Mohanty tells us "The academy as always been the site of feminist struggle." (170)
She asks "Is the North American university a similar global scape involved in the business of economic and political capitalist rule?" (172)
She continues "There is now a wide-ranging university/corporate alliance that sustains and supports the military/prison/cyber/corporate complex" and describes a shift to "an entrepreneurial, corporate university in the business of naturalizing capitalist, privatized citizenship." (173)
Mohanty wants us to preserve the university as a place in which "young people learn how to think critically and carefully about political problems, and about how to articulate their own views and defend them before people with whom they disagree."This entails "the necessity of the relative autonomy of the university community in relation to the state and the market." (174)
University restructuring on several levels is "glued" together by privatization she says. She defines privatization as "the transfer of public assets and services owned and performed by the government to businesses and individuals in the private sector...." (176)
Under "academic capitalism" Mohanty sees that "the commodification of the educational process requires shifting attention from educators to the products of education that can now be sold in discrete units." 178)
She points out how "discourses of retrenchment, funding, and efficiency mystify and cover-up the drawing of the lines in the sand." The results are, as she quotes Currie (1998) saying, "an intensification of work practices, a loss of autonomy, closer monitoriing and appraisal, less participation in decision-making, and a lack of personal development through work." (179)
She qualifies her analysis: "I do not privilege a purist notion of the university in making this critique. This is not an argument against all forms of joint corporate/education ventures...." Yet she wants herself and us "to make this shift visible for antiracist feminist scholars and teachers so that we can reflect on our particular place and accountability in the new vision of the university and determine how we can create dialogic spaces of dissent and transformation in this institutional climate." (185)
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You can find some materials on global academic restructuring at this working group site.
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