Academy Fight Song
Thomas Frank
"The coming of “academic capitalism” has been
anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and
universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical patents and
ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being
“entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless
aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their
workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron;
and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house
hedge funds.
Now, consider the seventeen-year-old customer
against whom this predatory institution squares off. He comes loping to
the bargaining table armed with about the same amount of guile that, a
few years earlier, he brought to Santa’s lap in the happy holiday
shopping center. You can be sure that he knows all about the imperative
of achieving his dreams, and the status that will surely flow from the
beloved institution. Either he goes to college like the rest of his
friends, or he goes to work."
"The coming of “academic capitalism” has been
anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and
universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical patents and
ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being
“entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless
aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their
workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron;
and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house
hedge funds.
Now, consider the seventeen-year-old customer
against whom this predatory institution squares off. He comes loping to
the bargaining table armed with about the same amount of guile that, a
few years earlier, he brought to Santa’s lap in the happy holiday
shopping center. You can be sure that he knows all about the imperative
of achieving his dreams, and the status that will surely flow from the
beloved institution. Either he goes to college like the rest of his
friends, or he goes to work."
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