Sociation Today

Criminal Elites, Conservatives, and the War on the Academy:
North Carolina and Beyond.
The 2017 North Carolina Sociological Association Presidential Address

by

Terrell A. Hayes

High Point University

Introduction

    The academy today is not the same place it was when I took my first academic position back in the fall of 1996. Then, there were occupational perks that I am certain I took-for-granted would always be a part of the job. The opportunity to teach and engage students in discussions on issues and topics that might be difficult, if not impossible, to breach any place else without fear of retribution, and the chance to work in an environment with a large number of people, who were awake in the world, for me at least, made the time and effort to secure and keep an academic position worthwhile. With apologies to the Grateful Dead and their legions of fans, what a long strange trip the last 21 years have been. Today, we should take nothing for granted as it relates to our careers especially with regard to tenure, academic freedom, and shared governance. Political, economic, and social forces continue to chip away at the walls built by our predecessors.

    Sociologists and others have written extensively on the profound transformation that American colleges and universities have undergone over the past quarter century, although in reality, this transformation has been developing for well over a century since the interests, values, and objectives of capitalism and higher education first began to clash (Donoghue 2008). In an effort to describe and explain the transformation, reference has been made to commercialization (Washburn 2005; Bok 2003), corporatization (Giroux 2002), rationalization (Ritzer 2013), institutional "wilding" (Derber 2015), and academic capitalism (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). Coming up with a single word or phrase to encapsulate all that is reflected in this transformation is challenging and perhaps unnecessary. Collectively, they have all contributed to the transformation and helped give birth to a "new paradigm" in American higher education, one celebrated by its proponents as a second academic revolution (Washburn 2005), and one met with considerable concern and suspicion by others. I place myself in the camp of the latter.

    A myriad of concerns have been associated with the emergence of this "new educational paradigm." One, is the launching of an ideological war against the university by political conservatives who contend there are "crises" in higher education that must be addressed. High on the list is the perceived existence of a skills mismatch between what workplace skills employers need students to have and what schools are actually offering (Cottom and Goldrick-Rab 2012). Another concern is the financial crisis facing many universities in the wake of the Great Recession. A 2015 report from the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that in almost all states, higher education support remained well-below what it was in 2008 at the onset of the recession (Mitchel and Leachman 2015). In response to these cuts, colleges and universities chose to adopt measures that included: raising tuition, making cuts in educational programs; devising ways to promote ever greater efficiencies, including expecting staff and faculty to do more with less, and looking for new and creative ways to market their respective institutions.

    Not surprisingly, conservative elites have aggressively promoted a corporate-business model as offering the only plausible solution to addressing the problems that plague higher education. While some of the steps taken are not all bad, I contend this new paradigm in higher education, has a dark side. Specifically, it has encouraged behaviors on the part of some elected politicians, economic elites, university presidents, and boards of trustees that are nothing short of criminal and should be identified as such. Their actions threaten not only the well-being of our higher educational system, which is still heralded as the best in the world, but also jeopardize the very fabric of our democracy and ultimately our way of life.

    While it would be preposterous to suggest that the crimes of ideological domination committed against faculty is comparable to the human misery and monetary costs associated with the war in Iraq, there are, nonetheless, serious costs and casualties in the culture war being waged on America's college campuses. Some may recall that prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon created and distributed a deck of playing cards to American soldiers with the pictures and names of the most wanted members of Saddam Hussein's regime, so as to assist our troops in identifying the bad guys. Today, as I address members of the North Carolina Sociological Association, I want to share with you the pictures and names, of some individuals who I believe have committed what constitutes crimes against the academy and those who work in it. First, a disclaimer. I do not personally know any of these individuals. They may be great fathers, husbands, church members, neighbors and friends. However, there is no denying there is a culture war being waged on college campuses here in North Carolina and across the country, and these individuals, I believe, promote and advocate for changes that seriously compromise what has long been held to be the mission of higher education as well as seriously threaten faculty. In their efforts to "reinvent" higher education, I think it is accurate to describe these individuals as "culture war criminals."

Political and Economic Elites

    In June 2016, under Governor Scott Walker, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law reforming tenure protections in the University of Wisconsin system. The law not only cut $250 million from higher education, but also severely weakened shared faculty governance and effectively destroyed professor tenure at state universities. The new law made it possible for any professor in the system, tenured or not, to be dismissed or laid off "when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection" (Streiff 2017). The law which essentially took away the faculty's voice meant that the University of Wisconsin's Board of Regents, 16 of whom were appointed by Walker, could fire anyone, at any time, for any reason (Streiff 2017). In January of this year, Republican legislators in Iowa, Arizona and Missouri jumped on the bandwagon by proposing bills which would eliminate tenure for state university professors, prohibit some courses from being taught, and in some instances, hold faculty accountable for the employability of graduates in their respective majors. Iowa, Republican Senator, Brad Zaun, proposed Bill 41 which would end tenure, even for those who already have it, at Iowa public universities giving legislators the ability to terminate professors with just cause, program discontinuance and financial exigency (Roberson 2017). HB 2120 proposed by conservative Arizona lawmaker, Rep. Bob Thorpen, a Tea Party Republican, would ban virtually every college event, activity or course which discusses social justice, skin privilege, racial equality or "advocate solidarity based on ethnicity" (King 2017). Also in January, Missouri State Representative Rick Brattin, a Republican, introduced HB 266 which, if passed, would eliminate tenure at Missouri's public colleges and universities to faculty hired after January 1, 2018. Aside from eliminating tenure, Brattin said the bill would also fix a "broken" system, by requiring colleges to publish the price of individual degrees and the job prospects for students who earn them. According to Brattin, "college graduates in Missouri should be able to find jobs that correspond with their degrees, and their professors should help them do so" (Zamudio-Suarez 2017).

    In January 2013, then North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory in a national radio program interview with former Secretary of Education, William Bennett, said he would push legislation to base funding for the state's public colleges and universities on post-graduate employment rather than enrollment. McCrory stated that he had given the green light to his staff to develop legislation which would "change the basic formula in how education money is given out to our universities and our community colleges…It's not based on butts in seats but on how many of those butts can get jobs." In that same interview, McCrory questioned the wisdom of continuing to support some liberal arts majors. "If you want to take gender studies that's fine, go to a private school and take it," McCrory told the radio host. "But I don't want to subsidize that if that's not going to get someone a job" (Kiley 2013).

    It has long been questioned whether, in fact, Pat McCroy was the mastermind behind his administrations legislative agenda. Many would bestow that title upon Art Pope, CEO and Chairman of Variety Wholesalers. Pope served four terms in the NC House of Representatives, is Chairman of the John William Pope Foundation and served as State Budget Director under Gov. Pat McCrory. Over the past 25 years, the John William Pope foundation has donated a total of $16,000,000 to various educational institutions across the state for the purpose of establishing academic centers. According to the foundation, "these centers provide a needed freedom-centric perspective that is often overlooked in the classrooms of higher learning." (John William Pope Foundation). At a lecture hosted by the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh in April 2015, Jay Schalin, Director of Policy Analysis at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education stated, "the main problems [with higher education today] have to do with the ideas that are being discussed and promoted, those being 'multiculturalism, collectivism, [and] left-wing post-modernism.'" (Carpenter 2015) Schalin believes the university can be saved through the propagation of privately funded academic centers that would "balance academia's gradual purging" of courses dedicated to liberty, capitalism and traditional perspectives by supplanting the French Communists, Derrida, Bourdieu, and Foucault with Ayn Rand." According to Schalin, "when you study capitalism on an objective basis, you are going to notice this very strong correlation between prosperity and capitalism – and that's okay to bring up." (Carpenter 2015). Schalin ridiculed the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill, for "working as an 'advocate for the poor' which he said was "actually a reason for getting rid of it." Just weeks before making that statement, the UNC Board of Governors voted unanimously to shut down the centers for poverty, biodiversity, and civic engagement and social change (Starving the Beast).

    What appears to be the crowning jewel of the Pope-McCroy administration was the passing of HB2. Certainly, HB2 has done nothing to improve the life of North Carolinians and only promises to further diminish the states already beleaguered educational system. Among the fiscal impact of HB2 on higher education in North Carolina is the potential to lose federal education funding of up to $4.7 billion annually as a result of Title IX violations. (Mallory and Sears 2016). As of November 2016, Forbes estimated that HB2 had cost the state at least $630 million in lost business and revenue since March 2016. (Jurney 2016). I think it is safe to assume that at least some of that lost revenue might have been earmarked for higher education. Even UNC President Margaret Spellings has expressed concerns regarding the impact HB2 could have on higher education in North Carolina. In April of last year, Spellings reported that she was "talking to U.S. Department of Education officials about the law and the possible loss of federal financial aid support and research grants because of any violations of federal anti-discrimination laws…[She added that she] "also worries about the law's impact on recruiting students, faculty and staff to UNC campuses" (Sims 2016).

    The "crises" identified by conservatives are not limited, however, to curriculum offerings, students prospects for securing employment, or a lack of funding. During his run for the Republican nomination for President in 2016, former neurosurgeon, Ben Carson explicitly stated that if elected President, he would use the Department of Education to investigate allegations of "liberal speech" on college campuses which make students feel uncomfortable or harassed. The implication being that the academy is dominated by "liberal" faculty seeking to promote their ideological orthodoxy upon unsuspecting students and therefore, they must be reeled in. Today, in an academic version of McCarthyism, various groups stand at the ready to assist in the "outing" of problem faculty. One social media web site which appeared only three months ago (Mele 2016) is Professor Watchlist whose stated mission is to "expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom." (Professor Watchlist). Professor Watchlist is a project of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a 501(c) 3 non-profit organization founded in June 2012. According to its web site, the organization's mission is to: "identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government" (TPUSA). The website also states that the organization "works consistently to re-brand free market values and boasts that their custom materials "are the best in the industry" and have been distributed on over 1,000 college campuses across the country. To date, Turning Point USA claims to have launched over 350 chapters in colleges and high schools across the country. In North Carolina, TPUSA claims to have chapters on the campuses of Appalachian State, East Carolina, Western Carolina, North Carolina State, and University of North Carolina campuses at Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Wilmington, and Greensboro. Among private colleges and universities in North Carolina so far only Barton College and Wake Forest University have chapters. TPUSA claims it will "continue to fight for free speech and the right for professors to say whatever they wish; however students, parents, and alumni deserve to know the specific incidents and names of professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls" (Professor Watchlist).

    Of course, this begs the question, who gets to determine what a radical agenda looks like? Professor Watchlist says their list of faculty is derived from "an aggregated list of pre-existing news stories… [taken from reliable sources] by a variety of news organizations throughout the past few years…[and while they gladly accept tips for new additions they only publish] profiles on incidents that have already been reported somewhere else." One popular and alleged reliable source is Campus Reform, which proclaims to be America's leading source for campus news and which identifies itself as:

"a watchdog to the nation's higher education system, [that] exposes bias and abuse on the nation's college campuses…[and] report on the conduct and misconduct of university administrators, faculty, and students."

A closer examination of its website reveals that Campus Reform is "a project of the Leadership Institute founded in 1979 by Morton Blackwell. In 1980, Blackwell organized and oversaw the national youth effort for Ronald Reagan and served as Special Assistant to the President Reagan's White House Staff from 1981-1984 (The Leadership Institute). The Leadership Institute (LI) proudly proclaims that it "actively supports the entire conservative movement…provides training in campaigns, fundraising, grassroots organizing, youth politics, and communications." It claims to have "trained more than 182,000 conservative activists, leaders, and students… [and its] college campus network has grown to more than 1,700 conservative campus groups and newspapers… LI's mission is not to "analyze policy [but rather to teach] conservative Americans how to influence policy through direct participation, activism, and leadership (The Leadership Institute).

Currently, Professor Watchlist includes the names and associated "offenses" of nine faculty and administrators employed at seven different UNC system schools across the state. These include: Dr. Brent Sirota, a history professor at North Carolina State University, who is alleged to have gone onto social media in 2012 dismissing then Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan's views as "radically transformative, effectively dismantling the 20th century" and wrote that presidential nominee Mitt Romney, was a "white male rich bully." Dr. Michael Waltman, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who teaches a course on hate speech and who "openly blames the political right for its use." His course description reads that the course is designed "to expose students to the nature of hate in American life . . . [that] is sustained through the imposition of racist, sexist, and heterosexist ideologies"; and Revital Zilonka, a doctoral student in education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who in her role of Graduate Teaching Assistant offers a course that "requires every student…read a list of books filled with Marxist and feminist ideas…[and] write an 8-page paper on their allegiance to social justice." If this is what the criteria looks like for what is considered to be radical, then I imagine that every sociologist is at risk of making the list.

A recent post on the conservative blog REDSTATE perhaps best sums up in a nutshell what many conservatives think of tenure and of the majority of arts and sciences faculty today:

"[Tenure's] benefits boil down to exactly one: guaranteed life-time employment to a few battalions of progressive ideologues who care much less about education than they do about completing Antonio Gramsci's long march through the institutions…the fact is that if the mission of the university is to actually "educate" and not create bragging rights about who is on faculty, there are damned few professors out there worth extra money. And exactly none of them teach gender or ethnic studies. Without tenure, the existing coterie of politically active left wing professors have zero leverage. They can't bully colleagues, they can't deny conservatives tenure, and they are powerless. Without tenure, university regents can rid campuses of covens of multi-degreed nitwits who have created entire departments devoted to teaching nonsense. Actual professors, those who keep their politics to themselves and research and teach, will be completely untouched by the reforms. And that is why the left is in a panic." (Streiff 2017)

Capitalism and the Corporatization of Higher Education

Advocates for corporatization have long championed the idea that the implementation of a corporate model to most anything makes for a better organization. Subsequently, the witnessing of an influx of corporate business elites promoting free-market business practices to university governing boards and administrative posts (AAUP) hardly comes as a surprise. Business men and women, some with no previous experience working in higher education, no understanding of the true mission of higher education, or even without the once necessary academic credentials of the Ph.D., have made their way into university president's offices (Ginsberg 2011). Sociologist, Michael Burawoy (2016), refers to some of these individuals as "spiralists - people who spiral in from outside, develop signature projects and then hope to spiral upward and onward, leaving the university behind to spiral down…Their distrust of the old administrative guard leads them to "cultivate, promote and protect each other through mutual recruitment [while] boosting their corporate-level incomes and contributing to administrative bloat" (941-942). Boston College sociologist, Charles Derber (2015) contends that as universities have become more like for-profit corporations, they behave not unlike Wall Street banks and large multinational corporations engaging in institutional wilding - "self-interested or self-indulgent behavior that hurts others and weakens the social fabric" (11).

Criminologist, James W. Coleman (1998), argued that there is a culture of competition, inherent in contemporary capitalism, which serves as motivation for committing white collar crimes. According to Coleman, this culture of competition, with wealth and success as its central tenants, values the pursuit of economic self-interest; promotes a "pervasive sense of insecurity" driven by a fear of failure; and often finds ethical standards for economic behavior at odds with values related to competitive individualism. I argue that competition among colleges and universities, for students and the money they bring with them has been instrumental in producing a hostile work environment where faculty are bullied and coerced to conform to the wishes of management, often at the expense of genuine educational objectives. Consequently, the corporatization of higher education has created an academic culture in which the white-collar criminal actions of university administrations have become pervasive and labor violations against faculty, in the form of political harassment and repression, are increasingly common. To create an environment where this kind of behavior will be tolerated, first requires the transformation of an organizations culture "with the explicit intention of inducing the faculty to relinquish certain values and practices" (Bousquet 2008:10) thereby creating, what Henry Giroux (2002) calls, "an ensemble of ideological and institutional forces that functions politically and pedagogically both to govern organizational life through senior managerial control and to fashion compliant workers"(429).

In February 2016, Mount Saint Mary's University of Maryland, President, and Simon Newman made news when he fired the Provost and two faculty members for their criticism of his retention policies. One, of the faculty members, a tenured philosophy professor was fired for what President Newman charged as disloyalty to the university. Prior to becoming president, Newman had spent 30 years in business and finance, serving as managing director of JP Capital Partners, a private equity firm, and CEO of Cornerstone Management Group, an investment and advisory company (Prudente 2016). Following pressure to reinstate those fired, which he did, President Newman resigned his position. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior among high level university administrators occurs more often than we would like to believe. Between 2000 and 2016, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) voted to censure 33 colleges and universities primarily for violations of academic freedom and or academic due process, and false claims of financial exigency. Common reasons given by the censured institutions for firing, or failing to promote faculty included disloyalty, insubordination, and public dissent of administrative policies. At Stillman College, censured in 2009, a professor was dismissed on the grounds that he violated the "Malicious Gossip or Public Verbal Abuse' policy for his criticism of the president. At Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, censured in 2012, a professor with 17 years on the faculty was terminated after his version of events surrounding flooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, contradicted the position of the administration.

Another consequence associated with corporatization of the academy, and the commercial ethos associated with it, (Giroux, 2011; Washburn, 2005) is a shift in priorities in which consumer demand dictates not only what courses and fields of study should be offered, but how they are offered as well. Patti Adler, former professor of sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, taught a class on deviant behavior to approximately 500 students each semester for twenty years. Over that time, Adler always ended each semester with a skit in which teaching assistants, former students and friends took on the role of key figures in the prostitution world and acted them out in front of class. Despite no previous objections being reported over the years, the Provost notified Adler in the fall of 2013 that several formal complaints had been made regarding her course. University officials determined the skit posed a possible legal risk to the school and offered to buy out Adler's contract. She was told that if she did not take the buyout she would no longer be permitted to teach that course, and was warned that should additional complaints be lodged against her in the future she ran the risk of being accused of violating the school's sexual harassment policy and could be fired for cause (Goldberg 2015).

Branding and Social Control

This move toward corporatization has also brought with it a competitive zeal not previously seen in higher education. Today's universities are almost forced to become entrepreneurial. Competition from for-profit universities, decline in public funding, and the amenities arms race many schools have joined, threaten how universities have conducted themselves in the past (Hines 2006). Colleges and universities today resemble cathedrals of consumption (Ritzer 2010) more than they do institutions of higher education. At private universities especially, students are encouraged to pay top dollar and tempted with upgrades in amenities – a kind of "super-size" me of higher education.

Since 2001, the median marketing spending at all colleges and universities, adjusted for inflation, has increased between 60 and 100 percent (Sirianno 2013). In an effort to compete and build new reputations almost overnight, lesser known colleges and universities of the "wannabe" variety have turned to more aggressive and creative marketing strategies via branding to enhance their images (Tuchman 2009). Branding essentially involves institutional level impression management (Conley 2008). With branding, perception is reality. It is not necessary to be the best, only to be perceived as the best. Branding involves working on the cheap and the adoption of a "fake it till you make it" mentality so that things appear better than they are for public consumption. The branding efforts undertaken by many corporate-styled universities represents an elaborate promotional scheme that frequently relies on spectacle (Ritzer 2010) over substance, and at times borders on a kind of consumer fraud perpetrated on the public by enticing impressionable students and their parents, that Brand X university offers an extraordinary educational experience that is second to none. In the competition for students, colleges and universities prostitute themselves (Budiansky 2006), and with little say in the matter, university administrations, in turn, prostitute out their faculty who are forced to resort to emotional labor as they are coerced into becoming co-conspirators in a ruse to market the university and uphold the brand's promise. Feeling powerless to speak out against such de-professionalism, and reduced in some schools to little more than highly educated, customer service representatives, many faculty "retreat into a sterile from of professionalism." (Giroux 2011).

It has been suggested that the corporate business model of higher education has been exposed as a Ponzi scheme with its demise as inevitable (Schultz 2015). Let's hope so. I am afraid, however, that even if that be true, corporatization will not go quietly into the night, but instead will try to inflict as much additional damage as possible before it takes its final breath.

Conclusion

When we think of oppressed groups throughout history, the professoriate does not come to mind. To compare the oppression of today's faculty as a group with that of any racial or ethnic minority, or with those in the LGBT community would of course be ludicrous. Yet, the state of academia today reflects a highly oppressed and alienated class of workers who appear to be desperately lacking class consciousness. On the whole, university faculty represent a class-in-itself, not a class-for-itself. The crimes being waged against the academy by conservative elites is serious. As we have been reminded on almost a daily basis by events in this country since the election of President Trump, oppression does not have a shelf life. When professors are silenced or dismissed for views that a political and corporate elite controlling university purse strings find offensive, there are serious consequences for society. College and university faculty are responsible for promoting critical thinking, the civic action which often follows, and the social change that eventually transpires. We have no need to apologize for that. Many more people celebrate our contributions to social justice than vilify them. Conservative elites have figured out that if they can control the academy, and silence those who work in it, then they can potentially rewrite the social agenda and undo decades of progress. In short, as the university goes, so goes society.

Northwestern University criminologist, John Hagan (2015) observed that the field of criminology was "silent" about the criminality of the invasion and occupation of Iraq under the Bush administration. To date, the same appears to be true regarding the criminality surrounding the invasion of American higher education. Today, I hope my remarks might start a conversation that will draw attention to the immediate need for faculty, across disciplines to take collective action for the common good. As faculty, and especially as sociologists, our voices are needed now just as much as they ever were in the past.

References

American Association of University Professors. URL: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/MJ/feat/andrsb1.htm

Bok, Derek. 2003. Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Bousquet, Marc. 2008. How The University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York: New York University Press.

Budiansky, Stephen. 2006. "Brand U." New York Times. April 26: A19

Burawoy, Michael. 2016. "The Neoliberal University: The Ascent of the Spiralists." Critical Sociology. 42(7-8):941-942.

Campus Reform. URL: http://www.campusreform.org/about/

Carpenter, Zoe. 2015. "How a Right-Wing Political Machine is Dismantling Higher Education in North Carolina." The Nation. June 8. URL: https://www.thenation.com/article/
how-right-wing-political-machine-dismantling-
higher-education-north-carolina/

Coleman, James William. 1998. The Criminal Elite: Understanding White-Collar Crime. 4th ed., New York: St. Martin Press.

Cottom, Tressie McMillan and Sara Goldrick-Rab. 2012. "The Problem with For-Profits." Contexts. 11(4):20-21.

Conley, Lucas. 2008. Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion. New York: Public Affairs.

Derber, Charles. 2015. The Wilding of America: Money, Mayhem, and the New American Dream. New York: Worth Publishers.

Donoghue, Frank. 2008. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. New York: Fordham University Press.

Ginsburg, Benjamin. 2011. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Giroux, Henry A. 2011. "Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University: Higher Education in the Service of Democracy." Truth Out. January 18.
URL: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/
69:beyond-the-swindle-of-the-corporate-
university-higher-education-in-the-service-of-democracy

Giroux, Henry A. 2002. "Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education." Harvard Educational Review 72(4):425-463.

Goldberg, Michelle. 2015. "This Professor was fired for Saying Fuck No in Class." The Nation. July 2.
URL: https://www.thenation.com/article/
this-professor-was-fired-for-saying-fuck-no-in-class

Hagan, John. 2015. "While Criminology Slept: A Criminal War of Aggression in Iraq" The Criminologist, 40(6):1,3-4.

Hines, Samuel. 2006. "The Entrepreneurial University: Rewards and Risks." Universities and Corporations. A Selection of Papers Presented at the WMU Emeriti Council Forum. Published by the Center of the Study of Ethics in Society. Western Michigan University. 16(2):13-42.

John William Pope Foundation.
URL: https://jwpf.org/grants/focus-areas/education/

Jurney, Corrine. 2016. "North Carolina's 'Bathroom Bill' Has Flushed Away $600 Million In Business And Could Dash Governor's Re-election Hopes." Forbes. November 3.
URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/corinnejurney/
2016/11/03/north-carolinas-bathroom-bill-
flushes-away-nearly-1-billion-in-business-
and-governor-mccrorys-re-election-hopes/#22c800446eb

Kiley, Kevin. 2013. "Another Liberal Arts Critic." Inside Higher Education. January 30.
URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/
news/2013/01/30/north-carolina-governor-
joins-chorus-republicans-critical-liberal-arts

King, Shaun. 2017. "Arizona Lawmaker Proposes New Bill Banning Classes or Events Discussing Social Justice on College Campuses." New York Daily News. January 13.
URL: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/
national/king-rep-ban-social-justice-events-
arizona-schools-article-1.2945382

Mallory, Christy and Brad Sears 2016. "The Fiscal Impact of North Carolina's HB2."
URL:
http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-
content/uploads/The-Fiscal-Impact-of-North-
Carolina%E2%80%99s-HB2.pdf

Mele, Christopher. 2016. "Professor Watchlist Seen as Threat to Academic Freedom." New York Times. November 28.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/
professor-watchlist-is-seen-as-threat-to-
academic-freedom.html?_r=0

Mitchel, Michael and Michael Leachman. 2015. "Years of Cuts Threaten to Put College Out of Reach for More Students" May 13, 2015.
URL: http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-
and-tax/years-of-cuts-threaten-to-put-
college-out-of-reach-for-more-students

Professor Watchlist.
URL: http://www.professorwatchlist.org/index.php/about-us

Prudente, Tim. 2016. "Mount Saint Mary's University President Simon Newman Resigns." The Baltimore Sun. May 13.
URL: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/
maryland/education/bs-md-mount-st-marys-
president-resigns-20160229-story.html

Ritzer, George. 2013. The McDonaldization of Society, 20th Anniversary edition. Los Angeles: Sage.

Ritzer, George. 2010. Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Continuity and Change in the Cathedrals of Consumption. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge.

Roberson, Robert. 2017. "Faculty Senate Discusses Proposed Bill to End Tenure." Iowa State Daily. January 17.
URL: http://www.iowastatedaily.com/news/
politics_and_administration/
article_14da9f66-dd2c-11e6-a2e4-531e09f1c23d.html

Schultz, David, 2015. "The Rise and Coming Demise of the Corporate University." Academe. September-October. 101(5).
URL: https://www.aaup.org/article/
rise-and-coming-demise-corporate-university#.WRctJbFqIkQ

Sims, Julia. 2016. "Spellings Worries about HB2 Impact on UNC System." April 8.
URL: http://www.wral.com/spellings-worries
-about-hb2-impact-on-unc-system/15629098/

Sirianno, Ed. 2013. "College Marketing Budget Trends."
URL: http://blog.ccanewyork.com/college-marketing-budget-trends

Slaughter, Sheila and Gary Rhoades. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Starving the Beast. 2016. Violent Crown Films, A Railyard Films Production. Director: Steve Mims, Producer: Bill Banowsky.

Streiff. 2017. "My, My. The Reform Of University Tenure Is Certainly Getting Panties Wadded." Red State. January 14.
URL: http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2017/
01/14/my-my.-the-reform-of-university-tenure-is-
certainly-getting-panties-wadded/

The Leadership Institute.
URL: https://www.leadershipinstitute.org/aboutus/

Tuchman, Gaye. 2009. Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Turning Point USA. URL: http://tpusa.com/aboutus/

Washburn, Jennifer. 2005. University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education. New York: Basic Books.

Zamudio-Suaréz, Fernanda. 2017. "Missouri Lawmaker Who Wants to Eliminate Tenure Says It's 'Un-American'." The Chronicle of Higher Education. January 12.
URL: http://www.chronicle.com/article/
Missouri-Lawmaker-Who-Wants-to/238886