Campus, Inc.: Corporate Power in the Ivory Tower

Abstract

Sonya Huber is a contributing author, "Tough Customers: Business’ Plan to Corner the Student Market" and "Faculty Workers: Tenure on the Corporate Assembly Line." Book description: The university, as a core institution of democratic society, is increasingly threatened by the intrusion of big business. Corporations are working their way into academe in subtle and obvious ways: granting of exclusive concessions rights on campus to a softdrink manufacturer; use of a major portion of the resources, faculty, and research efforts of university departments by a particular company in exchange for modest funding; university administrators whose salaries are often doubled for service on the boards of important corporate contributors. Compounding the problem is the growing scarcity of public funding, which makes universities vulnerable to the lure of big money from pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, computer giants, and wealthy private donors. Can faculty members remain independent under such heavy corporate influence? How does big money influence the direction of research? These are among the serious questions raised by the revealing articles in this thought-provoking and disturbing collection. Campus, Inc. exposes this new form of corporate welfare through hard research. More importantly, it emphasizes the necessity of preserving the democratic character of the university with its independent inquiry, diversity of viewpoints, and disinterested expertise. The authors also provide real and replicable examples, from the front-line of the movement, of actions that have been taken against campus corporatization: Successful efforts to take universities off the corporate auction block are becoming more common. A new era of student activism has helped roll back the sale of sweatshop-produced items in campus stores; the re-emergence of unions has helped faculty organize to prevent "hostile takeovers" of our publicly funded institutions; and effective strategies to redemocratize the university are increasingly available.

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