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Summary: CORPORATIZING AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES - SOLUTIONS TO SAVE THEM
Review: During four decades of working in several American, Canadian, and European university systems, I witnessed the insidiously gradual corporatization of universities. Now, the historical record of the nightmarish transformation has been written down in "Campus, Inc." edited by psychology professor Geoffry D. White and political organizer and writer Flanery C. Hauk. This book is a lively and thoroughly well referenced work. Those who believe in universities as centers of free inquiry that productively protect and defend democracy, will be revolted and horrified by the revelations in "Campus, Inc." The may even become activated. "Campus, Inc.," is an intensely absorbing collection of essays by thirty nine authors. Among them are consumer advocate Ralph Nader, outspoken MIT university professor Noam Chomsky, and political activist Ronnie Dugger former editor of The Nation and founder of Alliance for Democracy. These are but three of dozens of similarly subversive figures who discuss the history and mechanisms of the hostile takeover of American universities by self-serving corporations. Setting a grimly comic mood, Dugger's essay quotes a limerick recited by Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California who became top man at the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education: "There was a young lady from Kent,
Who said that she knew what it meant
When men took her to dine,
Gave her cocktails and wine,
She knew what it meant -- but she went." Then Kerr added to this, "I am not so sure that the universities and their presidents always knew what it meant , but one thing is certain -- they went." "Campus, Inc.," presents California professor Leonard Minsky's writings on America's conquered campuses that have become inhabited by, "Dead Souls," as the title of his essay characterizes today's students. Minsky cites U.S. Congressional passage in 1980 of the Bayh-Dole Act as initiating the removal of independent thinking on college campuses: " ... displacement and subordination of the humanistic tradition and collegial society that are integral to the university . . . . Without significant public scrutiny [corporations] annexed billions of dollars in public investment in the universities, silenced corporate and military critics on campus by defunding their departments and programs, replaced students with a more docile group intent on securing corporate jobs and benefits, and altered the culture of higher education by focusing it on the needs of corporate sponsors for marketable products instead of basic research." Todd A. Price's essay, "Wiring the World: Ameritech's Monopoly of the Virtual Classroom," presents the darkest view of corporatized education. He forecasts replacing live classroom teaching by technology that will change the campus from a thinking place into a pure workplace. Price predicts that video and computer technology will devalue the classroom experience by replacing live human classroom teachers altogether with staged and canned computer and video-instruction that can be cut, edited, centrally controlled and transmitted . Price documents teacher and student reactions to the techno changes: "They ripped my classroom up," one teacher is quoted. "A lead teacher . . . described a macabre scene. A student teacher was sitting in front of a row of students. She was wearing a headset with an attached microphone. Each third grader had a microphone on the desk just in front of them. A curriculum expert from the University of Athens sat in the background, miles away, and transmitted corrective feedback to the student teacher." Most students recoiled and retreated into silence. The teacher judged the experience of teaching on-camera as having little day-to-day value. Most young university graduates who would be professors naively believe that entering academic life will offer them freedom and opportunity. But "Campus, Inc.," presents a picture of bleak exploitation and systemic, corporate manipulation of young academics. " ... instead [they] find themselves in an existence as throwaway 'adjunct' instructors, hired and then fired, adrift like the Ancient Mariner and forever roaming the earth in search of a tenured port." Michael Parenti writes that if American campuses have had any instinct of linkage to the world of progressive activism, political action has been browbeaten out of them by decades of draconian surveillance. This assessment is seconded by Noam Chomsky who states, "all that has kept the vast university sector afloat was money from the Defense Department, which led to students and teachers becoming little more than an obedient home army providing technical and logistical support for a government that is at permanent war. Essayist Jeff Lustig promotes faculty unionization, citing the victory of the California Faculty Association at California State University at Sacramento where he teaches. However, he also charts an alternative to the campus as a knowledge factory and vocational training school for the corporate world order. Lustig proposes a democratic university to train academics in the mold of philosophes of the Enlightenment who brought to society itself the fruits of their learning in the form of a radical criticism that nurtured history's earliest movements for revolutionary democracy. American students as activists in a world struggle is an entirely new concept of a university mission that "Campus, Inc.," helps to popularize. Campuses could be a battleground against corporations that degrade workers and wreck economies around the globe. Chapters detailng the success of student actions against international sweatshops, against a California attempt of communications companies to gain access to the campus market in return for provision of educational technology, and opposing foreign investment of human rights violator Burma. "Campus, Inc.," can serve as a handbook for those in the forefront of mounting campus reisitance to presidents trying to run them like for-profit companies; who act like corporate CEO's by downsizing faculties, cheapening academic services and programs, and peddling access to whole student bodies to outside vendors and corporations. Parents of high school students who read "Campus, Inc.," will become skeptical about computers in classrooms. They will get a powerful urge to protect their children from video cameras on campus. Also, they will anxiously wonder where to find a corporation free, good old fashioned liberal arts campus that can prepare their children to become mature, independent thinking and democracy defending citizens.
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Summary: The Authoritative Book on the Corporatization of Education
Review: Thanks to Geoffry White for putting together this book.
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Summary: inspirational for student activists!
Review: This compilation documents the disturbing trend of so-called "Corporatization" in US Higher Education...includes articles & commentary by Ronnie Dugger of "The Texas Observer" and by Ralph Nader, as well as by student activists themselves, documenting their successes and failures in combating "Corporatization" and struggling to make universities more deomcratic. If you liked David F. Noble's _Digital Diploma Mills_, you'll love this book. If you buy this book and have never heard of David Noble, read up on him also! Likewise, this book makes a nice companion piece to any number of books by Stanley Aronowitz on Higher Ed, especially his books _The Knowledge Factory_ and _The Last Good Job In America_.
Essential reading for exploited graduate students, academic librarians, part-time adjuncts, and all members of academia's proletarians.
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Summary: inspirational for student activists!
Review: This compilation documents the disturbing trend of so-called "Corporatization" in US Higher Education...includes articles & commentary by Ronnie Dugger of "The Texas Observer" and by Ralph Nader, as well as by student activists themselves, documenting their successes and failures in combating "Corporatization" and struggling to make universities more deomcratic. If you liked David F. Noble's _Digital Diploma Mills_, you'll love this book. If you buy this book and have never heard of David Noble, read up on him also! Likewise, this book makes a nice companion piece to any number of books by Stanley Aronowitz on Higher Ed, especially his books _The Knowledge Factory_ and _The Last Good Job In America_.
Essential reading for exploited graduate students, academic librarians, part-time adjuncts, and all members of academia's proletarians.
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