There are two kinds of commodification I see going on with respect to universities, and I see good and bad in both. There is an overall commodification of means, which is hard to oppose on rational grounds. Somebody has to pay for the classrooms, computers, books, buildings, and energy we use, and somebody has to pay the salaries of the human providers of education. In order to transfer a larger part of the overall cost of these means to students (a process that began in my university over fifteen years ago), we are now marketing these means specifically to students and charging separate fees for them. I think the process is potentially exploitative. It is almost impossible for students to graduate in four years from many state institutions, and it is quite impossible for them to work their way through school. State institutions can still claim to offer students a bargain, but many now laughingly claim in private that their purpose is to equip students to get good entry-level jobs so that they can pay back their student loans.

The second sort of commodification is less visible. I am presently thinking of it as a commodification of university infrastructure, and there is a growing body of theory about it. I am reading a book entitled Resource Allocation in Higher Education by William F. Massey, et al. (Michigan UP, 1996), whose purpose is to suggest a model of sustainability for higher education. I admire the economic sophistication of this book, but I do not admire its moral sophistication. In a chapter entitled "Lessons from Health Care," the authors assume that ethical considerations can be left out of their discussion of the achievements of managed health care systems, though they admit that the absence constitutes an "oversimplification." The book as a whole manifests a similar oversimplification, stressing performance based funding and urging that universities develop and market total quality without grounding the notions of quality and performance in anything more than vaguely defined "educational outcomes," which the authors assume we know how to measure as readily as we can measure the outcomes of medical treatment. That outcomes are problematic and a theory of outcomes impossible has apparently not occurred to these authors.

But this book has an even more serious flaw, to my mind. It interprets the overall theory of non-profit economic entities so as to make the ethical purpose of the non-profit subservient to its economic survivability. I think this is not only wrong headed but corrupt. We need to rethink universities, but not this way. We need to negotiate many difficult and politically sensitive issues on our way to theorizing the university. To let economists have the job on their own would be a disaster, in my opinion. But where are the humanist books about the university that I can put on a shelf beside Massey et al.? Most humanist books about universities written during the culture wars are economically and historically naive, regardless of ideology. If they are going to join this theorizing effort and argue that universities occupy certain kinds of cultural spaces, humanists are going to have to think in some new ways. Here is a passage from the last chapter of Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell, 1990), a book not specifically about universities, which has great resonance for me, and which possesses the kind of sophistication I think we humanists need.

The idea of human nature does not suggest that we should realize any capacity that is natural, but that the highest values we can realize spring from part of our nature, and are not arbitrary choices or constructs. They are not natural in the sense of being obvious or easy to come by, but in the sense that they are bound up with what we materially are. If we do not live in such a way that the free self-realization of each is achieved in and through the free self-realization of all, then we are very likely to destroy ourselves as a species. Such a formulation moves, of course, at an extremely high level of abstraction, and will tell us nothing about what such terms as 'free' and 'self-realization' signify in any actual historical context. As far as that is concerned, the Habermasian answer is that we simply have to talk it over. Concrete ethical life, Hegel's Sittlichkeit, means negotiating and renegotiating, from one specific situation to another, what such an abstract injunction could possibly mean, with all the intense political conflict that this entails. It also means critically scrutinizing the whole concept of 'self-realization', based as it has historically been on a clearly inadequate productivism (412-413).

Of course commodification of universities is already pretty well advanced, and it may not be possible to argue any longer for legitimately separate and autonomous cultural spaces for thinking and learning. We scholars have been commodified as labor in a labor-intensive industry, which continues to need fewer and fewer of us. I don't think this trend is necessarily bad to contemplate, but I would rather contemplate a future shrinkage of the university system and even the death of weak institutions than to see universities transform themselves wholesale into a managed education system on the analogy to managed health care. And, and this is a big AND, the economic verdict seems still to be out on HMOs, doesn’t it?

[Posted at Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, 7 May 1998]