Universities as Business Entities The purpose of this research is t

The purpose of this research is to examine an article discussing how universities are becoming business entities in various ways. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal ideas contained in Ovetz's "Entrepreneurialization of the Universities," to discuss the positive and negative elements of the piece, and then to make recommendations that would appear to have a salutary effect on the clarity with which the ideas might be presented.

The argument of "Entrepreneurialization of the Universities" is in the nature of an analysis of the extent and character of corporate presence in the realm of higher-education research and development. The author views that presence negatively, not only because of the apparent conflicts of interest built in to the variant agendas of corporate and educational enterprises, but also because in its various constituent parts, the corporate presence appears to have had a negative impact on the potential for noncorporate academic and socioacademic agendas to arise and develop within the university structure. The article as a whole can be described as advocacy research for the reason that the intent of the paper seems as much to persuade as to inform. The author himself offers the term adversarial research (31).

The author appears to make an assumption that corporate and academic interests are diametrically opposed, and his thesis is that corporate interests are detrimental to the academy. This thesis--which may be perfectly t

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nse, clash with the needs of students, faculty, and staff on one hand, and the push for campus multiculturalism on the other. Ovetz says that financial aid has been slashed, undergraduate enrollment has been capped, and graduate enrollment has been increased (21). Meanwhile, he invokes the romantic image of the "shroud of ivy" (13) shorn from the temple of the academy by the high-tech sword. But the focus is obscured. When Ovetz cites a $1 million contract from Freeport to the UT geology department and research grants have been funnelled toward engineering, that is evidence of departmental partiality for corporate sponsorship of R&D, not of the fact that faculty are somehow "targets" of increased graduate enrollment. In one section of the paper, Ovetz laments the plight of the beleaguered faculty member overseeing university research projects funded in whole or in part by government or corporate grants who must "haggle" with administrators over his "miniscule [sic] share" (10) of the budget. He also criticizes, after Marx, the use of free student labor on research projects. Elsewhere, however, he deplores "allowing universities and their researchers to hold ownership in corporations that invest in university research" (14). He a

Category: Business - U