The problem of the intellectuals has long occupied political philosophy and social theory and when asked to define “the intellectuals” contemporary intellectuals will typically identify themselves as a politically autonomous stratum that pursues knowledge for its own sake, or if not for its own sake, then for some abstract public good. 1 When asked to explain the sociological basis of this epistemological claim, contemporary social and political theorists immediately retreat into the “idea of the university ” (Newman 1927; Wolff 1969). By organizing themselves as a university, intellectuals ostensibly insulate themselves from “external” social and political pressures that might render their work mundane and ideological. 2 For example, the historian Richard Hofstadter has argued that it is historically and sociologically possible to identify intellectuals as a distinct social stratum only because of their affiliation with the university, because it is this institution that ostensibly organizes them into an independent and autonomous social category produced exclusively within the ivory tower, rather than being attached to any social class with a direct economic relation to production or by an institutional attachment to the political power of the state (Hofstadter 1963, 408–409; Mannheim 1936, 155). 3
However, capitalist societies continue to generate “organic intellectuals ” (Gramsci 1971, 5–23) that are directly attached to classes, social groups, and the state and, consequently, Robert K. Merton (1968, 265–266) suggests that we should actually distinguish between two types of intellectuals in modern society; namely, “those who exercise advisory and technical functions within a [corporate or state] bureaucracy and those intellectuals who are not attached to a bureaucracy.” Thus, Merton distinguishes between bureaucratic intellectuals and unattached intellectuals , but he too identifies the unattached intellectuals with the university because it provides the possibility for them to exercise their intellectual skills autonomously, to discover knowledge without interests (Habermas 1971), and to avoid direct subjection to business or state control.
However, during the last quarter century, we have witnessed the emergence of an increasingly urgent critique of “the corporate university ” or what is sometimes euphemistically called “the entrepreneurial university .” We are now routinely bombarded with references to the knowledge factory, academic capitalism, managed professionals, the corporate corruption of the university, the university in ruins, college for sale, and University, Inc. 4 These critiques raise the question of what it means to be an autonomous or unattached intellectual at a time when the university itself—the guarantor of autonomy—is becoming a corporation that is already tightly integrated into networks of corporate and state power. This condition has made the problem of the intellectuals synonymous with the critique of the corporate university, which Henry Steck (2003, 66) correctly observes is now the “most fashionable and ominous buzzword in contemporary academic circles.”
We are regularly warned about the last professors, the fall of the faculty, and the last intellectuals (Donoghue 2008; Ginsberg 2011; Jacoby 1987), and these warnings are usually coupled to pleas for a return to the golden age of the university , a resurrection of the public intellectual, or calls for the professors of the world to unite (Nichols 2007). However, as I hope to demonstrate in this book, university corporatization generates its own internal contradictions, and I am not referring to the oft-discussed proletarianization of the intellectuals, but to a new category of entrepreneurial intellectuals that are best classified as petit bourgeois and who pose a challenge not only to the corporate university, but also to the proletarianized and bureaucratized intellectuals who inhabit it. 5 In subsequent chapters, I turn to my experiences as the director of an entrepreneurial research center at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (1992–2014) for 22 years to exemplify the social category of the entrepreneurial intellectual and to illustrate the structural contradictions between the corporate university and the entrepreneurial university . 6 I also draw on this experience to identify an alternative to proletarianization that occupies a sociological niche, which is neither administration nor faculty, capital or labor, but the proprietary self-management and autonomous organization of intellectual labor.
The Corporate University or The Entrepreneurial University?
My analysis of the problem of the intellectuals adopts Henry Steck’s (2003, 74) definition of the corporate university “as an institution that is characterized by processes, decisional criteria, expectations, organizational culture, and operating practices that are taken from, and have their origins in, the modern business corporation.” As Steck observes, a defining aspect of the corporate university is that it is “administered by managerial and fiscal practices drawn from the corporate sector,” including:
- 1.The belief that market mechanisms are appropriate for the university and that the behavior of the market has a legitimate place in university resource allocations.
- 2.Acceptance of the culture and practices of corporations, including mission statements, strategic planning, hierarchical and bureaucratic organizational patterns, benchmarking, productivity measures, the adoption of best practices, and an emphasis on institutional goals defined by management (as opposed to individual or employee goals).
- 3.The conceptualization of academic departments or other units as revenue or profit centers and the adoption of responsibility-centered management, which incentivizes or forces individual departments or colleges to become fiscally self-sufficient.
- 4.The commercialization and commodification of the campus and campus culture.
- 5.The importation of managerial practices and decision-making criteria into the university.
- 6.The development of ancillary revenue activities, such as athletics, conferences, facility rental, etc.
- 7.The adoption of a customer service orientation.
- 8.The development of new entrepreneurial activities and the creation of new organizational structures and relationships. 7
My analysis of the entrepreneurial intellectual is focused primar...