Tuesday, June 7, 2011

The Corporatization of the University

In a highly relevant NYT column, Stanley Fish lays out the problems with contemporary university governance, including the effects of turning the university into a branch plant of the corporation. In a reference to another essay on said topic (in the context of a serious dispute over the state of affairs at a university in Idaho, he  cites the following:
In an essay entitled “Inextricably Linked: Shared Governance and Academic Freedom,” Larry Gerber, chair of the committee that issued the Idaho State report, ties the very survival of higher education as we know it to shared governance: “It is no coincidence that many who seek to reduce higher education to a form of narrowly conceived job training are also in the forefront of efforts to replace shared governance with a corporate style of management.”
Nothing new, but very revealing all the same...