Is there a corporate sponsor in this very room?

Money: something we, as college students in NYC, love to think about but rarely have on hand. We sent Bwog staffer Betsy Ladyzhets to a lecture on neoliberalism and campus finance to torture her with money talk, but it ended up being an informative panel. We’ll try better next time–maybe a talk on how millennials are doomed in the job hunt? 

When I walked over to Fayerweather for the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism’s panel “The Neoliberal University” last night, I passed Low Library, in which CDCJ protesters had been locked for several days. I wondered what the view of Butler will look like when the new Henry Moore sculpture is installed next semester. I thought about Tuesday’s Barnard tuition hike, the highest increase in the college’s history. With all of these issues in mind, an event that discussed the influence of capitalist sponsors on private universities seemed all too timely. And I didn’t appear to be the only one with that opinion. The small lecture hall was packed: an undergrad, grad student, or professor in almost every seat.

A representative from the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism introduced the event by attempting to define “neoliberal.” The term, she said, is “associated with the liberalization of economic policy and the privatization of public services.” In the context of this panel, “neoliberal” refers to the way in which private donors can influence Columbia (and other universities) through grants that give an agenda to research, professors, and private institutes.

Reinhold Martin, the first panelist and an associate professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, expanded on this idea with his discussion of the different facets of neoliberalism. He first explained the history of Columbia as not a university, but a corporation: the university was founded to promote Anglicanism, then was later refounded as a research institution with specific ideal-centric goals, and has since only become more corporatized. Despite its supposed purpose as a site of public learning, Columbia is constantly redefined by the individuals who hold monetary power. He then posed questions about who the subject and the object of such corporatization is, what the effects of corporatization will be, and how this idea connects to social change and wealth distribution on a global scale.

“The human is constantly marketing themselves … and therefore is constructed as a site of investment,” Prof. Martin said.

Although Prof. Martin lost me a little bit with phrases such as “the problem of corporate personhood,” the next panelist, Michael Massing, helped to give his ideas concrete support. Massing, a former Executive Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and writer at the New York Review of Books, has recently been investigating the “hidden world of money, influence, and power” world of the one percent in America. He had never heard the term “neoliberalism” before last night, but his research definitely connected.

“Maybe I’ve been speaking about neoliberalism without realizing it,” Massing joked. He then went on to speak about neoliberalism from a journalistic perspective, citing examples of corporate money being used to influence private universities. The schools he discussed were both spread out across the country and as close to home as NYU and Teacher’s College.

Massing explained that Boards of Trustees have been “colonized by the wealthy.” At NYU, for example, the recent globalization attempts that have faced intense criticism are the product of a Board of Trustees that consists of 60 people – 57 of whom hail from the sectors of finance, real estate, law, construction companies, and marketing. The decision to place the controversial Henry Moore sculpture on our own campus was made by a Board of 24 trustees, 21 of whom hail from those same five sectors. Massing also mentioned the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina, the Boards of which both attempted to force out their presidents without giving an adequate reason. (Massing suggested, not unfathomably, that the true motivation for such coercion is that corporate minds on the Boards of Trustees feel threatened by more liberal university presidents.)

From Massing’s list of questionable behavior found through investigative Googling, the panel shifted to a more pointed investigation against a specific corporation. The third panelist was Lindsey Berger, a grassroots activist and the co-founder of UnKoch My Campus, a nationwide movement working to expose and stop the efforts of billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his donor network to use college campuses as a means of advancing their political agenda. Berger came prepared; she presented her movement’s goals and evidence with a powerpoint, showcasing statistics that were difficult to contest.

Berger explained Koch’s strategy using material from Koch and his advisers themselves. She focused in particular on the “Structure of Social Change” invented by Richard Fink, Koch’s chief strategist. This structure consists of three stages: first, Koch funds “scholarly thought” at universities (by funding programs, professors, and courses that promote free market capitalism); second, this research is passed along to think tanks that rephrase students’ abstract ideas in terms of political policy; and third, the policy ideas are sent to “grassroots” organizations that promote them to politicians.

“The foundation of this strategy is academic research,” Berger said. Koch forms a “talent pipeline” from universities, which it uses as the basis for its conservative platform. And this strategy is wide-reaching: according to the UnKoch My Campus campaign’s research, between 2005 and 2014, Koch donated $109 million to over 360 universities, in donations ranging from $10,000 to $77 million per campus. (That $77 million went to George Mason University, a hub for both capitalist sympathies and Koch influence.)

The examples Berger cited were both more specific and more terrifying than those mentioned by Massing. She discussed mission statements with “predetermined outcomes,” professors who are trained at George Mason, then spread Koch’s ideals around the country, and instances of students being forced to affiliate themselves with Koch. At one Florida university, for example, Berger said that Koch formed a committee that held veto power over professor hiring. And in Kansas, a Koch-funded lecturer at a Koch-funded center used his Koch-funded research to testify against Global Warming.

In addition, Berger stressed that Koch’s system of campus influence hurts universities in more ways than simply controlling Koch-funded centers and positions. She explained that several governors backed by Koch funding lead campaigns to cut funding to both public and private universities. “Then Charles Koch rides in on his white horse,” she said; he offers so much money that “desperate and vulnerable” colleges can’t refuse. Yet Koch funding is stipulated specifically for schools and departments of business, economics, law, and philosophy, so the school’s other departments have still lost crucial funding. This practice leads to tuition hikes, salary cuts, and increased hiring of adjuncts.

Last night’s discussion started with the theoretical and led to the specific, yet it never lost sight of its original focus: what is the current state of college in America as relative to corporatization and globalization, how did we get here, and how can we fix it? The three different perspectives presented by three different thinkers in different fields all helped illuminate that question, yet they did not exactly answer it.

“Do you know who the biggest Columbia donor is?” one student asked the panelists. And in search of an answer, the panelists looked back out at the audience – of students invested in their university, students who care about their academic freedom, and students with the intelligence and curiosity to research anything they find valuable. It is not our responsibility to answer these questions of corporatization and globalization, the panelists seemed to say. It is our responsibility to ask them, but finding the answers is up to you.

And in questioning our tuition, in refusing to give into the administration, in attempting to leave our mark on an institution run by the money of millionaires – we already are.

The room where the (anticapitalism) happens via Bwog Staff

Update, 4/21 10:17pm : This article originally misquoted Megan Stater and has since been updated to correct the error.