If any evidence was needed to demonstrate that universities in the U.S. are run as corporations, one need only examine the latest example involving the largest private university in the U.S., New York University. They follow four capitalist principles: making profit, teaching their ideology, fueling racist division, and bilking the students.
NYU has built a campus in the city of Abu Dhabi in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE), a U.S. ally. The UAE is “an oppressive regime which has been accused of torturing prisoners [and] looking the other way at abusive labor conditions for migrant workers” (NY Times, 5/27). Much of the UAE lives off of the super-exploitation of South Asian workers, who live in prison-like labor camps.
Much of the UAE The Times reported (5/19) that these racist conditions suffered by an all-South-Asian migrant workforce who built this campus included “workers being arrested, beaten and deported for going on strike, being charged a year’s wages to get their jobs, and being denied access to their travel documents.”
This campus is part of a campaign guided by NYU’s racist president, John Sexton, “to transform the university into an international…platform with hubs around the globe — the equivalent…of a far-flung multinational corporation. He was supported in that ambition by a who’s who of corporate America accustomed to seeking growth abroad” (NYT, 5/27).
A public letter from a group of NYU faculty declared that these “global ambitions were motivated more by the bottom line for NYU — which has raised nearly $6 billion during [Board of Trustees chairman Martin]
Lipton’s tenure than [by] education” (NYT). CEO Lipton “has made his career as the top advisor to corporate boards during mergers and acquisitions as a founder of Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.” Such are the “educational” resumés of the governing boards of U.S. institutions of “higher learning.”
Wall Street’s Campus
Hours after the exposé was published, “Mr. Lipton went into full crisis mode and sent an email to…member of NYU’s board, which is stacked with Wall Street boldface names [more “educators”?] like Laurence Fink of BlackRock; the hedge fund impresario John Paulson; and a Home Depot founder, Kenneth Langone” (NYT). He said he had been “unaware of the reported abuses and that an ‘independent’ investigation would” begin.
NYU president Sexton followed this by saying that “the contractors responsible for the…problems weren’t under the university’s control.” But this turned out to be unadulterated racist garbage. “The general contractor that helped oversee the construction of the campus isn’t some fly-by-night firm outside NYU’s purview” but “is run by a trustee of NYU’s board [emphasis added]: Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, the chief executive of the Mubadala Development Company.”
Racist Al Mubarak persuaded Sexton and the Board to build the campus, “with a $50 million donation from the government of Abu Dhabi.” Mubarak is chairman of Abu Dhabi’s governing executive council. Faculty member Mark Miller said Sexton’s “contractor” response “was a classic exercise in damage control, meant to distance NYU as far as possible from the horrific wrongs inflicted on those workers, and — therefore — divert attention from the fact that …Al Mubarak is not some faraway rogue operative but an NYU trustee” (NYT). Confirming that characterization, NYU spokesman John Beckman said, “Mr. Al Mubarak is a respected member of the NYU board and his membership is not in question.”
‘Global Clip Joint’ Bilks the Students
Some NYU faculty members objected to the new campus and said Sexton’s initiatives have “led to one of the highest tuitions in the country and soaring debt levels for its students.” The aforementioned faculty public letter declared that, “Any school that profiteers so avidly is sure to be renowned…as a global clip joint with an academic logo.”
NYU is not alone in running a university like a corporation. The presidents of numerous colleges have become millionaires, not to mention the football and basketball coaches. Their huge salaries that help rake in hundreds of millions from the colleges’ sports programs that help pay these salaries and the perks.
Under capitalism, education is a big business that reaps huge profits. It teaches the principles that govern a racist profit-making system, much of it on the backs of its students, their debts and the banks that collect the interest on that trillion-dollar debt. The exorbitant cost of education is increasingly freezing out the working class from any schooling that might enable them to get a decent job.
But, again, capitalism is designed to oppress the working class, not uplift it, in the U.S. as well as in the UAE. We need a profit- and boss-free system, run by and for the working class communism. Workers will collectively run the schools, teach ideas benefitting our class and enable everyone, regardless of area of origin, to fulfill their potential in all fields of endeavor.