Resisting The Corporate University: What It Means To Be A 'Slow Professor' : 13.7: Cosmos And Cultur
"Thrilling" isn't a word I often apply to books about higher education, but these pages galvanized me. Last December, I concluded 27 years of college teaching and, for now, I still feel a part of campus culture. I'm in contact with colleagues (locally, nationally and internationally) who feel burned by this corporate model. They work long hours yet have little time to read or write for work, or just to think - the faculty activities that Berg and Seeber say a university should prize most and that may benefit its students the most.
What exactly is the corporatization of the academy? Here's a powerful descriptive passage from The Slow Professor:
"The corporate university's language of new findings, technology transfer, knowledge economy, grant generation, frontier research, efficiency, and accountability dominates how academic scholarship is now framed both within the institution and outside it."
The buzzwords in this quote describe activities that might sound good but in fact often aren't, because emphasis on them leaches away the joy and the humanity from the teaching-learning process. "Frontier research" is an example: It sounds good, right? But when the plum prize is considered by university power structures to be external funding from governments and corporations, money that underwrites applied research, then non-dollar-generating, non-product-oriented approaches to learning in the humanities and social sciences may be devalued.
(Applied science research plays a vital role in the life of the university, in fact in all our lives. I hope this goes without saying. It's a matter of balance.)
Working at corporate universities, professors often become "beleaguered, managed, frantic, stressed, and demoralized," Berg and Seeber say. It's as if there can never be enough product generated (grants, jargon-laden documents about students' learning outcomes, committee white papers) in the hours available.
Does anyone still think that college professors have it easy..?
Resisting The Corporate University: What It Means To Be A 'Slow Professor' : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
What exactly is the corporatization of the academy? Here's a powerful descriptive passage from The Slow Professor:
"The corporate university's language of new findings, technology transfer, knowledge economy, grant generation, frontier research, efficiency, and accountability dominates how academic scholarship is now framed both within the institution and outside it."
The buzzwords in this quote describe activities that might sound good but in fact often aren't, because emphasis on them leaches away the joy and the humanity from the teaching-learning process. "Frontier research" is an example: It sounds good, right? But when the plum prize is considered by university power structures to be external funding from governments and corporations, money that underwrites applied research, then non-dollar-generating, non-product-oriented approaches to learning in the humanities and social sciences may be devalued.
(Applied science research plays a vital role in the life of the university, in fact in all our lives. I hope this goes without saying. It's a matter of balance.)
Working at corporate universities, professors often become "beleaguered, managed, frantic, stressed, and demoralized," Berg and Seeber say. It's as if there can never be enough product generated (grants, jargon-laden documents about students' learning outcomes, committee white papers) in the hours available.
Does anyone still think that college professors have it easy..?
Resisting The Corporate University: What It Means To Be A 'Slow Professor' : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR