Part THREE — § 1

Although the texts by the Vice-President are occasioned by what she represents as a (local) “crisis” in the English Department at SUNY-Albany, they are part of a larger anti-(non-profit)-research and pro-business move in the University. In other words, the views articulated in her texts are effects of historical tendencies to adjust the rate of profit in the knowledge industry as part of changes in the globalization of capital. They are, in short, symptomatic of larger shifts in public spending caused by the emerging economic and political practices aimed at further transferring wealth from the public to the private sector. Public expenditure on higher education has declined since the beginning of the current decade: the “proportion of state funds devoted to [higher education] fell from 14 to 12.5 per cent” (Breneman B-4). The decrease is usually justified by a legislative hysteria about “budget crisis." However, the reduction of public support for higher education is taking place at a time when “more than 15 states have budget surpluses” (Breneman B-4). Take the example of New York State: in his budget for 1997, George E. Pataki, the Republican Governor of the State, has proposed sharp cuts in spending on public education, health care and other social programs at the very time that the State has a budget surplus of over $1.36 billion. The City of New York (which routinely cuts the budget of CUNY) has ended up with over an $800 million surplus in the same budget cycle (The New York Times, May 2, 1997, B-1, B-4). The budget crisis is simply a ruse for transferring wealth to the upper classes by means of tax cuts, capital gains cuts and the like, especially cuts in social spending such as education.

These funding shifts and privatizing practices should be critiqued and changed: they impose new and more drastic limits on public education; restrict access to knowledge; restrain free intellectual inquiry and replace critique-al citizenship with techno-subjects.

Those who have discussed “privatization” have, by and large, looked at it as a positive development — a “model for the future," to use David W. Breneman's word. “Privatization” of the public research university, however, is not simply a matter of the reduction of public funds; rather it is a “new type of organization whose culture focuses on providing quality goods or services." It is, in the words of Ted Marchese, a “mind set” (SUIQ 3). “Privatization," in other words, is a re-articulation of the university, turning it from a space of critique-al knowledges into a corporation run by managers and by means of such methods as “TQM” (Total Quality Management) which are widely deployed in for-profit corporations. In most research universities — whether formally private (Carnegie-Mellon, Syracuse) or public (Michigan, Georgia Tech) business management strategies, such as the TQM method, are now the order of the day. At Syracuse University, for instance, the TQM model has been adopted as “SUIQ” (Syracuse University Improving Quality). The purpose of SUIQ is to do at Syracuse University what TQM has done in such corporations as Motorola, IBM, Federal Express and Westinghouse. In order to reshape the University as a corporation, TQM takes the “customer” as its central figure and them establishes a relation of identity between the "'customer,' 'student' or 'colleague'" (SUIQ 3). All relations, to be more precise, are relations of “consumption." To implement this new model of management, "[Syracuse] University looked to Corning, Inc." (SUIQ 4). One consequence of transforming the university into a consumption unit is to replace “critique-al” knowledge with business “excellence” (as in CETL — “Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning” at SUNY-Albany, which I will discuss at length later in this section).

SUNY-Albany, it seems, is convinced that the “wave of the future” is to undermine various forms of “basic research” in the humanities by weakening their supporting academic structures — primarily through the adoption of several different management models from the business world. Common to all these different management models being brought into SUNY-Albany and other universities is a shared antagonism to all practices that do not yield “profit," whether directly — by “bringing in money” to the University from outside — or indirectly—by producing skills and consciousness habits in the students/workforce that, as second order practices, will lead to profit-making activities. A research-oriented humanities program—including departments of English, Classics, French, German, Philosophy, History... — aimed at making critique-al knowledges available to citizens of a democratic society is in the way of such a de-formation of the university and thus must be either eliminated or marginalized. It is especially telling that SUNY-Albany has, in fact, eliminated its German Department.

An exemplary instance of this tendency to de-form research practices into more profit-making skills and information is the marginalization of the “history” departments at CUNY. Contrary to the pro-business propaganda, the dismantling of “history” departments at CUNY has nothing to do with a decline in the quality of the scholarship of the history faculty (the faculty of CUNY's history departments includes Arthur Schlesinger, Alfred Kazin, Blanche Wiesen Cook, David Rosner) or the lack of interest in history on the part of students. In fact at CUNY, between 1991 and 1994, “the number of juniors and seniors who declared a history major rose by more than 25 percent” (The New York Times, May 29, 1996, B-9). History departments at CUNY are marginalized, in other words, not because they are not producing first-rate scholarship or there is no interest in history on the part of students but simply because history is not a discipline which yields “profit” to Big Business. Instead, history has often offered some of the most critical assessments of corporate business practices in the U.S. and abroad. History has, in short, served critique-al citizenship by producing “basic research” that has insisted on maintaining a critique-al space in culture. The history programs at CUNY and SUNY-Albany's German Department are, of course, not the only instances of “downsizing” critique-al studies. At the University of Cincinnati, Bowling Green State University and Kent State University, graduate literature programs have either been downsized or completely eliminated (The Chronicle of Higher Education March 29, 1996, A-48). Comparative literature studies at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and University of Rochester have been closed down at the very same time that cultural theory itself has shifted from inquiry into national to post-national cultures. One can, of course, add other examples to this list. However, what is significant is that the elimination of non-profit “literature” programs is not simply a matter of lack of financial resources but of changing priorities. For example, the Ohio Board of Regents “wants to replace the literature program” at Kent State University, “with a new Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric” (The Chronicle of Higher Education October 18, 1996, A-10). Syracuse University has just added a new Ph.D. in exactly the same subject, composition and rhetoric, because these programs have acquired high “market value” — they provide the communication “skills” needed by transnational capital. The same market forces that marginalize, downsize and eliminate such critique-al transnational cultural studies as “comparative literature” (at the University of Illinois and the University of Rochester) or “Italian and Portuguese” (at the University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill), proliferate programs in “composition," “writing” and “rhetoric." The “global English” that is discussed in these programs is the “global English” of Business, and the un-said of many “Creative Writing” programs has become the training of “best seller” producers whose books — like Hollywood big budget films — are crafted to have a transnational market. The narratives that “composition” and “writing” are undervalued and have been victim disciplines in the universities is simply a myth aimed at justifying the disproportionate funding of these programs and the inordinate power and influence that they have in the organization of priorities by the university central administration.

The Vice President's texts and her administrative practices, such as putting the English Department in “receivership," are moves to marginalize non-profit research in the humanities by, among other things, weakening the autonomy of its faculty. The moves to marginalize the English Department; eliminate the German Department, and to collapse the remaining modern languages into one department at SUNY-Albany; the elimination of language and literature programs across the country, as well as the fate of “history” at CUNY and elsewhere, are not isolated acts. These are all part of larger administrative moves to deform universities, especially in the next decade or so, reducing their humanities to peripheral units engaged largely in “service" work for more profit-making practices. This process will eventually replace autonomous departments devoted to (non-profit) “basic research” with a number of quasi-academic, quasi-autonomous units that, adopting a common (British) term for an organizational unit that operates largely autonomously, I call quangos (Quasi Autonomous National Government Organization). University quangos, unlike departments, by-pass the academic processes of decision-making — setting priorities by the majority of faculty — which both involve the democratic participation of members through open debate and discussion and regard intellectual dissent to be an integral part of self-governance and teaching in the university. Instead, quangos “report” directly to one of the senior administrators, usually a vice-president. Quangos, however, do not only weaken the autonomy of research units through their administrative structure, for example, by undermining faculty decision-making processes. They also undermine the central role of the critique-al humanities in a democratic society through the way they (re)define the very work of the humanities itself.

"Surreptitious power” (the undemocratic and coercive force that appropriates resources to serve the interests of a few at the expense of the many) is what the critique-al citizen is educated to fight against. Without freeing humanity from the “surreptitious power” of myths and ideologies represented as truth, the Enlightenment humanities argued, there will be no “good society." The displacement of the humanities today is, in short, an attempt to marginalize the struggle for a “good society”—which affirms the well-being of the collectivity (not “networking") — and to put in its place a “pleasure society” that celebrates the singularities of individuals by valorizing the “desire” to obtain and “consume” objects of pleasure. The marginalization of critique-al practices, to put it in words that foreground the point I have been making about “profit," replaces the “good society” with a “consumer society." The ability of the citizen to accumulate the power of (personal) consumption and not her ability to critique-ally put human “need” before “desire” — and work to meet these needs—becomes the object of profit-making education.

It is a mark of this “disenfranchisement” that “literature," “philosophy," “history”...are displaced, in a consumer society of desire, by such profitable and “pragmatic” practices as “writing studies” which have a ready market. Critique-al work in the humanities has not been aimed at developing a specific skill but at cultivating a mode of thinking that insists on the priority of the human search for truth whether this has turned out to be “profit” making or (as is more often the case) has gone against the very grain of a society that has valorized consumption and given priority to “profit." It is this critique-al thinking (not to be confused with “critical thinking” which has become a commodity now taught as a skill as part of writing studies) that the quango-ing of the university displaces so that business practices aimed at making “profit” will assume the status of “natural” acts in human daily life.