Week 4 Blog
Anahi Rivera

I felt that the article Why We Should Fear University, Inc by Fredrik Deboer really described some of the feelings some students encounter during their experience on campus. For instance i am a freshman and i believe that myself and other students are exposed to the many forms of corporate power on campus. The Starbucks, Carl’s Jr, and Tacobell are some of the corporations that are now part of our university. This concerns me because it seems like the the university system empties our pockets with the high tuition rates and still benefit from other corporations by letting them be on our campus. As the article mentioned “enrolling at a university today means setting yourself up in a vast array of for-profit systems that each take a little slice along the way, (Deboer)” something that in the long run only affects students. It is true “that the corporatism has come to infect the soul of the American university” and it will only continue to increase as the years go by. Enrolling in a four year university before was about “students [adopting] a litigious approach to regulating campus life and working within the culture that colleges have built for them (Deboer)”. Now it seems like we are part of a “luxury resort hotel" (Deboer) which will leave us in debt for the rest of our lives. Hopefully in the future all of the students can come together and find a way to bring back the university that once felt like a university, instead of the new innovative campus life that has been created for the corporations benefit. 

Question: In what ways does the University System benefit from outside corporations ? Would our campus be affected if in the future we decide to remove them?