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Battling the Trappings of University Life

Posted by Jack Stephens | November 29th, 2007 | Crossposted from The Blog and the Bullet

The Wily Filipino, a college professor in a tenure battle, gives his two cents on battling neoliberalism in the university system, he opens with:

My former employer, an urban school by reputation, has essentially abandoned its decades-long “commitment” to the working class from its immediate surroundings, and instead has concentrated on recruiting aggressively from the O.C. to fill up their dormitories. (I have nothing against SoCal in particular, but it does raise the question of where the SF high schoolers are ending up. A year ago an overwhelming majority of the first-year students in my anthropology class were already dorm-dwellers. This is a fairly profound student demographic shift in my opinion, suggesting, perhaps erroneously, that they were relatively moneyed and that they had few ties to the local community. But that latter part can change.)

…

Enough chitchat; here we go…

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3 Responses to “Battling the Trappings of University Life”

  1. tred Writes:
    November 29th, 2007 at 10:26 am

    This could use some context. What is O.C.?

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  2. Silenced is Foo Writes:
    November 29th, 2007 at 11:15 am

    @tred

    Orange County, California. Wealthy suburban land, and Republican stronghold.

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  3. NotACookie Writes:
    November 29th, 2007 at 11:42 am

    As I see it, any battle against neoliberalism in the academy needs to take into account where it comes from. College is fabulously expensive and that forces students to pay close attention to value-received-for-money. And that pushes the students into a neoliberal mindset. And I don’t see how you contain those costs, except by pushing for larger lectures, and more use of grad student and adjunct faculty — precisely the trends that The Wily Filipino objects to. It’s tempting to think government funding would help, but all our experience to date is that that just encourages college administrators to raise tuition further.

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