Inside Corporate U: Women in the Academy Speak Out (review)

Since the 1980s, universities and colleges have been a site for corporatization. Alternately referring to "commercialization," "McDonaldization," and "privatization," North American academics and activists have noted the impact of the corporate world on higher education, calling attention to the ways research agendas, administrative practices, faculty working conditions, student expectations of schooling, and the definition, purpose, and discourse of the academy have been transformed. Some critics have indicted neoliberalism for converting public colleges and universities into extensions of private enterprise. Others have shown how commodified education exacerbates sexism and other forms of domination affecting racialized, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and working-class academics.

Inside Corporate U adds to this literature by focusing on the varied ways in which the corporatization of Canadian universities and colleges affects women faculty, staff, and students. The anthology's breadth is especially helpful to U.S. readers who may not be familiar with the differences, as well as similarities, between higher education in Canada and the United States, including the effects of corporatization on Canada's more federally centralized system of higher education. Topics include the public-private partnership of the federal government with global commercial research priorities, erosion of collegial governance and the resulting conflict between administration and faculty, and gender differences in tenure and promotion. One of the notable effects of corporatization, according to the authors, is the simultaneous increase in non-tenure track and part-time "sessional" or "contract academics" at the same time that women in full-time tenured faculty positions has decreased.

According to Linda Joan Paul in her article, "The Untenured Female Academic in the Corporate University," "[t]he largest proportion of women are found in contract academic positions," while making, on average, 85.7 percent of the salary of male faculty. Jane Gordon and Ilya Blum, in their article, "Shifting Programs or Undercutting Equity?" confirm the feminization of contract faculty. Comparing three universities, they note that "University A," whose faculty were predominantly female (64%) compared to the other two, relied in the 1980s on faculty with "low attachment"; by 1990, low-attachment faculty at University A were 100 percent female. Linda Joan Paul notes that women are further penalized by part-time status, juggling family and other work responsibilities, including a "speeded-up" workplace, making it more difficult, if not impossible, to unionize.

While Canada's version of affirmative action, the Federal Contractors Program (FCP), which was implemented in 1987, initially brought small but positive changes in equity, by the 1990s, these changes eroded, according to Carol Agocs, Reem Attieh, and Martin Cooke. As universities and provincial governments began to withdraw their commitment to and funding of "equity practitioners," it became more difficult for women or minority faculty to make progress in the academy as full-time academics.

Other articles address the social construction of students' consumerist attitudes, assessment of the effectiveness of "equity practitioners" as changemakers, the routinization of teacher "training" by the Canadian Department of Education's emphasis on test-focused assessment of literacy, assessment of corporatization's effect on women's studies programs, and cooptation of feminist discourse to discipline graduate student "dons" or residence hall assistants. Supervisors use the language of safety and inclusion to depoliticize any feminist disagreement or resistance, while at the same time enforcing traditional gender caretaking roles from women dons, and exempting male dons from similar expectations. The anthology closes with a description of a gender-sensitive approach to technology that encourages student interaction with outside communities, replacing mythologies of student computer sophistication. As author Cynthia Jacqueline Alexander notes, computer-mediated communication does not automatically convey critical knowledge just because it is differently packaged and marketed. Instead, she sees such technologies as one tool in helping students construct knowledge within the context of a liberal arts education.

Authors of articles in Inside Corporate U generally address the erosion of academic freedom and equity. Dorothy E. Smith points out in her historical overview that corporate concerns and managerial practices have...