Corporate Capture of Education

The “Corporate University” and Enclosure of Student Activism

Julia Hammond

February 18, 2024

This interview was conducted in March of 2023.

Rebecca Dolhinow is a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Department at California State University, Fullerton. Her research focuses on activism, education, youth social justice activism, and immigrant community organizing, among other topics.

This conversation uses as its starting point Professor Dolhinow’s 2017 article titled “Activism on the Corporate Campus.” In the interview, we discuss the “corporatization” of American universities. University administrations work to “enclose” activist spaces in an effort to maintain their images and preserve their marketability as sellers of higher education. As a result of enclosure and bureaucratic management from university administration, student activism often takes on a less radical, more watered-down form.

Julia Hammond: We can start with talking about what the corporate university looks like, if that’s okay. What makes an organization or university corporate, and when did universities become “corporate?”

Rebecca Dolhinow: It’s funny, when you ask what does a corporation look like—I’m not a business person. I’m not a law person. I understand a corporation is an entity of many people put together. And I think when we talk about a “corporation” in terms of anything that is not an actual corporation, we’re talking about it in a very theoretical way. We’re taking it and using it as a tool to understand something else. So I use the term in a social-theoretical manner. For me, that means taking into account hierarchical patterns of control and power. Being able to control the people that work for you, and make sure that they’re following what you want them to do. Profit, usually, is the goal behind that.

I’m also talking about the capitalist neoliberal corporation, right? And “image” is really important to a corporation. I think these are the key ideas for people who have thought about the corporate university.

When did universities become corporations? I don’t think that it happened overnight. And obviously they aren’t corporations, in the legal sense. But when did they start to act like corporations—when did people start to notice?

Everything has to be done for profit, that’s the end goal. You only do things to get to something. Nothing is ever done in and of itself. Which is why neoliberalism hates community so much. Because community is about helping each other, not yourself.

My job has changed, and the university experience is different for students. I think it’s worked its way along the same curve as so many things have been influenced by neoliberal capitalism. If you look at Wendy Brown’s book on neoliberalism, there’s a chapter on universities, and it’s taking the same path as everything else: this idea that everything is individual. Everything has to be done for profit, that’s the end goal. You only do things to get to something. Nothing is ever done in and of itself. Which is why neoliberalism hates community so much. Because community is about helping each other, not yourself. So I think it [the corporatization of the university] was a slow thing and it sort of paralleled the growth of neoliberalism.

This is not to say at all that universities were ever completely community-based, for-the-good-of-the-world institutions. Education in the United States is always served a purpose, and that is to create more little worker bees, right? That’s always what it’s been about.

And the university—well, the word “uni” comes from the idea of a universal education—has been in the past more about educating students in many different areas, getting a universal education so that a scholar can go out and talk about all kinds of different things and have, you know, “dinner table” conversations. They can be a good citizen who is able to discuss lots of different ideas and worldviews. That part of the university is stressed less now.

I don’t think universities think they’re stressing it less, but as they cut down general education requirements, they are stressing that less. The more and more you make every class a student takes be in their major, you are shrinking their ability to talk about the world at “dinner table” conversations. Right. And certainly in my 17 years at this university, I have noticed that shift.

In describing the corporate university, I think of a pyramid. When we think about education in the university, we think of a pyramid: at the bottom, it’s faculty and students. You have lots of faculty and students and the top would be like the president, the provost, and administration.

But this [indicating an upside-down triangle] is the corporate university . The admin–that’s where the bulk is. That’s where we’re hiring now. And the smaller part at the bottom is where the faculty is. The students are that big chunk in the middle. More and more we find that budgets, the hiring, it’s all happening up in the admin.

Okay. And that’s one of the ways in which I think it mirrors a corporation too, is the growing importance of controlling and dictating how everything is done. When I first came on, we created our syllabi and curriculum all ourselves. Now, the idea that [faculty] would know what’s best to learn is not something they think about. And that really influences how the university works in terms of administrative bloat and how faculty relate to the university.

JH: It’s interesting to hear about this from your perspective. I was in a program in college with a very broad focus, I had to learn philosophy and art and spend two years of college on things outside of my major. And it was not a perfect program, but it was a great experience.

RD: Yeah. Like I tell my students, there’s this “finish in four” thing. There’s so much stress at our institution, all the Cal States and the UCs–get it done, get ’em out, move ’em on–and I tell my students, just ignore it. This is just once in a lifetime privilege. And it’s an amazing privilege that so many people in the world don’t have. Take all the extra classes you can, learn everything you can. You are never in your life going to get this time back.

JH: I’d like to talk a little bit more about the student organizing portion of things. Can you explain for the readers how enclosure functions to control student organizing on campus?

RD: Yep. So I started reading a lot about the Commons and Enclosure, primarily because I was interested in the way activists use space. I’m a geographer by training, so my interest has always been how activists use spaces. And to me a lot of what happens when activists are using spaces is they’re creating community, creating a sort of commons.

So I got very interested in that and I started doing a lot of reading. In many ways, like in the pre-capitalist idea of commons, student organizing spaces are physically enclosed. They are physical spaces that are enclosed by administrations. And space is just crucial to organizing for creating communities on campus. When you don’t have space, it’s much harder to organize, it’s much harder to recruit, it’s much harder to do all kinds of things. And the kind of space activists have is crucial too.

student organizing spaces are physically enclosed. They are physical spaces that are enclosed by administrations. And space is just crucial to organizing for creating communities on campus.

One of the things that I’ve seen happen over the years is increased supervision of spaces. When you have space that’s autonomous or semi-autonomous—where you can be alone, you have a door and you can close it and no one hears you—you can create a different kind of community in commons in that closed-door space than when you’re in a space that’s open, where anyone who walks by—the administrators—can hear you. And those spaces aren’t working the same for activists to organize in, because you can’t talk about what you really might want talk about. You can’t have that freedom of speech that you have to have if the thing that you’re organizing against is your university. If what you’re questioning is Title IX, if what you’re questioning is racial bias, you can’t do that in front of your administrators, or even your teachers sometimes if those are the people you’re taking to account. So those spaces are what they enclose, because that’s where activists can make trouble.

It can be a physical enclosure. There’s also a couple of different more abstract ways of enclosing. The theoretical meaning of “enclosure” is achieved by breaking groups apart. They can take groups and put them in identity centers. They can also take what used to be intersectional groups, that are meeting and understanding that everybody has their own different issues—and break them apart. And that takes away some of the power of understanding what people share through their intersectional identities. But it also is a way to shape what people think is possible in terms of organizing, and that’s a more theoretical enclosure.

It’s a divide and conquer, in one way, by splitting people up. And when you [the administration] take the activism and control it yourself through surveillance, you’re able to control how far students can take things. And across the country, the admins are taking control of surveillance systems. I talk about this in the paper.

[Breaking groups apart] is a way to shape what people think is possible in terms of organizing.

So in order to avoid activists doing things that might embarrass an administration—call them out on something, get in the papers—they’ve found all these ways to make sure they know what activist groups are doing, at least the ones that are registered. My university has what they call the Quad Squad, and it’s a bunch of people in student affairs who walk around with these funny t-shirts and these loudspeakers they can talk into so you hear them. And they just patrol at lunch, and at the times when activists might be out there doing something, so that they can tell you, “oh, you’re not supposed to be there,” or, “oh, that’s too loud.” They can keep an eye on everything and if something goes the wrong way, they can call the police really quick.

So that’s like physical surveillance. I don’t know if Harvard does it–probably it does–does any event on campus has to be entered into the system?

JH: Yeah.

RD: You reserve a room and then once you fill out the form, it tells you what else you have to do. So if you enter in the form “we need a room to study,” that’s okay. But if you enter, “we’re going to have a rally and have speakers,” all of a sudden it’s like, “oh, you need to talk to the police. You need to talk to risk management. You need to talk to all these different people.” They say this type of system “saves paper, it makes everything faster,” but it’s really surveillance. And it gets rid of any kind of spontaneous activism. It gets rid of anything that they can’t control. So in that way it encloses all kinds of activism.

JH: Yes, Harvard definitely does that. In fall semester there was a kind of event where students ended up drawing with chalk on the sidewalks outside the school. And the police were called. It was as if they had vandalized the whole building. It seemed like the school was immediately coming in with all the force they had to stop harmless chalking.

RD: And before these systems, we used to just do that. When something happened in the news. Not that they’re not going missing now, but when it became a huge deal about all the women going missing on the border, we chalked every morning. As many women as they said were missing that day, we chalked bodies all over spontaneously. But you couldn’t do that now.

That didn’t harm anyone. It wasn’t dangerous. But we could do things like that. We could react to something that happened that day. Like when Roe v Wade was shot down, we could have done something that day, but because it wasn’t in the system, we couldn’t. That limits options. It circumscribes what activists think is possible, and that is the last thing activists need. Activists need to see the whole range of options.

JH: I wanted to circle back to your thoughts on how schools are supporting identity-based groups rather than more varied coalitions. You did touch on that in the article as well. What do you see as the effect of that?

RD: This is really interesting; I think this is where things get a little complicated and a little messy. Every university runs these kinds of centers a little bit differently. There was a time in the eighties and nineties where identity centers were where a lot of activism was happening because there wasn’t a lot of faculty at that time who were doing radical stuff.

“Defund, Disarm, Dismantle, Abolish” written in chalk on a sidewalk

Image provided by Shopify, taken by Matthew Henry

But then we see in the eighties and nineties, the creeping of neoliberalism, the growing of student affairs departments, the growing fear of what students are doing. And at least in my institution, the admin just reached in the departments and took all of the control. So at my school, the African American Resource Center was in the AFAM studies department. The Latinx center was part of Chicano studies. All these groups were held within the academic departments. Which is a very different venue than student affairs. But the administration took these organizations and put them student affairs.

One of the things that I think is really important to think about is: can students be split in two? No. Students come to a university to get one education, one holistic thing. They get academic, theoretical stuff and then they get extracurricular stuff. They should be together, not separate. And they’re so siloed in most places. And that’s just not good for creating whole citizens, whole activists, whole thinkers. And if we had more unity there, we could do a lot more work. Now, granted, on the academic side, you have people like me who’d like to do more revolutionary work than some people on the admin side, which is what runs student affairs.

Both types of spaces are valuable. But in the semi-autonomous spaces, it’s harder to control messages. Students can do more on their own. In identity-based centers, mostly operated by admin through student affairs, most of the time, people work at the behest of the president. If you go too far, you lose your job. I mean, it makes sense. There’s great people who run those centers, but if they push, they’re fired. They have very clear directions of what they can and cannot do. So even if students want to go too far, they can’t. Their job is partly to keep the students at a certain level of activism. That’s what they do.

Whereas tenured faculty can push as far as they want, they can encourage students to do all kinds of things. You also have some identity-based groups, like for our school, the Black Student Union, that are advised by faculty, in addition to the African American Resource Center, which is run by student affairs. So we do have a more radical side in addition to the less radical. So there’s gotta be distinctions made there. And the thing that would really get this together is having coalitions between the two.

JH: Thank you for explaining that; that was helpful for my understanding as well. So thank you. As a follow up, have you ever seen students successfully pushing “too far,” especially when they’re organizing against the university itself? Drawing attention to themselves, moving away from that safe space where they can speak without being heard, moving out into the open?

RD: Okay. That’s a good question. Yeah, I can think of a few instances of it actually. Usually it works best when there’s a coalition. You get enough groups together, there isn’t much the university can do. They can’t take them all down at once. The most recent example was the Power for the People Coalition, which was started by Students for Quality Education (SQE), which is a group that I advise on our campus. SQE is all across the CSUs, and it’s funded by our faculty union, the California Faculty Association. So it’s not part of the university per se, it’s part of our union, and they’re not a registered club. They can be a registered club if they want, but we choose not to so that we are further away from all of these big brother things. And it allows us to do a lot more because we have the backing of CFA.

The main campaign of SQE the last couple years has been to defund the police on the CSU campuses. We have very little mental health and our police budget is enormous. Most of the CSUs are majority minority, and the research we’ve done with students shows they don’t feel comfortable around the police. They would much rather have mental health services. We were doing a campaign to do that. And in the process we found out that our police chief has on his board of directors a cop who shot and killed a mentally disabled person. And we wanted this man off the board. We didn’t want him on campus.

The school was bringing Angela Davis to campus. And we as a group thought this is something that Angela Davis should know. So we did a protest to Angela Davis—not against Angela Davis, we made that very clear—but rather to bring light to this and for her [Davis] and others to understand the hypocrisy of bringing Angela Davis to campus, but at the same time putting all this money into the police, which really becomes a college to prison pipeline for some students.

We had all of these groups come together. It was amazing work. They all were at the protests. They all organized together and they pushed it. They had signs that said all kinds of stuff. They didn’t request anything in the system. They just went there and did it. And nobody kicked them out.

But these success stories are collective things and bringing the faculty in as much as you can is big too. You need all the support you can.

JH: In the article, you also discussed how universities emphasize extracurricular and co-curricular activities rather than the academic experiences in the classroom (the learning itself) to market students and the university. How does that impact students’ ability to organize and engage in activism?

RD: Yes, we see the difference between groups that organize on the outside or in semi-autonomous spaces, and the groups that, um, are doing social justice work and producing social justice events on campus. The SQE kids I’m working with and some of the other groups that are working with faculty, that don’t have these kind of limits, get more radicalized in a lot of ways. And then there’s sort of the sanitized and watered-down version of a lot of the concepts within student affairs.

I call it “social justice tourism,” right? A student can go and take a class, say, on pronouns, and come out and they’re like, “oh, I understand pronouns. I’m good on gender. I understand what being non-binary is. I got it right.” But you really have only a tiny amount. And people often do these short stints and so they think, “I don’t need to take gender studies.” And that’s unfortunate.

But the university likes that. I remember when our university decided social justice was a really big thing. Now social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, it’s everywhere. Every document, every five year goal.

some of the other groups that are working with faculty, that don’t have these kind of limits, get more radicalized in a lot of ways. And then there’s sort of the sanitized and watered-down version of a lot of the concepts within student affairs.

Sarah Ahmed has a book called On Being Included. She was a token person of color on a lot of committees doing diversity work. But basically, she says that a lot of diversity work is just performative. You know, you make up a policy to say you’re doing diversity, but you don’t do anything. And that’s what happens in a lot of these centers. That’s what happens in a lot of diversity, social justice work on campus, period. Anything that is run by the university, a lot of it is performative.

But a lot of that is because parents want it. Parents want their kids to be able to put this on their resumes, they want them to have done the internship and all that stuff. And it’s very quantifiable when it is extracurricular and organized by administration. It’s really hard to quantify what other activists do much of the time. I think that definitely contributes to the focus on extracurriculars over academics.

It’s very sellable. I mean, the university’s a marketplace of ideas. How neoliberal can you get?

JH: We’re enrolled in a class that produces this magazine, which as an organization lies somewhere in between semi-autonomous spaces and the university-run side of things. And the class faces a lot of bureaucratic roadblocks. We had a conference a couple weeks ago, and we can’t get the video recordings out to people because the school won’t approve it.

It’s very sellable. I mean, the university’s a marketplace of ideas. How neoliberal can you get?

RD: That sounds really interesting. I think that’s great. And that’s part of why I think this is important—even if the students come through and are part of these groups for a couple years, a lot of those students go on to do really impressive organizing work. It changes just how you seek the world and what you think is possible. And that to me is most important, is what you see is possible in the world