In many universities, you find yourself in a job
in which you're supposed to actually earn money for the university.
And public funding has become less and less.
And even there it’s largely targeted
so that you will get public funding coming through
the National Institute of Health, which is targeted
towards certain ends.
That public funding is often
connected to corporate interests in very specific ways.
And the idea that somehow or other the university is repositioning itself
in such a way that its main mission is to provide the wherewithal
or the ideas and the backup
for corporate capital and for big government.
And I've been in situations where I've seen position papers about,
you know, the mission statements of various schools,
and they all pretty much say the same thing.
My position all along has been that it is the public interest
that should drive what we're doing.
And the public interest, of course, is not necessarily
the interest that has enough money to be able to support what we're doing.
Therefore, that has to come from general taxation.
Well, the tendency now is to say, no, it's no longer taxation.
It is either the big research foundations
which have different kind of political postures,
some of them conservative, some of them,
you know, reasonably progressive, by
liberal standards.
So the whole kind of ethos of what it is you're supposed to do
and how you're supposed to do it.
And I recall actually in one of the universities as I was working in,
that we were
sort of singled out as being a department that was in trouble.
We didn't know we were in trouble
because we actually we were having a very good record of students
coming through, getting good jobs and all the rest of it.
And the dean came in and we said, well look at all
this stuff we've done and everything.
And he said, Yeah, you know, it's very impressive
academically what you've done but, and he pulled a
dollar bill out of his pocket, and he said, I'm only interested
in one thing and it's colored green and you don't make enough of it.
And yeah, that was a kind of a litmus moment for me
where I kind of thought, my God, yes, I'm here not,
you know, not to sort of do things that are interesting to me and so on.
And there perhaps have been, I would hope,
public benefit.
I'm here to earn money for the university.
So, the whole kind of idea of the university
not as a place of reflection and knowledge and creation and all the rest of it,
but as a moneymaking machine becomes seen.
And that connects also to if you like, the social structure inside of academia.
What we see right now is, in a sense, a class
within the class formation
in an institution like City University of New York?
The majority of courses are taught by adjunct teachers
and the adjunct teachers get paid almost nothing. And
then there are the sort of regular faculty,
and then there are a few stars here and there.
But CUNY is not a good example of this because the real stars,
if they're worth their salt, are going to be spirited
away to the big universities like Harvard, Yale,
which have business corporations
with very large endowments.
They're very, very large corporations.
They do a lot of their work with corporations.
And of course, they're the prestige organizations.
So somebody like the head of Blackstone,
Steve Schwarzman, can give
I don't know how many $150 million or whatever it is to M.I.T.
and to Oxford University each
to support the humanities or something of that kind
so that we have a completely different ethos in terms of what the expectation is
and the expectation that we can somehow or other
become
moneymakers and moneymakers for the universities
is one of the big shifts that has occurred.