ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that if leftists want to take the university back from corporate forces, perhaps we should take our inspiration riot from cultural conservatives but from economic ones, who'd teach us to "take over" higher education by severely trimming and streamlining the administrative ranks of middle management, and disgorging that excess cash back into the "core business" of education and research. The end of the cold war in the late 1980s could have brought with it a massive peace dividend in the United States, a welfare state of unprecedented expanse and largesse: a shiny new government-funded public sphere, fat with butter and short on guns. In the war for the soul of American business, flexible specialization and shareholder influence won while the univocal behemoth of slow, managed growth lost. Development contributions are treated by donors as charity, and no one will continue to give to a nonprofit that soaks up huge amounts of donor contributions in administrative costs.
