| Carolina North |
| Major Initiatives - Knowledge Economies and the University |
| Sunday, 09 December 2007 19:17 |
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Carolina North: towards an atlas of the Global University In the summer of this year the 3Cs started tracing the development of Carolina North, a 250-acre industry/university collaborative research park that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hoped to build on a large tract of forest a few miles north of the university. When we started our research, it seemed to us (and most everyone else) that development on the new campus was inevitable and unchangeable: yet another example of hegemonic corporatization of the university. As we talked to boosters and opponents, however, it became clear that even within the administration the vision of a new research campus was many things to many people. Some administrators argued that they needed top-of-the-line research labs with space for corporate offices in order to hire and retain top faculty, others framed that need more directly in terms of competition within the hierarchy of top-tier US schools to become a "world-class university". At other times and in other places the campus was cast as an economic development initiative for the State of North Carolina, a model of sustainable design, or even (just) a critically needed fix to shortages of research space on the main campus. Regardless of what they wanted, most everyone was already convinced that building a new campus would get it for them. Somehow, the one name of "Carolina North" had managed to hold together a multitude of distinct and sometimes contradictory visions, and sediment them together in space (or on paper, at least). What follows is our attempt to catalogue the visions, logics and motives which produced at our university the necessity and inevitability a new university-corporate research park. In some senses, then, this is a contextually specific project. However, many of the distinct logics we studied here in this place were explicitly global and national. Many of them are already part of the discussions on this listserve (hierarchization, corporatisation, metrics). Just as 'Carolina North' articulated distinct logics together with contextual specifics, we contend that a set of broader logics and discourses is traveling the United States and perhaps the globe held together in the name of "the 21st Century University", "the global university", or "the world-class university". This is not (just) a process of corporatization, commodification, or enclosure of the intellectual commons. Rather, we see a set of distinct forces, each with its own logics and discourses, which at this particular moment have coincided to form an apparently-coherent vision for the future of the University. It is precisely because of its complex and contradictory nature that this vision is so powerful -- it has become many things to many people. But this complexity also opens up new lines of flight. A cartography of the complex assemblage of 'the global University' is our ultimate project. This webpage is an ongoing catalogue of some of the sites we think should be included in that cartography. Some of them have been part of our research for a while now and have detailed write-ups. Others are still open research questions for us. Others are just ideas. We'd love to hear what others have to add to the list, or disagree with.
See below for references.
Along with a rising importance of ‘research’ in discourse about the university (see graph), and new conceptions of what constitutes ‘knowledge’, the 21st century university encompasses changes in the spatial layout of the university and of research practice. Thus while new research campuses might on the one hand appear as clear fixes to shortages of research space, on the other hand they also bring into being new spaces of research. Here we tell a specific history of spaces of research in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, where 3Cs and our university are located. While the history focuses mostly on the physical arrangement of space, we could as well tell a history of distinct juridical zones of research – with state-financed buildings subject to restrictions on the degree and kind of corporate research in which they can participate, one of the ‘shortages’ public universities face is not research space generically, but labs in which they are legally allowed to work on projects which might involve technology commercialization. A history of these juridical zones as they have been defined by federal law in the United States would be an interesting and useful addition to this atlas. 
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of three corners of the ‘triangle’ of major research universities in central North Carolina, the other two being North Carolina State University and Duke University. Much of the geography of knowledge production in the Triangle region has been defined by the Research Triangle Park (RTP), a corporate research campus located in the center of the Triangle. The founding of the RTP in the 1960s came along with a spatially-articulated debate over divisions between university research, corporate R&D, and industrial production. In order to produce the Park as a space specifically for research and development (an important part of the economic development vision of RTP was the trickle-out effect wherein basic and applied research in the Park would fuel industrial production elsewhere in the state), planners first had to convince potential corporate tenants of the usefulness of separating “the thinking from the hammering,” of locating research facilities distant from manufacturing facilities (Link, 17). Industrial production was officially banned from the RTP campus, though in practice this ban has not been consistently enforced, and anyway as Havlick and Kirsch point out, the work carried out at RTP is, “quite obviously, a part of large scale production processes” (270). In geographically dividing research from production, RTP helped promote divisions of labor (between ‘skilled’ research and ‘unskilled’ manufacturing) as well as a vision of research as pure of “odors, noise, vibration, fumes, dust, gases, smoke, etc...” (Link, 80). The role of the three universities at the vertices of the Triangle was another object of debate. Romeo Guest, a businessman credited by some with originating the ‘Triangle’ idea, viewed the three universities as “magnets” drawing corporations to the region; university labs, libraries, and faculty would be ready and willing to serve the research programs of companies in the Park (Link, 29). University administrators and faculty involved in the project, on the other hand, desired a clear separation between their work and the corporate research taking place in the Park. Robert Coker, at the time a zoology professor at UNC, described the university as the “fountainhead ... filling the reservoir into which the industrial researcher inevitably must dip” (Link, 11). These conflicting notions of the relationship between university research and RTP came to a head as Guest attempted to enlist the support of university administrators and faculty for his idea. During one meeting between Guest, the state governor, and several university presidents, William Carmicheal, president of the consolidated state university system, put his opposition bluntly, telling Guest “...you want the professors here and all of us to be the prostitutes and you’re going to be the pimp” (Link, 29). In order to enlist the support of universities in the project, it thus became crucial for Guest and other promoters of the RTP concept to articulate a strong division between university basic research, industrial applied research, and manufacturing; the division was reinforced not only by the geographical distance between universities and the Park, but also by carefully structuring interactions between the three universities and the Park, including the creation of the Research Triangle Institute, a contract research agency located in the Park through which consulting arrangements between corporations and the universities flowed. The landscape design of the RTP campus itself also reinforced a particular notion of research. Buildings in the Park, as at most science parks of the same era, are large, fortress-like and self-contained; zoning restrictions force that they are set far apart on even larger landscaped tracts (requiring no more than ten percent of a given lot to be taken up by building footprints). This design, which minimizes contact between workers from different corporate tenants (both through physical distance and through the lack of centralized social facilities like a cafeteria), came about in part in order to attract 1960s-era corporations looking for the relative isolation which would protect their research (and researchers) from poaching by competitors. Thus the landscape of RTP and other science parks reflects not only “...a secluded technoscience predicated on at least a sense of social withdrawal” (Havlick & Kirsch, 268), but also the Fordist employment practices which allowed this notion of technoscience to take hold. Forty years later, the very same landscape which once helped lure tenants like IBM and GlaxoSmithKline is a hard sell. Employment in the Park has been declining recently, and the rate of new firms moving in has slowed dramatically. The idyllic isolation which the Park embodies, in current theories of research and economic development, is undesireable – rather, along with proponents of Richard Florida’s “creative class” theory, high-tech corporations are seeking spaces which foster interaction and sociability, in mixed-use developments which encompass also coffee shops, restaurants, arts and recreation. Fifteen minutes up the road from RTP’s vacancy rates, media and software companies are filling up the American Tobacco Complex, a new development in the old tobacco warehouses of downtown Durham, North Carolina built in accordance with Florida’s model. (See also Holmes. The isolation of RTP is proving attractive to another group of clients, though – financial services companies are increasingly choosing to locate data centers in more rural secluded areas, in response to terrorism fears.)  Old and New RTP Websites In short, research-as-sociality is the new ideal, with flexible employees working flexible hours and new ideas arising from informal meetings (often between researchers from different corporations or corporations and universities). These days, “...people have to be able to bump elbows ... and in the park that’s a very difficult thing” (Cohen, 2006). The Park’s promotional materials have changed as well, from emphasizing RTP as a node in an impersonal, transnational web of research to emphasizing the Park campus as social space (see images). This attempt to sell RTP in the context of the new model comes in spite of a dissonance, acknowledged by Park officials, between the Park’s design and the contemporary vision of a social research campus. The new notion of social research includes also new relations between university and corporate research. The half-hour drive between basic research in Chapel Hill and industrial research on the RTP campus, once so crucial to the RTP concept, is today too far, and the faculty and administrators backing the Carolina North development are articulating new definitions of what research means in the university setting. Where 1980s-era university science parks mainly replicate the isolation of RTP (for example, UW-Madison), Carolina North and other newer research parks focus on dense, mixed-use plans with many smaller corporate offices co-locating with university labs. The plans for Carolina North, as mentioned earlier, emphasize spaces for informal ‘elbow-rubbing’ interactions between corporate and university researchers, in contrast to the planned isolation of earlier science parks. The landscape of Carolina North thus reflects changes in the nature of research on the university campus. Along with peer universities, UNC is re-articulating the nature of faculty research to include not only producing and transmitting knowledge within the academy, but also translating research into real-world applications. The work of faculty, materialized in the spaces of Carolina North, comes to include activities such as outreach and bringing new technologies to market, which previously were classed as corporate R&D (this shift also includes new emphasis on outreach in the social sciences to take up roles traditionally associated with the non-profit or governmental sectors).
Business into academia: management logics and the corporatization of the university A university’s plans and policies do not spring from a single monolithic entity. It is our contention that decisions are made within a particular discourse, itself constructed with the ideas, fears and ambitions of university administrators. Money and revenue are important to these mindsets, but are not the sum total or ultimate objective. This discourse is a synthesis of traditional academic ideas and rationalities of capital enterprise. Competition has long been a part of both components, and the discursive combination of the two articulates a new, particular kind of competition, a rationality that constructs the 21st Century University. These dual components are evident in the people who work in university administration. Corporate rationality literally walks in the door as more and more administrators come from a cadre of business-trained professionals. Craig Calhoun maintains that the sheer size of modern universities necessitates more management (2006, 9). Many of the administrators we interviewed in our research had business backgrounds. Certain varieties of competition, of course, are fundamental parts of capitalism, particularly to the vanguard of a given economic sector. Other varieties of competition, especially those associated with individual prestige, have been a part of university life for some time. Today, rationalities of business and academic prestige combine in context of decision-making. In this milieu, the competitive imperative becomes “reality” to be dealt with. Business Motivational Texts The nature of capital-style competition is evident in a series of mantras from popular business literature. These mantras are examples of the appropriation of business logics inside the academy and appeared in our interviews, public presentations and the literature. One example is the growth of “accountability.” Students expect more for their tuition dollars, both in services and the quality of their degrees (Dill, 2003, 1). In another instance, an interviewee noted the growth of “accountability” in fulfilling UNC’s “service” mission in the form of research on and programs for economic development in North Carolina. Accountability is especially significant, for it delineates how the University ought to function. What is more, this performance will be measured and credit or blame assigned accordingly. While universities have always been somewhat accountable, a need for accountability takes on additional significance in the discursive context of institutional prestige on a national scale or the global economy. Another mantra is that of “Good to Great”, created by Jim Collins in 2001. The idea of “Good to Great” or good, not great is that there are many ‘good’ companies, but only a few truly ‘great’ ones. Every good company should constantly attempt to be great. Great companies cannot be conscious of their own greatness because to do so would be a sign of decline. In practice, this means that only relative, competitive position matters. The organization in question will always be in competition with others or with what it could be on a forever receding frontier. Universities are no exception. Even within this context, progress must have some benchmarks on this never-ending road to gauge if progress is being made at all. Here enters a final mantra: “Big Hairy Audacious Goals.” One variety of this popular framework calls on a company to develop a “core ideology” with a long-term objective “that serves as a unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal…”(Collins and Porras, 1996). Within the competitive discourse, these “BHAGs”, such as the Carolina North research campus or the goal of a $1 Billion research endowment, are means by which decisions makers understand the University as moving forward. One significant effect of this foray of business into academia is a focus on a particular variety of rationality, an econometric idea of competition. Unlike business, money is not only ultimate objective for universities. Instead, this form of rationality, realized through human capital and motivational rhetoric, is applied to a University’s mission to teach students and serve society. Within this mindset, the only rational way for the 21st Century University to fulfill its mission is through an emphasis on competitiveness. for more along this line of thought see the section on prestige and metrics
Logics of size and profitability: massification and monetary economies Competitiveness, realized through research programs on a national or global scale has not always been the locus of University planning. Though loose pecking orders are nothing new in American higher education, the prioritization of institutional prestige underwent great changes in the last sixty years. Before the Second World War, geography limited market-style competition between institutions a great deal. Many institutions centered on their students, who had few choices of where to attend college. Traveling out of state was, on the whole, costly and difficult. As time passed, travel became faster and cheaper and fewer students remained in-state for their college educations. For example, in 1949, 93% of US students pursued 1st level degree in their home state. By 1994, only 74% remained in their homes state. Similarly, the average percentage of in-state Public University admissions fell from 95%-84% in that time. Similar Private admissions fell from 80% to 54% (Dill, 2005, 11). In addition to transportation the post WWII period saw enormous growth in the proportion of the U.S. population attending college and graduate school. A tide of footloose students brought Universities into more direct competition with each other for choice students. In addition, larger universities required more management with business-training, which we find contributes to a mindset of competition. Today, competition is not limited to students. The advent of entrepreneurial faculty created a need for University support. Without support for commercialization, some faculty will leave a particular University or pass it up entirely (personal interview). Out of this competition for students and faculty emerges a national market of institutions of higher learning. As universities increasingly enter a market and the mindset that entails, competition becomes more evident in University administrative decisions. The case of British Universities in the 1980’s is an illustrative case of intense marketization as the Thatcher government’s budget cuts forced Universities to do more with significantly less financial support. British Universities developed a series of measures to remain solvent in the short term, but that also improve the individual institution’s prestige among students and in national research ratings in the long run. These measures include developing a “brand image” for the University, sponsoring promising local students by raising tuition for foreign students, improving student leisure services and catering to student’s career, not academic, ambitions. These actions also extend beyond perceived student demand. Other actions included hiring professors out as consultants, subsidizing research with teaching and creating institutional science or business parks (Dill, 2005, 6, 8). American Universities today face a much more hopeful future than that of British higher education in the 1980’s. Yet, some of these actions are all too familiar around current American campuses. Carolina North is perhaps the only most evident at UNC-Chapel Hill. The fact that even those universities with promising futures develop such initiatives today is a sign not only of marketization but also that institutional decision making operates with a logic of competition, not absolute standing.
Prestige and metrics of status: building blocks of a 21st century university discourse How does the 21st Century University discourse function and propagate in university administration? What are the means by it proceeds? Achieving Big Hairy Audacious Goals are one indicator, to be sure, but they come along only occasionally and pertain to specific projects. All universities are slightly different. Officially, any accredited institution’s degree should be comparable with any other. Direct comparison is impossible unless one loses accreditation, a rare event that marks serious decline. To realize an econometric discourse requires creating data to make decisions and to mark progress. Metrics not only mark a University’s prestige but materialize competition by gauging peers and progress across a national field. These metrics come to serve as what Bruno Latour calls “immutable mobiles”. Unlike place-specific claims, immutable mobile hold the same meaning, regardless of where they are deployed. For example, stating that a given University’s biochemistry program is great does not allow standardized comparison with other biochemistry programs. Employing an immutable mobile, such as annual research dollars, places the given institution in a field with others on a common scale. Businesses have long based themselves on an immutable mobile: currency and through it, the profit margin. Institutional status is not as easily quantified, though that has not prevented the propagation of metrics in the academy. Only with immutable mobile metrics in hand do direct quantitative comparisons of Universities become possible. Thus the metrics are discursively essential as manifestations of and essential contributors to growing competition between Universities. Metrics of competition are the references with which a university can steer to success or mark its decline against peers and itself. Metrics thereby ground a rhetoric of necessity (to compete) in a discursive context from which university decisions are made and strategies planned. The most famous of these metrics for universities are the US News & World Report rankings of top colleges and universities. Other metrics include the National Research Council (NRC) ratings of departmental programs and even the rate of growth in federal funding dollars judged against the proportion of institutional funding coming from federal funding. Metrics can be published by the University itself, state and national governments, regional and national reviewers such as the NRC, and private publishers for profit, such as US News and in college guidebooks. UNC, for example, publishes various metrics of prestige in admissions materials, its admissions website, promotional materials for the research division and in presentations for Carolina North. The statistics employed for the Carolina North initiative were presented at community meetings, board of trustees meetings and on the website. As with any metric, the statistics of competition are imperfect, even within the discourse. For example, many of the market-based popular markers of prestige appear to be unrelated to actual student learning. One study indicates that “student’s growth or change is inconsistent or trivial in relation with” scores of educational expenditure per student, the student/faculty ratio, faculty salaries, the percentage of faculty with the highest degree in their field, research productivity, admission selectivity and peer-prestige rankings (Terenzini and Pascarella, 1994). Another limitation is that metrics across the board depend on inputs, not outputs. Some projects will inevitably fail to return on the money or working hours are invested (Dill, 2005, 19). These problems with metrics leave some administrators with mixed feelings. In our interviews, one administrator conceded a love/hate relationship with such measures. So how do Metrics function? How are they important? A study by the RAND corporation begins to get at the answer. They argue that the use of metrics to determine prestige is an “increasing arms race” that is disconnected from student performance (Brewer et. Al., 2002). Picking up where RAND left off, we must investigate the means by which metrics of prestige influence the nature of a University to arrive at an ‘arms race.’ It is through these immutable mobiles that the social expectations of the university against peer institutions and future plans are calculated and propagated. Metrics are important as the agreed-upon facts that constitute a discursively real field of possibilities for administrators. By defining the field of what real and rational, people, be it student consumers, faculty or administrators, make decisions based upon that field of options. These processes constitute a rhetoric of necessity with contextual scientific authority. Regardless of student or departmental performance, metrics of prestige are most significant because they tell administrators what they already discursively know. They indicate that the university is competing, that it is good, not great. Universities “invest in either reputation or prestige as a means of buffering themselves from competitive forces” (Dill, 2005, 17). In one interview, an administrator strongly stated that he and UNC did not base its decision-making on metrics of prestige. Instead, he stated that UNC is driven by competition, from peer institutions, the global economy and presumably against what UNC could be. Metrics are not direct references for all University decision making. Instead metrics feed and legitimate the administrative discourse of competition first as benchmarks in a program’s progress, second in standing against peers and third in statements about the institutional environment, such slowing growth in federal research funding. Furthermore, by reinforcing the sense of continued competition, metrics ensure their continued use. The implication of this focus on competition is a re-articulation of the already vague missions of a University-system in terms of competition and the metrics that constitute it. For example, competition enters into the valuation of student consumers that could choose a different university. Research funding is also very important component of the rhetoric of necessity. Promotional documents for Carolina North and UNC’s research division in general are replete with tables, graphs and statistics marking UNC’s strengths and perceived vulnerabilities in research funding. In addition, US News ranks correlate much closer with high per faculty research and development expenditures than with good graduation rate performance (Graham and Thompson 2001). Decisions that have a material influence on infrastructure and the space of the University are made with these priorities in mind. In this way the rhetoric of necessity is constructed in the material landscape. The recent history of UNC space allocation is a notable illustration. Since the mid 1990’s, only student services, research and administration saw relative growth in non-hospital space allocation by square foot. Carolina North would push this trend much further.
A discourse of 'sustainability' 
'Green fingers', a sustainability concept in the Carolina North plans It's been hard to miss "sustainability" becoming a buzzword of the 21st-Century economy. In Chapel Hill, where we're located, developers just leveled a block of land near the university to build what's billed as the nation's "greenest" condominium development; plans are on the way for a zero carbon-footprint complex. Early opposition to the Carolina North project focused on issues of sustainability and environmental impact: neighborhood coalitions balked at thousands of proposed parking spaces, bike geeks and trail runners formed a new group to keep the forest they run through free from development. Of course, big university development has always faced opposition on environmental grounds -- in the 1980s, North Carolina State University's Centennial Campus project had to wrangle much the same back-and-forth with neighborhood and environmental groups. The new term here is the discourse of 'sustainability', which has almost completely dominated discussion over the environmental impact of Carolina North, and even of the campus itself. Indeed, nationwide, we see universities racing towards green: carbon offsets for study abroad flights, local and sustainable food in cafeterias, grey water programs in dormitories... ...and "sustainable development", and "sustainable economics", and "sustainable entrepreneurship" (entrepreneurship is its own term in our list, or should be). We won't attempt a whole history of the word, only to mention that the source most of our university's faculty and administrators go back to is John Elkington, a business and management consultant whose company SustainAbility promotes a concept called the ‘triple bottom line’: that a sustainable business simultaneously focuses on “people, planet, and profits”. To some administrtors Carolina North will be a sustainable campus not just because it minimizes environmental impact, but because it produces new business and profit opportunities for researchers at the University. But take 'sustainability' back to community and environmental groups, and profit isn't part of the equation -- the word reads as environmental sustainability. The power of 'sustainability' then is the way in which it shows different faces everywhere it turns. UNC has been holding a series of monthly public forums about the Carolina North development to "present potential uses of the new campus and discuss conceptual approaches to its development". Their public presentations at those forums frame the dialogue in terms of sustainability. Each month new options for sustainability are presented and debated, in a subjunctive language which shows them up for the red herrings they are -- "Should we build one natural gas power plant now or wait ten years when new technologies might develop? Might we use geothermal energy to heat and cool the buildings? Could we tap biofuel from the municipal landfill?" The only certain yes is that the university plans to build; and by framing a debate over more-or-less sustainable build options rather than build or no-build, administrators have managed to enlist community energy towards the project, all in the guise of opposition. "It might cost the university more than they're willing to spend," paraphrasing one community argument, "but we want to have the most sustainable campus possible; a jewel for the community". As for what takes place on that campus? The community, it appears from UNC's "public input" process, hardly cares. There's another power of the discourse of sustainability: it construes universities and their communities as neoliberal subjects, with the only possible connection the exchange of environmental goods and ills on an open market. Meanwhile, the profit in the threefold equation administrators use is not only fiscal, but the status that will come from promoting new "sustainable technologies" developed on the research campus. Their promotional materials already prominently feature the work of Joe deSimone, a "green chemist", best known for a carbon-dioxide drycleaning technology he developed which is now a successful spin-off corporation.
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 12 December 2007 10:05 |
