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Promoting Quality Higher Education– An Investment in Oregon’s Future

NEWSLETTER, HIGHER ED FACULTY

The Biggest Cuts Need to Come From the Top

August 05, 2020 / Heather Nahmias

The Chronicle of Higher Education

by Silke-Maria Weineck

August 4, 2020

 

It is true that academics vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. This has led conservative enemies of higher education to claim that universities are left-wing institutions. They are not. They are quintessentially bourgeois institutions — liberal, sure, but not on the left in any meaningful sense. Their prime function is the reproduction of civil society and the managerial class.

With regard to labor politics, even calling universities liberal is a stretch. This is, in many ways, an open secret; we don’t talk about it much because it is in both academics’ and the right wing’s interest to maintain the fiction of campus radicalism. But the abyss between academic self-presentation and actual institutional politics is yawning so wide it threatens to swallow what’s left of our collective claim to decency. I want to draw attention to just one simple yet infuriating example of how many universities have abandoned even the pretense of liberal commitments.

Read the full article at The Chronicle of Higher Education

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