Week 4 - Ivan Yang A02

I did not realize how corporatization of public universities is so intricately tied in with so many deteriorating factors that we are observing in today’s academic atmosphere until I read this week’s readings. For example, as demonstrated in Christopher Newfield’s book, Unmaking the Public University, the demise of humanities subjects, specifically ethnic studies, in relation to the demise of postwar middle class population’s access to opportunities and their influence of changing the current systems based on the knowledge that they’ve been bestowed upon in public research universities due to the increasing corporatization of such institutions by conservative upper class individuals through delegitimizing efforts. Corporatization has also led to the corruption of academic freedom leading to the prioritization of STEM related research, as it yields much more tangible and profitable returns as compared to social sciences and other humanities research, which lead to less profitable knowledge in the corporate sphere yet is still fundamental in the advancement of human development. Secondly, I was extremely upset in seeing corporatization catalyzing the demise of ethical culture in public universities. As outlined in Fredrik deBoer’s article in The New York Times Magazine, corporate architecture of managing offense is built upon efforts designed to spare the institutions from legal liability, essentially systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions.

All of the above phenomena can be clearly seen back in our home campus of UC Davis. This has been further delineated in the article contrasting UC Berkeley’s more humanistic response to their Occupy protesters with UC Davis’ denouncing and legal-like response towards theirs, highlighting how our administration clearly sees us students primarily as assets and liabilities rather than actual knowledge-seeking scholars. This perspective is also clearly seen among faculty members based on their willingness to partake in the general corporatization of the public university institution as seen in Professor Amy Block Joy PhD’s autobiography, Whistleblower, where she recounts the numerous efforts UC Davis administration employed to shut down her complaints in relation to an embezzlement scandal. It has definitely highlighted my awareness when navigating my academic institution, especially as a person of color student where the system is actively pursuing efforts to delegitimize ethnic studies and other humanities subjects that are meant to empower minority groups/the middle class population and make way for us to be included in the dialogue of reshaping our social systems for the betterment and further inclusivity of humankind.

Lastly, these readings repeatedly served as proof that social movements need to be continuously kept in check throughout multiple generations of organizers. The corporatization of public research universities is one of many examples of how a social movement can been co-opted by the same forces that they were fighting against over time due to people thinking that the change has been made and institutional erasure of collective struggle.

(Let’s not forget the earlier hunger strike that happened in UC Davis in 1990 that fought for similar measures as described in the beginning of Newfield’s book that occured in UCLA and UCSB.) 

Question:
What capabilities do we have, as students of color who are directly affected by the delegitimization of ethnic studies, to reinforce the notion of social equity and human development that ethnic studies was meant to catalyze in UC Davis?


References:
DeBoer, Fredrick. "Why We Should Fear University, Inc." The New York Times Magazine, 9 September 2015, 1-8.
Joy, A. B. (2014). Ethics and “Breaking Bad”: Developing and practicing ethical skills. Compliance & Ethics Professional.
Joy, A.B. (2010). Whistleblower: Police.
Markow, A. (2011, December) A Tale of Two Campuses Berkeley and Davis respond to Occupy movements.
Newfield, Christopher. (2008) Unmaking the Public University: The 40 Year Assault on the Middle Class.

“Protest.” UC Davis Magazine, The Regents of the University of California, Davis Campus, Davis, California, 1 Nov. 2015, magazine.ucdavis.edu/protest-sparks-25-year-legacy/.