Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Choice Quotes: Joe Berry #5

This post continues the thread of choice quotes from Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower.

From “Getting Down to Work” (134):

Shifting to a corporate attitude makes higher education administrators potentially more vulnerable to job actions because they are more concerned about profit and production.  Beyond being disruptive, a strike may drive students away, which spells disaster for schools that are increasingly dependent on tuition and federal student aid to earn profits.

Corporate-led just-in-time higher education also makes institutions vulnerable.  Because the majority of students are “nontraditional” and part-time, the administration cannot stockpile services of the faculty nor can they stockpile students.  They are attempting to move in this direction with distance education, substitution of technology for faculty, and modularized learning, but still, in the main, they are forced to rely on the moment-to-moment, time-appropriate, face-to-face interaction of faculty (workers) with students (product).  We faculty have only begun to dimly grasp how to exploit this production model and have not organizationally used it at all.