Raghu says that the following is vitriolic and exaggerated:
Colleges and universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical
patents and ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being
“entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects
of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly
as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest
among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds.
I agree with Michael Smith that this is certainly not untrue. But I would go
further and say that it is right on the mark. This year marks my 45th as a
teacher. No longer full-time, but still an observer of how colleges operate.
Veblen wrote about the university as business in 1920. Things have only gotten
much worse. Colleges now do own the patents from their professors' research,
often publicly funded. They collect plenty of cash for these from businesses.
They do indeed battle their workers like any corporation, as I know from bitter
personal experience. A business mentality has infiltrated every aspect of
university life. Read Digital Diploma Mills by David Noble and many other books
and articles.
Does this mean that a student might not be able to get a decent education? No,
although I am not sure how possible this is in many colleges. Of course, this
all depends on what we mean by a decent education.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
