Corporatization

Into the Apocalypse

The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. Frank Donoghue. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

From The General Secretary: Labor and Capital, Working for You

In the eyes of budget balancers with blinders, professors are labor costs, to be capped, furloughed, and riffed. To those with more vision, however, we are the nation’s key intellectual capital, the wellspring of future knowledge workers, and drivers of our country’s cultural, political, and economic revitalization.

Faculty Adrift

What Ever Happened to the Faculty? Drift and Decision in Higher Education. Mary Burgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 (paperback edition, 2009).

From the Editor: Governance in a Time of Financial Crisis

Calls to resist the corporatization of higher education and for faculty control over educational issues go back at least to Thorstein Veblen’s publication of The Higher Learning in America in 1918. However, as many of the articles in this issue demonstrate, the current economic crisis has greatly intensified threats to the practice of shared governance.

From the President: Ethics and Corporatization

Almost every institutional problem we confront in higher education today situates us at the intersection of ethics and corporatization. Should we protect our lower-paid colleagues from pay cuts and furloughs? Should higher-paid faculty and administrators make sacrifices for community members living on the margins? Which is more important—a new campus building or free health care for all employees?

"Universities, the Major Battleground in the Fight for Reason and Capitalism"

Conditions placed on gifts from the BB&T Foundation range from the seemingly benign, funding for faculty and student research and a speaker series, to the sharply contentious, required reading of Ayn Rand.

Is This Curriculum for Sale?

In June 2009, North Carolina’s Guilford College, a small liberal arts college with strong Quaker origins and a decidedly progressive image, announced that it had accepted a large grant from the BB&T Charitable Foundation—$500,000 over a ten-year period. As has been the case at some, but not all, of the colleges and universities that in recent years have received grants from the BB&T Foundation, the money came with specific curricular and extracurricular strings attached.

Restoring the Health of Scholarly Publishing

Librarians and scholars who seek to counter the rampant commercialism and consolidation that endanger equal and affordable access to knowledge can learn from the recent successful effort to pass health-care reform.

The Canadian Corporate-Academic Complex

We need to defend professors and graduate students against powerful corporations—and their own universities.

A Mission of Amenities, Not Education

Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University. Gaye Tuchman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009

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