Week 4 Rachel Ibrahim

Rachel Ibrahim

Week 4

Section A03

This weeks readings all covered the topic of corporatization of the university and how many American universities are becoming run more like a corporation and less like a college. There are so many policies and changes to how things are run that take universities farther and farther away from an environment of learning and towards and environment of struggling to keep up with corporate policies. Pulling from Fredrik deBoer’s “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.,” universities are putting more money towards hiring administration to run the school instead of professors to teach the school. This poses multiple problems, the first of which is that less money is going into programs that benefit its students and more money into administration, not only to hire these people but to run the school at an administrative level. Part of this type of corporate behavior was seen in Amy Block Joy’s “Whistleblower,” where it makes corruption within the school’s higher level not only possible but impossible to report and end. Instead of being a place where professors are free to express their concerns and do the right things, any type of whistle blowing only has a negative impact on the careers of anyone not at the ‘corporate level.’ The second major effect of this issue is that it leaves universities with insanely high tuition costs that make it extremely difficult for deserving students to obtain an education. I think it is so unfair that pursuing a higher education has such negative consequences like giving enormous amounts of debt to the majority of university attendees. This fits in well with the piece on UC Davis vs UC Berkeley and the response to student protests. It is the right for students to express their discontent with such and unfair issue, but the UC Davis response to it was completely unwarranted. I think that their response demonstrates just how corporal Davis is compared to Berkeley. Instead of supporting their students as Berkeley did, they just cared about their image, money and what an inconvenience students are. I think this attitude that more and more universities are having regarding how they are operated is toxic to their students and needs to be stopped.

Question: Why exactly are universities becoming more like corporations? Why specifically now, at this point in time, are they just starting to become more focused on themselves rather than the good and education of their students?

References:

Severns, M., Erika Eichelberger, Maggie Severns, and Brett Brownell, Murphy, T., Calefati, J., Jones, M., Raja, T., & Toppa, S. (n.d.). The Student Loan Debt Crisis in 9 Charts. Retrieved April 23, 2017, from http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/student-loan-debt-charts

DeBoer, F. (2015, September 9). Why We Should Fear University, Inc. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html

Joy, A. B. (2010). Whistleblower. Point Richmond, CA: Bay Tree Pub.

A., Markow. (2011, December 19). A Tale of Two Campuses: Berkeley and Davis respond to Occupy movements. IVN.