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Ovetz argues thathigher education

worldwide is becomingentrepreneurialized asuniversities are forcedto organize themselvesincreasingly as profit-oriented businesses.This involves commer-cial partnerships withprivate capital and the

State; and the growingexploitation of bothteaching staff andstudents. However,there is also growingresistance to this trendfrom students, staff,and local communities.Ovetz illustrates hisargument by detailedreference to the USA,

and especially to theUniversity of Texas at

Austin.

Robert Ovetz

Turning Resistance intoRebellion:Student Movements and theEntrepreneurialization of theUniversities

The universities are no longer closed corporations as JamesRidgeway tagged them more than two decades ago in his book bythe same name. In response to the crisis of higher education thatdeveloped from the student insurgencies of the 196070s, sincethe late 1970s US-based universities are rapidly beginning theconflict ridden process of becoming profit making businesses

while hiding it from the public and students they supposedlyserve. The universities have not simply tightened and transformedtheir partnerships withbusiness but they are becomingbusinessesthemselves through various forms of profit making ventures basedon university resources, faculty and cheap and unwaged studentlabour. They are undergoing a process I call entrepreneurialization,

which in the face of rising resistance, may not be working asplanned.

The following is an analysis of the entrepreneurialization ofUS-based universities offered as a case study for understandingand resisting an ongoing global transformation of higher

education. Austerity, pressures to further serve the market, directcommercialization of academic research as new university-facultyowned business ventures, and the rerouting of campus finances

113

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114 Capital & Class58

to underwrite these projects are becoming a common occurrenceat universities throughout the world. Although this articleprimarily focuses on US universities, restructuring here isintegrally connected with the reorganization of Canadian and

Mexican universities facilitated by the North American Free TradeAgreement (NAFTA) as well as other Latin American universities.Because US universities often serve as a model for entrepreneur-ialization, it is vitally important that we study the beginnings ofthis process to begin building cross-national alliances amongstudents, faculty, staff and communities already actively resistingthese changes.

The Roots of the Crisis

Facing a crisis of manageability precipitated by the studentrebellions of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the financialdisinvestment from education that immediately followed as aresponse and still continues, the universities have been faced witha multitude of financial predicaments that have pushed them tofind new sources of funds and, in the process, a new way ofoperating. As rebellions rocked the campuses in the 196070s,

others were being organized in the urban cities, by women, factoryworkers, blacks, chicano/as, asian-americans, the unemployed,puerto ricans, gay and lesbians and many other communities thatruptured the Keynesian organization of capital and threw thesystem into a crisis from which it has yet to recover. Even today,low productivity, the Savings & Loans (S&L) collapse,government debt, and the resurgence of numerous socialmovements in the West, insurrection in China, Korea, and Africa,the international debt crisis and the crushing of Eastern Bloc statecapitalism demonstrates that the crisis continues both at homeand internationally.

In the midst of these insurrections, disinvestment began to takeplace in every area of higher education in the US. Military research,the foundation upon which the nearly 200 research universities

were erected since the 1940s, fell from almost 80% to 44% of totalR&D spending in the mid 1970s, and declined in the universitiesfrom more than 25% to less than 10% of federal R&D in the mid

1970s.1

Concurrently, cuts occurred in every area from ROTC toliberal arts as tuition skyrocketed, state funding declined, grantswere replaced with loans for financial aid, and graduates

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Entrepreneurialization of universities 115

employment possibilities turned bleak. In all, universities suffereda 43% decline in non-defence federal support over the past fifteenyears.2 In 1992, total state funding declined for the first time sincesuch data began being collected about 30 years ago.

Ironically, capital is again looking to the universitiesone ofthe terrains of conflict that helped to create the crisis in the firstplaceto restore manageability and profits. Today there is amassive attempt to reorganize the universities so that theycontribute to the restoration of productivity (i.e. more work) andcompetition (i.e. new ways to divide us), primarily by commer-cializing military research in high-tech and biotechnology. Inaddition to their responsibility for producing disciplined workers,the universities are now preparing to turn technology once

handed over to corporations into products that are marketeddirectly for profit.

Like the rationalization and industrialization of the universitiesbefore it, entrepreneurialization is a response to the disinvestmentby state and federal governments and corporate foundations withthe continuing disruption in the disciplining of new workers sincethe 1960s. Although universities have long been corporations,profiting from the disciplining of new workers through expandedfunding, contracts, grants and gifts as well as real estate ventures

and investment portfolios, their role in capital accumulationcontinues to be mystified by the unwaged status of students andthe lack of overt profits. With entrepreneurialization, however, thismystification is being stripped away and the relationship of theuniversities to other sectors of global capital is becoming clearer.The universities are no longer just subordinate to the interests ofbusiness by reproducing labour power (the ability of a person to

work) that is later used to produce profit but are becoming explicitbusinesses themselvesdeveloping and selling new technologies,often developed by unwaged student labour, through their ownfor-profit corporations. The disciplining of young people tosubmit to a life of endless work is now joined by the commercial-ization of profitable technologyoften indistinguishable fromeach otheras the primary functions of the universities.

Entrepreneurialization, however, is not going as planned.Entrepreneurializing universities are increasingly faced withrenewed student struggles organized around environmental and

multicultural (a buzzword referring to reforms aimed at givingaccess to disempowered social groups) issues and againstmilitarism and austerity. These struggles often directly and

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indirectly conflict with entrepreneurialization and austerity whileseeking to transform the campuses to serve the multiple needs ofstudents. Entrepreneurialization is also facing resistance from USCongressional investigations, faculty, students, animal rights and

environmental groups, and local communities blocking thepoisoning of their neighbourhoods. But for students to help blockentrepreneurialization it is necessary to recognize how the existingstudent movements and relatively ignored everyday forms ofresistance can complement each other locally and globally, turningresistance into rebellion to not only disrupt but transform theuniversities to serve the multiple desires of students.

This article briefly examines existing research into thisreorganization, focusing on entrepreneurialization in the US by

providing a brief case study of the University of Texas at Austin(UT-Austin). However, just as the crisis began in student struggle,it continues by the same hand. Entrepreneurialization is not adone deal, but only a name for the current terrain of struggle weface in higher education. I will analyse not only the forces thatrefuse entrepreneurialization but how they can link up in acomplementary way to stop it in its tracks. While this study islimited to the US, the same process is taking place throughoutEurope and internationally with the help of local national

governments, US based corporations, university based think-tanksand even the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Itis for this reason that we must understand entrepreneurializationin a local and international context if we are to defeat it.

New Strategies for the Same Crisis

Universities are getting out of the education business like U.S. Steelgot out of the steel business David Noble

The entrepreneurialization of the universities is taking placethrough so-called technology transfer, a process of commercializinguniversity based high-tech by private companies. The common

justification running through the technology transfer literature isthat these renewed university-business relationships are generatinga renewed flow of funds into the universities. However, this

mystifies the fact that much of the investment capital actuallyoriginates from federal programmes, state governments, tuition andfee payments, university endowments and bond financingin

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effect, a massive outflow of students and taxpayers money throughgovernmental R&D funding and tuition fees directly into thecorporate bottom line. But how did all of this start?

The disinvestment from military research in the universities

that followed the student anti-war related movements, began tobe reversed in 1979 when the Department of Defence (DoD)reinterpreted the Mansfield Amendment, which restricted thebreadth of research the military could fund, to open the way forincreased military research in the universities along a new track.Since many campuses had been forced to make at least a tokenopposition to classified research on paper, the military supposedlyfunded most of its research in small fractured projects and asunclassified, under the guise that it is only basic research without

an immediate application.The fiscal crisis that was extenuated by the refusal to invest in

the universities drove the universities in the late 1970s to re-embrace military funding even as the anti-draft, anti-nuke andCentral American anti-intervention movements grew in andaround the universities. DoD served to bring national security andeconomic prosperity together under the umbrella of hightechnology thus providing the resources to back incentives forentrepreneurialization. 3

Key federal legislation served to stimulate the commercializa-tion of renewed military and other federally financed R&D. ThePatent and Trademark Amendments of 1980 allowed universities,not-for-profit institutions, and small businesses to hold patent titleto federally funded research for the first time.4 This was furtheramended a few years later to allow all corporations, regardless ofsize, to commercialized publicly subsidized research. OMB Circular

A124 which soon followed formalized the removal of researchresults from the public domain, thereby casting privatization, andthe Technology Transfer Act of 1986 cemented a few final details,allowing for exclusive rights to government research and thesharing of royalties with government researchers.

Previously, only 4% of more than 28,000 federal patents werelicensed for a fee. With these changes, corporations had madetheir first successful move to gain access to a massive resource that

would now serve to socialize the costs of commercial R&D. TheEconomic Recovery Tax of 1981 further enlarged the write-offs

available to corporations that donated equipment to a universityand a tax credit of 25% to companies with increases in existingR&D expenses above existing levels. Although it expired in 1985,

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further extensions through 1986 were made while lowering thecredit to 20% and there is a push to make it permanent.

University-corporate combinations that have existed fordecades in the form of faculty consulting, research contracts,

student employment and the like soon took on a new angle.Where previously most development and all marketing was doneby the corporations, universities now began rushing to establishand fund technology transfer offices and services, business parksand incubators, venture capital funds and guidance, and facilitatethe creation of spin off companies, frequently owned and operatedby students, alumni, and former and current student paid faculty.In the process, the burden for financing high risk R&D has begunto shift to the universities as major multinationals such as Kodak

begin to downsize their research divisions.Corporations have upgraded little used strategies such as

consortia and research parks to consolidate redundant researchprojects. Consortia, monopolies composed of many of the largestcorporations in a market, are increasingly settling on universityproperty and using campus and government funded research andfacilities to build an industry monopoly. Austin, Texas is home topossibly two of the most significant consortia created so far, MCCand Sematech, which have served as important model consortia.

In 1984, the Justice Department ruled that the proposed MCCwas not in violation of anti-trust federal laws, thus managing tostir up a renewed cycle of university-corporate conglomerations.This served the passage of the National Cooperative Research Actof 1984 that legalized joint ventures among companies that holdmore than 25% of market share. As a result, between 198285the number of consortia increased five fold, almost all of them inexistence since 1979.5

Consortia and research parks are certainly not new, Stanfordhaving created Stanford Research Park which incubated suchcompanies as Hewlitt-Packard and spawned the Silicon Valley,MITs park, and North Carolinas Research Triangle. By 1990,there were already 109 university related research parks in the USand 15 in Canada, an increase of 22 in the US since 1987.6

Many of these parks were built with the use of UrbanDevelopment Action Grants that had previously servedcommunities rebuilding their neighbourhoods to block spatial

deconcentration during the 1960s that followed the uprisings ofHarlem, Watts and Newark.7 Tax exempt Industrial RevenueBonds also became quite popular slush funds, totalling $20 billion

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in 1981, as they were used to build such parks as New HavensScience Park. Others are funded by the university or state whocedes land, tax and fee abatements, provides tax-free loans tofinance construction or just builds the facilities itself and rents

them at a minimum cost as the Texas A&M Research Park andUT does with the Balcones Research Center.The federal government also played a role in bankrolling

entrepreneurialization. Much of the federal tech transfer policy wasdeveloped by the Reagan Administration, under whom federalresearch and labs were first opened to commercial application. TheStevenson-Wydler Innovation Act of 1980 allowed federal labsto authority to license commercialized research and the NationalCompetitive Technology Transfer Act of 1989 finalized the

incentives for commercialization. Federal labs, which received onethird of the $45 billion of federal R&D in 1984, between198083, saw their funding increase 9.7% while university R&Donly increased by 7.4%.8 Considering that 70% of the fundingcomes from DoD and the Department of Energy (DoE), openingthe labs to intensified tech transfer provides a massive untappedpool for capital to socialize the costs of commercializing militarytechnology.9 The potential returns to the 183 research universitiesis also great: Stanford University of California, one of the five

largest recipients of federal R&D money, made $3 million in198384 alone from patents. The Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT) has made more than $3 million from patentlicensing by 1987 and is expected to top $50 million by 1992.10

However, Stanford and MIT, who have been commercializingresearch for decades, are rare exceptions limited to the wealthiestendowed universities. The are many other well endowed federalincentive programmes originating from many federal agenciesaimed at promoting entrepreneurialization.

Such schemes are predicated on the illusion of money flowingfrom corporations to the universitiesexactly the opposite of whatis happening. In all, corporate sponsorship of R&D is still at adribble: around 8% in the early 1960s, it fell to 23% in the 1970sand early 1980s and now stands at only about 69%, dependingon who you talk to. Even though it is rising faster than federalcontributions, 7% vs. 4% between 198085, it is still minuscule.11

Overall, only 10 companies give one third of the money and two

give 20%.12

In fact, on average in 1987, while capitals share offunds was about 6%, universities themselves supplied at least24%.13 The reality does not match the rhetoric. Even after the

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publicity of the big deals in the early 1980s between Monsanto andWashington University (in Missouri), Harvards deals with Exxonand Whiteheads deal with MIT, university-industrial combinationsare neither a rousing success or dismal failure. 14

Some estimates even show a disinterest by the government.Lindsey argued that 1985 federal R&D spending levels areequivalent to 1967 levels in real terms.15 The universities aremaking virtually no money in return for their vast investments.In fact, only 10% of all new discoveries become patented, 1% arelicensed and 0.1% generate income greater than $25,000.16 Therest of the money comes through overhead charges for the indirectcosts of the research: library, staff and facilities usage. This can goas high as 90%, although at large public research universities like

UT-Austin it is rarely more than 15%.However, overhead costs have been huge sources of funding

goldmines many of the timesfor huge private universities suchat MIT and Stanford as Congressional investigations proved inearly 1991.17 With the returns from commercialization still verylow or even in the red, these universities resorted to profiting fromoverhead costs charged to society for what is presumed to be apublic good. The crackdown on overhead costs appeared muchearlier in 198384 when President Reagan called for a massive

reduction in the maximum charge. Although only marginallysuccessful, it set the stage for pushing the universities further froma guaranteed source of funding to having to prove theirprofitability in the market. Some call this process privatization,I call it entrepreneurialization. Denied adequate public finances,the universities are not simply selling themselves to outsidecorporations as privatization implies, but are being prodded tobecome overt profit-making business or face extreme financialhardship.

If these negative incentives have driven the universities tobecome more receptive to entrepreneurialization, it has not hadthe supposedly intended affect of drawing investments to highereducation. Corporate research contracts have remained steady atabout 6% in 1991 even since the early 1980s, leaving huge deficitsin campus financing. Estimates for equipment repair andreplacement, placed at least $300 million for emergency effortsand $10 billion in long term help, and tuition and fee increases,

that have outdistanced inflation until recently, attest to the levelat which capital still refuses to invest in the universities, whetherit be for high-tech or cultural studies.

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This may explain the intensified interest in tech transfer andspin-offs that take almost no corporate investment and growalmost unilaterally on university donated land used for incubatorsor research parks and centres, unwaged student interns that work

up to 3040 hours a week, university paid faculty that doeverything from advising to running the companies and statemonies in the form of tech transfer advisory services and centres,R&D grants and financial incentives.

University of Texas Inc.

These federal incentive programmes do not work alone but in

conjunction with a large number of other factors at state, localand university levels that are worth investigating in some detail.

Although many academics and students know intuitively what ishappening where they work, they seem woefully ill-equipped withthe details to document this transformation to a larger audience.I offer the following brief case study of the beginning process ofentrepreneurialization of the University of Texas System (UT) andUT-Austin campus as a model not only of entrepreneurializationbut for the kind of adversarial investigative research needed to

expose and resist it.

IC2

For George Kozmetsky, former weapons contractor and now chiefeconomic advisor to the Board of Regents and founder anddirector of the UT associated IC2 (the Institute for ConstructiveCapitalism), Austin, Texas is a test case for technology transfer andthe development of a technopolis, the further subordination of allaspects of life, work, leisure, government, and education to the high-tech industry. Although it appears as just another factor, at thecenter of the planned Austin technopolis lies UT-Austin, just asStanford stands in the center of what they perceive as a completedSilicon Valley technopolis, and TNCO and the University of Bariin Southern Italy.18 Through the guidance of IC2 and other closehigh-tech players, Austin (with its low paid labour, local taxabatements, infrastructure, etc.) and UT are being reorganized toserve as resources for the expansion of the high-tech industry. What

transpires at UT, the seventeenth largest recipient of researchmoney in the US,19 could indicate not only the direction furtherentrepreneurialization takes, but also how we can stop it.

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Kozmetsky has played a central role in the internationalentrepreneurialization of higher education. He is a primarymoving force of entrepreneurialization of higher education inTexas, having been responsible for the establishment of a number

of commercially oriented research centres in Texas universities andhelping to bring Sematech and MCC (military backed semi-conductor consortia) and a number of other defence relatedcorporations to Austin. He is now helping train planners in theSoviet Union how to do the same with their universities.

Kozmetsky is known, along with Charles Hurwitz, for his rolein MAXXAM Inc.s clearcutting of old growth redwoods inCalifornia in 1990, insider trading with Michal Milkens Drexel,and junk bond scams through United Savings which became one

of the best known S&L scandals.20 IC2

is also active inter-nationally, helping to set up the center for EconomicDevelopment at the University of South Florida and the Scienceand Technology Foundation in Alaska. They sponsor numerousannual conferences and generate a wealth of publications advisingcorporations in university entrepreneurialization in numerouscountries, including China, in which IC2was a booster as early as1981, and through the use of the military. Its army of fellowsinclude faculty and employees from at least twenty five other

corporations and universities.The remilitarization of the U.S. has been central to Kozmetskys

reorganization of the university. Kozmetskys strategy is to turngovernment funded military research into private profitable newproducts. For example, MCC and Sematech along with manyother recently arrived multinationals in Austin, rely on UT-Austinto subsidize the costs of research and commercialization. It is nosurprise that two IC2 generated conferences and the resultingbooks are titled: Commercializing SDI Technology andCommercializing Military Technology. The prime movers incarrying out this military lead development planning haveincluded a slew of ex-military men, including former UTChancellor Hans Mark, former Secretary of the Air Force, a NASA

Ames executive and Star Wars promoter.Entrepreneurialization planners make little distinction between

military or commercial and biotech or high-tech, and neithershould those who oppose it. To respond to these developments

with the argument that military spending has little value to theeconomy not only bypasses the obvious contention that theproblem is the economy, i.e. capitalism, but is also factually wrong

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since business is using public monies to restore accumulation.Military spending has been central to capitals persistence in theface of the ongoing crisis and has served to reverse many of theadvances culled by the movements of the 196070s.

Texas goes high-techWhile long tied to numerous industries overtly throughagriculture (going back to the Morrill Act of 1862), cement, realestate, construction and, of course, oil and gas, most of what hastranspired since the mid 1980s has forever torn the shroud of ivyfrom UT. Beginning in 1982, the state began a series of high levellegislative studies and reforms that established legal and financialincentives for public subsidization of the high-tech industry.

In 1985, the legislature required each university to establishintellectual property regulations that would allow universityownership of campus generated innovation that could then bepatented and licensed by the university. At the same time, theCenter for Technology Development and Transfer (CTDT), whichoperates out of the UT College of Engineering, was created. Thepurpose of the CTDT, with the added bonus of allowinguniversities and their researchers to hold ownership incorporations that invest in university research, is that it is to take

publicly funded university research and market it for privategain.21 This includes everything from channelling facultymembers into profitable research projects, locating start-up capitaland even marketing the research directly through universityowned and operated spin-off companies.

The passage of the Equity Ownership Bill in 1987 gave UTand other state universities the ability to own campus based spin-off companies. As a complement, in 198990, the conflict ofinterest law was revised, according to the Polemicist, an alternativeUT student newspaper at the time, to allow a member of theboard of regents of public universities to sit on the boards or investin non-profit or for-profit corporations that have licensing orsponsored research contracts with the university they preside over.22

This opened the door to formalizing participation by a number ofUT System Regents and the UT Engineering Foundation AdvisoryCouncil (composed of many investors and multinationalcorporations) in the creation of Research Application, Inc. (RAI)

in 1987 to facilitate such business schemes.23

RAI was established as the venture capital fund for thecommercialization of research conducted by the CTDT. It is one

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of five for-profit venture capital funds in Texas. In addition, bothare served by the Center for Technology Venturing (CTV) set upin the Business School (which is named after Kozmetsky, who wasonce its dean) to run the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI).ATI

offers the subsidized facilities to grow new high-tech companiesand CTVprovides the unpaid graduate students to work themunder the guise of class requirements by affiliated faculty.

In 1987, the legislature also added two programmes tosubsidize research in science and engineering with commercialpotential. Run by the Texas Higher Education CoordinatingBoard, these programmes have supplied many millions of dollarsto military and commercial high-tech and biotech researchincluding $3.3 million to the rail gun programme at UT-Austin.

The advisory committee and review panels are a whos whomembership of representatives from 91 universities, defencecorporations and the federal government. Between 1985 and1992, the coordinating board doled out $246 million forcommercializable research.24

UT Inc.As one of the largest research universities in the US and centrallytied into the high-tech industry, UT-Austin has become the

centrepiece of statewide entrepreneurialization. Of the many smallto multinational sized companies relocating here, nearly half haveties to the university.25

UT-Austin is not merely a magnet for attracting high-techcorporations but has become one itself. The number of patentfilings for UT based research has increased from 3 in 1983 to 28in 1988 and 102 in all by 1991, with 98 total issued patents.Twenty six licenses have been executed between 1986 to mid1988, a 62% increase over the period 198386. The UT Systemholds 311 research agreements with an option to license to thecorporation and UT itself owns equity in 6 spin-offs.26 There arepresently at least 31 significant income earning spin-offs orlicensing arrangements according to the UT System Office ofLegal Counsel, six involving UT-Austin, including one with AstecIndustries for whom William Weldon is director. Weldon is UTsmost entrepreneurial faculty member, holding 20 patents and 16applications in his name.27 In 1984, well before the

reorganization began, UT-Austin was generating $100,000 a yearin royalties. In all, income from these arrangements total morethan $1.2 million in 1990 as the number of licensing

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arrangements skyrocketed from a mere 15 in 1987 to 150 by1990. About 30 new corporations have spun off of facultyresearch or some type of UT System support since 1987. 28

Together these and other entities have facilitated widespread

entrepreneurialization at UT: $34 million in land and equipmentthat rent for $2.00 a year and most of $16 million for newlyendowed professorships for MCC, $140 million for the DoDfunded Sematech, $20 million for a Cray supercomputer, $70million for the proposed Jim Bob Moffett Molecular BiologyBuilding (named after the CEO of Freeport McMoRan) andMolecular Biology programme, and $1 billion through a statepublic bond sale for the now defunct supercollider.

UT is closely connected to many multinational corporations

through the change in its intellectual property regulations. Onesuch partnership is that of current UT System Chancellor andformer UT-Austin President William Cunninghams holding ofstocks, advisory role and membership on the boards of severalFreeport McMoRan subsidiaries (which is discussed later in thisarticle).

The rail gun programme best demonstrates the complex webof forces at work entrepreneurializing UT. Originally conceivedas part of the Star Wars project, the rail gun has found new

significance as an anti-tank land warfare weapon. This hasdeveloped under the guidance of former UT Chancellor HansMark who brought his SDI research programmes from the AirForce to UT. Some of this technology has most definitely alreadycontributed to the anti-tank weapon systems and steel piercingbombs used by the US in the genocidal Gulf War.

The railgun has been a major recipient of federal researchmonies, including a recent $13 million/5 year Army grant forland warfare research. Rail gun technology has been applied forcommercial purposes by at least six multinational corporationsinvolved in oil drilling, audio tape production, advancedsparkplugs, and metallurgy to develop their own products andincrease their profits. The recently finished $62 million buildingshared by the CEM and the Center for Energy Studies and othernew facilities and amenities have come from tuition and feemoney, bond issues, and other university sources.29

It has also been discovered that UT is leasing 2,000 acres of

West Texas land for $3.00 an acre per year to the so-called non-profit military contractor, MITRE Corporation, for whom formerChancellor Mark was a trustee until just prior to the agreement.

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MITRE is also the host organization forJASON, a think tank of 50academics who have advised DoD on the MX, ICBMs, theelectronic fence devised by Jason during the Vietnam war, laser

weapons and other technologies.30 MITRE will be conducting

sensor research near the UT-Permian Basin Center for Energy andEconomic Diversification, which tests the railgun by shooting ata mountain.

UT is only one example of many universities and researchinstitutions pursuing commercialization in Texas.31 The Houston

Area Research Center (HARC), a consortium of universities inTexas, Louisiana and Tissot of Switzerland, is a center of researchon so-called smart weapons, the Superconductor (SSC),biotechnology, and economic planning. Nearly every state

university has established commercialization support programmesand some such as the UT System Cancer Center has made morethan 100 licensing deals alone in only a three year period, havebeen significant.32

Entrepreneurialization and AusterityIn order to free up the capital necessary to underwriteentrepreneurial projects, the universities have introduced a processof selective austerity to reappropriate funds from programmes that

are unprofitable or resistant to commercialization. Tuition andfee increases, reorganization of the way the endowment is spentand invested, and a change in the way austerity is imposed havebecome commonplace. Campus administrations circulate amythology of declining state revenues even as they have increasedover the last decade in actual dollars, most of which goes tosupport commercially oriented projects. As federal and statefunding has been pushed sharply down, each campusand

within them, each programmeincreasingly come under pressureto prove their profitability in order to justify current funding letalone increases. This is unique not only to Texas or the US butappears to have become the standard operating procedure ofalmost every university system from Canada to China.

In Texas, austerity has become the order of the day, driven bythe engine of budget flexibility (and along with it flexible tuitionas he increases which are only flexible upwards are called). Between198487 alone more than $300 million was slashed from all 37

state colleges, universities and community colleges. Overall statefunding of UT has fallen 2.7%, or $5.6 million dollars since 1985and another $9 million was cut during Spring and Fall 1991 alone.

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Most importantly, this small but significant decrease isovershadowed by the source of this money: tax dollars now onlyaccount for 30.5% of the budget compared to 44.7% in 1985.33

Yet, it is completely ignored that state appropriations have nearly

doubled during the same period since 1980 from $106.8 millionto $198.4 million in 1991. Funding in 1991 was only $5.6 millionor 2.7% off that of 1985. The total budget itself has rocketed from

just under $100 million in 196970 to $277 million in 198081to $506.9 million in 198687 and $666 million in 199192.

These figures demonstrate a fundamental change in directionfor university funding that is influencing a transformation of thefundamental nature of the university. Although state revenues arenot rising as rapidly as the overall budget, the money is available

nonetheless since more than one half of the budget isunallocated, i.e. that it can be used however the UT-Austinadministration wishes. In effect, if a programme refuses or isunable to entrepreneurialize it falls under the pressures of austeritysince it is completely dependent on relatively declining statemoney. If a programme further subordinates itself to the overtneeds of the market it is rewarded, as engineering and biotechhave been, with massive support.

The range of austerity has been almost limitless at UT-Austin.

Fearing student responses to tuition increases, the Board ofRegents has selected its targets in a careful and fragmentedmanner. Tuition increases have now become an annual regularityfor both undergraduate and graduate students after an initialdivide and conquer strategy of raises for certain colleges. Forexample, between 198596 graduate student tuition has increased1600%. Fees for hundreds of classes were either created orincreased incrementally to siphon money from students in a moreindividual and less explicit manner. The general fee was increasedand new fees created to pay for services once included in tuitionlike advising on a school by school level and registration. A staffhiring freeze lasted throughout most of 1991 has been extendedeven as services, lines and employee working conditions worsened.Faculty positions remain unfilled due to departmental cuts andfund shortages that were made up by taking money from fundsproviding visiting professors, xeroxing, phone and mail services,sabbaticals and hiring for new positions. Library funding has been

cut as the state has underfunded the requested budget by 42% in199091, forcing the administration to redirect money fromelsewhere.

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Student financial aid has also faced the knife. While the StateHigher Education Coordinating Board was funnelling $246million to commercializable research, 1000 UT-Austin studentshad their aid delayed in January for months because the Boards

loan authorization had run dry. As federal aid has shifted fromgrants to loans, its share of funding has declined from 83% to73% while the university and state shares have increased to coverthe deficit. This has been met by UT-Austin with almost $19million in unmet student need in 198990.

A 1987 law provided the coordinating board with theauthority to impose enrollment caps on campuses unable to do sothemselves by placing a cap on allocations based on a per studentformula. The UT-Austin administration has attempted to reduce

undergraduate enrollment while rapidly increasing graduateenrollment, many of whom work as virtual slaves oncommercializable research projects or teaching huge introductoryclasses at the fraction of a professors salary.

Were Broke and Other Complete BullshitThe state and university have attempted to legitimize this austerityby claiming that they are broke. Yet UTs support for Sematech,HARC, and other commercially oriented projects show this to be

otherwise. In fact, UT has been found to have a number ofdifferent sources of unrestricted funds that can be used howeverit pleases. In 1989, state legislation granted increased budgetingflexibility to the campus administration to reallocate money to

where it may deem necessary. Since more than half the $666million 199192 UT-Austin budget is unrestricted the administra-tion has a large amount of money to direct to where the financialreturns are the largest.

UT has a number of lesser publicized supplementary sourcesof funds. Its $4 billion Permanent University Funds (PUF) shared

with Texas A&M yielded about $250 million in interest of whichUT receives two thirds. Although the money goes first to repaybond debt, UT received about $82 million in 1991 in cash that itused for a wide range of projects, mostly supporting entre-preneurial programmes in engineering. The interest forms the

Available University Fund (AUF) which over the years has beenused to establish a matching fund for endowed faculty positions

that amounts to about $377 million. Some of theAUF has alsogone into a reserve fund for construction projects that totals about$78 million. The PUF itself is a source of capital since bonds can

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be sold to finance construction projects backed by the endow-ment. Tuition, general fees and other sources of capital provideUTwith collateral for selling bonds that are repaid by increasedtuition and fees. The general Fee, which amounted to $10 million

in 1991 and is paid by every student, goes directly toward theconstruction and expansion of commercially oriented facilities,including $8 million for the Jim Bob Moffett molecular biologybuilding. In all, the UT System is nearly $1 billion in debtthrough each type of bond sale. UT-Austin was also found to have$91.6 million and the UT-System $428.3 million in all indiscretionary funds that the State Comptroller wanted toexpropriate in 1991 and the system has more than $1.3 billion inshort term investments and cash.34

In an in depth study I conducted, which was published in TheOther Texan, I found that UT and the UT System actually had atotal of $3.3 billion in discretionary, unrestricted funds available.35

These funds were not part of the PUF but found in some of theaccounts mentioned above as well as short-term flexibleinvestments. In a word, UT is not broke.

Austerity and CrisisWe are seeing a pattern of selective disinvestment from higher

education as a whole and from certain areas within eachinstitution. Unable to restore control and thus the universitiesusefulness to capital accumulation, the universities are beingforced to undergo fundamental reorganization through thepressures of austerity that will make them prove theirentrepreneurial usefulness or face hardship.

Much of what is described at UT-Austin is becoming standardoperating procedure throughout universities in the US and the

world. Nationwide, universities are cutting back ever more rapidly,raising tuition and fees, laying off staff and part time faculty,reducing class availability and library funding, and taking othermeasures that shift a larger share of the costs of education to thestudents. For the first time in the 33 years that records have beenkept, state governments spent less on higher education in 199192than the previous fiscal year. Seven of the 11 states that spendmore than $1 billion spent less than the year before. Thirty-fivestates did not increase spending at all or reduced it in real terms.

In all, according to the Pew Higher Education Research Programsreport that provided these figures: More than any time in the lasthalf century, American colleges and universities are likely to be on

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their ownleft to their own best instincts and to draw upon theirown talents and resources as they go about the business of adjustingtheir appetite to the provisions at hand. 36 No clearer can it be saidthat entrepreneurialization is being driven by austerity.

The talents of the universities are becoming apparent as fundsare being reappropriated from areas that serve students needs ordesires to those that serve the entrepreneurial open corporation.Higher education historian David Noble concurs, explaining thatthe tuition increase is just a symptom of the more fundamentaltransformation of our higher educational institutionspublic andprivate alikeinto corporate research, and hence money-makingmachines. 37 However, it isnt working as planned.

A Theory of Entrepreneurialization

The entrepreneurialization of US universities is taking place ontwo levels. Formal campus decision-making comes to bedominated by non-academic forces within the university, and theoverriding function of the university becomes transformed fromdisciplining labour power to using that labour power to producedirect profits. This is not as simple as saying outsiders come to

dominate the organization of the university. In fact, long existingactivities inside the university, research geared towards capitalaccumulation, come to not only determine but reshape thecampus as a whole. Both aspects are inseparable and cannot beunderstood chronologically but as interactive and in-process.

While my focus is on the latter, Janice Newson and HowardBuchbinder analyse the former: how the daily working of theuniversity have been reorganized in Canada.38 They focus on thereorganization of the internal daily working of the universitiesundergoing entrepreneurialization with an emphasis on the conflictsinvolving faculty, who are more widely organized into unions inCanada than in the US. Newson and Buchbinder argue that

whereas previous business activities did not determine what kindand how knowledge was produced, recent entrepreneurial activitiesdo. These entrepreneurial activities, unlike other campus concerns,become parasitic institutional policy without going through normalacademic decision-making channels, unlike progressive reforms.39

Over time, Newson and Buchbinder find Canadian universitiesbecoming increasingly reorganized into overt businesses, where eachunit operates as a business buying and selling knowledge created by

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entrepreneurial and waged academic workers while attacking facultyunionization and traditional faculty governance. The serviceuniversity is becoming fully integrated into post-industrialcapitalism by commodifying all aspects of education.40

Hugo Aboites and others have analysed the commercializationof universities in Mexico.41Aboites analysed the conflicts arisingfrom student and faculty resistance to attacks on universityautonomy from business and the state and pressures of austerityand entrepreneurialization since the early 1980s. Entrepreneurial-ization is seen arising within the context of antagonism betweenthe subordination of the universities to the needs of students andfaculty, enforced by widespread unionization, strikes and resistance,and that of global capital which initiated the imposition of

austerity through the IMF in the 1980s and will continue to do sothrough NAFTA. For Aboites, entrepreneurialization is a strategyfor reimposing control over the universities and smashing studentand faculty organization in order to restore their usefulness tobusiness. A similar process of also taking place in universitiesthroughout Latin America.42

What is sorely missing is a comprehensive analysis of theentrepreneurialization of US universities, although some havebegun to examine it.43 However, the idea that the universities are

a productive part of capital is hardly new theoretically, ThorsteinVeblen and Upton Sinclair having made the argument more than70 years ago as part of a movement against the growing pre-dominance of Taylorist rationality as the organizing principle ofthe universities.44 The antiquity of this question raises seriousquestions as to the continuing debates regarding the role of theuniversity in capital and strategic organizing questions such as therelationship of students and faculty to the rest of the working class.

In 1918 Veblen was already critiquing the emerging newpracticality, as C. Wright Mills came to call it,45 the businesslikeoperation and organization of the universities. Mill furtherexplained that by force of the same businesslike bias the boardsunavoidably incline to apportion the funds assigned for currentexpenses in such as way as to favour those practical or quasi-practical lines of instruction and academic propaganda that arepresumed to heighten the business acumen of the students or toyield immediate returns in the way of a credible publicity. (p.59)

To make this transition, he demonstrated the infusion of a newprinciple of rationalization in which the pursuit of knowledge andacademic work were perceived as standardized and measurable

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quantities. (p.163) Seeing the university as a space for the freepursuit of knowledge, Veblen saw the pursuit of profitableactivities inconsistent with that mission. But he not only pointedout inconsistencies with that ideal but articulated the conflicts that

began to arise as a result of faculty resistance to such pressures.46

David Noble and Clyde Barrows research are contemporaryfollow-ups of Veblen, Sinclair and Mill, establishing a foundationupon which to understand the process of industrialization thatpreceded entrepreneurialization. Taking the starting point that theuniversities are a productive part of capital, Barrow attempts tounderstand the process of industrialization and the reorganizationof the universities into businesses as part of the class struggle.Unlike Noble inAmerica By Design,47 Barrow recognizes that the

impetus for reorganization stems from periods of class conflict bothwithin and without the university that took place not only from1894 to 1928 but also from 1929 to 1962 and continues today.Contemporary concepts of modernization and rationalization, heexplains are ideological euphemisms concealing the class conflicts

which shaped and still structure American universities. (p.251)Barrow thoroughly documents the dominance of standardiza-

tion as the new method for organizing the university recognized byVeblen. Its introduction is found in Frederick Taylors disciple

Morris Cookes influential 1910 study Academic and IndustrialEfficiencycommissioned by the new higher education-orientedCarnegie Foundation, which as Barrow explains translated the idealsof corporate capitalism into a practical strategy for educationalreform (p.74). Higher education changed dramatically as a resultof Cookes recommendations. Every aspect of the university becamesubject surveys that were used to standardize, routinize, and measurethe labour of students, faculty and staff. Such now taken-for-grantedmeasures as student-teacher ratios, student hours, the quartersystem, costs per student hour, departments, central administrativecontrol over facilities, line item budgeting, and annual reports weretaken directly from Cookes study.

Like Sinclair, Barrows study informs his strategic thinking. Herefutes the myth that professors are classless and autonomousindividuals in pursuit of knowledge and argues that they are notonly workers but part of the class struggle, an analysis that can alsobe applied to an understanding of students. While explaining how

the university is a part of capital and a terrain of class conflict,Barrow fails to demonstrate exactly how professors contribute tothe accumulation of capital and are part of the working class.

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Much of the most thorough research into the reorganizationof the universities into multinational corporations is coming fromstudent activists and journalists carrying out research as part ofstudents movements concerned with issues such as tuition and fee

increases, budget cuts, anti-militarism, and the unionization ofgraduate students. Aside from my own case study of UT-Austin,there exists two other studies of the reorganization of particularcampuses. Charles Betz study of the University of Minnesotaoutlines the reorganization of the campus through austerity(enrollment cuts, disinvestment from disciplines not useful tobusiness, tuition increases, and cutbacks) and how most of theplan was defeated by students, faculty, farmers and parents.48

Austerity is central to the reorganization since it allowed resources

to be rechannelled to where the largest, most profitable returncould be gained.49 In analyzing this attempt to transform UM intoa global academy, Betz found a conflict between the universitystraditional mission for producing new labour power and the newemphasis on high-tech development. Entrepreneurializationevolved out of plans developed by a tripartite coalition of elites(from the university, business and government) and characterizedby structural contradictions rather than a socio-political crisis.

While the university plays a productive role in the international

capitalist economy, students appear more incidental than assubjects of conflict within the universities.

The University of Massachusetts was the subject of MarcKenens analysis, finding a connection between increasingresponsibility of the states for financing higher education andpressures to commercialize.50 Kenen identifies a coalition ofbusinessmen opposed increases in taxes for higher education inorder to pressure the universities to generate their own revenuethrough increased commercial activity. As a result, by 1989, non-state funding surpassed state funding for higher education for thefirst time, resulting in widespread tuition and fee increases, attackson non-traditional and multicultural programmes and childcare.Kenens research proved useful to widespread student and facultyresistance to austerity and military research, including a successfulstrike by graduate students in 1991.

A few others have examined the effects of entrepreneurial-ization, offering case studies of the commercialization of

particular academic disciplines such as the medical and biologicalsciences and even sociology. Unfortunately, some of them fail todevelop a theoretical analysis of what is happening and simply

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provide documentation. Martin Kenney offers a meticulouslydetailed study of the commercialization of medical, biological andchemical research in the universities.51 He shows how the rise ofuniversity based biotechnology depended on access to university

funding and resources and low paid graduate student workers.The universities use of venture capital funds to commercial theirfaculties biomedical research is also the focus of Jaron Bourkeand Robert Weissman study of Harvard and WashingtonUniversitys activities.52Jonathan Feldman analysed the role of theuniversities and their multinational chemical company partnersin the war in Central America and the dependence of agricultureon bio-engineered seeds and pesticides.53 The reemergence of themilitary in the universities since the late 1970s is also detailed.

Although sociology has been one of the first disciplines underattack for its general failure to consistently contribute profitablyto the university enterprise, the attack is motivated by itscontinued irrelevance to business even under the regime of thenatural science method and subservience to business and thestate.54 The dominance of the natural science model during World

War II meant the adoption of quantitative methods and theemergence of large scale survey research projects funded bycorporations, the military, the state and foundations. As a result

of the reorganization of the universities to focus on profits andtheir integration into the structures of transnational capital,sociology became dominated by the new practicality. Today,sociologists find themselves mostly irrelevant to capital andincapable of investigating and learning about capitals globalorganization. It has become useless both to those who manage andto those who resist.

My analysis of entrepreneurialization is not to simply decry thesoiling of the university by capital but to demonstrate that it haslong been an important part of capital. By studying the currentreorganization we can understand how the universitys relationshipto other institutions of capital are transformed because of the classstruggle. Unfortunately, many of these analyses of the commercial-ization process never make it this far but call for the displacementof the master by the slave, the slave or student who the university

was originally meant for. Insofar as the university was originallymeant for the students, rather than the corporations. 55 The

question at hand is to understand the role of the university inreproducing capitalist social relationships and how they are andcan be disrupted not simply changing those who control it.

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The Crisis Continues

Austerity has hardly worked as planned in service to entrepreneur-ialization. Joining a flurry of journalistic accounts of declining

support for R&D in U.S. universities, an August 26, 1991 Timemagazine cover story best summed up the crisis in its title: Crisisin the Labs: Beset by a budget squeeze, cases of fraud, relentlessactivists and a sceptical public, American researchers are undersiege.

How could a new round of disinvestment be taking place inthe universities? Has entrepreneurialization failed so soon? Andat whose hands? While too early to tell, these analyses make itapparent: entrepreneurialization has not delivered the goods for

capital. We have seen the corruption, fraud and scandals of thepast five years: exploding space shuttles, blind satellites andprobes, and the overpriced space station, genome project, star

wars and defunct supercollider. With costs skyrocketing, theuniversities are neglecting teaching and churning out science ofquestionable quality, Business Week (May 1991) adds. As a resultof lawsuits and faculty criticism, in 1995 the University of

Arizona became the first to explicitly prohibit institutional supportfor the spinning off of new university owned and funded

companies in favour of licensing and collaborations.Not only are commercially oriented projects not providing the

expected monetary and social returns, but they are increasinglycoming under attack from community groups fighting toxicdumping and students fighting for multicultural reforms andagainst tuition and fee increases, cutbacks and corporate orientedresearch. Entrepreneurialization also finds opposition in wellorganized areas of the universities such as womens, black,chicano, peace and environmental studies, experimental art,public interest law, as well as large numbers of radical faculty andresearch centres scattered throughout the traditional disciplinesthat grew out of the student movements of the 196070s andcontinue to seek to transform the campuses and society.

However, for these struggles to succeed we must try tounderstand how they can come to complement each other so thatcan become stronger. These struggles could be circulated a numberof ways in terms of the growing environmental or multiculturalism

movements or by expressing a demand for income for students toundermine the use of austerity against us. By understanding theglobal dimensions of entrepreneurialization we can better prepare

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ourselves to further develop international alliances that can notonly block capitals restructuring but promote our own.

Greening the Campuses

While faculty have organized at the University of Arizona, MIT,UC-San Francisco, UC-Berkeley and Harvard to block or slowdown university-business relationships,56 other more frequentactions have come from students. Highlighted by the massivegrowth of the Chapel Hill, North Carolina based StudentEnvironmental Action Coalition,57which had more than seventhousand show up to its Catalyst conference in 1990, studentshave been actively investigating university environmental records,health and safety, conduct environmental audits, and start up

recycling programmes and force them upon campus adminis-trations. Most important is SEACs attempts to link up themilitary, corporations, and racism to the environment.Environmental audits, first developed by students and faculty atUCLA, are becoming a vital asset to making the broad connectionsto other movements missing for a long time among students.

The struggle of Students for Earth Awareness and Action atA&M Galveston and a local community group against aMitsubishi owned copper smelter is one of many successes by

students. The company, which planned to locate the smelter onland bought from UT-Austin, already owned a smelter in the area

with a long history of toxic contamination that has put it on theSuperfund cleanup list. The groups not only investigated theenvironmental impact of the Texas Copper plant, but exposednumerous lies that won them a battle at the Texas WaterCommission that may make the whole project too unprofitableto proceed. They have traced connections to Maryland, where thesame project was recently defeated. In Spring 1992 Mitsubishicancelled the project because of the persistent opposition thatblocked the company from gaining a necessary state permit.

Another battle has been aimed at preserving over 100 acres ofthe spruce-fir ecosystem atop Mount Graham, an Apache spiritualcentre, in Arizona that would be destroyed by the $200 milliontelescope consortium. Arizona SEAC has linked up with Apaches,local environmental groups and students at consortium memberuniversities to block the project. While they have yet to succeed,

they have helped drive out Ohio State University, UT, Universityof Chicago and are working with people in Toronto to dissuadethe university of Toronto from joining.58 Many in SEAC are

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making similar efforts to connect the entrepreneurialization of theuniversity to environmental destruction and even racism.

The growing student environmental movement is quicklybeginning to make the connection between the university and

global environmental destruction. SEAC is currently involved withan international coalition of students calledASEED that is activelyworking to build resistance to the World Bank, the IMF andregional treaties such as NAFTA. As this connection is substantivelypursued it can potentially lay the foundation for a widespreadinternational student rebellion against the toxic side effects ofentrepreneurialization and even entrepreneurialization itself.

Fighting Austerity

Student organizing against austerity has circulated at an intensepace since the late 1980s. Many have heard about the pitchedbattles at the City University of New York System in Spring 1989,1990 and 1991 that led to massive takeovers on many of thecampuses to protest tuition increases and cutbacks. Lesser knownstruggles have also been waged at the University of Massachusetts-

Amherst where thousands struck for a day in 1989 against a newfee; Rutgers, where thousands of students blockaded a regentsmeeting and fought police to protest cost increases in 1990; and

even such disparate campuses as San Diego State University, theUniversity of New Mexico and UT-Austin. While in only a fewcases is it known that connections were made between the entre-preneurialization of their campus and austerity, it has notinhibited their effect.59 Graduate students are also starting to takethe offensive. In fall 1991 graduate students at Yale and UMass-

Amherst struck and won pay raises and other amenities toundermine cost increases at those universities and graduates atUC-Berkeley and UC-Santa Cruz followed suit in November1992 with their own jointly orchestrated strikes. In all, there aregraduate student unions on at least 24 campuses in the US andCanada and graduate students are getting organized on countlessmore.

The National Coalition of Universities in the Public Interesthas served as a clearinghouse of information about military andcorporate ties to the universities and current federal activities topromote them. Their Education for the People Organizing Guide

ties together numerous campus movements and offers ideas forhow to research ones campus connections. The UniversityConversion Project, which formed just prior to the Gulf War as

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the War Research Information Service, has linked up activists onmore than seventy campuses researching and resisting themilitarization of their campuses.

At UT, while tuition and fee increases have not been stopped,

we have seen a few modest victories: the long-awaited creationof a university financed childcare programme and the premiumsharing battle. Numerous forums, petitions, lobbying and asmall scale day care center run out of the department ofeducation forced the university to fund and expand theprogramme. At the same time, after 26 months of fighting forthe restoration of UTs contribution to premium sharing forgraduate student employees, led by the Graduate Professional

Association, nearly full victory was accomplished. Along the

way it took marches on the capital and Regents offices,lobbying, power structure research, two huge Main Mall rallies,and a huge teach-in that numbered almost 8000 students forclasses and office hours. In September 1991, graduate studentsfollowed up this victory by successfully organizing to restore a$1000 pay rise for TAs and AIs.

Unfortunately, many students are unaware of and unconnectedto widespread direct action of students in countries such as

Australia, Nigeria, France, Greece, England, Brazil, Italy, Canada,

and Mexico opposed to austeric attacks that have resulted in theformation of militant unions, nationwide strikes, rioting, and eventhe overthrowing of governments.

Fighting MilitarizationStudent resistance to the Gulf War got off to a quick, if notunsuccessful start. Aside from the hundreds of protests thaterupted on the campuses, students on some of the largest researchcampuses attempted to expose and fight the universitys specificrole in the war itself. At UT-Austin for example, Students Against

War attempted to take this even farther by demonstrating thatausterity and tuition/fee increases were going to fund militaryprojects on campuses and at the Balcones Research Center.

Although some of the student anti-war movement failed to makemany of these connections those who did have generated a newstrategy for articulating the relationship between militarization andausterity and, hopefully, eventually entrepreneurialization. The

roots of what is now becoming a growing anti-militarismmovement began as early as the anti-CIA and anti-Star Warsmovements of the mid 1980s that reached hundreds of campuses.

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To stop the next war however it will require that we connectthe war to the struggles we are already fighting. JonathonFeldman makes an effort to trace the connections between manydefence builders, chemical companies (most of the time one and

the same), and universities to exports of deadly herbicides,pesticides and weapons to Central American governments.60Withthis information, the potential exists to link up anti-interventiongroups, students fighting entrepreneurialization (since manyuniversities do the research for and own shares in these corpora-tions), so called underdevelopment (self-sufficient agriculture

wiped out by dependence on expensive chemicals), the peacedividend (where we should demand use of the money cut fromDoD), workers organizations (such as the United Farm Workers

fighting the use of deadly pesticides), and the environmentalmovement (such as opposition to toxic dumps in our neighbour-hoods). We need to fight where were at, a strategy we couldutilize to block entrepreneurialization at our campuses.

Multiculturalism: Building a RhizomeWhile it is not immediately apparent to many, the continuedsuccess of the multiculturalism movement has a tremendousimpact on whether we can block entrepreneurialization. As a

demand of the black, gay and lesbian and other communities,multiculturalism has the potential for circulating the struggle tothose left out, either because they do not think they are partof a multicultural society or feel mistakenly threatened orconfused. While chicana/o and black students have madeattempts to present multiculturalism in the context of the crisisand restructuring of the universities by explaining the impact ontheir communities, the movement has barely yet tapped itspotential.

Those of us in the movement who have yet to addressmulticulturalism to our own communities, whether as whites,or of European ethnic ancestry, need to articulate it in a way thatbrings out the fact that the university serves the needs of neitherthose of us who want to learn about ourselves and others whodont. Since we do not control the university, we are unable tostudy the subjects, cultures and societies we would like. Likewise,those who may have no interest in this are also suffering from

increasing tuition and fees, class shortages, weeding mechanisms,future indebtedness, etc. because they have no say over howeducation serves their needs. Theyre channelled into boring

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classes, with inattentive and overworked faculty, and are houndedby grades, tests, and second and third jobs.

We need to speak to the fact that for both groups theuniversity serves to process and prepare us for a lifetime of work

while attempting to suppress our original intention for going toschool. This means subsidizing Sematech and everything elseweve discussed occurs at the expense of learning about whatinterests us while it punishes poor students who cannot affordschool and have to get second and third jobs to pay increasingcosts. Making this connection means linking together how thesevarious struggles are complementary, and through thiscomplementarity, express how others not interested inmulticulturalism have desires that are complementary to it.

Some of these kinds of connections have been attempted atUT-Austin. The ONDAproposal presented by chicano/a studentsand the Black Student Alliances Project PRIDE called for arequired course on black, chicano/a, asian-american or womensstudies, intensified resources (peer guidance, financial aid, faculty)be put at the disposal of chicano/a students to help recruit andretain them. These proposals received much national attentionsince they were approved by the faculty Senate and the UniversityCouncil as a consolidated proposal but lost a faculty ballot

characterized by an initial fraudulent distribution of ballots. Theentire effort to diversify the campus and curriculum faced heavyopposition by alumni, administration officials, and right wingacademics, especially engineering faculty.

Much of what passes for National Association of Scholars (NAS)high profile opposition to multicultural reform is aimed directly atthe effect these efforts would have at subordinating the universityto our diverse desires rather than those of profit. Demanding moreresources to study solar energy, holistic medicine, whole language,popular culture, cultural studies, or whatever we desire runs counterto attempts to commercialize all aspects of the campus by placingit further under the imperatives of business. It should be no surprisethat some of the same forces behind entrepreneurialization are alsobankrolling the right wing counterattackincluding the NAS andother affiliated groups. Just as business has found multiculturalismto be a threat to their reorganization of the university, so must wesee our own plans to reorganize the universities to serve our

purposes as subverting entrepreneurialization.While we need to draw out the connections between thesestruggles and how they may complement each other, these

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movements must begin to dig deeper, articulating a critique ofeducation itself. The problem is not simply diversifying the campusor banning military and corporate activities, but the primary roleof the education and the universitiesto discipline us to spend our

lives working. The real diversion of money to capital comesthrough us as workers whether as paid graduate student employeesworking on a contract or unpaid English students.61

A Case Study of Resistance

It is important to offer a specific case study of a continuing effortto circulate such struggles beyond a single campus or country.

The following case study details how UT-Austin students andAustin community activists investigated the multinationaloperations of UT-Austin and its corporate partner FreeportMcMoRan using alliances with other activists in Louisiana and

West Papua to discredit two proposed development projects.

Blocking Freeport McMoRanAt UT, there is no lack of diversity among environmentalist andanimal rights groups, although few work together. An alternative

student paper, the Polemicist, did incredible investigations intoUT-Austins numerous toxic waste violations of Texas WaterCommission and EPA regulations, and Sematechs toxic dumpingin the predominantly black and latino East Austin that has serveda new neighbourhood groups battle with the consortium. Bestknown and most successful has been Earth First!s work with agraduate student group and local neighbourhood groups to blockFreeport McMoRans development and destruction of BartonCreek and links to the UT administration at the local level, whilelinking up an Indonesian Human Rights group fighting itsactivity in West Papua, and environmental groups blocking itstoxic dumping in Louisiana.

The details of the resistance to the Freeport-UT partnership arequite exciting. The partnership included a gratuitous naming of theproposed biotechnology building after Moffett on the site of AnnaHiss gym, paradoxically the only original building on campusnamed after a woman and only gym and pool that is accessible to

the disabled. Development had also come full circle: developmentin Indonesia and the halls of Freeport required underdevelopmentat UT. To oppose the original plans to destroy the gym (and later

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plan to use part of it) a wide range of groups and organizations onand off campus quickly mobilized. This struggle has crossed manydivides and coordinated the resistance of many diverse groups andinterests. It proved to be a powerful movement against the entre-

preneurialization of UT-Austin, blocking construction of the Moffettbuilding for two years. Unfortunately, in the calm days of summerthis year UT began construction of the Moffett building.

While UT students began to fight Freeport at UT-Austin, thecorporation was under attack in Louisiana, where it is the worstpolluter in the state, and West Papua, where aborigines living inand around the mountains stolen by Freeport with the help of theIndonesian military, have engaged in many forms of resistanceincluding armed struggle. Austin has also been the sight of as

powerful if different types of struggle as in West Papua. In 1990,about one thousand residents stormed a City Council meeting tooppose Freeports development project on the popular greenbeltBarton Creek, which runs through town. Since that uprising,Freeports and other development projects have been stalled if notblocked entirely and in August 1992, a city-wide referendumestablishing stronger limits on development proposed by the SaveOur Springs Coalition passed by an overwhelming margin, andcontinuing public opposition to secretly negotiated compromises

brought before the City Council.Much of this activity has tripped up plans to turn Austin into

a technopolis. IC2s Gibson and Smilor express their fear of possibledisruption by local communities and the obstacles set up againstthe technopolis.62 In all three of their supposed US basedtechnopolises, developers have had to face movements opposed tohigh-tech pollution and toxic waste. In Austin, the combinationof the movements against many projects organized with the helpof IC2just mentioned, along with the successful blocking of plansto build a new international airport, an essential piece in thetechnopolis puzzle, has definitely painted a picture of unsuccessfulentrepreneurialization.

Turning Resistance into Rebellion

Just recognizing the potential for circulating resistance to

entrepreneurialization locally and globally is not enough to expandthe issues beyond the concerns of small groups of activists. Rather,it requires that we re-evaluate what we recognize as resistance just

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as much as we need to re-evaluate the operations of theuniversities. It is easy to miss everyday forms of resistance that donot take the form of an overt movement. We often hearcomplaints that the majority of students are apathetic, passive,

and even conservative because they are not joining thesementioned student movements. However, we cannot confuse thelack of participation in a movement with the absence of resistance.

If the universities in the U.S. are not being wracked by overtrebellion on the scale of that of the 1960s to early 1970s, they doface widespread disruption and resistance that take subtle, sub-terranean forms. Throughout the 1980s, when students werechastised for being conservative, apathetic, concerned with gradesand wealth, incidences of cheating skyrocketed, joined by the

buying, selling and cooperative sharing of class notes, test answersand homework. Even more spectacular is the growing length oftime students have taken to complete schoola planned reductionin productivity even as austerity is aimed at increased productivityas well as increased frequency which students change theirmajors and schools in search of the easier grades and workloads.This does not even include the commonplace skipping of classes,showing up late, and leaving early. To top it off, many of thesesame students were also receiving student loans (often used for

various purposes other than school), which they later refused,upon graduating, to spend their lives working to repay. Althoughmany defaulters probably did not articulate this reason for notpaying, one cannot write off more than $4 billion in unpaidstudent debt due to poor economic conditions alone.

Resistance is taking place in many forms among students. Itis essential that we understand and make explicit the complemen-tary relationship between everyday and overt forms, breakingdown the false division and oppressive hierarchy between the two.Infinite forms of resistance are already contributing to thedisruption of higher educations role in generating generations ofpeople willing to spend the rest of their lives working. The powerof a student movement(s) lies in the ability of students torecognize that there is not one way to resist and begin to makelinks between those that exist. Just because few students go tomeetings, protests, or building takeovers does not mean we arenot already struggling in our own ways. To turn resistance into

rebellion we need to understand where students are already andhow they struggle, not to raise them up to the level of amovement, but to articulate alliances.

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Even recognizing resistance alone is inadequate. Everyday,students are engaged in a multitude of activities that are ant-agonistic or even unconnected to their lives as students. Somestudents do not even define themselves as students, but as diverse

people who spend a few hours a day or week as students (whichis especially true as many begin to go back to school later in life).Likewise, it is difficult to draw the line where being a studentbegins and ends since many ex-students hang around thecampuses for years while many who were never formally studentsdo many of the same things as students. There is so much moreto the lives of people we call students than just the unwaged workof studying, attending class, and writing papers. Many organizetheir lives around endless activities such as sex, sailing, writing,

acting, sleeping, music, reading, watching TV, travelling, hangingout, film, doing drugs et al. To call someone a student is to accusethem of defeat, of being reduced to a one-dimensional unwaged

worker preparing for a life of work.Each of these diverse activities, along with many projects

organized among those in overt movements (cooperative living,greening of the campuses, multiculturalism, experimental art,peace studies, etc.), offer us the potential for examining the myriadof ways, in which not only the university but life itself, are being

reorganized so that they transcend the current organization of lifearound endless work. These futures in the present, asC.L.R. James called them, offer the most tangible complementaryrelationship between everyday forms of resistance and overtmovements. While some resist, others are constructing orreconstructing new ways of living and learning. In the process, theuniversity is being subtly ripped apart by a battle between its rolein producing workers and the endless number of projects anddesires of those in and around it. In this way we can seeentrepreneurialization as a desperate attempt to restore thedisciplining function of the university in the face of either a radicaltransformation or complete destruction of the university.

______________________________

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Notes1. Sheila Slaughter argues as well that the student movements andwidespread social protest of the 1960s70s severed the connec-tion between the universities and the military. As a responsemassive disinvestment took place through most of the 1970s(Slaughter 1990: 42, 48).

2. Ibid., p.123.3. Ibid. Ehrlich outlines a whole range of new initiatives to bring DoD

and the universities closer together. Basic research support increasedby 15% between 198283, graduate fellowship programmes werecreated or enhanced, a joint DoD-NSF coordinating committeeformed, the DoD University Forum started in 1982 that is composedof university presidents and DoD administrators, and theIndependent Research and Development Council was created totighten university-industry interactions. (Ehrlich, 1985: 4).

4. It was not the first time patents to federal research could be heldprivately. The Institutional Patent Agreements negotiated with HEWin 1968 and NSF in 1973 allowed institutions and universities thatcould demonstrate transfer capabilities with the right to hold apatent. The NSF started even earlier. In 1968 it redirected itsfunding emphasis to applied research (from their perspective, thereis a distinction between the commercial potential of basic andapplied).

5. Fairweather 1990: 6.6. University Research Parks1987: 106114.

7. Yales Science Park, the Biomedical Research Park in Chicago andboth the University City Science Center and the Business andTechnology Center in Philadelphia are prime examples.

8. Newman 1985.9. No doubt this is already occurring and has been for a long time, since

AT&T has been running Los Alamos and Martin Marrietta the OakRidge Lab for years. In fact, since these changes, Livermore has spunoff at least 50 companies (Business Week1990: 84).

10. See Arntzen and Money, a compilation of presentations from aconference sponsored and published by IC2. MIT has also been linked

to more than 400 firms in Massachusetts with revenues of more than$27 billion started by alumni or professors (1991: 216). Also notableare the gigantic Genentech, formed by UC-San Francisco professorHerbert Boyer in 1976 that grew to a $600 million company in onlyfour years and Biogen, an equally large biotech firm started byHarvards Walter Gilbert. Arntzen and Money, are integral to thecommercialization of university-based research themselves at TexasA&M. Arntzen is the Deputy Chancellor for Agriculture andDirector of the gigantic Texas Agricultural Experiment Station whileMoney recently resigned as the Vice Chancellor for Research Park

and Corporate Relations, essentially the director of the Texas A&MUniversity Research Park. Tom Mabry, one of the editors, happensto be a UT faculty member and IC2 fellow.

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11. Newman, p.217.12. Chronicle of Higher Education1983: 4.13. Kay 1988: 24 (chart). Kay is the Executive Director of CORETECH,

which is composed of 47 university, 20 corporations and various highereducation associations (The Chronicle of Higher Education1987: 20).

14. MacCordy 1984: 59.15. Lindsey 1985: 86.16. Bok 1982: 156.17. Prior to the scandals, Stanfords overhead rate rocketed from 58%

in 1980 to 74% in 1990. Now capped by the government at 55.5%,the university will lose at least $20 million in 1991 (Business Week1991: 124). As a result of the scandal, Stanford fired PresidentDonald Kennedy a few months later in July. How easy the mightyshall fall. For more than a decade, he was considered one of the topentrepreneurial presidents and was the moving force behind the1982 Pajaro Dunes summit between research university presidentsand corporate executives that pretended to deal with criticisms ofconflict of interest and forced secrecy of research results that resultfrom commercialization.

18. It is interesting to note that Stephen Gomes, who is directingBechtels Technopolis Development Project, is also an IC2 fellow.Remember, Bechtel was a major contractor for Iraq and is now rakingit in rebuilding Kuwait.

19. Chronicle of Higher Education, table of largest U.S. university Defence

Department monies, January 17, 1990, reprinted in Education for thePeople Organizing Guide, 1991: 15.20. Henson and Philpott, 1990: 89, 11.21. Henson and Philpott 1990: 4.22.From Discovery, published by UT, in Henson and Philpott, p.4.23. The Washington DC based National Coalition of Universities in the

Public Interest (NCUPI) may be helpful with challenging such non-profit legal status of entrepreneurial universities. Section 501 (c)(3)of the Internal Revenue Code exempts a universitys income relatedto educational and basic research activities. However, since the

subsidiaries they create as tax shields are incestuously tied to theuniversity, they could be challenged as violating 512(b)(3) whichprohibits exemptions for organizations controlled by the parentcampus (Walker 1991: 275). Ironically, even as the whole book bragsabout how much the university is like a business, they try to suggestways at the end to hide it in this article.It is interesting that Derek Bok (1982) attacks this strategy that isalready occurring on various local levels. In fact, he notes that morethan 30% of private colleges and universities are already being madeto contribute to local governments for the expenses they incur, which

he opposes. Since universities were granted tax exemptions long agobecause they made little profit, it seems time to challenge their taxstatus since they are now overt entrepreneurial businesses.

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24. Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board 1988; Texas HigherEducation Coordinating Board 1989; and Texas Science andTechnology Council 1987.

25. Gibson and Smilor 1991: 55. This article appears in a book of paperspresented at a conference organized by IC2, for whom Gibson and

Smilor work for, and its associated organization, the RGKFoundation.

26. Wilson date unknown: 3.27.UT Patents Issued and Patent Applications through 1991,

documents provided by Dudley Dobie of the UT System Office ofLegal Counsel.

28. Vision 20201991: 8.29. Weldon 1987: 148. This book was also collected from a conference

sponsored by IC2. It includes an unbelievably comprehensive list ofcontributors like Mark, Adm. Bobby Ray Inman (ex-NationalSecurity Agency and MCCs founding chief), Kozmetsky, and a loadof military officers, who have been at the forefront of entrepreneur-ialization.

30. See The Nonviolent Activist 1988: 145. Information regardingMITREs support of JASON comes from Rich Cowan of the WarResearch Information Service through a response to an FOIAdatedAugust 19, 1991.

31. See Arntzen and Money for their description of the process at TexasA&M (1991: 220). An interesting explanation for the Baylor College

of Medicine, for example, develop