Week4 A01 Regenia Un

Regenia Un

A01

Week4

This week, our topic is “Corporatization of the University” and “Why We Should

Fear University, Inc.” by Fredrik deBoer effectively demonstrates how the American Universities are changing from a place generating ideas and innovation to a profit-making business. In the beginning, he uses the fact that his favorite wild garden is being transformed into a research park to depict that the educational system is also being transformed into a business.

In today’s world, universities’ enrollment equals to the sale of a product. More ironic is that there are more administer staff than professors or lecturer in the university. The universities are extensively spending money on things that can generate profit, thus eliminating the resources students can obtain. As a design major student, I always think that our school does not have sufficient resources. For example, it is supposed that every student should have a specific desk for architectural drawing but our school only has one in the classroom, so students have to take turns using. Moreover, although the number of administrative staff is increasing, our department does not have a product deign professor, so the product design courses have been eliminated from the class schedule for a long time. Therefore, we are not discussing other people’s stuff when talking about corporatization of university, because our school UC Davis is facing problem like this too. In “Whistleblower” by Amy Block Joy, she talks about being threatened when she discovered the embezzlement at UC Davis.  As we can see, the corporatization problem is getting worse and it can definitely ruin the principle of education and students’ experience since cost and expenses are being pushed to students eventually, just as how the increased cost has resulted in the increase of price of a product in the market. As a result, the question I have for this week is how can we assure the quality of education while the problem of university corporatization is getting worse?

For this week, I would like to share a motion graphics video made by Canadian Federation of Students and it clearly illustrates the corporatization of the University.

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

CFSFCEE (2016, October 26). Stop Corporatization on Campus. Retrieved April 23, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMJ5R6ib3ps