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Dr. John Wilson discusses the rising trend of the corporatization of universities and their focus on profits.

Which is More Important: Profits or Student Education?

By John Wilson on Dec 27, 2017
corporatization of universities Universities used to be a place that fostered learning and encouraged discussion and personal growth. Recently, there has been an increasing amount of pressure on universities to turn higher profits. This pressure has led to university administrators treating their university like a corporation where the focus is on profits, instead of adequately sustaining the learning process as they were intended to do since the beginning. Dr. John Wilson, a professor at the Assumption University of Thailand and contributor to the IGI Global title Seduction in Popular Culture, Psychology, and Philosophy, recently took the time to discuss his experiences with the corporatization of universities and his opinions on the matter.
Why do teachers teach? Because they love ideas and they want to share them and anything that gets in the way of that sharing destroys an essentially cooperative process. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, learning has been a dialectical process. It is a dialogue. This why teachers like their students to ask questions. Slowly, a process of understanding builds up, not through pedantry, but through the construction of a shared world of concepts which assumes that the intelligence of the learner will co-create a semantic field—one of meaning. Education is highly personal. It depends on a commitment running between the teacher and the learner. The teacher undertakes transmitting what s/he knows as best as s/he can in the time available. The learner undertakes devoting time and energy into working it out. One of my best jobs was one where we always ran over time a half-hour into the lunch—I could not stop the questions from coming, I could not bring myself to say, “Enough for today.”

However, this time-honored practice – of some two thousand years – is being corrupted by the greed and indifference of those who prefer profit over quality.

The corporatization of the universities is based on a crass illusion; that education is something that can be bought as a consumer product one can acquire like a material good. But education is not an object—it is a process. And one that requires time and cooperation from both the teacher and the learner. If either side fails in that commitment, the process starts to dwindle, and the eventual qualification no longer looks like an accomplishment – it becomes a commodity. University teachers are losing status because they are increasingly viewed as part of a service industry where the student buys a degree like a product. This reduces teacher status to that of a vendor behind a counter where dialogue is no longer at a premium.

The effective owners of universities are the trustees and they want to keep costs down, profits high and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. One way of securing this is to provide temporary hourly paid jobs with no security and benefits. This creates a “precariat”, a labor class that has no voice and future prospects. Today, this is happening in all labor markets. When workers – any kind of employee – are more insecure, they won’t ask for higher wages; they won’t go on strike and they won’t call for benefits. In teaching, this situation ends up with the teacher turning up at 9 a.m., giving a lecture, and then going home. So much for office hours and so much for the dialectical process.

And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed on all teachers. Likewise, the students experience precarity and a debt-ridden future by taking out massive loans. (Don’t be surprised in your once friendly class discussion has a peevish and dissatisfied air to it.) This situation encourages demands by students for unequivocal straight A’s and complaints from teachers that “they only come here for the credentials.” But all this diverts attention from the root causes of the problem.

In my last job, I was paid a straight hourly rate for my contact hours. I also ran tutorials and seminars for which I did not get paid. Nobody even thanked me. Can you imagine a taxi driver who gives out rides for free?

The costs of higher education keep rising. Where does all that money go? It sure doesn’t go into teachers’ salaries. So where? You have already guessed it–into administration and the upper echelons—finally into the pockets of the one percent who similarly have banking interests. From a neoliberal perspective, there is theoretically no limit to what one can charge for an education. And the universities are all at the same game. So why not keep bumping it up? Nowadays, a lot of teachers hop over into administration, because it offers a secure job and removes all the headaches of dealing with a dissatisfied consumer class. One might ask your old professor, “Well what happened to you, mister?” What indeed!
IGI Global would like to thank Dr. Wilson for contributing his thoughts on the epidemic of running universities like corporations. If you found Dr. Wilson’s insight to be thought-provoking, please recommend the publication Seduction in Popular Culture, Psychology, and Philosophy to your librarian, and preview his chapter, “Social Psychology: The Seduction of Consumers" today.

Further, IGI Global specializes in publishing research that examines the current problems in educational administration and offers the latest studies on innovative solutions. If you would like to explore this and other issues in more depth, please check out one of the titles listed below:



Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of IGI Global.
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