Category: Politics

Yesterday, we examined Jamie Brownlee’s claim that government’s were engaging in “austerity” in order to ensure that universities became “corporatized”.  The conclusion was that you have to use some pretty idiosyncratic definitions of austerity to make the term stick even half-way; and even then, it’s impossible to make the charge stick after about 1995.  But what about the more general charge of universities becoming “corporatized”?  Does that have any traction? The main problem with examining this claim is that the

A few weeks ago, Jamie Brownlee (who I believe is a graduate student at Carleton University) published a piece in Academic Matters (available here) in which he developed a two-part notion.  First, he argued that universities had become “corporatized”, and second, he believes that governments played a big role in this by de-funding universities through austerity.  I will deal with the corporatization argument tomorrow; today, what I want to do is demolish the idea that universities have been subject to austerity