Corporatization

Faculty Governance in the New University

What is the university now? Is the situation for higher education getting better, as we are expected to demonstrate in annual reports, or worse, as budget figures and myriad other indicators tend to suggest?

Rutgers, Inc., or How Thorstein Veblen Explains Today’s Policies in Higher Education

On April 3, 2013, Rutgers University head basketball coach Mike Rice was fired for abusing his players. The university’s president had discovered the abuse in November 2012. This delay is representative of the wider institutional culture in modern American universities.

Of Brahmins and Dalits in the Academic Caste System

Traditionally, the three-pronged mission of our colleges and universities has been to provide high-quality education, encourage cutting-edge research, and promote professional and community service. The substitution of business-based policies for sound academic principles, however, has institutionalized a form of professional inequality that threatens all three.

From the President: No Faculty Member Is an Island

Like it or not, our profession has been changing in a number of ways. First, 70 percent of faculty appointments are now off the tenure track. So, although we will continue to fight to expand the number of tenure-track faculty, we must do more to expand our membership among faculty who are off the tenure track. Likewise, because in many cases faculty responsibilities have been “unbundled” and academic professionals are now performing tasks formerly done by faculty, we must also do a better job of reaching out to those professionals. 

From the President: Inequality, Corporatization, and the Casualization of Academic Labor

When we think of threats to academic freedom, legislative threats are likely the first thing that comes to mind. For example, bills that threaten to withhold funds from institutions that are members of certain associations or that simply run programs that teach about unions.

The Rise and Coming Demise of the Corporate University

The corporate university is being undone by the very forces that created it. The defining characteristic of higher education in the last forty years has been its corporatization, which has transformed the university from an educational community with shared governance into a top-down bureaucracy that is increasingly managed and operated like a traditional profit-seeking corporation. Yet two developments—the collapsed business plan of the corporate university and the recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision in Pacific Lutheran v.

Social Inequality and the Access Myth

In September 2015, President Obama said, “The students I hear from every day remind me that if we can come together around the idea that every American—no matter where they grew up or how much money their parents have—deserves a quality education and a shot at success, then we can build a future as remarkable as our past.”

Teaching in the Corporate University: Assessment as a Labor Issue

When, in response to a call for papers for the 2008 conference of the Modern Language Association, I began to formulate an argument concerning the relationship between assessment and the corporate university, I assumed that writing such an analysis would be (and I hope I will be forgiven this admittedly masculinist simile) like “shooting fish in a barrel.” My intention was in fact to concentrate on something less obvious: assessment as a labor issue, and the ways the drive toward assessment is both explicitly and implicitly an attack on academic freedom. Imagine my surprise, then, when I read the spring 2008 President’s Column of the MLA Newsletter, with its defense of assessment (Graff 2008).

Hidden (and Not-So-Hidden) New Threats to Faculty Governance

Faculty governance has been under serious attack across the country in recent years. Some of the threats are obvious; others are not. Some are directly connected to one another; others are linked only by their ultimate effects. In Parts 1 and 2, I describe an outrageous Residence Life program at my institution. While this so-called “educational” program was a flagrant violation of students’ rights, its appropriation of faculty prerogatives and responsibilities was no less important. In Parts 3 and 4, I discuss several other current threats to faculty governance.

The Corporatization of American Higher Education: Merit Pay Trumps Academic Freedom OR More Discretionary Power for Administrators over Faculty: You’re Kidding Me, Right?

I decided to include the irreverent alternative title to this essay because, when I was first presented by our faculty union with the proposal for increased reliance on merit pay for pay raises, my initial response remains my most persistent thought on the subject: “You’re kidding me, right?” I have discovered that neither my administration nor my union leaders were kidding, yet the joke remains on me and the rest of my colleagues who are now subjected to the wonders of the grand idea and the realities of the perverse execution of the concept of merit pay in the university.

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