Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University [Hardcover]

Gaye Tuchman's detailed ethnography of a 'university in transformation' is funny in many places, but mostly sad. The author herself is clearly not pleased with the general direction she describes, and so, while the book concludes that the university was successfully 'transformed', this cannot be regarded as a particularly happy ending. The 'transformation' the university is undergoing is from being a more or less average state university to one of the top twenty-five. Societal judgments on what distinguishes a university--above all, rankings in US News and World Report--are more or less accepted at face value. The focus of her work is the relationship between the administration and the faculty in the course of this process. Thus topics like student life and classroom dynamics are mostly absent. The general trajectory of Wannabe U is to become a more auditable university, with ever more measures of how faculty, and the university in general, is doing. In particular, a market orientation is introduced. The value of faculty, measured in how many grants they attain, becomes more quantifiable and important, as does the value of the university to the state economy and the private corporations based there. The latter is epitomized by a more assertive policy towards patents at the university, which, when achieved, sometimes result in such financial gain for faculty that they are able to purchase McMansions on the same streets as administrators. Gone are the days when scientists at universities used to look down at those based in private industry on the grounds that the former produced knowledge available for the general advancement of science, while the latter did not.
The administrators of Wannabe U belong to a mobile class ever in search of a better position. They are far more familiar with the judgment of their peers, and the administrative challenges of running a large organization, than with deep philosophical questions about the nature and purpose of universities. Thus, they sometimes jump from fashion to fashion, announcing that the university is now focused on 'teaching and learning', or later on 'research', creating confusion and demoralization among much of the faculty (even when teaching is supposedly being emphasized, Tuchman wryly notes that it is meted out as punishment for underperforming faculty). What the administrators are able to pursue more singlemindedly is the centralization of authority in their hands and the weakening of the faculty's role in running the university. Additionally, faculty are progressively forced to be more 'productive' (more students taught, more grant money attained, etc). Although this process suffers a few setbacks, for the most part it is successful. It is undertaken in a gradual enough manner that the faculty never quite get a handle on what is going on. In general, the faculty are more concerned with the approval of their nationally dispersed peers than with the dynamics at Wannabe U. Important meetings are not well attended by faculty. Not unlike the administrators, the faculty often have one eye on using Wannabe U as a jumping off point for a better job, weakening their interest in campus politics. For these reasons, Wannabe U is successfully transformed into a higher ranked, but more administratively centralized and hard driving university with little to no resistance from the faculty.

Many aspects of the picture painted in Wannabe U will be familiar to faculty at American colleges and universities, particularly the ever expanding production of 'audits' such as 'teaching portfolios'. As noted above, Tuchman observed no grounds for effective resistance to the direction mapped out (sometimes not fully consciously) by administrators attempting to live up to an imperative to make Wan U more valuable to the state's economy. I think part of the reason, in addition to the narrow focus of faculty which she described, is that any sustained resistance to the transformation in general (rather than to a fragment of it, such as, say, increased teaching loads) would require questioning the logic of aligning the interests of the university with the interests of the 'economy' (i.e. the alliance of the state and corporations). And this questioning could not advance without broad questioning of the nature of the economy in general. In other words, the process of transformation is simply bringing the university in line with values (market driven, auditable, etc) pervasive throughout American society. Answering 'what's wrong with that?' involves either implausibly suggesting special privileges for universities (already viewed with some suspicion by much of the population) or generally challenging those values, which increasingly appear as a natural element of society, given their pervasiveness. In other words, the gnawing dilemma of how does one begin to critique capitalism when its logic seems so widespread appears once again. Perhaps at a subconscious level, awareness of just how difficult this would be helps to scale faculty demands down to some managable element that will not challenge the fundamental direction. The admiration of their peers, rather than a sustained interrogation of what they or the institution for which they work is doing, provides a more or less fulfilling goal.

This is a wonderfully perceptive (if dispiriting) examination of how public universities are scrambling to conform to a simplistic and untested "market model" of excellence that in actuality kills curricular diversity, critical thinking, and self-governance. Tuchman is especially good on the rise of an auditing culture that pretends to be about monitoring student success and retention but actually aims at Taylorizing teaching and deprofessionalizing the professoriate.

If you work at a second-tier public university and your administration is talking about "transforming" itself to better prepare students for the job market and establish a "flagship" reputation, read this book immediately!

This is an insightful scholarly review of the changes that occurred at a large public university, Wannabe U. Whether out of a desire to raise their ranking in a mass-media publication, or to emulate so many others, the author demonstrates how this representative public university changed, especially with respect to their administrators and management approach. The author maintains a level of objectivity that is rare. She notes how the changing relationships between faculty and administration have affected the academic environment as a whole. Many details of the changes that the author discusses, with respect to Wannabe U, match the stories from other large public universities. The author has gone to great lengths to hide the true identities of the administrators and college itself, although there is an online buzz as to the true identities. It might have been better if true identities had been used, but the approach is understandable in light of today's litigious society.