privatizing university ed

[Monty Neill <monty@FAIRTEST.ORG>]

For anyone interested in privatization of university education, outright or the more subtle increasing domination of corporate-sponsored research, you might check out the article by Les Levidow at http://www.commoner.org.uk/ the website of an electronic journal. 

The topics covered, as stated by author, are:
As this article will argue, neoliberal strategies for higher education have the following

features:

?all constituencies are treated through business relationships;

?educational efficiency, accountability and quality are redefined in accountancy terms;

?courses are recast as instructional commodities;

?student-teacher relations are mediated by the consumption and production of things,

e.g. software products, performance criteria, etc.

Neoliberal strategies have been devised for marketizing higher education on a global

scale. Each geopolitical context provides an extreme case or component of more general

tendencies. It is important to draw links among those contexts and among critical

perspectives for analysing them. To do so, this article proceeds as follows:

?the 'information society' as a paradigm for ICT in education;

?the World Bank 'reform agenda' for the self-financing of higher education;

?Africa, where higher education is being forcibly marketized and standardized through

financial dependence;

?North America, where some universities attempt to become global vendors of

instructional commodities;

?Europe, where state bodies adopt industry agendas of labour flexibilisation as an

educational model, in the guise of technological progress;

?the UK, where ICT design becomes a terrain for contending educational agendas; and

?global implications for counter-marketization strategies.

Monty Neill, Ed.D.
Executive Director
FairTest
342 Broadway
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-864-4810; fax 617-497-2224
email monty@fairest.org
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