[iDC] An Educational Prank

[Kembrew McLeod]

I've been lurking on this list for a while, but didn't feel like I  
had something worthy to contribute, until now. Here's a little piece  
I wrote that came out in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education,  
and it connects with the Praxis-based Ph.D.s thread.


http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=YjhtMypm4XtJYkktdZ9zKVhmNggpyzDn

An Educational Prank

By Kembrew McLeod

In a groundbreaking marketing move, six corporations sponsored my  
undergraduate course during the fall of 2006. To be more accurate, I  
should say, with a wink and a nod, that they "sponsored" the course.

There was no contractual exchange of money or services in this faux  
patronage experiment and, to be honest, some of the businesses didn't  
want to be involved in my scheme. (One company representative,  
sensing the political motivations behind my endeavor, told me via an  
e-mail message: "You will not use the Disney logos or any connection  
to the Disney Co. in your class.")

I began referring to my syllabus as a McSyllabus, and for the  
duration of the semester my corporately sponsored name was Professor  
McKembrew McLeod.

I even planned to plaster a tweed sports coat with the logos of my  
pseudo-sponsors -- McDonald's, MTV, AT&T, Disney, Pfizer, and Sony  
Music. Kind of like a NASCAR outfit, but with elbow patches. Alas, I  
never went through with that part of my plan, as there were too many  
papers to grade and not enough time.

My experiment was a provocation, a quiet protest that escalated near  
the end of the semester after a contentious move made by the  
University of Iowa's Board of Regents. That body had increasingly  
adopted a top-down management style and embraced a corporate model  
for the university, and demonstrated that last November by scuttling  
a 10-month presidential search because it didn't like the finalists.

The board's actions inspired me to push my prank even further, and so  
I personally contacted each regent, telling them about my plan. It  
came as no surprise when one regent -- unaware of my satirical  
motives -- happily endorsed the idea of a corporately sponsored  
classroom. But more on that later.

I should point out that I write this column from a protected  
position. As a newly tenured professor, I have strong free-speech  
rights in the workplace -- a right that is weakening across the  
country as colleges reduce the number of tenure-track professorships.  
Cutting the workforce and extracting more labor for less compensation  
may increase the bottom line of corporations, but it's no way to run  
a university, for a number of reasons.

Close attention from faculty members was a privilege I enjoyed while  
attending a midsized state university in Virginia during the early  
1990s. That one-on-one interaction broadened my intellectual  
horizons, and it transformed my life.

But few students I have met at Iowa have had the same experience. My  
own department, for example, is bursting with more than 1,300 majors,  
but we have only 12 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty  
members. Of course, some of our students do receive the special  
attention they deserve, but it comes from the goodwill of a faculty  
whose workweek easily exceeds 40 hours (not to mention our  
hardworking graduate students, visiting instructors, and office staff  
members).

The arts and humanities have obviously been hit hard, but even "big  
money" units have been affected. For instance, the blossoming  
university-industrial complex has experienced serious consequences in  
certain areas of basic scientific research, where the sharing of  
information is becoming less and less free. As universities and their  
corporate partners place a greater emphasis on developing valuable  
patented technologies, the norm of openness among scientists has eroded.

That has been widely documented, including in a survey of nearly  
2,000 university-based geneticists the results of which were reported  
in the January 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical  
Association. According to the survey, a third of the scientists  
agreed that it was becoming more common in their field to withhold  
data for financial reasons.

About three years ago I interviewed David J. Skorton, then the  
president of Iowa, about some of those issues. During our talk  
Skorton told me that he understood and took seriously the expectation  
that we should do "the best we can to commercialize technologies  
developed in the universities for the state's good."

"But," the president quickly added, "my own point of view has been,  
and will remain, that I am more concerned with freedom of expression  
than with the commercial imperative."

I'm sure his philosophy did not sit well with the university's  
regents, with whom the president had skirmished over other issues.  
When he left last year to become president of Cornell University, few  
people on our campus saw his departure as a coincidence.

Iowa's presidential searches have always been campus-led affairs, but  
after Skorton announced his resignation, for the first time in the  
university's history, the board appointed a regent as head of the  
search panel and exercised unprecedented control over the committee's  
operations. The regents also appointed the former dean of the  
business college as Iowa's interim president, who is quoted in a Q&A  
on the university's Web site as saying that "in educational programs  
and in research and clinical programs, we should seek partnerships,  
relationships where we're not bearing all of the costs and we're  
sharing the rewards."

All of which got me thinking, "What would a liberal-arts education  
look like if McDonald's underwrote it?"

My project gained a new sense of urgency when the regents terminated  
the search for Skorton's replacement. In a cryptic press release, the  
regents explained that the board "needed candidates who had more  
experience as leaders who oversaw complex health-sciences operations  
as well as the myriad of other academic and nonacademic operations of  
a large university." The Des Moines Register reported that the final  
applicant pool did not include an earlier candidate who had been  
favored by the board president, a candidate with significant ties to  
the insurance industry.

This disturbing sequence of events prompted me to send the  
aforementioned e-mail message to each member of Iowa's board  
explaining my prank in a straight-faced manner:

"In a class exercise I thought you'd appreciate, we are imagining  
what it would be like if several corporations sponsored this class.  
In one assignment, the students will be making an advertisement for  
one of these 'clients,'" I wrote, adding, "Because it is so important  
to organize the university more like a business, I thought you would  
appreciate and agree with the philosophy that underpins this project."

I concluded by mock complaining, "I believe that too many professors  
at the university are out of touch with real-world business practices."

Because I contacted the regents in the middle of the presidential- 
search firestorm -- and given my prankish history, which is just one  
Google click away -- I worried about two things. Either the regents  
would (a) see through my sardonic rhetoric and try to have me fired  
for being a smart aleck, or (b) affirm the e-mail's core sentiments.

One way or the other, it was a lose-lose proposition.

A few days later, I received an e-mail message from one regent, who  
cheerfully wrote: "Conceptually, it sounds great. Happy  
Thanksgiving." Although this was not a smoking-gun admission -- "yes,  
product placement in the classroom is part of our nefarious plan for  
the future!" -- my suspicions were nevertheless confirmed.

The troubles faced by the University of Iowa (and our nation's  
universities, more generally) run deeper than a mere bureaucratic  
squabble. This episode highlights the systemic problems that emerge  
when we try to turn the university into "an economic engine for the  
state," a term our administrators are fond of using.

Perhaps I should start stitching together that logo-slathered tweed  
jacket after all.


Kembrew McLeod is an associate professor of communication studies at  
the University of Iowa. His latest book, Freedom of Expression:  
Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property will be  
published this spring by the University of Minnesota Press.


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http://kembrew.com
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kembrew mcleod
associate professor
department of communication studies
university of iowa

home contact info:
1037 e. washington st.
iowa city, ia 52240
kembrew at kembrew.com
319-621-4620