Official portrait of Justice Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. taken on January 26, 1976. Public domain image via Wikipedia.Among those aspects are the way students are treated, the number of adjuncts used as “basically part-time labor to replace full-time faculty,” the now-franchised bookstores and food service, and the outsourcing of work like campus maintenance, Seybold said."So Seybold and others who hold onto the liberal ideals of university purpose and culture – “Because it is a public university, we should be serving our students” – are looked at basically as dinosaurs, holding onto realities that have been transformed.
Coming from the labor movement and as a sociologist interested in the organization of work, Seybold sees the corporate campus as an attack on the craft of being a professor.
“I consider being a professor a craft occupation,” he said. “And I see my craft being attacked.”
But the upshot is today’s universities train rather than educate, Seybold said, and the repercussions negatively impact all aspects of university life.
“I describe it as a degradation of the culture of the university,” he said. “It affects students, the staff, the faculty and the administration when the institution increasingly serves as a handmaiden to corporations.”
“I describe it as a degradation of the culture of the university,” he said. “It affects students, the staff, the faculty and the administration when the institution increasingly serves as a handmaiden to corporations.”
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