Universities no longer communities, but rather capitalistic corporations

Public state universities have lost their role as an inter-connected community and has become a capitalistic business venture that can only be restored by CSUS faculty said Professor Jeffrey Lustig. He said that universities have strayed away from teaching students to be part of the public and now trains them to be prospective employees.

“It's besieged not just by the disinvestment in higher education, but by institutional trends and theories within the universities themselves,” Lustig said. “They have presented us with difficult predicaments in the classroom and they also pose a danger to society.”

Most of the conflicts in universities today are due to the clash between two different visions of higher education and its functions said Lustig. He said that the older vision combined the personal, political and professional purposes. The new vision responds to what prospective employers want from the students he said.

“The faculty was meant to be part of a community that is free to evaluate everything, concern itself with the truth and speak reason - publicly,” he said. The new model has turned the university into a business Lustig said.

“The constitution says that the legislature should encourage intellectual improvement because it is essential to the rights and liberties of people,” he said. It is not to do career training or boost the state's GDP said Lustig.

Today, the university is seen as a place for capital accumulation he said. In a real community, no administrator would take a raise while the salaries of those who were fulfilling the requirements were being cut he said.

Lustig said that misconstruing students as customers proposes a drastic narrowing of obligation between teachers and students.

“The new message would be you are what you buy,” said Lustig. This privatization has given our state the lowest adult literacy rate of any state in the union he said. He said it has reversed the progress we made towards racial and ethnic equality.

“I hope our stand is against this new business model and mission,” said Lustig.

“It is essentially the job of the faculty to bring us back to the older model,” he said. This means to be active off campus as much as being active on campus Lustig said.

“The faculty has remained indecisive and mostly silent. That silence needs to end,” he said. “We need to be activist professionals or we'll cease to be professionals at all.”

Lustig spoke today to students and faculty gathered in the University Ballroom during the John C. Livingston Annual Faculty Lecture. The lecture honors CSUS faculty who have played an active role in the life of the University. Professor Livingston was a professor of Government at CSUS from 1954 to 1981 and the first recipient of the honorary lecture. Lustig is currently the professor emeritus of the Government department at CSUS.