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Authors: F.S. Michaels

Tags: #Business and Economics, #Social Science - General

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BOOK: Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything
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In the economic story, there is no abundance of God — only scarcity. Relationships are impersonal and anonymous transactions in a religious marketplace. What you believe is a man-made product that needs to be marketed to appeal to people where they’re at. Churches are religious service providers focused on customer service, organizational growth, and quantifiable success.
53
Theologian Darrell Guder writes, “It is now clear, as we look back over the last 100 to 125 years, that the value systems and operating structures of the large American corporation have become the dominant model for the institutional church. Over the last century, the Christian religion has become a big American business. We have centralized for efficiency and good management, developed major headquarters, accepted numerical and financial growth as the most important indications of success, introduced statistical measurement to determine that success, and made religion into a product.”
54

Finally, theologians Philip Kenneson and James Street warn that putting a marketing orientation at the center of the church’s life “radically alters the shape and character of the Christian faith by redefining the character and mission of the church in terms of management exchanges between producers and consumers.” They acknowledge that many things once deemed important in the Christian life do not fit in the management/marketing scheme of spirituality, and conclude that “not surprisingly, these matters are neglected in a marketing paradigm.”
55

YOUR EDUCATION
 

Just yesterday I was looking at the catalog of a nearby college. I couldn’t believe the courses they were offering. How to use a computer. How to make a good investment. How to get a good job. How to, how to. There was hardly one course to make the inner man grow. If you suggest that a course in ancient history may play a role in a person’s growth, they laugh at you. What relevance does it have to our life today?

 

—93-YEAR-OLD SOPHIE MUMFORD IN 1995, INTERVIEWED BY STUDS TERKEL

 

We have taken the great leap forward and said, ‘Let’s pretend we’re a corporation.’

 

—JOHN LOMBARDI, PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, 1997

 

EDUCATION WAS ONCE THOUGHT of as a service to humanity, as a cornerstone of democracy. Through education, you came to an enlightened understanding of the world, became someone who could think critically, someone who knew how to participate effectively in society and how to hold democratic leaders accountable. Education was a public good, a social investment in our life together as a society. We believed that education improved us collectively whether we were personally the ones being educated or not. We used education to redistribute opportunity. Education would narrow the gap between the haves and have-nots by making access to a better life more equal. If you started out at a disadvantage, through education you’d have a chance to improve your life.

For the most part, education was kept in the hands of public institutions. We worried corporations might be tempted to exploit students who would find it hard to gauge the quality of education they were getting. Because we believed education was a public good, we subsidized it or paid for it in full with our taxes as a way to pursue social and economic goals deemed to be in the public interest.
1
Schools promoted a set of values that helped students understand what it meant to be a citizen. At school, you ideally learned to cooperate, resolve your differences, and work with people who were different than you. You learned that you might draw, write, run, or do math better or worse than the person next to you, but that there was generally a place for everyone. Each person had something to contribute.

Science was an important part of education, and had a lofty purpose: to create knowledge for the benefit of humanity. Science was a calling — not a career. Scientists didn’t have to justify their work to outsiders because their research projects didn’t cost much, and what those projects did cost wasn’t paid for with public funds. A line, though not always a distinct one, existed between basic research that was primarily about discovering new knowledge for its own sake, and applied research where the real-world use of that knowledge was the focus.

As members of the scientific community, scientists were expected to share their data and results with other community members. Their research belonged to the intellectual commons. Publishing work in journals was about advancing scientific knowledge for the good of humanity, not staking a claim in intellectual property rights.
2
Bringing research to market wasn’t that important, and the idea of personally profiting from your work was generally absurd. Getting something patented was a complicated process anyway. Scientists also worried that patents would erode the pursuit of basic research — and patenting something like medical research wasn’t above-board because of the negative implications for public health. They conducted scientific research knowing their work was valuable and important because it benefited humanity.
3

As a scientist, you were expected to stay detached and objective in regards to your research. You steered clear of emotional or financial entanglements in your work, seeking only the truth of the matter at hand and challenging the conventional wisdom in your discipline.
4
Truth in science mattered. Galileo had linked the two, saying: “The conclusions of natural science are true and necessary, and the judgment of man has nothing to do with them.”
5
What he meant was that a scientific result was what it was — you couldn’t just
create
a different outcome because you didn’t like what you’d found. Galileo knew what he was talking about; he was tried for heresy and sentenced to house arrest by the Roman Catholic Church after he contradicted the church’s teaching and claimed that the earth wasn’t at the center of the universe.

For hundreds of years, science was “the pursuit of the Good and the True” — something that was intrinsically valuable because truth itself was intrinsically valuable. A scientist was viewed as a certain kind of person: someone who had the moral calibre to work without the rewards of wealth and power, to share his or her work with colleagues, and to stick to rigorous standards “in the service of a noble end: namely, the advance of knowledge and power on behalf of humanity.”
6

Then the story of education and science changed.

In the economic story, education is ushered into the world of markets and becomes a commodity. Students become buyers. Schools become sellers, service providers competing for business in the education services industry.
7
The economic story says that education is a private good, not a public one. Education is something that helps you get ahead in life as an individual. Education matters, not because it will help you become a fully formed and informed citizen capable of participating effectively in society, but because it will help you get a better job, make more money, and improve your quality of life.

Education becomes a financial investment that can offer you a high rate of return. You’re to think hard about those rates of return when you choose what you want to be when you grow up. You’re helped out by news headlines like this one: “Arts degrees reduce earnings.”
8
In 2003, the BBC reported that university graduates with arts degrees in subjects like history and English make between 2 and 10 percent less than high school graduates. Language and education aren’t lucrative, but law, medicine, math and engineering are solid financial investments. One of the researchers interviewed warned, “Feeling warm about literature doesn’t pay the rent. Maybe an average arts student knows he or she is not going to do very well. Maybe they do not. Education is a risk individuals take. We need to make sure people have the correct perceptions.”
9

The economic story tells us that because education is a private good and not a public one, the people who are getting educated should pay for that education themselves. Public funding for education drops. Tuition rates rise.
10
If you’re enrolled in a professional program like law, medicine, or business that offers a high rate of return on your investment by giving you a chance to make a hefty future salary, you are expected to pay more for those higher returns. Between 1995 and 2002, tuition fees in Canada soared by 132 percent in medicine, 168 percent in dentistry, and 61 percent in law, compared to only 34 percent in all undergraduate programs — and after accounting for inflation.
11

If you’re not already wealthy, climbing tuition rates make it harder for you to become educated at all. In the economic story, though, access to higher education is not about keeping tuition rates down — it’s about loaning students the money to pay for higher tuition, giving them better access to debt. More students are made eligible for student loans, and the amount students are allowed to borrow increases.
12
Those leery about taking on that kind of debt have fewer options than they once did. Scholarships and grants — money that doesn’t have to be paid back — are now based more on merit than financial need, and the criteria used to measure merit are highly correlated with socioeconomic status. In other words, students who are more affluent to begin with have higher merit scores, which makes them more likely to be awarded financial aid that doesn’t have be paid back. Education scholars observe that in the twenty-first century, more economic and racial inequality now exists in access to higher education than since the 1960s.
13

The economic story says you should choose which school to attend based not on the quality of the teaching but on the brand recognition and cachet of the school and its degrees; a better brand represents a better return on your investment.
14
In your classes, you compete against other students to get ahead. You’re ranked against your classmates and your ranking is largely based on how you perform as an individual.
15
If you’re independent, flexible, adaptive, fast, self-governing, and entrepreneurial, you’re someone to watch. High-performing, valued students are those who can help the school achieve its benchmarks in its own competition with other schools. If you’re not a high performer, you’re at risk of holding the school back and becoming labelled as an undesirable.
16

How you perform matters, because in the economic story, your school educates you to give the country a competitive advantage in a global knowledge economy. Your school exists not to help you become an informed citizen, but to help the nation advance economically and competitively, to increase innovation that leads to economic development, and to train workers for the workforce.
17

As a result, your school needs to be more entrepreneurial, driven to it in part since government funding is drying up anyway. Your school is to be on the lookout for new revenue streams; it’s now buying and selling real estate, developing and selling retirement communities on campus, partnering with corporations and venture capitalists, commercializing intellectual property, starting businesses, and aggressively recruiting international students who pay much higher fees than you do for the same seat in the classroom. Your classes are also starting to be evaluated in terms of how cost-effective, efficient, and marketable they are.
18

According to the economic story, schools should cut costs by outsourcing tasks and using private contractors instead of university staff to provide food, janitorial, laundry, and bookstore services. Schools should be less tied to their employees.
19
Tenured and tenure-track faculty positions — the kind of secure job professors used to get — are dwindling, falling from a combined 56 percent in 1975 to 35 percent in 2003.
20
Many instructors, often with PhDs, are now hired to teach on a contract basis for little money, few benefits, and no job security.
21
Marc Bousquet, author of
How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
, reported that a survey of the academic workforce shows that “fewer than one-third of the responding programs paid first-year writing instructors more than $2,500 a class; nearly half (47.6 percent) paid these instructors less than $2,000 per class…At that rate, teaching a full-time load of eight classes nets less than $16,000 annually and includes no benefits.”
22
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, universities are starting to speak a new language of strategic planning, mission statements, cost-efficiency, excellence, performance appraisal, audits, cost centers, competition, choice, and accountability.
23

In the economic story, science changes along with education. After science lost its moral high ground by creating the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in the Second World War, science slowly became more industrialized. The economic story says that scientists ought to be scientific entrepreneurs — people who create knowledge
and
find a market application for it.
24
Research that requires significant outside funding becomes common, and scientists slowly become more dependent on winning grants and paying attention to funders’ interests. Being able to win research contracts from outside the university becomes paramount. More and more research is published, but more of it is also criticized for being shoddy; solid scientific results require slow, painstaking work, but journals demand continual content and scientists need publication credits to improve their chances of promotion and tenure.
25

The economic story tells us that scientific research, once part of the intellectual commons, is now intellectual private property. Former colleagues become competitors. Scientists move from freely sharing their data and results with the scientific community to forming, protecting, and monetizing their results through patents, licences, and partnerships with industry to protect future windfalls in case their findings can be commercialized successfully.
26
Knowledge commercialization centers appear on campuses and scholars are advised to think twice before discussing their work with colleagues, presenting research at conferences, or publishing their findings in order to protect their market opportunities. After all, research can generate major income. In 2000, licensing revenues for research results like the hepatitis B vaccine, the cancer drug Taxol, the sports drink Gatorade, and vitamin D technologies topped $1.7 billion; revenues are typically split in thirds between the researcher, his or her department, and the university.
27

In the economic story, scientists increasingly have financial interests in their own research results. Areas of the university that attract outside money, like business schools and chemistry and biology departments, become more respected than areas that don’t, like the humanities. In 1976, a newly hired assistant professor teaching literature in the United States earned $3,000 less than a new assistant professor in business, but 20 years later, that gap had stretched to over $25,000.
28
Humanities advocates who once argued that studying ethics, aesthetics, language, history, religion, and the arts mattered because it was part of what it meant to be human now argue that the humanities matter because they contribute to economic development, or that the humanities literally are profitable because they generate more student revenues than expenses, compared to the physical sciences.
29

In 1955, educator John Mursell warned that schools of a democratic society that failed to support and extend that democracy were socially useless at best or socially dangerous at worst. At best, Mursell said, schools would end up educating people who would go and earn their living indifferent to the obligations of citizenship, and at worst, schools would end up educating people to be “enemies of democracy — people who will fall prey to demagogues, and who back movements and rally round leaders hostile to the democratic way of life.”
30

BOOK: Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything
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