Making Commodification Visible

Bruce Pietrykowski, in the June 2001 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues, quotes David Noble’s examination of “the identification of the campus as a significant site of capital accumulation” resulting “in the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property” (300). Pietrykowski points to the ways in which this “corporate university model offers up a rhetoric of libertarianism, entrepreneurialism, and individual empowerment” which may “fail to account for the social system in which the market for educational services is embedded” (304). He also notes that “the introduction of computer-based technologies may well signal a new terrain of struggle over the purpose and nature of higher education” (300), which sounds to me a lot like my own hypothesis: computers make freshly visible the economic commodification of higher education and also represent a point of possible intervention into that commodification.