Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization. Trump’s administration has fueled this campaign, not only targeting academic freedom but also pushing policies that criminalize dissent, especially when it comes to movements like those advocating for Palestinian liberation. The erosion of civil liberties extends to international students protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with threats of deportation looming over them. The chilling message is clear: higher education is no longer a sanctuary for free thought; it is a field of repression where the rule of authoritarianism dominates.

– Henry Giroux, CounterPunch

The quote from Henry Giroux points to the corporatization of the university, where in the last 50 years, a professionalized administration has been growing while faculties have been shrinking or remaining stagnant. At the same time, tenured positions have been declining so that as of 2023 only 23% of all faculty jobs are tenured with 9% tenure-track. Unsurprisingly, this decline has resulted in a sharp decline of faculty governance (virtually an erasure) with the tenure-track number pointing toward the eventual demise of a tenured and thus protected faculty, unless unions are legalized at private universities, and at both private and public universities, where unions are legal, collective bargaining replaces the tenure void. Without effective collective bargaining, however, teaching will become a kind of piece work, which it is today for the large majority who do not have tenure or the chance of tenure on tenure-track.

While the national tenure statistics are dismal, a brief survey on ChatGPT suggests that first-tier research institutions still have a majority or significant minority of tenured faculty. This points to a two-tiered higher educational system, the upper tier of which (The Ivy League and its peers, such as Stanford, Duke, and UC Berkeley) produces the professional elites who ascend to political, social, and economic positions that form the nexus of national power. In spite of the significant numbers of tenured faculty at these institutions, their top-down corporate structure, their allegiance to donors and trustees, that is to money, rather than to faculty, students, and staff is dominant. Lacking ethical cores, corporate universities are chameleons: they take the color of the system in which they are embedded and that system has mandated, not without ongoing resistance, that the order of the day is the erasure of Palestine and with it the erasure of traditional Judaism for Zionism because the values of traditional Judaism support social justice and human rights and the welcoming of the stranger,—”You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev 19:34). 

In 1918, the economist Thorstein Veblen gave us the blueprint for the corporate university in his book The Higher Learning in America. In the corporate view, “the university 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 at hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs, it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover” (62). Within this system, administrators are the bosses, knowledge is a commodity, students are clients, and most scholar-teachers are bureaucrats who work within narrow niches of marketable information. Within this system the humanities and qualitative social sciences are marginalized because the knowledge these disciplines produce resists commodification and thus threatens the workings of the knowledge factory.

Through a system of rewards and punishments, the hierarchical corporate structure is built to resist solidarity, the kinship of its workers (faculty, students, and staff). The faculty are isolated one from another through the hierarchy of rank and through the relative isolation of disciplines in departmental structures. There is, of course, interdisciplinary work, but that work goes on primarily between individuals and never threatens to become communal, that is, to override departmental borders and disciplinary distinctions. Faculty focus is intensely individual and thus alienating. If one is on tenure-track, then for six years one is focused on achieving the reward of tenure and avoiding the punishment of dismissal, which will come, in the first place, if one does not meet specific publication standards in terms of quantity and quality: quality, to be determined by a jury of one’s peers both inside and outside of the institution, depends not only on the approved content of what one writes but on the prestige of where one publishes a book or articles. Experimental work is implicitly discouraged: for example, a communal project that is documented but not publishable in a print format. Such projects are at the heart of Indigenous research (see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies). At first-tier universities, such as Cornell, where I teach, teaching comes second in the tenure track hierarchy: teaching evaluations from students are reviewed by the departmental faculty but unless there is a decided negative trend will not influence a strong publication record. Service to the department and the university is noted but negligible. After tenure, if one achieves it, one must focus on climbing the promotional ladder to associate and then full professor. This kind of career focus tends to blur one’s peripheral vision or, put another way, to stimulate one’s tunnel vision.

If one is not in a tenure-track or tenured job, that is, if one is a contingent faculty member, then one is simply focused on keeping one’s job without the scholarly benefits—primarily leaves and research support—that tenured and tenure-track faculty receive. Contingent faculty typically teach more than those tenured or on tenure-track because the research they do, if they have time to do it, cannot bring them the rewards of merit pay. Simply put, contingent faculty are the mirror image of tenured and tenure-track faculty. Though they typically have the same credentials (a Ph.D), they are paid to teach and not to do research, and they are paid substantially less than those increasingly few privileged to rise in the ranks. The status of contingent faculty implicitly alienates them from the tenured and tenure-track faculty, who have relatively secure positions, and makes the contingent vulnerable to arbitrary firing, particularly in this era if they support Palestinian rights.

For undergraduate students the road to the reward of a bachelor’s degree is equally isolating through a system of carrots and sticks that echoes the faculty path to tenure. The foundation of the system is grades reflected in the grade point average, which focuses students on quantitative rather than qualitative achievement, and the future (jobs, graduate school) rather than the present. The system of the major, coupled with the emphasis on grades, limits students’ ability to take a range of courses outside their discipline, that is, to learn in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. This is particularly true in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering , and Math), where major requirements strictly limit the number of courses outside the major that one can take. This structure, given the financial pressures (even for students with grants) instrumentalizes education. The question becomes, then, not what are we learning about ourselves in the world around us in order to change this world to provide a decent life for everyone. That is, we are not receiving an education in social justice. We are instead learning how to position ourselves, as competitive individuals, to make the best possible living, to get a return commensurate with our investment. In this corporate environment, the question of social justice is marginalized in very few courses, under fire now in the era of anti-DEI.

For graduate students, the job statistics previously cited tell the story: the end of academia. These students, being trained as scholar-teachers, typically within very narrow disciplinary limits,  when the job market has collapsed, are not being prepared for the market beyond academia, unless they are working in STEM fields where their studies may have practical applications.

Staff from middle managers (academic advisors,and administrative assistants) to service workers keep the university running, but are at the same time the most expendable employees, whose crucial importance to faculty and upper-tier administrators is virtually invisible. 

It is this corporate system, based on the alienation of all its constituencies from one another and the constituents of each constituency from each other, that explains why the universities capitulated so quickly to the weaponization of antisemitism and the attack on affirmative action (DEI). In this system, the constituents reflexively concede power to the top of the hierarchy, the upper administration, who answer to the trustees, who answer to the donors. At best, this leaves isolated pockets of resistance, which we have witnessed in sporadic student and faculty protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, typically met with violent suppression by university administrators, while an atomized faculty, students, and staff remain largely quiescent, locked in disconnected niches as the administration goes about its business of repression in order to keep trustees and donors content.

Within this structure, without broad faculty support, resistance can only function as a voice in the academic wilderness. Here, as a traditional Jew, and a critic of Zionism in my scholarship and teaching, I remember that the radical Jewish rabbi and Palestinian, Jesus of Nazareth, removed to the wilderness for 40 days and nights in order to prepare himself to organize the people for a ministry of resistance dedicated to social justice. So, I am reminded that keeping voices of resistance alive is crucial in a corporate structure that demands silence except when the managers speak. As one of the voices of resistance at a rally on May 9, 2025, sponsored by Cornell Grads for Palestine in memory of the 13,000 children murdered by Israel in Gaza (no doubt a conservative number),  I said the following,  which stands as an epilogue to the course, “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” I taught in the spring of 2025, a course certified by the appropriate faculty committee but condemned publicly by the Cornell president:

Gaza brings home to us, if we needed it to be brought home, that for those in power in government and civil institutions, such as universities, much to their shame, human life, no matter how innocent, is infinitely expendable in order to keep that power. 

It is at this juncture that the words of the Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, reverberate for me, a Jew who has a child and grandchildren who are citizens of Israel. These words stand against the capitalist imperialism that drives the genocide in Gaza: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

The resistance against this imperialism is at bottom the struggle for one’s soul, the soul necessary to ground a revolution that will build a world in which children are no longer sacrificed for profit.

The post The Collapse of the Corporate University in the Time of Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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