The Unintended Consequences of the Countercultural Movement of the 1960s

Abstract

Since the 1960s, the American milieu has evolved in a way that is at once more tolerant, humane, and progressive on the social and cultural fronts and yet more darkly threatening, unforgiving, and malevolent in our economic and business lives. This article offers a single explanation accounting for these two seemingly divergent phenomena. The all-pervasive, unrelenting power of marketing ideology, with its laser-like focus on the consumer and customer satisfaction, is cited as a contributing agent of change in how the affairs of our public institutions, including universities, are now being conducted.

Keywords

culture marketing concept macromarketing education consumer culture

Introduction: American Culture is a Strange Thing

The decade of the 1960s was a chapter in the American experience characterized by artistic exploration, cultural creativity, and social experimentation. It was also one of societal upheaval when the very foundation of nearly every institution, convention, and tradition was called into question. It was a period when David Truman, the Provost of Columbia University, told a group of students “all education should be subversive,” and when demonstrators at the University of Minnesota carried placards urging “down with everything that’s up.” Indeed, it was a decade when all kinds of roles – gender, race, and class – were challenged in new and ultimately subversive ways. What is clear 50 years later, however, is that while the decade of the 1960s has left an indelible and enduring mark on American life, the exact nature of that mark is ambiguous and poorly understood. Seen from a vantage point five decades on, an important question might be raised: since the 1960s, why has the progressive impulse triumphed so conclusively in the cultural and social areas of American life, but been so utterly and decisively routed on the business and economic fronts?

One central argument of this commentary is that the same energies animating and informing the countercultural left over the last half century have also galvanized and focused the economic right. Because this assertion might appear to contain contradictory elements, this article provides an analysis of the larger social forces behind these seemingly divergent phenomena. As background for the discussion, several factors leading to one of the more widely reported student uprisings from the 1960s are adduced to broaden our understanding of the social and cultural context of the forces unleashed at the time.

A second argument is that a society-wide enchantment with a radical form of individualism – along with the attendant embrace of an extreme free-market ideology with its over-application of the marketing concept – has been a significant contributing agent of change in attitudes towards the socio-cultural and business-economic aspects of American life.

A final argument is that this attitudinal change – marked by the near evangelical zeal with which Americans are now committed to the sanctity of marketplace solutions and free consumer choice – has inevitably led to the resulting invasion by commercial impulses into those areas, like the university, where, in former times, they would have been considered irrelevant and inappropriate.

Some Ancient History

Despite the turbulence of the helter-skelter 1960s, many people involved at the time in the various social movements harbored a hope, even a belief, that the future would be a more kind-hearted and open-minded period than the past had been. They expected more equality between the races and across the genders, less economic inequality and poverty, and greater access to housing, healthcare, education and employment opportunities, regardless of a person’s socioeconomic circumstances. Society would also hold a more tolerant and relaxed view toward all types of unusual lifestyles, speech, artistic expression, and even some recreational forms of drug use. Emerging from the period when “revolution was in the air” came the conviction that the future was destined to be a more humanely enlightened period than the past had been.

And so it has been. The decade of the 1960s has left its enduring stamp on American life in many ways. A half century later, many of the hoped-for changes have indeed come to fruition on the cultural and social fronts: more women than men now attend universities; gay married couples are now seen as commonplace while unmarried opposite-sex couples openly cohabitate, and even raise children, without facing any social disapprobation; states have begun to legalize the use of recreational marijuana; and an African American has been elected for two terms as the U.S. President. The extent of the cultural and social changes occurring in U.S. society since the 1960s has no doubt exceeded even the most optimistic forecasts of those involved in the ferment of the times.

Yet this progressive momentum has been confined mostly to the cultural and social realms of American life. Evolution in the areas of business and economics has not been nearly so humanistically informed. If anything, the economic arrangements characterizing American life today have regressed to something resembling those from the 1890s or 1920s when a red-tooth-and-claw, winner-take-all form of free-market capitalism defined the day. Today, a greed-is-good ethic is widely accepted not only as normal, but also as a standard of behavior that so many of our students embrace. They unquestioningly accept that the principle of noblesse oblige – once so common among public-spirited business, political, and academic leaders – has been displaced by something more darkly cynical and rapaciously sinister. Today, we are now encouraged to manage ourselves as brands, win through intimidation, and self-promote shamelessly in ever new and more dispiriting ways. Those who are less fortunate in this competitive, dog-eat-dog modus vivendi are dismissed as morally defective losers who are largely if not entirely responsible for their own bad luck.

What might account for this puzzling bifurcation in the American sensibility over the last five decades? In this author’s view, the triumph of radical individualism has brought about a seemingly schizophrenic divergence between the socio-cultural and economic-business realms in today’s America. Emerging from the ethos of the Me Generation of the 1960s has been an implicit but nonetheless real covenant between the elements of the live-and-let-live counterculture of the left and the button-down business establishment of the right. Both types of individuals – the bohemians, free-spirits and nonconformists as well as the corporate raiders, financial speculators, and predatory lenders – have been freed to do their own thing without fear of consequences, either from the larger society or from the government. In this nihilistic, Ayn Randian world, where no one is anyone’s keeper and few seriously believe that they will be judged by how they treat the least among us, anything goes. Just as society’s apostates and dropouts are now given free rein to indulge the hedonistic pleasures of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll to their hearts’ content, so are businesspeople free to pursue private financial gain without concern for the impact their actions may have on others, the environment, or subsequent generations. Thus, these two seemingly disparate phenomena are essentially two sides of the same coin.

A Question of Culture

That this phenomenon has manifested in so many different venues suggests that something more powerful is lurking behind the scenes, something more of a cultural nature. As we explore this line of reasoning, it is useful to define exactly what is meant by culture. A serviceable definition has been offered by the sociologist Daniel Bell (1996, p. xv): “Culture…is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential predicaments that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives.” The cultural change that occurred in American life can be characterized as a turning away from the view that we as citizens share a common bond, that we live interconnectedly with one another, and that we bear some level of personal responsibility for the maintenance of the commons of our society even if that involves some degree of self-restraint, even self-sacrifice, on the part of each citizen. Instead, it is radical individualism that now provides, as Bell might say, a coherent set of answers for both the Masters of the Universe in the business world as well as for erstwhile Flower Children of the Age of Aquarius.

Indeed, this turning away has manifested in one area of American life after another. The same forces that have infected the domains of arts management, broadcast and print journalism, healthcare provision, prison management, public broadcasting, religious institutions, and military services have also invaded our educational institutions. Commonly cited among the most worrisome indicators of the corruption of our system of higher education are the widespread embrace of a trade-school educational philosophy by administrators and faculty members, the obsessive careerism of the students, and the infiltration by corporate interests of university laboratories, classrooms, and (especially) academic policy decision-making. Since the 1960s, the symptoms of this problem have metastasized both in kind and intensity until many members of the academy are unaware of their existence, and unaware that it was ever different.

What’s Up With Our Universities?

In view of this, many have spoken and written passionately about what they see as the debasement by commercial impulses of the culture of not only our public institutions, but also of the university-as-a-community-of-scholars. Author and journalist, Christopher Hedges, has spoken to this issue with prescience and spiritedness for more than a decade. At a 2011 panel discussion, he said:

We are seeing the utter collapse of the educational system, both in terms of public education and in terms of private education because these universities fall all over themselves for money. College presidents are chosen and rewarded solely on their ability to raise money, and most of the people they raise money from should be in jail…. These people don’t understand human nature. There is nothing in 3,000 years of history to support the absurd idea that we should be ruled by the dictates of the marketplace. It’s almost utopian in its vision (Hedges 2011) (italics added).

Neither has this problem been ignored by those most directly affected by it, including faculty members themselves. Drawing on his decades-long experience as a marketing professor, Morris Holbrook (2005a, 2005b, 2007, 2009, 2011) has catalogued an extensive list of examples of how this change has manifested not only in the university, but also in our larger society. Nor have only marketing professors voiced this concern. Others, including sociologists Stanley Aronowitz and Cutler (1998), have cautioned about the dangers of the encroaching power of markets and marketing in the education system. And Berkeley professor of public policy, David Kirp (2004), raised several still-timely questions about the direction taken by the university. Is it a good thing to turn a humanities program into a profit center? Is it reasonable to expect a professor to grade a student in any meaningful way if the student sees herself as a customer who pays her professor’s salary? Is it possible to deflect the efforts by corporations to influence the type of research its faculty conduct? Clearly, alarm over the state of the academy has spread far beyond its departments of marketing and schools of business and management.

Free-Market Ideology and the Marketing Concept

These days, few question the economic benefits enjoyed by those societies that have adopted free-market capitalism as their economic system. This is especially the case in the United States where the philosophic and ideological underpinnings of capitalism are most congruent with the highly individualist nature of the people. Many Americans firmly believe that free-markets, and the role of free consumer choice, are essential features of our nation’s form of modern, advanced democracy. Indeed, they equate consumer choice and free-markets with freedom itself (see Schwarzkopf 2011).

The track record of free-market capitalism seems to bear this out. On average, the countries where free markets play the most prominent and long-standing role have higher than average personal incomes, a higher material standard of living, and much more freedom of consumer choice. Resources are more efficiently and effectively directed to the most productive agents of wealth creation, and that wealth is distributed more equally, if imperfectly, across larger swaths of society.

One of the elements most responsible for the success of free-markets everywhere has been the transformative role played by marketing. Not only has marketing provided a guiding operational philosophy for many business managers, it has also endowed customers with a greater voice about and authority over the kinds of products and services those businesses ultimately produce and sell. Levitt (1960) suggested that it is the customer, not the manager, who decides which businesses survive – and thrive. Whereas in former times marketing had been concerned with issues of production and distribution, marketing students (at least since the 1960s) have been taught that any business that ignores the marketing concept – one aspect of which is to identify and fill customer needs and not simply try to sell products – does so at its own risk. The emphasis is now on meeting customer needs, not on selling what the business is willing and able to produce. Levy and Luedicke (2012, p. 60) summed up the evolving role of marketing during the 1960s: “The radical turn from selling material to satisfying consumer desires sparked an inevitable progression from an ideology of marketing as a function concerned with distribution, toward an ideology of marketing as a concept concerned with customer orientation.” Thus the marketing concept has become both a principle that informs the thinking of today’s managers as well as a world view that has migrated into the sensibility of customers themselves who for many years have been told, and not only by Burger King, to “have it your way.” In many respects, this is a success story. That producers are now more solicitous about meeting their customers’ needs is usually a good thing.

The Newly Emergent Model of the University-as-a-Business

As the authors cited above argue, the evidence seems clear that an overly zealous application of the marketing concept in the context of higher education can result in lower quality outcomes not only for the university-provider but also for the student. Even so, many of the university’s most influential “interested parties” are committed to the view that universities should be ruled by the dictates of the marketplace (to borrow Hedge’s phrasing) because universities are no different from any other business organization that must satisfy the needs of their stakeholders – whether they are corporations, donors, alumni, politicians, or students. Indeed many universities today not only treat their students as customers but also have adopted many management practices from the business models of the corporate world.

Starting in the late 1960s, the abandonment of the university-as-a-community-of-scholars archetype for the university-as-a-business model started innocently and innocuously enough. At many universities, the motivation behind the embrace of a more corporate business model, including the adoption of the marketing concept, was driven by simple economics. Many administrators realized that their school’s financial endowments were generating a diminishing share of the revenues required to keep their institutions operating in the normal way, and accordingly faced an ever-greater pressure to acquire, retain, and satisfy tuition-paying students. Thus, enter the marketing concept. By the 1980s, the country became enthralled by the political philosophy of President Ronald Reagan (1981), “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1987), “There is no such thing as society; there are only individual men and women.” State legislatures started reducing public financial support both to their own state university systems as well as to their states’ own private colleges. This implied, among other things, that many institutions would move away from a full-time tenured faculty model to one relying more heavily on the use of under-paid adjunct instructors. Bizarrely, it has also given rise to the phenomena of the academic-department-as-profit-center by which those departments that cannot show they make a positive contribution to the institution’s financial bottom line risk elimination. Naturally, this new criteria for survival put many departments – among them the classics, philosophy, humanities, and even many language programs – in jeopardy. For other universities, the transition to the university-as-a-business model was set in motion once the students, followed by the donors, wanted a more prominent voice in the university’s decisions. By the 1980s, the allure of the marketing concept to university administrators grew ever stronger.

A Case Study: The Experience of One University

To take a closer glimpse at the genesis of the university-as-a-business phenomenon, consider the 1968 Columbia student uprising. In particular, we consider four questions: What was the university like before the insurrection? What was behind the insurrection and how did it unfold? How did it play out in the short term? What are the lasting effects? This episode is referenced for three reasons. First, it was an early attempt by students to make their voices heard in the university’s decision-making, an early expression of what later morphed into the student-as-customer phenomenon. In general, Columbia students in the 1960s were more solicitous than today’s students to macro-level issues such as poverty, racism, the Vietnam War, sexism, environmental exploitation, and government/corporate intrusion into the lives of private individuals, and in this, those attending Columbia were typical of students at many universities. Second, at the time, the Columbia uprising received a disproportionately generous amount of news coverage because it occurred in New York, where most of the country’s media are located, and because Columbia is one of eight universities comprising the Ivy League, a collection of universities distinguished more by serious scholarship and intellectual inquiry than by riots and building-occupations. The uprising at Columbia was not particularly noteworthy because it came earliest. It did not. There were student demonstrations, some quite violent, at the Universities of California, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa years before student turmoil erupted on the Columbia campus. Nor was the Columbia insurrection particularly violent, though skulls were cracked, noses bloodied, and students arrested and subsequently suspended. Finally, this part of the story is referenced at Columbia during the long-ago spring of 1968 because the author himself participated in one of the building occupations. Therefore, much of what is related below is of an anecdotal and eyewitness nature.

What Was the University Like Before the Insurrection?

Fifty years ago, the majority of faculty and administrators held a product-oriented philosophy that manifested as a sort of we-know-what’s-best face to the world both within as well as outside the university. Many administrators were faculty members themselves, and naturally they made academic policy decisions with the interests of the faculty in mind. Notably, however, students were seldom if ever considered as customers, but rather as raw young recruits – in the same way the military no doubt viewed the newly-enlisted who at the time were being shipped off to fight in Vietnam. One student involved in the Columbia insurrection was told during an interview with the university’s then-Vice Provost, Herbert Deane, that when students express their views about university administrative decisions, those views are of no more interest to him than if the students had said they liked strawberries (Kunen 1969). Faculty also tended to hold such authoritarian views toward students. These were the days when few professors bothered to provide course syllabi. Moreover, today’s ubiquitous student course evaluations were utterly unknown because neither the faculty nor the administration much cared what the students thought. In their view, the students were fortunate even to be there. If they did not like it, there were plenty of other universities they might attend, and there were at least a dozen others students who would happily take their place in the following year’s entering class. Clearly, the marketing concept was not alive and well at Columbia during the late 1960s.

What Was Behind the Insurrection And How Did It Unfold?

On April 23, 1968, students began what became a nearly weeklong occupation of five university buildings, including Low Library, the main administration building (see Figure 1). Among the reasons cited for the uprising were (1) Columbia’s ties to the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) in the service of weapons research connected to the Vietnam War effort; (2) Columbia’s heavy-handed approach to dealing with the residents in its neighboring community, particularly in Harlem; and (3) Columbia administration’s authoritarian manner of dealing with its students. What had begun as a peaceful demonstration by fewer than 200 students at the sundial – a central feature of the Columbia campus where student speakers traditionally hold forth on the various issues of the day – soon erupted into something larger and more spirited when the group marched en masse to the construction site of the new but controversial gymnasium being erected in Morningside Park, two blocks to the east. When they got there, they attempted to pull down the chain-link fence protecting the site, clashing with officers of the New York Police Department who were guarding it. One student was arrested. Undeterred, most of the demonstrators returned to the campus to occupy Hamilton Hall, the main classroom and administration building of the men’s undergraduate college. That night, in the face of escalating intra-group disputes, the occupants agreed to separate into two factions with the African American students staying on in Hamilton, the white students departing for Low Library and, later, for three other buildings. The uprising, which was marked by clashes between the building occupiers, university officials and (even) with other student groups, lasted for six days when, in the early morning hours of April 30, roughly 1,000 NYPD officers stormed the campus, violently evicting most of the demonstrators. In the end, 132 students, 4 faculty, and 12 police officers were injured; roughly 700 students were arrested; and 30 students suspended.

Figure 1.

Students hold a demonstration outside of Low Library, Columbia’s main administration building, April 1968. Image used with permission of Frank da Cruz. This and other images are available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1968/fotosyrecuerdos/.

How Did the Insurrection Play Out in the Short Term?

In the short term, Columbia parted company with the IDA. It also abandoned the construction of the gymnasium in Morningside Park. Most of the suspended students were readmitted the following fall semester. Significantly, a University Senate was established in 1969 that extended membership not only to faculty and administrators, but to students as well. Thus, for the first time in Columbia’s history, students would have a voice in the university’s decision-making.

What Are the Lasting Effects?

Columbia now finds itself in the same undignified position as other universities buffeted by the winds of change that have swept the land during the last five decades, and, accordingly, it has evolved from a cloistered ivory tower of fervent intellectual scholarship where students as well as faculty might pursue learning for learning’s sake to just another customer-friendly business organization. In fact, Columbia’s administrators now seem to feel they have little choice but to adopt many of the managerial practices of corporate business models, including but not limited to the treatment of their students as valuable tuition-paying customers whose views on education dare not be ignored.

A Marketing Concept-Inflected Ideology Has Invaded Academic Sensibilities

Over time, the old-fashioned, almost quaint operating assumption that the faculty own the curriculum has been displaced by the conviction, on the part of administrators and even some faculty, that the students be consulted on what and how they will learn in their academic programs. Nowhere is this more manifestly true than in our schools of business where students predictably cling most fervently to a customer-is-always-right worldview. In a recent New York Times article, Seligson (2014) notes, “In many MBA programs, lifestyle experiences are gaining on academic ones in importance” because, according to one first-year Harvard Business School student, “an MBA is very different from a law or medical degree; the MBA is designed for networking purposes.” Holbrook (2013) reports the lament by one of his Columbia MBA students in the end-of-term course evaluation: “I knew I would hate this class from day one when I looked at the course outline, saw that the topics and readings had already been selected, and realized that there would be no opportunity for me to shape the material in accord with my own needs and wants.” Nor is this a problem plaguing only the elite MBA programs. Glenn (2011) quotes Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard Business School professor, who states “business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters.” Although Khurana first saw this attitude emerge in MBA programs, he says that it is now well established in undergraduate business programs as well.

What has been the result of the embrace of the marketing concept and the resulting abandonment by business schools of the rigorous academic standards they once defined and upheld? Glenn cites the results of a study conducted by sociologists Richard Arum and Roska (2011) indicating “that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT…. they score lower than students from every other major.” Glenn concludes by reporting what one undergraduate, a senior accounting major with a 3.30 grade-point average, describes as his approach to classwork and the typical workday:

it seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that. (In a typical day) I just play sports, maybe go to the gym. Eat. Probably drink a little bit. Just kind of goof around all day.

And yet in an all-out, full-court press to maximize student-customer satisfaction, the tools of marketing research are now applied routinely in the classroom itself. Lewin (2012) reports,

many professors with large lecture classes swear by clickers that help them keep tabs on how well their students are following the material. Some online courses include dashboards that let professors see which students are stuck, and where. And thousands of professors use some variation of an… approach, in which, at the end of each class, students write down the most important thing they learned that day---and the biggest question left unanswered.

Long gone are the days when students were called on by inspired and inspiring faculty to show an absolute commitment to excellence in the day-to-day performance of their coursework responsibilities.

While the effort to improve the quality of instruction is laudable, even necessary in some instances, one might ask at what point have faculty reached diminishing returns to all these efforts? Sadly, with student-customers and fearful administrators now pressuring faculty to dumb down academic standards – and monitor and manage every mood, whim, and episode of student ennui, while they are at it – no one should be surprised by what the marketing concept has led to when misapplied in an inappropriate context such as the classroom.

Nor have those academic departments far removed from their campus’ schools of business avoided the pressure of the student-as-customer marketplace. Levitz and Belkin (2013) report “the humanities division at Harvard University, for centuries a standard-bearer of American letters, is attracting fewer undergraduates amid concerns about the degree’s value in a rapidly changing job market,” and an internal report at Harvard “suggests the division aggressively market itself to freshmen and sophomores, create a broader interdisciplinary framework to retain students and build an internship network to establish the value of the degree in the workplace.” Less financially well-endowed universities that cannot afford to finance a turnaround of their humanities programs are simply closing them down instead. For example, recently Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (Lewin 2013) eliminated the degree programs offered by the philosophy, German, and world languages and culture departments.

Hey Professor: If You’re So Smart, Why Ain’t You Rich?

The society-wide enthrallment with marketplace solutions and the conviction that the marketing concept always, in every place and every time, produces the best outcomes has contributed to this lamentable state of affairs in today’s university. The impact of this enthrallment, however, now reaches even further than what has been described above. Consider what happened when wealthy, politically well-connected individuals attempted to meddle in the affairs of one of the nation’s oldest and most highly regarded public institutions, the University of Virginia. In the summer of 2012, the Rector of the University’s governing board (a real estate developer) and two influential donor alumni (both hedge-fund billionaires) designed, or at least supported, the ouster of the University’s popular and widely-respected president, Teresa Sullivan. While no specific reason was given by anyone on the Board for the forced removal of Dr. Sullivan, an email message from one of the coup leaders offered some general insight into the thinking:

The decision of the Board of Visitors to move in another direction stems from their concern that the governance of the University was not sufficiently tuned to the dramatic changes we all face: funding, Internet, technology advances, the new economic model. These are matters for strategic dynamism rather than strategic planning (Vaidhyanathan 2012).

Although President Sullivan was soon rehired after a firestorm of protest swept across faculty, student, and alumni constituencies, a question remains about why the Rector and a small group of influential wealthy donors felt qualified and empowered to take such a drastic step. Vaidhyanathan (2012) attempts to answer this question:

In the 19^th century, robber barons started their own private universities when they were not satisfied with those already available. But Leland Stanford never assumed his university should be run like his railroad empire. Andrew Carnegie did not design his institute in Pittsburgh to resemble his steel company. The University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller’s dream come true, assumed neither his stern Baptist values nor his monopolist strategies. That’s because for all their faults, Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller knew what they didn’t know. (But) in the 21^st century, robber barons try to usurp control of established public universities to impose their will via comical management jargon and massive application of ego and hubris. At some point in recent American history, we started assuming that if people are rich enough, they must be experts in all things.

The reason that wealthy, politically well-connected people think they have the right to interfere in the operation of America’s universities is that they “think of universities as a collection of market transactions” (Vaidhyanathan 2012), which should be run like any other business with customer needs to meet. Since they make large financial contributions to the university that administrators are all too happy to accept, they naturally believe they are acting within their rights when weighing in on decisions that in former times were made by the administrators and faculty of the institution.

Conclusion: A Message To Faculty

The 1960’s era student uprisings did not cause the changes sweeping American society at the time. At most, they only helped unloose the avalanche that was already well underway by the time of the Columbia insurrection. This avalanche took the form of a collective tour de force that has materialized as an unspoken, even unacknowledged contract between the self-indulgently hedonistic elements of the left and the tirelessly, insatiably acquisitive constituents of the right that has liberated both types of individuals to pursue their respective self-interest without concern for repercussion or social stigma. Radical individualism has carried the day, and the results of this tectonic shift form the structure of the world we live in today. Among the most significant and enduring aspects of this shift has been the society-wide embrace of a radical form of free-market ideology with its over-application of the marketing concept in areas where it is manifestly inappropriate and irrelevant. However, a central argument here is that this widespread adoption of management practices and business models in the academy has done little else but accelerate the race-to-the-bottom in terms of the quality of outcomes, both for the university-provider as well as for the student.

The faculty themselves bear at least some of the responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs. In former times, faculty saw themselves more as citizens of a university community than as members of a field of academic specialization. However, for at least the last 40 years, faculty have concerned themselves far more with publications, conferences, and editorial and reviewer responsibilities that consumed considerable time, energy, and attention than with running their universities. Sadly, while faculty strained to establish and solidify their positions within their fields of specialization – while the professoriate took their eye off the ball – a new breed of administrator invaded and then seized control of the university with the result that the faculty forfeited their power to influence decision-making and policy-setting. Unless and until faculties make a concerted effort to re-establish their voice in the university’s administrative life, decisions will continue to be made by the administrators, the politicians, the hedge-fund managers, and even the students. Until then, we have only changed the face of those assaulting academic values, not the intensity of it.

Ms. Vicky Prince, the outgoing Vice President of Arts and Sciences at Columbia, spoke with eloquence and authority to this issue while addressing senior faculty and administrators in attendance at her retirement party. After many decades of service at the University, beginning just after the 1968 student insurrection and concluding in 2007, she was in a position to bear witness to the changes, bad as well as good, that had occurred in the life of the University. In the rotunda of Columbia’s Low Library, at the very same spot occupied by those students participating in the insurrection four decades earlier, she issued a warning to the faculty members in attendance (quoted by permission):

I know you are not interested in politics. How pleasant it is, after all, to treat all politics of whatever kind with utter contempt, to dance, to love, to drink, and sleep…the only thing is that while you are loving and sleeping, others are busy making handcuffs to fit you. You, the tenured faculty, don’t want to be bothered with the administration and the management of Columbia. You want to go into the classroom to teach, into the laboratory to do research, into the library to write. You want to leave the ‘business’ of the University to others. But beware, because others may be busy changing the business of the University. And, anyway, you are the business of the University! You must participate in the running of the institution.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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