NYT: “Academic Business”

There is an article in the New York Times about the increasingly corporate basis of universities across the country.  It is an interesting read in itself, but also of particular interest to us as it references Eastern.  I am sure that our former president would be displeased with the not altogether accurate way in which he is described:

“But [the] reputation [of universities] for probity and virtue is deteriorating fast.  It’s happening at every rung of the academic ladder. A few months ago, the board chairman at Roger Williams University resigned after using the “N” word at a board meeting. Not long before, the president of Eastern Michigan University was fired for covering up the rape and murder of a student, and more recently, a review panel sharply criticized the senior administrators at Virginia Tech over their handling of the shooting rampage on campus. Last April, the admissions dean at M.I.T., known for counseling students to avoid padding their résumés, resigned when it turned out she never attended the schools from which she claimed to hold degrees.”

The author of this article makes many worthy points, but I don’t agree with his unsupported assumption that professors themselves have been the ones to advocate the weakening of academics, succumbing to the pressure to run universities like a business.  Professors as a group have not even been complicit in that process, but instead have actively resisted it whenever possible.  (Nor do I think that a decline in “great books” courses is an appropriate way to measure a decline in academic rigor as a whole.)  Indeed, whatever little power professors do have in shaping academic culture in the face of corporate pressure has typically been used to strengthen academic culture, not the reverse.