Some excerpts from an online article on the Huff Post College site. The authors are
“Less widely appreciated is that many critics are now using financial exigency as a bogus justification for questioning the value of a college education and, by implication, undermining the worth of public research universities. Those who exploit this unease — including current candidates for the United States Presidency — consider a college education to be little more than a credentialing exercise to produce new cogs for the corporate machine. These critics also argue that the status quo is unsustainable and that today’s public research university must be destroyed and reinvented as an efficiency-oriented, bottom-line ‘business corporation.’ “
“One element of the current strategy being deployed for reinventing the public research university is for boards of regents and trustees — who usually lack any experience in higher education, but who are products of the corporate regime — to impose their narrow worldview on public universities. Their ill-informed or misguided decisions can wreak havoc for decades thereafter.”
“We should insist that public university boards include faculty members or others familiar with higher education in order to promote and protect shared governance, and that university Presidents and administrators be hired to fight for and not against the intellectual ideals of higher education. These positions should not be favors to those who have lavished large sums of money on the universities or the state governors in question.”
“Failure to appoint duly qualified and involved citizens on governing boards will effectively end America’s proud legacy of public higher education, leaving only private universities as venues for academic freedom, intellectual growth, creativity, and discovery. That would be a national disgrace and ultimately an economic disaster.”
Read the entire article HERE.