Russell J. Rickford: Are We Commodities?
[Russell J. Rickford is an assistant professor of history at Dartmouth College.]
When critics decry the "corporatization" of the university, they are referring to a number of trends that have transformed the character of higher education in recent years. Outsourcing a variety of nonacademic jobs that were once performed by university employees to large, external companies; forging entangling relationships with the corporate world; encouraging the growing presence of corporations to run bookstores, food services, etc. on campus; providing salaries for college officials that mirror those of corporate executives; imposing work speedups that exploit adjunct instructors and other low-paid employees; downsizing staffs; busting trade unions (including those designed to protect graduate students)—all those developments point to the overt application of marketplace logic to the practice of higher learning.
The fact that the culture of corporations has steadily leached into the veins of academe should come as no surprise. The university has always been, in part, a business. At the very least, colleges and universities in the West have long played a critical role in rationalizing and legitimizing the expropriation of the world's human and mineral wealth for the private profit of the elites who sponsor such institutions in the first place. The Western university has always relied upon bureaucratic management to fulfill its bourgeois aims. It has always produced more reactionaries than revolutionaries. Of course, the university has also generated some of the most trenchant critics of the social order.
What has happened in recent years is the dissolution of the innate tension between the university as the bastion of reaction and the cradle of dissidence. In place of that tension has arisen an institution that has enthusiastically dedicated itself to the orthodoxy of neoliberalism—the idea that the essential task of the state and of all social authorities is to smooth the path of transnational corporations....
Read entire article at CHE
When critics decry the "corporatization" of the university, they are referring to a number of trends that have transformed the character of higher education in recent years. Outsourcing a variety of nonacademic jobs that were once performed by university employees to large, external companies; forging entangling relationships with the corporate world; encouraging the growing presence of corporations to run bookstores, food services, etc. on campus; providing salaries for college officials that mirror those of corporate executives; imposing work speedups that exploit adjunct instructors and other low-paid employees; downsizing staffs; busting trade unions (including those designed to protect graduate students)—all those developments point to the overt application of marketplace logic to the practice of higher learning.
The fact that the culture of corporations has steadily leached into the veins of academe should come as no surprise. The university has always been, in part, a business. At the very least, colleges and universities in the West have long played a critical role in rationalizing and legitimizing the expropriation of the world's human and mineral wealth for the private profit of the elites who sponsor such institutions in the first place. The Western university has always relied upon bureaucratic management to fulfill its bourgeois aims. It has always produced more reactionaries than revolutionaries. Of course, the university has also generated some of the most trenchant critics of the social order.
What has happened in recent years is the dissolution of the innate tension between the university as the bastion of reaction and the cradle of dissidence. In place of that tension has arisen an institution that has enthusiastically dedicated itself to the orthodoxy of neoliberalism—the idea that the essential task of the state and of all social authorities is to smooth the path of transnational corporations....