Week 4 - Jamie McCaa

Jamie McCaa

ASA 002 Section A03
Week 4

Reading the multitude of articles for this week, the strongest feeling I felt in response to the articles was frustration. In “Unmaking the Public University”, the descriptions of the public university as having been idealized as the an “institution where blue- and white-collar, children of both wizens of every racial background were being invited into a unified majority” and as knowledge centers for the New Economy are idealistic at best – and that’s what makes me feel so frustrated (Newfield 4). I have always felt that universities should be places for innovation and the production of knowledge, but considering their evolution into spaces governed by corporate greed and administrative fear of liability, as detailed by many of the authors this week, it is difficult to say that they can still exist or function as such. It’s frustrating because I want universities to return to the more ‘honest’ mission of providing high quality education for the many – and I find it sad, and almost discouraging, that a hope like that can even be branded as hopelessly idealistic.

Additionally, I have always found it difficult to grapple with academic discussion on the “political correctness” on contemporary university campuses, but I found Frederik deBoer’s discussion of it in “Why We Should Fear University, Inc” to be well articulated and lacking the student-blaming tone that many other pieces I have read take on. I definitely think there is something worthwhile in the discussion of the “corporatization” of the university, specifically in reference to policy; and that the more the university “corporatizes” it’s policies, the more student activists have to play into that “corporatization” in order to combat it. In that way, resistance to the corporatization of the university is circular, where the only way to “break out” of that circle is stop playing into the regulations of administration and instead “[create] a new, human…campus politics” (DeBoer 7). I definitely agree that this is the way to combat administration, but I am unsure of how to do so, as corporate administration delegitimizes any oppositions made not in their own terms (just as the government does).

Question: In what ways can student activists ‘shake up’ the administration, when opposition to bureaucracy must often be made on the bureaucracy’s terms?

References:

DeBoer, F. (2015, September 9). “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.” New York Times Magazine. Retrieved October 15, 2017.

Newfield, C. (2008). “Introduction”. In Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-year Assault on the Middle Class (pp. 1-15). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[Digital image] (n.d.) Retrieved from http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/57033-free-university-education.html on October 15, 2017.