|
Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University |  | Author: Gaye Tuchman
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $15.00
as of 9/7/2010 18:02 MDT details
You Save: $10.00 (40%)
New (25) Used (13) from $15.00
Seller: Southampton Free Library
Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 222695
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 0226815293
Dewey Decimal Number: 378.1010973
EAN: 9780226815299
ASIN: 0226815293
Publication Date: October 15, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780226815299 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In most debates over its future, the university is represented—by both its critics and its champions—as a secular temple for learning, a sacred space freed from the more mundane concerns that trouble other institutions. But lately this lofty image looks increasingly tarnished, especially with regard to public research universities. There, a new class of administrative professionals has been busy working to make colleges as much like businesses as possible. In this eye-opening exposé of the modern university, Gaye Tuchman paints a candid portrait of these wannabe corporate managers and the new regime of revenue streams, mission statements, and five-year plans they’ve ushered in. Based on years of observation at a state school, Wannabe U tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. Aping their boardroom idols, the new corporate administrators wander from job to job and reductively view the students as future workers in need of training. Obsessed with measurable successes, they stress auditing and accountability, which leads, Tuchman reveals, to policies of surveillance and control dubiously cloaked in the guise of scientific administration. Following the big money to be made from the discoveries of Wannabe U’s researchers, Tuchman probes the cozy relationships that the administration forms with industry and the government. Like the best campus novelists, Tuchman entertains with her acidly witty observations of backstage power dynamics and faculty politics, but ultimately Wannabe U is a hard-hitting account of how higher education’s misguided pursuit of success fails us all.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Sharp portrait of a contemporary university January 30, 2010
S. Sherman
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
Gaye Tuchman's detailed ethnography of a 'university in transformation' is funny in many places, but mostly sad. The author herself is clearly not pleased with the general direction she describes, and so, while the book concludes that the university was successfully 'transformed', this cannot be regarded as a particularly happy ending. The 'transformation' the university is undergoing is from being a more or less average state university to one of the top twenty-five. Societal judgments on what distinguishes a university--above all, rankings in US News and World Report--are more or less accepted at face value. The focus of her work is the relationship between the administration and the faculty in the course of this process. Thus topics like student life and classroom dynamics are mostly absent. The general trajectory of Wannabe U is to become a more auditable university, with ever more measures of how faculty, and the university in general, is doing. In particular, a market orientation is introduced. The value of faculty, measured in how many grants they attain, becomes more quantifiable and important, as does the value of the university to the state economy and the private corporations based there. The latter is epitomized by a more assertive policy towards patents at the university, which, when achieved, sometimes result in such financial gain for faculty that they are able to purchase McMansions on the same streets as administrators. Gone are the days when scientists at universities used to look down at those based in private industry on the grounds that the former produced knowledge available for the general advancement of science, while the latter did not.
The administrators of Wannabe U belong to a mobile class ever in search of a better position. They are far more familiar with the judgment of their peers, and the administrative challenges of running a large organization, than with deep philosophical questions about the nature and purpose of universities. Thus, they sometimes jump from fashion to fashion, announcing that the university is now focused on 'teaching and learning', or later on 'research', creating confusion and demoralization among much of the faculty (even when teaching is supposedly being emphasized, Tuchman wryly notes that it is meted out as punishment for underperforming faculty). What the administrators are able to pursue more singlemindedly is the centralization of authority in their hands and the weakening of the faculty's role in running the university. Additionally, faculty are progressively forced to be more 'productive' (more students taught, more grant money attained, etc). Although this process suffers a few setbacks, for the most part it is successful. It is undertaken in a gradual enough manner that the faculty never quite get a handle on what is going on. In general, the faculty are more concerned with the approval of their nationally dispersed peers than with the dynamics at Wannabe U. Important meetings are not well attended by faculty. Not unlike the administrators, the faculty often have one eye on using Wannabe U as a jumping off point for a better job, weakening their interest in campus politics. For these reasons, Wannabe U is successfully transformed into a higher ranked, but more administratively centralized and hard driving university with little to no resistance from the faculty.
Many aspects of the picture painted in Wannabe U will be familiar to faculty at American colleges and universities, particularly the ever expanding production of 'audits' such as 'teaching portfolios'. As noted above, Tuchman observed no grounds for effective resistance to the direction mapped out (sometimes not fully consciously) by administrators attempting to live up to an imperative to make Wan U more valuable to the state's economy. I think part of the reason, in addition to the narrow focus of faculty which she described, is that any sustained resistance to the transformation in general (rather than to a fragment of it, such as, say, increased teaching loads) would require questioning the logic of aligning the interests of the university with the interests of the 'economy' (i.e. the alliance of the state and corporations). And this questioning could not advance without broad questioning of the nature of the economy in general. In other words, the process of transformation is simply bringing the university in line with values (market driven, auditable, etc) pervasive throughout American society. Answering 'what's wrong with that?' involves either implausibly suggesting special privileges for universities (already viewed with some suspicion by much of the population) or generally challenging those values, which increasingly appear as a natural element of society, given their pervasiveness. In other words, the gnawing dilemma of how does one begin to critique capitalism when its logic seems so widespread appears once again. Perhaps at a subconscious level, awareness of just how difficult this would be helps to scale faculty demands down to some managable element that will not challenge the fundamental direction. The admiration of their peers, rather than a sustained interrogation of what they or the institution for which they work is doing, provides a more or less fulfilling goal.
The Changing Public Higher Ed November 23, 2009
Harold A. Geller (Fairfax, VA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is an insightful scholarly review of the changes that occurred at a large public university, Wannabe U. Whether out of a desire to raise their ranking in a mass-media publication, or to emulate so many others, the author demonstrates how this representative public university changed, especially with respect to their administrators and management approach. The author maintains a level of objectivity that is rare. She notes how the changing relationships between faculty and administration have affected the academic environment as a whole. Many details of the changes that the author discusses, with respect to Wannabe U, match the stories from other large public universities. The author has gone to great lengths to hide the true identities of the administrators and college itself, although there is an online buzz as to the true identities. It might have been better if true identities had been used, but the approach is understandable in light of today's litigious society.
Conforming to mediocrity January 4, 2010
B. Davies (San Antonio)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is a wonderfully perceptive (if dispiriting) examination of how public universities are scrambling to conform to a simplistic and untested "market model" of excellence that in actuality kills curricular diversity, critical thinking, and self-governance. Tuchman is especially good on the rise of an auditing culture that pretends to be about monitoring student success and retention but actually aims at Taylorizing teaching and deprofessionalizing the professoriate.
If you work at a second-tier public university and your administration is talking about "transforming" itself to better prepare students for the job market and establish a "flagship" reputation, read this book immediately!
The demise of the university and the birth of a business June 30, 2010
Marcus Ford (Flagstaff, Arizona USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Professor Tuchman has written a wonderful book detailing the transformation of the university from an academic institution into a business.Other books have been written on this phenomenon, but none are so concise and engaging.Wannabe U should be read by everyone who is interested in higher education today.
Wannabe U describes how universities have changed from what they were in the middle of the last century to the present time. It is a sobering transformation and, in almost every respect, regrettable. Businesses are a perfectly legitimate social institution--as are the courts, political parties, families, and organized religion, for example--but, until recently, education was not a business. Universities were organized for the purpose of disinterested research, the dissemination of knowledge, and the cultivation of arts. These are perfectly rational objectives, but they are not the objectives of a corporation. The corporatization of the university constitutes the demise of one kind of social institution,the research university, and the birth of yet another business.
The transformation of the university into a business, I would contend, needs to be understood within a wider context of public funding and philosophy and, quite possibly, a private agenda by some to reverse the mechanism of upward mobility in our nation. Tuchman's book rarely touches on these matters. In addition to Wannabe U individuals who are interested in higher education in the US should also read the Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class, by Christopher Newfield. This book deals with the systematic underfunding of public education, even when the US economy was strong. Most of his examples come from California, but the trend is national in scope.
Public universities were once seen a public good, deserving of public (tax dollar) support. Public support made education affordable. Several generations of Americans graduated from college without any substantial debt because of tax-payer support. Today, public universities (many of which receive only 10% of their funding from the state) are regarded as a private good that do not merit public funds. Newfield's book presents a very clear overview of this transformation along with an argument that this transformation was quite intentional.
Another book that needs to be read is Save the World on Your own Time, by Stanly Fish. For many centuries a college education was viewed as a means of improving society generally and not merely the individual. A university education imparted some particular skills and knowledge, but more importantly, a university education enabled one to better understand the world and one's place in it and one's obligation to improve it. In the 19th Century it was traditional for the President of a college or university to teach the course on moral philosophy, which tended to deal with concrete issues of the day. As the title of his book so clearly expresses, Professor Fish is adamantly opposed to this philosophy of education. For all of his rhetorical flourishes, Fish's position is largely main stream today. The idea that purpose of education is to improve the world and to serve humankind and the planet is today largely regarded as old-fashioned and moralistic. The business of education, most contend, is not to change the world but rather to impart skills and information that can used however an individual chooses to employ them. (I believe that Fish has radically overstated the degree to which most university professors devote any time at all to "saving the world" and, more importantly, his contention that such concerns are inappropriate in the classroom.)
The funding, purpose, and organization of higher education are all aspects of one complex issue. If the purpose of higher education is not beneficial to society then education is not a public good and hence does not merit public support. And if higher education is a private good, then arguably it should be run like a private corporation.
The vast majority of university professors, as Tuchman notes, are not much interested in the topic of higher education--their concerns are largely limited to their own research, their salaries and, in some cases, teaching. The broader topics discussed by these three books fall outside their concerns. Most students and their parents are also not much interested in this topic. Their interests, understandably, tend to be limited to tuition and course availability. And the general public tends to be interested only in universities being well-managed and inexpensive--"accountable" and "accessible" are the buzz words of this discussion. Universities, it is widely assumed, must find a way to do more with less. (More what is not always clearly defined short of graduate more students.)
Wannabe U is an important book that deserves a wide audience. Buy it, read it, and pass it along. Transforming universities into business has had, and will continue to have, wide social consequences. A public discussion about the nature and purpose of higher education (and then about its organization and funding) is long overdue.
What's Really Going on in Your University July 9, 2010
Charldean Newell
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Tuchman ably combines scholarship and writing ability to describe what is going on as universities become more like their corporate brethren and less like the institutions we loved as students, alumni, faculty, staff, and administrators. Several friends have also read the book; all of us agree that it is an apt description of any wannabe institution. A good read.
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. | |
