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?
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.
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.