A Brief Conversation with David B. Downing ( Academic Capitalism) (Interview‪)‬

Steven Wexler: If it's okay with you, David, I'd like to begin with a big question. The Knowledge Contract presents itself as a critique of the corporate university (the title reads "Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace") yet the book clearly goes beyond university walls. In other words, you seem to be saying that academic capitalism's epistemology is late capitalism's Could you discuss in broad terms your understanding of the knowledge contract as well as the range you have in mind? David Downing: You're right, Steve, it is a big question, but a good one, and I'll try to be succinct. The "knowledge contract" is a configuration, a metaphor, if you will, to the extent that it suggests a high level of generalization. The point is to configure, in a general way, the relations between knowledge and social forces such as the church, the state, and the economy, but especially as those relations pertain to the history of the modern university. Knowledge is, of course, produced in many other segments of society from private crafts, trades, and various non-academic professional groups. My intention was to make the knowledge contract refer to the set of attributes that historically distinguished higher education's bargain with the devil. At its best, higher education has been one of the main social institutions for preserving some domains of freedom of inquiry essential for any real learning and research. I focus on the modern university in America where the knowledge contract configures (literally and metaphorically, depending on which level you analyze) the particular arrangements higher education has made with capitalism and state and federal agencies. On the other hand, terms like "academic capitalism" and the "corporate university" suggest that there is hardly a difference at all between the way knowledge is produced in higher education and the way it is produced in any other segment of the society, corporate or otherwise. In this sense, it would be correct to say that "academic capitalism's epistemology" is indeed the epistemology of late capitalism. Of course, it would then also mean that "academic capitalism" is a kind of unnecessary redundancy: it's just plain late capitalism, academic or otherwise, and the basic epistemology remains profit through surplus labor. Commodification then inhabits all dimensions of the life-world.