Everything is being corporatized, which is reducing our freedom as individuals in today's world.
The most recent example of this phenomenon was announced last Wednesday by the College of Business, which has received a $1 million gift from BB&T. The gift (better viewed as an investment by BB&T) will be given in $100,000 installments over the next ten years.
In return for the investment, the bank will be allowed to give high-profile public lectures in the Holtzman Alumni Center and to create a new undergraduate and graduate course where BB&T is allowed extensive freedom to choose the curriculum and syllabus. The course being offered is about "freedom" and its relation to the "market."
During the hour-long lecture last Wednesday given by John Allison, the CEO and chairman of BB&T, the ideological agenda the bank wishes to promote was very apparent. The lecture was nothing more than a very boring and dry discussion that failed to go outside the most basic and elementary talking points for Objectivism, a radical free-market philosophy created by Ayn Rand. Free copies of Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" where given to every student in attendance.
According to Allison, the purpose of the gift to the university is to counter the bias that is already present in academia across the country. According to supporters of the corporate partnership, the class, which plans on discussing "the moral principles underlying free markets," is fair and balanced because it teaches both Marxism and free markets by comparing and contrasting the two systems. The other free book given during Allison's lecture was "The New Industrial State" by John Kenneth Galbraith.
Such an argument, though, is based upon a false dichotomy and stems from a lack of reasoning. The question of bias in academia is not a "liberal" or "conservative" issue, nor is it a question of Marxism versus Capitalism. These are false dichotomies (especially in regards to a question of morality and capitalism) because there are many (if not infinite) different ideological frameworks that do not fall into either of those two categories.
To claim that bias is a question of liberal versus conservative is to demonstrate a lack of knowledge regarding how science functions and works.
The framework called "Objectivism" is not simply an economic argument, but an epistemological, moral and political one as well. Competing epistemological frameworks would include Imre Lakatos's famous methodology of scientific research programmes, or Paul Feyerabend's idea of epistemological anarchism. Competing frameworks of morality would include existentialism, nihilism or the ideas of economic justice promoted by John Rawls, Bruce Ackerman or Robert Nozick. Competing political or economic frameworks are just as numerous. A very short list would include different broad categories such as feminist, Neo-Walrasian, participatory economics, Keynesian or post-modernism, and these lists could easily continue.
Depending on the selection of epistemological, moral or political frameworks an individual chooses can drastically change that person's conception of "freedom" and how it relates to the "market." To claim that a course promoting Objectivism is balanced because the syllabus includes Hayek and Marx is an insult to the diversity and intellectual developments that have been made in academia for the past 60 years.
Granted, there has always been a corporate bias at universities and colleges across the country. The bias in academia stems from the structure and design of how academia is organized. The success of competing schools of thought are determined by a number of mechanisms, including the process of peer review, tenure, the allocation of research grants by the government and large corporations, or the prestige that is given to certain schools of thought when a leader in that field is given greater access or influence over policy makers. Through these various mechanisms, corporations and governments are able to influence which schools of thought become more popular. These mechanisms therefore act as a filtering process to determine which ideas are normally taught in the classroom to prepare students for the 'real world.'
The difference is that the influence of corporations used to be indirect. Now, corporations are able to skip all of these mechanisms to directly decide the curricula of the education students receive. It is an attack on the freedom of the intellectual and the scientific process because it circumvents the barriers and spaces that have been established to foster diverse and original ideas. It is a signal to professors that career advancement and gaining full tenure means falling lockstep into line with the ideas corporate donors wish to purchase. It is a reminder that at a university, ideas do not win or lose because of reason, logic or sound debate; it is instead a question of power. Having a large pocketbook is merely one weapon that can be used in the battle for our minds.
The loser will always be the student since we have no control over the future of our university or the selection of ideas we are taught. Instead, the actions of the College of Business simply demonstrate that they are more interested in serving their corporate donors than their students. In practice, BB&T is a consumer that is purchasing a school where the pool of potential job applicants will conform to their ideological agenda. Therefore, BB&T is nothing more than a modern day "witch doctor" that sets the agenda and ideological boundaries presented in the classroom.