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
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Tim Hatcher 0
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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)