Corporate Dominance

We were talking to a just retired medical doctor yesterday, and he said that he was much happier after he retired from a job that he depised. He said that many doctors he worked with were filled with rage and bitterness. He mentioned that, around 1990, something changed in the medical profession, and doctors, who has once been at the center of medicine, suddenly became employees. Hospitals started buying up small clinics, and doctors, who had been working 80-hour weeks, started to want to work 40-hour weeks--and so the clinics lost money. The doctors also lost prominence: now MBAs from health care management started telling them what to do. The most important thing was patient happiness, and if a drug addict wanted Vicodin or Oxycontin and was turned away (and then complained), that was a problem. So the doctor was called on the carpet. Of course, I saw the parallel to higher education. Faculty governance began to evaporate at around the same time. All of these highly educated people suddenly found themselves locked out of decisions, their opinions and knowledge useless. What became important was student retention and student happiness (especially as certified on student evaluations). High grades and dumbed-down classes became our narcotics--what we could hand out cavalierly to encourage student happiness and retention. The corporate conquest of the academy was completed. Now, I, too, am just an employee. My degrees and experience mean little, if nothing, to the corporate surrogates who run our institutions. And then, bewildered, they wonder why we don't identify with our institution. Who would?

The year (more or less) of the change intrigues me. Was the cause, then, the collapse of the Soviet Union? Were the people there essentially held hostage so that corporations couldn't operate with impunity? And then, lacking even a corrupt and monstrous alternative, did the corporate managers feel empowered to remove the last vestiges of faculty governance?