Academic Capitalism

In the years after World War II, the United States underwent tremendous political, economic, and social transformations. The influence of science and technology in the victory of World War II opened doors to a relationship between universities and federal agencies, the most prominent of which was the Department of Defense. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman refer to this era as "the academic revolution" which was characterized by the increase of institutions, students, graduates, and professors.[2] This boom in education is contributed to the GI Bill which sent more than two million veterans to college. Government funding also aided in the growth of popularity as the National Defense Education Act of 1958 allocated financial support to students for the first time. According to Louis Menand, the aim behind this expansion was "meritocracy, the opening of opportunities to talent".[3] The democratizing change that followed with the passage of the New Deal further strengthened the support in higher education and towards the end of this expansion, civil rights and feminist movements provided the way for racial minorities and women to attend colleges and universities. With this increase of students and universities there was a motive to unify the curriculum. Roger Geiger calls this an implacable movement towards common academic standards that created a national ideal of education that was adopted by the majority of universities.[4]

The second period of change began in the mid-1980s with lasting changes still seen in the status quo. The initial alteration was the growth of endowments and philanthropic contributions used to update and improve infrastructure. The push toward academic capitalism began in the context of corporate philanthropy and business investments in higher education that were often tied to specific research objections and to workplace development.[5] These investments introduced corporations into higher education allowing their power to dictate the knowledge that was being produced.  

By the early 1990s, neoliberalism gained popularity in most Western industrialized economies. "neoliberalism emerged as a set of economic policies and political strategies in the 1970s and 1980s designed to revitalize capitalist accumulation in the wake of the stagnation and crisis of the Keynesian welfare state.[6] Neoliberalism aimed to promote the interests of capital and the importance of profitability and competitiveness by limiting state intervention, deregulating markets, and ultimately prioritizing individualism, competition, and entrepreneurship.[7] The emergence of neoliberalism transformed economics from a standpoint of social welfare for the public, to enabling the individual as an economic actor while also supporting the privatizing, commercializing, and, deregulating, state functions to promote the new economy in global market.[1] These alterations to society slithered into the operations of higher education.

While the postwar academic revolution may be understood as the expansion of opportunity a movement towards greater equity, academic capitalism is defined by limited opportunity and mounting inequalities at all levels.[8] The first condition of academic capitalism is the inequality of institutions. Christopher Newfield writes that "the purpose of privatization is to move resources toward those willing to pay for them, which in practice mean giving more to those with more and giving less to those with less". This is shown in the status quo as a small gourd of private institutions experience unparalleled prosperity while the majority of others have not shared in that prosperity. Within the context of enrollment, wealthy institutions predominantly enroll white students, making the exception to achieve diversity goals backed with funding awards.

Academic science is more and more structured along the lines of the classic capitalist workplace.[9] This is illustrated though the dilemma of 'relevance of a discipline' and the 'utility of a course' which separates major or learning trajectory does not promise wealth and success, it is perceived as useless and irrelevant. This further shows the way in which capitalism has infiltrated education as norms and priorities of the market shape the values within institutions.[10] The purpose of education has changed, now existing alongside the unchallenged hegemony of capital. The dominant discourse to the importance of knowledge in the status quo rests on the value that knowledge supplants physical capital as the source of present and future wealth. Because the aim of knowledge is to sustain and expand the rule of capital, it is important that it feeds the ethics of competition on which capitalism survives.[11]

Competition is a core aspect of education and one of the main areas that showcases the emergence of academic capitalism. Not only does competition find its way into the peer relationships inside classroom as they fight for higher grades, good remarks, acceptance in high ranked schools, etc., but also feeds into the wider economy as an indicator of national competitiveness. Capitalism thrives on competition between cooperations and other economies which results in education becoming a means to participate in the market, and enhance one's own as well as the 'nations's' economic prospects which is in face enhancing the profit of private capital.[10] Here we also have the competitive nature of working markets and the value of different fields of study, typically reliant on wage and prestige that will eventually generate immense wealth that will be pumped into the system.