In a faculty meeting at Purchase College in New York, an administrator referred to students as "consumers," prompting the author to reflect on the pervasive corporatization and "administrification" of American higher education. The article argues that this language reflects a broader restructuring of universities as businesses, where students are customers, knowledge is a product, and faculty are service providers. It cites data showing that between 1976 and 2011, non-faculty professional positions grew by 369% while tenure-track faculty grew by only 23%, and at Purchase College, administrator salaries rose over 45% from 2016 to 2024 while assistant professor salaries rose just 14%, with inflation at 31%.
This matters because the transformation of art schools and universities into market-driven institutions undermines their core mission: to produce a capacity for critical thinking, argument, and questioning, rather than commodities. The shift from public good to transactional model, fueled by underfunding and austerity, threatens the role of education in building an informed public and a democratic society. The article serves as a pointed critique of neoliberal policies in academia, with specific implications for art education and the future of creative and intellectual labor.