Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
One would certainly think so. But it seems that at some point universities have begun treating students as customers.
Freddie deBoer has basically nuked his entire online presence, so I can't find his blog post about Purdue spending tons of money on a student center/mall, but this one is good enough:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/maga ... y-inc.htmlQuote:
No, I’m talking about the way universities operate, every day, more and more like corporations. As Benjamin Ginsberg details in his 2011 book, ‘‘The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters,’’ a constantly expanding layer of university administrative jobs now exists at an increasing remove from the actual academic enterprise. It’s not unheard-of for colleges now to employ more senior administrators than professors. There are, of course, essential functions that many university administrators perform, but such an imbalance is absurd — try imagining a high school with more vice principals than teachers. This legion of bureaucrats enables a world of pitiless surveillance; no segment of campus life, no matter how small, does not have some administrator who worries about it. Piece by piece, every corner of the average campus is being slowly made congruent with a single, totalizing vision. The rise of endless brushed-metal-and-glass buildings at Purdue represents the aesthetic dimension of this ideology. Bent into place by a small army of apparatchiks, the contemporary American college is slowly becoming as meticulously art-directed and branded as a J. Crew catalog. Like Niketown or Disneyworld, your average college campus now leaves the distinct impression of a one-party state.
Which is why, whenever the conversation inevitably turns to campus political culture these days, I think of the garden. It has become fashionable to argue that leftist language policing has mingled with the service vision of higher education — where students are the customers and professors their servants — to curtail the free expression of ideas that most see as the natural purpose of higher education. Minor campus incidents, magnified through the powerful lens of the Internet, become the focus of vast, binary arguments, picked apart ‘‘Rashomon’’-style by interested parties.
Quote:
Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it. Of course, sexual harassment is a real and vexing problem, not merely on campus but in all kinds of organizations, and the urge to oppose it through policy is a noble one. But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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