Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement

Welcome to academia in the 21st century, where 60% of tenured professors have been supplanted by underpaid graduate students or part-time adjuncts. The professoriate is no longer a "community of scholars" that governs itself, but a group of employees whose work is reviewed by administrators who cut deals to put cheaply packaged courses on-line for worldwide consumption.<BR>Where have the ivy-covered walls, tweedy professors, and genteel university presidents gone? Replaced, say the authors of this provocative work, by markets, profits, and computers.<BR>"Steal This University" documents the rise of the corporate university over the past twenty years as well as the academic labor movement that has developed in response. Universities are increasingly looking to corporations as their model for reform, investing in merit-pay packages, partnerships with hi-tech companies, and anything that will reap profits from their creations.<BR>With controversial, personal stories of workplace exploitation, tenure battles, and union organizing, the book shows the challenges of working within this new system and explains the countermovement working to restore independence to university teachers.<BR>From New York University's outrageous union-busting techniques to the rise of for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix, "Steal This University" is both an indictment of current trends and a blueprint for combating them.

Steal This University explores the paradox of academic labor. Universities do not exist to generate a profit from capital investment, yet contemporary universities are increasingly using corporations as their model for internal organization. While the media, politicians, business leaders and the general public all seem to share a remarkable consensus that higher education is indispensable to the future of nations and individuals alike, within academia bitter conflicts brew over the shape of tomorrow's universities. Contributors to the volume range from the star academic to the disgruntled adjunct and each bring a unique perspective to the discussion on the academy's over-reliance on adjuncts and teaching assistants, the debate over tenure and to the valiant efforts to organize unions and win rights.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-249) and index.