Andrew Foltz-Morrison

The Neoliberal University

Bloomberg recently published a scathing report on Rutgers’ spending on its athletic program and its effect on academic departments. The administration has consistently increased the size and scope of these programs, despite its claims about budget crises that they have used to justify wage freezes for faculty and staff.

It’s common among contemporary political economists to discuss the impact of neoliberalism on the university and the attendant policy changes it brings to schools. One aspect I noted recently in a conversation with my brother was that of the university’s own funding structure mirroring the developments in the economy at large.

Advertising dollars as finance capital. University executives, facing austerity from state and federal programs, are in a rush to bring money into their schools. With Gov. Christie’s draconian cuts to education in the state, Rutgers is a paradigm case of this. The allure of commercial endorsements and advertising is difficult to resist, and consequently programs designed to attract this kind of investment are promoted over the university’s core academic programs. Just as the rush to attract investment to cities has created a rush among them to promote a ‘favorable business climate’ to the detriment of social services, so too has the rush for sports marketing revenue diminished the university’s capacity to meet its most essential mission.

While the share of advertising dollars is not as high as the share of the economy that finance capital enjoys, even at universities with large sports, the two kinds of capital operate in structurally similar ways.

Needless Austerity. One vignette from the Bloomberg article illustrates quite perfectly this phenomenon:

Lee Jussim, chairman of the psychology department, told staff members in a December e-mail that they had to shrink the $40,000 budget for photocopies and computer-scanned forms for giving tests. Failure would mean rationing or billing instructors personally, he said. He recommended “giving fewer tests, dramatically shortening your tests, giving students online and take-home tests,” according to a copy of the e-mail.

“The cuts are sufficiently severe,” Jussim said in an e- mail to Bloomberg, “that our ability to accomplish our core missions are, for the first time in my career, under serious threat.”

Even if we take seriously the administration’s framing of a budget crisis, $40,000 is a paltry sum that is of no serious consequence to the university’s long-term finances, but will appear to have a severe impact on the quality of academic programs. Such measures are justified through ‘trim-the-fat’ ideology so common among state and municipal governments these days, but their ability to even accomplish their stated goals is limited. While I’m skeptical of functionalist explanations of such phenomena that categorize them as vague attempts to ‘discipline’ the labor force, it seems clear that the the impact of such measures will largely be ideological rather than economic.

Spectacle. Earlier this year, the student programming association brought Jersey Shore star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi to campus, and a controversy erupted when it became publicized that she was paid more than Nobel laureate Toni Morrison was to speak at commencement this year. I wrote about the controversy and its relationship to the structure of campus cultural life, in a letter to the Daily Targum. The culture of the university is increasingly organized around spectacles generated by outside performers.

We will see the spectacle of university events interfering directly with academic goals from the very first day of classes: Rutgers’ football team has its first game that day, scheduled to meet the needs of ESPN college sports programming. Professors and students alike must clear their cars from parking lots at 2PM for a game that begins at 7:30, hampering commuting professors, workers, and students from getting to where they need to be at the school.

Additionally, we also see a mirroring of a phenomenon recorded by urban geographers: spectacle in the built environment.

On Livingston campus, the business school has undertaken an effort to build a new hotel and convention center. While it’s not surprising that the business school has so embraced the spend-money-to-make-money approach to the university, it still reflects the shift in priorities of a non-profit organization increasingly behaving like a for-profit business in revenue generation.

Wage Repression. Despite pouring its revenue into large-scale projects like sports and convention centers to attract money and prestige, the university has refused to honor an agreement with the unions in which they would defer pay raises for a year. More than a year has passed, and the professors, support staff, and custodial workers are all without their contracted annual wage increases, and are currently working without a contract. The dispute remains under arbitration and negotiation. Despite overall spending increases at the school, paying workers more seems not to rank highly on the administration’s agenda.

Political Struggle. As a microcosm of large-scale social phenomena, the university is certainly not immune to the kinds of struggle seen elsewhere (and the aforementioned wage dispute is a clear indicator of this). Universities across the country are sparking student activism with increases in tuition, cutbacks in student aid and services, and various other threats to the stability of student life. Fortunately, Rutgers has an extremely vibrant and well-organized group of campus activists. We had large-scale protests, and occupied President McCormick’s office for 34 hours. The constant presence of protestors and media outside the building during the occupation prevented the administration from swiftly arresting the activists. Though the university has a clause preventing the administration from making any changes ‘under duress’ for situations like these, the board of governors of the university ultimately voted to raise tuition by only 1.8% for the next academic year. Given that this is lower than the rate of inflation, this was an effective cut in the tuition students pay, and a major victory for campus activism. When compared to schools raising tuition by 10% or more, our efforts were both remarkable and encouraging.

Though the setbacks of universities faced with austerity can at times look bleak, we must not forget the possibilities for change they open up. It’s quite easy to focus on the bad trends when doing political economy, but I think we ought to bear in mind the successes that some student organizations have won, and how such efforts might play out on a larger scale.