[Peace-discuss] Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault

[Laurie Solomon]

Universities did not change in 'the Sixties' in any significant or essential 
ways politically; only very specific sectors of the universities underwent 
noticeable changes - and their significance is questionable and even might 
have been cosmetic.  The only substantive changes that I see as having taken 
place as a result of the events of 'the Sixties' is that universities (1) 
became  more extensions of high school and less academies of higher 
intellectual exploration and creative learning, (2) changed their focus from 
institutions of teaching to research facilities, (3) redirected their 
teaching goals from academic goals to vocational training, (4) became more 
dependent on governmental and private corporate contract research and 
consulting for financing, and (5) allowed funding agencies, governmental and 
corporate, to set the research agendas and research subjects that were to be 
conducted by the university faculties and in university facilities as well 
as to determine the topics and content taught in classrooms as well as 
syllabuses of courses within the various schools, divisions, and departments 
of the universities.  The net result being an increased corporatization of 
academia and its universities where the universities and their personnel now 
work for the corporate establishment in very direct and fundamentally 
practical ways by serving as recruiting and training facilities for 
development of a corporate workforce and labor pool and as research and 
development centers for the corporate world which not only conduct 
theoretical and pure research into academic topics but now engage in actual 
concrete applied research and product development for the corporations.

I am willing to acknowledge that universities prior to 'the Sixties'  (from 
the end of WWII to the early 1960s) were both elitist institutions and 
functionaries in the service of both the establishment and the government 
(particularly the DOD, the Dept. of State, and DOJ); but even then, there 
was a much greater independence from those funding agencies and from direct 
involvement of the corporate establishment in the internal workings, 
research, and goals of the universities and their personnel.  Universities 
still tended to be sort of ivory towers where teaching was dominant over 
research, the aims of undergraduate teaching were intellectual development 
of the student and not on job training, the goals of graduate schools were 
not focused on furnishing work credentials for a labor force for the 
corporate and governmental worlds but were oriented toward producing 
replacements for retiring university faculties, and the institutions were 
generally self-governing to a large extent.  Prior to the WWII, universities 
were conservative elitist academies and ivory towers of intellectual 
contemplation for the most part.  If they had a pragmatic component, it was 
in the fields of agriculture; and while they may have depended on 
contributions and endowments from the upper class and the wealthy in many 
cases with - in the case of the land grant schools - basic financial support 
and funding coming out of tax payer dollars, they were pretty much left to 
govern themselves, set their own goals and standards, control their own 
agendas, and hire and fire who they pleased in accordance with their own 
academic and non-academic standards.

-----Original Message----- 
From: C. G. Estabrook
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2011 9:57 AM
To: Peace-discuss List
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault

Why universities have changed more in this decade than in 'the Sixties' - 
and in
the other direction.

http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2958/noam_chomsky_public_education/
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