Teaching the Three C's in Higher Education

Teaching the Three C’s in Higher Education

Since 1980 there has been a disturbing trend in higher education, the growing influence of the corporate mindset on the administration, curricula, faculty and thought process of public and private universities and colleges and even community colleges. This has been in general regarded as a positive thing, and for it brought with it an influx of cash from the corporate sector to higher education. All of this was started by the Bayh-Dole act that allowed private concerns to take advantage of research done by public institutions, ostensibly paid for with your tax dollars. This law allowed the patenting of public research by the corporate sector for profit. Since that time public-private relationships have flourished between the corporate sector and public higher education, so much so that community engagement in the present means developing closer relationships with big business, not the public community as it once meant. An analogy would be if big Pharma had been allowed to patent Dr. Jonas Salk’s miracle of the 20th century, his polio vaccine, instead of the public sector manufacturing and distributing it to everyone, rich, poor and otherwise.

The influence of the corporate sector can be seen in the expansion of educational ideas and theories that emphasis the development of “skill sets” by students to be used in the workplace over the development of critical thinking skills by those students. The Humanities are now seen as disciplines that do not add to the skill set process pushed by the business community. The programs in the Humanities area are ones that can be eliminated to make room for more job oriented programs in times of tight funding as we are now experiencing. While this kind of thinking seems practical on the surface, there is an agenda at work within it at the same time. For workers who have acquired not only skill sets but also the ability to think critically, represent a threat to the corporate power paradigm. While workers who have only been taught skill sets for their job and cannot think critically, represent no threat to the power paradigm. The process can be called teaching the Three C’s, Corporate Capitalism, Colonization and Censorship, all of which represent a huge threat to democracy as we know it.

Corporate Capitalism has evolved since the early 19th century in the US and the west from small entities to huge structures dwarfing even the largest nations in power and influence. This process has been represented as something that is responsible for the economic expansion of the west in the 20th century, while the social programs (educational aid for the masses, social welfare programs to eliminate poverty and unionization) that really underwrote this expansion are not discussed. Corporate capitalism has been caricatured as the benevolent father figure in higher education. Especially since 1980, as corporate capitalism being the engine that creates the wealth of nations, which is opposite of what had been taught before, that it is human labor or work that is the engine that creates wealth and capital. Now in the first decade of the 21st century, we have seen the real creation of unfettered corporate capitalism, greed, corruption and ruin for the common people. But the corporate capitalist mindset toward higher education is still in charge, with an emphasis on numbers of students, outcomes (code for how many students are passing) and creating a good image of the educational corporate entity, all of this sacrifices the learning aspect long part of higher education. What about Colonization, what role does it play in higher education?

Colonization is a tool that was developed by the West in the 700 years spanning from the Crusades to the end of World War II. The appealing idea of Colonization is the development what we were taught in junior high and high school 40 years ago, “spheres of influence,” where one nation is in control of the flow of raw materials and finished goods in that area. When we think of this, images of India, Africa and China come to mind, as the West carved out spheres of influences on those nations or continents called colonies. This type of control lasted for hundreds of years; the effects of it are still resonating in the present world for those who care to look close enough. Now we see these same strategies being used by global corporations in controlling “spheres of influence” in the global market place. The idea of colonization in the corporate setting is not limited to the global south or the less developed nations as Imperialist colonization was at its peak. Now through the flow of capital, people in the developed world are struggling under the new corporate colonization as well as the people in the less developed world. This bringing colonization to a new high was for the most part encouraged by the colonizing mindsets nurtured in university settings here in the US and elsewhere in the West. For it is taught as bringing progress to the world, not bondage and control of the world. In order for the colonizing mindset to find a home in the university, there has to be a process, one that is underwritten by large amounts of cash gifts to public and private universities. This process is the dumbing down or elimination of those courses that have historically and consistently been critical of colonizing and colonization. By making large “gifts” of cash, the corporate colonizers buy “access” to the administrations of universities to make suggestions on curricula and course offerings. This is presented as being counsel that in the best interests of the universities and also in the best interests of keeping the cash flowing. So trade policies that would have condemned in a earlier time by those in the university as being counterproductive for progress and adverse to all people; are now represented by those in the University setting as an expansion of prosperity, freedom and democracy to less developed nations via trade. Along with the corresponding argument of the resulting increase of skill levels and competitiveness by those workers in the developed nations by sending low skill jobs abroad. The process that is contingent on this type of message succeeding is censorship.

Censorship is the limiting of information and knowledge to a people for the express purpose of controlling them. It is sometimes masked as preventing the distribution of materials that are seen as dangerous, either in a prurient sense or in empowerment sense. When a institution participates in Censorship, it is betraying the foundation of its existence, to provide all of the knowledge it can to its audience and let them decide. We see more and more examples of this process, sometimes in an overt manner or in a covert manner. An overt manner would be the removal of an art work, the cancelling of a informational demonstration or creating rules that actually inhibit the learning process behind the mask of security and safety. A covert manner of censorship would be the elimination of a course that contained an element of critical thought on a topic that is not in the interest of the university’s corporate patrons. In this time of budget crisis, the areas that are taking the biggest hits are those programs that have been instrumental in fostering critical thinking in the student body.

In the 21st century, the teaching of the Three C’s has replaced the ideas of thought, reasoning and articulation of larger ideas of human kind in the University setting. What will be the outcome of this as we are fond of talking about outcomes in education these days? The idea of outcome and not the investment of the public are all overpowering in a society duped into turning their children into people who are skilled at picking C, but not in understanding the ideas behind C. As Pogo, the cartoon character of the comic strip of the same name said in 1969, in a reference to the Vietnam War, “We have found the enemy and it is Us.”

Patrick Saunders