This week, along with the usual mid-term moodiness of exams
and essays, students at the University of Manitoba are being confronted with
the additional weight of a potential faculty strike. At best, this could mean a week off from
classes, allowing us some extra time to read, write, and sleep. Worst case scenario, however, is we lose the
work we’ve done this semester, get our tuition refunded, and start all over
again. While the latter is unlikely, the
looming possibility only adds to an already discontented university culture.
In recent
years, a noticeable shift has taken place on the Fort Garry Campus, with
visible signs of the university’s insistence to pursue a corporate model. One blindingly obvious example is the presence
of a Monsanto research facility on campus. Earlier this year students, faculty, and staff rallied together to protest
privatization and mismanagement. Now,
among other concerns, the faculty are pushing back against the university’s
corporate model, arguing that it can have a huge impact on the direction of
research and development required of professors.
In emails
to students and staff, the university administration continues to imply, I
would argue in an intentionally misleading fashion, that the issues surrounding
the impending strike are primarily monetary.
However, from what I can gather from speaking with the professors
themselves, the issue of money is generally resolved. The real issue, I would argue, is the
continued corporatization of the university.
The effects
of corporatization abound; subtle and obscene, they not only affect the
academic culture of our campus, and of campuses globally, but also the mundane
aspects of our every day. When we begin
to accept our surroundings without question, we are spoon fed corporate profit
over academic integrity. When faculties
become part of the business model, professors become a tool in creating what
Noam Chomsky describes as “commodities for the job market”, students being
pushed along an assembly line for inevitable corporate consumption. When we accept that the majority of the food
available to us on campus is only provided by a small handful of corporate
giants, when the university campus continues to get gobbled up by corporate
industry and it’s interests, and when big banks make their appearance on campus
in order to introduce themselves to first years students, offering out credit
card debt under the guise of “making student life more affordable”, we are
accepting our roles as being produced by a machine in which we have no agency. If professors’ research and development
requirements are dictated by the administration forcibly integrating the
business model within academia, deterring critical thought, analysis, and
freedom, the quality of education we, as students, receive, will inevitably
suffer.
In speaking
at the University of Toronto in 2011, On Academic Freedom and the
Corporatization of Universities, Noam Chomsky describes his reaction to
corporatization at his own university:
“So
what's the right reaction to outside funding that threatens the ideal of a free
university? Well one choice is just to reject it in principle, in which case
the university would go down the tubes. It's a parasitic institution. Another
choice is just to recognize it as a fact of life that when I'm at work, I have
to walk past the Lockheed Martin Lecture Hall, and I have to look out my office
window at the Koch building, which is named after the multibillionaires who are
the major funders of the Tea Party and a leading force in on going campaigns to
wipe out the remnants of their labour movement and to institute a kind of
corporate tyranny.
Now, if that outside funding seeks
to [influence] teaching, research and other activities, then there's a strong
argument that it should simply be resisted or rejected outright no matter what
the costs. Such influences are not inevitable, and that's worth bearing in
mind. “
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