Should it ever come to pass that one day I sire children, I will relate to them how the social reality of their world (if there remains a world to support a social reality) is a product of a plague which came over the land in the late years of the twentieth century, and which has lingered to the present day. This plague came on not so much as a convulsion but as a sort of anaphylaxis — a slow tightening leading to increased distress, to labored function.

The curse of which I speak is the corporate mentality, which is nigh unto hegemonic. It has become increasingly difficult to find any corner of our culture uninfected with the buzzwords of corporate seminars, team-building in-services, Six Sigma and Getting to Yes. Every institution, for-profit or otherwise, intones these buzzwords in awestruck expectancy, eager for the magic to follow — the magic of healthy returns, of fat dividends, of perquisites and privileges.

I’ll tell my children that we became fatally enamored of the fantastic promise of corporate order. We believed the bothersome friction of life would disappear once the balm of corporate hierarchy spilled forth liberally upon it. This hierarchy would prove as binding as some Old-Testament covenant, reinforced by salary structures, progressive discipline, and, most importantly, the anxiety fostered by executives, secreted away in their Olympus of boardrooms and offices, inscrutable in their judgment.

Enchanted with the iron certainty such a hierarchy promised, we reckoned not what we had to surrender to this great work of the ages. We forgot that the bothersome friction we so desperately wished to rid ourselves of was the very thing by which we served our interests. We forgot that the cozy peonage of corporate existence recompensed the sacrifice of one’s sovereignty but poorly.

Marc Bousquet, straight-shooting gadfly at the site, How the University Works, chronicles the pernicious changes the corporate model has wrought on American institutions of higher learning. Bousquet goes to extraordinary lengths to demystify the glozing euphemisms gleaned from the corporate world, and to shine a harsh, clear light on their real implications. He writes that

private corporate and public institutional managers both employ “quality” in an Orwellian register in which a “quality process” is one of continuously increasing workload and continuously eroding salary and benefits, with a single, doltish mantra employed everywhere — in police departments, in social services, and school systems, just as on college campuses: the perpetual command to “Do More With Less.”

Bousquet highlights the fact that so-called “total quality management” (TQM) means squeezing employees for greater productivity while at the same time reducing the cost of employing them. Apparently discontent with the profits the company was generating as it was then configured, executives one day discovered they could wring profit out of the company itself. For executives, this was nothing short of a revelation.

Veiled profit: TQM strikes gold right under execs' feet.

To those in the know, “total quality management” appears cribbed from Karl Marx, who in the first volume of Capital writes in rather absolute terms:

The labourer adds fresh value to the subject of his labour by expending upon it a given amount of additional labour, no matter what the specific character and utility of that labour may be.

But what happens when management culture seeps into institutions that supposedly don’t pursue the bottom line? Well, strange prodigies result. At least, that’s what happens according to Pennsylvania State University literature professor Michael Bérubé. “Assessment and impact: these are the new watchwords in higher education,” he writes in the July 30, 2009 edition of The Time Higher Education Supplement:

We have assessment indicators in the social sciences, the physical sciences and our business and law schools, which ask: “What does this research do? What footprint does it leave? Are its benefits worth the costs?”

Talk of footprints and benefits versus costs, when applied to university social and physical sciences programs, effects a rather untroubled translation from its original domain, the corporation. After all, social sciences can always be wedded to Madison Avenue, and physical sciences to the military–industrial complex.

This would appear to leave the humanities in the lurch. And indeed, since the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which essentially forced American state universities to adopt a bottom-line mentality, in the lurch have they been. “Alas, the humanities do not respond well to these questions,” Bérubé admits:

One might as well ask the business and finance ends of campus what they contribute to the aesthetic richness of our lives — but, oddly, no one ever does.

Sounds like if the humanities hope to survive, the United States Treasury better start minting “beauty bucks.”