Category Archives: Professional

I can’t decide if the ongoing stories about coaches and administrative salaries (“From the Sideline to the Bottom Line“) are going to have a Lenny Bruce effect– if you repeat something often enough it looses all power to shock– or an “occupy” effect of  driving protest by emphasizing just how profoundly greed shapes what are supposed to be institutions devoted to public service.

It makes me wonder if we ought to be advocating for Corruption Studies as a new form of cultural studies;  here, we would be studying one of its main branches, the University Sports Division. I think that Corruption Studies would begin with a discussion of the history of the ongoing rise of tuition and fees on the one hand, and student debt on the other, over the course of the last three or four decades.

This history would then be contrasted or juxtaposed with the rise of big time university sports programs and, more specifically, the fantastically inflated salaries of coaches.  As the sports programs grow larger– supposedly, at least nominally and at first, as a way to support the universities academic missions– and generate more money, tuition, fees, and debts rise. That’s corruption in a nutshell.

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.