–Should faculty be included as stakeholders in decisions about content for their courses?– I was asked. In the past, we would have had the collective power to laugh at such things.
Axé.
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coldhearted scientist وداد 
I attended one of those meetings to talk about “stakeholders” for Women’s Studies. “Who are our stakeholders?” they asked. I looked around at my fellow faculty members, expecting to see amused looks on their faces; yet everyone seemed busy incorporating this business-speak into the conversation. I knew it was over.
I feel your pain. “Stakeholders?” Really? Is tuition stock in our classes? This is the way the world ends.
…damn.
The way the world ends, it is over, I hear the bell tolling.
Actually, Women’s Studies is the only department I’ve been in that called meetings on this and takes the question seriously. I suppose it has reason to feel more embattled and to need to prove its validity, but I thought it was our job to point to the ironies of the exercise.
However, the idea that one is only a “stakeholder” in the determination of content for one’s courses and might not even get to be that any more is new to me and I think we have stolen it from the University of Phoenix.
You might want to throw in a little “sustainability” with that. Very popular in the Portland, O., usually comes with lots of stakeholder. Sausage, I say.
So that means the sustainability of an effort, or does it mean that sustainable agriculture and/or development is a voiced consideration in that many business conversations in Portland? (Honestly, sustainable agriculture was my first association with your comment, because of the Portland connection! Look how I stereotype the Oregonians!)
Its boundaries are limitless it seems. The past weekend there was a humanities conference at Portland State U. on “understanding sustainability.”
Purpose was “to construct bridges across the diverse terrains of sustainability theory and practice, engaging in productive dialogue and debate that might lead to innovative green frameworks for environmental scholarship, activism, research, and policy.”
Very Portland, it was free and open to the public. You are correct to envision the concept as food production because seems where it started–though perhaps with less jargon, just growing things green.
Oh God — a humanities conference on sustainability!
And so it’s become a business term too, as in, they talk about it in the same breath as stakeholding?
Quelle horreur! C’est un grand scandale!
Chiming in late. The horror, the horror. I really don’t know what to think.