Truthout
Challenging the Corporate University
How can we move forward toward a more equitable and liberatory era in higher education?
Series Introduction
Recent transformations and restructuring within higher education — along with profit-making, exploitation of labor, and revenue-generating goals of the university — have disproportionately impacted marginalized and contingent faculty, staff and impoverished students. More recently, the economic turmoil incurred due to the coronavirus pandemic has provided an opportunity and an excuse for university boards and administrations to restructure and treat universities like a volatile market. The move toward corporate models in these institutions weakens the fundamental notion and purpose of higher education. In this new Truthout series, we will ask: What are the challenges, realities, symptoms, and failures of corporatized colleges and universities? Who is impacted and how? And how can we move forward toward a more equitable and liberatory era in higher education?
Future Generations Will See Students Backed Palestine as Admins Attacked Protest
These moments determine how history will remember each of us, as well as how we remember history in the future.
Campus Crackdowns Have Exposed Authoritarian Rot at the Heart of Universities
The greatest threat to democracy on many campuses has turned out to be the schools’ own trustees and administrators.
Administrators Are Trying to Strip Decision-Making Power From Faculty
Scholar DeShana Collett discusses the threats to shared governance at her university and, by extension, other schools.
Scholars Should Be Able to Speak Out Against Genocide Without Fear of Punishment
The censorship of pro-Palestine speech on campuses is escalating. We must all work to resist this.
Academic Institutions in the West Can No Longer Remain Silent on Gaza
Israel is targeting Palestinian universities and scholars in Gaza and the West Bank. All academics should speak out.
Harvard President’s Ouster Makes Visible the Rising Power of the Far Right
The same forces targeting Palestine solidarity work are trying to end all campus discussions of anticolonial politics.
Palestinians Face Genocide. Now Is Not the Time for Academic Neutrality.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” Desmond Tutu once warned us.
Layoffs at West Virginia University Expose Right-Wing Trends Sweeping Higher Ed
Unspoken right-wing ideological motivations operate beneath the language of brute financial calculus.
Amid Extremist Attacks on Higher Ed, We Must Go Beyond Diversity and Inclusion
The framework of diversity, equity and inclusion isn’t radical enough to truly challenge the spheres of power.
Harvard Has Become a Tax Shelter for Billionaires as Public Education Languishes
Massachusetts needs to reevaluate the tax-exempt status of its private universities with endowments over $1 billion.