COLLOQUY

Richard Mahoney's arguments are all well-and-good about the delivery of commercial or bureaucratic services. But Mahoney's nightmare-epiphany is about far more than streamlining administrative services. Make no mistake about: While postmodernism is known for celebrating the death of "master metanarratives," a new, totalizing master narrative has emerged, the narrative of the Market. Often this is coupled with a revival, through the discourse of Total Quality Management, a structural-functionalist discourse that marginalizes dissent and difference, in the name of organizational efficiency and global competitiveness. And its proponents seek to impose upon public space the logics of the corporation, which are held up to be moral, just and true. But are they?

For example, in assessing the role of behemoth transnational corporations in the global economy over the last twenty years, what are the usual effects? Briefly put, these effects are usually visible in social and economic stratification patterns that are skewed toward tiny demographic pockets of great wealth, accompanied by shrinking pockets of the middle class, and flanked by growing masses of the working poor and a permanent underclass, seen as a largely disposable labor force. In its own way, academia mirrors this situation at large universities, in its use of adjuncts and graduate students, while older tenured faculty are pacified with generous buy-out packages and/or the retention of their benefits in bifurcated state systems. And, from the community-college on up, it is no secret that much of the serious money in academia is made at the upper end of administrative apparatuses.

One of the really interesting points that Mahoney proposes is the elimination of "unproductive" departments and functions? To no small extent, it begs questions that are unasked in his opinion piece. For example, we could ask what are the criteria for assessing productivity and unproductivity? For example, is a class that teaches students how to critically examine media messages and formats "unproductive?" Are the humanities, because they are seen as a competing world view to market-based realities, "unproductive?" Or should the question be for us to collectively ask: When we say something is "productive" or "unproductive," it should be amended to include the phrases "unproductive of what? And for whom?"

Essentially, these are political questions over what zones of human activity and thought are "productive" and not merely primarily managerial decisions that are assumed to reflect a stable, and eternal consensus. To take these decisions totally out of the public realm may have a variety of effects that are hard to predict, although they may not be desirable.

Finally, think about the aspects of these corporations that Richard Mahoney did not address. For example, ask yourselves whether we want to nurture institutions where Presidents and Provosts will be able to vote themselves bonuses or perks for meeting enrollment, retention, or graduation rates? Do we want institutions where Presidents and Executive Vice Presidents and athletic coaches make 50 or 100 times (or more) the income of an instructor? Do we want institutions that rewrite the rich cross-cultural, and historical experiences of the human animal as a mere matter of consumer preference? For when we live in a world where public space has been so totally dominated by the hegemonic privatism of the market metaphor, we have will have lost the last diminished shreds of democratic governance. And we will have surely lost any real sense of the sacred.

-- Dion Dennis, Assistant Professor, Texas A & M International University (posted 10/20, 10:30 a.m., E.D.T.)

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