HIGHER EDUCATION BETWEEN ELITISM AND ... - Multiworld India

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marginalized social classes. While this might be true in some limited sense, the upward mobility of the fewhas resulted in the increased marginalization of the many who have gone through the same lengthy andvery costly process only to realize that the rewards at the end are few and far between. Nevertheless, thehope for success and mobility continues to increase demands for a university education, although the hopeis blinding to the fact that there is no similar rise in demand for the impending increase of graduates.Therefore, higher education has in many cases simply perpetuated the problem of K through 12 nationalschooling, leaving in its wake ever more of the ‘walking wounded’ who are graduated into a society that hasno need or place for them. At the same time, communities and families acting on the hope of upwardmobility and access to wealth and power through a university degree are coming under a greater burden inpaying for the education of their children, even while the prospect is often bleak of getting a job that leadsto a satisfying position and which provides enough income capable of paying back such a great investment.One tangible outcome of this increase in demand for higher education has been felt in the financial policiesimpacting universities, which have been emboldened by the neo-liberal ideology coupled with the belief thathigher education is no longer in need of public funds that can now be spent elsewhere. This has led tobudget cuts for higher education which in turn has pushed many universities to be run more likecorporations in that financial concerns and business slogans are beginning to replace traditional missionstatements. What matters now, in a crude economic sense, is survival of the fittest, meaning those that canraise their own funds. In other words, in many places the corporate university is now replacing the nationaluniversity. Readings (1997) has identified this as a shift away from the traditional research university to the‘university of excellence,’ with excellence taken here to be a vapid concept devoid of referential value butindicative of the mindset of the corporation. For Readings, the university of excellence has lost track of‘modernity’s encounter with culture.’ Others have described this shift in terms of universities increasinglyembracing an ethos of entrepreneurialism, that the term ‘corporate university,’ as employed by Aronowitz(2001), refers to a university that has adopted the ‘framework and ideology of the large corporation’ andwhich has prioritized the ‘application of accounting principles to academic employment and planning.’Distinct from a university run by a corporation, the corporate university is one that is run as a corporation.In light of this brief outline of the shift from the national to the corporate university, what remains is aconsideration of what it now means to be a university student or to work in higher education as a teacher,researcher or administrator. What are we doing in the roles we are playing? What are our expectations andthose of students, families and other concerned parties? Considering our personal limitations as well as theunfolding situation, what options are there to effect an active and constructive role in this situation? Shallwe envision a utopian system of higher education and work towards that? Or do we want to preserve thingsthe way they were in the past, or perhaps protect the structure while changing the content and curricula?In his discussion of ‘education in spite of postmodernity,’ Zygmunt Bauman (2001) has noted that while inthe modernizing countries universities ‘may still play the traditional role of factories supplying a heretoforemissing educated elite,’ universities in the West will need to ‘rethink their role in a world that has no use fortheir traditional services, sets new rules for the game of prestige and influence, and views with growingsuspicion the values they stood for.’ Bauman also observed that universities have become slow to respondto the unpredictable and hyper-changing worlds of ‘liquid modernity.’ For instance, by the time graduatesfinish a degree the knowledge they gain may already be obsolete. Meanwhile, he laments, after the‘scientifically assisted horrors’ of the twentieth century our faith in the humanizing potential of the modernWestern sciences ‘seems laughably, perhaps even criminally, naïve.’ While many nineteenth and twentiethcentury traditions used to be coveted assets for creating meaning in modern research universities, they arequickly becoming liabilities in a more fluid and tentative world. Bauman suggests that universities candevelop responses to this emerging global disorder and perhaps maintain their sense of meaning andpurpose by developing a diversity of opinions, methodologies and curricula as necessary survival features.However, he does not address what kind of institutional structures might be required to bring this about.Recent economic trends in higher education, in which governments have retracted and reduced funding forhigher education, have posed challenges for academics. In particular, as corporate universities adopt a‘student as customer’ approach to solving financial problems, class sizes and teaching loads areexpanding. This has given rise to various strategies employed by university professors tasked with teachingthese courses. We can illustrate these strategies through a brief tale of two teachers. Teacher one creates2
artificial scarcity by intimidating students to reduce class size and then guiding the remaining small andelite body toward graduate programs in the Global North, reveling in the ability to gain access for a limitednumber of students in these elite institutions while at the same time artificially maintaining small class sizesat the expense of his colleagues who end up taking up the slack. This teacher justifies this strategy throughrecourse to the quality argument. Unlike this elitist colleague, our second teacher accepts the duty to teachhundreds of students in a single lecture, bowing to the quantity demands of the corporate university, butgives them an easy ride by using exams that everybody, regardless of the course content, can easily pass,providing questions in advance, practicing social promotion, and creating a new social contract based onmutual agreement to not make waves or require or achieve much. Despite teaching being one of the maintasks of a university professor today, owing to the increased demand noted above, each position providesrelief from teaching one way or another; perhaps we can say that the latter is a populist response and theformer an elitist response. As a result, both teachers gain more time for pursuing research interests andwriting grants, which are often still highly valued, especially in the elitist universities. More importantly, bothpositions are responses to an emerging trend in higher education that gives pause for reflection on ourroles in the academy. Our first teacher laments the ‘low quality’ students and seeks to retrench the elitismof the colonized academy but which ignores or undermines hard won gains by women, people of color andethnic or religious minorities, or the struggles of the poor and marginalized that have opened the academydoors to a broader cross section of humanity than ever before in history. This could even be seen as a gainor a victory against the exclusivity and elitism of the colonized university, unless the curricular issues notedabove mean retrenching the elitist impulse through demands for inculcating one or another national canon.Of course, there is one possible way to solve much of this problem, which is to close fifty, sixty, or seventypercent of the universities to rebalance the scarcity issue and bolster the elitism. But that would just feedback into the old forms of classical colonization. Rather than that, some may suggest going in the otherdirection by opening up the academy completely to everybody, which would solve the quantity problem atthe expense of the quality issue. Or, perhaps rather than dichotomizing, there needs to be ongoing dialogbetween civil society, NGOs, the world of work, families and other institutions and the university, so that theuniversity could become more aligned with those sectors of society. Actually, this is what Clark Kerr (2001)proposed in his idea of the Multiversity in the 1960s, a proposal that was roundly despised by universityacademics of the day and which remains severely criticized even forty years later. Why? I think it’s becausea lot of university academics are still operating in the elitist model. But the valid criticism of Kerr’s proposalfor a Multiversity is that what he really meant was corporations, as a sort of advocacy of a proto- or crypticcorporateuniversity before we recently named it as such. But if we broaden that vision of the universitybeing accountable not just to monied corporations but to civil society, to NGOs, to volunteerism to normalemployers, then perhaps we can redeem that initial idea of the Multiversity as responsible to society andoverlay that with our idea of Multiversity, which is really about re-introducing marginalized voices into theacademy, thus redressing both the institutional as well as curricular imbalances in higher education today.Actually, to many players closing the requisite number of universities to redress imbalances might seemlike a fast solution to this problem. Many academics more inclined toward research than teaching would behappy to be in a position to only teach future clones of themselves, training the next elite of researchersand managers, as noted in the above tale of two teachers. But this seems unlikely, given the strong publicbelief that a university education can open doors for economic and political opportunity and provide somechances at upward mobility. Beyond that, universities remain one of the few semi-public spaces dedicatedto learning, for better or worse, so to close them down or turn them over to the rich might strike others asimmoral. Another option would be to make universities more competitive through ever increasingly difficultplacement exams and more stringent entrance requirements, but the resulting downside, given the demandfor a university education, is likely to create more walking wounded. Subsidizing universities, as is still donein many parts of the Global South, may seem like an option, but this gets complicated by the ever-presentprospect of brain drain, with the struggling corporate universities of the Global North enticing the elite of theGlobal South with their subsidized educations to supplement their dwindling domestic enrollments or toprovide workers for their own aging societies to keep social security systems afloat or, more crudely, totreat international students as ‘cash cows.’ In fact, this is becoming a matter of policy in the Global North,as evidenced by recent statements from the US House Republican Technology Working Group on ensuringAmerican access to the best workers: ‘We will examine current education programs to make sure they areoperating efficiently. We will also examine current visa and immigration laws to make sure we attract and3
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HIGHER EDUCATION BETWEEN ELITISM AND ... - Multiworld India

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