Shanghaiing America's Best Thinking: Musings on University Corporatization, Chinese Partnerships, and Embracing Critical Theory

McGeorge Law Review, Dec 2007

By Tim Hatcher, Published on 01/01/07

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Shanghaiing America's Best Thinking: Musings on University Corporatization, Chinese Partnerships, and Embracing Critical Theory

Shanghaiing America's Best Thinking : Musings on University Corporatization, Chinese Partnerships, and Embracing Critical Theory Professional Ethics 0 Corporate Conduct 0 Tim Hatcher 0 North Carolina State University 0 0 Tim Hatcher, Shanghaiing America's Best Th inking: Musings on University Corporatization, Chinese Partnerships, and Embracing Critical Th eory, 39 McGeorge L. Rev. (2016). Available at: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/mlr/vol39/iss3/6 Tim Hatcher* I. INTRODUCTION The majority of America's public universities no longer focus on educating people for the civic duties or liberal thinking that made America great, as John Dewey, Tocqueville, and others suggest.' Rather, universities are handmaidens of corporate power, bastions of neoliberalism and economic globalization, and "knowledge factories" that produce workers with skills and competencies global corporations require. Corporate accountability has replaced social responsibility. The professional school has replaced the academy. Research bought and sold by powerful industries, such as pharmaceuticals and the military-industrial complex, have replaced research for the benefit of society. As much as we would like to think the professoriate is immune from this covert incursion, university administrators and managers increasingly reduce full-time, tenure-track faculty positions by institutionalizing part-time, contingent faculty through denying tenure and making promotions difficult.! This article discusses U.S. public universities' recent role-reversal from instilling civic duty to focusing on corporate accountability and subservience to globalization. How far this structural change and conceptual shift has gone is illustrated by China's robbing of state-of-the-art knowledge through significant increases in U.S. universities' presence in and partnerships with China and its Communist, oppressive government, leading a country that is now the world's fastest growing economy and an increasing military power.3 Part II discusses the regression of U.S. universities' emphasis on civic duties to embracing corporate servitude. Part III describes the recent trend of U.S. universities partnering with Chinese universities and the pitfalls these partnerships create. Part IV offers a response to these recent trends by looking at Human Resources Development (HRD) through the lens of critical theory and arguing that HRD can provide a structure that enhances democracy by carrying out its desire to remain autonomous and disengage itself from wholesale corporatization. Part V concludes that, while recent changes in the U.S. university system present many dangers to a democratic way of life, recognizing the problem and addressing it through HRD and critical theory can prevent the future degradation of U.S. academia and intelligence. II. THE MODERN PUBLIC UNIVERSITY: FROM CIVIC DUTY TO CORPORATE SERVITUDE Public universities in the early twenty-first century underwent significant changes, with damaging consequences for democratic development and a weakening of the United States' dominance in intellectual capital. The most evident changes over the past twenty years include a myopic focus on external funding instead of civic duty, with little focus on academic freedom, the latter of which results in a weakening of tenure.4 Other examples include a general shift in public universities' "old" mission, supporting state level extension, and engagement toward a "new" focus on economic development connected with internationalization and an unquestioning support of globalization To varying degrees, public universities have always been agents of economic development. However, modern public (state) universities "are increasingly regarded as suppliers of private goods (individual economic benefits) ra6ther than public goods (broad-based economic development and social equality)., Today's public university evolved from merging of the ideals of private land grants, European universities, and colonial colleges whose mission was to educate the population for life in a democratic society.7 Further, early universities, many of which became land grant institutions, focused on conducting research and providing training in applied disciplines, like agriculture, primarily to help America rebound politically and financially from the devastation of the American Civil War.8 "Many of the original institutions were active in building the new nation and later were joined by new institutions that combined the European emphasis on research with the American interest in service."9 In the United States, public universities have a history of addressing the growth and sustenance of democracy. Yet their recent financial shortsightedness overshadows and subverts this social objective.' In addition, applied research that in the past benefited the public good is now primarily carried out as part of corporate partnerships and grants or contracts that benefit only the purchasing agent and, (...truncated)


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Tim Hatcher. Shanghaiing America's Best Thinking: Musings on University Corporatization, Chinese Partnerships, and Embracing Critical Theory, McGeorge Law Review, 2007, Volume 39, Issue 3,