What gets me about the myth is the complete disregard for the 800-pound
gorillas in the room.
* How many universities have business schools but not even a single
course in running non-profits or workers' cooperatives, let alone
how to do good (centralized or decentralized) economic planning?
* How many have departments of government or "political science," with
a sanguine view of the state, but no courses, let alone departments
of anarchism, self-management, or syndicalism.
* How many universities are beholding to corporate interests for 50%
or more of their physical plant, as even a casual noting of the
names of university buildings readily attests.
* How many are more concerned about their multi-million dollar sports
business than academics?
* How many "land grant" colleges today ignore the enabling
legislation's intent that they provide a liberal education to
working-class students, with "liberal education" understood as
education suitable for free persons, and instead focus on what's
"practical and applied" and leads to jobs in the corporate economy,
justifying this orientation by the Morrill Act's requirement that
participating states offer instruction in "agriculture and mechanic
arts," when Morrill himself said this was included just as a way "to
tempt" students to attend college at a time when less than 1% of the
population went to college and not a single profession required a
college degree?
* How many academic departments are under pressure to justify their
existence by increasing enrollment and therefore self-police by
keeping academic standards modest but students' perceptions of
employment-relatedness high?
The deeply corporate nature of U.S. "higher education" is also more
subtle. When I was an undergrad at Cornell, I took a required course
called "Advanced Engineering Economic Analysis," which covered things
like deciding on projects based on internal rates of return, etc. We
read articles on capital theory by Modigliani and others without even a
whiff of the Cambridge Capital controversies, which turned much of what
we learned into nonsense. I had to learn this subject matter on my own
several years later. When I told the professor teaching the course that
I was thinking of studying urban planning in graduate school and would
therefore like to write my term paper about applications of the subject
matter in the public sector, he told me he knew nothing about how this
ostensibly neutral subject matter could be applied in the public sector.
Instead, he suggested I consult with a certain professor in Civil
Engineering, who gave me a reading list of about 40-50 books, by
Galbraith and others. Reading all of them would have been the equivalent
of taking 2-3 courses to fill the deficiencies in my corporate-oriented
education, and even then would not have covered Marx, Keynes, or any of
the major critiques of and alternatives to neoclassical economics.
Some years later, while a PhD student in UCLA's urban planning program,
I received a fellowship to spend several months in Chile attending a
seminar on inequality systems (it was spring of 1973). Emmanuel's
"Unequal Exchange" was one of the required texts, and I remember how I
found its approach so completely alien to the social science I had been
studying and therefore more difficult to grasp. At the time, my
department at UCLA bragged about its ranking as the #1 planning
department in urban and regional economic development, yet what it
taught was strictly & solely neoclassical. Since the department had a
strong emphasis on the LDC's, it was more than odd that what it taught
was nothing like what many universities in Latin America, Africa, and
elsewhere taught about the subject. (To its credit, the faculty of the
department was open to change when a number of students returning from
overseas study, as well as esteemed guest speakers from outside the
U.S., gave critiques of what the department was teaching.)
It is interesting to note that even in the late 1960's & early 1970s,
Cornell had a reputation for being left-leaning (having graduates like
Peter Yarrow & Richard Farina will do that), as did the department at
UCLA. Yet this visible leftish tinge was just a patina over a deeper,
almost subconscious, right-leaning corporatism.
And haven't there been several studies of economics departments and
their ideological biases? I seem to recall one that asked economics
faculty members to rank economic journals, with the result that even
completely fictitious titles, like "Journal of Mathematical Economics,"
got higher rankings than actually existing ones with leftish names, e.g.
RRPE?
> Date: Sun, 6 Dec 2015 11:13:01 -0500
> From: Brian McKenna <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: The Myth of Leftist Academia | Opinion |
> teleSUR English
> To: Progressive Economics <[email protected]>
> Cc: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
> <[email protected]>
> Message-ID:
> <camkkstpjnys+5bwr5ihidplhbyzdj97ujtjrgzymnh7abxs...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> They are also using "faculty misconduct" charges against tenured professors
> who profess too much. They can get around "academic freedom" nostrums by a
> documenting overly emotional talk, or charging the misbehaving faculty
> member with micro-aggressions that elicit outrage - from either students or
> FELLOW FACULTY. The university is now a PSYCHIC PRISON for real leftists.
> It has gotten much worse in the past 5 years.
>
> Brian
>
> On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 8:54 AM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Myth-of-Leftist-Academia-20151204-0006.html
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>
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