This column explores the university, it’s problems and potential. More specifically we’ll be looking at the University of California, the biggest and baddest (and I mean bad in a literal sense) university in the world. We’ll be touching on very fundamental issues of governance and function of the university from a critical perspective. In subsequent columns we’ll explore who it is that rules the university, the ins and outs of university governance, we’ll look in detail at specific members of the UC Regents, issues of structural racism in higher education, and ask questions about the university’s roles in war, economic imperialism, consumer capitalism, neo-debt peonage, and other big topics. This first column is dedicated to a very, very basic question, however. What is the university?

The university is a meat grinder and you’re the meat. It’s a sorting and ranking machine. It’s a mechanism to ensure inequality. It’s training grounds for middle management. It’s finishing school for the next batches of Bill Gates and Richard Blums. The university is a factory and we lucky students are the product. We’re also consumers in in the shopping mall called college. It’s a laboratory for capitalism’s insatiable need for new technologies and gizmos. The university is a central part of the military-industrial-complex. It’s a servant to transnational corporations. It’s one of the largest employers in the state and it likes to bust unions. It’s a bureaucracy that pays its top functionaries six figure salaries. It’s a major land owner and developer. It’s a legitimator and arbiter of Truth (with a capital T). It’s a profoundly important institution within the wider power structure of this world. It’s also many things that contradict some of the above functions, and much more. And it’s where you and I are at for now, for better or worse, so learning about it is not only useful but a matter of responsibility.

Lest you had any doubts as to the prime function of the university let’s get this out of the way up front. Universities serve three masters above all: the state, corporations and the military. To the state the university provides an “educated” and indoctrinated population of privileged citizens as well as a constant stream of ideas, theories and histories that legitimate the reigning social order. To corporations the university renders a skilled workforce steeped in ideologies of market economics and free enterprise. It also produces valuable research in the physical and life sciences to create new products for market. Furthermore, the university produces research in the social sciences to create needs, demands and markets for these new products. Finally, to the military the university renders its scientific prowess as it does to no other master. Universities are constantly working under billions of dollars in contracts to produce next generation weapons systems. To put things bluntly, the university does not exist for you or I, but instead for these three masters.

The Constitution of California is quite clear about these functions, especially the university’s subservience to corporations. The UC’s precursor, the College of Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Arts was established by the state legislature in 1866. The school’s function is right there in its name: agriculture, mining and mechanical arts. The school was dedicated to advancing the practical needs of rapidly expanding extractive enterprises that were overtaking the state during the latter half of the 19th century. This was a period of imperialist conquest for the United States as it expanded west under a doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The UC was forged in a California much unlike our own: a California being tamed, tapped and trampled by miners and cattlemen, planters and railroads, all assortment of robber barons set on ripping wealth from the land by any means necessary. It was a wild western orgy of savage and primitive accumulation.

In 1868 the Organic Act established the UC and put these economic functions front and center for the new school. Furthermore this legislation militarized the university from day one requiring that: “all able-bodied male students of the University, whether pursuing full or partial courses in any college, or as students at large, shall receive instruction and discipline in military tactics.” The university was dominated by these needs for much of its early existence as the state of California became a massive plantation ringed by mountains mined for gold and other precious metals. UC helped “civilize” and “develop” these lands during a time of genocide for the Native American population of California. That many UC campuses are built on the sites of former Indian villages and burial grounds, including UCSB, indicates the link that UC had to this process of extermination. UCSB (and the airport) sits partially on the site of a former Chumash village.

By the early 20th Century the UC was becoming a powerful institution and California a powerful state. Reflecting the changing nature of the state’s economy the UC began to shift emphasis away from agriculture, mining and mechanical arts and put more emphasis on basic sciences, the humanities and social sciences. The first great shift within the university accompanied the World Wars. Demands for newer and more powerful weapons through research was a major windfall for UC. It was during this period, roughly the 1930s through 1950 that UC became a leading military-industrial corporation in its own right. UC took on research and management contracts from nearly every branch of the military, many arms manufacturing corporations, and most famously built the first atomic bombs for the US government. To this day UC manages the two nuclear weapons design labs that resulted from this original partnership. UC presently does over $150 million in research for branches of the military and another $5 billion roughly for the nuclear weapons labs under contract with the Department of Energy. Helping the state to make war is one of UC’s most central functions.

All through this period UC was an elitist institution that barred access to people of color through de-facto segregation. Women were also underrepresented as students and faculty, even though early on they were technically allowed to attend. Clauses stating the Regents would “determine the moral and educational qualification of applicants for admission” meant in effect that UC was closed to Latinos, blacks, and Asian Americans. Black residents of West Oakland could see the campanile of UC Berkeley from their front porches, but could only dream of standing under it some day as a student. A dream still much deferred given the UC’s student admission demographics. Although fees were initially much lower than they are now – indeed, for most of its history UC has been surprisingly affordable as fee hikes are a recent phenomenon – the cost of education was high enough to preclude most working class people from attending. It was not until the struggles of the 1950s, 60s and 70s that people of color and women opened UC up and made it a more democratic and accessible institution for all of us. Regardless, the university functioned then as it does now largely as a means of stratifying the population. Those who could afford the costs and possessed the privileges of white supremacy, patriarchy and class were ensured access to its halls and a degree conferring them with a worth in this world that would pave their ways to success. The university still more or less fulfills this function of creating and legitimating a class hierarchy in America.

The second major shift in terms of UC’s economic function is presently under way. If the first period of UC was characterized by research into extractive industries, the second into big science research for the military and industrial research for capital, this third period is more or less marked by the coming of bio-sciences and information technologies. It’s not that these areas of have replaced the older functional forms of knowledge production, but rather that they augment the original functions which remain important. This shift in the intellectual produce of the university is accompanied by a serious effort to privatize and corporatize the university. Privatization entails scaling back the public sector, out-sourcing service work, increasing the costs of education for students and cutting state/federal payments, and basically turning the university more or less into a para-statal corporation through which services and degrees are bought, and knowledge status and future success are paid for at market rates. Corporatization means that the most privileged user of the privatized university is the transnational corporation. Thus research is being further driven by corporate dollars and influence, students are more or less trained and channeled into employment with the likes of Chevron and Lockheed Martin, and university administrators are behaving as though they were running a fortune 500 firm instead of a school. Administrators pay is ballooning while that for the workers at the bottom is shrinking. Unions are targeted for eradication and curriculum is further standardized.

Sound bleak? It should if you care about the potential of the university as a more open and democratic space. Next issue we’ll focus on the (mostly) men who run the university, the UC Board of Regents. For parting words let’s end with a favorite chant at Regents’ meetings: Ruck the Feegents!