I’ve finished Derek Bok and moved on to get myself several chapters into Stanley Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory. Where Bok was careful and restrained in his critique of the effects of commercialization in university research and athletics, Aronowitz makes sweeping and incendiary pronouncements that he sometimes fails to back up. In temperament, I’m more with Aronowitz, who takes an often dim view of the current state of affairs in academia, but I wish he took more care in his argumentation.
Aronowitz takes some harsh swipes at Clark Kerr, some of which hit their mark, and cast Kerr’s book in a rather different light for me. Basically, the title of Aronowitz’s book refers to the perceived single most important purpose of Kerr’s university as producing economically and socially useful knowledge, like a factory manufacturing goods for society’s consumption. Aronowitz is not happy with this construction, and contends that in the first part of the twentieth century, “there was no unambiguous democratic purpose in the maintenance of these institutions” of public higher education; rather, “publicly funded colleges were integral to the strategy of economic development. If the business of government is business, so should be the business of public higher education” (26). Pretty tough stuff.
Anyway: like I said, I’m only a few chapters into Aronowitz, and it’s reading more like a polemical history than anything else. With Aronowitz and Bok and Kerr, I’m trying to put together an understanding of the university as an economic site and a classed site, within which I hope to locate writing instruction as an economic process and a classed process, and in doing so connect the university and writing instruction to the classed and economic uses of technology.
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