RORY MACLEAN
News Editor

Universities are failing their faculty and students by adopting a corporate model antithetic to the goals of higher education, says University of Saskatchewan professor Howard Woodhouse.

Woodhouse’s new book, Selling Out: Academic Freedom and the Corporate Market, is a scathing overview of the modern university.

“The regime of the market model of education has to cease,” said Woodhouse, in a Jan. 21 interview. “I don’t think the imagination of students or faculty, in general, is engaged enough.”

The steady decline in government funding since the 1980s has led the university to fill the budget shortfall with corporate funding, slowly eroding academic autonomy, he said.

Increased competition for scarce funding resources has led universities to adopt a corporate model themselves, courting students like businesses court customers, writes Woodhouse, a professor of educational foundations.

In Selling Out, Woodhouse describes the relationship between students and the university. The perception of students as clients has resulted in the now-widespread use of student evaluations in decisions such as awarding tenure, renewal of probation, promotion and right of first refusal.

Student evaluations of teaching “tend to indicate ”˜customer satisfaction’ rather than the extent to which learning has taken place, and they are an inaccurate measure of the quality of a professor’s teaching.”

According to Woodhouse’s research, neither students nor faculty believe in the effectiveness of student evaluations, despite their growing impact in administrative decisions.

Underfunding has also caused rising tuition costs and inflated class sizes. Students now perceive themselves as customers, coming to class demanding results.

“You’d say, ”˜I’m not getting what I paid for,’ ” said Woodhouse.

On the research side, Selling Out outlines a shift in emphasis toward projects with the potential to bring goods and services to market and away from curiosity-based research.

Government research dollars are increasingly tied to projects done in partnership with groups in the private sector who will offer to match funds, he said.

This can erode the autonomy of university researchers.

“They can set the goals and the nature of the research,” he said.

Research in the fields of the humanities and social sciences has been particularly affected.

There is less and less money for research in the humanities and social sciences, causing professors to spend more time dreaming up ways of connecting their current research to business applications rather than nurturing their imaginations, charges Woodhouse.

“How can I reframe what I’m doing to make it related to business? How can I use my study of John Donne’s poetry to improve the marketability of books?” said Woodhouse. “If it weren’t so disastrous it would be laughable.”

Woodhouse also comes out critically against the Canadian Light Source. He fears that the synchrotron — paid for largely with public funds — will be used by private corporations to withhold socially valuable discoveries from the public.

For example, patent laws controlling intellectual property allow pharmaceutical companies to control new drug discoveries, inflating prices.

“The Canadian Institute for Health Information estimates that per capita costs for prescription drugs across Canada have grown by 15.4 per cent, from $537 in 2001 to $620 in 2003,” he writes.

Woodhouse is concerned because the facilities used for much of this research are paid for by public funds. If the public foots the bill, they have an interest in the research findings. Discoveries in the health sciences should be freely shared for the public good, he argues.

It might be more acceptable if private researchers could at least pay for the operations of the Canadian Light Source, he writes, but even the regular operation of the facility requires constant injections of public money. The synchrotron has a mandated limit of 25 per cent private for-pay research capacity, but in 2007 less than 10 per cent of users were from private companies.

The Canadian Light Source draws less than a 10th of its operating budget from private users, depending on federal funds for the rest, writes Woodhouse.

This is Woodhouse’s main contention — that a research facility the public paid to build and must pay to keep running could actually be used to create intellectual property for private companies instead of the public good.

Research should be about the advancement and dissemination of shared knowledge, says Woodhouse.

No love for the corporations

Brett Fairbairn, U of S provost and vice-president academic, bristles at the notion that the U of S has completely adopted a market model.

To Fairbairn, being a corporation isn’t such a bad thing.

“When people talk about the corporatization of the university I always think the word is really interesting because I’m a historian. Universities are actually the first corporate bodies. They were actually corporate entities before businesses were corporate entities,” he said.

Perceptions of the word corporation have changed, he said.

“When people talk about corporate behaviour, to me that’s very specifically about profit maximization and that is not what universities do.

“We’re a business, but only in the sense that everything is a business,” said Fairbairn. “You could say a family is a business. We do have income and we have expenditures. We’re an organization and we need resources to do the things we do.”