The Crisis of Higher Education in Transnational Corporatism: David Mamet's Oleanna

Abstract

Since the world economy has been operating based upon the principal operative rule of globalization, the university especially in the advanced countries has rapidly become a transnational corporation. More specifically, in the consumerist culture of globalization, values such as global competitiveness and efficiency are highly advocated and the importance /role of the nation-state is decreasing sharply. Thus, the contemporary university is not a cultural and ideological center for the nation-state any more; instead, the university is a transnational corporation which seeks the global recruiting of excellent/affluent students and the global foundation of the university’s branch schools. For this purpose, the university eager to seek excellence, which implies that the university is now a corporation and students are now customers. The pursuit of excellence, however, causes many problems in the university. For example, since the excellence of the university is evaluated by the rankings of the university, the university is desperate to be ranked high on the lists of rankings although the ranking system is itself highly arbitrary given the condition that a slight change of weighting factors will affect the whole rankings. Another problem of the university’s excellence is that since only quantified measurement prevails in academia, faculties are desperate in securing their positions, courses and departments. In particular, the marginalization of the humanities and the social sciences are inevitable in the contemporary TNC university. In short, the TNC academia throws the whole higher education into a crisis rather than provides the excellent education for students. In Oleanna, David Mamet studies the crisis of the contemporary university education controlled by transnational corporatism through the interaction of the two characters—the untenured male professor and the radical female student—who are residents of academia. The main conflict between the two characters comes from the differences of their perspectives on the contemporary university. For the professor, the university is a corporation, therefore, he can just provide the agendaless/contentless education since his top priority is securing his position in academia. On the other hand, for the student, the university is still the center of culture and ideology for the nation-state; thus, the professor’s agendaless/ contentless education must be excluded in academia. However, it is the transnational corporatism in academia which is the real criminal for the agendaless/contentless education in the contemporary university.