Higher Education and Capitalist Crisis
In: Socialist review: SR, Band 8, Heft 6, S. 67-91
ISSN: 0161-1801
The relative autonomy of the higher education system in the United States & other advanced capitalist countries is collapsing, posing new problems to students, faculty, & other workers in this sphere. The tremendous growth of higher education in the 1960s suggests that the principal relation between higher education & capitalism has shifted from the production of ideological/technical practices & elites to the production of a new type of labor power required by the growing 'white-collar' sector of the economy since World War II, especially in occupations like teaching, nursing, accounting, & engineering. Since higher education is now engaged in producing significant sections of the labor force, it is & will continue to be subject to fluctuations in the business cycle. In the 1960s demands by labor, minorities, women, etc, coincided with capitalist needs for new types of skilled workers, pushing up the percent of the college-aged population enrolled in higher education programs in states like Calif to almost 70%. It is clear that the labor done by faculty & other workers in the university is labor that 'folds into' the sphere of productive labor & thus belongs in the ensemble of socially unified labor capacity characteristic of advanced capitalist relations of production. All this has meant changes in the character of faculty-administration relations, curriculum, tuition policies, etc. Economic chaos & uncertainty plague all involved in higher education. Possibilities of fighting back include faculty unionism, student & graduate student organizations, & coalitions to defend higher education against retrenchment. In the long run, workers in the higher education system will have to recognize a communality of interest with workers in other sectors (& vice versa). This would involve the beginning elaboration of a socialist program for higher education in the United States. Modified AA.