Steal this University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement

Welcome to academia in the 21st century, where 60 percent of tenured professors have been supplanted by underpaid graduate students or part time adjuncts. The professoriate is no longer a "community of scholars" that governs itself, but a group of employees whose work is reviewed by administrators who cut deals to put cheaply packaged courses on-line for worldwide consumption. Where have the ivy-covered walls, tweedy professors, and genteel university presidents gone? Replaced, say the authors of this provocative work, by markets, profits, and computers. Steal This University documents the rise of the corporate university over the past twenty years as well as the academic labor movement that has developed in response. Universities are increasingly looking to corporations as their model for reform, investing in merit-pay packages, partnerships with hi-tech companies, and anything that will reap profits from their creations. With controversial, personal stories of workplace exploitation, tenure battles, and union organizing, the book shows the challenges of working within this new system and explains the countermovement working to restore independence to university teachers.