Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

The Corporatization of Higher Education

The media coverage of sweatshop scandals discussed in the last chapter did not go unnoticed on college campuses. Student groups on a number of campuses began

engaging in anti-sweatshop activism. Over the course of the 1997-1999 school years, this lead to the formation of a national organization, United Students Against Sweatshops.
They proved to be dynamic force, dramatically changing the landscape of anti-sweatshop activism, putting apparel companies on the defensive. Before exploring USAS’s history and the strategy they pursued, however, we first need to understand the power structure and the political opportunity system on college campuses, how they work as both decision-making and discursive arenas. Just as it is necessary io understand how the structure of the apparel industry shapes the options open to workers and their allies, we must understand how the structure and culture of higher education shapes the possibilities
for student activism.
As part of this, we need to examine the increasing corporatization of higher education. The corporatization of higher education—the penetration of neoliberal ideology and practices into the academy—is a significant part of the context in which student activists must operate. On the one hand, it creates an atmosphere on campus that is not conducive to activism, as administrators focus on maximizing revenues and students focus on training for jobs after graduation and the enticements of consumer culture. On the other hand, this very corporatization is what has given students a potential point of leverage over the apparel industry, for it is the very ties that apparel companies have



formed with colleges and universities that students are turning against the brands to pressure them.
Corporatization refers to the fact that school administrators have increasingly adopted both the values and the techniques of big business in managing their campuses, students, faculty, and other employees such as janitorial and food-service staff. In many ways, schools are increasingly operating as if they were for-profit organizations, while still maintaining their formal non-profit status (Rhoades and Slaughter 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; White 2000). Ties between the academy and business are nothing new. In the nineteenth century, colleges served essentially as finishing schools for the children of the nation’s elite. In the early twentieth century, as the industrial revolution came into its own and scientific research became of more importance io business, the first US research universities began to develop. Much of the work they did was with the goal of providing knowledge that was valuable io business; during the Cold War, universities also received extensive subsidies from the Pentagon to develop knowledge that would be of benefit to military leaders. Nonetheless, prior to the 1970s, both business and the Pentagon had a relatively hands-off attitude towards academic research. Nor that this was a halcyon period--the Pentagon could and did demand loyalty tests from academics, for instance. And it was expected that academic would contribute to the good of business and the military--but they expected them to do so as much by pursuing knowledge for its own sake as by working on specific projects favored by the military or specific companies.
There was an understanding that enlarging society’s pool of knowledge would, in the


long term, produce work that was of benefit to elite institutions (Aronowitz 2000; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004).
Corporatization has altered this equation, so that now schools have much closer ties with not just the business community as a whole, but specific businesses, for whom they specifically perform research. Thus, instead of encouraging scholars io perform general research to expand the pool of knowledge on which business can draw and benefit from in the long run, the focus has increasingly become on producing knowledge that will immediately turn a particular company a profit. Schools have also increasingly come to regard their purpose vis-à-vis students not as providing them with a broad education that will allow them to be informed citizens, but as training them quite specifically for administrative and technical positions in TNCs (Aronowitz 2000;
Slaughter and Rhoades 2004).

The on-going corporatization of higher education has taken place in the context of the rise of neoliberalism, described briefly in chapter two. Part of the reason for the shift lies simply in the shift in the larger ideological climate of the country (Aronowitz 2000). There are two other important sources for the change though—changes in government policy and the flow of ideas from the businesspeople sitting on schools’ boards to school administrators. In the 1970s, Congress dramatically changed national policies on

financial aid for higher education. While formerly federal money had principally been used io subsidize colleges and universities as a whole, now federal money would be channeled in the forms of grants and (mainly) loans to individual students, based on the neoliberal rationale of empowering students as consumers. This lead, however, to

increased focus by schools on marketing to students, with all the deceptions that involves; and the growing stratification of higher education, as students from poorer families could less and less afford to go to elite schools (Rhoades and Slaughter 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004).

In the 1980s, Congress enacted a number of laws to promote “national competitiveness” in the globalized economy. Much of this legislation provided incentives for research universities to develop ties to individual businesses, in order to develop goods that could turn a profit for both the school and the company. The decline in government funding has also encouraged schools to form close ties with business as a way of raising money. As the norms of the business world increasingly became the norms of society as a whole and ties between higher education and big business tightened, the corporate executives who had long sat on school boards were increasingly able to