Corporate Hand in Academic Glove: The New Management's Struggle for Academic Recognition-The Case of the Harvard Group in the 1920's
In 1909, John Jay Chapman, a professor at Harvard, issued a very harsh indictment of American universities: "As the boss has been the tool of businessmen in politics, so the college president has been his agent in education."(1) Thorstein Veblen made a similar accusation in his book The Higher Learning in America. Veblen warned against letting industry's values engulf the modern university, and pointed out the external manifestations of that dangerous process: opulent campus buildings, changes in the character of the board of trustees, the supplementation of teacher salaries through research foundations, and so on. Veblen did not see this as a deliberate conspiracy, but rather as a deplorable tendency to go too far, and he accused university presidents of ignoring the danger. He took particular exception to the universities' concern for public opinion, which in his eyes cheapened the autonomous scientific spirit, and represented the first fatal step towards the take-over of the universities by the business sector. As an initial measure to remedy this situation, he suggested completely abolishing the board of trustees as an institution.(2) In the second and third decades of the century, however, this was a minority view. The accelerated development of the universities paralleled and promoted the ascendancy of the Progressive movement, and was in turn fueled by it. Before Progressivism, American higher education had no link with the social system and everyday life, such as the colonial colleges had had with the colonial society that financed them. The goal of university studies in the nineteenth century could best be described as self-seeking. The colleges of the time prepared young people to devote themselves to God, and the college boards were composed primarily of clergymen. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, this situation changed. The clergy were gradually replaced by businessmen, and the symbiosis between the business and academic worlds expanded. The close relationship between these two subcultures gave rise to what George M. Marsden has called a "service station mentality,"(3) signally manifested in the development of a pragmatic vocational orientation in the universities, and the introduction into the academic sphere of the social sciences in general and management sciences in particular. This essay examines the special orientation of the discourse that developed in the management faculties, an orientation that was the result of their close relationship with the business sector they were set up to serve. The Harvard group is used as an example here because it expressly took the lead in disseminating the ideal of a service university. My contention is that the unique discourse that developed in the period when the management faculties were establishing themselves had a definitive influence on the development of the human-relations trend in industry, creating very progressive management norms. However, while this trend fostered a commitment to humanistic professional ethics in labor relations and raised management culture to a higher level, it also produced an extremely conservative corporate ideology. Although this ideology arose in the context of the Progressive movement, it represented a reaction against parts of that movement's political legacy. The Business Administration Faculty in the Service of the Nation The strong movement towards the incorporation and bureaucratization of firms had already raised weighty questions back at the beginning of the century--how was the liberal ethos to be preserved in a place where modern business organization was becoming a new kind of property, and the individual's chances of survival depended on his entering some form of association? What shape would liberal democracy take? What would happen to little entrepreneurs when they had to compete with big ones, and what would happen to the ordinary worker? Social Darwinism had begun to lose steam as a rampant laissez faire philosophy threatened to annihilate the coveted equal opportunity of the American dream. …
America by Design
This book is an overview of all features of America's built environment, both the monumental and the commonplace, since colonial times. It is also announced in the Oxford General Books catalogue for Autumn 1987.
The New ‘U’
Today's talk about tenure must be framed within broader discussions about the role of the university. Our university system is now over one hundred years old, the “Old-Time College” is gone, the “cold war” university is no longer viable, and the foundations of the modern “multiversity” are cracking, so it is time to talk about change. But change is not necessarily reform, and resisting change probably will not keep things the way they are, so academics must understand the forces reshaping the university. Whenever I listen to colleagues defend the status quo by saying that the United States has a university system that is the envy of the world, I hear echoes of the Detroit automobile industry's casual dismissal of foreign competitors in the early 1960s. The decision not to change did not preserve the auto industry, and it is unlikely to preserve public universities as we know them. The current debates about tenure began with ideological attacks on “tenured radicals” who used their secure jobs to subvert conservative cultural values. The attack on tenure gathered steam as fiscal hawks in financially-strapped states looked for ways to save money and found huge state university systems with budgets to match. When asked why he robbed banks, the legendary Willie Sutton replied, “Because that's where the money is.” When asked why they are robbing tenure, legislators, regents, and administrators reply, “Because that's where the money is.” Personnel costs are a large share of university budgets and tenure ties the hands of administrators and legislators accustomed to using purse strings to control universities.