Week 4 - Leigh Bagood

Leigh Bagood
Section A02
Week 4

Week 4 - Frederik deBoer. “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.”

deBoer’s article, “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.,” discusses the increasing corporatization of universities and higher education, specifically addressing the criticisms of student activism that draws the attention away from the overarching systemic issue pervading our universities. deBoer says, “I wish that committed student activists would recognize that the administrators who run their universities, no matter how convenient a recipient of their appeals, are not their friends.” I find this really important for students to know especially when deciding the actions they take in fighting for their rights as students. We like to think that the administrators that run the way we receive our education are there to promote our welfare, forgetting that the system has a developed the vision of a corporation with corporate interests and not student interests. Therefore, by taking litigious approaches, student activists are only feeding the beasts. And because of this, critics of student activism tend to blame the students for impeding on intellectual and speech freedom, when in reality it is the culture they have been influenced by, the system they are within, that is dictating their responses. This article made me more aware that university administrators have an agenda, and the structures we think are there to help us are students are really there to help them achieve their agenda. And in order to combat this, we should avoid participating with those corporate mechanisms and view the system as our target of change rather than the means.

Question: deBoer asserts that students should lead the way by “creating a new, human--as opposed to corporate--campus politics.” What sort of actions does these “human campus politics” entail? And how can we combat the corporatization of universities as we continue to pay for the education we are engineered to need?

References:

1. DeBoer, F. (2015, September 9 ). Why We Should Fear University, Inc. . The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved October 15, 2017.
2. [Digital image]. (2014, April 19). Retrieved October 15, 2017, from https://movetoamend.org/program-privatizationcorporatization-higher-education