| AUTHOR: | JAMES OTTAVIO CASTAGNERA |
| TITLE: | PROFESSORS WITHOUT PICKET SIGNS (II)(FN1): WHERE IS THE PROFESSORATE WHEN IT'S NEEDED THE MOST? |
| SOURCE: | Labor Law Journal 52 no3 157-65 Fall 2001 |
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The Middle Ages are not an era I used to think about very often. Five years ago this changed. During the first lunch meeting of many I was to have with the chief negotiator for my university's chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)--whose collective agreement I had been hired to administer and negotiate for the administration--he outlined the genesis of the modern college. Professors, it seems, initially recruited their own students, taught their classes, and collected their fees. When this became too troublesome, they hired administrators to find the students and collect the tuition. Down the centuries, the support staff grew in size and complexity until voila, the modern megaversity of post-World War II America.
The moral of this allegorical tale is that "you can eliminate the security department and you'll have an unsafe university; you can eliminate the facilities department, and you'll have a dirty campus. But eliminate the faculty, and you don't have a university anymore."
This made sense to me at the time (or was it the single-malt Scotch the chief negotiator and I sampled together?). Today, though, I wonder, especially when I learn such facts as, "About 40 percent of Yale's teaching is now done by graduate students ... and 30 percent by adjunct faculty"(FN2) The University of Phoenix (UP), the nation's leading for-profit college, employs a tiny full-time faculty at the home office, which pumps out courses and curricula to the thousands of part-timers who staff UP's classrooms across the country. Where is the venerable centrality of the faculty in these models? What was once a reality is fast becoming an ideal which the AAUP fights to foster and preserve.
Collective bargaining is at the core of the AAUP's fight for faculty centrality. Nevertheless, faculty members seldom share any sense of solidarity with blue-collar employees and grad student unions on their campuses. To the contrary, they tend to line up with the administration when their teaching assistants or the school's cafeteria workers seek to organize.(FN3)
Universities for their part commonly espouse such civic virtues as diversity and social justice, yet quickly oppose union organizing on their own campuses.(FN4) In an earlier article published in THE LABOR LAW JOURNAL(FN5) I argued for labor-management cooperation between faculty unions and administrators on college campuses, but I argued for it in the context of collective bargaining and cooperative problem solving. Today, what we are witnessing is faculty members aligned with administration as managers allied with managers, confirming the rightness of the U.S. Supreme Court's Yeshiva decision. Perhaps, even more accurately, when we see faculty aligned with administrators to thwart the aspirations of blue-collar workers and teaching assistants on campuses, we are witnessing entrepreneurial professionals protecting their own interests, where they feel no sense of shared community with the institution's 'grunt workers.'
In a recent article in CHANGE Magazine(FN6) I contended that higher education must act as a counterweight to corporate global power and must reach out globally to help lift up the wretched of the earth.
This article extends that thesis. It contends that faculty members, in order to protect their own historically-central status in the university and to compel their institutions to rise to the challenge of fulfilling this historic opportunity to champion justice in the global arena, must rekindle the sense of community and shared responsibility, once a hallmark of most college campuses, but which globalization and professionalization have eroded and placed in mortal danger.(FN7)
Let's begin with a brief retrospective on professorial activism in the 1950s and 1960s.
1. PROFESSORIAL ACTIVISM IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES
The pivotal professorial personality on academe's left during the 1950s was C. Wright Mills. A strapping young genius out of Dallas, he came to Columbia University by way of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. As much a journalist as a sociologist, he facilitated the intellectual transition from the discredited Marxism of the 1930s to the New Left of the 1960s. In such seminal works as The Power Elite,(FN8) Mills crafted a powerful critique of capitalism at a time when post-war prosperity was at its peak. An example:
The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences ... They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.
****
The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society.... They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of responsible organizations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.(FN9)
Mills, in seeking a solution to the problems he perceived, placed his faith in the emerging nations of the Third World and in organized labor.(FN10)
Though Mills died of heart disease at age 46 in 1962, he succeeded in recasting the image of the college professor.
A man of fierce physical and intellectual presence, Mills was remembered by his friends... first and foremost for his energy and combativeness. Academics were expected to be genteel and solicitous of their colleagues; most professors at Columbia wore the academic uniform of tweed jacket, flannel slacks, and bow ties. But Mills seemed determined to provoke and antagonize his colleagues. He dressed as a lumberjack -- in khaki pants, flannel shirts, and combat boots -- and would arrive for class from his house in the country (which he had built himself) astride his BMW motorcycle. His style, body language, and pronouncements seemed calculated to rebuke the more polished world around him; he was from the real world, his manner seemed to say, as the others in academe were not.(FN11)
Mills exited stage-left at a time when the professorate and their students were just awakening to the power of their institutions. In the words of Harvard economist J. K. Galbraith, writing in 1967:
As the trade unions retreat, more or less permanently, into the shadows, a rapidly growing body of educators and research scientists emerges. This group connects at the edges with scientists and engineers within the technostructure and with civil servants, journalists, writers and artists outside.... They stand in relation to the industrial system much as did the banking and financial community to the earlier stages of industrial development. Then capital was decisive, and a vast network of banks, savings banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses and investment bankers came into existence to mobilize savings and thus to meet the need. In the mature corporation the decisive factor of production... is the supply of qualified talent. A similar complex of educational institutions has similarly come into being to supply this need.(FN12)
The year that Mills died, Tom Hayden became president of the Students for a Democratic Society. SDS was the largest of a flock of leftist student organizations which included the DuBois Clubs, the May 2nd Movement, and the Young Socialist Alliance. First achieving national prominence during the Berkeley Free Speech movement in 1964, SDS went on to take the lead in the anti-draft program beginning in September 1965. By 1968 the student anti-war movement had fractured into many splinters, some like the Weathermen being avowedly violent in their tactics.(FN13) In 1969 the Skolnick Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence would write, "Student activism during the 1960's appears... to have unprecedented qualities. Compared to earlier activism, that of the 1960's involves more students and engages them more continuously, is more widely distributed on campuses throughout the country, is more militant, is more hostile to established authority and institutions ... and has been more sustained."(FN14)
More important to my purpose is that members of the faculty often joined or sympathized with students. The Skolnick Report blamed this on the fragmentation of the "megaversity," where specialized faculty in a seller's market felt no loyalty to their particular institutions. "Only a few universities, such as Harvard and Chicago, have traditions of sufficient prestige to assure the loyalty of their faculties ... Studies of student activists indicate that they have close ties to faculty; activists are not unknown and anonymous faces in the classroom."(FN15)
By the end of the decade of the sixties, the professorate and the student left were parting company, as the violent and anti-intellectual turn increasingly alienated their professorial supporters. As Nathan Glazer recently recalled, "When I came to Berkeley, in 1963, I still thought of myself as a man of the left, and for the first few months of the free-speech issue, I was on the side of the free-speech people. The students I was closest to were people who believed in organizing. But there came a time when I felt that the push against institutional authority was simply excessive."(FN16) For Paul Goodman, whose writings--notably Growing Up Absurd, which first brought him national attention in 1960--and activism had won him the title "the Joan of Arc of the Free Student Movement,"(FN17) that time came while he was trying to teach a graduate seminar on professionalism in 1969. "He hoped to teach the difference between careerism and fidelity to a professional calling. To his astonishment the class rejected the notion that there was such a thing as a true profession. All decisions were made by the power structure. Professionals were merely peer groups formed to delude the public and make money."(FN18) Recalled Goodman, "Suddenly I realized that they did not really believe that there was a nature of things. Somehow all functions could be reduced to interpersonal relations and power. There was no knowledge, only the sociology of knowledge.... Then I knew that I could not get through to them."(FN19)
While the student movement of the sixties still had its most violent scenes to play in the early seventies--notably the Kent State shooting in May 1970--many of the most activist and sympathetic faculty, like Goodman and Glazer, were turning away.
2. FACULTY UNIONISM IN THE 1970S AND THE YESHIVA DECISION
Concurrent with the anti-war activism on college campuses from around 1965 into the early to mid-1970s, faculty at some 350 colleges and universities sought to unionize and enter into collective bargaining relationships with their institutions.(FN20) In many instances these faculties were responding to new enabling legislation at the state level allowing for collective bargaining at public institutions of higher learning.(FN21) This decade--roughly 1965 to 1974--has been labeled "the faculty bargaining movement."(FN22) The movement was not confined to public institutions, but was apparent on private campuses too. Even sectarian schools, such as St. John's University in New York and Catholic University in Washington suffered strikes.(FN23)
Sometimes the links between the student movement and the faculty bargaining movement during the 1960s seem compelling. For example, San Francisco State College endured both a student strike centered upon the school's Black Studies Department and the level of African-American student enrollment(FN24) and a faculty organizing strike.(FN25)
The unions most strongly interested in organizing faculty were the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The NEA and AAUP also view themselves as professional organizations, while the AFT--an affiliate of the AFL-CIO--is more purely and exclusively a labor union.
Strikes by faculty unions were relatively rare.(FN26) Several explanations leap to mind: faculty aversion to the heightened level of student violence during this time period, as noted above; legislative restraints on picketing and work stoppages by public employees,(FN27) and the relatively high level of conflict aversion one encounters generally in academia. "[I]n the first decade of the faculty bargaining movement, there [were] only five strikes recorded in four-year institutions. In addition there [were] only twenty-five to thirty strikes in two year institutions," noted contemporary observers.(FN28) They added, "Given the fact that there have been approximately 500 two-year and 150 four-year agreements negotiated over a ten-year period, the level of strike activity can be considered low."(FN29)
Another source reported 200 collective bargaining elections on four-year campuses between 1970 and 1977, with 75 percent of them resulting in union victories.(FN30) This source suggested that the causes of the proliferation of faculty organizing efforts included:
* Permissive governments, i.e., enabling legislation
* Desire for higher wages and benefits
* Desire for more influence in campus governance
* Fear of a teacher surplus
* Public support for higher education
* Union activism and competition for new members.(FN31)
Whatever the causes, those halcyon days were about to end. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Yeshiva University case.(FN32) The 5-4 decision held that the faculty of certain schools at Yeshiva exercised sufficient influence and control over university policy to be deemed "managers" under the National Labor Relations Act.(FN33) The decision effectively ended union organizing of faculties on private college and university campuses. Furthermore, numerous private institutions withdrew recognition from existing faculty unions, many of which were decertified as collective bargaining agents in subsequent litigation before the National Labor Relations Board and the courts.
Thus, while unions continue to represent faculty at numerous public institutions of higher learning (and even at a few private schools, such as my own Rider University, where I administer the collective agreement on behalf of the administration), it is fair to state that, as the early seventies saw the withdrawal of most faculty from support of the student movements of the time, the early eighties marked the end of the collective bargaining movement among faculty.
3. THE 1980S AND 1990S: PROFESSIONALISM AND PROFITS
As the collective bargaining movement lost momentum under the weight of the Yeshiva decision, the student movements of the six-ties and early seventies gave way to student interest in careers and jobs. These changes reflected the mood of a country which elected Ronald Reagan for two terms. One of the conservative Republican's first acts was to 'bust' the air traffic controllers' union in 1981. Private employers took their cue from the White House and began breaking strikes by hiring replacement workers, a practice which has always been legal under the National Labor Relations Act, but which was rarely successful in the days when organized labor held key U.S. industries in an iron grip.
As M&A (i.e., mergers and acquisitions), junk bonds, and LBOs (i.e., leveraged buyouts) entered the jargon of the American news media and even the middle class investor, enrollments in law and business schools were on the rise. This new student passion for professionalism soon permeated the professorate as well. This process proceeded apace, so that at the close of the century, President Arthur Levine of the Columbia University Teachers College could include among his "9 Inevitable Changes" for higher education, "Faculty members will become increasingly independent of colleges and universities."(FN34) As early as 1990 Harvard's Robert Reich(FN35) sniffed this change on the wind. In what I view as a seminal work equal to The Power Elite, he observed,
Unlike the boats of routine producers and in-person servers..., the vessel containing America's symbolic analysts is rising. Worldwide demand for their insights is growing as the ease and speed of communicating them steadily increases.... Among symbolic analysts in the middle range are American scientists and researchers who are busily selling their discoveries to global enterprise webs. They are not limited to American customers. If the strategic brokers in General Motors' headquarters refuse to pay a high price for a new means of making high-strength ceramic engines dreamed up by a team of engineers affiliated with Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the strategic brokers of Honda or Mercedes-Benz are likely to be more than willing.(FN36)
Even at little Rider University, union leaders occasionally have complained out loud about the difficulty of attracting faculty to union social events. Absent members' attachment, they have observed ala Reich and Levine, is to their professions and their consulting practices and not to the University community or the faculty union.
Concurrent with this trend toward full-time faculty disengagement from their campus communities has been the increased use of adjuncts and the on-slaught of for-profit competition in higher education. These two trends have been powerfully melded by the highly-profitable University of Phoenix. "In 1997, for example, the University of Phoenix had 45 full-time faculty... and 4500 adjuncts, or ratio of one to 100. In short, at the University of Phoenix, the adjunct IS the faculty." (emphasis in original)(FN37)
This, of course, is not true of all faculty at Rider or anywhere else for that matter. Even at Harvard, when last spring students conducted a sit-in to protest sub-standard wages for the university's custodial workers, some 400 faculty reportedly signed the students' petition.(FN38) When a disgruntled corporation filed a "slap suit" against a researcher at Cornell's school of labor relations, who had the temerity to criticize the company's unfair labor practices in print and before a Congressional committee, 500 faculty signed a petition in her support.(FN39) In fact, many faculty at Rider and elsewhere remain dedicated to their institutions, their unions and their commitments to a better world.
Nor are all institutions employing adjunct faculty as a contingent workforce at the same numbers and levels of exploitation. At Rider, for example, longtime, high-performing adjuncts can achieve employment security and employee benefits, while some even attain full-time, tenure-track status.(FN40)
Furthermore, I am neither arguing for a return to the student activism of the sixties or for a revival of the faculty collective bargaining movement of the seventies. Neither disruptive campus activism nor the professionalism and disengagement of the 1980s and 1990s are the appropriate place for faculty to be.
4. A CALL FOR A BALANCED APPROACH BY UNIVERSITY FACULTY TO THE SOCIAL INJUSTICES OF THE 21ST CENTURY
The socio-political pendulum swings on college campuses as everywhere in our society. The activism of the sixties and seventies gave way to disenchantment, disengagement and a quest for profits in the eighties and nineties. But many of the world's great religions counsel a quest for balance,(FN41) i.e., balance between reflection and action, between passion and reason, between engagement and withdrawal into the ivory tower and between looking inward and reaching outward.
President Levine has listed "9 Inevitable Changes" in higher education.(FN42) They are:
* More numerous and diverse providers
* Grouping into three basic types of institutions ("brick" universities; "click" universities, i.e., distance education; and "brick and click" hybrids)
* Students, not institutions, set the agenda
* A shift from teaching to learning
* Traditional functions become unbundled (i.e., faculty research and service are less institution-centered)
* Concurrently, faculty members become increasingly independent
* Degrees wither in importance
* Individuals have education "passports"
* Dollars follow students more than they follow educators.
Some of these changes are well advanced already. Some may seem to be desirable, even to those who most wish to cling to higher education's oldest traditions, which clearly are threatened by many, if not all, of these trends.
Nevertheless, at least some of these changes seem to me to be highly undesirable. In this article I have focused on two, which are closely related: the unbundling of the traditional faculty functions of teaching, service and research, and the increasing independence of faculty. I believe they are undesirable because they sap the traditional university of its power to play a significant role in the cause of social justice.
Recently, former Notre Dame President Theodore M. Hesburgh complained that college presidents no longer speak out on important political and social issues. "When I was a college president, I often spoke out on national issues, even when they didn't pertain to academic life," he recalls. He suggests that today's presidents are more concerned with raising funds--"tak[ing] Voltaire's advice to cultivate their own gardens"--and presiding over "institutions that have grown much more complex and bureaucratic."(FN43)
Understandably, colleges and universities are striving to survive in the face of increased competition by raising more and more funds, competing for grants, and wooing corporate partners. These skills, perhaps more so than academic achievements, are valued in presidential candidates, while trustees and administrators are increasingly cautious about offending major donors and corporate joint-venturers.(FN44) Combine this with the drift of faculty away from their campus communities into global professionalism, and it's little wonder that Father Hesburgh failed to find the traditional institutional spokespersons weighing in on issues of national importance.
If I am not advocating either a return to the campus activist of the sixties or the collective bargaining movement of the seventies, what solution am I proposing? To answer that obvious question, let me return to Robert Reich's The Work of Nations. In it Reich suggests
Distinguished from the rest of the population by their global linkages, good schools, comfortable lifestyles, excellent health care, and abundance of security guards, symbolic analysts will complete their secession from the union. The townships and urban enclaves where they reside, and the symbolic-analytic zones where they work, will bear no resemblance to the rest of America; nor will there be any direct connections between the two.... The remainder of the American population, growing gradually poorer, will feel powerless to alter any of these trends.(FN45)
Substitute "faculty" for Reich's "symbolic analysts" and "campuses" for his "townships an urban enclaves," and his observations fit higher education as characterized by Levine's nine inevitable trends. But Reich poses a second scenario:
There is also the possibility that symbolic analysts will decide that they have a responsibility to improve the well-being of their compatriots, regardless of any personal gain. A new patriotism would thus be born, founded less upon economic self-interest than upon loyalty to the nation.
What do we owe one another as members of the same society who no longer inhabit the same economy? The answer will depend on how strongly we feel that we are, in fact, members of the same society.
Loyalty to place -- to one's city or region or nation [or campus] -- used to correspond more naturally with economic self-interest.(FN46)
"The question," Reich contends, "is whether the habits of citizenship are sufficiently strong to withstand the centrifugal forces of the new global economy."(FN47)
Between 1950 and the early 1970s, the American economy as a whole began to exemplify this principle. Labor, business and the broader public, through its elected representative, tacitly cooperated to promote high-volume production; the resulting efficiencies of scale generated high profits; some of the profits were reinvested to create even vaster scale, and some were returned to production workers and mid-level managers in the form of higher wages and benefits. As a result, large numbers of Americans entered the middle class, ready to consume the output of this burgeoning system.
But as the borders of cities, states, [campuses], and even nations no longer come to signify special domains of economic independence, Tocqueville's principle of enlightened self-interest is less compelling.(FN48)
It is this sense of enlightened self-interest which faculty must be encouraged to rekindle itself on our campuses. The cooperation I espoused in Professors Without Picket Signs (I)(FN49) must be nurtured and then employed, first, to insure justice for all members of the campus community and, second, to reach out to better the circumstances of the wretched of the earth. This, then, will be the balanced approach that sets its course between the disruptive and destructive campus activism of the sixties (which the professorate rightly rejected) and the profiteering professionalism that threatens to atomize faculties and campus communities today.
This is my proposal, and my challenge, to the professorate in this new century.
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The Role of Higher Education in the 21st Century
Collaborator or Counterweight?
The December 8, 2000, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that an article in the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, in which the authors had criticized the alleged behavior of Boise Cascade Corporation toward workers in its Mexican facilities, was withdrawn by the University of Denver after the corporation threatened a disparagement and defamation lawsuit.
The report is reminiscent of earlier articles in The Chronicle and elsewhere concerning "slap suits" against academics whose scholarship is critical of corporate interests, and other forms of corporate retaliation against universities that have taken stands against selling sweatshop goods. As the University of Denver's acquiescence suggests, higher education's response to such corporate challenges to age-old principles of academic freedom and social justice has been uneven at best.
The 21st century is no time tot faint-heartedness in higher education. Rather, this should be a time when we champion free speech and social justice, even at the risk of our own prosperity. No one else can do it.
In 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith, in The New Industrial State, postulated a three-legged stool on which the well-being of American society rested: Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor. These legs kept one another in check, a sort of socio-political supplementation to the political checks and balances outlined in the Constitution. Galbraith's thesis was correct in its fundamental features. But by the 1990s, Robert Reich--in many ways Galbraith's intellectual successor at Harvard--would express his concern in The Work of Nations about the failure of that balance, due to the shift from a manufacturing to a services economy and the decline of organized labor.
When Galbraith was writing, in the 1950s and 1960s, labor represented one in three American workers, and a typical American CEO took home 40 times the salary of the worker on the shop floor--a sum that, when reduced by our steeply graduated income tax, amounted to only 12 times the worker's wages. By 1988, the number of unionized workers in the private sector had fallen to one in 10, and CEOs were enjoying 70 times more after-tax income than average workers.
In this brave new world, Reich concluded, the information manipulators--in his terms the "symbolic analysts"--are the dominant subspecies. Indeed, this is true even within the labor movement: The most prominent private-sector unions in America are those representing professional athletes and entertainers. Whatever happened to Cezar Chavez? Today's big name on the border is NAFTA.
A NEW ROLE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
Let me suggest that higher education should aim at filling the vacuum left by Big Labor in Galbraith's construct of The New Industrial State. Its capacity to serve as a countervailing force will rest on one or more of the following features of the contemporary university:
• Vastly increasing endowments, as we see developing at the Ivies and universities of analogous high quality and prestige;
• Expanding geographic reach via multiple campuses--for example, Penn State's 1997 upgrade of 14 of its regional campuses from two- to four-year colleges;
• Direct competition with the for-profits, such as the University of Phoenix, in the distance-education market, which is being more or less successfully attempted by some large universities and systems; and
• Consortia of small colleges, and/or small-college affiliations with a larger (possibly "hub") institutions, a strategy being pursued, for instance, by a group of small Catholic colleges in eastern Pennsylvania.
This suggestion and list of features, of course, conjure memories of the critique of the "megaversity" that emerged from such works as C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite. Admittedly, "mega" is a part of what higher education must be if it is to be a co-equal member of the triumvirate upon which 21st-century American society will rest. The small, independent college will not be able to play this role except where it is unusually well endowed or affiliated with a major religion or consortium.
If higher education is to perform the crucial task I have proposed for it in 21st-century America, it must take a page from the history of organized labor in the unions' heyday. Like Big Labor at its zenith, higher education needs to become adept at shifting from the right foot of collaboration with Big Business and Big Government to the left foot of confrontation. It must do this even at the price of lost corporate and government support, and even in the teeth of threatened litigation, when the issue is academic freedom or social justice.
Indeed, many public university systems are striving to build their alumni support and endowments so as to gain a measure of independence from the strings attached to government purses. And many church-affiliated institutions, especially Catholic universities, are returning to their religious roots and for the first time in a long while are publicly celebrating--even marketing--their moral and doctrinal orientations.
What of the prospects of success for higher education in the sometimes-confrontational posture I am proposing? In his sweeping survey in Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto says that the monasteries that survived the Dark Ages triumphed only by being needed. They also survived by being distinct from government and the marketplace. The more that colleges and universities morph to match their for-profit competition, the more they incapacitate themselves to act as a counterweight to those other powerful forces.
In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia's Arthur Levine listed nine "inevitable changes" that colleges and universities experience in the coming decades, such as competing with "more numerous and diverse" providers of higher education. But the more readily they accept Levine's nine changes as "inevitable" and collaborate in their coming about without carefully considering the merit of each--followed by a conscious decision to accept or oppose it--the less they will be able to function as free agents influencing American society.
TRUTH-TELLING IN THE INFOTAINMENT AGE
As David Halberstam observed in The Next Century, America is more than ever an "entertainment-driven society." A felling example is the contrast between the media coverage of the Vietnam War and the coverage of the Gulf War some two decades later. Stanley Karnow wrote of the 1968 Tet offensive, "After years of viewing the war on television, Americans at home had become accustomed to a familiar pattern of images....The screen often portrayed human agony in scenes of the wounded and dying on both sides....[M]ostly it transmitted the grueling reality of the struggle...punctuated periodically by moments of horror."
By contrast, the Gulf War was quick, high-tech, and portrayed on American television as if it were a video game. Satellite photos were combined with simulations to feed American viewers sanitized images, depicting no more real blood and pain than a quick game of "Space Invaders."
Thus, barbarism passed beyond the merely banal to the visually alluring. The film industry has responded to, and in turn reinforced, its audience's fascination with the visually unusual and compelling. From George Lucas's breakthrough Star Wars films of the 1970s and 1980s to The Perfect Storm last year, special effects--and, increasingly, computer-generated visuals--are at the heart of most blockbuster hits. If it can be imagined, it can be depicted.
This power is potentially hazardous. Severo Ornstein, writing in the journal Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, points out, "Today the art of simulation has developed to the point that it has become necessary to identify television simulations as artificial, so we won't think we are seeing the real thing....When employed for political purposes, illusion becomes diabolical and deception becomes downright dangerous."
If higher education must differentiate itself from business and government in order to serve as a counterweight to them, one of the fundamental ways it must do so is in adhering to a strict code of truth-seeking and truth-telling. Even if particular institutions of higher learning are unwilling to take unpopular stands on controversial issues, they must share consensus on this code or run the risk of abrogating their claims to being genuine educational institutions. Are we not entitled to expect a higher level of integrity from our universities than we anticipate when we turn on our TVs?
This expectation of integrity means that when universities use the power of technology to lie as governments and businesses do, it seems more scandalous. Witness the University of Wisconsin's embarrassment when it was "exposed" in a Chronicle article on Nov. 24, 2000:
The cover of its new admissions brochure displayed a photograph of happy U.W. students attending a football game at their home stadium--a photograph that turned out to have been doctored. The original picture contained no black faces, but U.W. officials had desperately wanted their admissions materials to reflect a diverse student body. So, using photo-design software, the director of university publications and the director of undergraduate admissions simply asked their staff to add one.
Coming now full circle, let us consider in greater depth the University of Denver's decision to withdraw an article previously published in one of its law reviews, when faced with a major corporation's threat to sue. Let us begin by agreeing, if we can, that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. And let us assume--purely for argument's sake--that the censored article is inaccurate, or even that it is defamatory. What ought the university to have done, or offered to do, in the face of Boise Cascade's threatened legal action? Let us compare what it did do to what Cornell University did when faced with a similar situation.
In 1998, Professor Kate L. Bronfenbrenner of Cornell's School of Industrial Relations was sued by Beverly Enterprises, Inc., one of the nation's largest nursing home chains. Beverly accused the professor of lying about the company's labor relations record to members of Congress and in her published scholarship. Bronfenbrenner reportedly told Democratic Congressmen at a town hall meeting that Beverly had a "long-established record of egregious labor-law violations in the context of union-organizing campaigns." The corporation sued her for defamation. Cornell hired attorneys and successfully defended the suit on its faculty member's behalf.
In the wake of Beverly Enterprises, Inc. vs. Bronfenbrenner, faculty around the country were understandably concerned that "slap suits" would become more common. At Rider University, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) came to the negotiating table in summer 1999 with a proposal aimed at ensuring that the university would defend any faculty member who was named in any such "slap suit." The university, to its credit, agreed to a new provision in the collective bargaining agreement that will provide such protection, and then obtained the appropriate insurance to cover any such claims.
In short, my contention--which I hope is shared by the great majority of my readers--is that a university must do at a minimum two things to think of itself as a real university: seek the truth and defend those who try to tell the truth under the institution's auspices. Absent a strict adherence to these two baseline principles, an institution ceases to be a university, no matter how many sports teams it fields, how many academic programs it offers, or how many campus amenities its students enjoy. The institution may be an information purveyor or a training school or a research center, but it has forfeited the right to call itself a university.
INSTITUTIONAL ACTIVISM IN THE NEW CENTURY
Now comes the hard part, where I expect that many of my readers and I will part company. For I argue that the two baseline principles outlined above are only that: credentials that qualify an institution to call itself a university. But while a labor union must fairly and vigorously represent its members, a great union will also put its resources at risk in order to organize unrepresented workers. A great university likewise will reach out and actively oppose injustice.
This is not the view of most universities today. Just as many unions have long since circled their wagons, emphasizing preservation of existing power bases over the organization of new constituencies, so too have many--perhaps most--universities taken the path of cautious conservatism. Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame University, wrote in the February 2 issue of The Chronicle,
When I was a college president, I often spoke out on national issues, even when they didn't pertain to academic life. Yet nowadays, I don't find many college presidents commenting on such issues on the front page of The New York Times or in any of the country's other major news outlets. Once upon a time chief executives in higher education talked to the press about military policy in the same breath as the Constitutional amendment for the 18-year-olds' vote, but I wonder whether we hear them taking stands on similar topics now.
Father Hesburgh cites a recent American Council on Education (ACE) report, which concluded, "[T]he vast majority of Americans rarely hear college presidents comment on issues of national importance, and when they do, they believe institutional needs rather than those of the students or the wider community drive such comments." He offers several reasons why this has happened. Among them is "that presidents must play an ever-larger role in raising money for their institutions--and often from supporters who have strong views on what presidents should or shouldn't say to the press."
Today colleges feel free to draw their CEOs from the ranks of development officers, a practice that to my knowledge was almost unheard of even two decades ago. In current searches for college presidents, it seems that the absence of the initials "PhD" after the candidate's name is not necessarily an impediment if the fund-raising record is substantial.
Our students, too, have for the most part been quiet since the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1980s witnessed a rush to law and business schools for JDs and MBAs, then on to the M&A (merger and acquisition) practices of the nation's big accounting, law, and investment banking firms. During the latter half of the 1990s, undergraduates couldn't wait--and sometimes didn't--to establish their own dot-com business ventures.
But as the last decade of the last century of the old millennium came to a close, there were stirrings in at least some of our student bodies. Students at universities across the country became energized--at least temporarily--by the anti-sweatshop movement. Initial corporate responses to these new stirrings of student unrest included withdrawals of sports sponsorships. But these punitive reactions were rapidly replaced by the formation of the Fair Labor Association, an anti-sweatshop consortium consisting of such major manufacturers as Nike and Reebok and some 140 institutions of higher learning.
The Fair Labor Association may be compared by critics to the company unions that proliferated in the early part of the 20th century, before they were outlawed by the 1936 passage of the National Labor Relations Act. The Worker Rights Consortium, a more militant anti-sweatshop organization, operates independently, and--perhaps not surprisingly--has come under fire from corporate members of the Fair Labor Association. Said a Nike spokesman of the consortium recently, "It's just parachuting into a country, conducting a few interviews, and writing a report in a few days. Thorough monitoring involves culling through records, matching up pay stubs, getting a sense of the local practices and culture. There is a lot more involved in auditing and monitoring than what that report represents."
The important point for my purposes here is not whether the Fair Labor Association or the Worker Rights Consortium has got it right about any particular allegation of sweatshop abuses. What matters here is that the two groups appear to be engaged in dialogue and debate about the truth behind such labor-abuse accusations. This is precisely the sort of conversation that is denied to higher education's constituencies when a corporation threatens to sue or to withdraw sponsorship and the targeted institution bows to the threat.
Slowly but surely, however, at least some of America's several thousand institutions of higher education are manifesting a willingness to use their virtual global reach to identify and help address the inequities that proliferate beyond their campus boundaries.
The record to date suggests that such initiatives are not nearly as risky as some may fear. Just as American companies in the 1940s and 1950s reached accommodations with organized labor because they needed the workers represented by those unions, so too does the quick creation of the Fair Labor Association suggest a recognition among apparel manufacturers like Nike and Reebok that they need big-time college athletics. By extension, corporations need our graduates, our scientists, our consultants--in short, our knowledge. Knowledge is capital. As such, it affords us leverage.
Does higher education possess the collective will to exercise that leverage? I do not know. But let me suggest that many big issues of our times cry out for us to demonstrate that will. Father Hesburgh points to affirmative action and "developing education programs that seek to improve the status of women--especially in Asia, South America, and Africa, where many are second-class citizens"--as issues he would address, were he still a university CEO. Women's rights, affirmative action, and the anti-sweatshop movement can all be characterized as battles in a global struggle to end the exploitation of human beings. Environmentalism, community outreach, and health research are related issues on which higher education could also speak out.
A key question in my view is, How will higher education use its global reach and knowledge capital, particularly as those have been enhanced by communication technology, in the 21st century?
To date, the discourse has been a self-referential one, centered on the displacement of traditional classroom teaching by distance learning. To borrow the words of the ACE report, it has focused on "institutional needs rather than those of...the wider community." Much less discussed is the potential for the Internet to make American higher education a force for fair play and human dignity in the international arena. Global reach brings with it global responsibilities. Knowledge is not only capital--it is power. Whether that power will be focused upon the narrow concerns of individual institutions or combined for the good of "the wider community" is a defining choice for higher education.
