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Notes From
the Editors
The Politics of
Capitalism
by Ellen Meiksins
Wood
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The strike was the first campus-wide challenge to Chancellor Shaw since he
took office in 1991. SU had welcomed its new chancellor with an extensive
renovation of the chancellor's nine- thousand-square-foot, twenty-room mansion.
Simultaneously, SU instituted a salary freeze for its staff and prepared a
restructuring plan that would cut 15 percent of SU's 4,300 employees and
thirty-eight million dollars out of its 452 million dollar annual budget by
1995.14 Nearly 20
percent of SU's tenured faculty—120 professors—opted for SU's
“supported resignation program.”
In February 1992, Shaw wrote in the Syracuse Herald American that
“in order to ensure their survival, institutions of higher learning must
now devote their energies to the enterprise of sausage making.”
Elaborating on this metaphor, Shaw observed: “Even with the most carefully
chosen and healthful ingredients—turkey, organic cereals, natural
spices—sausage making is an ugly process to witness. But after all the
slicing, chopping, blood and gore, the end product can be delicious, nutritious
and of remarkable quality. In short, America's colleges and universities must
now pursue—and a number of them, indeed, have already been forced to
begin—the kind of painful restructuring that is akin to sausage making and
has been taken up in earnest by many U. S. corporations, from Chrysler and IBM
to Time Inc. Ugly in the process, but, if done well, healthy in the
outcome.”15
The day after the essay appeared, Shaw presented the restructuring plan to
students and faculty in Hendricks Chapel. As he was speaking, a series of sharp
cutting noises suddenly rose from the central aisle. Joanna Spitzner, a
performing arts major, and Michael Waddell, an illustration major, were
kneeling on the chapel floor, slicing oranges on a cutting board.16 University security
quickly led the two SU seniors away. “The chancellor is very good at
talking around questions,” said Waddell afterwards. “It's pretty
pathetic to just let things happen.”17
Soon afterwards, students and professors at the School of Music occupied a
dean's office for a night to protest the cuts to their school; a dean, perhaps
a relic from a bygone age, angrily took issue with Shaw's sausage-making
metaphor.
Shaw took such reactions in stride. “Institutional restructuring, as
I've stated, resembles sausage making in its ugliness,” he wrote in his
sausage-making essay. “And institutions undergoing major changes will
experience a grief cycle just as individuals do, with phases of denial, anger,
bargaining, depression and acceptance. In reporting on educational
restructuring, the media will be able to report truthfully that faculty and
staff morale is at an all-time low, people have never been more vicious to one
another, and special interests have never been more in evidence. This should be
understood as an honest part of the sausage-making process and of the grief
cycle.”18
It was to restore the smooth functioning of an educational organization, to
help it cope with its grief cycle, that a corporate management strategy such as
Syracuse University Improving Quality (SUIQ) entered the picture. “Our
internal customers are first our students and also members of the faculty and
staff,” explained Shaw in his November 1991 convocation speech. “A
total quality management approach leads to knowing whom we serve and how we can
better serve them. It can lead to excellence in our processes and in the
product.”19
Thus, as employees lacked participation in the workplace and
outsour<%-2>cing deprived employees of even the fiction of institutional
identity, total quality management (TQM), with its emphasis on communication,
helped dissipate pent-up frustrations that might otherwise have turned nasty.
By “listening” to the worker, TQM allowed authoritarian universities
to appear caring, to create an illusion of participation and a semblance of
satisfaction in the workplace.
Union organizer Larry Alcoff said of SUIQ that “allegedly it is to
drive down decision- making to the point of production, to accept that the
people who do the work have the knowledge, and that we should draw on that and
flatten the bureaucracy.” In practice, SUIQ rigorously quantifies the
hours of training that employees undergo in a never-ending quest for quality
improvement. As Shaw explained to SU faculty, SUIQ “not only sought to
change the processes by which we serve and support our students, but also to
create a new mind-set ....”20
That new corporate mind-set was ultimately responsible for the strike at SU.
Most corporations exist primarily to make a profit. In contrast, a SU faculty
committee stated a decade ago that “the fundamental mission of Syracuse
University is to advance knowledge and to preserve and transmit humanity's
cultural heritage. It is through the continuing pursuit of this mission that
the University makes its essential and unique contribution to society.”
Faculty members typically oppose the importation of the corporate model into
the university. “Our students are referred to officially as
`customers',” said Sorkin in a tone of disbelief. “Can you imagine?
Customers!” Sorkin believes that a university ought “to be a
community of scholars dedicated to the search for truth, with a great concern
for the well- being of everyone in society.”
Philosophy professor Linda Martin Alcoff also deplores the supremacy of the
market at SU. “The philosophy department had to prove, like every
department, that we supported ourselves,” she said. “They had this
arcane system showing how many students were in your class and how much revenue
they provided, and then matching that with the revenues of the budget, which is
insane for a liberal arts institution, because you need some departments that
don't support themselves.”
Bill Readings, who taught at SU, describes the symbolic displacement of
culture in The University in Ruins: “Interestingly, during my time
at Syracuse, the University logo was changed. Instead of the academic seal with
its Latin motto affixed to University letterhead and other documents, a new,
explicitly “corporate” logo was developed, and the seal reserved
solely for official academic documents such as degree certificates. This seems
to me directly symptomatic of the reconception of the University as a
corporation, one of whose functions (products?) is the granting of degrees with
a cultural cachet, but whose overall nature is corporate rather than
cultural.”21
SU's corporate reorientation led to the recent suspension of graduate
programs in German, foreign language teaching, and humanities. The classics
department, reduced to only two professors, no longer offers graduate programs.
Classics professor Donald Mills laughed when requested to explain the
importance of classics to a liberal education. He asked, “Have you got
about three hours?”. If the purpose of university education is to prepare
one for the future, said Mills, then it helps to know where one has been. The
classical world, Mills observed, is the source of such words as `republic' and
`democracy,' and for the very concepts that those words denote. I pressed Mills
for a specific example of what the past might teach us. “The Roman
Republic came to an end,” said Mills, “when Roman politicians
discovered ways of using the judicial process to embarrass and humiliate their
opponents.”
As Mills sees it, universities, trying to justify their ever-increasing
tuition by convincing students that their degrees will lead to well-paying
jobs, are becoming vocational schools. “I personally rebel at that. I
think that's misguided,” Mills said. “I tell my students, freshmen in
particular, `you're here for four years. Your job is to get an education. After
that, you've got the rest of your life to find a job.'”
Mills recalled how the previous chancellor, Melvin Eggers, would often refer
to “our product.” In his 1988 address to the Greater Syracuse Chamber
of Commerce, Eggers said, “The private nature of their business may have
in the past made them wary of public government, but now the two are working in
a partnership. Business and education are now partners. It's clear that those
of us in higher education need you.22 The Chamber of Commerce was appreciative of
Eggers, and once named him “The Businessman of the Year.” “It
says so much,” Mills sighed.
In 1991, Shaw replaced Eggers on the board of the Greater Syracuse Chamber
of Commerce and became the vice president of the Metropolitan Development
Association (MDA) which provides tax abatements and other incentives for
corporations. MDA's president is none other than H. Douglas Barclay, the former
Republican State Senator who stepped down as chair of the SU trustee board in
May 1998.
In the material shift underway in higher education, skills training has
replaced the education needed for critical thinking, citizenship, or the
understanding of the human condition and the natural world. SU's future is
decidedly high-tech. The newly established Center for Really Neat Research
recently won a 1.6 million dollar contract from the Defense Advance Research
Projects Agency to help build a mine-detection system.23
Another recent innovation at SU is the Center for Study of Popular
Television. While the relationship of TV to corporate interests and the
destruction of communal bonds merit scrutiny, it is difficult to comprehend the
replacement of the classics with the study of popular television. The
predicament is summed up in the title of a new book from Syracuse University
Press: Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy and Long-Term
Memory Loss.
In The Moral Collapse of the University, Bruce Wilshire ponders the
implications of long-term memory loss:
The numbness and stasis and disconnectedness so often seen in
students are palpable and need to be explained and addressed. There seems to be
no sense of being part of history, of sharing a common venture with those in
power. The disintegration of a sense of historical community is amazing ...
Missing is any sense that anything is missing. Few students have ... a clear
awareness that there might be segments of human development which, when laid
down, lead up to themselves and point beyond, and for which they have
responsibility as the group of living human beings.24
Jamie McCallum, a sociology major and animal rights activist, is among the
few with such an awareness. McCallum edits a magazine called Conformicide and
covered the strike as a photographer for the Daily Orange. The employees who
clean floors and serve food represent for him the physical reality that makes
academic life possible at SU.
While McCallum regrets the “dearth of knowledge of the importance of
the labor movement and its relevance to students,” he believes that the
strike did much to create an awareness of labor history at SU. “The
university did not consider for one second the possibility that we as students
could learn more from the workers on strike than we could from the professors
in class,” said McCallum. “I can't tell you the number of kids that
went out and saw the people on strike and talked to them, and learned in
minutes the history of labor and how important it was to these people's
lives.” McCallum believes that SU needs alternative means of educating
students and collectivizing life on campus, including democracy teach-ins. His
concern for others, whether collecting food for strikers in Watertown or
handing out free vegetarian lunches with Food Not Bombs, demonstrates his
conviction about how he relates to others and sees himself.
Ultimately, the strike was about the search for identity, which made the
fight over outsourcing particularly bitter. Outsourcing deprives employees of
institutional identity, making them transients in the workplace. As
universities deprive their employees of identity, they strive to create an
illusion of identity for students and alumni. At Syracuse, pride in the
football and basketball teams goes well beyond the university. In a 1988
interview, then chancellor Eggers called SU's sports program “a vitality-
generating activity, vitality-sharing activity” that “does provide a
unifying theme, certainly more than anything I've seen in the community.”
SU's mascot, an orange ball with a face, looks as though it might have
escaped from an M&Ms commercial or a Tom Tomorrow cartoon strip. It is
supposed to represent the school spirit that has powered SU sports to great
heights. Sociology graduate student Katherine Gregory described the mascot's
omnipresence on campus as a sort of “forced frivolity.” “They're
reproducing identity through their sports, their athletic teams, and ... this
orange man, whatever it is,” she said. “They want to instill it in
their students so that they will eventually send their alumni checks.” In
a letter to Shaw in support of the strikers, Gregory wrote: “After years
of temporary positions at numerous institutions of higher education, on the
most personal level, I grasp the feeling of `disposability' in the workplace. I
spent over eight years without health insurance or benefits.”
While Gregory appears to have few illusions about the university in general,
or about SU in particular, she says that she came to SU in search of a
“refuge.” That search may well prove futile. At his convocation, Shaw
quoted the University of Pennsylvania's Robert Zemsky, who said: “We are
coming to the end of sanctuary. The end of a time in which America's colleges
and universities were sheltered from the cold winds that buffeted other
institutions.” Shaw then went on to say that SU was now “part of the
larger action” and that “clearly, `the end of sanctuary' includes
Syracuse.”25
One cannot help but be struck by the composition of the SU trustee board.
Missing are the historians, poets, artists, scientists, heads of cultural
institutions, and educators. SU trustees represent top investment firms, banks,
and power companies. Honorary trustees include Roy Bernardi, the mayor of
Syracuse, whose budget has devastated local schools and Governor George Pataki,
who enacted the largest higher education cuts in the history of New York State.
Professor Sorkin views the conflicts at SU as systemic rather than local.
“You think that some particular conjunction of events has happened at your
university, that some particular administrator got in and followed this
corporate model,” he said. “But every place you go, you find the
exact same phenomenon has occurred. The language is the same, the rationales
are the same. It would be interesting to see the mechanism by which this is
achieved.” Sorkin believes that a long-term process is underway “for
universities to be absorbed into the capitalist economy, into capitalist
culture, and the capitalist way of organizing things,” since “it's
natural for capitalism to penetrate every institution and reorganize it along
its own lines.” Gregory sees events at SU in a similar light. “What's
being said here is being said at a dozen universities throughout the northeast.
The same story. The same dehumanization,” she said.
Even so, faculty, employees and students speak of a new feeling in the air,
of exchanged looks of complicity in hallways, dining halls, and parking lots.
“They [the administration] thought the strike would fracture this campus,
but it has actually brought everyone together,” said union representative
Coert Bonthius.26
The union victory surpasses the guarantees in the new contract. The strike
ended the invisibility of those who clean the floors, prepare the food, mow the
lawns, and fix the heaters. It revived a sense of identity and community,
bringing Shahn's powerful compassion to our remembrance, and his mural to life.
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NOTES
- Martin H. Bush, Ben Shahn: The Passion of Sacco and
Vanzetti (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1968).
- Stan Pinkwas, “Ben Shahn: Portrait of the Artist,”
Daily Orange, March 4, 1968.
- Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step, (Pasadena, CA,
1923), p. 285.
- Unity News (SEIU Newsletter at SU), April 1998, p.
1.
- David H. Stam, “Annual Report. Syracuse University
Library. July 1996 to June 1997,” June 20, 1998, p. 7-8.
- Joy Davia, “SU Moves Into M-Street With Mall
Purchase,” Daily Orange, August 31, 1998, p. 12.
- Advertisement, Daily Orange, August 31, 1998, p.
6.
- “The Myth of the `Memo,'” Negotiation
News, September 3, 1998, p. 1.
- Sapna Kollali, “SU Faculty Hold Sit-In,” Daily
Orange, September 2, 1998,p. 1, 3.
- Dave Levinthal, “Strike Forum Features SU, Local
200A,” Daily Orange, September 2, 1998, p. 7.
- James Roscoe Day, My Neighbor The Working Man (New
York: The Abingdon Press, 1920), p. 101.
- Ibid, p. 372.
- “Memo Underscores SU's Commitment To Fairness,
Healing,” Negotiation News, Sept. 25, 1998, p. 2.
- Robert L. Smith, “Cutbacks Target SU Administration
Along With Academics,” Post- Standard, December 17, 1991,p. A4.
- Kenneth Shaw, “SU Aims To Cut With Finesse, Not
Brutality,” Syracuse Herald American, February 16, 1992, p. B7.
- “Searching for Words,” Syracuse New
Times, February 16-26, 1992.
- Frank Herron, “Downsizing SU,” Syracuse
Herald- Journal, February 18, 1992.
- Shaw, “SU Aims To Cut,” p. B7.
- Kenneth Shaw, “Building On Strength: Values For The
Future,” Syracuse Record, November 18, 1991, p. 9.
- Kenneth Shaw, “What Is Quality?” Syracuse
Record, September 23, 1996.
- Bill Readings, The University In Ruins
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), p. 10-11.
- Adriel Bettelheim, ”SU Chancellor Says Private,
Public Sectors Must Cooperate,” Syracuse Herald Journal, June 2,
1988.
- “Revolutionary Robotics,” Syracuse
University Magazine, Fall 1998, p. 5.
- Bruce Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the
University (Albany: SUNY Albany Press, 1990), p. 11-12.
- Shaw, “Building On Strength,” p. 7.
- Sapna Kollali, “Faculty Leads Chapel
Protest,” Daily Orange, September 3, 1998, p. 1, 3.
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