Grades are in and the semester’s done. I’m relieved and a little regretful too, and like I said, I’ll miss the students. (I’m very tired, as well, but that’s largely due to the pneumonia.) I’m also almost entirely done with my Christmas shopping, which is a happy feeling (did I already say I’m tired?); the one thing left is to pick up something for my dad that my brother asked me to get, for which I’ll have to travel down to the big mall tomorrow — not looking forward to it.
Anyway: I made some good progress through Derek Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace today. Bok contends that “whatever value consumer demand may have in deciding what goods to produce, it is not a reliable guide for choosing an appropriate curriculum or constructing an ideal research agenda” (29), with which you may accurately imagine that I happily agree, and much of the book examines the complicated intersections and interactions between universities and markets. He goes on to point out that “efforts to adapt the corporate model by trying to measure performance of ‘manage by objective’ are much more difficult and dangerous for universities than they are for commercial enterprises” (30), which again strikes me as apt: why is it that so many people so easily think that corporate capitalism is an ideal model for every aspect of society? Do we perform a sort of mental syllogism by which most humans today like and need money, corporations are all about producing more and more money, hence in a democratic society corporations and things that imitate them can produce the greatest good by producing the greatest amount of money?
OK, so it’s a rhetorical question, and a reductive and rather silly one at that. Bok goes on to offer chilling accounts of the collision of corporate and university agendas in the arena of high-stakes academic research and concludes that the corporate privatization of research is genuinely dangerous because of the demonstrable ways in which corporate interests contravene human interests: “using the promise of financial gain to bring about socially useful results is a risky enterprise” (77). I was happy to see, as well, that Bok has some of the same reservations I do about the contemporary hyper-privileging of efficiency: “efficiency is not a very helpful guide for teaching and research. A corporate trustee will periodically make news by calling for greater productivity through heavier teaching loads and fewer faculty members per student, but such measures can easily damage the quality of education. Similarly, an efficiency expert can identify redundant positions in science departments, but eliminating the positions may gravely diminish the value of the research effort. As James Watson is said to have remarked: ‘To encourage real creativity, you need to have a good deal of slack.'” (31) [Somebody help me out here: what do you do with MLA style and punctuation and citation in that last sentence, aside from the block-quote cop-out? ‘Cause I’ve got Gibaldi’s 6th edition of the official Handbook and two other handbooks — Hacker and The Everyday Writer — and none of them help.] Again, the contemporary trend seems to be to see corporate America as utopia — but do we really want to live in a world where efficiency is the crowning virtue?
Is an efficient lover a good lover? Or would we rather take, as Supertramp puts it, the long way home?
More tomorrow.
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