In the world of University Professorship. The fact the Professor concerned is an outspoken critic of the privatization of education in the Russell group, I am sure is completely coincidental.
There’s a certain irony in this happening at the University of Warwick, the institution that came under sustained attack by E.P. Thompson in his 1971 polemic Warwick University Ltd. Thompson was disgusted by the development of close business and corporate links that Warwick was fostering in the late 1960's, as well as the secret dossiers the University was holding on visiting lecturers deemed ideologically suspect. Thompson ended his polemic thus:
"Is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing, with increasingly authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management? Or can we by our efforts transform it into a centre of free discussion and action, tolerating and even encouraging “subversive” thought and activity, for a dynamic renewal of the whole society in which it operates?"
This is the latest example unfortunately of the former.
There’s a certain irony in this happening at the University of Warwick, the institution that came under sustained attack by E.P. Thompson in his 1971 polemic Warwick University Ltd. Thompson was disgusted by the development of close business and corporate links that Warwick was fostering in the late 1960's, as well as the secret dossiers the University was holding on visiting lecturers deemed ideologically suspect. Thompson ended his polemic thus:
"Is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing, with increasingly authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management? Or can we by our efforts transform it into a centre of free discussion and action, tolerating and even encouraging “subversive” thought and activity, for a dynamic renewal of the whole society in which it operates?"
This is the latest example unfortunately of the former.
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