Critique of Making Higher Education a Business

= More Info (see policy on "more info" links)

• The Cal State Controversy
  • Update: C/Net, "College Tech Deal Folds" (June 29, 1998)
  • Selected Resources (for fuller bibliography, see Featured Controversy)
    1. "Technology Infrastructure Initiative Supporting Partnership Plan" (the Cal State plan to create a limited liability corporation "comprised of the four corporate partners [GTE, Fujitsu, Hughes, and Microsoft] and the CSU auxiliary") (CSU)
    2. FAQ for the TII (highlights of the plan in question-and-answer format) (CSU)
    3. C/Net, "Colleges to Give Windows Top Billing" (Nov. 24, 1997)
    4. Los Angeles Times, "A Farewell Warning," Jan. 7, 1998: B2 ("As he assumes his new job . . . former Chancellor Barry Munitz delivers a stark pronouncement to those who protest Cal State's creative financial arrangments")
    5. Los Angeles Times, "Microsoft Dropped from University Partnership," April 17, 1998: D1, D5 (coverage of new developments in the controversial Cal State system plan to partner with major technology firms) | see also C/Net, "Microsoft Drops Out of College Deal" (Apr. 16, 1998)
• "Classical Studies Degree at George Mason University under Threat of Elimination" (1998) ("As reported in The Washington Post of March 15, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at George Mason University has begun a process of extensive restructuring to bring the college in line with the university's new emphasis on technology. As a result 19 degree programs in arts and sciences are being slated for elimination. Among these are the B.A.s in Classical Studies, German, Russian, and Russian Studies as well as M.A. degrees in French and German and the Graduate Certificate in Translation, all offered through the Department of Modern and Classical Languages.") (The Classics Page at George Mason U.) | See Washington Post, "Liberal Arts at GMU Targeted by Degrees: Proposed Cuts Draw Immediate Protests"
• Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928 (Madison, Wisconson: U. Wisconsin Press, 1990)
• James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, "The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money" (1998) | Bibliography ("The starved logic that sees money as the most desirable result of education--that knowledge is money or should be directly convertible to it--has produced what we call the Three Criteria[:] . . . A Promise of Money . . . A Knowledge of Money . . . A Source of Money . . . Is our disinvestment in the humanities--what we might call the dehumanization of higher education--a legitimate response to desirable market factors?") (Harvard Alumni Magazine)
• The Industry Standard: The Newsmagazine of the Internet Economy, "Higher Earning: The Fight to Control the Academy's Intellectual Capital" (June 28, 1998)
• Paul Lauter (Trinity C., Conn.)
  1. Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), esp. pp. 175-97: "Retrenchment--What the Managers are Doing"
  2. "Unionizing Against Cutbacks" (1998) (Workplace)
• Los Angeles Times
  1. "Will Technology Commercialize Higher Learning?" Jan. 19, 1998: D6 (". . . some academics are starting to view their institutions as emergent clones of market-driven high-tech companies instead of as universities and colleges")
• Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984)
• Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996)
• Wesley Shumar, College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education (London: Falmer, 1997)
• Langdon Winner (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, "The Handwriting on the Wall: Resisting Technoglobalism's Assault on Education" (1997) (major essay on the general problem of the corporatization of education by a well-known philosopher and historian of technology)