Egemonia

The Power Structure and Social Networks Governing the American Research University System


"There was a time not so long ago when any inquiry into the relations of our universities to social forces was regarded as improper. It was assumed that institutions higher learning operate in a realm of disinterested scholarship far above the play of social forces. It was assumed further that members of the boards of trustees, when they sit in conference on education policy, dissociate themselves from their interest as private citizens and become guardians of universal truth. Today no thoughtful student of education would support his view. Yet we have had very few scholarly studies of that uniquely American institution, the lay board of trustees, which links the university to society and generally has the final word on matters of large policy. Such studies are particularly necessary in an age like the present when the balance of social forces is undergoing profound change. Clearly the time has come for directing the attention of both educators and citizens to the question of the reconstruction of this institution. The inherited pattern, with its limitation of membership almost wholly to a small segment of the population obviously requires modification…"
- George S. Counts - 1947


Introduction

The continuing transformation of the modern American university system, with its trends toward increasingly technical educations, its focus on science and technology as economic and social tools, the growth of corporate and military funding in science and technology research, commercialization of university resources like new knowledge, the conception of the student body as a market of consumers; all of this and more is reducible to the subordination of the university as an institution to the needs of the traditional spheres of power in modern society.

Universities have always been the concerns of the powerful. Early American colleges were institutions of cultural and ideological power that specialized less in economic and technological advancements of knowledge, and more toward the creation of upper class cohesiveness and convention. The rise of the university in the late 19th century, along with the rise of modern science and technology as the main propellants of industrial production have led universities toward closer integration with the material economic concerns of the power system. The production of ideology and the polished upper class individual have not been especially important products of the university for nearly a century, but new knowledge (applied physical and organizational knowledge) and the endless production of technologies and new frontiers of expansion for the global economic system have only gained in importance.

Knowledge, and the knowledgeable person, the technocrat, scientist, capable worker, or entrepreneur, the things which the university has evolved to produce in ample amounts, are central to economic expansion, and military dominance in the modern world system. This fact is not static. The conventional spheres of power in the world system, economic might, military strength, and the ideologies that support them are more and more dependent on new kinds of knowledge and the people who use that knowledge toward the goal of greater wealth and power. As dependence on the universities' products grow in qualitative ways, beyond the central importance that presently exists, we should only expect to see a further subordination, and, for lack of a better word, incorporation of the university system and its key products into the current power structure for more critical and far reaching goals.

Given the purposes of the university, one of which is to create new knowledge, it is important to understand what kinds of knowledge universities are creating, for what ends, and why. What kinds of people and ideas are the nation's universities producing?

To help understand exactly what kinds of knowledge and for what purposes knowledge is increasingly being produced we need to understand the dynamics of the university as part of the larger social system in America. This requires that we understand how decisions are made regarding the resources and organization of the American university system. How are decisions regarding everything from budget cuts to faculty and staff workforce composition, and other decisions affecting the whole institutional system made?

One way of understanding the decision making process is to look closely at who it is that controls the positions of decision making power in the university. To look at the directors of the university system in America is to look at the center of the corporate and military-industrial power structure.

Therefore, this study is an introduction to a social group; the university directorate who hold the positions of power, and make the important choices that will affect the future of the university and everything it produces. The power structure, at the top of which they reside, is dependent on the university system's current products and future form. To discern what the university is becoming, and toward what ends it resources are to be put we need to first look at the men and women, the CEOs, generals, corporate directors, capitalists, politicians, and technology evangelists that are currently in control.

And, as George Counts wrote in 1947, because an equally profound transformation of higher education in America is, has been, and will continue to be upon us, it is important that we study the composition of university boards to understand who it is that exercises control over these amazing and indispensable institutions, no matter what our common goals will be.


Directorships and Direction

There are two meanings of the word 'direction' that need to be made clear from the start if we are to understand the directorate as a distinct social group within the power structure. Because this essay is concerned with power, specifically the power to determine the present and future of higher education in the United States, direction should be thought of as a position and an exercitation of power by individuals and the groups they represent over large units of labor, resources, and capital.

Legally integrated units of labor and capital are corporations in the strictest sense of the word. The modern business corporation has become synonymous with the everyday use of the word corporation primarily because it embodies the corporate form of organizing in its purest sense, but also because business corporations far outnumber the other varieties of legally incorporated power. A university is also a corporation in this strict sense, and its directors are the trustees, regents, or overseers.

Directorship as a position is one of great power. The many uses to which the title "director" is put can explain the position's importance in more detail. For instance, the director of a symphony, who stands above the sea of instruments to direct the tempo and exchange amongst many performers is in position to exercise control over the totality of a musical performance. A film director dictates a film's production to the degree they see fit, controlling action, camera angles, light, sound, and the suspension of reality itself to produce the desired cinematic effects resulting in a movie. But neither is in control of every detail. In fact, the direction they provide is usually more concerned with the integration of all parts smoothly and purposefully. Nonetheless, it is still a concentrated form of decision making power that affects the totality of the people, resources, and end goal.

Direction is by definition the power of the many, and the resources of the whole, put toward the purposes that the small elite of the directorate see fit. The director controls the actions and resources of the many, and is him or herself beholden to the direction and power of few others. The inverse of the directorate is the reality of power which most persons are familiar with; the subordinate worker, student, citizen, and soldier. Persons occupying these positions in the power structure more often take directions, orders, and receive the effects of decision making power exercised from above. The life sphere of the director on the other hand is quite different. It involves decision making on a daily basis that will change the course of history, decisions that will alter the lives of thousands, and decisions that will lead to entire concrete futures out of the realm of possibilities that is the present.

Direction as an exercise of power is part of the larger picture of a complex society composed of competing interests, struggling with one another, sometimes forging coalitions, sometimes striking and protesting, always working, lobbying, buying, selling, and scheming to attain the few tightly held positions of power, be they the chief executive office of the United States, the title 'chairman of the board' of the Ford Motor Company, or the 26 seats that make up the Regents of the University of California. To attain the offices and positions granted with the vast powers of direction it is necessary to have resources, connections, and a degree of power from the start. For these reasons, those who already have power are always more likely to maintain and win in contests for the positions of direction . In fact, the struggles over most directorates of public and private power are usually contentions between competing groups of elites and the affluent coalitions they bring together.



Direction of Universities

As it relates to institutions of higher education and scientific research, direction refers to the activities of the 'trustees' or 'regents', who are by definition members of the board of directors of the corporate entity known as the modern research university. Being a director of the university, the 'trustee', 'regent', or 'overseer' (the specific title given to members of university boards varies by institution) fulfills the same basic obligations as the director of any corporation, be it public or private, non-profit or for-profit.

Directors of American colleges and universities manage the institution's finances and treasury, make senior level executive and managerial appointments, decide and deal with the external relationships between the institution and governments, other universities, and the realm of business. University directors also decide upon most of the major internal policies which govern the school and its multitudes of subunits (campuses, centers, institutes, programs and laboratories). In short, the university director exercises control over the multitudes of resources and people who make up the modern university, organizing them, funding, and directing from above to achieve what is most often called in official documents the "University Master Plan" or "Long Range Plan".

University directors do not exercise anything remotely close to total control over the institution, especially concerning academic programs. Rather, the directors of higher education lead the institution from the macro level. But it is precisely these macro changes and decisions made by the directorate that when translated from immediate policy and pragmatism, into future realities, end up changing the most minute details of any institution.

Direction is always a process that incorporates and synthesizes the multiple visions of the directors into a coherent goal or future for the institution which they govern. It is a kind of idealizing into the future, and execution of the practical activities in the present to create that envisioned future. For example, the directors of a modern day transnational corporation might desire a world in which everyone consumes their product. In achieving this goal they will organize the body of the corporation, its employees, capital, and operations, into a design towards that end. The directors of a nation state, the president and ruling political coalition, might desire to maintain military preeminence over all other nations. To meet that goal the people and resources of the nation will be fashioned so that they can be mobilized to meet this decision from above. The same kind of practice of envisioning the desired future and directing it from positions of great power happens in all corporate entities including universities. Although this essay deals with the direction of higher education, the direction of all institutions and organizations at all levels should remain in question because the relations of power between the nation state, the corporation, the university, and the non-governmental organization remain inextricably interrelated.

The core questions of this study are concerned with the directors of the American research university: Who are they? What common attributes do they share as individuals? And what common biographical backgrounds do they have? To answer this question we need to look into the economic lives of these individuals, their interlocking positions of power, as well as their political activities, and in the process elucidate the wider social network that is the American power elite.

Implicitly it should follow that we ask; in what direction are universities evolving? What might be the end goal envisioned by the directors of our institutions of higher learning? This is not to simply repeat what they have said or written about the governance of the modern university, but rather to look at the directors as a cohesive group, what do they have in common?, and what might be in their interests regarding the future of higher education. Thus the two key questions: Who directs, and in what direction?

This essay incorporates fresh empirical data with the existing literature on modern universities to help determine who the directors of our nation's institutions of higher learning are, and to raise the long term questions about the direction and future of higher education in the United States. Toward what ends are our nation's institutions of higher learning being put? Who is shaping the university of tomorrow? What kinds of knowledge are we producing? These are urgent questions, because, as is, under the present system of university governance, the future of higher education will be determined for the most part by the directors.


Who Directs, and In What direction?

The directors of the modern research university system in the United States are on average; wealthy; also directors of large business corporations; often engaged in regional, state, and national politics through financial campaign contributions; usually serve on the boards of multiple non-profit public policy organizations, think tanks, and foreign policy groups; are board members of industry trade groups and industry lobbies and policy organizations; have backgrounds or current affiliations with federal and state government offices and commissions; make large philanthropic donations to charities, schools, and foundations; and are part of an elite social network that will hereafter be referred to as the university directorate.

The university directorate are part of a larger social network in the United States that has been identified as the power elite, or the upper class, but common to any name given to this social group, they remain a distinct portion of the American population that owns the majority of the nation's wealth, and exerts a vastly disproportionate share of power on virtually all aspects of everyday life. C. Wright Mills deemed this slender percentile of the population "the power elite," who can be;

"Conceived [of] as members of the top social stratum, as a set of groups whose members know one another, see one another socially and at business, and so, in making decisions, take one another into account." Furthering this explanation, Mills states, "The elite, according to this conception, feel themselves to be, and are felt by others to be, the inner circle of 'the upper social classes'. They form a more or less compact social and psychological entity; they have become self-conscious members of a social class."(1).

The core of Mills' thesis, which has only gained validity since it was first published is that power in the United States is not delegated in the democratic manner which is commonly professed. Decisions concerning national priorities, industrial planning, commerce, employment, healthcare, and specific to this study, higher education, are the results of negotiations between different constituencies and socio-economic classes, but by far, their exists a power elite with the wealth and organizational ability to shape the outcomes of issues more than any other segment or coalition of the larger population. In reality, decision making is the prerogative of the few, and it is through the finite positions of directorship that this power is wielded.

This concentrated power in business and politics would be of little value if the American elite existed as an atomized class with little common interest or conception of self. But there is an extraordinary degree of convention within the networks of the power elite on all manner of social issues. G. William Domhoff's studies on the power elite are some of the best works exploring the cohesive networks of the upper class in contemporary America. (2). Domhoff uses evidence of interlocking directorates, co-membership in civic and public policy organizations, common memberships in elite social clubs and institutions, as well as the elite schools from kindergarten to college that put the wealthiest of Americans in contact with one another at a young age. These contacts last a lifetime and constitute the foundations of the social psychology of the American power elite. The elite know one another through business, but also through recreation, education, and civic participation, they know one another as partners or peers, even rivals, and therefore constitute a social class set apart from the majority of America. Nevertheless, the most distinct aspects of the elite as a social class are not found in the institutions that form their social networks. What most clearly defines the elite as a social class is their ownership of the majority of the nation's wealth, and the immense decision making power they exercise on a daily basis as the directors of our corporations, universities, foundations, political parties, and the largest non-profits.

The ability of the power elite to literally make history by means of their hugely disproportionate strength in the political process is due in most part to the nature of the power system. Power, as Hanna Arendt defined it, is the aggregate of the people. (3) Power is what results from the coordinated action of the many when they mobilize and work with the material objects of economy, and society. The present power system is structured, however, by a decision making process whereby the directors, in competition and cooperation with one another, make decisions for the many. Decisions to mobilize large pools of labor, and resources are made not by the multitudes that act on these decisions, but rather by the few elites who reside in the positions of directorship.

Taking into account the levels of wealth inequality and the scale and impacts of decision making in global corporate capitalism, it is possible that in contemporary America, real power is concentrated in fewer hands than ever before. This ascendancy in the strength of the few over and in command of the power of the multitudes (directorship) is synonymous with corporate organization, capitalism, industrialism, and in its purest form, the military model of organization. The scope of power exercised by the directorate is far beyond any historical system, with the intentional and unintentional results of their decision making power affecting the most mundane aspects of every day life (work, education, ecology, climate, health) on a global scale.

As it relates to the university, power and organization are more difficult to muster, but no less in operation. The popular analogy of the university as a system of powerful feudal states warring with one another over resources certainly has a ring of truth, but much of the recent history of higher education is one of centralizing power and authority in the office of the President and the Board of Trustees as educational institutions become more important to institutions of economic, military, and ideological power.

Dependence on the university by business corporations and the military now necessitates clear and strong shared directorates between these respective organizations. Each is organized in concert with the others as much as possible. The power of university faculties in determining the structure and priorities of the institution is still a force, but the empowerment of the directors and administrators is clearly growing, as are the goals and priorities they associate with. This will in turn engender an empowerment of their allies within university faculties as the current workforces of these institutions transform.

However, to start at square one, to begin to make some sense of the changing university and its new purposes, the best starting point is to look at the individuals who now occupy the directorates of the expanded power structure that solidly includes the university system with the business world, and the agencies of military-industrial strength.



Past Studies on the Composition of University Boards and Trustees

Probably the best single study to look at trustees of American universities as a cohesive group is Hubert Beck's 1947 book "The Men Who Control Our Universities." (4) Beck's survey, a predecessor this study in many ways, collected data on the directors of the nation's 30 most prestigious universities including descriptions like; occupation, income, business offices and directorships, age, sex, residence, and other miscellaneous data suggesting a common social and economic orientation among these trustees. The total number of trustees for which data was gathered was a staggering 734 individual. Beck's conclusion, nearly identical this study's, is that the boards of the American research university system are primarily composed of the wealthiest strata, usually directors of one or more major business corporations, very few of whom hold advanced degrees in the arts or sciences, and fewer who have made their careers in academia. Under Beck's analysis, the US university system has been under the solid direction of the power elite since at least the mid point of the 20th century.

Beck's data on the occupational distributions of the trustees he surveyed shows that the vast majority are businessmen, bankers, financiers, and manufacturers. Table A-1, adapted from Beck, shows the percent of trustees with occupations as directors and senior level managers in business corporations.


Occupation % All Universities % Private % Public
Proprietors, Managers & Officials 47.4 51.5 39
Businessmen 41.5 47.4 29.4
Bankers & Financiers 15.4 18.4 9.1
Manufacturers 11.8 12.8 9.9
Professionals 49.2 47.5 52.7
Lawyers 23.6 17.1 36.9
Table A-1

Table A-2 adapted from Beck represents the interlocking directorates of his sample of 734 trustees from the 30 most prestigious US universities. According to Beck, approximately half of the four hundred largest corporations in America had at least one or more trustees on their board of directors or in their employ at the time of his study.

Type of Business Number of Business Orgs % of Business Orgs having 1 or more trustees on their board or as an executive officer # of major offices or directorships held by 734 university trustees
All 400 49 386
Financial 200 46 187
Commercial Banks 102 55 110
Public Utilities 96 52 104
Rail Roads 52 54 56
Power Companies 39 49 36
Communications 5 60 12
Other
Oil Companies 21 29 6
Steel Companies 10 60 9
Table A-2

The composition of university boards in 1947 is clearly dominated by members of corporate America. Beck also adds onto this structural evidence several sections on the gender, wealth, and age to give a more rounded picture of the university directorate. By his measurement, the trustees of the American university system of the middle of the 20th century were elder white wealthy men with extensive positions of power and ownership over the largest business corporations in the United States.

Other studies of the university directorate include Scott Nearing's collection of data from 143 large American colleges and universities published in 1917 as, "Who's Who Among College Trustees?" (5) Nearing's survey on the occupations of several thousand trustees led him to conclude that;

"The college and university boards are almost completely dominated by merchants, manufacturers, capitalists, corporation officials, bankers, doctors, lawyers, educators, and ministers." (Ibid)

Nearing put special emphasis on the first five - merchants, manufacturers, capitalist, corporate officials, and bankers - who accounted for nearly 4/5 of the university trustees he focused on. And while his conclusion is very familiar to Beck's survey, as well as the data collected in this study, by 1947 the numbers of clergy present on university boards had dropped precipitously, whereas today the number of clergy present on the top fifty research university boards of directors can be counted on one hand.

This rise of Businessmen and fall of clergy in the compositions of university boards was charted over the seven decade period from 1860 to 1930 by Earl McGrath in a study published in the Educational Record. (6) According to McGrath's numbers, the percentage of trustees who were clergymen in 1860 was 39%. By 1930 this majority share had fallen to 7%. Concomitantly, the percentage of trustees who were businessmen which was 23% in 1860 rose to 32% in 1930. The most drastic rise of any occupational category onto the boards of trustees for the American college system were bankers, who only represented 5% of the board memberships in 1860, but came to occupy 20% by 1930. McGrath observed that in 1930 no trustee was classified as a laborer or mechanic, and only a few in any decade were engineers or housewives. In conclusion, McGrath states;

"In so far as the institutions selected represent other similar institutions, the control of higher education in America, both public and private, has been placed in the hands of a small group of the population, namely financiers and businessmen." (Ibid)



The Corporation and the University: Interlocking Directorates and the Decision Making Process

Surveying the similarities of the directorate of the nation's fifty largest research universities one cannot help but notice the strong representation of corporate interest, personified in the director, who sits on both the corporate board and the university board. It is common for professors and students alike to point out "corporate control" over universities through the interlocking directorates of university trustees and major corporations.

Disdain for the businessman's control over university operations was articulated early and with much force by Thorsten Veblen in his essay, "The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen." (7). It is equally common for this kind of commentary to be dismissed as irrational and wrong by trustees and administrators alike. No doubt Veblen's own perspective on the relations of business and the university was met with scorn by the proponents of the earlier version of the bureaucratic system he disdained. Not much in that respect has changed to this date. Few would argue, however, that the influence of business and the military-industrial enterprise are anything as muted and dilute in the modern research university than they were in the universities of Veblen's day.

Dereck Bok, the former president of Harvard dismisses the claim of corporate control over higher education saying that, "it is one thing to note the effects of the economy on academic institutions and quite another to imagine a plot on the part of business leaders to bend universities to their corporate purposes." (8). He admits that the influence of wealth and business on the university is great, but that the university remains a thoroughly independent and plural body. Bok believes that the cause of what he calls "commercialization" in the university is due to a more dynamic process emanating from multiple actors, and has as its engine the changing US economy that is becoming knowledge based and service oriented. For Bok, the notion that increasingly vocational educations, corporate funding and access to university science, and the larger shift of the university's resources toward specific expansionary economic goals is part of a whole social transformation in America with no specific groups organizing it, and no specific groups to profit from it. Bok points out that while the trend is clearly an emergence of economic goals to put the university's resources toward, there remain many participants and protagonists in the university pushing for this commercialization. They include professors, students (soon to be employees), and society at large, in addition to the business leaders that control the university boards.

Those opposing Bok's characterization of the power structure of the modern university counter that if instead of asking what do some faculty gain from the commercial university, what do some students gain, what do some segments of society gain, if we ask what do all of the power elite stand to gain as a social class from the commodified university, we will again be pressed to ask what is the motor of change in higher education? In Bok's analysis, the presence of any faculty members and students whose power and freedom might be expanded in the "commercialized" university is evidence against the claim that the university directorate, are the propelling force of commodification in science and education.

Bok remains firm that the commercialization of education is a diffuse phenomenon. Furthermore, he explains the ascendancy of the business elite on the university boards as a matter public service rather than the emergence of and solidification of class interests and expanding power into new social territories previously of little interest and importance to the power elite. For Bok, the corporate executives, lawyers, and wealthy investors who now reside on the boards of Harvard, the University of Texas, etc., are doing so out of a benign commitment to public service, and because they are the most competent to manage the university's complex finances and operations.

However, what Bok leaves unstated is that the interlocking structures of power in America that include corporate directorships, government office, and the military establishment, also include the directorates of the nation's research university system. If as most economist and social theorist now believe, the United States' economy is becoming more knowledge based, control over the university will become of even more concern to the power elite. The traditional spheres of great power, corporate business, state politics, and the military establishment are increasingly reliant on the national university system. Therefore the university's importance is only growing within the power structure. As part of this still emerging importance, the power elite of the three traditional spheres have quickly become the very same directorate of the fourth sphere of power, the research university system. This effectively guarantees a structural control over the kinds of knowledge and the kinds of students the university will produce.

But this debate about the motivations and causes of economic ends taking primacy over university resources is premature. First we would do well to determine, as matter of fact, who it is that occupies the positions of decision making power over the nation's university research system.


The University Directorate in 2004

As part of an effort to gain a picture of the present directorate of the national research university system, this study contains a database of the directors of the 50 largest universities in the United States. (9) The data was collected over a period of five months beginning in the fall of 2003. Major sources of information included official university web sites, university magazines and newspapers (including alumni publications, student papers, and public affairs/press releases). Information on the interlocking directorates of each individual was gained through several online databases including Forbes', and Hoovers', but much of the information was also collected from current biographies posted on corporate websites as well as reference materials like "Standard and Poor's Register: Directors and Executives 2003". Another rich source of information was found in the Bizjournal and its local affiliates, in both online and print editions. Literally tens of thousands of websites and documents were searched for information related to the board positions and executive jobs currently held by the university directorate.

Appendix A. contains a list of the directors of the fifty largest research universities in the nation. The universities are organized in rough order starting with the largest expenditures in dollars on research in the year 2001. Every individual on each university's board of directors is listed by name (in whatever order they were listed by the university's web site), with any present or immediate past positions of directorship or senior executive level position in a business corporation, law firm, or other for profit entity listed on the second line below. Past affiliations with corporations and businesses are on the second line in parenthesis, and the third line contains random biographical data on memberships and positions in government and civil society. For instance:

Director X
Current Corporate Affiliations

(Past Corporate Affiliations)

Random biographical information and memberships in non-profit organizations
The lists contains 1807 individuals who make up the core of the nation's research university directorate. This list represents the elite of the directorate of the nation's research university system, therefore, it also represents the nation's corporate, political, and military-industrial elite through interlocking positions of power, and the formal social networks that connect the decision makers through numerous other institutions.

These 1807 individuals direct the resources of 50 university systems, totaling at the very least 20.7 billion of dollars in scientific research in 2001. The endowments of these university systems account for a combined total well over $100 billion dollars. (10) Larger still are the investment funds of these universities that if combined would spill into the hundreds of billions of dollars range. The University of California alone invests approximately $54 billion dollars in hundreds of corporate stocks, mutual funds, capital funds, and indexes, all overseen by its directors. The University of Texas, which at the behest of its regents spun its investments into the first privately managed investment corporation for a public university (11), currently works with a liquidity of $14.8 billion under management.

In terms of the labor pools over which these 1807 individuals preside are millions of staff, hundreds of thousands of faculty, and hundreds of thousands of graduate students. This aggregate of people is for all intent and purpose, the core of the nation's scientific and scholarly community. Therefore broad changes that affect their workplaces and positions, affect the national intellectual landscape, and the nation's gross scientific and technological products.

Finally, there are the millions of students for whom the decisions of the university directorate affect everything from tuition and university access, to the range of possibilities and pursuits in higher education. This body or constituency of the university system that dwarfs all other placeholders represents the workforce of the future and the core mission of the university system.


Corporate Power and University Direction

In terms of corporate power over the university, there is no clearer possible proof than the interlocking directorates that bind these 1807 individuals to both universities and business corporations. Through interlocking positions of power, these 1807 university trustees, regents, and overseers, represent a minimum of 2887 different corporations, banks, law firms, and businesses. This amounts to 1.6 corporations for every university trustee. This massive representation of corporate officers and directors on the boards of the top 50 US research universities is a near model of the political economy that is the American power elite. Of the business entities represented, nearly every sector of the US economy is present, including banking and finance at the top, and industrial manufacturing, petroleum and energy, high technology, military-industrial and aerospace, mining, textiles, agriculture, food retail, media, transportation, communications, and real estate only to name a few.

Of the 2887 corporations represented there is clearly an elite of the elite. The best represented corporations are large US based multinationals, with multiple directors on the boards of multiple prestigious universities. Approximately half of the Fortune 500 (Fortune Magazine's ranking of the 500 largest US corporations) are represented on the boards of the top 50 research universities through their directors and executive officers. Of the 50 largest corporations in America, 41 have direct representation on the boards of the university directorate through their directors and executive officers.

Appendix B [excel file download] is a matrix illustrating the connections between the 2887 corporations represented, and the boards of the fifty largest research universities, through an interlocking directorate of one or more board members. Corporations are listed in order of their number of connections to universities, and then in alphabetical order. Column AZ shows the total of interlockers between individual corporations and all universities. Accordingly, there are 3543 different interlockers between all 2887 corporations and the 50 universities. Clearly, many corporations find representation through their directors on more than one university board. This is most often due to several different board members of a corporation holding seats on several different university boards, but there are also a few cases of especially powerful individuals with directorships in multiple corporations, and/or seats on the boards of multiple universities. For instance, individuals like Thomas Everhart, a trustee of Harvard and the California Institute of Technology who also serves on the boards of Agilent Technologies, Raytheon, General Motors Corp., Hewlett Packard, and Saint-Gobain Corporation among others, making him an exemplar conduit of power between and among both corporations and universities.

The top ranked corporations in terms of representation on one or more of the 50 university boards are JP Morgan Chase with 26, Goldman Sachs Group with 16, and the New York Stock Exchange with 11. AT&T, BCM Technologies, Bear Stearns Companies, Citigroup, Mercantile Bancshares Corporation, Motorola, and NASDAQ round out the top ten with 7 interlockers at one or more universities. The next eight corporations each hold 6 directorates in the university system, the next eleven holding 5 interlocking directorates, the next twenty-nine possessing 4 interlocking directorates, and finally, the next 62 corporations holding 3 interlocking positions of directorship. Table 1 simplifies this data below.

Number of Corporations (Rank(s)) Number of Interlocking Directorates with Universities
1 (1) 26
1 (2) 16
1 (3) 11
7 (4 - 10) 7
8 (11 - 18) 6
11 (19- 29) 5
30 (30 - 59) 4
63 (60 - 122) 3
262 (123 - 384) 2
2503 (385 - 2887) 1
Table 1


The Upper Echelons

The individuals who tie together the nation's most powerful corporations and the American research university system constitute a higher circle than even the majority of the university directorate can be said to belong to. The decision making power vested in these individuals is enormous by any measure. The level of inner-connectivity of the social networks which they form is also enormous. It is hard to draw the line on the highest circle of the university directorate, but for the purposes of this study, the line has been drawn at the 128 individuals from the original sample of 1807 who occupy positions on the 18 best represented corporations (ranked by total interlocking directorates with universities). These eighteen corporations from which the upper echelon has been sliced are those with 6 or more directors linking the business corporation to the university board. As of 2003/2004 they are:

1. JP Morgan Chase & Co.
2. Goldman Sachs
3. New York Stock Exchange
4. AT&T
5. BCM Technologies
6. Bear Stearns Companies Inc.
7. Citigroup
8. Mercantile Bancshares Corporation
9. Motorola
10. NASDAQ
11. Avery Dennison Corporation
12. Bank of America
13. Bank One Corporation
14. Baxter International
15. General Motors Corp.
16. IBM
17. Marathon Oil Corporation
18. Northern Trust Corporation

However, while drawing the line at the 18 corporations with six or more interlocking directorates to the university system, the 128 individuals who link these 18 corporations to the universities also occupy board positions at least 24 other corporations in the top 50 (these have fewer than 6 interlocking directorates with the university system). They are:

19. Agilent Technologies
20. Boeing Corp.
21. Boston Scientific Corporation
22. Exxon Mobil Corporation
23. Freddie Mac
24. Hewlett Packard
25. Ralston Purina Co.
26. Tribune Company
27. Verizon Communications
28. Morgan Stanley & Co.
29. Abbott Laboratories
30. Aon Inc.
31. BlackRock Inc.
32. Comcast Corporation
33. CSX Corporation
34. Delta Airlines
35. E.I. Du Pont de Nemours
36. Edison International
37. Estee Lauder Companies
38. Fannie Mae
39. H.J. Heinz Company
40. Hasbro Inc.
41. Henry Crown & Co.
42. Intel Corp.
43. Northern Trust Corporation

These best represented corporations are mostly fortune 500 firms with seven of the top ten representing the financial industry. The trustees who link these corporations to the university system are some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in the nation. Appendix C is a matrix delineating the connections between these 128 individuals through the corporations they control, the universities they govern, as well as a selected number of civic and governmental organizations they share memberships in. Among these civic and governmental organizations are groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, various think tanks and policy organizations, industry lobbies, foundations and NGOs, business school visitor boards, and government commissions and positions. These organizations have been selected to show an even greater level of connectivity among the university directorate than is evident in their interlocking directorates that control the corporate and university spheres of power. These non-governmental organizations have also been chosen because they once again demonstrate the directorate's decision making power through the positions of direction that they occupy.

Appendix D contains a comprehensive list of the best represented corporations, along with the names of the directors who connect them to a specific university. The list contains every corporation with three or more interlocking directorates with the university system.

When run through UCINET (12) using the affiliations command and mapping the results with Netdraw the matrix in Appendix C gives a visual representation of the inner-connectivity of the highest circles of the university directorate. These 128 individuals not only sit on the same corporate boards and govern the same universities as trustees and regents, but they also hold memberships and positions in some of the most powerful non-profit organizations in the country. Together, they constitute a cohesive social network bound through relationships on the boards of large business corporations, and through the power they wield as the directors of the nation's research university system. Concomitant with their interest, they form, serve, and exercise power through the influential and well financed non-governmental organizations to which they belong.

Another distinguishing attribute of these individuals, one that can be generalized to the wider 1807 individuals of the national university directorate, is their influence in regional, state, and national politics through campaign contributions. As persons of significant wealth, power, and prestige, they are involved in politics as a very fact of life. Their corporations depend on the access and policy which campaign contributions buy, and the social system on which their wealth is built and power enhanced further relies on a strong presence in all things political. Appendix E [Word Doc. download] contains a record of political contributions from the 128 individuals in the uppermost echelon of the university directorate. (13) Judging from the data, most of the university directorate makes contributions at all levels of politics, from local elections to the presidency of the United States. Indeed, many of the directorate are generous benefactors of state governors who in turn appoint them as regents if it is a board position on a state university they seek. In this respect the boards of the larger state schools are battlegrounds between the democratic and republican parties, between liberal and conservative ideology about what education should be, and how we should govern higher education.



Conclusion

Higher Education in the United States is undergoing a quickening period in its organization and purposive evolution. The trends discussed in the introduction - commodification, corporate and military dominance in scientific research, privatization of the university, etc., are increasingly important aspects that define the purposes of universities and higher education.

The individuals in positions of directorship, the people who will make decisions regarding the restructuring of higher education in America, and to act and react to the changing nature of higher education, are, for the most part a homogenous body. They are on average wealthy, directors of large business corporations, involved in regional and national politics as campaign financiers, members and directors of powerful non-governmental organizations, and members of an elite social network that is composed of the traditional spheres of power; corporate business, the military, and national politics.

The current trends in higher education stand to benefit this elite group more than any other subgroup within American society. Therefore it should come as no surprise that they occupy the majority of the board positions in the university system. Commodification, privatization, and access and control over knowledge production can only empower business corporations and the state branches which fund scientific research for specific purposes like profit and military power. Making a consumer market of the student body by further privatizing university plants and services will first and foremost benefit those in positions to profit. Guiding higher education toward technocratic ends, de-funding state systems and unprofitable excesses like fine arts and classical studies, raising tuition to decrease state subsidization of education, all of this and more, while it may benefit some segments of the university community, and while it may promise specific advantages over different models of university organization, most assuredly stands to benefit the socio-economic class that not coincidently happens to be firmly in control of the current and future direction of higher education.


1. Mills, C. Wright. "The Power Elite." Oxford University Press: 1956
2. Domhoff, G. Willaim. "Who Rules America?"
3. Arendt, Hanna. "On Violence."
4. Beck, Hubert P. "Men Who Control Our Universities." Kings Crown Press: 1947.
5. Nearing, Scott. "Who's Who Among College Trustees?" School and Society. VI 9/8/1917.
6. McGrath, Earl J. "The Control of Higher Education in America." Educational Record. XVII April 1936.
7. Veblen, Thorsten. "The Higher Education in America."
8. Bok, Dereck. "Universities in the Marketplace."
9. National Science Foundation. "Academic Research and Development Expenditures FY 2001: Table B-32. Total R&D expenditures at universities and colleges ranked by fiscal year 2001 total R&D expenditures: fiscal years 1994-2001." National Science Foundation: 2002 www.nsf.gov
10. NACUBO. "NACUBO Endowment Study 2003" National Association of College and University Business Officers: 2003. www.nacubo.org
11. UTWatch. "UTIMCO." http://www.utwatch.org/utimco/
12. Borgatti, S.P., Everett, M.G. and Freeman, L.C. 2002. Ucinet for Windows: Software for Social Network Analysis. Harvard: Analytic Technologies.
13. Open Secrets. http://www.opensecrets.org

Sunday Book Review - The New York Times
Published: May 14, 2006

Essay
The Deciders

By JOHN H. SUMMERS


"The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern."



The opening sentence of "The Power Elite," by C. Wright Mills, seems unremarkable, even bland. But when the book was first published 50 years ago last month, it exploded into a culture riddled with existential anxiety and political fear. Mills — a broad-shouldered, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia — argued that the "sociological key" to American uneasiness could be found not in the mysteries of the unconscious or in the battle against Communism, but in the over-organization of society. At the pinnacle of the government, the military and the corporations, a small group of men made the decisions that reverberated "into each and every cranny" of American life. "Insofar as national events are decided," Mills wrote, "the power elite are those who decide them."

His argument met with criticism from all sides. "I look forward to the time when Mr. Mills hands back his prophet's robes and settles down to being a sociologist again," Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in The New York Post. Adolf Berle, writing in the Book Review, said that while the book contained "an uncomfortable degree of truth," Mills presented "an angry cartoon, not a serious picture." Liberals could not believe a book about power in America said so little about the Supreme Court, while conservatives attacked it as leftist psychopathology ("sociological mumbo jumbo," Time said). The Soviets translated it in 1959, but decided it was pro-American. "Although Mills expresses a skeptical and critical attitude toward bourgeois liberalism and its society of power," said the introduction to the Russian translation, "his hopes and sympathies undoubtedly remain on its side."

Even so, "The Power Elite" found an eclectic audience at home and abroad. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara debated the book in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir published excerpts in their radical journal, Les Temps Modernes. In the United States, Mills received hundreds of letters from Protestant clergymen, professors and students, pacificists and soldiers. This note came from an Army private stationed in San Francisco: "I genuinely appreciate reading in print ideas I have thought about some time ago. At that time, they seemed to me so different that I didn't tell anyone." In the aftermath of the global riots of 1968, the C.I.A. identified Mills as one of the most influential New Left intellectuals in the world, though he had been dead for six years.

The historical value of "The Power Elite" seems assured. It was the first book to offer a serious model of power that accounted for the secretive agencies of national security. Mills saw the postideological "postmodern epoch" (as he would later call it) at its inception, and his book remains a founding text in the continuing demand for democratically responsible political leadership — a demand echoed and amplified across the decades in books like Christopher Lasch's "Revolt of the Elites" (1995), Kevin Phillips's "Wealth and Democracy" (2002), Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire" (2004) and Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas?" (2004).

Much of "The Power Elite" was a tough-talking polemic against the "romantic pluralism" embedded in the prevailing theory of American politics. The separation of powers in the Constitution, the story went, repelled the natural tendency of power to concentrate, while political parties and voluntary societies organized the clash of interests, laying the people's representatives open to the influence of public opinion. This "theory of balance" still applied to the "middle levels of power," Mills wrote. But the society it envisioned had been eclipsed.

For the first time in history, he argued, the territories of the United States made up a self-conscious mass society. If the economy had once been a multitude of locally or regionally rooted, (more or less) equal units of production, it now answered to the needs of a few hundred corporations. If the government had once been a patchwork of states held together by Congress, it now answered to the initiatives of a strong executive. If the military had once been a militia system resistant to the discipline of permanent training, it now consumed half the national budget, and seated its admirals and generals in the biggest office building in the world.

The "awesome means of power" enthroned upon these monopolies of production, administration and violence included the power to prevent issues and ideas from reaching Congress in the first place. Most Americans still believed the ebb and flow of public opinion guided political affairs. "But now we must recognize this description as a set of images out of a fairy tale," Mills wrote. "They are not adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works."

The small groups of men standing at the head of the three monopolies represented a new kind of elite, whose character and conduct mirrored the antidemocratic ethos of their institutions. The corporations recruited from the business schools, and conceived executive training programs that demanded strict conformity. The military selected generals and admirals from the service academies, and inculcated "the caste feeling" by segregating them from the associational life of the country. Less and less did local apprenticeships serve as a passport to the government's executive chambers. Of the appointees in the Eisenhower administration, Mills found that a record number had never stood for election at any level.

Above the apparent balance of powers, Mills said, "an intricate set of overlapping cliques" shared in "decisions having at least national consequences." Rather than operating in secret, the same kinds of men — who traded opinions in the same churches, clubs and schools — took turns in the same jobs. Mills pointed to the personnel traffic among the Pentagon, the White House and the corporations. The nation's three top policy positions — secretary of state, treasury and defense — were occupied by former corporate executives. The president was a general.

Mills could not answer many of the most important questions he raised. How did the power elite make its decisions? He did not know. Did its members cause their roles to be created, or step into roles already created? He could not say. Around what interests did they cohere? He asserted a "coincidence of interest" partially organized around "a permanent war establishment," but he did little more than assert it. Most of the time, he said, the power elite did not cohere at all. "This instituted elite is frequently in some tension: it comes together only on certain coinciding points and only on certain occasions of 'crisis.' " Although he urged his readers to scrutinize the commanding power of decision, his book did not scrutinize any decisions.

These ambiguities have kept "The Power Elite" vulnerable to the charge of conspiracy-mongering. In a recent essay in Playboy called "Who Rules America?" Arthur Schlesinger Jr. repeated his earlier skepticism about Mills's argument, calling it "a sophisticated version of the American nightmare." Alan Wolfe, in a 2000 afterword, pointed out that while Mills got much about the self-enriching ways of the corporate elite right, his vision of complacent American capitalism did not anticipate the competitive dynamics of our global economy. And of late we have seen that "occasions of crisis" do not necessarily serve to unify the generals with the politicians.

Yet "The Power Elite" abounds with questions that still trouble us today. Can a strong democracy coexist with the amoral ethos of corporate elites? And can public argument have democratic meaning in the age of national security? The trend in foreign affairs, Mills argued, was for a militarized executive branch to bypass the United Nations, while Congress was left with little more than the power to express "general confidence, or the lack of it." Policy tended to be announced as doctrine, which was then sold to the public via the media. Career diplomats in the State Department believed they could not truthfully report intelligence. Meanwhile official secrecy steadily expanded its reach. "For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end," Mills wrote in a sentence that remains as powerful and unsettling as it was 50 years ago. "Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own."

John H. Summers teaches intellectual history at Harvard. He is currently writing a biography of C. Wright Mills.

We are now in an America where it's a commonplace for our President, wearing a "jacket with ARMY printed over his heart and 'Commander in Chief' printed on his right front," to address vast assemblages of American troops on the virtues of bringing democracy to foreign lands at the point of a missile. As Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post puts it: "Increasingly, the president uses speeches to troops to praise American ideals and send a signal to other nations the administration is targeting for democratic change."

As it happens, the Bush administration has other, no less militarized ways of signaling "change" that are even blunter. We already have, for instance, hundreds and hundreds of military bases, large and small, spread around the world, but never enough, never deeply enough embedded in the former borderlands of the Soviet Union and the energy heartlands of our planet. The military budget soars; planning for high-tech weaponry for the near (and distant) future -- like the Common Aero Vehicle, a suborbital space capsule capable of delivering "conventional" munitions anywhere on the planet within 2 hours and due to come on line by 2010 -- is the normal order of business in Pentagonized Washington. War, in fact, is increasingly the American way of life and, to a certain extent, it's almost as if no one notices.

Well, not quite no one. Andrew J. Bacevich has written a book on militarism, American-style, of surpassing interest. Just published, The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War would be critical reading no matter who wrote it. But coming from Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, it has special resonance.

Bacevich, a self-professed conservative, has clearly been a man on a journey. He writes that he still situates himself "culturally on the right. And I continue to view the remedies proferred by mainstream liberalism with skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering foreign policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values. On this score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by the radical left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional liberals as well as the professional conservatives who define the problem."

I've long recommended Chalmers Johnson's book on American militarism and military-basing policy, The Sorrows of Empire. Bacevich's The New American Militarism, which focuses on the ways Americans have become enthralled by -- and found themselves in thrall to -- military power and the idea of global military supremacy, should be placed right beside it in any library. Below, you'll find the first of two long excerpts (slightly adapated) from the book, and posted with the kind permission of the author and of his publisher, Oxford University Press. This one offers Bacevitch's thoughts on the ways in which, since the Vietnam War, our country has been militarized, a process to which, as he writes, the events of September 11 only added momentum. On Friday, I'll post an excerpt on the second-generation neoconservatives and what they contributed to our new militarism.

Bacevich's book carefully lays out and analyzes the various influences that have fed into the creation and sustenance of the new American militarism over the last decades. It would have been easy enough to create a 4-part or 6-part Tomdispatch series from the book. Bacevich is, for instance, fascinating on evangelical Christianity (and its less than war-like earlier history) as well as on the ways in which the military, after the Vietnam debacle, rebuilt itself as a genuine imperial force, separated from the American people and with an ethos "more akin to that of the French Foreign Legion" -- a force prepared for war without end. But for that, and much else, you'll have to turn to the book itself. Tom


The Normalization of War

By Andrew J. Bacevich

At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamored with military might.

The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue. Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles. Indeed, one striking aspect of America's drift toward militarism has been the absence of dissent offered by any political figure of genuine stature.

For example, when Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, ran for the presidency in 2004, he framed his differences with George W. Bush's national security policies in terms of tactics rather than first principles. Kerry did not question the wisdom of styling the U.S. response to the events of 9/11 as a generations-long "global war on terror." It was not the prospect of open-ended war that drew Kerry's ire. It was rather the fact that the war had been "extraordinarily mismanaged and ineptly prosecuted." Kerry faulted Bush because, in his view, U.S. troops in Iraq lacked "the preparation and hardware they needed to fight as effectively as they could." Bush was expecting too few soldiers to do too much with too little. Declaring that "keeping our military strong and keeping our troops as safe as they can be should be our highest priority," Kerry promised if elected to fix these deficiencies. Americans could count on a President Kerry to expand the armed forces and to improve their ability to fight.

Yet on this score Kerry's circumspection was entirely predictable. It was the candidate's way of signaling that he was sound on defense and had no intention of departing from the prevailing national security consensus.

Under the terms of that consensus, mainstream politicians today take as a given that American military supremacy is an unqualified good, evidence of a larger American superiority. They see this armed might as the key to creating an international order that accommodates American values. One result of that consensus over the past quarter century has been to militarize U.S. policy and to encourage tendencies suggesting that American society itself is increasingly enamored with its self-image as the military power nonpareil


How Much Is Enough?

This new American militarism manifests itself in several different ways. It does so, first of all, in the scope, cost, and configuration of America's present-day military establishment.

Through the first two centuries of U.S. history, political leaders in Washington gauged the size and capabilities of America's armed services according to the security tasks immediately at hand. A grave and proximate threat to the nation's well-being might require a large and powerful military establishment. In the absence of such a threat, policymakers scaled down that establishment accordingly. With the passing of crisis, the army raised up for the crisis went immediately out of existence. This had been the case in 1865, in 1918, and in 1945.

Since the end of the Cold War, having come to value military power for its own sake, the United States has abandoned this principle and is committed as a matter of policy to maintaining military capabilities far in excess of those of any would-be adversary or combination of adversaries. This commitment finds both a qualitative and quantitative expression, with the U.S. military establishment dwarfing that of even America's closest ally. Thus, whereas the U.S. Navy maintains and operates a total of twelve large attack aircraft carriers, the once-vaunted [British] Royal Navy has none -- indeed, in all the battle fleets of the world there is no ship even remotely comparable to a Nimitz-class carrier, weighing in at some ninety-seven thousand tons fully loaded, longer than three football fields, cruising at a speed above thirty knots, and powered by nuclear reactors that give it an essentially infinite radius of action. Today, the U.S. Marine Corps possesses more attack aircraft than does the entire Royal Air Force -- and the United States has two other even larger "air forces," one an integral part of the Navy and the other officially designated as the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, in terms of numbers of men and women in uniform, the U.S. Marine Corps is half again as large as the entire British Army--and the Pentagon has a second, even larger "army" actually called the U.S. Army -- which in turn also operates its own "air force" of some five thousand aircraft.

All of these massive and redundant capabilities cost money. Notably, the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era. In 2002, American defense spending exceeded by a factor of twenty-five the combined defense budgets of the seven "rogue states" then comprising the roster of U.S. enemies.16 Indeed, by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.

Furthermore, in all likelihood, the gap in military spending between the United States and all other nations will expand further still in the years to come. Projected increases in the defense budget will boost Pentagon spending in real terms to a level higher than it was during the Reagan era. According to the Pentagon's announced long-range plans, by 2009 its budget will exceed the Cold War average by 23 percent -- despite the absence of anything remotely resembling a so-called peer competitor. However astonishing this fact might seem, it elicits little comment, either from political leaders or the press. It is simply taken for granted. The truth is that there no longer exists any meaningful context within which Americans might consider the question "How much is enough?"

On a day-to-day basis, what do these expensive forces exist to do? Simply put, for the Department of Defense and all of its constituent parts, defense per se figures as little more than an afterthought. The primary mission of America's far-flung military establishment is global power projection, a reality tacitly understood in all quarters of American society. To suggest that the U.S. military has become the world's police force may slightly overstate the case, but only slightly.

That well over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States continues to maintain bases and military forces in several dozens of countries -- by some counts well over a hundred in all -- rouses minimal controversy, despite the fact that many of these countries are perfectly capable of providing for their own security needs. That even apart from fighting wars and pursuing terrorists, U.S. forces are constantly prowling around the globe -- training, exercising, planning, and posturing -- elicits no more notice (and in some cases less) from the average American than the presence of a cop on a city street corner. Even before the Pentagon officially assigned itself the mission of "shaping" the international environment, members of the political elite, liberals and conservatives alike, had reached a common understanding that scattering U.S. troops around the globe to restrain, inspire, influence, persuade, or cajole paid dividends. Whether any correlation exists between this vast panoply of forward-deployed forces on the one hand and antipathy to the United States abroad on the other has remained for the most part a taboo subject.


The Quest for Military Dominion

The indisputable fact of global U.S. military preeminence also affects the collective mindset of the officer corps. For the armed services, dominance constitutes a baseline or a point of departure from which to scale the heights of ever greater military capabilities. Indeed, the services have come to view outright supremacy as merely adequate and any hesitation in efforts to increase the margin of supremacy as evidence of falling behind.

Thus, according to one typical study of the U.S. Navy's future, "sea supremacy beginning at our shore lines and extending outward to distant theaters is a necessary condition for the defense of the U.S." Of course, the U.S. Navy already possesses unquestioned global preeminence; the real point of the study is to argue for the urgency of radical enhancements to that preeminence. The officer-authors of this study express confidence that given sufficient money the Navy can achieve ever greater supremacy, enabling the Navy of the future to enjoy "overwhelming precision firepower," "pervasive surveillance," and "dominant control of a maneuvering area, whether sea, undersea, land, air, space or cyberspace." In this study and in virtually all others, political and strategic questions implicit in the proposition that supremacy in distant theaters forms a prerequisite of "defense" are left begging -- indeed, are probably unrecognized. At times, this quest for military dominion takes on galactic proportions. Acknowledging that the United States enjoys "superiority in many aspects of space capability," a senior defense official nonetheless complains that "we don't have space dominance and we don't have space supremacy." Since outer space is "the ultimate high ground," which the United States must control, he urges immediate action to correct this deficiency. When it comes to military power, mere superiority will not suffice.

The new American militarism also manifests itself through an increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of war. There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. troops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, however, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared. During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events. The brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just Cause (the overthrow of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military interventions. And that count does not include innumerable lesser actions such as Bill Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq throughout the late 1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen GIs dispatched to Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines. Altogether, the tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become nothing short of frenetic.

As this roster of incidents lengthened, Americans grew accustomed to -- perhaps even comfortable with -- reading in their morning newspapers the latest reports of U.S. soldiers responding to some crisis somewhere on the other side of the globe. As crisis became a seemingly permanent condition so too did war. The Bush administration has tacitly acknowledged as much in describing the global campaign against terror as a conflict likely to last decades and in promulgating -- and in Iraq implementing -- a doctrine of preventive war.

In former times American policymakers treated (or at least pretended to treat) the use of force as evidence that diplomacy had failed. In our own time they have concluded (in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney) that force "makes your diplomacy more effective going forward, dealing with other problems." Policymakers have increasingly come to see coercion as a sort of all-purpose tool. Among American war planners, the assumption has now taken root that whenever and wherever U.S. forces next engage in hostilities, it will be the result of the United States consciously choosing to launch a war. As President Bush has remarked, the big lesson of 9/11 was that "this country must go on the offense and stay on the offense." The American public's ready acceptance of the prospect of war without foreseeable end and of a policy that abandons even the pretense of the United States fighting defensively or viewing war as a last resort shows clearly how far the process of militarization has advanced.


The New Aesthetic of War

Reinforcing this heightened predilection for arms has been the appearance in recent years of a new aesthetic of war. This is the third indication of advancing militarism.

The old twentieth-century aesthetic of armed conflict as barbarism, brutality, ugliness, and sheer waste grew out of World War I, as depicted by writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and Robert Graves. World War II, Korea, and Vietnam reaffirmed that aesthetic, in the latter case with films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.

The intersection of art and war gave birth to two large truths. The first was that the modern battlefield was a slaughterhouse, and modern war an orgy of destruction that devoured guilty and innocent alike. The second, stemming from the first, was that military service was an inherently degrading experience and military institutions by their very nature repressive and inhumane. After 1914, only fascists dared to challenge these truths. Only fascists celebrated war and depicted armies as forward-looking -- expressions of national unity and collective purpose that paved the way for utopia. To be a genuine progressive, liberal in instinct, enlightened in sensibility, was to reject such notions as preposterous.

But by the turn of the twenty-first century, a new image of war had emerged, if not fully displacing the old one at least serving as a counterweight. To many observers, events of the 1990s suggested that war's very nature was undergoing a profound change. The era of mass armies, going back to the time of Napoleon, and of mechanized warfare, an offshoot of industrialization, was coming to an end. A new era of high-tech warfare, waged by highly skilled professionals equipped with "smart" weapons, had commenced. Describing the result inspired the creation of a new lexicon of military terms: war was becoming surgical, frictionless, postmodern, even abstract or virtual. It was "coercive diplomacy" -- the object of the exercise no longer to kill but to persuade. By the end of the twentieth century, Michael Ignatieff of Harvard University concluded, war had become "a spectacle." It had transformed itself into a kind of "spectator sport," one offering "the added thrill that it is real for someone, but not, happily, for the spectator." Even for the participants, fighting no longer implied the prospect of dying for some abstract cause, since the very notion of "sacrifice in battle had become implausible or ironic."

Combat in the information age promised to overturn all of "the hoary dictums about the fog and friction" that had traditionally made warfare such a chancy proposition. American commanders, affirmed General Tommy Franks, could expect to enjoy "the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods."

In short, by the dawn of the twenty-first century the reigning postulates of technology-as-panacea had knocked away much of the accumulated blood-rust sullying war's reputation. Thus reimagined -- and amidst widespread assurances that the United States could be expected to retain a monopoly on this new way of war -- armed conflict regained an aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the literary and artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military cataclysms were thought to have demolished once and for all. In the right circumstances, for the right cause, it now turned out, war could actually offer an attractive option--cost-effective, humane, even thrilling. Indeed, as the Anglo-American race to Baghdad conclusively demonstrated in the spring of 2003, in the eyes of many, war has once again become a grand pageant, performance art, or a perhaps temporary diversion from the ennui and boring routine of everyday life. As one observer noted with approval, "public enthusiasm for the whiz-bang technology of the U.S. military" had become "almost boyish." Reinforcing this enthusiasm was the expectation that the great majority of Americans could count on being able to enjoy this new type of war from a safe distance.


The Moral Superiority of the Soldier

This new aesthetic has contributed, in turn, to an appreciable boost in the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves, a fourth manifestation of the new American militarism.

Since the end of the Cold War, opinion polls surveying public attitudes toward national institutions have regularly ranked the armed services first. While confidence in the executive branch, the Congress, the media, and even organized religion is diminishing, confidence in the military continues to climb. Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Americans fearful that the rest of society may be teetering on the brink of moral collapse console themselves with the thought that the armed services remain a repository of traditional values and old fashioned virtue.

Confidence in the military has found further expression in a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America. The men and women of the armed services, gushed Newsweek in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, "looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their business with poise and élan." A writer for Rolling Stone reported after a more recent and extended immersion in military life that "the Army was not the awful thing that my [anti-military] father had imagined"; it was instead "the sort of America he always pictured when he explained… his best hopes for the country."

According to the old post-Vietnam-era political correctness, the armed services had been a refuge for louts and mediocrities who probably couldn't make it in the real world. By the turn of the twenty-first century a different view had taken hold. Now the United States military was "a place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybody… looked out for each other. A place where people -- intelligent, talented people -- said honestly that money wasn't what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings." Soldiers, it turned out, were not only more virtuous than the rest of us, but also more sensitive and even happier. Contemplating the GIs advancing on Baghdad in March 2003, the classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson saw something more than soldiers in battle. He ascertained "transcendence at work." According to Hanson, the armed services had "somehow distilled from the rest of us an elite cohort" in which virtues cherished by earlier generations of Americans continued to flourish.

Soldiers have tended to concur with this evaluation of their own moral superiority. In a 2003 survey of military personnel, "two-thirds [of those polled] said they think military members have higher moral standards than the nation they serve… Once in the military, many said, members are wrapped in a culture that values honor and morality." Such attitudes leave even some senior officers more than a little uncomfortable. Noting with regret that "the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve," retired admiral Stanley Arthur has expressed concern that "more and more, enlisted as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve." Such tendencies, concluded Arthur, are "not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy."

In public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become obligatory and the one unforgivable sin is to be found guilty of failing to "support the troops." In the realm of partisan politics, the political Right has shown considerable skill in exploiting this dynamic, shamelessly pandering to the military itself and by extension to those members of the public laboring under the misconception, a residue from Vietnam, that the armed services are under siege from a rabidly anti-military Left.

In fact, the Democratic mainstream -- if only to save itself from extinction -- has long since purged itself of any dovish inclinations. "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about," Madeleine Albright demanded of General Colin Powell, "if we can't use it?" As Albright's Question famously attests, when it comes to advocating the use of force, Democrats can be positively gung ho. Moreover, in comparison to their Republican counterparts, they are at least as deferential to military leaders and probably more reluctant to question claims of military expertise.

Even among Left-liberal activists, the reflexive anti-militarism of the 1960s has given way to a more nuanced view. Although hard-pressed to match self-aggrandizing conservative claims of being one with the troops, progressives have come to appreciate the potential for using the armed services to advance their own agenda. Do-gooders want to harness military power to their efforts to do good. Thus, the most persistent calls for U.S. intervention abroad to relieve the plight of the abused and persecuted come from the militant Left. In the present moment, writes Michael Ignatieff, "empire has become a precondition for democracy." Ignatieff, a prominent human rights advocate, summons the United States to "use imperial power to strengthen respect for self-determination [and] to give states back to abused, oppressed people who deserve to rule them for themselves."


The President as Warlord

Occasionally, albeit infrequently, the prospect of an upcoming military adventure still elicits opposition, even from a public grown accustomed to war. For example, during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, large-scale demonstrations against President Bush's planned intervention filled the streets of many American cities. The prospect of the United States launching a preventive war without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council produced the largest outpouring of public protest that the country had seen since the Vietnam War. Yet the response of the political classes to this phenomenon was essentially to ignore it. No politician of national stature offered himself or herself as the movement's champion. No would-be statesman nursing even the slightest prospects of winning high national office was willing to risk being tagged with not supporting those whom President Bush was ordering into harm's way. When the Congress took up the matter, Democrats who denounced George W. Bush's policies in every other respect dutifully authorized him to invade Iraq. For up-and-coming politicians, opposition to war had become something of a third rail: only the very brave or the very foolhardy dared to venture anywhere near it.

More recently still, this has culminated in George W. Bush styling himself as the nation's first full-fledged warrior-president. The staging of Bush's victory lap shortly after the conquest of Baghdad in the spring of 2003 -- the dramatic landing on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with the president decked out in the full regalia of a naval aviator emerging from the cockpit to bask in the adulation of the crew -- was lifted directly from the triumphant final scenes of the movie Top Gun, with the boyish George Bush standing in for the boyish Tom Cruise. For this nationally televised moment, Bush was not simply mingling with the troops; he had merged his identity with their own and made himself one of them -- the president as warlord. In short order, the marketplace ratified this effort; a toy manufacturer offered for $39.99 a Bush look-alike military action figure advertised as "Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush -- U.S. President and Naval Aviator."

Thus has the condition that worried C. Wright Mills in 1956 come to pass in our own day. "For the first time in the nation's history," Mills wrote, "men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency' without a foreseeable end." While in earlier times Americans had viewed history as "a peaceful continuum interrupted by war," today planning, preparing, and waging war has become "the normal state and seemingly permanent condition of the United States." And "the only accepted ‘plan' for peace is the loaded pistol."

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam veteran, he has a doctorate in history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is the author of several books, including the just published The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War.

Copyright 2005 Andrew J. Bacevich

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War, copyright © 2005 by Andrew J. Bacevich. Used by permission of the author and Oxford University Press, Inc.


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compiled and edited by Tom Engelhardt


about
Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt (bio), a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world and ourselves. The service is intended to introduce you to voices from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here) who might offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.

An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley.

There are two main causes of capitalist militarism. Firstly, there is the need to contain the domestic enemy - the oppressed and exploited sections of the population. The other, as noted in the section on imperialism, is that a strong military is necessary in order for a ruling class to pursue an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy. For most developed capitalist nations, this kind of foreign policy becomes more and more important because of economic forces, i.e. in order to provide outlets for its goods and to prevent the system from collapsing by expanding the market continually outward. This outward expansion of, and so competition between, capital needs military force to protect its interests (particularly those invested in other countries) and give it added clout in the economic jungle of the world market.

Capitalist militarism also serves several other purposes and has a number of effects. First, it promotes the development of a specially favoured group of companies involved in the production of armaments or armament related products ("defence" contractors), who have a direct interest in the maximum expansion of military production. Since this group is particularly wealthy, it exerts great pressure on government to pursue the type of state intervention and, often, the aggressive foreign policies it wants.

This "special relationship" between state and Big Business also has the advantage that it allows the ordinary citizen to pay for industrial Research and Development. Government subsidies provide an important way for companies to fund their research and development at taxpayer expense, which often yields "spin-offs" with great commercial potential as consumer products (e.g. computers). Needless to say, all the profits go to the defence contractors and to the commercial companies who buy licences to patented technologies from them, rather than being shared with the public which funded the R&D that made the profits possible.

It is necessary to provide some details to indicate the size and impact of military spending on the US economy:

"Since 1945. . . there have been new industries sparking investment and employment . . In most of them, basic research and technological progress were closely linked to the expanding military sector. The major innovation in the 1950s was electronics . . . [which] increased its output 15 percent per year. It was of critical importance in workplace automation, with the federal government providing the bulk of the research and development (R&D) dollars for military-orientated purposes. Infrared instrumentation, pressure and temperature measuring equipment, medical electronics, and thermoelectric energy conversion all benefited from military R&D. By the 1960s indirect and direct military demand accounted for as much as 70 percent of the total output of the electronics industry. Feedbacks also developed between electronics and aircraft, the second growth industry of the 1950s. By 1960 . . . [i]ts annual investment outlays were 5.3 times larger than their 1947-49 level, and over 90 percent of its output went to the military. Synthetics (plastics and fibers) was another growth industry owning much of its development to military-related projects. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, military-related R&D, including space, accounted for 40 to 50 percent of total public and private R&D spending and at least 85% of federal government share." [Richard B. Du Boff, Accumulation and Power, pp. 103-4]
Not only this, government spending on road building (initially justified using defence concerns) also gave a massive boost to private capital (and, in the process, totally transformed America into a land fit for car and oil corporations). The cumulative impact of the 1944, 1956 and 1968 Federal Highway Acts "allowed $70 billion to be spent on the interstates without [the money] passing through the congressional appropriations board." The 1956 Act "[i]n effect wrote into law the 1932 National Highway Users Conference strategy of G[eneral] M[otors] chairman Alfred P. Sloan to channel gasoline and other motor vehicle-related excise taxes into highway construction." GM also illegally bought-up and effectively destroyed public transit companies across America, so reducing competition against private car ownership. The net effect of this state intervention was that by 1963-66 "one in every six business enterprise was directly dependent on the manufacture, distribution, servicing, and the use of motor vehicles." The impact of this process is still evident today -- both in terms of ecological destruction and in the fact that automobile and oil companies are still dominate the top twenty of the Fortune 500. [Op. Cit., p. 102]

This system, which can be called military Keynesianism, has three advantages over socially-based state intervention. Firstly, unlike social programmes, military intervention does not improve the situation (and thus, hopes) of the majority, who can continue to be marginalised by the system, suffer the discipline of the labour market and feel the threat of unemployment. Secondly, it acts likes welfare for the rich, ensuring that while the many are subject to market forces, the few can escape that fate - while singing the praises of the "free market". And, thirdly, it does not compete with private capital.

Because of the connection between militarism and imperialism, it was natural after World War II that America should become the world's leading military state at the same time that it was becoming the world's leading economic power, and that strong ties developed between government, business, and the armed forces. American "military capitalism" is described in detail below, but the remarks also apply to a number of other "advanced" capitalist states.

In his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned of the danger posed to individual liberties and democratic processes by the "military-industrial complex," which might, he cautioned, seek to keep the economy in a state of continual war-readiness simply because it is good business. This echoed the warning which had been made earlier by sociologist C. Wright Mills (in The Power Elite, 1956), who pointed out that since the end of World War II the military had become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire American economy, and that US capitalism had in fact become a military capitalism. This situation has not substantially changed since Mills wrote, for it is still the case that all US military officers have grown up in the atmosphere of the post-war military-industrial alliance and have been explicitly educated and trained to carry it on. So, despite recent cuts in the US defence budget, American capitalism remains military capitalism, with a huge armaments industry and defence contractors still among the most powerful of political entities.

D.8.1 Will militarism change with the apparent end of the Cold War?


Many politicians seemed to think so in the early nineties, asserting that a "peace dividend" was at hand. Since the Gulf War, however, Americans have heard little more about it. Although it's true that some fat was trimmed from the defence budget, both economic and political pressures have tended to keep the basic military-industrial complex intact, insuring a state of global war-readiness and continuing production of ever more advanced weapons systems into the foreseeable future.

Since it's having more and more trouble dominating the world economically, America now claims superpower status largely on the basis of its military superiority. Therefore the US won't be likely to renounce this superiority willingly-- especially since the prospect of recapturing world economic superiority appears to depend in part on her ability to bully other nations into granting economic concessions and privileges, as in the past. Hence the US public is being bombarded with propaganda designed to show that an ongoing US military presence is necessary in every corner of the planet.

For example, after the Gulf War the draft of a government White Paper was released in which it was argued that the US must maintain its status as the world's strongest military power and not hesitate to act unilaterally if UN approval for future military actions is not forthcoming. Although then President Bush, under election-year political pressures, denied that he personally held such views, the document reflected the thinking of powerful authoritarian forces in government -- thinking that has a way of becoming public policy through secret National Security Directives (see section D.9.2 -- What is "Invisible government"?).

For these reasons it would not be wise to bet on a deep and sustained American demilitarisation. It is true that troop strength is being cut back in response to Soviet withdrawals from Eastern Europe; but these cutbacks are also prompted by the development of automated weapons systems which reduce the number of soldiers needed to win battles, as demonstrated in the Persian Gulf.

Although there may appear to be no urgent need for huge military budgets now that the Soviet threat is gone, the US has found it impossible to kick its forty-year addiction to militarism. As Noam Chomsky points out in many of his works, the "Pentagon System," in which the public is forced to subsidise research and development of high tech industry through subsidies to defence contractors, is a covert substitute in the US for the overt industrial planning policies of other "advanced" capitalist nations, like Germany and Japan. US defence businesses, which are among the biggest lobbyists, cannot afford to lose this "corporate welfare." Moreover, continued corporate downsizing and high levels of unemployment will produce strong pressure to maintain defence industries simply in order to keep people working.

Despite some recent modest trimming of defence budgets, the demands of US military capitalism still take priority over the needs of the people. For example, Holly Sklar points out that Washington, Detroit, and Philadelphia have higher infant death rates than Jamaica or Costa Rica and that Black America as a whole has a higher infant mortality rate than Nigeria; yet the US still spends less public funds on education than on the military, and more on military bands than on the National Endowment for the Arts ["Brave New World Order," in Cynthia Peters, ed., Collateral Damage, 1992, pp. 3-46]. But of course, politicians continue to maintain that education and social services must be cut back even further because there is "no money" to fund them.

A serious problem at this point, however, is that the collapse of the Soviet Union leaves the Pentagon in desperate need of a sufficiently dangerous and demonic enemy to justify continued military spending in the style to which it's accustomed. Saddam Hussein was temporarily helpful, but he's not enough of a menace to warrant the robust defence budgets of yore now that his military machine has been smashed. There are some indications, however, that the US government has its sights on Iran.

The main point in favour of targeting Iran is that the American public still craves revenge for the 1979 hostage humiliation, the Lebanon bombing, the Iran-Contra scandal, and other outrages, and can thus be relied on to support a war of retribution. Hence it would not be surprising to hear much more in the future about a possible Iranian nuclear threat and about the dangers of Iranian influence in the Moslem republics of the ex-Soviet empire.

In the wake of the Persian Gulf War, the United States has quietly been building a network of defence alliances reminiscent of the Eisenhower years after World War II, so that America may now be called upon to police disturbances all over the Arab World. Sending troops to Somalia appears to have been designed to help accustom Americans to such a role.

Besides Iran, unfriendly regimes in North Korea, Cuba, and Libya, as well as communist guerrilla groups in various South American nations, also hold great promise as future testing grounds for new weapons systems. And of course there is the recent troop deployments to Haiti and Bosnia, which provide the Pentagon with more arguments for continued high levels of defence spending. In a nutshell, then, the trend toward increasing militarism is not likely to be checked by the present military "downsizing," which will merely produce a leaner and more efficient fighting machine.


An Anarchist FAQ
Version 11.6 -- 13-MAY-2006