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New Political Science

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The Coming of the Corporate-Fascist

University?
Clyde W. Barrow

Universit y of Texas, Rio Grande Valley

Published online: 30 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Clyde W. Barrow (2014) The Coming of t he Corporat e-Fascist Universit y?, New
Polit ical Science, 36: 4, 640-646, DOI: 10. 1080/ 07393148. 2014. 954794
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New Political Science, 2014

Vol. 36, No. 4, 640646, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.954794

Review Essay

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The Coming of the Corporate-Fascist University?

Anthony J. Nocella, II, Steven Best, and Peter McLaren, Academic

Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex, Oakland, CA:
AK Press, 2010, 590 pp.
Anthony J. Nocella, II and David Gabbard, Policing the Campus: Academic
Repression, Surveillance, and the Occupy Movement, New York, NY: Peter
Lang, 2013, 223 pp.
There is a well-respected classical tradition of radical critiques of the American
university that includes the works of James McKeen Cattell, Thorstein Veblen,
Upton Sinclair, Earl J. McGrath, and Hubert Park Beck.1 These critiques revealed
the relationship between the transformation of the American university and the
emergence of corporate capitalism and an imperial state in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Each of them observed that university governance,
administrative organization, financial controls, teaching methods, curriculum
content, and research agendas were being systematically reconstructed and
realigned to support corporate capitalism and an emergent American empire.
With the advent of economic globalization, and a renewed push by corporate and
political elites to further integrate higher education into the new social structures
of accumulation,2 contemporary scholars have built a cottage industry on this
foundation and extended it to an analysis of contemporary higher education.3
1

James McKeen Cattell, University Control (New York, NY: Science Press, 1913);
Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of
Universities by Businessmen (New York, NY: Sagamore Press, 1957); Upton Sinclair, The
Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, Revised Edition (Pasadena, CA: Privately
Printed, 1923); Earl J. McGrath, The Control of Higher Education in America, Educational
Record 17 (April 1936), pp. 259 272; Hubert Park Beck, Men Who Control Our Universities
(New York, NY: Kings Crown Press, 1947).
2
On the concept of social structures of accumulation, see, Samuel Bowles and Herbert
Gintis, Beyond the Wasteland (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1984); James OConnor,
Accumulation Crisis (New York, NY: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
3
David N. Smith, Who Rules the Universities? An Essay in Class Analysis (New York, NY:
Monthly Review Press, 1974); Barbara Ann Scott, Crisis Management in American Higher
Education (Westport, CT.: Praeger Press, 1983); Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the
Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education,
1894 1928 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Sheila Slaughter, The Higher
Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1990); Wesley Shumar, College for Sale: A Critique of the
Commodification of Higher Education (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge Falmer Press, 1997); Sheila

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Review Essay 641

However, the recent critiques of corporatization4 have been like Cassandras
prophecies falling on the deaf ears of university faculty, who may now find
themselves in the latest and highest stage of the building of the corporate-fascist
university, while equipped with few political tools or economic resources to stem
the tide.
Anthony Nocella, II is the lead editor of two sobering books that examine the
growing use of overt repression, intimidation, and harassment on university
campuses in the United States and abroad to silence and discredit progressive
scholars and scholar-activists across a broad spectrum of topics and fields of
study. In the first book, Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic-Industrial
Complex, Nocella, Steven Best, and Peter McLaren have assembled a large
collection of essays that break with the well-established tradition of liberal
historiography, which portrays conflicts between faculty and corporate trustees,
senior administrators, and political elites as a history of the development of
academic freedom in the United States.5 Nocella et al. call it what is: academic
repression. The editors define academic repression as the use of intimidation,
harassment, penalties, and firing to deny and negate the right of professors and
students holding unorthodox, nonconformist, critical, controversial, and
dissenting views to research, publish, teach, speak, and lead political lives as
they choose (p. 27). While most professors think academic freedom was
threatened in the past, but was safeguarded by the founding of the American
Association of University Professors (1915) or, more recently, faculty unionization,
the case studies in this book suggest that academic repression may be worse today
than at any time in the last hundred years.
Academic Repression includes numerous autobiographical case studies from the
United States, the Middle East, and Africa that focus on a wide range of issues and
ideologies subject to academic repression in the contemporary university. For
example, Michael Parentis essay reviews several cases from the 1970s to the
present, including Samuel Bowles, Michael Parenti, Bertell Ollman, Kenneth
Dolbeare, Henry Giroux, Angela Davis, Marlene Dixon, and the critical legal
scholars at the New England School of Law. However, despite this extensive list,
Footnote 3 continued

Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial
University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Gary Rhodes, Managed
Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1998); Geoffrey White, ed., Campus, Inc. (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 2000); Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory (Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 2001); Clyde W. Barrow, Sylvie Didou-Aupetit, and John Mallea, Globalisation, Trade
Liberalisation, and Higher Education in North America: The Emergence of a New Market Under
NAFTA? (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003); Sheila
Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State,
and Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Jennifer
Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York, NY: Basic
Books, 2005); Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the
Humanities (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008); Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of
the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
4
Henry Steck, Corporatization of the University: Seeking Conceptual Clarity, Annals
of the American Academy of Social and Political Science 585 (January 2003), pp. 66 83.
5
Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the
United States (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1955).

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642 Review Essay

Parenti observes that One could add many more instances from just about every
discipline including political science, economics, anthropology, literature, history,
sociology, psychology and even physics, mathematics, chemistry, and musicology (p. 116).
Moreover, as several of the essays document, the traditional targets of
academic repressionpolitical science, economics, and sociologyhave
expanded dramatically to encompass animal rights activist-scholars, radical
environmentalists, and critics of bio-engineering in fields such as environmental
science, biology, bio-chemistry, and medicine, while also expanding to encompass
proponents of radical feminism, gay, lesbian, and transgendered studies, ethnic
studies, and area studies so that the old Red Scares have been joined by the Green
Scare, the Pink Scare, the Brown Scare, the Black Scare, and the Yellow Scarea
veritable rainbow of right-wing hate campaigns.
The book as a whole analyzes an array of interrelated mechanisms that are
used to enforce academic repression. First, corporate-funded right-wing think
tanks and rogue anti-intellectuals, such as David Horowitz, now regularly survey
universities from coast-to-coast looking for objectionable, irrelevant, leftist,
and un-American thoughts and values in the curriculum (p. 6). Many have gone
so far as to create and distribute black lists of ostensibly dangerous or unAmerican professors (see, pp. 77 78 for examples). A second mechanism is the
organization of campus watch groups that send students into classrooms to
monitor and report back on any left-wing or radical deviations from conservative
orthodoxy, although usually with grossly inaccurate, exaggerated, or false
accounts of what actually transpires in the classroom. As Nocella et al. point out,
this new form of social surveillance, as opposed to government surveillance,
allows the new guardians of the right to penetrate deeper into the academy than
government agents could ever to do in the past by monitoring courses, syllabi, and
entire departments (p.79).
These two mechanisms of repression are often linked to letter writing
campaigns aimed at trustees and senior administrators, media smear campaigns,
and organized email assaults designed to embarrass, intimidate, humiliate,
discredit, discourage, and isolate faculty who cut against the grain of orthodox
right-wing opinion. These campaigns seek to demonize individual faculty,
discredit dissenting viewpoints or entire fields of study, and to generate an
atmosphere of fear and paranoia that can be exploited by its perpetrators. While
such tactics may not discourage the brave of heart, Robert Jensen observes firsthand that these campaigns can have a chilling effect on other faculty who are
afraid of guilt-by-association (p.168).
A third, tried and true mechanism of academic repression, is the growing
abuse of authority by college and university trustees, who deny tenure to faculty
on spurious grounds, while simultaneously waging a relentless campaign against
tenure itself. Nocella et al. observe that Academic repression targets critical and
radical scholarship and activism in manifold ways, including discriminating
against job candidates, denial of tenure or promotion, demotion (e.g., from
department chair back to the ranks of faculty), and firing tenured professors
(p. 30). Notably, however, this tactic not only requires aggressive trustees, but the
cooperation of multiple layers of administration and senior faculty, which has a
further chilling effect on junior faculty and graduate students.

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Review Essay 643

Fourth, despite the incessant cry of a never ending fiscal crisis, university
administrations now expend millions of dollars per year defending and initiating
lawsuits involving faculty and faculty unions. The increasing use of lawsuits, or
threats of legal action over minor transgressions, or defending hopeless lawsuits
against discrimination to the bitter end, are consciously employed to threaten
faculty with financial ruin regardless of how egregiously a university may have
violated the law.
Finally, the structural transformation of academic labor supports and
intensifies the chilling effect of academic repression.6 Academic tenure has
always been the bedrock of academic freedom, but as Michael Berube points out
in his Foreword: Underneath the radar, the academic labor force has been
casualized over the course of decades . . . . Roughly three-quarters of the people
teaching in American universities are now working without protection or even
the hope of protection of tenure. They are employees-at-will (p.3). Gregory
Tropeas chapter analyzes how the de-tenuring of the professoriate endangers the
very concept of the university by institutionalizing structural repression as a
basic configuration of the twenty-first century university (pp. 479 490), where
dependency and insecurity are the cornerstones of acquiescence and compliance.
While Academic Repression analyzes the use of financial inducements, program
and curriculum review, administrative perquisites, and personnel processes as
mechanisms for inducing cooperation or compliance with the corporate agenda in
higher education, Policing the Campus, edited by Nocella and David Gabbard,
examines the expansion and arming of campus police forces and their use by
administrators as an overtly coercive repressive apparatus on university
campuses. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, three-quarters of
four-year colleges and universities with 2,500 or more students in the United
States are served by a campus law enforcement agency with sworn officers with
full arrest powers. The percentage of campuses using sworn officers has been
steadily increasing over the last three decades, as has the number of campuses
using armed police officers. The number of police officers per capita on campus
has also increased during this time. Many campuses now employ more than 100 to
150 police officers or enough armed men and women to form a full military
company (or several platoons) in an armed combat situation.
Policing the Campus also calls attention to another trend, which is that campus
police departments are not just expanding in numbers, but larger departments are
creating specialized emergency response units, detective squads, and special
victims units. They are increasingly called upon to conduct criminal background
checks of prospective employees (including faculty at many campuses), which
effectively inserts them into the faculty search and screen process. Campus police
increasingly monitor expansive camera surveillance systems in dormitories,
hallways, cafeterias, and campus grounds, while increasing their use of more
intrusive community policing, bicycle patrols, and motorcycle patrols. Thus, as
many contributors to this book make clear, campus police departments have
largely completed the transition from unarmed security services responsible for
building access, parking enforcement, and key control to well-armed professional
6

Clyde W. Barrow, Beyond the Multiversity: Fiscal Crisis and the Changing Structure
of Academic Labour, in John Smyth, ed., Academic Work: The Changing Labour Process in
Higher Education (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1995), pp. 159 178.

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644 Review Essay

police departments with detective, surveillance, and even para-military units.
Law enforcement agencies and senior administrators have justified these changes
as necessary to provide security for faculty and students, but with rare
exceptions they simultaneously enhance the surveillance and intimidation
capabilities of senior university administrators.
While some of the essays in Policing the Campus deepen the analysis found in
Academic Repression, many of them also draw on the work of Michel Foucault to
illustrate how college campuses are coming to mirror the signature features of
the larger surveillance society (p. xvii). David Gabbard observes a general
criminalization of dissent and activism on campuses through the use of free
speech zones (pp. 195 96), suspensions, and expulsions (p. xvii). This trend is
acutely manifest in how university administrators and campus police responded
to the Occupy Movement on campuses. Thus, in scenes reminiscent of the novel
1984, Christian Parenti warns It will be hard for a generation raised under
constant surveillance and police bullying in the form of metal detectors, bag
searches, stop and frisk to then develop the mental and cultural autonomy
necessary to build effective protest movements and achieve progressive social
change (p. xii).
What is to be Done?
These stories and insights are chilling, to be sure, but they fall short of the activistscholar imperative to ask what is to be done. And together, these volumes speak
indirectly to why, in the present situation, it might be easier to analyze the
problem than to propose solutions. In Academic Repression, Robert Jensen argues
that we should work to hold onto what protections for academic freedom exist to
provide some space for critical thinking in an otherwise paved-over intellectual
culture, with an eye on the long-term (p. 164). In the same work, Berube goes
beyond this purely defensive position to suggest that we need an account of
academic freedom that emphatically and explicitly defends a scholars right to be
controversial . . . . [A]cademic freedom is essential to a free society, and a free society
should not merely tolerate but actually support controversial scholars (p. 3).
While necessary, neither of these proposals is sufficient to confront the current
situation in academia.
The problem, as Rik Scarce observes in Academic Repression, is that oppressed
scholars have at their disposal few resources with which to fight back (p. 7).
Moreover, Scarce is correct that too many within the academy accept the
desiccation of academic freedom. Too many cower and duck for cover. . . . Too
many look out only for themselves, assuming the roles of narcissistic careerists
rather than concerned citizens (p. 8). Thus, when Victoria Fontan reflects in the
same volume on her own experience of academic repression, she reports that
weak or non-existent solidarity and support networks for progressive scholars
is a problem for those who come under attack by the media and right-wing
organizations (p. 281, 287 288) and she fears that the War on Terror has
thoroughly intimidated and decimated progressive academics and the US left
(p. 288).
Like many other contributors to Academic Repression, Robert Jensen concludes
that the most important aspect of the current controversies is how they mark the
complacency and timidity of faculty members themselves (p. 164). Jensen

Review Essay 645

suggests that the vast majority of faculty members are like the vast majority of
any comfortable professionals in a corporate-capitalist empire: Morally lazy,
usually cowardly, and unwilling and/or unable to engage with critics (p. 172).
He claims that faculty are ill-equipped to assess threats to academic freedom or
present an effective defense (p. 174) and, hence, he argues, corporatization of the
university has finally achieved its objective:

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. . . a well-disciplined intellectual class. The members of it who have risen to

administrative positions and are charged with formulating and executing policy
know which master they serve. The more secure members keep quiet to make sure
their privilege is not disturbed. And the less secure members shut up in the hope
that they will be allowed to move up a notch. In such a setting, elites cannot
guarantee complete conformity from intellectuals, but the system works well
enough to keep things running relatively smoothly these days (p. 176).

On the other hand, I have argued previously in this journal that there is really
only one solution to the problem: The progressive alternative will not be realized
until faculty and students retake physical control of their campuses and join with
other social movements to reconstruct power relations within those institutions
and redefine their relationship to the state.7 We saw a brief glimpse of this
alternative in the Occupy Movement, and Henry Girouxs contribution to Policing
the Campus argues that faculty should join with Occupy Movement protestors on
college campuses as the first step in reconquering our captured institutions
(pp. 201 08).8 More substantively, Maura Stephens offers a remarkably practical
20 point plan of action that can be adopted by any faculty either alone or in
solidarity with others (pp. 177 183). Ryan Thomson and Natalia Abrams share
their experience in discovering ways to combat police brutality on campus
(p. 197). Contributions like these are very welcome, particularly in the climate of
cowering and covering that Scarce (correctly) identifies, because they provide an
action-oriented rejoinder to claims that there is not much to be done. Giroux,
Stephens, Thomson, and Abrams suggest that there is quite a bit to be done and
quite a bit that should be done now.
As in a previous phase of academic rebellion, it was students leading the way
with the Occupy Movement and faculty standing on the sidelines waiting for
some knight in shining armor to rescue them from the polar night of icy
darkness that has descended on the iron cage of the university.9
CLYDE W. BARROW
University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley
q 2014, Clyde W. Barrow
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.954794

7
Clyde W. Barrow, The Rationality Crisis in US Higher Education, New Political
Science, Vol. 32, No. 3 (September 2010), p. 344.
8
When I proposed this same strategy to my former faculty union during the Occupy
UMass Dartmouth and Occupy Boston movements, I was informed by the unions
executive board that Occupy was a student issue, which takes one back to Jensens
critique of university faculty.
9
Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, in Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds) From
Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 128.

646 Review Essay

Notes on Contributor

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Clyde W. Barrow is Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas - Rio

Grande Valley. His publications include Universities and the Capitalist State (1990),
More Than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard (2000),
and Globalisation, Trade Liberalisation, and Higher Education in North America (2003).
He has also published numerous articles on state theory and higher education
policy.