[URBANTH-L]QUERY: Top Ten Ways to Battle Against the Neoliberalization of University Life?

[Vincent Lyon-Callo]

Maybe we can release a "policy statement" on how it is harmful to pedagogical practices.  I'm sure that once enlightened in such a fashion that "policy makers" will reverse course.  

But, seriously, the problem is that individual efforts like below, while certainly well meaning and they might help a few students in a small fashion, are really by and large underwhelming.  I know for the several students whose parent's homes are being/have recently been foreclosed upon while their parents have been laid off from the auto industry here in Michigan, a cheaper textbook option might be helpful, but it certainly doesn't begin to address their inabilities to afford the cost of a university with increasing tuition costs and decreasing faculty and state funding.  Yet, finding ways to collective struggle to effectively transform the institutional, state, and structural practices producing such neoliberal restructurings of education are difficult to locate or imagine.  

Vin

--
Vin Lyon-Callo
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo MI 49008
269-387-3964

----- Original Message -----
From: Angela Jancius <jancius at ohio.edu>
Date: Thursday, November 15, 2007 4:50 pm
Subject: [URBANTH-L]QUERY: Top Ten Ways to Battle Against the	Neoliberalization of University Life?

> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> In preparation for an upcoming special issue of Anthropology News, 
> on the 
> "Political Economy of Academia," I'm preparing a top ten list of 
> ways to 
> "battle against the neoliberalization of university life."
> 
> Here are a few examples I thought of, upon initial reflection:
> 
> * Invite adjunct and part-time faculty to departmental meetings.
> * Don't require standardized testing for student admissions.
> * Use course packets or next-to-last edition textbooks, which 
> students may 
> purchase for $10 (rather than $120).
> 
> I'd like to make this a collective list, as I am sure that you 
> also have 
> some excellent ideas.  What practical steps might we to take, to 
> make 
> our departments more about people, and less about budgets?
> 
> Please email your ideas, by 11/19/07, to: jancius at ohio.edu.
> 
> 
> Thank you in advance!
> 
> Angela Jancius
> 
> Co-Moderator, Urbanth-L
> jancius at ohio.edu
> 
> 
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> and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA)
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