“…In the United States and England, in particular, the ideal of
the university as a vital public good no longer fits into a revamped discourse
of progress, largely defined in terms of economic growth. Under the onslaught
of a merciless and savage financialization of society that has spread since the
1980s, the concept of social progress has all but disappeared amid the
ideological onslaught of a crude, market-driven fundamentalism that promises
instant gratification, consumption and immediate financial gain. If dissident
intellectuals were the subjects of right-wing attacks in the past, the range
and extent of the attack on higher education has widened and become more
insidious.
“As Ellen Schrecker succinctly notes: ‘Today the entire
enterprise of higher education, not just its dissident professors, is under
attack, both internally and externally. The financial challenges are obvious,
as are the political ones. Less obvious, however, are the structural changes
that have transformed the very nature of American higher education. In reacting to the economic insecurities of
the past forty years, the nation's colleges and universities have adopted
corporate practices that degrade undergraduate instruction, marginalize faculty
members, and threaten the very mission of the academy as an institution devoted
to the common good’ (Ellen Schrecker, The Lost Soul of Higher Education, (New York, N.Y.: The New
Press, 2010), p. 3.).
“Memories of the
university as a citadel of democratic learning have been replaced by a
university eager to define itself largely as an adjunct of corporate power. Civic freedom has been
reduced to the notion of consumption, education has been reduced to a form of
training, and agency has been narrowed to the consumer logic of choice legitimated
by a narrow belief in defining one's goals almost entirely around
self-interests rather than shared responsibilities of democratic sociability…”
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