties. If this is the case, we need research that looks at the true costs and benefits of these initiatives. And we cannot think of the entrepreneurial turn in higher education as purely a rational response to economic conditions. It must serve other purposes.

Third, I noticed an interesting paradox that has been discussed by a few others. Entrepreneurship, in part, is about taking risks to disrupt the status quo. For this reason, the university has developed an entire marketing campaign around the slogan “Fearless Ideas.” But what Cupid’s Cup and similar initiatives try to do is minimize the risk to students by providing coaching, access to experts, and seed funding. The university has created a set of resources that collectively create a business incubator for students. Some of these resources come directly from state appropriations, hence the concept of the state-subsidized student entrepreneur developed by Matthew Mars. Interestingly, the competition included an award for the team that had best leveraged all of these resources in developing their product or service. Plank encouraged “all those out there who want to start a venture but don’t know where to begin” to make use of campus resources to incubate into reality “the fearless ideas that keep you up at night.” What I find intriguing, however, is the possibility that all of this coaching and all of these resources actually constrain innovation. There are norms and parameters set, shaping the types of ideas that students pursue in order to gain access to seed money. It could be the most disruptive, novel ideas are those that are never given the chance to compete or win any money because they do not conform to institutional expectations of social/economic value creation.

The final learning moment for me was the most profound. It aligned with a comment one of my advisors made during a talk I gave on entrepreneurship in education. He said that the rise of entrepreneurship is a symptom of system failure. We saw similar discourses about the need to be innovative and entrepreneurial in the 1980s, when, much like today, our country grappled with slow economic growth, questions about global competitiveness, and high unemployment. In other words, we turn to entrepreneurship when there are few good jobs, and the powers that be want people to reignite the rugged individualist spirit and channel ingenuity in order to pave their personal path to prosperity. At Cupid’s Cup, President Loh told the audience that there is a lack of formal, full-time jobs for this generation of students. Graduates in the 21^st century need to invent their own jobs, and the nation needs them to innovate in order to out-compete India and China. After all, in order “to win the future” students must contend not just with competition from “Baltimore and Boston, but also Bangalore and Beijing.”

So, it’s not really just about fearless ideas and making dreams come true. We have to think about the particular historical moment that has given rise to investment in student entrepreneurialism—how the social context has shaped the field. The sociology of knowledge teaches that a field emerges not merely from ideas themselves, but also the settings in which researchers and practitioners work. How is it that entrepreneurship has developed into a subject of study, something that is “recognized as worth knowing, teaching, credentialing, advancing through research, and the like”? (Gumport, 2007, p. 349). When we step back to do this type of analysis, we recognize the multifaceted dimensions of the push for entrepreneurial studies—equal parts political, economic, and cultural. Entrepreneurship comes to embody the concept of functionalization. That is, when one discourse comes to serve the strategic and utilitarian ends of another: national economic competitiveness. 

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Gumport, P. (Ed.). (2007). Sociology of higher education: Contributions and their contexts. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Developments in Higher Education's Entrepreneurial Turn

Last week, I attended a patent seminar at my university, which was advertised as both an introduction to intellectual property as it relates to academe and an explanation of changes to the patent filing process as a result of the 2011 America Invents Act. The university’s vice president and chief research officer spoke at the beginning of the seminar, and his remarks reinforced an unmistakable trend in higher education: the cultivation of entrepreneurial spirit in faculty and students.

Entrepreneurship is not a new phenomenon among America’s research universities, but a recent wave of popularity is propelling it into areas previously detached from such activities. The spread of entrepreneurship raises several questions for the student of higher education policy: Why now? For what ultimate purpose? To whose advantage and whose disadvantage? And it raises at least one question for the somewhat interested onlooker: Who cares? In keeping with the RBMB mission, this post offers a few tentative, untested ideas.

Judging by the sign-in sheet, I might have been the only person in the patent seminar not affiliated with a science or technology program. The lens through which I understood the event, then, probably differed from others in the room, many of whom were professors and advanced graduate students whose work directly intersects with the market. Nevertheless, a few choice lines delivered by our chief research officer could not be subject to divergent interpretations:

• “A patent is like a publication. They are both junk unless you plan ahead and do something with them.”
• “I don’t care about your patent, I want to hear about your business plan.”
• “Figuring out how to get your methodology to market is more important than patenting.”
• “Do great things. Become rich!”

The overall message of the presentation was that research devoid of commercial follow-through on the part of faculty and graduate students was of little value. To simply discover new knowledge is wasteful, given the wealth-generation potential of certain types of university-based research. Gone are the days of basic, curiosity-driven research. Many would chalk up this message up to the emergence of the knowledge economy over the past fifty years.

Whereas as production strategies and economic growth immediately following World War II were organized around assembly-line manufacture of material goods, today they are a function of creating new science and technology-related products and services, and applying these inventions via information processing and telecommunications. Knowledge becomes a raw material that can be owned and sold. This organization of production requires not an abundant source of unskilled laborers, but rather a smaller number of educated information managers overseeing a larger cadre of flexible workers.

The research university has become indispensable to the knowledge economy because it is a central site of knowledge production and transfer. On the one hand, universities have become de facto research and development wings for corporations. As a result of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, universities can retain ownership over discoveries from federally-funded research, creating a new revenue stream. On the other hand, universities have become vital in preparing the educated, technology savvy consumers and workers the new economy requires. Consequently, various policymakers and corporation leaders have become keenly interested in reforming higher education to better teach “21^st century skills” that are aligned with the demands of the labor market.

The shift from an industrial to knowledge economy sheds some light on the question: Why now? Entrepreneurship in universities is both more feasible and better supported today than in the past because the exchange—versus symbolic or intrinsic—value of research has grown exponentially. Equally important, however, is the fact that research universities have been forced to search for new sources of income. The steady roll back of state and local funding for higher education has meant that universities, if they hope to remain competitive and not compromise quality, must address budget shortfalls with privately acquired revenues—from sale of merchandise and professional certificates to patent royalties and equity in spin-off companies. And, of course, one of the most important private sources of income is tuition.

The astute observer of higher education would argue that entrepreneurship is a new name for a longstanding tradition within research universities of innovating and operating in the context of a free-market capitalist system. It is certainly true that one aspect of research universities has always been to support economic development. In the same vein, university research has always been instrumentalized to serve purposes beyond the search for truth or greater understanding of the universe and its inhabitants. In fact, most university labs in the postwar era were generously funded by the federal government, which believed that basic research was the foundation of applications useful to national defense. Knowledge production has always been pursued for pragmatic reasons, not the least of which include personal and societal improvement. But to simply say that the entrepreneurial spirit has always played a part in what universities do is to give no consideration to how that role has changed over time.

I’ll sketch out here a few of the ways in which I think that the entrepreneurial turn in higher education deviates from the past. First, we must acknowledge that entrepreneurial activities are more deeply embedded in campus life. I’ll use my campus as an example, which may be misleading because our president has made innovation and entrepreneurship one of his top priorities. Nevertheless, many of these initiatives predate his arrival, and I have seen them at other campuses nationwide. Here’s a quick rundown of entrepreneurial programs and offices at the university:

1. M Square – a research park and business incubator space adjacent to campus. M Square “serves to physically and programmatically link university researchers, students and staff with federal laboratories and private sector companies.” The park is co-sponsored, in part, by the university’s division of research. This office also sponsors the Maryland Small Business and Technology Development Center and list of resources facilitating the founding of companies near campus
2. Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) – since 1986, this office has provided support and assistance in safeguarding intellectual property, encouraging technology transfer, and fostering collaborative research with industrial sponsors. According their website: “OTC has recorded more than 1,700 information, life and physical science invention disclosures; secured more than 300 U.S. patents; licensed more than 900 technologies to business and industry, which have generated more than $16.3 million in technology transfer income; and assisted in the creation of more than 50 high-tech start-up companies founded on the basis of technologies developed at the University of Maryland. Continued growth is expected as the University builds on its strengths in engineering, information technology, and biotechnology.”
3. Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (MTech) – claims 3 missions: to educate the next generation of entrepreneurs, start successful technology ventures, and connect the university and companies in the state. Included among the MTech initiatives are entrepreneurship and innovation walk-in hours, legal services, a venture accelerator, a technology company incubator, a student business model challenge, and a start-up lab.

The former director of MTech was recently named associate vice president for innovation and entrepreneurship. He will launch the university’s new Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship this year, which, in the words of the provost will “ignite students' entrepreneurial spirit.”  This introduces a second point of departure in the current entrepreneurial turn—the fact that, in addition to being deeply embedded, it also affects new stakeholders. The expanding breadth of entrepreneurial activities means that no longer are conversations about intellectual property, research commercialization, and technology transfer limited to scientists and their graduate students.

Like the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, several initiatives have been established with the explicit purpose of developing an entrepreneurial mindset in undergraduate students from diverse majors. Engineering students have long taken entrepreneurship courses. Now, however, students can take part in Hinman CEOs, “the nation’s first living-learning entrepreneurship program” and “a groundbreaking initiative placing entrepreneurially-minded students from all technical and non-technical academic disciplines in a unique community.” Furthermore, undergraduate students can minor in technology entrepreneurship or, if they are academically talented, receive a scholarship or take part in an entrepreneurship honors college to develop skills in innovation and business creation.

Faculty from all disciplines are also affected by the breadth of the entrepreneurial turn. Although patents have always been factored into promotion and tenure decisions for faculty in the STEM fields, the university is now pushing a committee to consider how entrepreneurship can be included in the academic rewards system across campus. Accordingly, the previously three-legged stool of the academic profession (service, teaching, and research) could soon include a fourth leg: entrepreneurship. Some faculty have reservations about this move, as they argue that faculty members who have developed companies or products are less interested in their work on campus. They are pulled in a different direction. Other faculty members wonder what kind of behaviors this move incentivizes  and who truly benefits from the work of academic entrepreneurs. Do inventor faculty better campus life, improve the educational experience of students, or simply bolster their incomes?

This brings is back to the last of our original questions. There are, naturally, advantages and disadvantages to recent manifestations of entrepreneurial turn in higher education. These advantages and disadvantages are not evenly experienced among all groups. It cannot be denied that a campus dedicated to the cultivation of big ideas is a good thing. Some of these ideas may address real social problems, and the university has repeatedly emphasized its contributions to job creation, economic development, and state wealth. While overlooking the nuance of specific cases, we can acknowledge that these are positive outcomes for many people.

On the other hand, certain areas of universities cannot be easily commercialized. They are designed to help us better experience and understand what it means to be human, to think about how the past can instruct and illuminate the present, and provide society a critical voice and social conscience. These areas are marginalized in a campus environment that is unabashedly forward-thinking, innovation-centric, and deeply invested in translating academic products and services into sources of revenue. The value of an idea has fundamentally changed on many campuses: a discovery, novel theory, or compelling narrative of humanity are “junk” unless they can be turned into a business plan.

We arrive, then, at the answer to the big question: So what? After all, the skeptic is probably reading this post and labeling me a left-leaning academic-to-be, resistant to adapt to new realities. Perhaps the university is finally making itself relevant and useful. Perhaps it really is like a microcosm of the market, with academic departments opening and closing like firms at the whims of supply and demand. Perhaps these are all true. But, as I reflect on the depth and breadth of efforts to cultivate “entrepreneurial spirit,” I wonder what is being compromised, or even lost.

Our campuses have not suddenly come into extra state money to fund these academies, programs, and research parks. They often must accept money from the private sector and, therefore, increasingly answer to the expectations of their funders—expectations which, as a number of court cases have pointed out, do not always have public wellbeing in mind. Or they must divert funding and energy from other areas, like character building, citizenship education, and the liberal arts.

Universities nationwide may be educating the next generation of inventors. But questions surround whether these inventors will have anything beyond self-enrichment guiding them. “Do great things. Get rich!” This may be a valid, albeit simplified, approach to economic prosperity. But I maintain it should not be part of the mission of our college and university campuses.

What Every PhD Student Should Know About Tenure

Just a few days ago, I ran into a colleague in the midst of an academic job search. He was excited for an upcoming interview—his first and, he hoped, not lone opportunity to secure an assistant professorship. As I inwardly marveled at the stress he must be experiencing, attempting to simultaneously finish his dissertation and find employment, he asked how my new job was going. I recently started a new graduate assistantship in my university’s office of faculty affairs, which coordinates, among other things, the appointment, promotion, and tenure process.

I foolishly launched into long explanation of how much I had learned about tenure in a short period of time. This explanation culminated in two conclusions: 1) finding an academic job is just the beginning of an arduous journey and 2) achieving tenure can be tremendously difficult. I laughed and said the idea of a tenure-track professorship seemed even less attractive to me than it did before. I’m sure my colleague found these conclusions less humorous, even if they did not completely catch him by surprise.

Nevertheless, it dawned on me that many PhD students may not have thorough understanding of the tenure process. There has been a great deal of chatter recently about the overproduction of PhDs and the stiff competition for academic jobs, especially in the humanities. However, I have heard little mention of changes to tenure and how they may affect PhD students. My office organizes orientation for faculty members, and it is not uncommon for new hires to be completely clueless about tenure. Given that an unfortunately high number of assistant professors never achieve tenure (30% at my university, and the percentage is higher for women and minorities), it is worth considering the points below if you are studying to become an academic. (Caveat: most of these points are based upon knowledge of public research universities, and it should be noted that there is great diversity in how tenure is viewed, pursued, and reviewed.)

1. Tenure is intricately linked to the political economy of higher education. This means, firstly, that the entire enterprise is currently under siege for producing inefficiencies, inhibiting institutional flexibility, and inappropriately shielding faculty from accountability. Many institutions are not replacing outgoing tenured faculty with new tenure-track hires. Instead, they are turning to non-tenure-track instructors, or adjuncts, who can be cheaper (if they are not full-time employees or afforded benefits) and allow departments to respond to rapidly changing market circumstances. At my university, the share of credit hours delivered by non-tenure-track instructors (46%) now exceeds the share delivered by tenured and tenure-track faculty (41%). The implications of this phenomenon (what I sometimes unfairly call adjunctivitis) are numerous, but merit a separate discussion.

Secondly, speaking of the market, tenure (and the faculty rewards system in general) is shifting to favor faculty activities that generate revenue. Such activities include not only winning lucrative grants, but also engaging in entrepreneurship, or commercializing research. Certain disciplines heavily involved in technology transfer are automatically at an advantage. I was recently in a meeting in which it was emphatically underscored that entrepreneurship needed to be better integrated into the tenure process, as we were “way behind our peers.” This emphasis helps explain, in part, the hiring of contractual instructors, making it possible for tenured faculty to focus on research and raising questions about the place of undergraduate education in the faculty rewards system. 

What it means for you: Tenure, as it has been understood for many decades, may look very different by the time you are up for review. 

2. Tenure is a multi-dimensional, multi-level process. It is multi-dimensional because it traditionally requires that a candidate excel in the teaching-research-service triad. Of these three dimensions, research is unquestionably the most important. We’re all familiar with the “publish or perish” cliché, but this pressure on faculty must be qualified. It should be clear to tenure review committees that an assistant professor seeking promotion has a research agenda they can pursue into the future. Furthermore, it is expected that a candidate is not merely publishing regularly, but also publishing in top tier journals. In the humanities, there is the unwritten rule that assistant professors have at least one published book manuscript in order to be promoted. This has recently been made difficult because, in an era of steadily declining government appropriations to higher education, some university presses are downsizing and closing. Teaching is the second most important dimension, typically assessed through a statement of teaching philosophy, student evaluations, graduate student advising record (if applicable), and syllabi. Service is the final and least important dimension, encompassing public or community engagement at some institutions.

The tenure review process includes at minimum two levels. Often, the first level is the unit or department level, which marks the first step in the construction of a candidate’s collection of documents providing evidence of teaching, research, and service—usually referred to as a casebook or dossier. If the department-level tenure committee recommends promotion, the dossier is passed along with their feedback to the next level. At some institutions, the school or college dean reviews the dossier and, if she/he approves of the recommendation for promotion, will forward it to the university-level tenure committee. The final decision to award an assistant professor tenure rests in the hands of the president, provost, and/or board of regents.

What it means for you: If you land an assistant professorship, you would be wise—from a self-interested perspective—to focus on research above teaching and service, while bearing in mind that your performance will be assessed at multiple levels based upon the needs and interests of the institution. 

3. Tenure is not a formulaic process and can be a moving target. Some new hires believe that if they follow a formula, making certain to publish constantly and bring in revenue, their future is secure. However, there are no guarantees. In addition to considering how a faculty member fits within the context of the institution, each committee also solicits letters from external reviewers. External reviewers are tenured faculty in a candidate’s field that are deemed qualified to comment on the strength of the candidate’s research contributions. A dossier is strengthened if external reviewers are affiliated with prestigious institutions. The good news is that candidates are usually able to recommend a few people as external reviewers, but they cannot be mentors, advisors, or research collaborators. Letters from external reviewers are just one of many wild cards in a process that sits on the border of objectivity and subjectivity. 

All institutions have what is commonly referred to as a tenure clock. This represents the number of years that pass before an assistant professor must be reviewed for promotion. The traditional tenure clock is 6 to 7 years. However, extensions of 1 to 2 years can be granted for care of a dependent, illness, childbirth, or adoption. Within that 6 to 9 year period of time, institutions can undergo substantial transformation. This is particularly true of “striving” colleges or universities, which are committing enormous resources to raising their prestige. Research on striving institutions has found that many junior faculty are confused by tenure expectations. Policies and procedures lag behind institutional change, with the result that faculty find the ground beneath them shifting as they work to secure their future. In other words, tenure can be somewhat like attempting to build the foundations of a career on quick sand.

What it means for you: Be prepared for nearly a decade of competition, adaptation, and strategic thinking.

After considering these points, you may say, “So what? I don’t care if I’m tenured.” Unfortunately, the system is designed such that, if you want to have any respect or privileges on a university campus, you must be on the tenure track. If you are not recommended for promotion to associate professor, you are not able to remain an assistant professor indefinitely. Typically, you are given a one year contract within which to find employment elsewhere with few, if any, opportunities to appeal the decision.

Many of these points may be obsolete in short order, since the academic profession is rapidly changing with the entire higher education landscape. It is possible that they will be completely irrelevant if, as some observers predict and others applaud, tenure stands to completely disappear as higher education goes the way of the market. Even though it is a stress-inducing, arduous journey—one that I plan to avoid—I sincerely hope that tenure is still in the picture for coming cohorts of PhD students. It is the bedrock of academic freedom, instrumental to democracy, and the engine of a nation's critical conscience at a moment in history when we need it most. 

Singularity University and the New Economy

“There’s really no other institution,” explains Ray Kurzweil, “that studies the exponential growth of information technology and how it can solve the major problems of the world.”

Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, sees such emphasis on information technology as the unique contribution to U.S. higher education of his brainchild, Singularity University (SU). This, however, is not the only unique feature of SU. The university is perhaps the most developed example I have encountered of Slaughter and Rhoades’ academic capitalism theory.

SU takes its name from Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, and, more generally, from the concept of technological singularity. In the book, Kurzweil predicts that we are approaching a moment in which it is possible through the study of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics to see artificial intelligences that surpass the cognitive abilities of the human brain and medical advancements that overcome the limits of human biology. 

Entrepreneur and scientist Peter Diamandis was inspired enough by Kurzweil’s ideas to suggest building upon the model of the International Space University and create an institution of higher learning. After convening a meeting at NASA Ames Research Center with “50 of the leading thinkers” in 2007, SU was founded. It runs two academic programs at its campus in Silicon Valley: a nine-week summer graduate studies program and an executive program.

The curriculum of these programs is closely tied to Kurzweil’s book, which is perhaps not surprising, given that he is the Chancellor. The institution’s short history is described via a TED Talk Kurzweil gave on technological singularity. Students take courses on:

Future Studies and Forecasting

Policy, Law, and Ethics

Entrepreneurship

Networks and Computing Systems

Biotechnology and Bioinformatics

Nanotechnology

Medicine and Neuroscience

AI, Robotics, and Cognitive Computing

Energy and Ecological Systems

Space and Physical Sciences

Not exactly the liberal arts. Then again, SU is fairly clear about its mission to “assemble, educate and inspire a new generation of leaders who strive to understand and utilize exponentially advancing technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges.” Who are these leaders? Based on the website, they are attractive, highly accomplished young people from around the world. SU profiles one past participant in the categories of entrepreneur, policy influencer, academic, big thinker, NGO leader, and technologist. The bottom line is that, unless you are a Business Week Entrepreneur Award Winner or Harvard Medical School student, you likely won’t earn one of 80 spots out of 1,600 or so applicants.

What do students get from their SU experience? Diamandis underscores the interdisciplinary nature of SU: “if you come in as an expert in nanotechnology, you’re going to learn about molecular genetics, you’re going to learn about medicine and human enhancement, and AI and robotics…you’re going to learn the vocabulary, you’re going to find partners to start new companies.” This is just one of the ways in which the lines between institution of higher learning and business incubator are blurred at SU. To top it all off, students also get access to a global network of geniuses-to-be and budding millionaires.

The university gets its funding from a string of corporations and venture capital funds, including Google, Nokia, and LinkedIn. These corporations will have first pick of students to fill any vacant positions on their research and development teams. Therefore, any major problems that are solved at SU come not from research conducted at the university itself, but rather from corporations funding the institution or companies started by students. This is a university created by the private sector for the private sector.

With its concentration on select domains of knowledge, corporate sponsorship, business incubation, and other marketeering activities, SU epitomizes the interplay between higher education and the new economy. The new economy, in the words of Slaughter and Rhoades, “treats advanced knowledge as a raw material that can be claimed through legal devises, owned, and marketed as a product or service.” SU clearly caters to those with advanced knowledge that can be transformed into marketable products or services. Any solutions generated by SU to save humanity will need to be purchased.

The mechanisms through which higher education connects to the new economy constitute what Slaught and Rhoades call an “academic capitalist knowledge regime.” This regime "values knowledge privatization and profit taking in which institutions, inventor faculty, and corporations have claims that come before those of the public.” By contrast, the public good knowledge regime, as the name implies, views “knowledge as a public good to which the citizenry has claims.” The authors acknowledge that these two regimes are starkly differentiated only for analytical purposes. In reality, there is substantial overlap.

Although SU is emblematic of the academic capitalist knowledge regime, other institutions, including publicly funded colleges and universities, are connecting to the new economy, adopting practices found in the private sector, and seeking new sources of revenue. At my own institution, the University of Maryland, state funding per student has steadily declined over the past decade. In order to remain competitive and retain top faculty, campus leaders have looked to sources of revenue beyond dwindling government appropriations. 

These sources include the University of Maryland University College, an online education profit center. Additionally, the university unveiled M Square, which is public-private partnership with a real estate investment trust designed to offer “incubator space for start up companies” and “build to suit options for larger technology clients in Maryland’s largest research park.” Most recently, the Honors College launched a new living-learning program dedicated to advanced cybersecurity education. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman helped fund the program, and students are eligible for internships and mentorship opportunities at the corporation.

My point is not to predict a corporate take-over of U.S. higher education. The state, big business, and higher education have always been inextricably linked. It is rather to highlight the new types of relationships emerging as higher education positions itself as a key site of knowledge production in an economy whose competitiveness hinges upon harnessing educated workers and advanced technology.

The singularity may be near, but it is also, frankly, creepy. Forgive me for not sharing Kurzweil's enthusiasm for robotic red blood cells. Singularity University is likewise problematic, signaling a shift with clear implications for social justice in American higher education. As the state rolls back funding of higher education, the public good functions of universities retreat with it.