In Change Magazine, there is an article on the academic industrial complex to read and discuss. The piece begins by showing how the Carnegie Foundation and the AAUP shaped academia in the 20th century.
Together, these two entities created a national, mobile professoriate (see also the discussion of Carnegie units and credit hours), a professoriate with security, academic freedom, and responsibility for shared governance, and a stratified professoriate (see also the discussion of standardized tests). They then created or attempted to create a counterbalance to this stratification.
Rhoades then talks about the current situation and the future. It seems to me that he is recommending we dismantle the corporate or “deconstructed” model of faculty work that has been imposed over the past twenty or thirty years. This is good, but it is also chilling to note that my own institution is just warming to the deconstructed model. Will it take Rhoades’ recommendations into consideration, perhaps, by the time I retire?
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It is Carnaval, and it is the weekend, so we are singing – despite having several onerous bureaucratic tasks which must be accomplished soon. I have attended one very refreshing rock concert, and I am doing my nails so I can get into my Mardi Gras ball.
Update: the concert was better than the ball. My nails are still not well enough done, nor are the bureaucratic tasks. It is cold.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 