Social Justice and the University

Globalization, Human Rights and the Future of Democracy

J. Shefner, H. Dahms, R. Jones, A. Jalata, J. Shefner, H. Dahms, R. Jones, A. Jalata

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137289377
• eBook ISBN: 9781137289384
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Can universities continue to play a major role in advancing social justice today? This volume illuminates key aspects of social justice as a theoretical project and as a set of practical challenges. Authors address related issues from the perspectives of active practitioners in the context of or from close proximity to universities.

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Introduction

Globalization and the University—A Path to Social Justice

Robert Emmet Jones and Jon Shefner

For the past 35 years, every political, economic, and cultural institution around the world has been defined in part by globalization. Universities in the United States, like those elsewhere, have seen a variety of challenges and opportunities emerge because of globalization and the ways states and other actors have chosen to respond to globalization. This book brings together a variety of perspectives about how globalization has influenced universities in the United States, especially in regard to university conceptions of and efforts to pursue social justice.

Social justice is a central concern of this volume for a variety of reasons. First, we address social justice because much of the effect of globalization has resulted in declining resource pools for many universities. Declining resources in turn pose important, usually negative, implications for the varied constituencies of universities. Second, economic inequality has increased across the past decades, and those increases may be traced to the influences of globalization. Third, universities have histories as actors responding to inequality and striving for social justice. That history is by no means unambiguous. Certainly, there are many universities that have acted contrary to the pursuit of social justice by reinforcing social hierarchies. But as teaching institutions, generators and sharers of knowledge, and engines of economic development, university efforts have long intersected with thinking and action on social justice. Thus, universities have simultaneously been pressured by contradictory trends: globalization, increasing inequality, and diminished resources, on the one hand, and the need to address social justice concerns on the other.

The concept of globalization has permeated academic discussion, as well as journalism, politics, and economics. Because of its wide conceptual scope, let alone its geographic scope, discussions of globalization are often messy and imprecise. We think of globalization as the transnational exchange of investments, commodities, people, politics, technologies, and cultures. Globalization is both a characteristic of the contemporary world and the culmination of large-scale, long-term social change. Although globalization at times seems dominated by new economic and political formations more powerful than the traditional nation-state, it has also mobilized new expressions of local and transnational discontent and resistance.¹

This definition quickly betrays our position. The editors of this volume do not deny that some of the results of globalization have been positive. The interchange of culture has enriched many, and may have reduced fears or other negative attitudes to others. Some national populations have seen increasing income, and relative decreases in poverty. Some analysts have found the greater flow of communication aiding co-responsibility, with the added benefit that notions of human rights and justice follow the lead of a “global civil society” (Keane, 2003). That communication flow has often facilitated Northern responses to Southern struggles for justice (Keck and Sikkink, 1998).

Despite such optimistic analyses, we find ourselves in the camp with many analysts who have found the effects of globalization profoundly damaging (Portes and Hoffman, 2003; Korzeniewicz and Moran, 2007; Harvey, 2005; Stiglitz, 2002; Mishel, Bernstein, and Shierholz, 2009; Shefner and Fernández-Kelly, 2011). This is largely because we limit our analysis, as many of the authors in this book do, to the political and economic effects of neoliberal globalization. Here we find much less ambiguity than in examining the bigger picture of cultural globalization. Focusing on neoliberal globalization allows us to examine the intersection of political economy and the university, as one manifestation of the attack on the state. We follow Harvey in his view that

[n]eoliberalism is … a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.

(Harvey, 2005, p. 2)

Harvey goes on to explain that the state’s role, according to neoliberals, must be confined to guaranteeing that market institutions are secure, to help establish markets where they do not exist, and to protect private property rights. For neoliberals, the market is the best institution to resolve human needs, not the state. It is this element of neoliberal globalization, the attack on the role of the state, with which we are most concerned. “Downsizing” the power of government and labor unions, “freeing” the market system from them, and demonizing anything that would subvert neoliberal ideology became the solutions of choice for neoliberal policymakers across the globe. The public university system, its governance structures, faculty, and sources of funding were seen by many to be part of the problem that needed to be significantly changed.

From the vantage point of public universities, the impact of neoliberalism has been clear and unambiguous. As an ideology, neoliberalism prioritizes individual accomplishment and how such accomplishments are valued monetarily above all else. This position contrasts dramatically with the role of public universities as fundamentally collective efforts to build knowledge. As a basis of policy, neoliberalism searches for ways to reduce society’s obligations to all citizens. Universities, again in contrast, are fundamentally about the social use of knowledge and have historically provided one avenue to individual social mobility and collective social, economic, and political progress. University orientations to progress within the United States are perhaps best understood by looking at both the history of land-grant universities and the veterans’ benefits that followed World War II.² We discuss these paths in greater detail below, but our point now is that the individualist ideology of neoliberal globalization, on the one hand, and subsequent imposed budget restraints on governments, on the other, have had significantly damaging results on US universities in recent decades.

This is not to suggest that we find only gloom in the potential of globalization. Others who have examined globalization’s impact on universities focus on the opportunities opened, as well as the potential that greater interdependence poses for universities to build citizenship (Rhoads and Szelényi, 2011). Our commitment to social justice is similar to Rhoads’ and Szelényi’s belief that universities can foster global citizenship. Universities, we believe, can still be places of social mobility, innovation, and creation that is measured by metrics not reducible to the marketplace, and devoted to shrinking inequality. This is the spirit that animates this book—our search for ways that globalization can be transformed into opportunity and that universities can act to build social justice.

The rest of this chapter discusses our position, before introducing the work of our authors. First, we examine some of the traditional, preglobalization roles of the universities. Universities have neither been consistently progressive nor elitist but respond to pressures and opportunities of the times. Next, we look at how globalization has been manifested in universities, marshaling various data to demonstrate how globalization has had concrete impacts. Following that discussion, we examine various university responses to pressures and opportunities, concluding the section by examining some novel ways of addressing some of the inequalities intrinsic to globalization. Finally, we address social justice briefly as an idea that has evolved historically and more extensively in relation to the university, as our authors have discussed.

Changing roles of the university

The major roles that universities and colleges play have transformed over time to respond and adapt to a variety of social, economic, environmental, and technological changes and concerns.³ According to Bonnen (1998), precursors of the modern American university emerged in medieval Europe in schools, teaching Christian theology and providing vocational training for the clergy. The future priests, monks, and bishops who trained in these schools became a small but powerful group of elites that served the needs of the church and the ruling class, and helped secure the obedience and loyalty of the masses. Church dogma was taught as truth and was reinforced as laws that went largely unquestioned. Indeed, “every idea expressed inside or outside of the … Church was subject to the scrutiny and judgment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy” (Greer, 1968, p. 202).

European contact with the Muslim world and the East during the Middle Ages, the emerging power of the law and medicine in peoples’ lives, and the need to train future generations of doctors and lawyers stimulated the birth of liberal arts programs within theological schools. Liberal arts education eventually became a prerequisite for mastering these professions (Greer, 1968). A small but growing group of professional elites came from the ecclesiastical and aristocratic ranks and served their needs as well as the new social, economic, legal needs of emerging nations.

Both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment spurred the growth of education among lay elites, but serving God and the needs of his anointed representatives remained the unquestioned priority for Western universities and colleges until the late eighteenth century. Indeed, private elite universities and colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, and Trinity College largely trace their lineage to their origins as theological and divinity schools (Harkavy, 2006; Clawson and Page, 2011). Science and the Scientific Revolution did not begin to openly challenge the traditional roles these schools played until the late nineteenth century (Bonnen, 1998, p. 2). The growing importance of scientific research nurtured the emergence of graduate education in German universities. This two-tiered undergraduate and research-orientated graduate educational model later served as a framework for the modern public research universities in the United States (Bonnen, 1998, p. 2).

Changing values were institutionalized in the series of Morrill Acts and their contributions to land-grant institutions. The first Morrill Act was part of a progressive Republican Party agenda, passed during Lincoln’s administration, which promoted “the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” (US National Archives, 2012). Lincoln signed this legislation on July 2, 1862 and stipulated that “[t]he land grant university system was being built on behalf of the people, who have invested in these public universities their hope, their support, and their confidence” (University of Minnesota, 2012). The Morrill Act helped to establish early land-grant colleges and universities such as Iowa, Pennsylvania and Michigan State universities, and the universities of Vermont, Maryland, Wisconsin, and California. Along with other progressive era reforms, the Morrill Act led to the development of modern public universities (Clawson and Page, 2011).

The revised Morrill Act of 1890 built on its predecessor by extending grants to all former Confederate states and newly created states and territories. It further stipulated that race would neither be a criterion for admission nor used to designate separate land-grant institutions for people of color. These legislative changes responded not only to unequal economic opportunity among people of color but also to growing economic inequality among urban industrial and middle classes and farmers. Subsequently, agricultural, mechanical, military and veterinary training and research along with educational outreach and community service became important functions fulfilled by both historically black and white land-grant colleges and universities.

By the twentieth century, the Neoplatonist and messianic ideals and roles that fostered theocratic and aristocratic models that had dominated universities and governance structures were being openly challenged by secular, scientific, democratic, and economic values. These values were manifested by the growing social and economic power of the middle classes that were rapidly transforming both the university and Western societies. No longer were definitions of the “good society” articulated only by elite university voices, nor were they the only influence in designing how that society was to be built (Harkavy, 2006, pp. 6–7).

By the middle of the twentieth century, land-grant policies and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, joined with the efforts of progressive educators, had clearly transformed the social roles of public universities and colleges (Bonnen, 1998, p. 4). First, access to higher education had expanded beyond the few elites. Second, the function of higher education itself converted; no longer were higher education systems structured only on meeting the needs of elites, but were directed towards the common good of rapidly developing societies. Opportunities for higher education and a university degree remained far from being equal, even after they became seen as essential for achieving the “American Dream” by a growing number of Americans after World War II (Clawson and Page, 2011, p. 31). Access did increase over time, so also changes in social policy. The GI Bill helped increase access to educational opportunities to returning veterans after the war, and the civil rights and women’s movements had a similar effect for women and minorities during the 1960s and 1970s. Today, there are almost twice as many Americans graduating each year from public universities than from non-profit private colleges (Chronicle for Higher Education, 2012). Moreover, there were three men for every two women who earned a college degree in the 1960s; today it is just the opposite (Clawson and Page, 2011, p. 31).

However, according to Clawson and Page, higher education still betrays significant inequality in access:

The bottom quarter of the population, and indeed the bottom half, is no more likely to get a college degree today than it was in 1970—but people in the top half of the income distribution are substantially more likely to graduate from college.

(ibid., p. 35)⁴

Still, many believe that there has been a significant progress made in changing the character and composition of public universities as they responded to the many challenges and opportunities they faced in the twentieth century. Near the end of the century, economic and political forces such as the rise of globalization and neoliberalism began to significantly challenge some of these newly fundamental roles played by public universities, as well as how they have tried to promote democracy and the public good. These forces also present us with fundamental challenges about who we are, what we value, what kind of future we want, and the roles we expect the university to play in securing our collective future (see Rhoads, 2011, p. 35).

Universities in a neoliberal world

Neoliberalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to welfare economics and progressive political values and gained traction in the United States in 1980 when one of its greatest champions, Ronald Reagan, was elected president. During his first inaugural speech, Reagan proclaimed that government was not the solution but instead the obstacle to achieving social and economic prosperity in the United States and the rest of the world. President Reagan and his followers thought that unbridled global economic growth would be achieved via deregulation, massive tax cuts to business, privatization of public goods and services, and the abandonment of progressive economic, social, and environmental policies. “Downsizing” the power of government and labor unions, “freeing” the market system from them, and from any other regulatory or legal constraints, and demonizing government were cornerstones of neoliberal ideology. Rational self-interest replaced any notion of collective responsibility as a basis for social order. If men and women are the best judges of their own particular needs and capacities, it follows that the most rational use of human and material resources will occur automatically if people are allowed to follow their natural bent under the conditions of free competition. Governmental action that interferes with free markets decreases the wealth of nations. Consequently, rising costs of public education, its governance systems, and the freedom of teachers and faculty to design curricula became viewed as problems to be addressed by the neoliberal state. Publicly funded universities and colleges as well as the socio-historical roles they had played became the major targets for neoliberal scrutiny and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Globalization and the University—A Path to Social Justice
• Part I: Globalization and Social Justice
• Part II: Universities’ Roles in Promoting Social Justice
• Part III: Constructing Social Justice from the University
• Part IV: Teaching for Social Justice
• Part V: Social Justice Movements and the University
• Index