Word: ridgeway
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...MOST interesting section of The Closed Corporation focuses not on the activities of university corporations, but on the entrepreneurial schemes of professors. Ridgeway describes J. Sterling Livingston, professor at the Harvard Business School, who has established six companies of his own since World War II. Ithiel de Sola Pool, professor of Political Science at M.I.T., works at the social problem solving firm Simulmatics for a minimum annual consulting fee of $5000. Under certain circumstances, he gets $100 a day. Last year Pool headed a secret program at Simulmatics for the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, trying to figure...
...conclusion of his book, Ridgeway sketches a few ways in which the university might be democratized and made to serve the public. He suggests that trustees be elected by students, faculty, and alumni, that meetings of university governing boards be made public, and that universities issue financial reports. He suggests that university officials should not be allowed to sit on other boards...
...does not propose these ideas with any indication that he thinks they will be adopted. Critics have complained about this, saying The Closed Corporation provides no viable solutions for the "crisis" American universities are now undergoing. But this objection misses the point. It is no accident that Ridgeway offers the universities no way out of their present mess. His cynicism stems directly from his analysis of their situation. As he shows, us the university has become an industrial complex and nothing more. The real business of a university is business. Like any corporation -- or like the United States government...
NONE OF the professors have liked Ridgeway's book much. James Billington who teaches medieval history at Princeton and doubles as a consultant for the CIA, called it "childish" in a Life review. Ernest Van den Haag, retained in 1964 to testify against the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision, participated in the WNDT panel as a professor from the New School for Social Research, and scoffed at Ridgeway's pessimism...
...university entrepreneurs go about their business, unperturbed by students sitting in or taking over switchboards. Ridgeway's book offers no coherent picture of what might be done to improve the situation, because what is needed is a total redistribution of power in the universities. A few reform schemes cannot provide for this. What Ridgeway deplores about the universities is their implication in the political maneuverings of other institutions. This collusion between universities, business, and government--which places the same corporate elite in charge of everything--cannot be ended solely by internal change within the universities. Such change, which would proceed...