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?
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.
Public Universities Run on Underpaid Labor. Now Grad Workers Are Fighting Back.
From Temple University to Rutgers, the devaluation of academic labor has its roots in decades of neoliberalism.
As Universities Submit to Neoliberalism and Fascism, Workers Must Fight Back
Faculty unions need to scale up organizing among academic workers to counter far right attacks on higher education.
Purdue Students and Faculty Say No to War Criminals on Campus
Activists at Purdue will protest George W. Bush’s role in the war on Iraq during his December 6 campus visit.
Let’s Build Leftist Academic Solidarities to Rebuff Far Right Attacks
To defend space for justice-based scholarship, we must challenge the individualizing logic of the corporate university.
Universities Are Plundering Cities. How Can This Relationship Change?
Scholar Davarian L. Baldwin discusses how “UniverCities” occupy -- and reshape -- local spaces and local economies.
My University “Rebranded.” Instead, It Should’ve Actually Confronted Injustice.
UMass Boston's rebranding may serve to establish the campus as a beacon of bait-and-switch austerity politics.
Adjunct and Tenured Faculty Must Unite to Resist Pandemic Opportunism on Campus
Administrators are still using COVID to justify the neoliberal gutting of higher education. Let’s resist together.
It’s Time to Challenge the Corporate University
Both public and private universities have been gradually moving toward market-driven models, creating a "gilded age."