LIBERAL CORPORATION OR RADICAL COLLECTIVE
[Note: the second part of this essay regarding how Hampshire could be a 
radical collective is missing.]

"No major departure, no new and consequential venture, is made without a 
context and vision."
--Franklin Patterson, The Making of a College [p.44]

INTRODUCTION
This essay presents an analysis of the political structure of Hampshire 
College. The essay seeks to describe the distribution of power within 
the college and the framework of power which relates the college to the 
society which surrounds and supports it.

The analysis is predicated upon the radical assumption that fundamental 
structural patterns exert decisive influence upon the ultimate character 
of institutions, quite apart from the particular personalities of the 
persons who happen to occupy positions within those structures. It is 
quite important to keep in mind, then, that this is a formal, not a 
personal, critique. The paper is not intended as an attack upon any 
individual or group of individuals at Hampshire, although it does 
present a strong indictment of a particular mode of institutional 
organization. The paper may at times assail the office of the President, 
for example, but this is not necessarily to attack the President 
himself. The distinction is delicate, but crucial.

The analysis proceeds from another important assumption: that a college 
is simultaneously a thing and an idea, a place and a way of life, a 
community and a consciousness. A college is presumed, in other words, to 
have both physical and psychological reality, both objective and 
subjective existence. Political structure, the subject of this essay, is 
an essentially psychological reality--a collective consciousness (or 
unconsciousness) which either stimulates or inhibits the actions of 
individuals. This is so because people are objectively free to act only 
when they feel subjectively free, objectively responsible only when they 
feel genuinely responsible, and so on.

Not surprisingly, one of the activities affected by political 
consciousness is the process of education. The essay argues that the 
type of political structure which the College exhibits, the type of 
personal freedom and personal responsibility which the prevailing 
ideology encourages, will have a direct and demonstrable bearing upon 
the quality of education which the college can provide. An authoritarian 
structure will provide one sort of education, a liberal structure 
another, and a radical anarchist structure a third.

The observation that political organization and educational ends are 
related is hardly a novel one, but it must be emphasized nonetheless. 
Discussion of educational innovation often takes place within a 
governance framework, a hierarchical structure, which is held to be 
neutral. The basic claim of this paper directly contradicts the liberal 
view that reform and innovation are possible without changing the 
"system". Hierarchical political structures are oppressive within, as 
well as outside, the classroom. Significant educational reform will be 
possible at Hampshire, and elsewhere, only to the extent that a radical 
democratization of governance is simultaneously undertaken.

A statement in the Hampshire catalog can be taken as accurately 
descriptive of the college's present political structure:
The Hampshire governance arrangements will not be egalitarian: they will 
be hierarchical. To be involved, informed, and participating will be the 
responsibility 	 and right of every member of the community; but 
experience, past performance, and a definition of role will determine 
the decision-making arrangements [p. 52]

At the moment, then, Hampshire sees itself as a hierarchical, non-
egalitarian community. It expects everyone to be "involved, informed, 
and participating", although clearly some people are intended to be more 
"participating" than others. This self-image is essentially 
schizophrenic, since "hierarchy" and "community" are fundamentally 
incompatible values in a college for the same reasons that class 
structure and democracy are incompatible in wider society.

This paper argues that at the present time Hampshire College is in most 
respects a liberal corporation, but with elements of consciousness which 
are characteristic of a radical collective. The present situation is a 
political melange, a sort of institutional double-exposure. At the 
moment the college is masking its real hierarchy, while advertising an 
empty, rhetorical community. The desire for genuine community is so 
strong within the college that it is often exploited by the hierarchy 
for directly opposite goals, just as the advertiser exploits the need 
for love to sell products which only increase alienation.

At the moment, the danger of increasing transition to competitive 
liberal corporation and the promise of increasing transition to 
cooperative radical collective combine to make Hampshire College a 
frustrating and exciting place. Unfortunately, the tension between these 
two tendencies becomes creative only when we clearly comprehend it and 
begin to see our way clear toward its resolution. "Reform" without 
analysis is virtually certain to be self-defeating.

I have written this paper in the hope that it might provide both a 
context and a vision, as a step toward understanding what we are--and 
what we may yet become.

Part One: The COLLEGE AS LIBERAL CORPORATION 
"There is a tendency in American colleges and universities to increase 
the administrative staff and the administrative detail out of proportion 
to the essential responsibility of teaching...Real danger comes when 
administration becomes an end in itself, as most humans activities tend 
to be if let alone, when it tends to multiply and bureaucratize, or when 
it tends to vacillate, run to ambiguity, and fail to help a community 
define and articulate its limits and aspirations.
--Franklin Patterson, The Making of a College [p.188]

Although such a model is never explicit in either the external or the 
internal propaganda of the institution, there is an unmistakable formal 
correspondence between the structure of Hampshire College and the 
structure of modern liberal corporations (e.g. Xerox, IBM). This is 
actually hardly surprising, given the influence which business and 
businessmen have exerted during the last century upon higher education 
in America [See, for example, The Corporation and the Campus, ed. Robert 
H. Connery, or David Horowitz' article, "Billion Dollar Brains," in 
Ramparts.]

Thorstein Veblen preceded Franklin Patterson by more that half a century 
in identifying the administrative threat to academic life. In a book 
which he wrote in 1918, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on 
the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, Veblen objected to the 
imposition of a corporate model upon higher education. Under that model, 
as Veblen put it, the college "is conceived as a business house dealing 
in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain 
of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in 
the largest feasible output." [p.62]

In the college as corporation, the president heads a hierarchically 
organized set of constituencies, each of which is assigned a different 
set of interests. (in fact, the resulting stratification of the college 
closely reflects the class structure of the capitalist society in which 
the college finds itself, a society where corporate organization reigns 
supreme.) To understand the college as corporation, it is necessary to 
understand the various roles played by the classes which constitute it: 
trustees, administration, faculty, staff, and students.

1. TRUSTEES
In the college as corporation, the trustees are the board of directors. 
Although they are not all donor/investors themselves, they represent the 
interests of the major sources of capitol (government, foundations, 
wealthy individuals). Legal responsibility and "ownership" accordingly 
accrue to this body.

Such titular control is quite insignificant in one sense, for in both 
the corporation and the college, the nominal owners (trustee/directors) 
are generally in no position to monitor or influence the day-to-day 
affairs of the organization. Their actual power is strictly limited by 
practical considerations of distance, expertise, and access to 
information. The trustee/directors do not, in general, live near the 
organization which they allegedly "own" and "control," they often lack 
professional skills necessary for effective decision-making, and they 
are unable to gather information independently of 
administration/management [see below], which is their only structural 
link to the life of the organization and the other constituencies within 
it.

Still, the trustee/directors are periodically invited by 
administration/management to come and "make decisions" about the future 
of the enterprise in the long run, particularly as concerning financial 
matters. On such occasions, the questions to be "decided" are invariably 
prepared for the trustee/directors by administration/management, whose 
position is almost always sustained, if only faute de mieux. 
Trustee/director meetings are elaborate extravaganzas attended with much 
official reporting and documentation, wining and dining, but despite all 
this circumstance they are essentially perfunctory ceremonies. In almost 
all cases, the trustee/directors can be counted upon to rubber-stamp 
administration/management's proposals, and the latter will occasionally 
even publicly admit as much.

With rare exceptions, then, it is administration/management that runs 
the organization. This is not, however, to say that the trustee/director 
body has no function, or that its composition is irrelevant. The 
trustees, as titular owners, have no short-run control, but they do have 
certain long-ruin class interests, and the college as corporation must 
never contravene those class interests.

In Hampshire's case, the trustees' class interests are those of the 
upper-class white male liberal Eastern Establishment. The most cursory 
sociological analysis of the Board of Trustees or the "surrogate alumni" 
of the National Advisory Council is sufficient to demonstrate the 
predominance of wealthy industrialists and prominent Establishment 
figures. Token blacks, women, and the less-well-to-do are exceptions 
which prove the rule. The recent inclusion of one student and one 
faculty-member on the Board is a co-optative measure with similarly 
token effect.

It is significant that this upper-class control is encouraged by the 
administration. Seats on the Board of Trustees are sold to the highest 
bidders, by design. Consider, for example, the following "strategy for 
Individual Gifts for Phase II of the Hampshire College Founders' Fund:"
Strengthening the Board of Trustees: At the moment, there are four 
vacancies on the Board. Others will occur as the present members rotate 
off. At least two of these places should be reserved for individuals who 
are able, if inclined, to give gifts of $1,000,000 or more.
In an industrial corporation, it is rather easy to identify the class 
interests of the directors: profit and stability. But what are the class 
interests of the trustees of a college? What do they have to gain from 
their contribution of time and capital to the college? Does the analogy 
between corporation and college break down at this point, since the 
trustees receive no direct monetary return as a result of their 
participation?

In fact, the analogy still holds. The trustees do benefit as a class 
from their control of the college, since they are able to see to it that 
the college produces (1) the class structure, and (2) the ideology, 
which are required by their corporate interests.;
Consider, for example, the remarks of Roger Blough, former chief 
executive of U.S. Steel ["Agenda for the Seventies," in Connery, The 
Corporation and the Campus, p.176]:
The corporation and the campus are interdependent. It is not enough to 
utter the truism which has become a cliche--that the corporation needs 
educated people to make a profit and the colleges need dollars to 
produce educated people. Corporate support of higher education 
contributes significantly to the long-range goals of a corporation, for 
business is not only concerned with producing goods and services at a 
profit today but also with the continuity of a profitable enterprise. If 
American business does not aid in the maintenance of liberal education 
as the bulwark of good government, it is not properly protecting the 
long0-range interests of its stockholders, its employees, and its 
customers.

"Good government," of course, is simply the Establishment's transparent 
euphemism for its control of "the system," the social and economic 
structure in which the upper class enjoys such magnificent privilege. 
Any assertion that trustees who have such enormous personal interests 
can represent :the public at large" must be dismissed as nonsense.
The trustees represent the Establishment, not the public. It is they who 
are the ultimate source of the elitist character of Hampshire College. 
They see to it that the college is an exclusive institution with a 
largely upper-class student body and a distinctively upper-class 
ideology.

The elitist ideology, crudely expressed, is that the beautiful people of 
the upper class have a right to rule society. The Hampshire Catalog 
states that the new society we have is in many ways vital and rich, and 
every part of the world is reaching for the kinds of benefits it can 
confer. The technological society is shaped increasingly by scientists, 
engineers, economists, and other professionals--a large range of related 
elites open to anyone able and educated enough to qualify. [p.19]

What the Catalog does not say is that Hampshire college itself is a 
conduit to the elite professions which is manifestly closed to most 
students who are "able and educated enough to qualify", but who lack 
wealth sufficient to pay tuition.

Elitist ideology promotes respect for the ":professionals" and contempt 
for the working class. It is fundamentally anti-democratic and 
patronizing, a highly self-centered and manipulative view of the world. 
For this the trustees are largely responsible. For more on elitist 
ideology, see John Clayton's forthcoming analysis of the Hampshire 
Catalog.]

2. ADMINISTRATION
In the college s corporation, administration is management. It is 
administration/management which seeks, as Veblen says, "to turn the 
means in hand to account in the largest feasible output." It is 
administration/management which makes the day-to-day decisions about 
capital allocation and which guides the long-term financial decisions 
nominally made by the trustee/directors.

The administrators are the educational entrepreneurs, the institutional 
manipulators. Veblen called them the "captains of erudition," in 
parallel with the captains of industry in the corporate world.

Educational entrepreneurs see their role as the efficient production and 
retailing of a product, namely education. This is the "merchantable 
knowledge" to which Veblen referred. The primary function of 
administration is to see that the human and financial capital available 
to the college are maximally exploited in the production of this 
product. Administration runs the show.

Veblen observed the consequences of this entrepreneurial process:
The immediate and visible effect of...a large and centralized 
administrative machinery is, on the whole detrimental to scholarship.... 
The ideal of efficiency be force of which a large-scale centralized 
organization commends itself in these premises is that pattern of shrewd 
management whereby a large business concern makes money. The underlying 
business-like presumption accordingly appears to be that learning is a 
merchantable commodity, to be produced on a piece-rate plan, rated, 
bought and sold by standard units, measured, counted and reduced to 
staple equivalence by impersonal, mechanical tests. In all its bearings 
the work is hereby reduced to a mechanical, statistical consistency, 
with numerical standards and units; which conduces to perfunctory and 
mediocre work throughout, and acts to deter both student and teachers 
from a free pursuit of knowledge, as contrasted with the pursuit of 
academic credits.... Under such a scheme of standardization, 
accountancy, and control, the school becomes primarily a bureaucratic 
organization. [p.163]

Within such a bureaucratic organization, hierarchy becomes an 
institutional obsession. Administration/management works compulsively to 
hierarchically organize itself--and the college as a whole. It expends 
great amounts of time, energy, and paper in clarifying just who-reports-
to-whom, detailing the chain of command in elaborate administrative 
gobbledygook. An excellent example of this managerial process is the 
Report of the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on the Office of the Deans of 
the College [dated 2/3/72]:
It is clear that support for the exercise of the office of the Dean of 
the College is to come operationally from the Vice-President whenever he 
feels a clear sense of the President's view of the policies under which 
operations are to be carried out. Essentially this means that in those 
cases where the Dean feels the need to inquire, he has available to him 
the services of the Vice-President immediately for the resolution of the 
question. All other academic support units are supervised by the Vice-
President who functions as the President's executive officer responsible 
for all systems in the College.

Words like "operationally", "academic support units," "functions," and 
"systems" give this "clear" statement an air of objective authority and 
orderliness, an aura of competence and efficiency. This is very 
important.

Although faculty and student often suffer from its crackpot realism, the 
administrative bureaucracy sees itself as the responsible, efficient, 
rational, and fair organizing force in a community which would 
presumably be irresponsible, wasteful, irrational, unjust and chaotic 
without it. Administration/management has at its disposal by far the 
greatest share of power within the college as corporation, and it 
requires this ideology to rationalize its position, both to itself and 
to the community that it controls.

Thus, administration tells the college that it has been around from the 
beginning, that it has the blueprint for development, that it has the 
expertise to look far into the future, watching out for the "long-range 
interests of the institution." Administration claims to plan for the 
good of all. It asserts that it is the only element in the college with 
a sufficiently long view to transcend the petty interests of the moment.

In pursuit of its goal of efficiency, administration/management does 
what it can to promote competition among its employees to develop an 
atmosphere of what might be termed "creative insecurity.: Presumably, 
employees will work hard only if prodded by management.

In general, management chooses to make its product as capital-intensive 
as possible. Whenever given the choice between investing in material 
resources on the one hand and human resources on the other, management 
will tend to prefer the material. (Machines, books, and buildings are 
appreciably more constant and reliable than human beings.)

The tendency of academic managers to prefer visible and "practical" 
investments was also noted by Veblen:
Imbued with an alert sense of those pecuniary values which they are by 
habit and temperament in a position to appreciate, the sagacious 
governing board may, for instance, determine to expend the greater 
proportion of the available income of the university in improving and 
decorating its real estate... There is, indeed, a visible reluctance on 
the part of these businesslike boards to expend the corporation's income 
for those intangible, immaterial uses for which the university is 
established. These uses leave no physical, tangible residue in the way 
of durable gods, such as will justify the expenditure in terms of 
vendible property acquired; therefore, they are prima facie imbecile, 
and correspondingly distasteful, to men whose habitual occupation is 
with the acquisition of property. [pp. 58-9]

In the production of the educational product, then, administration as 
management will generally seek to minimize expenditures on intangible 
and invisible items like financial aid, psychiatric counseling, and 
social life, while maximizing expenditures for administrative machinery, 
buildings, public relations, and educational technology. As Veblen went 
on to observe,
By force of the same businesslike bias the boards unavoidably incline to 
apportion funds assigned for current expenses in such a way as to favour 
those 'practical' or quasi-practical lines of instruction and academic 
propaganda that are presumed...to yield immediate returns in the way of 
a creditable publicity. [Ibid.]
Administration's preoccupation with "a creditable publicity" is quite 
understandable within the corporate model. Publicity (advertising) is 
essential to any organization that sees itself as selling a product on a 
competitive market. And the college as corporation is always in 
competition with other colleges.

The public relations office has the advertiser's job of product-
differentiation. It seeks to convince the buyers (students and parents) 
and the investors (donors, government, and foundations) that the college 
is producing a product that is "new," "innovative," "experimental," "on 
a par with Harvard's", etc., etc.

Such advertising is extremely expensive, and in no way relates to the 
educational operation of the college, but administration as management 
claims that the return makes this an efficient allocation of the 
college's income. By advertising effectively, the college can charge a 
higher price for its product (raising tuition), since it has created a 
favorable market for itself.

The office of public relations will publicize those aspects of college 
life which foundations, parents, wealthy donors, and potential students 
will be inclined to approve. As Veblen comments,
...every feature of academic life, and of the life of all members of the 
academic staff, must unremittingly (tough of course unavowedly) be held 
under surveillance at every turn, with a view to furthering whatever may 
yield a reputable notoriety, and to correcting or eliminating whatever 
may be conceived to have a doubt fuyl or untoward bearing in this 
respect.... Without such a painstaking cultivation of a reputable 
notoriety,, it is believed, a due share of funds could not be procured 
by and university for the prosecution of its work as a seminary of the 
higher learning. [168-9]

The college as corporation expends enormous resources projecting a 
warped, but glossy, image onto the public at large.

In the college as corporation, the administrative entrepreneurs both 
implement and determine policy, although their role in the determination 
process is often disguised. Where parliamentary governance structures 
parallel the administrative hierarchy, the administration will treat the 
former as a perfunctory rubber-stamp. It will lead the parliamentary 
bodies to believe that they play a genuine role in the policy-making 
process, while in practice they are systematically ignored.

In the "Statement of Specifications for the Post of Dean of the College" 
[dated 2/2/72], for example, no mention is made of the Academic Council. 
It is apparent from the statement that all substantive decisions are 
made finally by administrative officers:
The Dean of the College, with the Vice-President, will work directly 
with the President in the formulation of academic policies and in the 
interpretation of important policy questions. The Dean will be fully 
participant in those decision processes where present practice, new 
proposals, and the allocation of resources needed for both must be 
finally determined.

Under the circumstances, the Academic Council becomes little more than a 
glorified all-college debating club.

As was noted above, administration/management rationalizes its great 
power by employing the ostensibly legitimating ideology of "efficiency-
expertise-fairness". This ideology is not always sufficient to protect 
it from challenge, however. When serious challenge does arise, 
administration can be expected to apply various tactics, at least four 
of which can be isolated. They might be called (1) repressive tolerance, 
(2) divide-and-conquer, (3) come-advise-us, and (4) co-optation.

Repressive tolerance allows dissent to be expressed, but totally ignored 
its essence. This tactic amounts to holding large public meetings (e.g., 
Academic Council) where a lot of steam is let off, where confrontation 
and "free speech" are permitted, while nothing is ultimately done about 
objections raised. Repressive tolerance accords administration a liberal 
image--and often leads dissenters to expend all their energy in an 
ineffectual way.

Divide-and-conquer isolates individual dissenters from their sources of 
support. With faculty and staff, employees subject to administration's 
managerial control, this tactic involves gently intimidation of a sort 
which could never be employed if there were effective faculty or staff 
unions. With students, the tactic is often expressed as: "Come see me in 
my office about this next week." Alone, of course.

Come-advise-us is used against constituencies which might be tempted to 
assert power on their own (e.g., the Community Council). Those who have 
a legitimate right to actually make decisions are instead invited to 
tender recommendations to the administration.
Co-optation is used when challenge has escalated to an intolerable 
level. When opposition is overwhelming, administration will claim that 
the reform demanded is what it has always wanted anyhow. By taking the 
issue to its breast as though it had thought up the reform in the first 
place, administration denies support to the real reformers.

All these tactics are used to prevent any effective organization from 
developing within th ecollege. The administration will abandon tactics 
and surrender actual power only in the face of implacable opposition.

To sum up, administration's role is that of capitalist entrepreneur. It 
massages, cajoles, exhorts, encourages, intimidates, coerces, and 
overworks the other elements of the community, as the occasion requires. 
It does not so much administer as manipulate.

3. FACULTY AND STAFF
The teaching faculty and administrative staff (secretaries, maintenance 
employees, technicians) are the employees of the college as corporation. 
They are the work force which is to be exploited in producing the 
educational product. Faculty are the white-collar workers and staff are 
the blue-collar workers. As in the liberal corporation, the class line 
between these categories is strictly maintained.

Faculty as white-collar workers are much better paid than staff, they 
have more vacations and greater control over working conditions, and 
they have relative job security. The faculty's preferential status 
requires an ideological rationalization (in much the same way that the 
administration's power advantage does): faculty are held to have 
"credentials and qualifications" entitling them to higher salaries; they 
play the key role in production (direct personal contact with students) 
and they must be rewarded accordingly. Faculty members are quite jealous 
of their "professional expertise", and this vanity is a weakness which 
administration/management can easily exploit. In general, faculty will 
be coddled. flattered, and wooed, rather than coerced.

Staff as blue-collar workers enjoy much less privilege. In general, they 
are badly paid an rottenly treated. They are given little or no job 
security, they are looked down upon by administration, students, and 
faculty alike as temporary tools, as nearly sub-human hacks. They are 
ranked and classified according to the amount of "contact time" they 
have with students, i.e., the degree to which they are accorded basic 
human social skills. The staff are rarely asked to innovate or create, 
to contribute from non-machinelike parts of their personalities. They 
are asked only to do their jobs--to type, or wash pots, or rake leaves. 
They are viewed as one-dimensional devices which can always be replaced 
on the job market.

Faculty are also tools, of course, but they are invited to think of 
themselves in other terms. They are encouraged, like the engineers at 
IBM or XEROX, to innovate in the production of a superior product. They 
are urged, even required, to be creative. What is more, they are given 
the important illusion that they have some genuine control over the 
institution that employs them.

This is, however, strictly illusion--as Veblen once again has long since 
noted:
The first executive duty of the president]... is to keep his faculty 
under control, so as to be able unhampered to carry out the policy of 
magnitude and secularization with a view to which the governing board 
has invested him with his powers. This work of putting the faculty in 
its place has by this time been carried out with sufficient effect, so 
that its 'advice and consent' may in all cases e taken as a matter of 
course; and should a remnant of initiative and scholarly aspiration show 
itself in any given concrete case in such a way as to traverse the lines 
of policy pursued by the executive, he can readily correct the 
difficulty by exercise f a virtually plenary power of appointment, 
preferment, and removal, backed as this power is by a nearly 
indefeasible black-list. So well is the academic black-list understood, 
indeed, and so sensitive and trustworthy is the fearsome loyalty of the 
common run among academic men, that very few among them will venture 
openly to say a good word for any one of their colleagues who may have 
fallen under the displeasure of some incumbent of executive office. This 
work of intimidation and subordination may fairly be said to have 
acquired the force of an institution, and to need no current 
surveillance of the faculty, or of a working majority, may safely be 
counted on. [185]

Should faculty members become seriously displeased, however, the 
administration will play repressive tolerance of come-advise-us, 
inviting the unhappy individual to server on yet one more of the many 
committees-for-the-sifting of sawdust into which the faculty of a well-
administered university is organized. There committees being, in effect, 
if not in intention, designed chiefly to keep the faculty talking while 
the bureaucratic machine goes on its way under the guidance of the 
executive and this personal counsellors and lieutenants. [186]

Talking, however, is of little avail, since the administration is
served by a corps of adroit parliamentarians and lobbyists, ever at hand 
to divert the faculty's action from any measure that might promise to 
have a substantial effect. By force of circumstances, chief of which is 
the executive office, the faculties have become deliberative bodies 
charged with the power to talk. Their serious attention has been taken 
up with schemes for weighing imponderables or correlating 
incommensurables, with such a degree of verisimilitude as would keep the 
statistics and accountancy of the collective administration in 
countenance, and still leave some play in the joints of the system for 
the personal relation of teacher and discipline. It is a nice problem in 
self-deception, chiefly notable for an endless proliferation. [206]

Thus, the faculty is hopelessly bamboozled, as its vanity and love of 
talk are extravagantly catered to by the administration.

The faculty is able to innovate to some degree, it is true, but it is 
never allowed control over the budge, the crucial mechanism which either 
permits or proscribes all innovations. To quote Veblen once more:
Much effective surveillance of the academic work is exercised through 
the [administration's] control of the budget. The academic staff can do 
little else than what the specifications of the budget provide for; 
without the means with which the corporate income should supply them 
they are as helpless as might be expected. [58]

And so the faculty bumble along--divided and conquered, tolerated and 
ignored, flattered and overworked. They are never given any significant 
amount of genuine power, but them, they never demand it.

Faculty are encouraged to compete with one another, and they are 
frequently reminded by the administration of the state of the job 
market. Promotion schemes further this competition, where the ratio of 
1:2:4 for full, associate, and assistant professors force young faculty 
at Hampshire to compete with one another for the higher positions. Lack 
of tenure also functions to increase faculty insecurity.

There is little solidarity or political consciousness within the 
faculty. The corporate ethic of competition is not conducive to 
cooperation, teamwork, or personal support. The lack of teamwork is 
directly reflected in the academic program, which is characterized by 
highly individualistic and uncoordinated academic efforts (genuinely 
collective intellectual activities like the Environmental Quality 
Program are quite rare). There is no effective political structure which 
might give the faculty unity and power. Faculty are defeated by their 
own excessive individualism: the administrative strategies of repressive 
tolerance, divide-and-conquer, come-advise-us, and co-optation are 
devastatingly effective.

4. STUDENTS
In a sense, students and parents occupy the same position with respect 
to the college as corporation. Both groups are consumers, buyers, 
customers, the market. A large portion of the college's advertising 
effort is directed toward building a corporate image for the college in 
this market. The college as corporation must see to it that students and 
parents are persuaded that they are "getting their money's worth." And, 
as in most cases where advertising is used, this means that some of the 
money that the consumers pay for the product is spent on trying to 
convince them that they have made the right purchase and should continue 
to buy.

This buyer-seller relationship may appear at first glance to be exterior 
to the life of the college, a boring an unpleasant fact of institutional 
life. In fact, however,m this external financial framework seriously 
influences the internal educational process. Because students are 
encouraged by the system to regard themselves a s consumers of the 
educational product, they tend to adopt the mode of participation 
appropriate for the consumption of other "entertainment" products 
available in our society. Higher education becomes a "big show", a four-
year telethon where students are essentially passive spectators. Any 
teacher who has led a seminar full of spectators knows the consequences.

The financial framework tends to encourage selfishness, as well as 
passivity. Students and parents are urged to view their expenditure on 
education as a "wise investment"--as though adolescent human beings 
could be helpfully regarded as mini-firms which undertake educational 
investment now to reap the guaranteed financial benefits alter. The 
college makes it easy for students to fall in to positions of upper-
class privilege by teaching them to expect such rewards. By granting 
degrees, the college ends up selling tickets to glory on the upper-class 
express.

Because students are taught to see themselves primarily as consumers, 
they feel free to make great demands of the college, particularly of the 
faculty (whom they may view--at least in some respects--as their 
servants or employees). Students feel entitled to special consideration 
because they are paying for it. Many faculty, in turn, toady and pander 
to the student as consumer, engaging in a personally and intellectually 
degrading race for popularity. Faculty find themselves increasingly 
catering to students' whims, tolerating sloppy work and halfhearted 
participation.

On the other hand, students feel that they have no obligations to the 
college, beyond meeting tuition payments. They are invited to 
participate in the "making of the college," but in fact they are not 
asked to contribute physical labor, to become genuinely responsible.

Since the administration tries to anticipate every need of the student 
as consumer, there is little call for personal initiative. Students 
know, anyway, that they have no real access to decision-making in the 
hierarchical structure. They know that exhortations to "be involved, 
informed and participating" are empty rhetorical devices.

In the college as corporation, students have no reason to see themselves 
as having any particular obligations to faculty, staff, or other 
students. Only the business office makes real demands on them. Students 
are swallowed up in a sad, lonely individualism: living in individual 
rooms, doing independent study, taking individualized exams, undergoing 
a privatistic identity crisis. Students have no sense of collective 
identity or shared purpose when they function as consumers. The result 
is loneliness, apathy, meaninglessness.

5. EDUCATION AS PRODUCT
The college as corporation has the same basic purpose as the industrial 
corporation. It works to turn out a competitive product that will sell 
on the market. The college as corporation is concerned with efficiency, 
not with social responsibility. In general, the college as corporation 
never seriously examines its purpose. It claims to provide education and 
to further knowledge. But education to what end? Knowledge for what 
purpose? For whose benefit?

Like the industrial corporation, the liberal college-corporation 
vigorously asserts its political neutrality. As Franklin Patterson 
stated in the First Commencement Address [22 May 1971]:
In keeping with the tradition of free inquiry and free expression that 
Hampshire continues, this College is not and should never be an 
instrument of politics to be used by anyone--Right or Left or Center--
who thinks he has a monopoly on truth and who claims a right to bend the 
institution and its people to his special dogma or unique, revealed 
wisdom.
In fact, however, the liberal college-corporation servers in general to 
maintain the status quo (the prev ailing ideology and prevailing class 
structure). It is true that the college's politics are never explicitly 
worked out, but its implicit ideology is no less political for that. the 
sociological composition of the student body and the ideological content 
of the curriculum are political tacts which the college as corporation 
never squarely faces.
Since the fundamental ideology of the college as corporation is elitist, 
this fact can never be made explicit. To do so would alienate too many 
of the idealistic young. Rather than make it clear to students that they 
are being groomed to become the ruling elite of the future, the college 
prefers to allow students to wallow in their individual identity crises. 
It is easier to permit paralysis than to risk radicalization. At its 
worst, the college as corporation takes energetic young minds and 
confronts them with isolation, helplessness, and indirection.

6. SUMMARY
Ultimately, the college as corporation cannot inspire the loyalty of any 
of its constituencies, because it has no purpose, in the dynamic sense 
of the word. As a corporation, the college does not seek to transform 
society, or even to fundamentally alter the lives of its members. It is 
an emotionally empty institution which does not meet the need for 
collective spirit or personal fulfillment.

The college as corporation is organized into hierarchical, basically 
antagonistic classes, which are dominated by an entrepreneurial 
administration. Its ethic is competitive, individualistic, and elitist. 
As a corporation, the college is neither socially responsible nor 
socially critical. It is a man-power pipeline, an ideological conveyor 
belt. As such, it is joyless, hectic, and dehumanizing.