On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 6:40 AM, michael yates <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > With due respect to you, Michael Smith, Thomas Frank and others, this is wrong. For one thing Frank treats colleges as if they are all homogenous. Much of Frank's polemic in the article makes no sense for instance for community colleges that enroll 40% of all US undergraduates; these do not have expensive athletic programs, patent portfolios or lavish endowments. Higher education in the US is in trouble, even in crisis, but there is still much there that is still worth fighting for, preserving and strengthening. In fact if you read the part of Thomas Frank's article that talks about what it would take to fix the academy, it is not all that radical at all. If you read the polemical part of his article though, you come away with the view that college as an institution is thoroughly corrupt, indeed predatory, and without any redeeming value. This is a very unfortunate and unhelpful attitude. After all if colleges are as far gone as Frank seems to suggest, why care if they live or die, any more than we would care about the solvency of Walmart Corporation? -raghu.
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