The James Column

If university presidents function as CEOs and students are branded products—that is: if universities are more profitable as corporations—then why are students unable to demand a refund? Products are always refundable. Students are said to be the products of universities: a student graduates then shows off her wonderful education, inspiring other people to attend, as though students were green straws or Coke cans.

The reason that business plan sounds bizarre is because it is bizarre—it’s fake: it’s a red herring: it’s a talking point designed by Stanford graduate consumer psychologists to give disenfranchised students and staff something on which to wax poetic. The true product of the university is nothing. The university business plan is to be a middle person collecting fees from textbook producers and students and funding from the government. If the students are kept spending then money will continue to trickle up.

Mr Crow’s $700,000 salary is old news not worth griping about—nothing substantial can be done. And, indeed, he’s not the problem—he makes right in the middle of the $50,000 to $100,000 per month range of every university president in the US. Furthermore, he’s warm and thoughtful and remembers names. The bigger issue is how salaries are determined. The prevailing logic comes from Economics 101: The more a person contributes to the value of an organization the more she should make. CEOs do the most and take the most risk, therefore they should be paid the most.

That logic is called the marginal productivity theory, and because it has a proper name and is found in bold print in economic textbooks it has the impression of being legitimate, like the laws of gravity. But the theory is wrong. The professors who hold extended officers hours and interact with students add the most value, not the CEOs. The professors who will sit with students even three years after having them in a class give a university its name, not the CEOs. The professors who have wisdom and who are unafraid to share take all the risk, not the CEOs. The marginal productivity theory is a smoke screen. It functions as subliminal indoctrination to forgetting and forgiving the massive income inequalities of universities; and further, it serves as a way to legitimize dehumanized institutions. 

Universities must first be human before they can be businesses. ASU has no human side to it other than a handful of underpaid instructors who have genuine care and interest in what they teach and in their students. ASU’s salary structure is the same as its professor ranking structure is the same as its academic paper co authorship structure is the same as its tuition structure is the same as its customer service: everything about ASU is a power grab obscured by design.

For the department chairs and aspirational tenure track wonks it’s a mix of ego and greed: My title’s bigger than yours, therefore I deserve more money. My title this. My title that. Look, everybody, at my title! But for the dozen or so designers of the university, the extraordinarily wealthy and connected people behind the curtain, the power grab is about money. These people care about titles only so far as they can legitimately take more of the profits because they have a higher rank. Other than that, the authorship name games and farcical professor title structures are just bones they throw the dogs to keep them occupied and away from what’s really happening. 

The university teaches nothing students are unable to learn on their own. Indeed, students can learn more on their own studying calculus and literature and science and economics while working full time as a cashier or a gas station attendant. ASU has no true competitive advantage over self study. The science labs are jokes—they teach how to follow lab manuals without thinking. The literature program is embarrassing: how can a student get through university without having read all of Emerson’s collected works or the Greek foundations? There’s no reason a literature student should ever say Who’s Lucretius? The business education is worst of all: all it does is legitimize greed and corruption. How can a professor still teach classical economics with a clean conscience? The ASU business program teaches students how to obscure the Trickle Up Theory into Business Will Save the World. An ASU education is, at best, a waste of time, and at worst it’s brainwash. 

But who cares, man: We have Mill and Old Town and Tempe 12 and Playboy 100 and Gym, Tan, Laundry. No. That’s wrong. Students who take that route will be forever blind. The people at the top of the university scheme are getting rich by selling nothing. ASU will give no jobs. ASU will give no funding. ASU will give nothing but the false satisfaction of a degree spiced with alcohol and risky sex. The people at the top want students to fall into those traps—trapped students are easy to control.

The ASU Foundation is the cancer of it all. All the money collected goes into the ASU trust, and that money gets invested into mutual funds, hedge funds, mortgage properties, rental properties: the people at the top are taking tuition money and student loans and professors’ furloughs and investing them and getting richer and richer and richer. Students and professors will never see any of those profits. The profits go to the partners of the university—the dozen or so people behind the scenes—by way of several million dollar five year salary packages, and are further reinvested into the trust so it can grow, and grow, and grow.

Endowment investments and manager salaries are secretive to the point of fraud. It’s known, however, that in 2008 the ASU trust was at $493 million, and just after the market crash was at $407 million. That’s half of $1 billion. With the market rebound that occurred it could be nearer $1 billion now. The people who manage the trust are the true owners of the university. At a 1% per year fee, which is less than common for fund managers, they will make a $4 million to $5 million a year salary.

Why is none of this money being spent on students or to encourage professors? Why does tuition keep going up? Why are there so many additional fees? Why are students being forced into debt when the university is as cash rich as it is? Why does being a professor have to be a punishment? Greed. It’s the ASU power grab at the top. The more they push students into debt the more students have to conform to their lesson plans and the fewer questions students ask, all out of fear of being unable to find a job after college or of being different. The more the people at the top harass good professors the less wisdom the good professors can profess. When people are broken they’re simple: they turn to MTV and alcohol and drugs, which create predictable, measured, studied, designed consumers. When people are broken money trickles up.

And such is the problem with ASU: it’s all a farce. Every step of the education is designed to get money from students, keep it from professors who deserve it, and funnel it to the top. It’s the trickle up theory. And every step of the way students are blinded to the scheme by inadequate curriculum designed on ignorance and lies. Meanwhile, the Stanford graduates at the top (top jobs will never be available to ASU graduates) have designed consumer psychology schemes to keep students and professors off track. Why are professors arguing about their titles or co authorships? Those are petty matters. The professors are the wise ones, and they should be encouraged to stand up to the system, to free students’ minds. It’s the professor’s job to undo all the damage that high school did. But professors are just as powerless as students because they’re kept fighting over a diminishing salary pool and tenure positions. 

ASU is designed as a money grab by the people at the top. There is no direct way to fight greed. The people behind the curtain will never be seen. They will never give anything more than token summits upon conferences upon office hours upon question and answer sessions. That’s all consumer psychology. That’s all food for the dogs. Conferences and summits function the same way as the Economics 101 marginal productivity theory does: they keep people debating on one side while reality is happening on the other. It’s the classic confidence trick.

The only effective way to fight greed and intellectual oppression is indirect—to use reason: to think and to debate and to speak up and to observe and to participate. Observation and participation is the mantra to the intellectual warrior.

ASU sells freshman English classes as having 19 students—it’s on the ASU tour website—yet they have 25. Day 1 all 25 students have to send emails to the administrators asking why the additional students when they decided to come to ASU from the teacher student ratio that was reported to the US News and World Reports. When Mr Prescott, the Nobel Prize winning economist in the School of Business, starts lecturing that inexpensive computers and technology in cash poor countries will pull starving Africans out of poverty by increasing business supply efficiency, all 200 students have to raise their hands and ask Why? How?, and state the obvious: Oppressed and starving people in cash poor countries don’t need computers—they need clean water, food and shelter and freedom from tyrannical governments. Selling shipping technology to African nations benefits IBM and IBM shareholders only. Why is this being taught when it’s wrong? 

The attitude of the contrarian must be had at all times, from the small battles to the large. If a professor doesn’t respond to emails asking about grades then go to her office. If a TA marks something wrong without adequate justification then demand Why. If only two Eliot poems are on the syllabus when there’s more than enough time to read all of them, demand Why. If the men and women behind the curtain show themselves then ask Why are tuition and fees so high? Why do the good professors have suck up to power hungry department chairs for contract renewals? Why, for that, are the good professors not the department chairs? If they respond by saying Because the department chair is the highest ranking and has the biggest title, then say No: That answer is irrelevant: This professor is far better: She deserves to be the department chair. Then demand more good professors: out with the bad and in with the good. 

ASU is an oppressive organization—it shackles students’ minds with ignorance and fear and false debates and leaves them with cancerous debts and no way to pay them. However, 50,000 students demanding Why is powerful. When every student in a small seminar class is engaged in discussion magic happens—minds open, eyes widen, the traps of the world become clearer. Students must, then, participate. Students must push themselves and push professors to push them back. Some professors will be unwilling to adapt to being genuine professors. That means, then, that students will have to push harder, and if they don’t respond, push them out of their jobs. 

If a student graduates with the same hopes and dreams and fears and insecurities that she had when she started then she’s wasted her time, then the ASU system of oppression has won.ASU is set up to give away nothing—because professors are scared for their jobs they don’t profess, because students are scared of everything they don’t study, and because the people at the top are greedy they want to keep the students and professors down. Thus, what is available must be uncovered, unchained, and taken with the measured yet unrelenting force and determination of a soldier: Wisdom.

The mind is a jewel. Freedom of the mind is more important than anything. Despite all of the facades and barriers at ASU there are some professors who have it and who are willing to be professors and share it. Those are the people who need to be in charge. Those are the professors with whom students need to unite.

 But ASU is designed to keep students passive and blind and to keep the wise professors down, because once students see that ASU is nothing but a curtain that can be pulled down, revealing fat, crusty, middle aged avarice, students will rebel and demand the intellectual freedom, job opportunities, graduate school placements, and professors’ wisdom that they thought they were buying. And if those demands are never met, the wise and crafty students will figure out ways to get refunds and to be compensated for their lost years, scary prospects, indeed, to greedy CEOs.

Let’s demand more.

William Hamilton

Email William at whamilt@asu.edu