academics are the new entrepreneuers
David Hildebrand reminds me every time I open my electronic education environment to manage my course website and grades that I am my own brand -- and that "Some may better understand what academics strive to do not by thinking of classes and books but of "intellectual capital." Like monetary capital, intellectual capital is the cumulative product of both individual effort and supportive communities. Intellectual capital is the dividend of years of hard work and practical experience that bears fruit by transforming lives and benefiting society." And that as Universities are beset by scandals and suspicion, we should look to business models as our models for performance and "excellence."
I think the big joke here is that Universities are the new Corporations, but academics are told to adjust to this situation by thinking of themselves are entrepreneurs! We work in large unwieldy, bureaucratic organizations that Hildebrand rightly says are not "ivory towers." More like cinderblock bunkers for some...but still to get back to my point, the idea that we can save ourselves from obsolescence by assuming a business model for the kinds of work that are done in the humanities is more than ridiculous.
Under late capitalism, the entrepreneur has monopolized the image of both sovereignty and autonomy. But he or she is just as subordinated to the laws of capital as anyone else. It just appears that the entrepreneur as overlord can cut through the crap of bureaucracy to GET THINGS DONE! Unfortunately, bureaucracy is not all bad: we call upon it as one of the mainstays of accountability within the University. When pseudo-populist legislatures want to bash public univerisities, they call up accountability as one of our biggest issues.
In fact at both Minnesota and Irvine, the medical schools got into trouble precisely because there was NO accountability. So I'm not making a plea for the pencil pusher, just trying to peel away a little bit at the label entrepreneur and finding that something that looks like con-man oh no, it says ENRON lies underneath!
I have nothing against entrepreneurs per se: I just don't want to model myself or my research activities after their business models. And they don't seem to want me to either.
I think the big joke here is that Universities are the new Corporations, but academics are told to adjust to this situation by thinking of themselves are entrepreneurs! We work in large unwieldy, bureaucratic organizations that Hildebrand rightly says are not "ivory towers." More like cinderblock bunkers for some...but still to get back to my point, the idea that we can save ourselves from obsolescence by assuming a business model for the kinds of work that are done in the humanities is more than ridiculous.
Under late capitalism, the entrepreneur has monopolized the image of both sovereignty and autonomy. But he or she is just as subordinated to the laws of capital as anyone else. It just appears that the entrepreneur as overlord can cut through the crap of bureaucracy to GET THINGS DONE! Unfortunately, bureaucracy is not all bad: we call upon it as one of the mainstays of accountability within the University. When pseudo-populist legislatures want to bash public univerisities, they call up accountability as one of our biggest issues.
In fact at both Minnesota and Irvine, the medical schools got into trouble precisely because there was NO accountability. So I'm not making a plea for the pencil pusher, just trying to peel away a little bit at the label entrepreneur and finding that something that looks like con-man oh no, it says ENRON lies underneath!
I have nothing against entrepreneurs per se: I just don't want to model myself or my research activities after their business models. And they don't seem to want me to either.
4 Comments:
Hi there. Thanks for the mention. I want you to know that I shared your skepticism about whether the word entrepreneur could ever have more than a business connotation. I was finally convinced by Richard Cherwitz (U Texas Austin Communication) that if folks in the humanities don't try to take back some of these business words by adding in their own connotations, we lose a lot of territory. That's the gambit I am engaged in. The point is not that we try to become more like business world entrepreneurs, but that we try to take the word back and present ourselves to the world outside academia with these words, fleshed out with our own sets of meanings and objectives.
You may suspect that this gambit will not work; you might be right. But as someone in the humanities seeing the humanities increasingly sidelined, I feel the experiment is worthwhile.
Best wishes,
David (the author)
hilde@yahoo.com
This is a small portion of a chapter I have writtrn for a book that explores what it will take to create a truly interdisciplinary engaged university.
Rick Cherwitz
UT-Austin
IE Director
https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/
__
The Intellectual Entrepreneurship Philosophy
The language and philosophy of IE fundamentally alters the “separate and unequal” status under which the quest for engagement has languished. That is its strength: IE is a way of changing academe’s rhetorical practices. The mission of IE is to educate “citizen-scholars.”
These scholars are living proof of what it means to take ownership of one’s work and intellectual capital—personally, professionally and academically. Citizen-scholars use their capital as a lever for social good through meaningful contributions to disciplinary knowledge. They realize that, when the personal/professional dichotomy is erased, we spawn change from the ground up. Like Demosthenes, citizen-scholars understand that speech (scholarship) without action is empty and idle.
It is a common academic misconception that all entrepreneurs are necessarily business persons. To the contrary: the language of intellectual entrepreneurship is not a covert move to import carte blanche the corporate model into universities.
We believe that public universities are and indeed should be subject to different rules and expectations than businesses in the private sector. In order to retain their unique identity as places to discover and disseminate knowledge, “return on investment” must remain a distinctive concept for universities. Yet, as the Kellogg Commission reports, times are changing. If anything, the push to adopt a corporate model of intellectual capital in universities will come in a much more subtle package than one that is labeled “intellectual entrepreneurship.” Though it may sound like a cliché, academics must now become the agents of change lest they become its casualties. Being the vanguards of institutional and social change, we argue, is a task well suited for the “citizen-scholar.”
Engagement and ownership go hand in hand for citizen-scholars. More specifically, they function as mutual prerequisites. To assume ownership of one’s work is to assume accountability for all phases of the process – questions, methods (invention), implications, audience adaptation (disposition) and implementation. Ownership entails more than accountability to an “other”; it also means accountability to one’s self. Researchers who own their work are able to view themselves as distinct from more conventional faculty members. Citizen-scholars are not cogs in the university machinery. Because these researchers are creative agents of their own practices and products, engagement becomes one of the most natural extensions imaginable of academic scholarship.
Citizen-scholars require certain basic conditions to thrive. Most important is the kind of institutional support that can come only from rhetorical strategies departing from current ones. With the language of IE, we suggest, engagement is a natural part and extension of one’s scholarly agenda, rather than a separate and inherently unequal venture. Moreover, the language of IE empowers faculty to own and be accountable for their scholarship, thus rendering them more in control of their professional futures and that of their institutions. In other words, the language of IE liberates us from starting with and incessantly talking about “products” (e.g., publications, grants, awards, etc.). Instead, the language of IE allows faculty to direct attention to the scholarly enterprise itself—an enterprise and way of thinking potentially generating many products, all of which are a fundamental part of scholarship. By focusing on and starting with “process” (how we configure and deploy intellectual resources), rather than “products” (the desired goals and outcomes), IE language fosters “ownership,” “integration” and “collaboration”—three necessary ingredients of an engaged university.
P.S. From: Cherwitz, Richard. “Creating a Culture of Intellectual Entrepreneurship.” Academe July/August, 2005.
Creating material wealth is only one expression of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship isn’t a synonym for business; it is an attitude for engaging the world—a process of cultural innovation. Witness the nationally acclaimed Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) initiative at the University of Texas, whose slogan is “educating citizen-scholars.” Through structured experiences incorporating entrepreneurial thinking into learning—studying how to solve the overcrowding of emergency rooms, for example—students exploit their passions and professional commitments to discover knowledge of value both to academic disciplines and society
HO HUMMMMMMM!!
Isn't anyone EVER going to wake up and smell the coffee, er, KOOL-Aid, that keeps reappearing under this IE umbrella?
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