Commentary the Corporate University is not an Ivory Tower: Possibilities for Ensuring a Critical Space for Anthropologists

Abstract

U.S. universities, as well as universities in other advanced capitalist countries, have increasingly come to function as resource bases for corporations, in part as a response to funding cutbacks by state and federal governments and corporate-based foundations. According to Robert Ovetz in "Assailing the Ivory Tower: Student Struggles and the Entrepreneurialization of the University," (Our Generation 24(1):71-95. 1993), "[u]niversities have not simply tightened and transformed their partnerships with business, but have become business themselves through various forms of profit making ventures based on university resources, faculty, and a pool of cheap and unpaid student labour" (p. 71). Universities often buy and sell their stocks on the market to maximize their operating expenses. Furthermore, they are often directly or indirectly involved in business ventures that developed out of campus research activities. Sociologist Stanley Aronowitz notes in The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon Press. 2000) that "[b]y the mid-1990s, the corporate university had become the standard for nearly all private and public schools" (p. 83).