Remember that this dismantlement took place after the university announced that it had raised almost $4 billion. The decisions made by Roski’s administrators were not based on reason or logic or an investment in learning. Those decisions are ideological. They’re cultural. They’re not financial. And this provoked deeper questions about the viability, even survival, of student and faculty voices in the fine arts within academia.

HELEN MOLESWORTH: But that is also evidence of a split—to tie Cooper and USC together again—between administration and faculty. There is a corporatization of the academy across the country in which the administration of the academy and the faculty are now increasingly at odds. There is no longer the idea that faculty is involved in the institution’s leadership, in self-governance, basically.

A. L. STEINER: Eighty percent of USC’s faculty is now adjunct and contingent. This is part of an ideology of austerity being embraced at the school, even though its undergraduate program ranks sixteenth in tuition nationwide and the university is one of twenty schools nationwide responsible for one-fifth of the country’s graduate-school student debt. The dean’s thinking came down to a gamble—that the graduate faculty’s interactions, and the program’s funding and curricular promises, were unnecessary. There’s a bigger agenda in play, and it’s intertwined with the value and significance of an arts education in a technocratic regime, in a world where the nonprofit sector exists as a manifestation of the private sector.

and

A. L. STEINER: How much does the cultural shift that we’re talking about—requiring the justification of the value of an arts education or the humanities—have to do with the tech and finance sloganeering of creativity, from “Think different” and “disruption” to the experience economy?

(All of this drives me crazy.)

Wow. That was a fantastic read. One thing that I think was interesting that was briefly touched upon is the student-as-consumer model. You go to college and are expected to graduate, you expect to receive a wide variety of services, and you expect to be able to be professional. Engineering as an example teaches you how to be ready for industry and to work a job, but it doesn't necessarily teach you how to be a good engineer. At times I have noticed a deep lack of critical thinking and a lack of desire to engage in dialogue in classes, such as a couple of history courses I took at college. Could that be tied in to a disconnect because it's not related to a persons major, and therefore is of little importance? (I am also a big believe in multi-disciplinary studies at this point in my life). This ties in to the discussion about college selectivity. It seems like acceptance rates at most institutions are < 60% (excluding Ivy Leagues and some other very competitive places) with graduation rates somewhere in that ballpark. To me, the former number is too high and the latter number is too low. But we have been in a spiral where the infrastructure of the public and private college in the United States will collapse without a steady stream of student-consumers and we are now witnessing the perils of an increasing prioritization of style and non-rigorous education over substance.