Appendix A

“How Economics Affect Universities.”

Original Interchange episode aired May 4, 1999. Edited and aired on WFHB Rewind, August 27, 2025. Digitized from cassette.

INTRODUCTION: This week’s archive segment comes from an episode of Interchange broadcast May 4, 1999. In it, host Darryl Neher talks with IU English Professor Stephen Watt and graduate student Sarah Stevens about the relationships between economics and academics. This episode was digitized from a cassette stored in the WFHB archives by Volunteer Adriane Pontecorvo.

Darryl Neher: Well, earlier this week, the Indiana State Legislature passed its state budget, a budget Indiana University President Miles Brand called one of the best Indiana University has received in recent years. But if you dig deeper into the proposed budget, you'll find the major benefits are going to only a few major capital building projects, and the general operating budget is only seeing an increase of approximately 4% this is in light of recent studies that place, IU at the bottom of the big 10 for faculty salaries and an IDS article that highlighted the ever increasing workload and debt burden being placed on the university's graduate students. Today on Interchange, we're going to explore how the changing economic landscape of the university is transforming higher education, and not always for the better. Our guests today are Dr. Stephen Watt, a professor of English and Cultural Studies at Indiana University, and the coauthor of Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary of Higher Education, and Sarah Stevens, the moderator of the GSO graduate student organization and a doctoral candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures. Welcome to Interchange. Professor Watt, I guess I want to start off with you, that one of the central themes to your book, Academic Keywords that you wrote with Cary Nelson is the idea of the corporate university, and I think that really drives a lot of the argument that you have in this text. And could you explain to us what the corporate university is all about?

Stephen Watt: Well, that's a long... I'll try to keep what could be a long answer short, and I think it has several different possible meanings. One of them certainly is, and Cary, if Cary were here, he could tell you, better than I could, is the increasing interest from educational institutions in getting a good, better percentage of its funding formula from corporate investment. Now, you know, part of that is of necessity, as the funding formula for state legislatures goes down as universities, public universities, in particular, like Indiana, are put in a terrible position, in the sense that is where their operating budget has to come increasingly, not merely from tuition and a declining state support, but also from corporate and other kinds of investments in the university. Then a concern, I think a legitimate concern, comes up, that to what extent are universities taking that money and doing corporate bidding, as opposed to in doing independent investigation. My feeling about that is actually somewhat different than that: to what extent are our universities borrowing the worst kinds of labor strategies from corporations, implementing them at the university, with the result that it impoverishes all but a very few high paid workers at the University. I'm here talking largely about clerical workers, talking about graduate student employees, talking about a lot of the people who make universities work and who, after putting in a full 40, 50, 60, hours a week, are still at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. That's what bothers me and worries me a great deal. And there have been graduate student strikes and other labor strikes across the country on these very issues which we could talk about.

Darryl Neher: One of the passages that strikes me, and it's early in the book, where you say, “Most faculty,” and I think we can extend this to most people who aren't really affiliated with the university, and looking at it from the outside, outside the corporate university loop, “have no idea what such relationships actually entail, let alone how thoroughly degraded a corporate-owned university program can become. The risks need to be stated with unvarnished clarity for corporatization at its worst, is the devil's bargain for academia.” Now, what is the devil's bargain that you're talking about here?

Stephen Watt: Well, those are Cary's words, again. You know, Cary's always good at what some might call hyperbole, but at its worst, I think what Cary means there is, and he's got all kinds of examples in the book, of university departments whose research is really the agenda, not of their own intellectual interest or curiosity, but of the corporations paying the bills for the department, so all of a sudden, one of those things which we really value at universe at the university, independent research, academic freedom to pursue intellectual projects of a wide variety become narrowed down, really, to only those projects which are fundable, then the whole idea of academic research becomes called into question, or comes called into question. And Cary used an example of, for example, psychiatry department the University of Cincinnati, which, after doing some research, he found, was almost entirely funded to do product testing for a corporation. Well, is that a university, or is that just a branch of the business? And why does it matter? Why should it matter? We feel that, of course it should matter. But again, let me emphasize I don't think this is in every case average. I don't think there are bogeymen out there. I think in some instances, a lot of public universities have been forced into a posture of accepting money from corporations. Of course, they try to accept money in ways that are ethical, and of course, they try to accept monies in ways which don't impact seriously on the research that's conducted. But it's very, very clear that some universities that's no longer the case. I'll give you another example, the proliferation of MBA programs at places like Duke and Stanford, they're really open to executives only because the tuition is $60-70,000 a year. And so a lot of universities across the country have made to answer your question anyway, have made deals with corporations, and the devil's bargain is, on the one hand, you get the money, but on the other hand, you dance to their tune.

Darryl Neher: Sarah, I know you came to graduate school not envisioning having to dance with the devil so to speak and what, for you, and you can only speak from your own experience, but also the experiences that you've talked with other people who are affiliated with GSO, what drives someone to come to graduate school and you start confronting and seeing these little mechanisms that are in place?

Sarah Stevens: Well, I think we, we all come to graduate school because we love to learn and we love to study, and after going through four or five or whatever years of college, there is still a drive to delve deeper into those things that you're exploring. And so a lot of people don't even come to graduate school with an eye to a career, or really any kind of idea of what they're going to get out of it. They just know they want to explore something. And then once you come in, you get very pigeonholed into an academic career and getting involved with the university on that kind of level, because you spend eight, sometimes 10 years in academics, getting your PhD, and afterwards you're very committed to finding a job in that field. I don't think most people come with an eye to finding any kind of a corporation job, or even with any clue that their department might have corporate ties. There are, I know there’s, especially in the sciences, there are programs where a company like Exxon or Shell will give people a fellowship to come and study. So they might, people who accept that kind of a fellowship might think more that they're going to be tied to a corporation, but I think most people come in and expect just to search for knowledge, for knowledge's own sake, and eventually, most programs here at the University gear you into the mindset that if you don't get a tenure track, full professor track kind of job, then you've somehow failed in that academic goal.

Stephen Watt: There was a very interesting article in the April 16 Chronicle of Higher Education, written by John Lombardi, who used to be a dean here, who's now president of the University of Florida. And the title of the article was, 'Universities Aren't Employment Agencies.' And his thesis was that the University of Florida is in the business of producing knowledge, and that more PhDs and more knowledge, the better the world, and it benefits the world in larger sense, and they're expanding, he said, enthusiastically, that's his quotation, all the PhD programs at the University of Florida. And he actually, you know, was fairly critical of programs like ours that over the last decade, have tried to bring supply and demand for PhDs into some kind of balance by downsizing, not that downsizing is always a great answer. And when Sarah was talking, I think a lot of your listeners who aren't in higher education would be surprised at some of the numbers, that the average PhD in the humanities is not a three or four year endeavor as it was a generation and a half ago. There are very few PhD programs in English and comparative literature and history that graduate even half of their folks in less than seven years. The national average in some major departments is eight, nine years.

Sarah Stevens: The average in my department is nine, I think is 9.2.

Stephen Watt: Then you add to that a job market for PhDs. The MLA, Modern Language Association's Committee on Professional employment last year announced that their data showed that one out of every two PhDs in English, worse in some foreign languages, would find a tenure track job within a year of graduation.