Decline in academe

Abstract

When universities became corporate universities, the constraints that defined universities changed. The values of the old university, of scholarship, truth and freedom, were replaced by the values of the market. Education became a product, the university a firm, and the university system an industry. This paper considers the decline in academe as universities converge towards for-profit corporate universities. The paper explores why universities have become corporations, how they have become corporations, and how academics survive within those corporations. In the corporate university, the academic becomes accountable to management and to
 students. Collegiality is sacrificed for managerialism, and freedom for accountability. The academic role is inverted. The academic becomes the academic of the production line, producing standardised teaching and research. The paper suggests that the corporate university risks sacrificing too much scholarship and too much
 freedom for the principles of the market, thereby diluting the integrity of the university.
 
 "On his way to the Ministry, the Minister learns that there is a new hospital in Northern London that is staffed with 500 administrators and ancillary workers, but has no doctors, nurses or patients. The Minister is aghast."
 From The Compassionate Society. Yes Minister, BBC (1981).

Constructing the crisis: Audience perceptions of for-profit education and institutional integrity in the closure of Dana College

“…Those in the field of higher education tend to be more suspicious of corporate "intrusion" into academia. This attitude is well illustrated in the previously cited piece by Sawyer et al (2009), published a year before Dana's closure. The authors draw a distinction between "old universities" and "new, corporate universities," a (as they admit) simplified binary that nonetheless serves to explain what many see to be the decline in educational standards that accompanies the corporatisation of higher education (p. 11).…”

“…Rather, it is to situate these larger questions of educational integrity in a real-world, tangible context to illustrate how audience perception of educational integrity can shape and even jeopardise the future of academia. One of the primary advantages of the "old university," as stated by Sawyer et al (2009), was that, though "financial risks were not negligible . .…”

“…In an unstable global economy, there is a greater demand for the career-based education that for-profit colleges often provide. Sawyer et al (2009), though they take a generally negative view of corporatised education, acknowledge that the "old university" was "unresponsive to government needs to educate more students to higher levels [and] slow in responding to the demands of students for market-related courses" (p. 12). As with most matters in education, the debate is complex and multifaceted.…”

Investigating Staff Views on Plagiarism in Transnational Higher Education

“…(3) excessive amount of administrative time required to deal with the misconduct case (Lodewijks, 2011;de Jager & Brown, 2010;Sutherland-Smith, 2008;(4) heavy teaching and research workload with requirement to publish (Li, 2015); and (5) pressure from some institution to enhance passing rates (Sawyer et al, 2009;Sharman & Wilshire, 2007). McCabe, Butterfield and Traviño (2012) stressed the necessity for staff to be more pro-active in its engagement against plagiarism.…”

Integrity in higher education marketing? A typology of misleading data-based claims in the university prospectus

“…Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself. (Mark Twain, 1906) One consequence of the move to the marketisation of higher education (Hemsley-Brown, 2011;Molesworth, Nixon, & Scullion, 2009;Sawyer, Johnson, & Holub, 2009), has been an increasing emphasis by universities on how they promote themselves to potential students. The university prospectus that was once "a modestly produced booklet mostly written by academic staff" (Brockbank, 1996), has become a large illustrated glossy brochure with a parallel website designed by marketing professionals (Steele, 2009).…”