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More on “Corporate Cash Alters University Curricula”

April 8, 2014 by

Corporate Cash Alters University Curricula.

There were some replies to my comment.  I replied to one and someone very thoughtfully replied to that and…..  Anyway, here they all are.

Anthony Bonefeste wrote,

“Acedemic freedom” is all well and good. But charging six figures to mislead students into thinking that there is a career in Germanic Poetry or some other such field is practically criminal. Students go to college because they believe it will lead to a better job, not because they feel a deep need to gain a better understanding of a specific field.

Universities that better prepare their students to become productive members of society and reliable employees are, in my opinion, taking a step in the right direction. Academic freedom is not lost in this model in any way; it simply takes a different form and has an added source of funding. If this model takes off, we might even see a decrease in the amount of debt taken on by students in the future.”

I replied,

Mostly, I agree with you. Certainly “..mislead[ing] students…” is wrong. I also agree that most, but not all, students go to college to get a better job. I do think though that Thomas Jefferson would have something to say about additional goals of education in a democracy where it is important that the people understand issues.

Here is where I disagree with you: “…Academic freedom is not lost in this model…”. There is not enough room in a comment for me to explain why I think that is wrong – and important, so I will just quote from two important observers of higher education.

Here is what Robert Maynard Hutchins had to say,

“…when an institution determines to do something in order to get money it must lose its soul. … I do not mean…that universities do not need money and that they should not try to get it. I mean only that they should have an educational policy and then try to finance it, instead of letting financial accidents determine their educational policy….”

and, here is what Derek Bok had to say in his Report to the Board of Overseers (of Harvard), 1996,

“The commercialization of universities is perhaps the most severe threat facing higher education…Universities appear less and less as charitable institutions seeking truth and serving students, and more and more as a huge commercial operation that differs from corporations only because there are no shareholders and no dividends.”

Daniel Sharp wrote, (which I really like)

I agree with much of what you write in this forum, but I must respond to the Derek Bok quote you included in a later comment. I do not see why those in academia should fear grants from corporations but not from the federal government. My children’s university received well over a half a billion dollars in grants from the federal government last year, which was almost eighty percent of that university’s R&D spending for the year. It’s not alone. Stanford received just over 72% of its R&D spending from the federal government, and Johns Hopkins over 87%.

I submit that perhaps this government money, coming year in and year out, has become a drug to which those institutions and their faculty are now addicted, rendering them incapable of contemplating anything but a federally subsidized world of tenure, housed in ever more elaborate buildings. It’s so bad, so entrenched, that, like most addicts, they do not see it.

Even the largest corporation lacks the resources to provide so much money to so many institutions, but even if one did, how would its influence be any more pernicious or undermine “academic freedom” (assuming it even exists at all) any more effectively than the US government? Why does the “profit motive” rank lower than whatever mendacity one can ascribe to politicians and government apparatchiks?

Just some questions I ponder.

Finally, I wrote,

You make important points. Government money has had a big affect – some quite negative. The paper “How Undergraduate Education Became College Lite: And a Personal Apology” by Murray Sperber addresses the negative affect (on education) of government money that flowed into universities after Sputnik. He was there and particpated, and feels that it led to what you call a drug and he calls a sense of “research entitlement”. (There is a link to the paper on my blog in the “reading list”.

I do think there is one difference between government and business. In an ideal world, the government should represent our nation’s interest and business should represent their own interest. Maybe in the real world, the government can at least lean toward the general interest.

Thanks for the comment. This is a tough topic.

 

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