Criticizing And Reconstructing The Theory Of Academic Captalism

There exists a prevalent viewpoint in the field of higher education, which is state’s cutting higher education budget worldwide. Constrained by limited resources, higher education institutions begin to engender revenue from patenting, tuition, university-industry partnerships, spinoff companies, and so forth. Higher education institutions seem like commercial organizations while academics become state-subsidized entrepreneurs. Slaughter and Rhoades call those activities as academic capitalism. However, other studies show that money is not the only purpose of entrepreneurial activities. The contact and exchange between higher education and society may bring benefits to education, research and social wellbeing. Given those different views and results, this research aims to criticize and reconstruct the theory of academic capitalism.For achieving the aim above, this research explores three questions:1) What is the driven forces under the phenomena of academic capitalism? Is it because of the external environment change, especially, the cutting of higher education budget?2) What is the result or effect of academic capitalism? How to balance academic values and managerial values? And3) What is future of higher education? Does academic capitalism represent for it?The methods of this research are historical and comparative approaches. The historical approach aims to set academic capitalism in a broader background of history of higher education, science and scholarship. This approach enlightens us the very meaning of higher education, science and scholarship. Based on those understandings, we may get a more proper evaluation of academic capitalism. The comparative approach here is to use Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and National Texation Revenue as a reference; then, to compare them with state’s higher education bugdge; and to compare their growth rate with the one of higher education institution’s expenditure.The results of this research are:1) The driven forces of academic capitalism are various, not just revenuc generation. The essence of slaughter’s academic capitalism is resource seeking. The key reason is not state’s cutting of higher education budget but the exponential growth of knowledge, which leads to the exponential growth rate of higher education institution’s demand of resource. In contrast, the growth rate of GDP and national taxation revenue is much slower than the one of institution’s demand of resource. Thas fact makes the state by itself cannot maintain higher education system. And institutions have to engender extra revenue as well as income from state.2) If we refer to GDP and national taxation revenue, we will find that state maintains a relative stable support to higher education. The descending of state share in institutional revenue can be explained by two facts:first, state’s higher education budget to a great extent influenced by national economy. Second, growth rate of developed countries’economy is much slower than the one of institutional demand on resource.3) There are benefits and costs for higher education institutions while they pursue academic capitalism. It stands for the future of higher education. However, it might be more reasonable to substitute "institutional extra revenue generation" for "academic capitalism. During the process of revenue generation, we need to establish a system of counterbalance, which consists of academic culture, free-market mechanism, policy on conflicts of interest, and the respect towards individual values.4) The exponential growth of knowledge will lead higher education to undergo a revolution in the near future, which includes organization, teaching, learning, and diploma.