Wednesday 17 August 2011

USSWORD in The Star Phoenix

Today the Saskatoon Starphoenix printed an article summarizing the presidential search controversy thus far:

Senators Want Board Chair to Step Aside

In the article, Mary Jean Hande says:
"I think it would be very difficult to maintain that public research goal and vision of the university if it was run by somebody who was working in the corporate sector as well."

Selling Out: Academic Freedom and the Corporate Market by Howard Woodhouse

Check out the following book by a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan :

Selling Out: Academic Freedom and the Corporate Market by Howard Woodhouse
How Canadian universities are abandoning their intellectual independence by capitulating to the interests of big business.
McGill-Queen’s University Press (2009)

In a powerful defence of the values that define education, Howard Woodhouse uses concrete and vivid examples to show how universities in Canada have been engulfed by the market model of education and how administrators have done little to resist this trend. 

Selling Out demonstrates that the logics of value of the market and of universities are not only different but opposed to one another. By introducing the reader to a variety of cases, some well known and others not, Woodhouse explains how academic freedom and university autonomy are being subordinated to corporate demands and how faculty have attempted to resist this subjugation. He argues that the mechanistic discourse of corporate culture has replaced the language of education - subject-based disciplines and the professors who teach them have become "resource units," students have become "educational consumers," and curricula have become "program packages." Graduates are now "products" and "competing in the global economy" has replaced the search for truth.

Challenging the current orthodoxy that the market model is the only way forward, Woodhouse argues that governments have a responsibility to fund universities, recognizing that they are the only places in society where the critical search for knowledge takes precedence.

Cloth (0773535802) 9780773535800
Release date: 2009-09-01 
CA $39.95  |  US $39.95
Order by mail / fax : Order form

Professor Woodhouse is a professor of educational foundations, University of Saskatchewan.

To read an excellent synopsis of the salient arguments in Professor Woodhouse's book, from a review by Patrick Keeney in THE NATIONAL POST, December 26, 2009, click on the link below:[http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/afterword/archive/2009/12/26/book-review-selling-out-by-howard-woodhouse.aspx]