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The Corporate University Critiques of the corporate university abound. These are sobering accounts of the increasing entanglement of universities with private corporations, the pressures on faculty to secure outside grants and then compromise their research in order to retain them, the dominance of the Nike swoosh on school apparel and sports scoreboards, the shrinking budgets for the humanities, the disappearance of collaborative learning and debate as students become career-driven consumers. No longer, it would seem, does the university stand in opposition to the market; it’s just another place where, as Henry Giroux puts it, “market values replace social values, and people appear more and more willing to retreat into the safe, privatized enclaves of the family, religion, and consumption ” (2001, xi). For a moment, I’m convinced. I feel sad, wishing I’d started my career when the university was truly a site where democracy was practiced, where students and faculty were free to say what they wanted, where social issues were hotly debated without fear of offending some corporate funder, where communities of scholars form because of a shared commitment to certain causes and beliefs. But I only feel sad for a moment, and not even that, really, because I can’t help but wonder: Did this “public sphere” ever really exist? If so, did it recognize that a community of scholars is not produced simply because a university exists? As the feminist critique of Habermas has aptly put it: the so-called public sphere has relied on the exclusion of all but the bourgeois male and preserved the hierarchies of labor that keep women at home, caring for children, so that men can go out and drink coffee. I can’t muster much nostalgia for the liberal university, given the dishes piled up in the sink, the papers waiting to be graded, the deadline for this book looming, and the prospect of a lonely weekend when colleagues who critique the private (the familial) retreat to their individual enclaves. 2 85 Perhaps, as a colleague of mine has written in a slightly different context , the corporate university should actually become more corporate (Nealon). Thumbing through the annual issue of Working Mother dedicated to reviewing the most “mother-friendly” corporations, I’m struck by the way mothers’ work is made visible and by the policies that seek to make mothers’ lives more manageable—things I’ve never even heard of, like a lactation room where breast-feeding mothers can go to pump milk. By the year 2001, writes labor and industrial relations scholar Robert Drago, “67 of the corporations listed in the Working Mother magazine’s top 100 U.S. companies for working mothers had on-site or near-site child care facilities, and 8 of the top 10 companies offered this benefit” (62). By contrast, few universities offer on-site child care, and if they do, it is woefully inadequate for meeting the needs of faculty, staff, and students . Unions have begun pressuring corporations to commit resources to child care; for example, the United Automobile Workers successfully negotiated with Ford Motor Company for a package of thirty Family Service and Learning Centers that include after-school care for preteens, tutoring for teens, museum trips for retirees, and five state-of-the-art, twenty-four-hour on-site child-care facilities across the country. In announcing the centers, Ford connected caring to profits, saying that by producing a more “stable work force,” it will surpass G.M. as the world’s largest auto maker, bringing the discourse of caring in line with the discourse of excellence (Greenhouse). Excellence is the mantra of the corporate university, a point made in Bill Readings’s oft-cited book on corporate academia, The University in Ruins. According to him, excellence is a contentless quantifying category used to gauge efficiency and profit. Yet if excellence leads to on-site child care, I’ll take it, since it’s already here when it comes to measuring my c.v. What matters when it comes to tenure and promotion is not so much the argument or the eloquence but the numbers: how many articles in excellent journals, how many books published with excellent presses, how much money from outside sources. Those lefties who want the public sphere back might acknowledge that corporations with family-friendly work policies have made it easier for women to “go out” in public. In fact, academics on the left are perhaps singularly negligent in providing child...

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