Sums it up, I think. best
Simon On 24 Nov 2012, at 18:30, Brian Holmes wrote: > On 11/23/2012 07:28 PM, Susan E Ryan wrote: >> I have witnessed the >> escalation of university administration, both in the number of >> administrative positions and in the rather breathtaking salaries that I >> have heard >> quoted to me. These are elite corporate executives. I assume this is >> part of the corporatization of the university, and that that is the real >> culprit. > > Well, there has been a kind of star-system applied to professors, to the > point where salary scales have been all but abandoned in many places. You can > look up the salaries of professors in the UC system (public servants you > know) and it's interesting to see who gets what. But of course, the star > system only affects the stars, leaving everyone else with the usual wage > stagnation, while the actual faculty majority, the adjuncts, get the worst > deal of all. The question is indeed why, for what and for whom? > > From all I can see, the neoliberal transformation of universities over the > past thirty years is effectively driven by the administrators you are talking > about, who typically give themselves three-figure salaries. They come in, you > see, in the wake of economic crisis, in order to make the university *more > efficient* -- ha ha, which is apparently why there is a tuition spike after > every major recession, including a large one right now. The administrators go > before Congress every couple years to raise the level of the loans that will > be guaranteed by the government, and they use the proceeds, along with > corporate partnerships and financialized endowments, to preside over vast > expansions. > > I think the research university should be identified as the central > institution of the neoliberal knowledge-based economy. The sea-change was the > Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allowed for the patenting of publicly funded > research. Corporations as well as government could then scale back their > large laboratories and practice what's now called "open innovation," where > relatively small amounts of seed money are enough to catalyze research > processes whose results can be selectively acquired by buying out the > relevant patents. In a society where, since Reagan, only business is > recognized as a value, this transformation of scientific research was enough > to justify running the entire university like a corporation. The star system, > the corporate partnerships, the precarization of academic labor, the > competition for the revenue stream of student loans, and more recently, the > franchising of major university brands in Asia, are all among the results. > For what? is the best question. In my view, very sadly, it's for reducing > knowledge to nothing more than a function of capitalism. > > The best book I've found on this is, fittingly, entitled Academic Capitalism, > by Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades. It's serious, anything but simplistic, > a very impressive and wide-ranging piece of scholarship, check it out: > > http://books.google.com/books?id=Y-mISmAUa38C&printsec=frontcover > > Another good one is Chris Newfield's Unmaking the Public University, > particularly the chapter "Facing the Knowledge Managers": > > http://humanities.wisc.edu/assets/misc/FacingKnowledge.pdf > > Finally, my own attempt to sum these things up: > > http://autonomousuniversity.org/content/silence-equals-debt > > No one yet has the solution to these problems, but the good thing is, over > the last five years people have finally started to ask the important > questions and to begin mobilizing around those questions. Student loans and > corporatization are issues in themselves: but they are also part and parcel > of a larger problem, which is the neoliberal development model. It can't > address the problems of inequality and ecological unsustainability, and as > long as it rules over the universities, we will get nothing substantial from > them. A great loss, I'd say. > > in solidarity, Brian > _______________________________________________ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre > Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.org.uk/ MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?id=656&cw_xml=details.php
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