Wesley Shumar

Shumarw@drexel.edu

Paper given at the Higher Education Close Up 2 Conference, Lancaster University, Lancaster UK, July 2001

In this paper I reflect on my current work with two movements in higher education. I have been working as an ethnographic evaluator for The Math Forum (http://forum.swarthmore.edu), a former NSF-funded internet resource center supporting math education on the web and a group that is attempting to leverage the new information technologies (IT) to build a virtual community of teachers, students, hobbyists, and mathematicians who share a common interest in math education. Because of my work with the forum I have been very involved in the work around the use of IT in education including distance education and the commercialization of educational products.

The second movement I have been involved with is service learning. Service learning is a movement in the United States that draws heavily on the progressive educational ideas of John Dewey and is oriented toward "learning by doing". The sociology major in my department defines itself as a "service learning" program and I have been responsible for the last two years for two central service learning courses in the program. In these courses we send students out into the community to work with community organizations on programs that serve people. Students then return to class and reflect on those experiences through the literature that they are reading and the classroom lectures. It is a format that allows for the merging of theory and practice as well as giving students a more active role in the learning process.

These social movements in education in the United States, the IT revolution and service learning, have a significant discursive component where adherents and detractors air everything from practical problems to larger theoretical concerns. Each of these social movements is a utopian response to the current (and very instrumental) orientation of American higher education. They hope to bring new life meaning and excitement to the educational process that is becoming increasingly marketized. As such these movements produce what Bernstein (1996) would refer to as prospective social identities. This paper explores these utopian visions tying this "universe of consciousness" to the macro-economic changes in American capitalism commonly referred to as globalization and transnationalism. I suggest that the pressures upon the state and state institutions coming from the contradictions of the current arrangement of global capitalism have produced two types of legitimacy crisis in higher education. The first goes to the meaning and purpose of education. The second is a deeper challenge of how to pay for the production of new knowledge and indeed what institutions will control the production of new knowledge. Service learning and the movement around IT are two ways the legitimacy crises in higher education are being addressed.

While each of these social movements hopes to address the crises of American higher education, there are also dystopian influences as well. Each discourse has its dark side as IT is thought of as a way to further promote the commodification of the university and Service Learning is imagined as a way to fill in the gap in social services no longer provided for by the state. The counter forces show us that the struggle to produce a progressive vision that might rescue American higher education is one that is deeply conflicted. The paper will explore some of the implications of these conflicts as well.

While I don't want to suggest there is some list of essential functions of the university in American society, I would suggest a Bourdieuian framework that would allow us to talk about social actors and their strategies within a system of social constraints. Bourdieu's (1988) notion of the social field is an interesting and complex one, but it has value in that it allows us to imagine a complex overlapping social space that never the less has an identifiable structure which can be explored. Universities have several claims to their central role in modern society and the ways that they are central to the reproduction of that society. The first two have to do with knowledge. Knowledge is something that is accumulated at universities and so they have for a long time been the central archives of our civilization. The research library is often seen as one of the key facilities of modern universities as well as other parts of the university that collect information, research labs, computer centers, etc. The other knowledge arena in the university is the generation of new knowledge that takes place through social interaction. In discussions, lectures, informal chats, and solitary work, university faculty and student critically engage with what has been known and generates new ideas makes new discoveries. This process of knowledge generation is not instrumental but involves critical thinking skills that are not easily transmitted but are inculcated in the students as the sleep, eat, and breathe the work with their professors. The last two claims the university makes about its central role are related to the generation of new knowledge and the necessary critical thinking skills for that task. They are the socialization of youth and the bestowing of credentials that are the legitimate mark of expertise in a professional society. These last two activities are normalizing activities and as such are involved also in the political dimension of knowledge productions. Power operates through the university fields to constrain who gets to produce or control the production of knowledge which effectively determines what is official knowledge and what is illegitimate (Apple 1993).

While there is a great deal that can be said about the power relations within the university fields and the symbolic violence that goes on therein, to use Bourdieu's phrase, my immediate concern is the way the economic is overrunning other arenas of social life and the commodification and marketization (Fairclough 1997) processes going on in higher education and their long term consequences. The pressures of the marketplace are having a dramatic effect on the knowledge generating activities and the normalizing activities within universities. These effects are producing their own contradictions that threaten the institutions of higher education in fundamental ways. Those threats then in tern have generated a series of responses from different groups within the university. I'd like to sketch out how I see these forces playing out and then talk about two social movements I have been involved in that are specific responses the contradictions of contemporary American higher education.

My earlier work College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Education, attempted to locate the commercializing pressures on higher education that Slaughter and Leslie (1997) call "Academic Capitalism" in an overall set of changes in capitalism that many were calling Post Fordism, (Harvey 1989), postmodernity, (Smart 1993 Jameson 1997) and more recently globalization (Waters 1995, Aglietta 1998, Sklair 1991).

To reduce this argument to a skeleton for the current discussion, the successful run of capitalism in the post World War 2 period had reached a stage of stagnation and breakdown by the late 1960 and early 1970s. This crisis according to Aglietta is due to capitalism's inevitable unstable and contradictory nature. In A Theory of Capitalist Regulation Michel Aglietta (1979) argues that capitalism is never laissez-faire as the neo-liberals would have it, but only flourishes when there are a complex arrangement of institutional regulations that contain the contradictions of capitalism to allow for accumulation to occur and benefit a large number of constituents. Such was the case in the Fordist/Keynesian system of the postwar. But even a system of regulation will eventually begin to come unraveled.

David Harvey (1989) and Susan Strange point out that by he late 1960's there was a classic crisis of overproduction in global capitalism with many nations saturating their domestic markets and then attempting to dump their excess production on the global market. The inability to increase economic growth in this way led to the deregulation of financial markets and the dramatic expansion of financial capitalism we are currently in. Fredric Jameson, (1997), citing Braudel and Arrighi points out that the cyclical nature of capitalism is such that the contradiction of overproduction will lead to a stage of financial expansion at the end of a successful run of capitalist expansion.

For Jameson, what makes this period distinct is that there has been a significant development of information technologies at the moment of the financial expansion of this run of capitalism has occurred. This information revolution has allowed for very dramatic movement of finance and other information. These postmodern conditions have intensified the current phase of finance capitalism because financial products and cultural products have become a new "deterritorialized" "desubstantialized" set of commodities.

This new phase of finance capitalism has produced a certain amnesia. We now think we are beyond the contradictions of capitalism and what has been opened up is an era of stable economic growth without intervention. While Aglietta and others point to the global indicators of instability and the need to find new social values to contain the economy, many neo-liberals are imagining that they were right all along and the economy can operate according to laissez-faire principles. Accordingly there has been an increased suspicion of state and public spending and a corresponding increased faith in the ability of the market to solve social problems. Fred Block, in The Vampire State has suggested that the reigning metaphor in the United States is money=blood. The free circulation of finance capital is essential to the health of the social body. This set of metaphors means that the state is a vampire and any state spending is detrimental to the health of the society. It is precisely the inefficiency of the state and its slow and bureaucratic response to all circumstances that have fueled the notion of the market as a more efficient solution to social problem and social needs. Whether we are talking about health care, education, cultural institutions like museums and libraries, the market has been seen as a more rational and efficient way to deliver these services.

Of course there are two problems with this thinking. First, capitalism during periods of expansion is intoxicating. The dizzying rapid movement of the economy creates the euphoric sense that anything can be achieved-it's a sort of social opium. This high is only brought into perspective when the run of expansion is over and the recession begins. As the current expansion has be more global the coming recession promises to be equally dramatic. The second issue, and the one closer to our concerns in this paper, is that there is an assumption that the forms of culture, in this case education, brought about by the market are the ones we want. This is a tricky notion, it assumes that there is no manipulation in the market and that the market is just giving us what we want. I submit that like a binge of chocolates, one eventually realizes that sometimes the choices one makes are not what one wants or needs.

To return to the main point the neo-liberal attitude toward the state and the market coupled with the crisis of capital accumulation in the 1970's and 1980's has led to declines in state spending in higher education. The loss of those sources of income has directly led to the commodification of higher education the subject matter of my earlier book. Currently, I would characterize the crisis in higher education as multidimensional. There are still the forces that are driving universities to market to more students to increase tuition revenues. Also as Slaughter and Leslie maintain, the emphasis today is on applied research that can be turned into a marketable commodity. This is true even in the social sciences as we turn away from basic research and look for ways to make ourselves more "sustainable".

It is at this juncture that I would like to turn to Randall Collins work to think about credentials. Collins (1979) raises two important points about the nature of credentials and their role in the rise of the new professional class. First the credential is a sign. The semiotic aspects of the credential are necessary in its legitimacy conferring function it provides for the professional. But that sign nature in a capitalist system leads to two effects itself, the reification of social knowledge and the raising of the importance of appearance over substance. In other words the credential itself is like the commodity in Marx's description of the commodity fetish. Second, because credentials are signs, reified fetishized tokens in a token economy, they are subject to inflation especially as the economy of credentialism heats up.

It is these facts about credentials, and the context of globalization of the 1980's and 1990's, that has led to what I would call a legitimacy crisis in higher education. As state funding has declined and universities have sought more paying students, credentials have become inflated. As colleges compete for students, grant money, corporate partnerships, appearance becomes much more important than substance. One way these financial pressure have influenced they way universities are run directly is that it has made college presidents glorified fund-raisers. They spend more of their time traveling, meeting with business leaders, venture capitalist etc. Other portions of the administration have been equally influenced, in the 1980's several articles in the Chronicle and the popular press pointed to the increasing power of the admissions office as it become more of a marketing department. Overall, university administration has become structured more like a business and the culture of business has replaced the administrative culture of the older public service institution (Shumar 1997).

The above set of structural contradictions, from the macro-structural shifts in the current run of capitalism and the neo-liberal ideologies that have been engendered, to the shifts in higher education finance and the accompanying cultural shifts, have each in their way helped lead to the new ways universities are strategizing about knowledge. From the Reagan administration to the present, one of the changes is to shift the production of new knowledge from basic research concerns to those research concerns that have a practical and market outlet. Knowledge increasingly here becomes a commodity and as Bernstein (1996:87) point out one that is completely severed from those who produce it.

On the other hand, many of our colleges and universities in the U.S. are not "Research I" universities and therefore are more in the business of disseminating knowledge rather than producing it. Many of the new administrators in these universities, influenced by the culture of business, have realized that the knowledge economy has opened fissures for new loci of credentialism even if not actually realized yet. Many see the web and the Internet university as a panacea bringing in new "customers" and eliminating unnecessary "faculty laborers". This perspective involves a reified view of knowledge as product that fits well with the fetishized worldview of the business culture. From this perspective knowledge becomes information and the issue increasingly becomes how to package that information into more product wrappers to sell more of it to a buying public. We'll return to this theme below.

In Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, Basil Bernstein suggests that the globalization of capitalism is pressuring toward new forms of pedagogic practice. He certainly sees these practices as part of learning institutions but Bernstein also sees the idea of pedagogic practice broadly within society to any "social context through which cultural reproduction-production takes place" (Bernstein 1996: 17). Bernstein argues that the shifts in pedagogic practice involve new relations of power and control that pressure for new institutional structures and the disembedding of identities allowing for new kinds of identity formation to emerge, specifically what he calls decentered, retrospective and projective identities. Loosely the decentered identities are a product of commodification and involve the commodification of the self, retrospective identities are nostalgic for a past with strong foundations, and prospective identities are identified with new social movements seeking new ways to create solidarity.

Bernstein's model is quite complex and involves a very careful mapping out of how relations of power and control influence institutional structure, the forms of discourse and the identities that group out of the institutionally based pedagogic practices and forms of communication. While I would not wholly support Bernstein's tendency to map strict models of institutional structure and strict rules of interaction, his careful working out of how ideologies are produced through interaction and not a given static piece of culture is in my mind very valuable. Further he helps to illuminate how consciousness is related to the institutional structures we inhabit and the larger political economy. It is in the spirit of Bernstein's work that I would like to suggest that the celebration of the Internet and service learning, two areas I have been involved in, are new social movements in universities, new pedagogical practices that are the product of the above discussed shifts in global capitalism and its impact on the university. As such they have strong interest groups, with the Internet and the Web tending toward the discourse of the decentered identities and service learning toward the prospective identities. But there are other voices that envision these social movements differently and so they are contested terrains. Further these discourses are utopian in that they imagine a future that is better than the one we already inhabit.

My work with the Web began when I was asked to be an ethnographic evaluator for the Math Forum, http://mathforum.com, an Internet resource center for math education. One of the Math Forum's central goals has been the development of a community of users whose common interest are math education and the improvement mathematical teaching primarily at the k-12 level. The Math Forum began as the Geometry Forum before the Web existed and saw as one of its key goals trying to present geometry over the Internet, a by no means simple task. One of the Forum's key activities was having a role in the development and implementation of geometer's sketchpad to achieve the above-mentioned goal. With the development of the Web the Forum grew into the Math Forum and its mission and staff expanded as well.

Beginning as a small staff that new each other well and one made up of creative individuals who fostered innovation and self-development the Forum is a very original and bold-thinking group. The office grew from one room to a small building on the campus of Swarthmore College and from 2 people to about 20 individual some who tele-commute and others who work on site. People dress in running clothes, bare feet, tee shirts or more traditional office wear. A high level of idiosyncratic individual behavior is not only tolerated but also supported as long as it doesn't interfere with others. It's important to give some of these more ethnographic details about the staff because these details reflect an important set of larger norms. The Forum expects members of the staff to take charge of some aspect of the work they do. More than that it is hoped that people will develop new areas of work and try to make their vision come to some fruition. All the Math Forum projects that currently exist are the product of a staff member's dream which was then realized by that staff member and the support of others on the staff who joined the effort. Innovation, risk taking and collaboration are key values that have grown into a culture at the Forum. These values are supported by a set of norms which allow people as much room as possible to be creative and innovative self-starters. The staff itself is a model of the process of creating an environment for people to develop interests and from those interests dreams are born. People then creative use or develop resources and take risks to see those dreams come to some maturity. This is the story of the POW's, Dr. Math and many other services of the Forum.

The above mentioned projects that staff members develop are all part of the central goal of the Math Forum. That goal is to support mathematics education by fostering mathematical thinking and mathematical interaction and to attempt to look at the ways technology can make a difference in these processes. As such the Forum staff see themselves as both offering a vision of internet communication and the possibility for a form of community as well as being a conduit to connect people, store resources and make those resources readily available to others. It has been a part of the Forum culture from its inception that community is an important part of the communication process. Further, the way to foster better mathematical interactions and offer better math content is to be part of a community where individuals have a stake in learning together and sharing their skills and ideas with each other. So the Forum staff has been taking their cultural goal of creating an environment conducive to good creative work and trying to make a larger Internet community part of that process with them.

The Math Forum staff then has a progressive vision of education, they are very much focused on a inquiry-based and process oriented teaching and learning of mathematics while at the same time they are very concerned to support good math content on the web. The Forum is constantly cited by professional organization and the popular press as having some of the best math content on the web. The Forum see the space/time compression inherent in web interactions couple with the potential generalized reciprocity that a large data base creates as the key things that a web based organization can add to math education. As such their utopian vision is complement existing math teaching and to add more to the lives of students and teacher than they already have.

The Forum however exists in a larger political economic context. Ironically in the last few weeks the Math Forum has become part of my own university. The three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that the Forum got had several goals. First, the NSF is very interested in how to reproduce the Forum. They see the Math Forum as an exemplar of Internet site that has good educational content and is able to do inquiry-based education. Some folks at NSF were hoping that they could figure out what makes the Forum the Forum and then reproduce the model. The other big interest of NSF is making the Forum "sustainable" and this was part of the funding requirements that the Forum seek ways of becoming an independent organization not dependent on grant monies. Sustainable is a code word here, commonly used in Internet organizations with slightly nuanced and different meanings in different contexts. In this context it means that the Forum should be able to be financially solvent by somehow developing independent revenue streams-in other words, become a business.

Slaughter and Leslie show in Academic Capitalism that there were national pressures to push institutions of higher education toward commodity production and one of those organization was the NSF. The NSF used to support much more basic or "curiosity driven" research, but now there is a greater emphasis on funding applied research that can generate profit. While the Math Forum is not biotech or engineering, clearly agents at the NSF saw this organization as potentially have a way of providing quality education and being profitable at it so that the state does not have to support its growth or development.

To return to Bernstein's work, while the identities at the Forum are Prospective, those at the NSF are decentered. There was a gap in worldview of the two groups leaving the future of the Forum very much up in the air. A little over a year ago the NSF grant ran out and the Math Forum began a corporate partnership with WebCT. WebCT is a new dotcom company that was doing very well a year ago when people were intoxicated with the boom in the dotcom industry. It provides an online college course platform and is very similar to the more well known Blackboard. The Math Forum's goal was to continue to offer high quality services that are based on human learning interactions-even if technologically mediated. At the same time they know that they had to offer their corporate partner something that was of interest to the commodity speculator. The value the Math Forum had for a company like WebCT is its huge data base, a trace if you will, of a number of past pedagogic interactions, most between students and volunteers, or teachers which is of great interest to several corporations. This database of math problems, concepts, and questions and answers is considered one of the best on the Web for K-12 mathematics. WebCT saw in the content of this database digital commodities that they can leverage in some ways to either sell or sell advertising on the pages where they reside, or use the database to lure math professors and teachers to the WebCT platform through their notion of "learning communities". The Math Forum's hope through all of this was to keep human learning interactions alive alongside the commodified vision of forum products. WebCT seemed to share the Forum goal of a new Internet economy, where companies can make money but not necessarily compromise their larger social goals of community, learning, and free resources. They both dreamt of a utopian world where there is a new possibility beyond decentered and prospective identities, where the economic rationality in not in conflict where more humanistic social goals.

During the economic expansion of the last 2 years this seemed very possible. But boom led to bust and as the NASDAQ began to decline WebCT saw its revenues shrink and decide they had to concentrate on there core business. Contrary to what everyone, including myself, thought would be the problems working with a for profit company, the first big crisis the Math Forum faced was being spun off. In the new economy business deals and mergers are very short lived and the Math Forum was put on the market to be sold. WebCT gave the Math Forum six months of salaries and support, but at the end of the six-month period no buyer emerged. Finally WebCT laid off all the employees and began to make plans to close the Math Forum down. It was at that point that my own university, Drexel University, began to talk with representatives for the Math Forum and WebCT. After several weeks of negotiation Drexel bought a stripped down version of the Math Forum with a skeleton of their former staff.

Ironically, Drexel's interest in the Math Forum has to do with the same set of commodifying pressures on universities that led NSF to encourage the Math Forum to seek "sustainability" through the marketplace. As an up and coming technological university in the Philadelphia area, Drexel sees its future in being a leading research institution in the areas of information technology, biotechnology and medical technology. As a leader in online education and learning communities, the Math Forum is interesting to Drexel University, which seeks to stake out a leadership role in these areas. The question for the future will be what kinds of pressures the university is under and how will they envision the future of the Math Forum. What has made the Math Forum a success, is that it has been made up of a group of smart creative people who care about math and care about math education. They used the Internet to foster interactions between people and to enhance learning. As such the technology was never an end in itself nor a commodity. It remains to be seen if Drexel can continue that vision.

Service learning in the United States grew out of the progressive work of the 1960's and 1970's with the student democracy movement and the civil rights movement. It also has grown out of the long tradition of progressive education and the traditions of community service. In higher education there are several key organization where service learning is articulated. In administration there is an organization called campus compact. Most states have a campus compact and administrations from universities and colleges in that state are members. There is also an organization called the Invisible College (It has just changed its name to Educators for Community Engagement) which holds a national gathering each year. It is primarily an organization of faculty members doing service learning in their classes. University students can belong to the Campus Outreach Opportunity League (COOL) and the National Youth Leadership Council is an organization for k-12 education. There is also the National Society for Experiential Learning and a section of the American Association of Higher Education that focuses on service learning

My work with service learning has been more recent but no less deeply involved than my work with the Math Forum. If the Math Forum has a utopian dream of the role technology can play in enhancing human interactions; service learning is a funny kind of retrospective discourse masquerading as a prospective discourse. It speaks to a utopian past, the era of settlement house and elite volunteerism, an era that was progressive and attempts to resurrect that tradition to cope with the commodification of education today.

In An Aristocracy of Everyone, Benjamin Barber traces out these positions we have been describing in higher education. He too sees the commodification of higher education as courses are treated more like a commodity and students become consumers of that commodity. For Barber on of the results of that commodification process is the loss of meaning. If everything is about money, then you do need a good education to get a good job but that is just survival. Life has no meaning otherwise and in fact the social no longer exists. For Barber commodification is like fast food, it tastes good and one likes it but a steady diet is not nutritious.

Barber shows that the conservative response to this loss of meaning is a very traditional return to past which argues that what has been lost is a sense of common culture and knowledge. This loss should addressed by returning us to the great works of literature. A common historical curriculum and the emphasis of facts over process learning. The conservative response to the threat of a decentered world -introduced by the pressures to commodify education- is the truly retrospective identity. Further Barber argues this is the wrong response. In a word it replaces one fetishism with another. It replaces the fetishism of the commodity with a historical reification of knowledge. Such historical reifications, like all forms of fundamentalism are totalizing. Theirs is the only correct worldview, all other worldviews are at best less important and more often just wrong.

What Barber suggests instead is service learning. Where education at the university level is tied to ones relationship to a community and where the education and learning are in reciprocal relationship to giving service to that community. In this model, students learn to be good citizens, their volunteer efforts help those in need, and the things they learn are tied to real life needs and situations and not just in abstract textbooks. The issue of meaning is addressed by resisting commodification and making learning a living set of relationships that would be very difficult to commodify. And this work will help to revive the civil society, the only aspect of society that can truly address our social problems today. The neo liberal are right according the Barber, the state cannot meet all our needs, but they are wrong to put their trust in the market, because the market sell product irregardless of the real needs people have. It is only civil society that can know people needs and seek to meet them in a humanistic way.

In my department I have become one of the service learning advocates and I was for a while co-academic director of service learning for the university. While I think Barber is right about some of the claims he makes for service learning, I have found in practice there are many impediments to "real" relationships with community leaders and organizations. First, often much of what we have to offer is bounded by the structure of the university course. Our courses are ten weeks long and it is hard to invest in a community for ten weeks and then have it be over. Many of the community organizations in West Philadelphia where Drexel is located have a lot of need and in ten week things are just getting started. Further, because of pressures on the students it's hard to continue projects beyond the ten weeks.

I teach a sociology of education course and work with a literacy provider in the city. We have a regular relationship and so I am constantly sending students to tutor in this organization. Here we have overcome some of the problems of the ten-week term by having a stream of students continually providing literacy support. But is this what Barber has in mind? I think not and the reason I would say that is that there are larger structural forces that restrict our pedagogical practices. This literacy agency is not trying to empower citizens in the Freirian sense, it is trying to help people find minimum wage jobs and make it easier for corporations to use low skilled people in jobs they need filled. Right now with the job market tight, these corporations are supporting the efforts of literacy agencies. Further the state is leaning on the literacy agencies to facilitate welfare to work getting more people off the welfare roles quickly and without protest. In other words the literacy agency and my students and my class are all part of the new corporate and state agenda in the era of global capitalism. We are helping to discipline the new low end workforce making inculcating them into a work ethic and a particular form of literacy while encouraging us to see ourselves as doing progressive work. After all we aren't making the big corporate bucks. Bernstein is right we are engaged in the process of producing our own ideological positions and the ideologies that then come to define us. It reminds me of an earlier scholar who if he were alive today might say that ideology interpolates us as subjects.

While there is institutional resistance to service learning in a lot of schools there is also a lot of money and support for service learning. There has developed a service learning infrastructure especially under the support of the Clinton administration and the National Service Corporation. But these debates against and for service learning rarely deeply address the dramatic social changes that would be necessary for a truly democratic process to take place that would engage everyone. Further there is a larger question about the tendency to romanticize the past with a utopian imagination of community and whether it is the best way to resist the infiltration of the market. Is the image of community developed by service learning advocates another form of retrospective nostalgia for the past, for an era when people living in neighborhoods took care of each other and met there needs and had richer lives without the intervention of the State and the market? I suspect there is a good bit of this imagination among those in service learning. That is not to say that all comparisons with the past are suspect. It is possible to lose good things over time or learn from a past perspective or way of life.

I am left wondering from both of these experiences what is necessary to keep a utopian vision alive? And in a world where so many of our institutions are under commodifying pressure and where many of us, significantly intellectuals spend more of our time in these commercialized institutions how are we to change our consciousness around what we are doing and what our doing does. Ideology as Bernstein says is not content but process and we are living this process right now in Starbucks, Borders Books, and conference hotels. For the middle class this is their community. And what of the working class and neighborhood associations, will they lead the way in the development of civil society and its resistance to the market? At least in the U.S. there seems to be little hope of that.

Within service learning there is a powerful potential model for change, it is the university and community partnership. This model does not have to imagine a past where the community once met needs. Rather it looks to the future where professors in universities with the skills they have acquired and the resource of the university that they can marshal can become partners with local communities to build a better and stronger neighborhood for all who are part of that neighborhood. This vision reunites the production of knowledge with the producers and consumers of the knowledge. The members of the university community are also members of the local community in which their university is found. As such they can act as good neighbors to work with other community members and organizations to meet the needs of the people in that community.

But this vision will not be an easy one to make real. The overwhelming influence of the pressures of commodification is rapidly turning many American universities into what George Ritzer calls "cathedrals of consumption." The university is becoming both resort and shopping mall at the same moment with Marriott corporation providing dining and other hospitality services and Barnes and Noble creating temples out of bookstores that become the anchor in a mini-mall of university shopping. And this rapid transformation of the landscape parallels the transformation of the idea-scape where more and more knowledge is being seen as information that can be repackaged and sold in a variety of outlets. These commodifying forces are moving rapidly and rapidly changing infrastructure has the effect of limiting the consciousness of the people who inhabit these worlds. Already, American college students have trouble imagining a de-commodified university. The university they know is already the one that looks more like a shopping mall than a public institution. Reaching these students and encouraging them to become advocates for the local community is a large challenge.

Aglietta, Michel 1998 Capitalism at the turn of the century: regulation theory and the challenge of social change. New Left Review Nov-Dec 1998 i232 p41(5).

Barber, Benjamin R. 1992 An Aristocracy of Everyone: the Politics of Education and the Future of America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jameson, Fredric 1997 Culture and finance capital. Critical Inquiry Autumn 1997 v24 n1 p246(20).