[First published in the University of Guelph's weekly student newspaper, The Ontarion 134.

13 (12 April-2 May

2001): 5. I have corrected one notable error, and have added footnotes, which did not appear in the text as
originally published; the third, fourth and fifth of these notes cite sources which I drew upon in writing this
piece. My concluding suggestion of a Latin motto for graduating students also did not appear in the article as
first published.]

[Index: Canadian politics, corporatism, higher education]

[Date: April 2001]

Revolution Inc.
Michael Keefer

Gnothi seauton in the Greek original, Nosce teipsum in Latin translation: Know
thyself. Even the current arbiters of cool would have us accept this injunction of the
Delphic Oracle as a goal of human thought: when in The Matrix Keanu Reeves is taken
by Samuel Jackson to meet THE Oracle, he finds a Hollywood-Idiot-Latin version of the
saying hung up over her kitchen door.
But when the Roman poet Virgil declared that person to be happy who knows the
causes of thingsFelix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causashe was suggesting that
knowledge of the self wont take us very far unless it includes knowledge of the world
which contains and conditions that self.
Virgils wordsRerum Cognoscere Causasare actually the motto of this
university. They imply a commitment to developing an understanding of what's going on,
a commitment, if you like, to truth. (In recent years that motto has been largely displaced
by a more banal English tag, Changing Lives, Improving Lifewhich, though
pleasantly up-beat, contains no reference to knowledge or truth.)1 But the University of
1 There was an odd factual error in my text as first published: I identified Rerum Cognoscere Causas as
the motto of the university where I did my graduate studies in the late 1970s. A strange mistake, given
that by 2001, when this piece was written, I had taught for more than a decade at the University of
Guelph. The motto of the University of Sussex, where I did my doctoral studies, is actually Be still and
know, which is lifted from Psalm 46. I can guess why I might have forgotten that fact. During my time
at Sussex, the university's motto may have seemed a faint exhortation addressed to recalcitrant students
whose learning processes involved activist praxis as well as quiet reading: for at least two years the
undergraduate student union was led by members of the Situationist International, who in support of
what they understood as just causes and a project of understanding the causes of things recurrently
occupied the central administrative building, Sussex House. I've altered this paragraph to correct the

Guelph's original Virgilian mottoadopted, one would suppose, at the time of its
founding in the 1960swas a sign that the institution believed itself not just to be
imparting knowledge (skills, theories, or facts), but also fashioning people who, through
an understanding of the causes shaping them and the world they inhabited, would be able
to participate in a principled, creative re-fashioning and transformation of that world
and perhaps of their own identities as well.
The functions and the self-understanding of universities have themselves been
radically transformed since those far-away 1960s, as one result of a socio-political
revolution which has swept across the English-speaking world, and which in its further
expansion has taken the name of globalization. Im talking about the Corporatist
Revolution.
Never heard of it? If so, youve just illustrated Liftons Law, a paradox formulated
in the 1980s by the American psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, according to which theres
an inverse relationship between the actual life-and-death importance of any aspect of
contemporary history and the likelihood that it will receive any attention in our university
curricula.2
But even if were too ill-informed or too diffident to have taken note of the fact,
the Corporatist Revolution has happened. In the U.K., starting in 1979, it took the form
(as Christopher Hitchens says) of sado-monetarism: Mrs Thatcher, the Iron Lady, set
out to handbag the welfare state and make social democracy a distant memory. She
succeeded.
The Reagan Revolution began in 1980 in the U.S. Despite all the talk about debt
reduction, Reagans strategy (as his first budget director indiscreetly revealed in 1981),
was to rack up deficits so huge that no future government would be able to undo
Reaganite cuts to social spending. The idea was, effectively, to bankrupt any future other
than the one intended by Reagan and his handlers.3
Having elected Brian Mulroney to power in 1984, Canadians found themselves
being overhauled for entry into the Reaganite world of deregulated capitalism: with the
FTA and then NAFTA we abandoned all but the flimsiest pretence of national control
error.
2 SeeGillianThomas,Lifton'sLawandtheTeachingofLiterature,inLiteratureandPolitics/Literary
Politics,ed.MichaelKeefer,specialdoubleissueofDalhousieReview66.12(1986):1421.
3 See Budget Director David Stockman's interview with William Greider in the Atlantic Monthly
(November 1981).

over natural resources, economic policy, and Canadian culture. In 1993, we threw out
Mulroneys heirsonly to put ourselves into the hands of Jean Chrtien, a more fervent
admirer of Reagan and his works than even Mulroney had been. At that point we began to
learn what it means in this era to be open for business.
(You dont like massive cuts to medicare, the elimination of transfer payments in
support of higher education, or the prospect of finishing your university degree tens of
thousands of dollars in debt? Sorry, folks: thats part of the package.)
But Canada had to wait until 1995, and the Ontario electorates approval of the
Common Sense Revolution, to hear from a true philosopher of the new order. The
moment came when John Snobelen, Mike Harriss grade-eleven-drop-out minister of
education, decided to strut his stuff in front of a gathering of ministry bureaucratsand
was vain enough to have his vapourings captured on videotape.
In good Reaganite fashion, Snobelen explained the need to bankrupt the actions
and activities that arent consistent with the future were committed to. The initial phase
of this process would involve creating a useful crisis. Yeah, he said, we need to
invent a crisis. And thats not an act just of couragetheres some skill involved.4
Skilfully or not, the Harris government has applied this philosophy of invented
crises and selective bankrupting to Ontarios universities. Institutions that were already
crumbling due to many years of underfunding and the recession-years cuts of the early
1990s were hit after 1995 with a massive withdrawal of funding. A fraction of the money
that was withdrawn is now being restored in the form of capital spending programs, but
these are targeted to areas like information technology, engineering, and the health
sciences. (The pure sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences are evidently in line
for the bankrupting prescribed by Dr. Snobelen.) Morever, the restored money is being
made available only in cases where matching funding can be raised from outside sources,
thus ensuring corporate control of a remodeled higher education infrastructure. As
finance minister Ernie Eves put it, The private sector believes its best to have some
input on the ground floor of the postsecondary education system.5
4 See Richard Brennan, Minister plotted to invent a crisis, Toronto Star (13 September 1995): A3;
Lisa Wright, Apologize for remarks Harris tells Snobelen, Toronto Star (14 September 1995): A3;
Thomas Walkom, Snobelen scales windy heights of bafflegab, Toronto Star (14 September 1995):
A25; and Harris Mainly Mum on Plans for Post-Secondary Education in Ontario, CAUT/ACPPU
Bulletin (November 1995): 6.
5 Quoted by John Ibbitson, Universities and colleges get big boost from Ontario, Globe and Mail (23
February 2000): A1, A7.

The Harris government is well aware that Ontarios deliberately weakened

universities are now facing a demographic double-whammy. In 2003, thanks to the
elimination of Grade 13, the annual cohort of applicants to Ontario universities will be
doubled in size. And in the two following years, due to what demographers term the
baby-boom echo, the annual cohorts will increase by about fifteen per cent.
The governments response? Thousands of positions for university students are
being prepared at Ontarios community colleges, and legislation has been passed to allow
private degree-granting institutions to establish themselves in Ontario. Digital diploma
mills, as historian David Noble calls them, already exist in the U.S. These low-overhead
distance-education operations employ ill-paid faculty on revolving-door contracts to
provide large numbers of students with job-market training in a manner that maximizes
the institutions profits.6
Sounds appetizing, doesnt it? But they must be needed here, since our publiclyfunded universities just cant seem to do the job. And once theyve set up shop in
Ontario, the diploma mills will most likely be eligible for public funding on the same
basis as public universities. (Check the fine print of NAFTA.)
But what can we say about the corporatist form into which our existing
universities have morphed during the past two decades?
First and most obviously, the corporate university is controlled by corporate
interests, rather than by representatives of any larger public interest. Im not thinking so
much about who controls the Board of Governors, though thats important enough, as
about the fact that the research agendas of many academic units are under direct
corporate controlwith obvious implications for the orientation of their teaching.
Ive pointed to the Ontario governments decision to let corporate interests in on
the ground floor. The same attitude is evident in the Chrtien federal government. After
withdrawing money from the three Councils responsible for the public funding of
research in medicine, the natural sciences and engineering, and the humanities and social
sciences, the government poured resources into a new Canadian Foundation for
6 See David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, Toronto: distributed
by OCUFA, October 1997; and Digital Diploma Mills, Part II: The Coming Battle Over Online
Instruction, Toronto: distributed by OCUFA, March 1998. For some historical context, see Janice
Newson and Howard Buchbinder, The University Means Business (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1988);
and Neil Tudiver, Universities for Sale: Resisting Corporate Control over Canadian Higher Education
(Toronto: James Lorimer, 1999). Parallel developments in the U.S. have been analyzed by Sheila
Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial
University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Innovation, which provides funding only to researchers who can organize matching
funds from private sources.
Guess how much corporate funding is available to researchers who want to do
work critical of genetically modified foods. Guess what happens to the academic careers
of scientists who cant secure research funding.
In other respects as well, the corporate university will be responsive to the selfish
desires of a social elite rather to the larger interests of society as a whole. Why should
this come as a surprise? According to the Toronto Stars headline story of March 16,
2001, three per cent of Ontarios families control 27 per cent of the total wealth; and the
richest twenty per cent of Canadians saw their wealth increase by 39 per cent from 1984
to 1999, while the poorest forty per cent made no advance or became poorer.7 Wouldnt it
be more surprising if a social elite that has bent the tax regime so far to its advantage
were to neglect twisting the higher education system in the same direction?8
High tuition fees? That might be a matter for concern if we thought the institution
retained any function of ensuring social mobility. The children of the rich can manage
high tuition fees. Dont worry about the others: if student loan debt has risen by six
hundred per cent since 1984,9 wont those who carry it be all the more likely to behave
like good selfish free-market individualists when they graduate with thirty or forty
7 Elaine Carey, Rich, poor are even wider apart, Toronto Star (16 March 2001): A1, A10. Carey
observed that in Ontario, the richest 3.1 percent of Ontario families control 27 percent of the province's
wealth, while in Alberta and B.C. a similar proportion3.2 and 3.3 percent respectivelycontrol 36
percent of the wealth in those provinces.
8 Relevant data from the U.S. is provided by Hendrick Hertzberg, Generous George, The New Yorker
(12 March 2001). The Administration has dismissed, but has not been able to refute, independent
analyses showing that forty per cent of the benefits of the Bush tax cut will accrue to the richest one per
cent of taxpayers; that the bottom eighty per cent will get less than a third of the benefits and the bottom
twenty per cent less than one per cent; that all the benefits of the proposed abolition of the estate tax
will go to the heirs of the richest two per cent; and that the richest six per cent of that two per cent will
rake in half the estate-tax pot. The shape of the Bush tax program represents a seismic shift in the
overall tax burden toward the bottom of the economic scale. And its size represents a massive diversion
of actual and potential resources away from public activities that benefit the whole of society
activities like education, public health, and environmental protection, the very ones Bush endorsed at
the outset of his speechand toward the single purpose of augmenting the net incomes of the
comfortable (pp. 41-42). From 1992 to 1998, moreover, the average after-tax income of the richest
one percent rose from about four hundred thousand dollars to just under six hundred thousand, and from
12.2 per cent of the national net income to 15.7 per cent. (Disparities of wealth, as opposed to income,
are, of course, much higher.) Really, nowhow urgently do these good people require a new subsidy
from the other ninety-nine per cent? (p. 42). The richest one percent versus the remaining 99 percent:
this opposition would resurface a decade later in the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
9 Carey, Rich, poor are even wider apart. In remarking that Canadian student loan debt was six times as
high by 1999 as it had been in 1984, Carey highlighted the story of a Ryerson student who, despite
having worked twenty hours per week as a waiter in a campus bar, was going to graduate in 2001 with a
debt of $40,000 in student loans.

thousand dollars of debt, and with a hot charge of resentment against the society that laid
this on them?
As for the notion that a university might exist to provide our society as a whole
with a variety of institutionalized forms of critical self-understandingIm sorry, that
ones going a bit blurry on me. Rerum Cognoscere Causas: is that some kind of a tip on
what to do with my ten-cent NASDAQ stocks, or what?
Perhaps we need a Latin motto for graduating students, and not just for the
universities that (thanks to the invented crises of Snobelen & Co.) have become
dependent on ever more burdensome tuition fees.
Here's one for a start: Sperare Videor Aes Alienum Exsolvere. It means: I flatter
myself with the hope of paying my debts.