A Missive on Privatization

At the RA, NYSUT expressed opposition to privatization in stronger terms than before. It struck me that in thinking about working conditions in a broad framework, we ought to be thinking more seriously than we have about what privatization actually means in the university and higher education.

Several points of opposition were clear:

Opposition to Charter schools and privately run schools. This included opposition to vouchers
In higher Ed this has a longer and somewhat different history. The NY State Legislature and most federal programs for loans and aid (non-profit tax status is perhaps the most significant) do not always or often discriminate between public and private institutions.

Selling off of public assets. This is the usual meaning of privatization in neoliberalism. It clearly is at work with respect to the hospitals, and has been raised in the context of particular programs and schools at various times.

Subjecting education to standards and assessment tools originating in and primarily serviced by private corporations. This clearly raised the question of who is calling the shots and whether the profit motives of private corporations are influencing education policy and curriculum, as well as the work of teachers.

We should add to this the infiltration of corporate rationalities and administrative logics that have subordinated collegial forms of governance, and attempted to transform faculty into academic entrepreneurs. This was not to my knowledge part of NYSUT’s oppositional narrative.

What I think we need — and I would propose to do a paper for presentation at our committee meeting at the fall DA on this — is a compelling narrative within which we can begin to make sense of and specify clearly privatization as it effects the university and higher education and that enables us to plot strategies to confront it and perhaps to turn it to our advantage. What are the distinctive forms that privatization is taking in the university and higher Ed, and how can we contest the prevailing narratives out there that re supporting and defining privatization.

There seems to me a disconnect between the narratives of privatization informing and framing neoliberal privatization policies, and the grounds on which NYSUT and others are opposing it.

For example, one of the leading and thoughtful spokesmen for privatization, Arthur Levine of Teachers’ College, makes the argument that privatization in higher education is inevitable and hence must be accepted. This is because of increased demand for higher education in the knowledge-based economy and especially because this economy is global. This economy ratchets up demand for higher education, de-nationalizes it (which makes entry into education markets easier for corporations in part because it reduces the political calls for regulation and because it distances higher education from the usual meanings and discourses of “public”), and, perhaps most important, creates a favorable climate for businesses, better able than brick and mortar universities to take advantage of multiple and global markets, in order to make large profits providing higher education.

I think we need an alternative narrative, or alternative narratives, to this, and I am proposing to work on this and present a paper on it at our fall meeting.

Discussion and other volunteers to write and present papers?