ABSTRACT
There has been much written to argue that higher education has historically functioned as a hegemonic institution to both facilitate the dominant economic system-liberal capitalism-as well as to contain resistance to that system by redefining social needs through the rhetoric of individual access and opportunity (see Aronowitz; Brown; Ohmann). At this historical moment, in order to understand our current political economy and the cultural and material implications of the work we undertake within higher education, we must complicate the ways we view the market and state and include a critical perspective on the role of voluntarism, service, and hybrid institutions such as higher education itself. I suggest that because there has been an apparent decline in state support for the “research culture” that has dominated higher education, the move toward privatized support of research and university’s participating directly in market-driven research has engendered a shift in how universities define themselves in our current social context. I argue that the research culture has not disappeared, but that governmental support has shifted in the area of “service” activities, especially in the humanities, and that those activities function in important ways to enable and sustain the profit-oriented research functions of universities. In what follows here, I develop that claim by identifying this expanded culture of service and community development in higher education and by reading out the some of the ideological implications of those activities. I argue that in developing community-based partnerships around such sites as literacy and community development, the university reinscribes itself as the source of cultural authority and undertakes activities within the discourse of dominant ideology. Because the university reflects the ideological imperatives of the dominant economic system, the community development projects supported by the university perpetuate problematic discursive structures and provide “solutions” to communities by redefining the problems themselves. I encourage active critique of these activities in order to address the contradictions of motivations for community health while serving economic
and ideological structures that depend on exploitation to expand. Finally, I suggest some possible ways to read radical potentials in these trends.
