Week 4 - Yuanxin Zhang

Yuanxin Zhang
Section A01
Week 04

In the article Why We Should Fear University, Inc., Fredrik deBoer suggests that the administrators are not the friends of students, thus students should try to shake up the administrators, rather than make appeal to them, so as to fight for the justice. Fredrik deBoer took the university as a corporation and the student activists who failed as people “trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense”. The author’s point is very sharp. I think it is very usual for a student activist to seek help from the administrators because administrators are people who run the campus and have the power to change some unfair circumstance, but we cannot ignore the fact that administers employed by the university sometimes have to serve as the need of the university; not for the need of students, or for the sake of justice. This might be explained by the ethic theory at Amy Block Joy written in the Ethics and “Breaking Bad”. People won’t necessarily do the ethical things even when they know what is ethical and what is not, because of fear and peer-pressure. It is understandable, though pathetic, that some employees take unethical actions for the sake of their own interest when they feel they might receive unfair treatment from the university of peer pressure from the colleagues.

Question:

At the end of the article Why We Should Fear University, Inc., Fredrik deBoer raises the idea of developing new campus politics. How can we, as the students, help foster the development of such politics? What should the student activists do to really shake the school administration?

Reference:

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

2.        Why We Should Fear University, Inc. - The New York Times. Retrieved from https://nyti.ms/1K8JSUV

3.        [Digital Image]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.justiceinschools.org.