Much has been written on the corporatization of American higher education, the defunding of public universities, and the broader neoliberal project that turned students into customers and faculty into precarious contract labor. However, far less has been said about how the university has ceased to exist as a self-sustaining institution. The modern campus is no longer a community of administrators, students, scholars, and staff united under the umbrella of a discrete organization. Instead, the campus is a nexus of outsourced labor and private contracts, with corporate vendors now running many of its most basic operations.

Once upon a time, bookstores and dining halls were directly staffed and operated by the university in-house. Now chains like Barnes & Noble and Follett run many bookstores, treating public institutions like high-traffic shopping plazas. Aramark and Sodexo operate dining services, despite student protests over their ties to the prison-industrial complex. Financial and record-keeping services, once housed on campus, have since been outsourced to Ellucian, Oracle, Workday, and SAP. Even the work of student success, once the domain of professors, advisers, and peers, is now mediated through assessment and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. These platforms are often rebranded versions of corporate tools originally designed to track sales pipelines. One only needs to look at Salesforce’s entry into higher education as an example of the trajectory.

The use of contractors and the shift to the cloud create barriers to labor organizing. There are fewer secretaries and people working in the bursars’ and registrars’ office, while the custodians and maintenance workers are employed by separate entities altogether. This atomization carves up the shop floor where solidarity can be built or in some cases eliminates it entirely. For universities’ top managers, outsourcing is cost-effective and logistically convenient: the institution no longer has to handle benefits, payroll taxes, training, or other overhead. But most convenient of all is that the university no longer has a relationship with or obligation to the worker.