A Review of Slaughter and Rhoades’ Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, Chapter 12:1 “The Academic Capitalist Knowledge/Learning Regime”

A Review of Slaughter and Rhoades’ Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, Chapter 12:1 “The Academic Capitalist Knowledge/Learning Regime”

Peter Chiaramonte

You can see why I may have been hesitant to include the title of American professors Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades’ final chapter in the heading for this review. “The Academic Capitalist Knowledge/Learning Regime” is more than a mouthful. What’s more, the authors repeat the phrase so often it becomes a mantra that can make you woozy. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a wonderful conclusion to a brilliant book but, if you had to try teaching it to someone else, language such as “propertized” “interstital” and “intermediating organizations” might trip you up in the seminar hall. Is it worth getting tongue-tied just the same? You bet. Here’s why: “The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.” I’m no Tom Wolfe but I would like to tell you something about a book worth remembering in spite of its flaws.

Students and scholars of higher educational systems will find many references to this rather seminal work cited in academic books, magazines, and journals. All tongue- tying neologisms aside, professors Slaughter and Rhoades provide a very thorough and impressive treatment of the key issues as they see them. First is their theory that, in the new economy, knowledge is becoming viewed more and more as just another raw material intended to serve corporate interests in developing, advertising, and selling educational and research products in the private marketplace. The authors cover a wide range of topics to verify each of these points—including the multiple expansion of managerial capacity, intellectual property patenting, copyrighting, networking, marketing, and so on. Elsewhere in the book they occasionally touch on the replacement of full-time tenured faculty with part-time contingent faculty—primarily as a cost savings priority.

Here in the final chapter, once again the authors get into the extensive growth of non-academic middle managers hired to handle the infrastructure, economic development and entrepreneurial activities of the academy. But they do not explicitly connect this to the whirling paradoxes of having non-academic managers so embedded in university business. This in spite of the fact that even when “institutional expenditures go up, expenditures for instruction go down” (p. 332). What Slaughter and Rhoades in my mind fail to address—despite solid grounding in Foucault’s “disciplinary regimes,” 1980, and Castell’s notion of “the network society,” 1996—are the so-called “bureaucratic effects” embedded in this system. Although they must clearly recognize how bureaucracy itself can become a disease for which it purports to be the cure, they overlook some of the “systemantic” (John Gall, 1975) ways in which academic and capitalist bureaucracies not only solve problems but create them as well.

To their esteemed credit, Slaughter and Rhoades do strike more than a glancing blow at the incongruities inherent in academic institutions moving to intersect more with corporate interests than social ones. The fundamental idea of the college or university as a public domain and forum for discussion, debate and critique is, as they say, “pulled to the background” (p. 333). Instead of high-caliber teaching and research, the authors suggest that universities may increasingly come to represent factories for the manufacture of employees for the new economy.2 Therefore, by and large for me the foremost implication of the book is that higher education systems have become systems for the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of knowledge as a commodity. This shift, according to Slaughter and Rhoades, has taken us from a “public good” paradigm to one of “academic capitalism.” They conclude that this swing toward values of privatization and profit making in our society has given individual corporate and institutional claims on new knowledge priority rights over the public good. The subplot is that higher education is ever more at risk of becoming a mere instrument of economic policy and of very little else.

Slaughter and Rhoades do a terrific job of highlighting the many fault lines that blur the boundaries between public and private sectors yet nonetheless sustain a substantial level of public subsidy of higher education (p. 329). Furthermore, in their view, academic capitalists are apparently not very successful at generating net revenues. Although colleges and universities present their commercial activity as being of benefit to all—the economy, educational capacity, and so on—there is evidence that academic institutions are not as it turns out very good capitalists. For example, Slaughter and Rhoades report that while technology transfer brings revenue in, it also takes much of it away in legal fees and costs for the maintenance of technology transfer offices. The differences between debits and credits even I can figure out.

As unmistakably concerned as the authors are about these issues, they are also pragmatic in recognizing where lies the true crux of the matter. They see a change from what, at the time of Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie’s previous book—Academic Capitalism: Policies, Politics and the Entrepreneurial University (1997)—they had already begun to understand: that the pursuit of market activities to generate external revenues has distorted the boundaries between markets, states, and higher education. Here in the more recent book (2004) Slaughter and Rhoades still do not see the new regime as having necessarily overthrown the previous one, but they have recognized how unnerving this overlap of the two domains has become.

In any case, this overlap (or collusion if that’s not too strong a word for it) between early twenty-first century academic and economic regimes is unlikely to go away any time soon. I only wish the authors of Academic Capitalism and the New Economy had written about all of this in the language of their shorter piece for American Academic (Rhoades and Slaughter (2004) “Academic Capitalism in the New Economy: Challenges and Choices.” Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 37-59). This is, in my opinion, an appreciably more readable version of their call to “republicize” colleges and universities. In a superb review of Academic Capitalism and the New Economy in the Education Review by Rebecca Barber (www.edrev.info/reviews/rev453.htm) she also felt that, although Slaughter and Rhoades give us very finely distinguished coverage of the issues, the style and vocabulary of the book can be confusing and off-putting much of the time. I certainly agree with that. The manuscript needs another good line edit. Less Tom Wolfe next time and more Ernest Hemingway. I submit they consider renaming this chapter “The Capitalist Knowledge Regime.” It’s less redundant and more or less stands for the same disturbing phenomena. Besides, it’s an easier title to remember and repeat.