Review of "Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University."

The following review was submitted by a reader:



Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, Gaye Tuchman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 256 pages.

Those familiar with Gaye Tuchman’s books know her as an ethnomethodologist who has investigated news-making processes and also as the author of Edging Women Out, which describes how male authors essentially took over the domain of the Victorian novel from 1840-1900, which had originally been dominated by women.

Tuchman has now turned her analytic attentions to the phenomenon of the corporate university. The after-the-colon title of her new book could as well be Edging Professors Out. In any case, her book should be of special interest to readers of ASC Forum Blog, for even though she is writing of the pseudonymic “Wannabe University,” most of her observations could as well have been made at the University of Toledo.

She shows the application of a mindless marketing model where the university becomes entrained to a competitive battle to move up in the rankings. The all too familiar administrative mantras of transformative change, benchmarking, strategic planning, five year plans and selling the brand are chanted too at Wannabe. Also seen are the same trends for increased enrollment with decreased faculty size and deprofessionalization of faculty balanced by augmentation of administration.

Wannabe manifests many of the very same administrative antics as UT. Presidents and provosts and other high level administrators are seen as wandering careerists passing through on their ways to presumably more glorious destinations. The university is to these “outside administrators” a “stepping stone to elsewhere.” Professors do not envy these “corporate types,” Tuchman points out, but resent them. She even cites Robert Jackal on the primacy of public relations rather than substance in administrative behavior and the need to outrun administrative nonperformance and mistakes by soon taking another job. (Even her cites are generally impressive and thorough, the footnotes worth reading.)

What is perhaps most alarming—actually this reviewer finds it sad—is the apparent sameness of it all—how little creativity is shown in what amount to heavily administered attempts at conformity. For one of Tuchman’s most striking findings is this: Wannabe transforms by compliance and conformity with the middle of the road practices at similar universities. Far from achieving excellence, it achieves only a mediocrity startling for its sameness and lack of deviance from what administrators perceive as “best practice.” Administrators, far from being the creative problem solvers that they present themselves to be, function as low-grade plagiarists. Tuchman describes them as middle status conformists. So much for excellence! For how does one become distinctive through mindless imitation and managerial fads?

Also much like UT, we see cumulative pressure on faculty, unclear priorities, people who some perceive of as “failed academics” with poor publishing records elevated to positions of power, a drumming rhetoric of institutional transformation and market logic, ceaseless fake planning, increased centralization and a lack of transparency—as it is better to say nothing—wryly observes Tuchman—than to have to lie, which would be corporately unethical.

Chillingly, Tuchman notes that the university is one of the last Western institutions to be “de-churched.” In practice this means commodification, corporatization and increased serious state surveillance. The corporate university is “not to educate, but to train.”

Vo-Tech anyone?