Social Matter

Corporate America tends to create a variety of English that’s nigh-indecipherable to outsiders. Business speak. They’re notorious for it. They’ll tell you, with a straight face, that “We’ve pivoted to become a mobile-first, UXaaS company delivering paleo delight straight to consumers in half hour installments.” And presumably there are folks out there in a cubicle farm who could interpret that bit of esoterica for us. American academics do the same thing. They generate bloated jargony English as well, just of a slightly different flavor. They’ll talk about “socially-constructed subjectivities circumscribed by racial formations” or something along those lines. Once again with a straight face. Once again in a diction presumably interpretable by at least some miserable bastards out there.

These two biomes cross-pollinate each other sometimes, and it’s interesting to note the sites where they do. The ways that academia infiltrates the business world are pretty well documented at this point. Anyone who’s ever attended an HR-mandated diversity workshop or a sensitivity training seminar can attest to said colonization. There are the moral status-signalling games that entice companies to hire wheelchair-bound transgendered IT workers, too, and increasingly byzantine rules concerning workplace sexual harassment. Sometimes even a CEO will get retired for insufficient enthusiasm towards homo marriage. And all that’s in part the educational system’s doing. The seeds for those dysfunctions were sowed by the college faculties of yesteryear.

The ways in which the business world infiltrates the academy are somewhat less remarked upon, at least outside the academy. But they’re there. Universities over the past few decades have become themselves managed more and more like for-profit corporations, and easy federal loans ensured that there was big money to be made by doing so. Some universities refer to their students as clients in internal e-mails, even customers. Fast food chains establish lucrative partnerships with campus food services. And, of course, business speak euphemisms start cropping up in faculty meetings.

One of the hottest buzzphrases in circulation right now is “student retention.” It’s a major action item. Administrators across the country are doing their best to make sure that their undergraduates stick around for at least four years. A lot of strategies for student retention revolve around building “academic self-confidence,” which may include any number of things. It may include padding the first year of college with remedial courses that last century would’ve embarrassed high schools to offer. Classes that cover basic English, math, even “study and time-management skills” help incoming freshpeople “transition” to life on campus. It also may include emphasizing “compentencies over rote learning” (which, being translated, means emphasizing showing your work rather than getting the right answer or grading papers based on expressiveness rather than content or correctness). Academic self-confidence initiatives can even include telling classroom faculty to be more lenient on absences and late-work, to “meet students where they are,” busy social calendars and all.

Other strategies for student retention involve outfitting dormitories with the freshest amenities, maintaining a winning sports team or two, basically maximizing the wow factor of the college experience, that sort of stuff.

From a business perspective, student retention makes perfect sense. The more semesters a given undergraduate sticks around, the more tuition checks you can cash, whether it’s that students parents signing off on them or daddy government. And if you have to lower standards a bit and idiot proof the campus by toning down the amount of actual learning pupils have to endure in the classroom or by passing students that show up for the lecture once in a blue moon, well… what the hell, right? Money is money. So much the better, in fact, because the lower the standards the wider the pool of potential college recruits you can draw from. Little Johnny is going to need us to hold his hand as he re-learns his ABCs? No problem. We have a spot for him in our fine institute of higher learning, provided he’s a paying customer.

From a business perspective, it’s not really an issue that increasing college attendance, hiking tuition rates, and lowering the bar on required performance devalues the degree. From a business perspective, it doesn’t matter that you’re dumping graduates with these degrees on an already depressed economy, an economy that seems rather sluggish in getting around to that promised “recovery.” From a business perspective, it doesn’t even matter that you’re saddling your students (many of whom you knew from the get go couldn’t hack a college education) with tens of thousands of dollars in undischargeable debt before you hand them that devalued degree and dump them onto that depressed economy. None of that is bad for your bottom line in the short term.

It does seem, however, that some of this might be a little questionable from the perspective of the college professoriate. Those folks are overwhelmingly liberal and progressive and enlightened. After all, the left generates a lot of high-flown rhetoric about standing up for the little guy, about championing his interests over the prerogatives of fat cat capitalism. But in practice our progressive colleagues don’t do much to oppose the economic exploitation of the student body. They aid and abet, in fact. There is an eerie compatibility between the drive of liberal educators to “democratize” higher education and the drive of behind-the-scenes financial interests to fleece every last mother’s son for portions of their paychecks into perpetuity. The former want to throw open the gates to one and all. The latter is more than happy to collect admission. So while professor types tend to talk a big game about raging against the machine, they are all the while they’re oiling its treads.

The fact of the matter is that the resentment that animates contemporary egalitarians and the greed that animates the corporate world aren’t opposed much at all. Despite appearances and despite the protest marches that college kids on their parents’ dime occasionally skip finals to attend. You see this every time Wal-Mart sells a Banksy print or some shithole factory in Indonesia pumps out another round of Guy Fawkes masks. Less trivially, you can see it in how, say, feminism promises emancipation and fulfillment and independence but actually just exacerbates the empty, soulless consumerism of American life. “Lean in, ladies! You can grab some Panera on the way home after you pick up your kids from daycare.” Perhaps that’s why the corporate world and the world of the pristine progressive campus cross polinate so readily and produce such grotesque hybrids. It’s an incestuous liaison between envy and avarice.

And I suppose all this means is that those of us of a conservative or reactionary or a traditionalist bent can’t trust either of these enemies to run each other through, despite their ostensible opposition to one another. Neither one of them will finish our jobs for us, even by accident. Nothing to do, then, but to speak the truth in plain words and go to war with them both.