There is a trend at Miami University that I have noticed increasingly over the past two and a half years: everything is closed. From “a la markets” to the dining halls, food options for students have either been reduced in hours, closed with no apparent plans to reopen, or shut down with plans to remodel––leaving them useless until they are replaced with fast food chains. At the same time, the cost of the mandatory meal plan has increased for incoming students. 

The COVID-19 pandemic placed restrictions upon what universities could provide for students service-wise, but as we ease out of that period, the consequences seem to linger. Indeed, the ramifications extend far beyond dining options and student inconveniences. Between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years, the number of faculty at Miami University plunged 13%, with a drop of almost 150 full-time instructors and more than 300 visiting instructors. During this same time period, enrollment for first-year incoming classes grew by nearly 18%. What this has resulted in are overstuffed classrooms and professors struggling to manage the ever increasing workload placed upon them. 

This decline in quality is not an isolated incident but a symptom of a much larger problem confronting universities nationwide: the prioritization of profit over student outcomes.

To understand why universities have shifted toward such a model, we must turn to the history of college tuition in the United States. Higher education was once considered a public good that would benefit the entire state by providing trained workers and “advantages of the best education.” After the Second World War, policies were passed to increase college access for Americans. Within the first seven years of the passage of the GI Bill, around eight million veterans enrolled in college. At the same time, the Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal funding for post-secondary institutions and developed scholarship programs and low-interest loans. This act also established the Guaranteed Student Loan Program, which allowed private institutions to provide government subsidized loans. This allowed millions of middle and lower income Americans to receive a higher education, but it also unintentionally laid the groundwork for the modern student debt crisis. 

Under the Reagan Administration, between 1980 and 1985, federal spending on higher education was cut by about 25%. This forced states to compensate by either raising taxes or raising tuition, the former of which would have been politically unpopular. Public college tuition thus increased by 141% during the 1980s, more than twice the general inflation rate. In 1992, the Higher Education Amendments created FAFSA, the Direct Lending Program, and unsubsidized Stafford loans, making students pay the cost of interest rather than the federal government. Over time, these policy changes created the perfect storm for college tuition to skyrocket nationwide.  

Colleges have since adopted structural models that resemble corporations, treating education as a market and students as consumers. Administrative bloat now runs amok. According to a study by the conservative Goldwater Institute, administrative spending (expenditures related to personnel and supplies that do not directly support students) per student at top public and private universities rose by a staggering 61% between 1993 and 2007, while instructional spending (expenditures for activities related to the interaction between teachers and students) per student rose only 39%. Moreover, while the number of full time administrators per 100 students grew by 39%, the number of instructional, research, and service staff rose only 18%. Faculty continue to lose power to administrative bureaucracy, while that same bureaucracy laud their model of shared governance. This loss of power has resulted in pushback by university staff, particularly in the form of union drives. Since 2012, there has been an 81.3% increase in the number of faculty bargaining units at private sector non-profit institutions. While the increase has not been as marked at public universities, due in part to the preexistence of unions at some of them, the increase has been felt at Miami University. 

In February 2022, Miami University faculty announced a unionization campaign, named the Faculty Alliance of Miami (FAM). To understand how this unionization effort specifically relates to the corporatization of higher education at Miami University, I spoke to Cathy Wagner, president of Miami University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and lead organizer of the union drive. 

Wagner has been working on the FAM drive since 2020, but went public with the effort in early 2022 after assessing staff support. “What we kept hearing in one-on-ones during early parts of the campaign is that people just felt like they weren’t able to deliver in the way that they would like to the students, and that the educational mission was in decline at Miami,” said Wagner. 

After getting her PHD in 2000, Wagner worked as an adjunct professor at Boise State University for several years, and then at the University of Utah as a full time lecturer. In the mid-2000s, Wagner also worked as a part-time professor online for the University of Phoenix. During this time, despite her love of teaching, she was aware of the precariousness of her position, and that she had little influence over her pay or working conditions. When she later attained a tenure-track job at Miami University, Wagner was astounded by the academic freedom and safety of the position. However, it was not until she became a full professor that she felt that she had the security to push for change at the university. 

Wagner spoke about the school’s shift in funding sources, and how this contributes to a model wherein out-of-state students are prioritized, leading to a shrinking number of Ohio students who are being served. “To find sources for funding, what they do is they pound the pavement looking for students to pay as much as they can get the students to pay. That means adding a lot of money and office space on staff who will deliver the goods in the form of out-of-state students, international students, students who will pay more. […] So if you think about how things would be different, you know, if we had more public funding, that’s one of the reasons why the university looks so different.”

“But then there’s the other side of the staff, which is the upper administration, and that has definitely gotten much bigger. Part of that is overseeing all the new administrators, but it’s also a function of what I think you could definitely call a corporatization model, where you put higher paid people way up here, and then the rest of us end up answering to them. It ends up conflicting with the model of the university as having shared governance. I mean, just last year we saw the Provost Office expand and we saw an enlargement of the President’s board.” 

It is apparent that the nationwide shift among universities toward a corporate model has impacted Miami University, and that the implications of this are being felt by staff and students alike. Yet when staff attempt to raise their voices on campus through unionization, many university responses are eerily similar to that of the mega-corporations like Starbucks or Amazon. 

Over the past year, workers at these corporations have achieved historic union victories, despite the companies’ best efforts to squash the movements. Both Starbucks and Amazon have been dragging out contract negotiations in the hopes that high employee turnover and worker impatience will induce workers to vote to decertify their unions. Similarly, despite having a majority support for the union verified by the State Employment Relations Board (SERB), Miami University is delaying the union election, arguing that non-tenure-track faculty should be excluded. When asked about the similarities between Miami University’s response to the FAM campaign and these corporations’ responses to their employees, Wagner said: 

“If you look at the boilerplate union busting language, it’s very similar to what’s on the Miami website. I remember seeing a poster from the Alabama campaign that was making some similar points, like ‘why pay dues when we’re giving you a 4% raise,’ kind of thing. Really messaging on dues that’s very misleading, that a union is a business, the implication that a union is going to be making a lot of money on people’s dues. The AAUP is actually a super lean organization; we have one paid person in the whole state. […] And I’ve never been paid for this work. We are all volunteers.”

“Their tactics are, kind of, to divide and delay. Just basically their lawyers asking for extensions, but also trying to make the bargaining unit just tenure-track, to exclude other people from the bargaining unit […] But there are some things that are more subtle. Last year, it was more overt. […] There was that messaging in the spring, and they put out an anti-union website. You know, it’s just boilerplate, all anti-union websites look like that and say the same things. They’re very carefully phrased to sound scary.” Wagner is hopeful that Miami is aware of the support for the union. She does not believe that the school would do some of the more aggressive things that companies like Amazon have done, such as having a worker arrested for delivering food to other employees on Amazon’s property. It is her hope that the union will be able to have a positive, collaborative relationship with the administration. However, this does not eliminate the similarities in messaging, especially when combined with the other ways in which the school resembles a corporation. Whether it be through anti-union propaganda, staff cuts, or even consistent declines in food quality and availability, corporate culture and the prioritization of profit is hurting Miami University.  As a proud Miami student, I hope this approach will change.