WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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What shall it profit a university to gain valuable endowments or private partnerships, if it should lose its soul?
The public University as we know it is in crisis, as business prerogatives overtake its values and executive-style leadership eats away at its budgets. The number university administrators has grown over 350% since 1976, while faculty levels are nearly stagnant*; college presidents are sometimes paid over a million dollars a year, and yet state legislatures keep cutting education budgets and passing the burden along to students and their parents.
A quick glance at Indiana University reveals a President whose total compensation in 2016 was over one million dollars with a base salary of six hundred thousand and two Vice Presidents adding nearly another million in salary alone. And that’s just at the tippy-top…one rung down there are academic Deans like John Graham who heads the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) and is the former “Regulatory Czar” for George W. Bush–he’s even got a “SourceWatch” page devoted to him for his industry-friendly work.
The environment in question inculcates the values of this business ideology where marketing professors are “worth” double those in any humanities discipline and splashy “signature” projects that do little of fundamental value for the public are pushed on administrative whims, with no regard for the university’s actual mission.
(I’d sure love to know what IU’s Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics might say about this…oh, that’s right IU nixed its funding in 2016, closing, after 43 years, what might have been called the conscience of the University.)
Our guest tonight is University of California Berkeley Sociologist, Michael Burawoy, who has studied industrial workplaces in Zambia, Chicago, Hungary, and post-Soviet Russia, has turned his sociological lens on the workplace that is the modern University. Burawoy says top Universities are now helmed by people he calls “spiralists”: executive administrators who enter the university from the outside, with little knowledge of its inner workings or long-standing values. They cultivate, promote and protect each other through mutual recruitment, at the same time boosting their corporate-level incomes and contributing to administrative bloat, all the while corroding the public-spirited legitimacy universities were founded on.
Work has always been a locus of social construction, from the shop floor to the classroom. And yes, schools, though we may forget, are sites of labor. And one particularly freighted with an inherent socialist tendency. It’s why there has been a great struggle in the last decades for the soul of university: a struggle currently being handily won by spiralists and profiteers.
RELATED
Michael Burawoy on Sociology and the Workplace (Social Science Bites)
The Neoliberal University: Ascent of the Spiralists (Critical Sociology, 2016)
Privatization increases inequality and reduces the quality of education (The Daily Californian)
Poynter Center Expected to Close Its Doors (Indiana Daily Student)
*Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media by Thomas Frank
GUEST
Michael Burawoy has been a participant observer of industrial workplaces in four countries: Zambia, United States, Hungary and Russia. In his different projects he has tried to illuminate — from the standpoint of the working class — postcolonialism, the organization of consent to capitalism, the peculiar forms of class consciousness and work organization in state socialism, and, finally, the dilemmas of transition from socialism to capitalism. Over the course of four decades of research and teaching, he has developed the extended case method that allows broad conclusions to be drawn from ethnographic research. He’s the author several books and articles among which are, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism, and Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment with Karl Von Holdt.
MUSIC
“Education” by The Kinks
“Hard Way” by the Kinks
“Life of a Scholar” by 3 Titans
“College” by 3 Titans
“Birth, School, Work, Death” by The Godfathers
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Edited by Rob Schoon
Music Editor: Bryce Martin
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
