Education has become big business.

Like any business the object of the educational

enterprise has become the attraction of capital. Revenues go up and the enterprise grows.
It becomes more profitable.

I am always a little bothered when I hear those in the public sector use business analogies
to describe their operation. When an elected official or an appointed administrator claims
that government ought to run more like a business what does he mean? Isn’t the goal of a
business to seek profit. Providing a service or selling a commodity are really secondary.
It is a means to an end, the end being growth of capital. Profit. So when the official uses
this business analogy isn’t he at least tacitly admitting that in his view government’s
primary purpose is not to provide service, protection or safety but to generate a profit.
How is it that we hear very few discussions about what role government ought to play in
our lives, what services it ought to provide, what protections it ought to offer? The vast
majority of the conversation is directed towards how government goes about growing
revenues and growing itself.

My intent here is not to make an anti-tax or anti-government argument but to point out
that the underlying philosophy of many government entities has little or nothing to do
with providing a service. The service is merely a means to an end and the end is to
generate a profit.

It has become fashionable in education and government circles to talk about a knowledge
economy. Our economy we are told is changing structurally. Manufacturing is dead.
Knowledge workers will rule. We will all become entrepreneurs and we will all need a
skill set that can only be delivered by several years of expensive attendance at university.
Forget for a moment that manufacturing is dead primarily because our newest business
model has for the most part decided that profit is much easier to acquire if it isn’t
dependent on labor. And along with manufacturing we have killed most of the skilled
trades and the trade school system that trained them. The mantra is productivity and
productivity is increased by using less labor or at least less expensive labor.

Productivity drives profit and in this interest we are killing the middle class and
eliminating the middle income job. In a society driven by profit there will be winners and
losers. The winners will be the knowledge workers and the losers will be low wage
service workers. We have been sold this myth and we have swallowed it hook, line and
sinker because in a society with only one measuring stick we are left with nothing else.
This myth glosses over the fact that there is only so much room at the top. A workforce
focused only on productivity and profit eventually consumes, downsizes and outsources
itself.

One of the obvious winners in this model is the university. Their success is measured
solely by growth and their ability to generate a profit by attracting revenues. They
needn’t deal with messy intangibles like service to the community. They need only to
grow because growth attracts revenues and revenues are success. And so a small teachers
college in a picturesque setting becomes a quaint, inefficient anachronism.
WCU’s millennial campus is a myth. It is snake oil. It refuses to recognize the value of a
small mountain community. It refuses to recognize the value of integrating with the
community. It is a myth that says that open space, farmland and indigenous culture are
impediments to growth, productivity and profit. It is a myth that requires an ever bigger
footprint in an environment that abhors big footprints. It is a myth that is sold as uplift for
an underprivileged community but relies for its success on attracting an ever increasing
outside influence that will overwhelm that community. It is a myth because it sells itself
as necessary when it is redundant within the state university system. It is a myth that
sustains itself on intensive public relations campaigns and hollow gestures while always
keeping the prize of more revenues and more growth solidly in focus. It is a myth that has
captured local economic development and perverted it into an effort to become something
we are not while forgetting who we are and ignoring the potential of who we might
become. It is a myth that seeks not to develop and enhance our existing resources and
talents but to replace and supplant. It is a myth that pays lip service to local culture and
community while aligning itself with predatory development interests. It is the central
part of the equation: Big Boxes + Big Roads, + Big Schools + Big Development = Big
Ideas (and big profit).

What WCU has succeeded in doing is providing a perfect definition of government as a

corporate entity focused not on service but on the prime corporate objectives of
acquisition and accumulation.