Week 4 - A02 - Richard Nguyen

The theme for this week’s readings is the corporatization of the university. From a young age, we are conditioned to believe that going to a good university will pay for itself with future economic stability and opportunity, despite requiring more and more loans to afford the cost every year. In a sense, it is University Inc.’s business pitch repeated to us over and over again, until we accept it as fact. I think this is especially prevalent for STEM majors, from my experience. I was told that if you majored in STEM at a good college, you would land a good job and live a good life. Anything else was deemed a waste of time. When I was participating in on-campus tours during my senior year of high-school, the college staff would make sure to reference the number of alumni that get sent off to work in prestigious corporations, or brag about the number of recruiters they pull from big companies like Google or Amazon. All of this served as a sales pitch for University Inc. University Inc. doesn’t try very hard to hide the fact that its bureaucracy is ran by middlemen placed by the industries they regularly name-drop to entice young, bright-eyed high school students into joining. In Chris Newfield's "Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-year Assault on the Middle Class,” the technology industry was used as an example of an industry that has carved a position in higher education in order to farm future laborers.

Scandals, which are another thing we commonly associate with shady businesses, runs rampant in universities. From some of the readings, Block Joy describes having evidence of embezzlement from the chairman of UC Davis. Embezzlement is the type of crime typically seen in K-dramas, with the corrupt CEO and their underlings reaping all the benefits. Most of these scandals are often swept under the rug due to the competency of University Inc’s PR department. Every public statement in the face of a scandal is measured in order to maintain the image that universities remain the bastions of free thought and higher education.

What can we as students do in order to better combat University Inc? Frederik deBoer suggests that we create a new human-campus politics, but I don’t know what that entails. How would we even start such a thing up?

Source (for image)

MacKay, Kevin. “Neoliberalism and Postsecondary Education: A View from the Colleges.” Academic Matters, 28 Nov. 2018, academicmatters.ca/neoliberalism-and-postsecondary-education-a-view-from-the-colleges/.