For anyone that has been on a college campus in the last ten years, it is impossible to ignore the signs of increasing corporate influence-buildings named after corporate donors, omnipresent soft drink vending machines, food courts full of fast food restaurants, and bulletin boards announcing job fairs sponsored by corporations looking to hire interns. Consequently, Jennifer Washburn's University Inc, outlining the growing “corporate corruption” of education, seems like it was an almost inevitable book. Back in April, Media Mouse mentioned the book in a news update about the corporate influence on college campuses and as a result, was eager to read the book.
Washburn begins the book discussing how the popular dialog regarding colleges in the United States has focused on the topic of “political correctness” and whether or not universities are havens for “leftists,” rather than looking at what she considers a more serious problem-the growing influence of corporations. Washburn traces much of this new corporate influence to the pivotal Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 that enabled universities to patent federally funded research and license it to private company in exchange for royalties. In the twenty-five years since 1980, there has been a ten-fold increase in university-generated patents, while industry funding has expanded at a rate of 8.1% annually. This has been a boon for universities with major research institutions earning millions of dollars in revenue from licensed products (frequently medical drugs), yet has come at the expense of the university's traditional role in benefiting the public good. Washburn exhaustively demonstrates this in each chapter, detailing stories of deaths caused from new medications that had dangerous side-effects covered up, university administrators firing professors that criticized the corporate relationships or expressed doubts about the efficacy of various drugs, the patenting of basic research techniques needed to make further discoveries, and a host of other problems.
In detailing the corporate influence on research and development at major universities, Washburn in many ways chooses a focus that is too narrow. Washburn either ignores or briefly mentions many of the ways in which corporate influence is growing on campuses. Little attention is given to the prevalence of corporate chain restaurants on college campuses and how those companies labor practices reflect on colleges (this became an issue when students participated in a boycott of Taco Bell due to the way workers picking tomatoes were treated) or how university food service has been privatized Aramark at many schools. There is no mention of how many school bookstores are now operated by chains such as Barnes and Noble, there is no mention of the corporate textbook industry, or the fierce competition for athletic licensing contracts with companies such as Nike and Reebok. Washburn's focus on research contracts, while certainly eye-opening, only identifies one aspect of the corporate influence on campus.
Indeed, the concluding chapter, in which Washburn focuses on the use of adjunct professors and graduate assistants as a way of freeing up research time for “star” professors that are able to attract corporate funding, that is the most interesting. Classes at elite universities are taught by overworked adjuncts and TA's while the universities make millions from research relationships between professors and corporations, highlighting the fact that corporate influence has had a direct impact on how universities exercise their most important function-educating society. While this important point is easily inferred throughout Washburn's book, it occasionally gets lost amid the often tedious method in which story after story is used to describe the negative impacts of corporate involvement in research and development.
Jennifer Washburn, University Inc: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education, (Basic Books, 2004).
