Joshua Vandermeyde
Week 10 - The future of higher education
Section A03
This week’s reading, the introduction to Fight the Tower, encompasses what we have gone over this quarter. It represents the fights that have already occurred in higher education as well as the fights that still need to happen. I had not heard of the Tung case and how it affected higher education. “Tung’s case made the tenure and promotion process more transparent, and it is this kind of structural change that we hope the work in this volume, and the research inspired by it, will support.” Through the extensive research and stories introduced in this piece there should be structural change as outlined. The current university system is favored toward administration and suppressing attempts to point out the flaws from within. A restructuring of power as suggested in this piece would be great for education, and would bring the university back to what its intentions were originally: the nurture and exploration of information and knowledge, an endeavor that is hindered by the Tower. Through the reduction of power in the university, there can be more academic freedom, and the divisiveness that comes with it will be gone. I found this statistic to be emblematic of the progress that still needs to be made: “Their study shows in a recent fourteen year period, white males had a 92% rate of tenure and promotion from assistant to associate professor, while the numbers were nearly half that for white women and people of color.” If this trend continues without backlash, this discrimination will only continue, and the Tower will continue to be built higher and higher.
Question:
What would a university without the power structures look like?
Sources:
Valverde, C., & Dariotis, W. (2017). "The Time to Fight is Now": When Asian American Women in Academia Go Rogue. Retrieved June 4, 2017.
Women of color in academia. (n.d.). Retrieved June 04, 2017, from http://fighttower.com/
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