Cultural students in the corporate university

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Rutherford, J. (2005). Cultural students in the corporate university. Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, May, pp. 297-317.

Contents

Abstract

Responding to corporatization of the university with a revisit to Cultural studies "early rejection of humanism" for a "humanism without guarantees" (297)

Introduction

  • University as a global business
  • Accusations of irresponsibility (298)
    • Could the Univ be a responsible corp actor?
  • Pedagogical concerns, contested goals
    • Transferable skills set opposite critical analysis (but aren't they one in the same?)

The corporate university

  • Nation state to market state
  • UK's New Labour government sought to transform the university from "ivory towers into business partners" (301)
    • Education, knowledge, entrepreneurship
  • Education re-imagined as an service producer encouraging and enabling individual entrepreneurship, development

A knowledge driven economy?

  • Recalling a rhetoric of "knowledge" as a most-valued resource (302)
    • Despite job growth in f2f human services
  • Dot com bubble burst as a wake-up (303)
  • "Knowledge-driven economy" less likely than capitalism influencing knowledge (304)

University life

  • Importance of "productivity", lack of metrics, means to measure (305)
  • Challenges to turning education into a commodity
  • Evidence of transition: students as customers buying a service, outcome being grade/ degree/ job (307)
  • Accountability of lecturers, professors
    • Accompanied by "hostility" toward "left-liberal intellectuals" and "public sector professionals" (308)

Culture versus the market society

  • Origins of the English univ
    • German Idealism
    • Coleridge and Romanticism, reacting against the industrial machine age
    • Emphasis on humanism (turned out to be racist, etc)
  • Ruskin, Arnold
    • Culture values "equality" but not "anarchy" (310)
  • Preservationist, conservative turn at the end of the 19th (id'd by Raymond Williams)
    • Culture is something to be protected / preserved
    • Bentham developing social framework of "calculation, individualisation, and mgmt of human behavior" (310)
  • JS Mill attacks Bentham for lacking empathy, focusing only on what is empirical

Cultural studies

  • R. Williams and Richard Hoggart try to "shift English Literature away from its elitist ... focus [on canon]" (311)
  • Both hoped to include popular culture, working class experience
  • "Three C's" used to articulate tension between capital + society:
    • Class
    • Culture
    • Colonialism
  • Francis Mulhern (2000) argues that CS reproduced the same hierarchies it was trying to undo
  • Structuralism "effective demolition of humanism and its claim to speak for a common humanity" (312)
    • Structural marxism of Althusser, introducing Lacan in the 1970s
    • "Individual unconscious 'sutured' into the ideological state apparatuses" (312)
  • 1980s "gave way" to Gramsci
  • Foucault's "end of man ... dissolved the political" (313)
    • Rather than admit that CS had lost its politics, it claimed everything was political
    • "Value judgement was relativised" (313)
  • CS' anti-humanism did not concern itself with the place of humans in culture (313)
    • "[Anti-humanism] politically disarms any attempt at resisting them" (313)

Future or fate

  • Charles Taylor: "neutralization of even the human psyche" // utilitarianism + anti-humanism
  • "modernity without sympathy" (313)
  • Role of imagination in the utilitarian university?
    • "externalities of a market-based education system" (314)?

Conclusion

  • Anti-humanism undermines CS as a critical method for watching liberalisation
    • Because it "lacks a place to speak from" (315)
  • Calling for a new humanism, a "humanism without guarantees" (a la S. Hall) (315)

Random thoughts

  • What were the specific, material manifestations of the The University which are thought to have lead the European Enlightenment?
    • Were small colleges, Catholic colleges included in this arrangement?
    • What about trade schools?
  • Are attendees of commuter or night or trade schools included in The University?
  • Perhaps we are seeing the economically stable schooling experience of middle class people undermine the unstable education+research fantasy of a small elite?
    • From where was Harvard's endowment drawn?
    • And why did it fall so hard under the market crash?
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