writinginthewild.com

It’s always interesting when educators or administrators get up on their high horse and begin complaining that academia needs to “re-tool for the 21st century” (to cite the cliché). It’s interesting because if you succeed at a university and get tenure it is, in some sense, because you help the institution keep up the status quo. It’s an unavoidable contradiction, to use the Marxist term.

That’s on reason that I find most of the criticism about my industry unpersuasive: the system of exploitation created in the public sector of higher education  is far more extensive and long-lived than what the for-profits have created. There’s not a non-profit problem here and a for profit problem there; there’s a labor and an education problem throughout. The non-profits are tossing rocks in glass houses.

There’s a decadence problem rotting away at the ruling caste everywhere, from boot heel to toe. The Reagan era has produced a remarkable shift in resources, as Juan Cole points out effectively, away from public education and towards prisons.  Since the Great Depression, and especially since WWII, the consensus was that education was a palliative that would prevent the sort of unrest that could end capitalism.

It would also support the U.S. nationalist agenda in the Cold War, as well as provide the creative muscle needed to keep the economic machine running smoothly. In the last 30 years, though, this consensus has been replaced by a much nastier vision rooted in what Cole rightfully calls a gulag, The capitalist minority isn’t bound by nation anymore; long live nihilism, human capital is dead.

In the age of the market religion– the Reagan age– corporations pretended that the “invisible hand” shaped markets becuase that allowed them to shape markets.  That underwrote market practices that in more ordinary times would be considered illegal or unethical or both.  Capitalism needs, well, capital, so allowing the  financial corporations to shape the financial markets doomed the economy.

It’s possible to imagine a ruling class/oligarchy that had very different assumptions but, at least in our time, the wealthy and powerful seem almost freakishly unconcerned with the long term. In the market that they shaped, the next quarter mattered and little else. This “damn the future” attitude isn’t just limited to finances. The university powers-that-be, e.g. the administrations, have no monopoly on long term thinking.

They shaped their markets by destroying full time employment, shifting costs to individual students via loans, and raising their salaries.  Greed is the order of the day. They loved the corporate marketing models that made athletic sports so important. They’re no better than the financial sector. This is the environment that birthed the for-profit universities and so it’s not surprising that they too created a market that lacked scruples.

Now that the regulatory machinery is starting to come alive again, we can at least  hope for some democratic input into the ways that certain markets work.  In Higher Education, the point of the  regulatory spear seems to be the for-profits, which makes a certain amount of sense, given the sentimentalism that tends to surround public education. The public universities, though, can’t expect to stay out of the fray for long.

The Republican Party, and far too much of the Democratic Party, are market fanatics. That’s an ideological statement, but I think it’s also a fact with a lot of substantive supporting evidence. Fanaticism is both demonstrable and dangerous. You can see it in action simply by watching the Tea Party caucus in Congress. The impasse is a conscious and often explicit strategy and it’s rooted in the market religion.

I’m no fan of liberals, and too often the liberal solution to any given problem is horrible, but the current Democratic Party, the party of President Clinton, is pragmatic to a fault and so willing to compromise.  Arguably, they are too willing to compromise. So the governmental impasse that is slowing down the economic recovery isn’t symmetrical, even if each side is ideologically more similar than is too often assumed.

The Republican strategy is different because it is founded in an irrational faith in markets that may or may not be cynical or self-serving. Do they really believe that the economy will take off if  we were to eliminate environmental regulations?  Is it simply that they get paid to say these things? It’s hard to say. What is clear is that the audience for the market religion has been consciously cultivated over the last three decades.

The idea of a “free market” is no more substantive than “creationist” theories; markets are many things but they are never free. Yet groups like the Koch brothers, and their allies in higher education, like the ACTA, continue to insist that any  ”exchange of ideas” about economics must treat the market religion as a rational system and not a faith. I think their creepy desire to collect email is a hunt for converts to their cult.