Friday, November 9, 2012
research blog #7- counter argument -
Recently, there are striking changes in higher education. Economic troubles of the last decades, and an unwillingness to fund higher education on the federal government's (and the state's) side paved the way for private capital to be involved in higher education. Although, for-profit colleges (private institutions) made up only a small number of universities in the US, their numbers are ever increasing. My question is whether this privatization is part of the natural evolution of higher education (institutions evolve just like living organisms to suit the needs of their time) or an intrusion of its natural course by foreign forces, private capital and the corporate world. One way the corporate world gets 'involved' with universities is the utilization of universities to train skilled workers for the industry. In his article Are Universities and University Research Under Threat, Martin Ben talks about the recent changes in universities. He dubs the recent involvement of the corporate world in university sphere as the universities' forgotten third mission. This third mission, he argues has been there since the beginning; universities have been involved with their surroundings and locale, and served as centers of knowledge assisting their host country and city in many ways, including training of skilled workers for the industries. In his article, he promotes the recent privatization saying the universities should not be isolated and should be more involved with their surroundings as to accomplish their third mission. I, however, disagree with the promotion of privatization. Even though I agree that universities should be involved with their locale, state and economy by assisting them with their expertise (and sometimes with its mere presence since a university makes its host city more active socially and economically, just like New Brunswick during semesters), this involvement does not and should not require loss of autonomy and character on the university's part. I believe that a university can assist society without bowing to the demands of private capital and business interests. It is a university's autonomy and academic character (rather than a proposed corporate or business character) that makes a university beneficial for society. Otherwise (under private control), it is just another company doing business in the city that does no good to society if it is not in its interest to do so.
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It could be that the privatization should be understood as a response in the higher education community to environmental changes, as privatization and resistance to taxation have become broader movements in the culture at large.
ReplyDeleteI wonder, though, if maybe a focus on the growth of administration during this period of privatization might reveal some interesting things. Meister, interestingly, suggests it is a deliberate choice on the part of school administrators, who embrace privatization not out of necessity but because it gives them some advantages. One advantage, by the way, is that it allows administrators to fund more administration -- and gives them the money to pay higher salaries to administrators. I saw an interesting chart that showed that, while the price of tuition has soared, faculty pay has just kept up with the rise in consumer prices (the consumer price index). That suggests that the gap between the cost of labor and the cost of tuition is very high. Some of that can be accounted for by the cuts in state support. But some of it might also be the rise in the cost of administration. And it may be that privatization has been an administrative response to change designed to maximize rewards to administrators and to expand their numbers. So, we can see the university as an internally competitive system where administrators are the ones gaining all the rewards.
This is just a suggestion. You can definitely talk about the shift toward greater privatization as an evolutionary development. But you might want to focus attention on some aspect of that shift, whereby colleges and universities have adopted corporate patterns into their genetic make-up, including higher pay for executives and greater administrative control.
this 'change' in the administration and administrators reflects the change in universities. So, I am wondering if it would be appropriate and useful if I talked about the traditional definition of a university professor (or president) and what we have now? because I've always thought about professors as being immune to the worldly pressures of society, I'd expect them to be oblivious to worldly gain (kind of like priests of knowledge and academics)and only concerned with the advancement of science and knowledge, not with profits.
Deletebut of course that would mean I need a new source describing what a 'traditional professor' means.
That is an interesting idea. Administrators definitely have different interests from professors. In fact, professors are often more focused on their standing within their specific field of research (how their peers outside of their institution see them) than they are about their standing at their school. So they focus on research, for example, over teaching. And the schools, which value the standing of professors, reinforce that.
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