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Higher Education for Economic Advancement and Engaged Citizenship: An Analysis of the U.S. Department of Education Discourse Tatiana Suspitsyna
The Journal of Higher Education, Volume 83, Number 1, January/February 2012, pp. 49-72 (Article) Published by The Ohio State University Press DOI: 10.1353/jhe.2012.0003
For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhe/summary/v083/83.1.suspitsyna.html
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Tatiana Suspitsyna
Higher Education for Economic Advancement and Engaged Citizenship: An Analysis of the U.S. Department of Education Discourse The steadily growing body of literature on universities’ contribution to democracy and civil society has repeatedly called for a re-examination of the nascent purposes of higher education and the nature of higher education’s compact with society (e.g., Fallis, 2007; Kezar, 2004; McDowell, 2001; Young, 1997). From the appeals to save the soul of higher education and democracy (Chickering, 2003) to the attempts at starting a national movement to promote the public good (Kezar, Chambers, & Burkhardt, 2005), the literature reveals the urgency and gravity of scholars’ concern about the ability of colleges and universities to prepare active citizens and maintain democracy. Although more faculty and administrators explore ways to produce public scholarship, infuse their curricula with service learning, and build stronger links between campuses and communities (Bringle, Games, & Malloy, 1999; Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont, & Stephens, 2003; Eberly & Cohen, 2006; Eyler & Giles, 1999; Lewis & Hearn, 2003; Maurrasse, 2001), their efforts remain secondary to the universities’ preoccupation with producing competitive graduates for the job market and cutting edge research for industry. The market-oriented nature of university curricula and the symbiotic relationship between research universities and industry have been accepted by many (Duderstadt & Womack, 2003; Kerr, 2001; Newman, Couturier, & Scurry, 2004), criticized by some
Tatiana Suspitsyna is an Assistant Professor in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership at The Ohio State University. The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 83 No. 1 (January/February 2012) Copyright © 2012 by The Ohio State University
50 The Journal of Higher Education (Bok, 2003; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Zemsky, Wegner, & Massy, 2005), and disparaged by others (Giroux, 2002, 2003). Yet all acknowledge the fact that the contemporary discourse on higher education tends to give more prominence to universities’ participation in the economy than to their role in society. Scholars have well studied the causes and outcomes of this emphasis on the economic function of higher education, tracing it back to the neoliberal economic policies in the late 1970s (Davies & Bansel, 2007), supply-side higher education in the 1980s (Rhoades & Slaughter, 1997), and the decline of the social welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s (Fallis, 2007). What remains little examined, however, is how the market role of higher education is supported by the government rhetoric and what the consequences are of that support for the ability of colleges and universities to prepare students for engaged citizenship. Studies of the official rhetoric in the U.S. tend to focus on presidential strategies and campaigns (Burden & Sanberg, 2003; Cohen, 1995; Holian, 2004; Wood, Owens & Durham, 2005). Critical evaluations of government discourses specifically on higher education are few (e.g., Ayers, 2005; George-Jackson, 2008; Jones, 2009: Shaw & Rab, 2003) and often based on the non-U.S. context (e.g., Davies & Bansel, 2007; Grundy, 1994; Nairn & Higgins, 2007). Yet, as scholars suggest, the rhetoric of public officials can disguise exclusionary practices, while espousing benevolent goals (Menjivar & Kil, 2002). In this study, I intend to address that gap in the literature by investigating what gets excluded and lost in the U.S. government’s messages about higher education. For that purpose, I analyze speeches by the U.S. Department of Education, samples of government discourse par excellence. Although it has no formal jurisdiction over American colleges and universities, the Department of Education, during the second George W. Bush administration, built an impressive record of instigating and sustaining public debate, if not controversy, about higher education through its Commission on the Future of Higher Education (Modern Language Association, 2007). The work of the Commission itself has been scrutinized by journalists and academics and recently became the subject of scholarly investigations (e.g., George-Jackson, 2008; Jones, 2009). Promoted by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, the department’s message about accountability and learning outcomes of higher education reverberated nationally and set the tone and agenda for many meetings of professional associations, accrediting agencies, state boards, and individual institutions (Ruben, Lewis, & Sandmeyer, 2008). The rhetoric of the department therefore has pervasive and enduring properties that express future possibilities for American colleges
Higher Education for Economic Advancement 51 and universities. It is these possible futures or models of higher education that are the focus of this study, which is guided by two broad questions: What are the economic and social roles of higher education in the discourse of the U.S. government? And who are the stakeholders in higher education? The paper is organized in five parts. I begin with a brief discussion of two competing conceptualizations of higher education as an industry and a social institution. I then outline the poststructuralist theoretical framework of the study and proceed with an overview of the analytical methods and findings. I conclude with a broader discussion of the findings in relation to different models of democracy and citizenship in the context of higher education. Higher Education as an Industry and a Social Institution Marked by the unfolding Information Technology revolution and neoliberal market policies of the Reagan era, the early 1980s saw a shift in the conception of public higher education from a social institution to an industry (Gumport, 2001). While some scholars see the rise of the knowledge industry as penetration of external market forces inside the academe (Bok, 2003; Readings, 1996), others view it as an internal transformation governed by the existing institutional culture, as well as by economic and political pressures inside and outside the university (Clark, 1998; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Whatever were the vectors of change, the resulting entrepreneurial university operates now in the distinct language of private for-profit sector and is an essential part of increasingly global economy (Deem, 2001). A fundamental goal of higher education as a social institution, preparation for citizenship in a democracy, some believe, has been relegated to the humanities (Fallis, 2007), and civic engagement has been encouraged largely through voluntary service-learning activities and community-outreach programs (Cohen, 2006). Commentators also point out that requiring students to take civics classes and relying on their volunteerism may be insufficient to prepare them for the life of active citizenship, and that faculty and administrators need to make a more systematic effort to create opportunities for teaching and learning democracy (Cohen, 2006; Colbeck & Wharton-Michael, 2006; Pusser, 2006). Rather, they envision higher education as a Habermasian public sphere—a space for deliberation and discussion (Pusser, 2006), a place to test new ideas, criticize governance, and search for better models of government (O’Neil, 2005). In other words, they believe college and university classrooms should become sites for learning deliberative
52 The Journal of Higher Education democracy (Fallis, 2007), broadly defined as governance involving public reasoning over public policies (Gutmann & Thomas, 1996). The tension between the two conceptualizations of higher education is often perceived as a matter of balance: an emphasis on one idea at the expense of the other is believed to inhibit the capacity of colleges and universities to advance the economy or to prepare critically thinking and actively engaged citizens. I believe, however, that the problem lies not in the unequal weight accorded to one idea over the other, but rather in the power of one conceptualization, higher education as an industry, to co-opt and transform the other, higher education as a social institution. This domination of one meaning-making framework over another in the field of U.S. higher education can be best understood in Foucaultian terms of discourse and power that I outline below. The government emphasis on the business industry model of higher education is illuminated further by the notion of neoliberal governmentality. Governmentality and the Neoliberal Subject Foucault (1990, 1995) observes that institutions of power such as the state, the penal system, and the legislature routinely rely on the sciences and experts to examine, measure, explain, and predict populations in order to create knowledge that would make their practice more efficient. These techniques of managing populations and the political rationality behind them are part of what constitutes the art of governing. Another aspect of government consists of individual subjects’ freely regulating their own conduct according to the norms endorsed and propagated by the political sovereignty. This self-conduct, or in Foucault’s parlance, techniques of the self, together with the techniques of managing populations and the rationality exercised by political sovereignty, constitutes what Foucault (1991) calls “govenmentality.” In other words, governmentality is governmental rationality where government is understood as an activity, an art of regulating the conduct of autonomous individuals for the good of society (Foucault, 1991). Neoliberalism changes the formula of governmentality: the power to predict and regulate people’s behavior shifts from the social sciences to budget disciplines and accountancy; nongovernmental organizations take over some functions of the state (Rose, 1996); and the expert authority becomes subject to checks and audits (Rose, 1993). The citizen subject of the neoliberal government is a hybrid of two traditions: it owes its flexibility to the postmodern embrace of diversity and difference and at the same time carries some characteristics of humanism, namely, its emphasis on rationality, autonomy, freedom, and
Higher Education for Economic Advancement 53 choice (Davies et al., 2006). Unlike its humanist predecessor, however, the neoliberal subject redefines the fundamental concepts of freedom, choice, autonomy, and rationality in market terms. In the neoliberal discourse, freedom of choice is an exercise in economic rationality that the subject must possess in order to select best value goods and services at the optimal price (Bansel, 2007). Autonomy is understood as heightened individualism aimed at survival and success in the economy; the survival and success of the subject are themselves linked to larger discourses of national economic competitiveness (Davies et al., 2006; Davies & Bansel, 2005). Rationality is redefined as achieving economic success through education or through the cultivation and application of entrepreneurial qualities (Nairn & Higgins, 2007). In short, freedom is achieved through choice in consumption, rationality is a way to acquire labor market power, and autonomy is a prerequisite of competitiveness. As a site of discursive practices, i.e., practices of production and dissemination of discourses, higher education is deeply implicated in the dominant neoliberal doctrine. That the dominant vision of higher education is neoliberal has already been established by other scholars (cf., Ayers, 2005; Giroux, 2002). What I wish to add to their analyses is an understanding of how the neoliberal discourse subverts the social functions of universities that are aimed at social justice and redefines individual agency in terms of economic rationality. The goal of my endeavor is to implicate the current meanings of higher education in the relations of power and to lay the groundwork for a discussion of models of engaged citizenship. Method of Analysis My method of data analysis belongs to the general category of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Commonly associated with the names of Ruth Wodak, Norman Fairclough, and Teun van Dijk, CDA is broadly defined as an approach that integrates linguistic analysis and social theory (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000, p. 454). Researchers in education have made a good, although not prolific, use of CDA in their analyses of various discourses ranging from tests and textbooks to publications and classroom interactions (Rogers, Malancharuvil-Berkes, Mosley, Hui, & O’Garro Joseph, 2005). Despite numerous empirical applications, CDA has not developed into a unified method with a consistent set of analytical procedures, but continues to grow in directions plotted by several influential CDA scholars (Rogers et al., 2005). In this study I follow a method developed by one of these scholars, Norman Fairclough (2006), who adapted his model of discourse anal-
54 The Journal of Higher Education ysis from Foucault’s large-scale historical investigations of discursive practices. In broad terms, Fairclough’s method of “textually oriented discourse analysis” (TODA) consists of an analysis of linguistic means of expressing power relations imbedded in the spoken or written text. Procedurally, as suggested by Fairclough (2006) and Gill (2006), my data analysis consists of several operations, specifically, the coding of the text, identification of critical samples for discourse analysis, and the discourse analysis proper. Guided by Fairclough, I examine the samples at three levels. First, I analyze them as texts and focus on the lexical and grammatical means of constructing reality. Second, I discuss the authors, audiences, and genres of the samples as discursive practices. Finally, I approach the discourse as a social practice and establish connections between the rhetoric of the samples and larger neoliberal processes and practices. To enhance the quality of analysis, during the coding I consulted with a peer trained in linguistics and qualitative research methods. The data consist of 164 U.S. Department of Education speeches posted on the department website (www.ed.gov). The speeches cover three full years from January 2005 to December 2007. Chronologically, the selected time period spans from the beginning of Margaret Spellings’s tenure as Education Secretary through the build-up to and formation of the Spellings Commision on the Future of Higher Education in September 2005, the release of the Commission’s report in September 2006, the passing of the Higher Education Act reauthorization bill by the U.S. Senate in July 2007, and the launch of “College Portrait” in November 2007, a web-based template for reporting information to the public and a product of a joint project of national college and university associations known as the Voluntary System of Accountability. Table 1 describes key characteristics of the data by year. A total of 164 documents or approximately 675 single-spaced pages of text were downloaded from the department website and imported in the NVivo software. The narratives were examined for themes and coded. Not surprisingly, the first round of open coding revealed that the most frequently occurring themes in the speeches related to high school dropout, unpreparedness of high school graduates for the workforce and college, and the No Child Left Behind legislature that Secretary Spellings at that time had promoted in her official capacity. The second round of coding specifically focused on themes pertinent to the research questions of the study: economic and social roles of higher education and its stakeholders. Approximately half of all references coded in that round described various aspects of the relationship between higher education and the national and global economy. A
Higher Education for Economic Advancement 55
Table 1 Description of Data by Year Year
Number of Speeches
Speech Situation
2005
75
38 Conferences, incl. 3 on higher education & 5 international; 8 School visits, incl. 2 colleges/universities; 8 Congressional testimonies; 10 Ceremonies & celebrations; 9 Announcements, launches, & initiatives; 2 Spellings Commission meetings
2006
50
22 Conferences, incl. 6 on higher education; 10 College/university visits, incl. 3 international; 8 Congressional testimonies; 4 Other addresses abroad; 3 Announcements & launches; 3 Ceremonies
2007
39
17 Conferences, incl. 5 on higher education & 3 international; 8 College/ university visits, incl. 1 international; 8 Congressional testimonies; 5 Meetings with business & legislative organizations; 1 Other address abroad
quarter of references referred to the affordability, accessibility, and accountability of college education. Approximately 20% of references related to the social roles of higher education in serving democracy, providing testing grounds for new ideas, and promoting the American Dream. Finally, about 7% of references described the roles and expectations of stakeholders in higher education. (For a more detailed summary of the coding results, please see Table 2). The second round of coding revealed that the discussion of higher education in the U.S. Department of Education speeches was dominated by concerns about the economic role of colleges and universities and their accountability, affordability, and accessibility. In the texts, these concerns repeatedly overlapped with other themes and formed sequences that presented causal or explanatory models in support of the speaker’s arguments. To uncover the reasoning behind these arguments, I returned to the themes identified in the first and second rounds of coding and examined them for cohesion. Cohesion of clauses and sentences reveals rhetorical schemata that the producers of the text use to build their argument, and rhetorical schemata display different modes of rationality (Fairclough, 2006). As a result of this inquiry, I identified several rhetorical schemata that supported arguments grounded mainly in economic rationality. For the discourse analysis proper, I chose three speech samples on the basis of three criteria, which were applied to the data sequentially: the selections answered the two research questions of the study; they
56 The Journal of Higher Education
Table 2 Themes Related to Higher Education in Department of Education Speeches Theme
2005
2006
2007
Total
College pipeline reduced by high school dropout
38
19
15
72
High school graduates unprepared for college
26
14
12
52
Economy requires postsecondary credentials
22
10
7
39
Accountability for access to college education
11
7
6
24
Accountability for affordability of college education
10
7
6
23
American Dream as attainment of college education
10
9
4
23
Higher education as investment
8
8
5
21
Responsiveness of colleges/universities to the market
9
5
5
19
Global competitiveness of college graduates
6
5
3
14
Higher education as pathways to democracy and civic engagement
3
5
3
11
Colleges and universities as testing grounds
2
4
1
7
presented semantically whole segments, i.e., they introduced a new thought, developed it, and completed it before moving to the next topic; and they represented the central themes in the corpus. The last criterion of representativeness was determined numerically by counting the number of most highly referenced themes in each sample. The list of these themes is presented in Table 2. Discourse Analysis of Speech Samples The first sample illustrates the U.S. Department of Education’s vision of the economic and social roles of higher education. The sample is excerpted from a speech on closing the achievement gap in schools, which Secretary Spellings delivered before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce in September 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The sample includes the four most frequently used themes: the economy requires postsecondary credentials, high school dropout, the American Dream as attainment of higher education, and foreign competition for American higher education. It also connects two of the most frequently used rhetorical schemata: as foreign competition increases, the economy requires college credentials to stay competitive, but dropping out of high school prevents Americans from attaining higher education.
Higher Education for Economic Advancement 57 Sample 1. Economic and Social Roles of Higher Education 1. If the hurricanes show us anything, they show how vulnerable we are. As the international playing field gets flatter, American students need better education and training to compete. In our global economy, more than 80% of the fastest-growing jobs will require education or training beyond high school. Unfortunately, five out of 10 minority students—and three out of 10 overall—don’t even finish high school on time! 2. The one million students who drop out of high school each year cost our nation more than $260 billion dollars. That’s in lost wages, lost taxes, and lost productivity over their lifetimes. In federal dollars, that will buy you 10 years of research at the National Institutes of Health. 3. Business, political, and education leaders are regularly sounding the alarm. When we lose a million students every year that has a tremendous impact on our economy. And it represents the American Dream … denied. (U.S. Department of Education, 2005, para. 21-23) The opening sentence of paragraph 1 refers to Hurricane Katrina and admits to the vulnerability of the nation in the face of tragedy. Since the kind of vulnerability is not specified, the meaning potential of the sentence is broad and ambivalent. Depending on the listeners’ mental map of social reality, i.e., on their political and ideological interpretation of the context and their understanding of key and secondary aspects of the situation, they narrow down the multiplicity of possible meanings to one interpretation (Fairclough, 2006). For example, to the listeners who saw the footage of flooded New Orleans streets and faces of predominantly African American families stranded in the Louisiana Superdome and who heard the public criticism of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that vulnerability may mean an ecological, engineering, or organizational problem, if not a class and race issue. The rhetorical schema of paragraph 1, however, leads the listener to a different interpretation. In Secretary Spellings’s presentation, the Katrina disaster is separated from the social and political sphere where it was publicly scrutinized in the aftermath of the destruction and is moved into the economic sphere: Katrina’s lesson is that not enough Americans, especially racial and ethnic minorities, hold college degrees to compete with their global peers. The political and social aspects of the event then become invisible and rhetorically non-existent. Representing
58 The Journal of Higher Education categorical prediction, the verb “will” lends authority to the speaker as an expert on the issue. The use of statistics (e.g., 80% of fastest growing jobs, five out of 10 minority students, etc.) enhances the credibility of the speaker’s argument by imparting it with scientific rationality and legitimating it as truth. Paragraph 2 offers a similar transformation of what has traditionally been viewed as a social justice issue—high school dropout rates are associated primarily with poor urban neighborhoods with large racial and ethnic minority populations—into an economic issue. In this logic, the problem is not that the youth from poor and minority households do not have an equal opportunity to go to college. Rather, the problem is that the national economy loses on their potential tax contributions and labor. The market interpretation of higher education is rationalized by the use of numbers ($260 billion dollars, 10 years of research) that endow Secretary Spellings’s position with objectivity conferred by statistics. The invocation of the American Dream in the last sentence of Paragraph 3 serves to enhance the persuasive power of the argument by appealing to the ubiquitously recognized and valued American cultural artifact. Although the meaning of the last sentence is ambiguous and in this context the American Dream can signify the attainment of a college education, upward social mobility, both or neither, the fact that this unquestionable good is denied underscores the grave consequence of failing the economic function of higher education. The emphatic pause before “denied” in the speech amplifies the rhetorical effect. The sample draws on more than one discourse to create the message, which is a property of discursive practice known as interdiscursivity (Fairclogh, 2006). The overwording of the sample with market vocabulary (competition, economy, jobs, wages, taxes, productivity, dollars, etc.) signals the dominance of the market discourse, which infuses the meaning making in the sample with economic rationality and constructs higher education thoroughly as a business enterprise. As a discursive practice, the sample has at least two types of participants: the author of the text, who is presumably Secretary Spellings, and the listeners. The initial audience of the speech consisted of government officials, i.e., members of the House of Representatives. In the text the two participant roles are explicitly indicated by pronouns: the listeners are identified as “you,” while “we” refers to the producers of the text whom the speaker represents. Yet, rhetorically the two pronouns are not opposites. The listeners who can potentially buy ten years’ worth of research at NIH and the producers who lose the dollar equivalent of these ten years are the same. In a narrow sense, they are the federal govern-
Higher Education for Economic Advancement 59 ment; in a broader sense, they are taxpayers of one national economy. The reference to the American Dream as a right and an aspiration of all Americans suggests the latter meaning. This symbolic extension of the audience to all citizens via the trope of the American Dream is what preserves the relevance of the speech when it is made available to the general public on the Internet. As a social practice, Secretary Spellings’s speech is a mirror of actual policies and models of higher education. The speech reflects what Fairclough (2006, p. 215) observes to be the colonization of higher education discourse by the economy. The colonized discourse operates according to the neoliberal formula of governmentality: criticizing, correcting, and planning higher education relies on the techniques of auditing and accounting that calculate losses and profits of the higher education enterprise. These techniques, however, are not suited to analyze non-financial tasks of higher education such as promotion of equality among various population groups. The economic rationality does not account for civic and moral intentions and limits the repertoire of causes that higher education may adopt. In that sense, in the neoliberal discourse the lesson of Katrina and the issue of unequal educational opportunities can be only economic. Since reimagined as economic problems, inequality, discrimination, and racism have to be corrected by the market, colleges and universities may be absolved from searching for political, social, and moral solutions to these new economic ills. In the next sample, the role of higher education as the social equalizer is couched explicitly in moral terms. The excerpt comes from a speech that Secretary Spellings delivered at San Jose State University in May 2007. The sample contains several of the most frequently occurring themes in the corpus: the high school dropout, lack of preparedness among high school graduates for college, accountability, access to and affordability of a college education, and higher education as investment. In the preceding paragraphs, Spellings postulates the existence of moral and economic imperatives of higher education and talks about the nation’s founding fathers’ understanding of the importance of education. Sample 2. The Moral Imperative of Higher Education 1. But access to opportunities in higher education remains uneven at best. And the problem begins in our K–12 system. 2. Consider imbalances in graduation rates. Fifteen percent of our high schools produce half of our dropouts, and these schools are disproportionately in low-income areas with mostly minority
60 The Journal of Higher Education students. Nationally, one of every two African American and Hispanic students drops out of high school. 3. Of the 40,000 students who failed the mandatory high school exit exam last year in California, more than half do not return and of course earn no diploma. These tens of thousands of young Californians face a future without the advantages graduates will draw upon every day. 4. In addition to epidemic dropout rates, rapidly rising tuition costs mean that many lower-income students do not even consider attending college. And many who are lucky enough to attend begin their careers saddled with debt. 5. On top of the high price tag, a general lack of accountability and transparency at colleges and universities often makes it difficult for consumers to know what they’re getting for their investment. 6. If we are a nation dedicated to equality, we cannot be satisfied with the status quo. Helping more students make it to college and succeed there is a morally urgent challenge. (U.S. Department of Education, 2007b, para. 14–19) Like the previous sample, this speech fragment combines several discourses to create the persuasive effects of the message. The use of statistics in paragraphs 2 and 3 lends the speaker scientific authority, vocabulary such as “consumers” and “investment” in paragraph 5 points at business, and “equality” and “morally urgent” in paragraph 6 draw on discourses of social justice and ethics. As a discursive practice, the speech has several micro- and macro audiences. In addition to the listeners at San Jose State, the speech is addressed to Californians who are concerned about higher education and to all Americans who make up the “we” in “if we are a nation dedicated to equality.” As a social practice, the excerpt exemplifies what scholars of neoliberalism characterize as moralization of choice. In the speaker’s presentation, the moral imperative of higher education as a social equalizer is a hybrid of social justice and business ethics. As it follows from paragraph 6, equality is defined as ensuring that more young people from various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds go to and succeed in college. The dissatisfactory status quo that hampers equality consists of high dropout rates (paragraphs 2 and 3), growing tuition costs (paragraph 4), and lack of institutional accountability to individual consumers for their investment in college education (paragraph 5). Thus, the economic transaction of investment is factored in the formula of social
Higher Education for Economic Advancement 61 equality, and the moral imperative for equality requires, among other things, facilitation of consumption in college education by students and parents. In neoliberalism, the consumption in education is in itself a moral right of students and parents who are responsible for managing their life choices with regard to education, health care, retirement, etc. (Peters, 2005). “Responsibilized” subjects do not simply exercise their individual freedom by continuously making consumer-style choices; they are morally obligated to do so for the sake of their own welfare and the welfare of their families. Foucault (1978–1979/2008) views this selfentrepreneurialism as a new type of self-conduct, a new technique of governmentality in advanced capitalist societies. Steeped in market relations, this technique exemplifies the penetration of the private familial sphere by business ethics, prompting some scholars of governmentality (Peters, Marshall, & Fitzsimons, 2000, p. 121) to call it “busnopower,” a neoliberal version of the Foucaultian bio-power that regulates the lives of individuals. Reflective of the pervasive culture of audit in the public sector (Rose, 1993), accountability of colleges and universities to consumers is also a technique of governmentality that is directed at shaping and supporting the market-oriented behavior of educational organizations. While the advantages of a college degree that Secretary Spellings alludes to in paragraph 3 may consist both of civic opportunities and economic competitiveness, the framing of the issue in terms of accountability to customers and investors in paragraph 5 suggests that the moral compass of students and universities is skewed toward their performance in relation to the market and consumption. Because the entrepreneur of the self is responsible first and foremost for the self and the entrepreneurial university’s priority is economic advancement, the social justice signification of the moral imperative in the excerpt is all but lost behind its economic meaning. The third sample illustrates the construction of stakeholders in higher education. It is excerpted from a speech that Secretary Spellings made at the meeting with business and higher education leaders in February 2007. The topic of the speech is the role of businesses in preparing school graduates for market competition. The sample contains a common rhetorical schema that links the demand for accountability with investment and is remarkable for one of the most popular metaphors in the speeches, the comparison between shopping for a car and choosing a college, which appears between 2006 and 2007 at least seven more times.
62 The Journal of Higher Education Sample 3. Stakeholders in Higher Education 1. In almost every area of our government—from prescription drug programs to welfare to K–12 education—we expect transparency and accountability for our tax dollars. 2. But over the years, we’ve basically invested tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money in higher education and just hoped for the best. As a result, we don’t have a very good picture of how the system works today and how it could be improved. 3. We live in the “Information Age.” If you want to buy a new car, you go online and compare a full range of models, makes, and pricing options. And when you’re done, you’ll know everything from how well each car holds its value down to wheel size and number of cup holders. 4. That same transparency and ease should be the case when students and families shop for colleges—especially when one year of college can cost more than a car! (U.S. Department of Education, 2007a, para. 35–36) The business vocabulary of the sample (invested, taxpayer money, tax dollars, etc.), the description of the government as an economic macroactor in paragraphs 1 and 2, and the car metaphor in paragraph 3 undoubtedly bear the markers of the market discourse. Because metaphors have the power to construct reality and structure individuals’ systems of knowledge (Fairclough, 2006), the car metaphor is particularly successful at naturalizing the economic rationality of the sample: since schooling, like cars, is a commodity, it makes sense to want a good deal on it. As a discursive practice, Spellings’s address mixes genres. The car metaphor marks a shift in genre from official public speech to colloquial talk, and a shift in the speaker’s position from a government official to an average consumer. This bringing together of discursive participants—the producers and listeners of the speech—is accomplished when the governmental “we” of the first sentence is extended rhetorically to include the “you” of the listeners via the mediation of the speaker who is both part of the “we” as secretary of education and part of the “you” as the consumer. The exclamatory ending of paragraph 4 stresses the taken-for-granted truthfulness of the speech: when both Secretary Spellings and the average consumer Spellings promote the same message, the message carries more weight. As a social practice, the discourse on higher education stakeholders reflects the model of economic relations centered on the figure of the
Higher Education for Economic Advancement 63 rational economic actor. That actor is a markedly gendered and classed construction. Although women and men may consume cars equally, in dominant discourses on technology and gender, men are defined through technology and women represent nature (Cockburn, 1985; Faulkner, 2000). Technical knowledge of a “full range of models, makes, and pricing options” and details of the wheel size has traditionally been associated with masculinity (Mellstrom, 2002). To appeal in the speech to the listeners’ technical knowledge is therefore to invoke the dominant construction of the bearer of that knowledge: the male. The material possessions of the economic actor (a home computer and home Internet connection) and his fiscal ability to purchase a car are the markers of his middle class. The middle class male economic actor in the sample is also a generic parent. As a technique of the self, parenting is modified to involve consumption: good parents do a cost and benefit analysis before purchasing their child’s education. Once consumption is inculcated in parents as an appropriate behavior toward education, they will adopt the economicrational model of conduct freely and demand consumption as their right. That unencumbered consumption of education has become the norm and the right of students is suggested in paragraph 4 by the verb “should,” which conveys both obligation and propriety. By repossessing the norm from the government and holding the government accountable for ensuring the norm as one’s right, the subjects reverse the relations of authority (Rose, 1993, p. 296). This reversal of authority from describes a new form of agency that students, parents, and the general citizenry exercise as consumers. Secretary Spellings’s speech illustrates another element of neoliberal governmentality: the technique of audit. Higher education institutions are no longer trusted with generating appropriate truth claims. The financial investment that Secretary Spellings mentions in paragraph 2 is also a symbolic endorsement of the expert knowledge that higher education institutions had and that is now deemed inadequate and in need of examination and correction. Discussion In addition to conveying the administrative authority of the government, Department of Education documents serve as vehicles for maintaining and disseminating the dominant discourse. To be more precise, they are both products and tools of that discourse: they are shaped by it at inception and they promote it to different audiences. Implicated in the
64 The Journal of Higher Education dominant discourse, the speeches have the power to prescribe some visions of higher education and to marginalize others. As I demonstrated in my analysis, the official rhetoric on higher education emphasizes free enterprise, accountability, individual choice, and consumption formulated within the neoliberal market doctrine. It is therefore not surprising that the official speeches promote a business model of higher education. What gets lost in that market perspective is the noneconomic social and political roles of higher education. For example, the instruction in citizenship and democracy, which has been a central purpose of higher education at least since the American Revolution (Geiger, 1999; Harkavy, 2006), is barely mentioned in the entire corpus of data. The role of colleges and universities in addressing social ills such as unequal access to college and low retention rates of minority students are divested of their social designation and recast in economic terms as barriers to national advancement. The agency of citizens and higher education stakeholders—students, parents, educators—ostensibly indicates only one source: their role as consumers. In short, the official discourse obscures the ways in which higher education can assume a social and moral stance for the public good and prepare students for non-monetary aspects of citizenship. For a project of reclaiming the social functions, if not the soul, of higher education, marketization of colleges and universities is an impediment to the conceptualization of a citizenship model that can be taught and practiced on college campuses. Neoliberal models of citizenship have little prospect of teaching students participation in noneconomic causes for the good of the society. Critics of these models also point at neoliberal democracy’s limited capacity to advance any public interest if that interest goes against the needs of the market (Magnusson, 2000; Torfing, 1999). Deliberative democracy as a system of political decision making that involves public discussion of policy has lately been more popular among scholars (Dryzek, 2005). Transforming campuses into places of learning and practicing democratic deliberation is one of the proposed solutions to the predicament of marketization and consumerism (Giroux, 2002; Pusser, 2006; Fallis, 2007). The hope is that students will learn citizenship through active engagement in debating policy, weighing multiple perspectives, testing new ideas, and forming public consensus. I believe, however, that higher education as a Habermasian public sphere of democratic deliberation may not provide the desired model of engaged citizenship. First, there is a practical difficulty in practicing deliberative democracy because the model is grounded in a core set of values and preconditions that are assumed to be universal. For instance,
Higher Education for Economic Advancement 65 deliberation requires that the participating sides be committed to cooperation for the sake of cooperation, formulate arguments in reasonable terms, and reciprocate in accepting these arguments for consideration (Gutmann & Thomas, 1996). Even proponents of deliberative democracy concede to the impossibility of meeting these preconditions universally, especially in the case of deeply dividing religious and political identities of the participants (Dryzek, 2005). In the higher education setting, conflicts between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups and between Christian fundamentalists and liberals similarly attest to that difficulty. Second, the procedure of deliberation requires a dispassionate and formal type of discussion that is neutral to the participants’ backgrounds. Deliberation thereby privileges formal argumentation over other forms of presentation that are grounded in individuals’ race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other facets of identity (Gabardi, 2001). Moreover, even if arguments are reasonably formulated, some groups are systematically disadvantaged and less likely to be heard than others, because historically their voices have been considered unimportant, or in other words, lacking in “epistemological authority” (Sanders, 1997, p. 349). In higher education, the struggles of racial and ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians over inclusion in the curriculum and institutional decision making exemplify the effort to gain that authority. Finally, to be a site of counter-discourses, the public sphere would have to be a place where the social and the political resist the pull of the economic. As critics of deliberative democracy observe, the public sphere is deeply affected by the mass media-information order that creates and disseminates constructions of reality infused with the neoliberal doctrine (Gabardi, 2001). The U.S. Department of Education website with its electronic press room is part of that order, as are colleges and universities by virtue of their producing and distributing knowledge and using information technology. If colleges and universities were to emulate the public sphere, they would reproduce its problematic universals, formal style argumentation that, as some scholars (e.g., Young, 1996) suggest, is associated with White men, unequal epistemological authority among groups, and imposition by neoliberal mass media. Although a useful exercise in political participation for students, deliberation is unlikely to offer new perspectives on government, power, and citizenship that are not circumscribed by the neoliberal doctrine. At best, deliberation on campuses may serve to hone the existing techniques of the self as a conscientious member of society without questioning the naturalness of neoliberal governmentality.
66 The Journal of Higher Education A Foucaultian conceptualization of democracy as a continuously changing practice possibly offers a more fruitful framework for thinking about the role of higher education when preparing for citizenship. Foucault’s views on democracy evolved over time in the dialogue with and more often, as reaction against Habermas’s work (Flyvbjerg, 1998; Love, 1989). Foucault (1995) is concerned about the disciplining effects of liberal democracy as a regime of truth that the subjects learn to accept and obey. From that perspective, a public consensus is a product of domination of some discourses and rationalities over others, rather than an exercise in individual free will. Instead of searching for a definitive solution as the deliberative model would have it, Foucault (1984) proposes asking questions to elucidate the relations between knowledge and power. The questioning, or problematization of “what is given to us as necessary to think and do,” is an interrogation of the existing truths embedded in the dominant political doctrine (Burchell, 1993, p. 279). Thus, the goal of democratic action is to contest continuously not the government, but the truths and rationality upon which the government relies for its techniques and strategies of governing the population (Curtis, 2002, p. 525). The contestation at the center of that democratic action describes local micro struggles that individuals pursue as practice of freedom (Flyvbjerg, 1998). These struggles reflect individuals’ different and conflicting interests and values. Such an understanding of democracy is agonistic, i.e., based on the acceptance of conflict and confrontation as a legitimate part of politics. Agonistic democratic practice does not have an essence that is universal for all; instead, it acknowledges and affirms the existence of multiple essences and multiple identities that make up the society (Mouffe, 1999). It does not suppress informal styles of argumentation, either. On the contrary, the agonistic model recognizes passions that rise from the conflict and difference and harnesses them for democratic purposes (Mouffe, 1999, pp. 755–756). Institutions of higher education pride themselves on the diversity of their intellectual traditions, organizational forms and histories, curricula, students, faculty, and staff. Without claiming inclusiveness, the agonistic model respects the conflicting values and positions that diversity brings. The agonistic emphasis on questioning and contestation is congruent with the scientific ethos of universities. The Foucaultian conceptualization of agency as performance rather than essence opens possibilities for resistance, exploration, and experimentation with new subjectivities (Kulynych, 1997) and promises new visions of citizenship. Without a foundation in economic rationality, citizenship can be re-imagined outside the neoliberal doctrine as a new technique of the self, a new way of
Higher Education for Economic Advancement 67 relating to civil society and economy. Preparing students for agonistic citizenship requires teaching them how to draw on their identities to tirelessly scrutinize, doubt, and challenge the naturalness and inevitability of dominant discourses and their consequences. Agonistic citizenship therefore appears to be the most viable model of engaged citizenship that can counterweigh the neoliberal discourse on higher education. Conclusion As I suggested in the title of this article, higher education certainly serves both the market and democracy. As a discursive formation, higher education borrows from multiple discourses to construct its subjects— scholars, students, administrators—and its objects—knowledge(s) in the sciences and the humanities, administrative practices, organizational logics, etc. However, it is not the social constructionist and interdiscursive nature of the higher education discourse that I wished to problematize in this study. My goal was to investigate how the meaning of one purpose or idea of higher education could be subverted and reinterpreted to support a different, if not antagonistic, purpose. In other words, I wanted to know how “economic advancement” and “engaged citizenship” in the title could serve the same goal. When the social function of higher education, including support of equality and preparation for citizenship, is re-signified as promotion of national competitiveness and the global market, colleges and universities are starved of political imagination that does not conform to neoliberal governmentality. The inauguration of Barack Obama as the U.S. President brought about new department rhetoric about the “Barack effect” and “the soft power that accompanies the symbolism of an African American president who has made education cool and exciting and infinitely promising” (U.S. Department of Education, 2009, para. 8). As his proposals for reforming the system of student loans show, some of President Obama’s promises for higher education are decidedly different from the policies of his predecessor. Yet, no reform can occur with disregard to the nation’s neoliberal economic setting and its narrow definition of higher education. In this context, the agonistic model of democracy carries a great potential for reimagining the roles of higher education outside the neoliberal doctrine and separating citizenship from consumption. While searching for the soul of higher education may be problematic because of the essentialist connotation of the trope, having spirited discussions about the place of colleges and universities in the networks of power and knowledge can be quite fruitful for creating higher education that is both economically responsive and socially responsible.
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