Can this University Be Bought?

What do you think should be the relationship between commerce and academic life? How should the "life lessons" of the marketplace enter the University? Make connections to Croissant and to your own experience.

In "Can This University Be Bought?", Croissant talks about the deepening relationship between corporate commerce and academic life. This is a disturbing relationship that should not exist. Croissant talks about how ethical corporate sponsorships of University. This can help boost a school out of obscurity and as she says' "establish an institution's relevancy." This makes sense, more money equals a greater ability to be recognized equals more students equals more money. What is the cost of this? The school may be seen as legitimate but the corporations may want to have a hand in deciding what curriculum is taught and what kind of technology is used. Croissant writes about the relationship between the University of Arizona, AOL, and Cisco systems. Students at the University are being taught curriculum for a individual corporate system and is funded by the taxpayers. This is the type of narrowing of ideas that corporate sponsorships of university departments can bring. Croissant also talks about how the state government cut funds for programs that were being funded by sponsorships. This is the situation where the school will no longer have a say and must do what they are told by the people with the money.

I think the life lessons of the marketplace are not taught by having a specific sect of the market telling your teachers what they should teach. I think that classrooms need to be open to different methods of teaching as well as free thought and different views on a specific subject. The student will not gain as much as they could from a school that has the corporate sponsorships Croissant writes about. I can see Universities heading down the same path as so many other parts of American business.

One way I can relate this topic to my own experiences is to compare it to the state of Western medicine. Western medicine was hijacked by big corporate pharmaceuticals. They injected money into the family practices, medical schools, and research institutes. Today doctors are getting kickbacks for putting people on more drugs that are increasingly expensive. Hospitals perform the most expensive and usually unnecessary procedures. Most research for new drugs is performed by doctors and scientists who work for that drugs parent company. Advertisers push newer more damaging drugs on people everyday. People in the US are not getting quality health care and soon students will be taught a corporate agenda brought to them by their sully sponsored university.