Commercialization of universities

Part-time academic consultants
University competition in the private consulting sector

Nature

The commercialization of university research, and the financial and political encouragement accorded to research that can presented as bearing immediate and calculable relevance to desired economic goals, have worked to alter significantly the working models of intellectual enquiry. There is every indication that this period of restructuring and reorienting in higher education and research is only part way through; it is hard to imagine it ever being fully reversed.

Claim

Higher education is no longer about imparting high aesthetic and moral values, tutors no longer develop minds. Rather, universities have become large, bureaucratic, disciplinary machines that process human subjects as units of consumption or utility; lecturer have become technicians who programme students with a number of 'transferable skills' available for purchase and employment on the job market.