Farewell to The Corporate University Andrew Ross The Chronicle of Higher Education The term "corporate university" barely raises an eyebrow these days. That is unfortunate. It's perfectly fine for a collegial kvetch around the department water cooler, but it's not all that helpful for analyzing how institutions like ours are being restructured. In fact, the term is a lazy shorthand for understanding the changes coursing through higher education. Admittedly, there is a pile of evidence to support the idea that universities have gone corporate. The casualization of the academic work force is the most obvious—arguably, the loss of professional job security has occurred at a rate faster than in any other occupational sector. The polarization in salaries is another example of marketization: The ratio of executive compensation to the pay of the average adjunct instructor bears comparison with that in most top-down corporations. So too have universities, like corporations, gone offshore, cutting costs, spreading assets, and polishing their brands in "emerging markets." The shift in attention and funds toward commercially relevant fields has also been quite pronounced, and the production of a jumbo pool of student debt has made universities into vehicles, if not instruments, for bankers' profits. Some of the most delicious water-cooler tales emphasize how our administrators are adopting managerial techniques from corporate America. But there the analogy begins to unravel. At my own university—no slouch when it comes to entrepreneurial moves—the administration recently introduced a "re-engineering" campaign to cut costs and improve managerial efficiency. Transplants from the corporate world might have concluded they were in a time warp. After all, the heyday of the managerial fad known as "re-engineering" was in the early 1990s, sparked by Michael Hammer and James Champy's Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (HarperBusiness, 1993).

News Outlets Follow NPR's Lead: No Staffers at Stewart and Colbert Rallies Nate Freeman, NY Observer After a memo banning staffers from attending rallies — specifically the two high-profile ones to be orchestrated by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert later this month — made its way around the internet and collected backlash in its swath, NPR is trying to get other news outlets to join its side of the fight.