This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Of course, many scholars have attended to the disciplinary (if not perhaps the ‘professional’) parameters of political theory (see for instance Gunnell, 2006; Adcock et al., 2007). Most recently, Kaufman-Osborn (2006, 2010) has done much to begin historicizing the terms of the discipline.
Some of these letters are made available as supplementary material in Rehfeld (2010).
There are, writes Rehfeld, good ‘epistemic reasons’ for relegating such forms of inquiry to the humanities. By this logic, though, I suspect one could easily imagine good ‘cultural reasons’ for repatriating cultural minorities to the border, regardless of whether there is a neighboring country to take them ‘back’ (see Rehfeld (2010, p. 467).
Borrowing from Weber (through Parsons), Merton in 1938 identifies disinterestedness as one of the four norms that comprise the ‘scientific ethos’. The others are communism, universalism and organized skepticism (see Merton, 1973 [1938], pp. 275–277).
In a 1979 study commissioned by the government of Québec, Lyotard gave his now classic account of how the legitimation of knowledge had changed in post-modern society (see Lyotard, 1984 [1979]). Some 20 years later, in a different idiom, Readings also explored the ways in which the ‘old constitution’ of the university had indeed become fictional, now that the university was no longer harnessed to construction a national identity (see Readings, 1996). Most recently, in the French context, Macherey has also inquired after the status of the res universitaria (see Macherey, 2011).
The more influential accounts of this privatization process include Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), and Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (2008). For a critique of neoliberalism’s influence on the sciences specifically, see Mirowski (2011); for a discussion of the industrial scientist and the scientific entrepreneur specifically, see Shapin (2008). For an account of the British case, see Evans (2008).
In one controversial case, the Prussian Ministry of Education in 1908 appointed Ludwig Bernhardt to the rank of full professor at the University of Berlin without consulting the university’s professors or providing them with a list of potential candidates. Although such appointments were technically within the jurisdiction of the Ministry, the fact that the Ministry made the appointment with consultation drew considerable criticism from many academics at the time – among them Weber. For a discussion of this case, see Myers (2004, p. 273). In the United States today, one would not expect such meddling. And yet, one cannot help but wonder: in the time since I first submitted this article to Contemporary Political Theory for consideration, Steven Salaita was denied a tenured position at the University of Illinois, on account of political comments he had made on a social networking site. My own University of Wisconsin, meanwhile, has had to contend with a state Governor whose presidential aspirations have required him to reinvent public education in myriad ways. As I write, the House’s Joint Finance Committee is poised to vote on a budget proposal that not only reduces the University’s funding by US$300 million, but also eliminates tenure and faculty governance. Suffice it to say that when I first submitted this piece to CPT, I wondered whether it might help or hinder my chances of getting tenure; I now wonder whether there will be any tenure to be got.
As Tuchman’s study of Wannabe U makes clear, the ‘corporate’ university need not be a private one, and the ‘market ethos’ can find expression in a university’s ‘service to the state’ (for example, its contribution to the state’s industry or workforce) (see Tuchman, 2009, pp. 175–176). For more synoptic accounts of the privatization of higher education, see among others Newfield (2008), Washburn (2005), Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), Kirp (2004).
Of course, as one reviewer helpfully points out, the need for generating revenue is nothing new, and it was to this need that the German docent was responding when trying to drum up enrollment. What does strike me as novel, however, is the increasingly explicit requirement as part of scientist’s contractual obligations that they apply for external grants to finance their research.
Weber himself, it should be said, was by all account an enthralling lecturer. His wife Marianne (as noted by Kemple, 2005, p. 1) writes that his was a ‘wonderful voice’. For a full discussion of Weber’s ‘voice’ and ‘professorial charisma’, see Kalinowski (2005, pp. 117–147).
The trends I am describing, of course, are hardly limited to the university. Much as there was in 1917 (according to Weber) a cult of subjective experience [Erlebnis] such that young people ‘put themselves through torture in order to “experience” things’, so it seems that today we fetishize what is objective or measurable (2004, p. 10). In higher education, this can take the form of an obsession with university rankings; in other corners of society, the price of something will be taken as a measure of its value.
The information regarding Lubar’s campaign donations is available through the Federal Election Commission’s Website: www.fec.gov (accessed 29 May 2015).
Many people have turned to the philosopher John L. Austin for an understanding of ‘How To Do Things With Words’. Those concerned with the question of how to do things with money will find it answered in the US context by Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose majority opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission most clearly articulates the democratic principle of ‘one dollar, one vote’. For a more subtle and sustained reading of the case, see Brown (2015, pp. 156–173).
For a testimony of how the field of neuroscience, in particular, has been transformed as a result of the increasing importance of money, see JacSue Kehoe’s contribution in Squire (2004, p. 344).
1 ‘Privatization’ connotes to many a process of selling-off state-owned enterprises to private owners. This is not happening in the realm of higher education. What is happening at public universities, however, is a shift away from reliance on public funding and toward reliance on tuition, research partnerships with private enterprises and private donor dollars. For lack of a better name, I will call this process – relative, gradual and incomplete as it may be – privatization (see, for background, Dennison, 2003). Dennison traces privatization in the United States back to the 1970s.
2 Bowen’s full list of goals, which he admits ‘has a utopian quality about it’, is on pp. 53–59 of Bowen (1977).
3 Hence when people decry the changes underway in the university, they imagine merely a change in who is in charge of the activity of teachers. The classic model is that teachers govern their own activity; the interloper is the ‘client-centered’ model, in which student demand displaces professorial autonomy. Teachers remain active, students remain passive, but now the teacher’s activity is directed to the entertainment of the passive spectator rather than to the molding of the immature mind.
4 ‘Financial intervention by government reduces the direct costs of tertiary education to those benefiting from the intervention. In the absence of such intervention the individuals concerned would have had to meet the full costs themselves. As the benefits of tertiary education are substantially investment benefits from the economic function, this would probably have been achieved to a large extent by borrowing against the expected enhanced future income streams’ (Treasury, 1987).
5 Which is not to say that all liberals are proponents of privatization, or that the arguments of privatization flow automatically from the central tenets of liberalism.
6 The diversity of funding regimes across the nations of the OECD is illuminating, and make generalizations about ‘what works’ quite difficult (see OECD, 2011).
7 One of the most thoughtful of these liberal proponents is Levy (see Levy, 2012).
8 Part of the price, that is, opportunity costs in foregone income are also to be factored in.
9 Ira Steward’s words, as quoted in Gourevitch (2013b).
10 Some of the relevant history is told in MacGilvray (2011).
11 The program that might bring the fight around to where it ought to be fought is: Wages for schoolwork. This call would have the virtue of foregrounding the facts that students are working, that this work is largely a sort of pre-labor for their future employers, and that they are forced to undertake this labor.
References
Adcock, R., Bevir, M. and Stimson, S. (eds.) (2007) Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges Since 1870. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Altbach, P.G. (2001a) Why higher education is not a global commodity. The Chronicle of Higher Education 11 May.
Altbach, P.G. (2001b) The American academic model in comparative perspective. In: P.G. Altbach, P.J. Gumport and D.B. Johnstone (eds.) In Defense of American Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bousquet, M. (2008) How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York: New York University Press.
Bowen, H. and Servelle, P. (1972) Who Benefits from Higher Education – And Who Should Pay? Washington DC: American Association for Higher Education.
Bowen, H. (1977) Investment in Learning: The Individual and Social Value of American Higher Education. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Bray, J.F. (1957 [1842]) A Voyage from Utopia. In: M.F. Lloyd-Pritchard (ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Brown, W. (2010) Political theory is not a luxury: A response to Timothy Kaufman-Osborn’s ‘political theory as a profession’. Political Research Quarterly 63 (3): 680–685.
Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press.
Calhoun, C. (2009) Academic freedom: Public knowledge and the structural transformation of the university. Social Research 76 (2): 561–597.
Dennison, G.M. (2003) Privatization: An unheralded trend in public higher education. Innovative Higher Education 28 (1): 7–20.
Dillon, S. (2005) At Public Universities, Warnings of Privatization. The New York Times, 16 October, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/education/16college.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1381939414-Lj9XV3q03tZ7Rsc7qGNZjg.
Doti, J.L. (2004) Is higher education becoming a commodity? Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 26 (3): 363–369.
Etzkowitz, H. and Leydesdorff, L. (2008) Universities and the Global Knowledge Economy: A Triple Helix of University-Industry-Governement Relations. New York: Routledge.
Evans, D. (2008) The conflict of the faculties and the knowledge industry: Kant's diagnosis, in his time and ours. Philosophy 83 (326): 483–495.
Frank, T. (2012) The price of admission. Harpers June, http://www.tcfrank.com/essays/The_Price_of_Admission.
Gourevitch, A. (2013a) Labor republicanism and the transformation of work. Political Theory 41 (4): 591–617.
Gourevitch, A. (2013b) Wage slavery and republican liberty. Jacobin: A Magazine of Culture and Polemic 28 February, http://jacobinmag.com/2013/02/wage-slavery-and-republican-liberty/.
Grace, G. (1989) Education: Commodity or public good? British Journal of Educational Studies 37 (3): 207–221.
Gross, M. (2008) French research split. Current Biology 18 (12): R496.
Gunnell, J.G. (2006) The founding of the American political science association: Discipline, profession, political theory, and politics. American Political Science Review 100 (4): 479–486.
Kalinowski, I. (2005) Leçons wébériennes sur la science & la propagande. In: M. Weber (ed.) La science, profession & vocation, I. Kalinowski (ed. and trans.). Paris, France: Agone.
Kaufman-Osborn, T. (2006) Dividing the domain of political science: On the fetishism of subfields. Polity 38 (1): 41–71.
Kaufman-Osborn, T. (2010) Political theory as profession and as subfield? Political Research Quarterly 63 (3): 655–673.
Kemple, T. (2005) Instrumentum vocale: A note on Max Weber’s value-free polemics and sociological aesthetics. Theory, Culture & Society 22 (4): 1–22.
Kirp, D. (2004) Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Korab, M. (2013) ASSÉ to boycott higher education summit. The McGill Daily 16 February, http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2013/02/asse-to-boycott-higher-education-summit/.
Labaree, D.F. (1997) Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal 34 (1): 39–81.
Laval, C., Vergne, F., Clément, P. and Dreux, G. (2011) La nouvelle école capitaliste. Paris, France: La Découverte.
Levy, J.T. (2012) The high cost of low tuition in Quebec. Academic Matters, November, http://www.academicmatters.ca/2012/11/the-high-cost-of-low-tuition-in-quebec/.
Loo, D. et al (2011) Cooking the goose that lays the golden eggs: California’s public higher education system in peril, http://defendthecsu.blogspot.ca/2011/05/cooking-goose-that-lays-golden-eggs.html.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984 [1979]) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
MacGilvray, E. (2011) The Invention of Market Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Macherey, P. (2011) La parole universitaire. Paris, France: La Fabrique.
Martin, R. (2011) Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Translated by M. Nicolaus. New York: Vintage Books.
Merton, R.K. (1973 [1938]) The Normative Structure of Science. In: N. Storer (ed.) The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mirowski, P. (2011) Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Myers, P. (2004) Education as academic and political calling. German Studies Review 27 (2): 269–288.
Newfield, C. (2008) Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1997) Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2010) Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
OECD (2011) Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators. OECD Publishing.
Otto, S.L. (2012) Antiscience beliefs Jeopardize U.S. democracy. Scientific American 307 (5): 62–71.
Rampell, C. (2012) Where the jobs are, the training may not be. The New York Times 2 March, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/business/dealbook/state-cutbacks-curb-training-in-jobs-critical-to-economy.html?_r=2&ref=education&.
Ripstein, A. (1987) Commodity fetishism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (4): 733–748.
Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rehfeld, A. (2010) Offensive political theory. Perspectives on Politics 8 (2): 465–486.
Ringer, F. (1969) The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933. Cambridge, CA: Harvard University Press.
Shapin, S. (2008) The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Shubert, A. (2004) Why we shouldn’t treat higher education as a commodity. The Globe and Mail 23 November.
Simon, R. (2013) Public University prices soar. The Wall Street Journal 6 March, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324539404578342750480773548. html.
Slaughter, S. and Rhoades, G. (2004) Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Market, State and Higher Education. Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Squire, L. (ed.) (2004) The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography, Vol. 4. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
Stern, F. (1961) The Politics Of Cultural Despair; A Study in The Rise of The Germanic Ideology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
The Treasury of New Zealand (1987) Government Management: Brief to the Incoming Government, Vol. 2, Education Issues Wellington, NZ: Government Printer.
Tilak, J.B.G. (2005) Higher education: A public good or a commodity for trade? Address delivered at the Second Nobel Laureates Meeting, 2 December, Barcelona, Spain.
Tuchman, G. (2009) Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Wade, N. (2010) Anthropology a science? Statement deepens a rift. The New York Times 10 December: A16.
Washburn, J. (2005) Corporate U: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.
Weber, M. (2002 [1905]) The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, P. Baehr and G. C. Wells (eds. and trans.). London: Penguin.
Weber, M. (2004 [1917; 1919]) The ‘Vocation’ Lectures, T. Strong and D. Owen (eds.) Translated by R. Livingstone Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press.
Wolin, S. (1969) Political theory as a vocation. American Political Science Review 63 (4): 1062–1082.
Acknowledgements
The author is deeply grateful to Kennan Ferguson and to the two anonymous readers for Contemporary Political Theory, whose suggestions improved the text immensely. The generosity with which they engaged this argument is a reminder that Merton’s scientific ethos does endure, even when neoliberalism is ascendant. Thanks also go to David Ascher, Barbara Cruikshank, Ray La Raja, Michael Stein and Yves Winter, who the author trusts will recognize their own contributions to the argument.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ascher, I., Roberts, W. Education and scholarship in the twenty-first-century marketplace. Contemp Polit Theory 14, 409–433 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.40
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.40