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Dissertation Information for Wesley Shumar

NAME:
- Wesley Shumar

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- [No Discipline Recorded]

SCHOOL:
- Temple University (USA) (1991)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: College for sale: An ethnography of the commoditization of higher education

Abstract: Colleges and universities in the United States have been experiencing major transformations in the last twenty years. One major transformation is the commoditization of education. Through this process education becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. As a commodity it experiences the heightened importance of appearance, or the image of education over the substance of education. This tendency it is argued is behind many of the concerns over the quality of college education today.

Not only is education becoming a commodity but teachers are becoming laborers in the factory of higher education while administrators are taking on the role of corporate management. This dissertation draws together much historical material to discuss how this process has come about and looks at some of the repercussions these institutional changes have for workers today and particularly the part-time workers who have become the migrant workers of higher education.

Many of the problems in higher education, the concern over curriculum, the questions of cultural literacy, and now more recently the debates over the canon and political correctness are seen as conflicts which have developed out of the contradictions produced by the commoditization of higher education.

The final section of the dissertation looks at the relationship between the political and economic forces that have developed in higher education over the last forty years and the kinds of everyday practices engaged in by faculty working in this cultures, and the shape of the struggles of which they are a part.

MPACT Scores for Wesley Shumar

A = 0
C = 2
A+C = 2
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2010-09-22 23:39:49

Advisors and Advisees Graph