If “universities are not corporations” ever was a good argument, it isn’t anymore because universities, always corporations in financial fact, become increasingly corporate in spirit every day; and if I and my colleagues are not employees, from whom do we receive salaries, promotions, equipment, offices, etc., and to whom are we responsible in the carrying out of our duties? (If it looks like a duck . . . .) It’s not God and it’s not (despite some claims to the contrary) students, and it’s not awestruck admirers of our dazzling intellects.Of course, in a technical legal sense almost all American universities have been "corporations" for quite some time. The question here is whether American universities today are much like profit-seeking commercial corporations. I agree with my colleague Stanley Fish that in many respects and in most instances the answer is "yes."
It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.
2 comments:
My university broke a faculty union in the 1970s. And the Supreme Court itself endorsed the university's action. NLRB v. Yeshiva University, 444 U.S. 672 (1980). (The university is still "blacklisted" by the AAUP.) Does my university now deal more arbitrarily with its faculty members than it would if faculty members were unionized? I suspect the answer is "yes."
It is true that the arbitrariness of university administrators can be replaced by the arbitrariness of a labor union. But I believe and hope that in most universities faculty members place a higher premium of scholarship for the sake of truth than university administrators do. (In fairness, however, it must be said that today both administrators and faculty members often place a much higher value on renown in the mass media than on the quality of scholarship. Has it always been so?)
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