The University in the Twenty-First Century

There are at least two reasons it is important to experiment, critically and creatively, with the institution of the university at this particular moment in its history. In the chapter 'The Rise of the Global University' in his 2009 book, Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross predicts that it is only a matter of time before we see the beginnings of a global university on the 'model of the global corporation' such as News Corporation, Time Warner, Coca-Cola, Elsevier, and Pearson. He proceeds to present a somewhat gloomy vision of the future for universities if, in their drive to be ever more business-like and profit-orientated, they continue to follow the corporate model:

In this labor-intensive industry (the majority of education costs go to teaching labor), the instructional budget is where an employer will seek to minimize costs first, usually by introducing distance learning or by hiring offshore instructors at large salary discounts. Expatriate employees — assigned to set up an offshore facility, train locals, and provide credibility for the brand — will be a fiscal liability to be offloaded at the first opportunity. If the satellite campus is located in the same industrial park as Fortune 500 firms, then it will almost certainly be invited to produce customized research for these companies, again at discount prices. It will only be a matter of time before an administrator decides that it will be cost-effective to move some domestic research operations to the overseas branch to save money.

As far as the domestic record goes, higher education institutions have followed much the same trail as subcontracting in industry — first, the outsourcing of all non-academic campus personnel, then the casualization of routine instruction, followed by the creation of a permatemps class on short-term contracts, and the preservation of an ever-smaller core of tenure-track full-timers, crucial to the brand prestige of the collegiate name. Downward salary pressure and eroded job security are the inevitable upshot.

As Ross's account of the U.S. domestic situation suggests, we should take care not to console ourselves too quickly with the thought that such globalised corporate scenarios belong to an as yet still distant future. In fact just one year after the publication of Nice Work If You Can Get It, an article in the U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education detailed how the director of business law and ethics studies at the University of Houston was outsourcing the grading of undergraduate papers to Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., whose employees are mostly in Asia:

The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task — and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's [teaching assistants] can. The graders working for