Higher Education Is Now a Battlefield Between Workers and Corporatization

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- A student walks by Royce Hall on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on Nov. 17, 2021.
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- Truthout, March 26, 2022. - Ed.

Capitalism eventually ruins all good things. Corporate CEOs override COVID safety measures with demands to “reopen the economy,” a sanitized term for “keep our profits flowing.” Wall Street’s next quarterly earnings trump measures to address the climate crisis. Even social housing, food and medical programs originally intended to uplift humanity are disciplined to monetize everything and embrace business models that differentiate the “deserving” from the “undeserving.”

Higher education, too, has been a central arena of struggle between profit motive and social good. As Joe Berry and Helena Worthen note in their book, Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education (2021), in the last 40 years, “we have seen higher education transformed into a profit-seeking industry.…The flow of money through the whole project of academic research has distorted what is studied, what is judged, what is published and who has access to it.” And with soaring tuition, endless fees and hidden add-on costs, along with privatized student loans and soaring student debt,

“The higher ed industry, like the real estate industry and its sibling, the finance industry, has found a way to suck down the wealth accumulated by the previous generation during the 1950s and 1960s.”

Look beyond higher ed’s Latinate mottos and lofty paeans to truth and knowledge to see what’s steering the ship of higher education: Just survey the building names at your local university. In Seattle, you can stroll to the University of Washington’s Bank of America Executive Education Center (with its Boeing Auditorium), adjacent to the business school housed in PACCAR Hall, “named for the Bellevue truck manufacturer, PACCAR Inc., in recognition of its $16 million gift to the UW.” You’ll see the William H. Gates Law School, named after corporate lawyer & father of Microsoft founder & centibillionaire Bill Gates. The former Physics Building now named after the elder Gates’s wife, Mary Gates, is located between the 2 computer science bldgs. bearing the names of Bill Gates & Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Continue to the Alaska Airlines Arena for a sports event or perhaps a tennis match at the adjacent Nordstrom Tennis Center.

Mind you, this is supposed to be a public institution. The ego-boosting naming rights and & tax deductions that these elites reap, & the governing board positions that their generosity purchases, are accessory benefits to their real objective: The creation & maintenance of a publicly funded assembly line producing the intellectual capital necessary to feed their voracious private profit machines. Fortunately, this dystopian vision is not without organized resistance in the form of the growing army of precarious university workers who perform most of the teaching & research in higher ed. Fifty years ago, more than 3/4ths of university faculty were tenure or tenure-track, and only 1/4th were temporary teachers, or adjuncts. Today, those numbers have flipped, with 75% of college classroom teachers being precariously employed, as “adjuncts,” lecturers or doctoral candidate teaching assistants. They have no long-term job security. They must stay keenly on the lookout every year- or even every academic term- to secure their next teaching or research gig. It’s not that different from Uber drivers hustling for the next ride...

- Read More, https://truthout.org/articles/higher-education-is-now-a-battlefield-between-workers-and-corporatization/



- A student lives in his car at the Univ. of Calif. Irvine.

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https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016319171