Week 4 — Jennifer Zhang

Week 4

Jennifer Zhang

SID# 914019640

ASA 002 / A03

Corporatization of the University

This week's readings focuses on the many issues that arise from the corporatization of universities, and highlights how stark the differences between the issues are. Alan Markow's "A Tale of Two Campuses: Berkeley and Davis respond to Occupy movements" sheds light on the effects and aftermaths of protests, but calls our attention to the contrasting ways the two universities dealt with them. Davis chose to "ignore this issue in its public communications about damages caused by the Occupy students," while "Berkeley ignored any such damages and responded to the need for lower costs of education," clearly showing how the universities differed in their priorities—one's was to respond to the students' demands, while the other's was to remain unfazed and instead try to shame its students regarding how much money their protests would cost the school. Amy Block Joy's first chapter, "Police," in Whistleblower shows the struggles she faces, both internally and externally, when coming across her coworkers engaging in criminal activity. The fact that her struggles with the situation exist further emphasize the consequences of the corporatization of our educational systems. These two pieces by Markow and Joy reminded me of the harsh reality that my learning institutions are not as safe and perfect as they were always painted to be—they are corrupted by corporatization and fueled by the greed for more money, and, as a result, harm the students and staff that are so reliant upon them. But in addition to being more aware of these toxic practices around me, I also recognize that I should be more proactive in taking a stance alongside the students to fix the institutional wrongs of our generation. 

Both Amy Block Joy's "Ethics and 'Breaking Bad': Developing and practicing ethical skills" and Christopher Newfield's Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-year Assault on the Middle Class bring forth the intersectionality that must be addressed when discussing corporatization. Issues of ethics and morality, culture wars, politics, class and more are all affected by transforming our schools into corporations. Fredrik deBoer's "Why We Should Fear University, Inc." even brings in the matters of political correctness and how the corporate taming of American colleges is not only limiting academic freedom, but pitting students and activists against the wrong people and leading them to take action in the wrong places. Although I have been articulating the importance of intersectionality more and more after taking a class on women's and gender studies, I realized after reading these articles that I have failed to acknowledge the massive amount of intersectionality taking place in different areas of politics. Intersectionality is not limited to feminism, but to corporate America, and even between the two. Admittedly, it took me a few good reads and some time to understand the relationship between social awareness topics such as trigger warnings and political aspects of corporatizing education. In this case, I learned that rather than "making appeals to institutions that will never truly serve their needs," students should be the ones to create "new, human—as opposed to corporate—campus policies." Students' efforts to assert power over areas they can control such as language and culture take attention away from material politics that harm both the students and teachers. These pieces shed a lot of light and topics that I had never thought deeply about, and expanded my view on the problems of our educational institutions. 

Attached are results of a 2013 survey with those newer-to-higher-education an those that have been in higher education for a longer period of time citing the most signifiant change (positive or negative) that they have seen since they started working in higher education. People are growing more aware of the "increased influence of business/corporatization of the university" but still prioritize it less than budget "budget cuts/fewer resources/decreased government support," even though the two are closely related. 

Question: Are there any other recent, more mainstream areas of student activism similar to the trigger warning issue DeBoer described that are tied to the corporatization of universities? 

Works Cited:

DeBoer, F. (2015). Why we should fear University, Inc. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html

Inside Higher Ed. (2013). [Graphic data of survey results on most significant changes in higher education]. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/stratedgy/survey-results-what-has-been-most-significant-change
Joy, A. B. (2014). Ethics and "Breaking Bad": Developing and practicing ethical skills. Compliance & Ethics Professional. Retrieved from http://www.amyblockjoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/scce-cep-2014-05-Block-Joy.pdf

Joy, A. B. (2010). Police. In A. Rinzler (Ed.), Whistleblower (pp. 1-9). Bay Tree Publishing. 

Markow, A. (2011). A tale of two campuses: Berkeley and Davis respond to occupy movements. IVN. Retrieved from https://ivn.us/2011/12/19/a-tale-of-two-campuses-berkeley-and-davis-respond-to-occupy-movements/ 

Newfield, C. (2006). Introduction. Unmaking the public university: The forty-year assault on the middle class (pp. 1-15). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.