|
August 2, 2009
In Study, Students, Universities: An Introduction in the latest issue of Polygraph
Luka Arsenjuk and Michelle Koerner say that the challenge presented by the current economic crisis appears in the field of education as a continuation of the shifts and transformations of the University into a transnational corporation that primarily views students as consumers or as an exploitable labor-force to be managed and which is concerned with the mere management of already accumulated knowledge. The corporate universities' narrative about themselves is that they are the new borderless agents of world economy and administration.
Arsenjuk and Koerner make reference to Duke University hosting a conference under the title The Collapse of Traditional Knowledge” in January 2007. They say that:
The conference was pitched as an attempt to “reflect critically on the conditions of our own thinking,” while expressly avoiding the pitfalls of a “simple political complaint about the corporate University.” Bringing together an impressive group of academics, the conference aimed at continuing the discussion—which has itself become a tradition of sorts in the humanities—of the transformations in the contemporary University’s guiding rationale and its corresponding models of the production and transmission of knowledge. In trying to identify the structural causes of a shift in the organization of knowledge, to relate them to concrete effects, and, it was hoped, to open up new possibilities for thought, “The Collapse of Traditional Knowledge” conference covered a wide range of questions: the crisis of public education and the erosion of academic freedom in the face of increasing privatization; the transformative effects on thought and knowledge of new technologies, new media, and digitally “revolutionized” modes of communication; and a reconsideration of “alternative” and “unstable epistemologies,” both in relation to the discourse of scientific rationality, as well as from the positions of marginalized and excluded subjectivities.
They say that what the conference made apparent to us was the need to identify the novel aspects of these continuous shifts in the organization of knowledge and to explore new subjective possibilities, distinct from the ones offered by the established accounts of the transformation of the modern University.
In a time of global crisis of capital the attempts are to privatize education and subsume it even more completely under the demands of the market and the criterion of profitability. The corporate university is not the victim of late capitalism; it is its agent.
What is currently happening in the coproate univerate university has little or nothing to do with humanistic paeans to the “value” of a liberal education or the fantasy of the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; in fact, the intellectual mission of the University rapidly recedes into the background as a type of side business. Marc Bousquet in How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation says that the corporatist ethos rather, Bousquet argues, the deliberate choice of a management culture in university administration that has self-consciously stylized itself after Wall Street, with superstar CEOs, disproportionately high administrative salaries, and recklessly expensive, resource-squandering pet projects. Bousquet writes;
The university under managerial domination is an accumulation machine.... money squeezed from curriculum, faculty compensation, and student financial aid flows into a discretionary fund to be used by university higher-ups as they see fit, with little or no oversight from students, faculty, or the surrounding community at large
|
