Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University
| Date: 28 April 2011, 02:34
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Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University
By Gaye Tuchman
* Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
* Number Of Pages: 272
* Publication Date: 2009-10-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0226815293
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780226815299
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 expose 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.
Summary: The Changing Public Higher Ed
Rating: 5
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.
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