Week 4 - Armanjot Bhangu - A04

Armanjot Bhangu

Section: A04

Week #4

For this week, I chose to read “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.”, written by Fredrik DeBoer. In this
article, DeBoer goes into detail about how as time has gone by, universities across the United States
seem to have developed characteristics similar to that of a business rather than than being hubs for
academia. Universities are acting more and more like corporations and as a result the students who
study at these institutions are forced to suffer. Therefore, being the ones who are getting impacted
directly by this change, DeBoer suggests that it is up to the students themselves to try and reverse this
trend. According to him, “students will have to be the ones who lead the way, not by making appeals to
institutions that will never truly serve their needs but by creating a new, human — as opposed to
corporate — campus politics.” Simply put, until students make an organized effort towards colleges that
is filled with demands rather than requests, universities will only become more corporatized. The author
also goes into detail about how rather than spending university funds in areas of actual need, they
choose to spend money for things that are completely unnecessary and can be looked at as a waste
of time, effort, and money. This leads to the notion that universities do not have the best interest of the
students in mind when making major decisions. It is up to the students to decide whether or not they
want to act against this injustice, or watch it continue to go on and directly affect their academic
experience.

QUESTION:

How can students rise up and protest the injustices being done towards them by universities, without
having their voices shut down due to the immense amount of funds that the universities have access to?

REFERENCES:

DeBoer, F. (2015, September 9). Why We Should Fear University Inc. The New York Times Magazine.