Erin O'Connor has a review of Derek Bok's "Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education" here.
In the review Erin brings up some good points that Derek Bok seems to have missed. I will agree with Bok on a few points, such as that having corporations contribute money for advertising purposes or for first dibs on scientific breakthroughs that could be used in commerce is not necessarily a bad thing. But Erin points out certain defects in Bok's analysis as indicated in the excerpt below:
In focusing almost exclusively on athletics and corporate-funded research, Bok ignores some of the major ways universities might be said to be "selling out." There is no mention anywhere in the book of the fact that across the country, tuition is skyrocketing even as classes are closing, departments are downsizing, and resources are becoming ever more scarce. There is no mention anywhere in the book of the fact that on many campuses, upwards of half of all undergraduate teaching is now done not by fulltime faculty but by undertrained, underpaid graduate students and by a poorly paid and often uninsured corps of part-time, non-tenurable faculty (more than 40% of the professoriate works part-time; 70% of part-timers make less than $3,000 a course). There is no recognition that the campus labor movement that has so many university administrators up in arms – and that loudly and regularly accuses universities of sacrificing its educational mission to economic interests – is a predictable and logical outgrowth of universities' attempts to cut costs by cutting academic corners.
Read the whole review.
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