Universities for Sale: Resisting Corporate Control Over Canadian Higher Education

Alexander D. Gregor is director of the Centre for Higher Education
Research and Development at the University of Manitoba and the co-editor
of Postsecondary Education in Canada: The Cultural Agenda.

Universities for Sale provides a useful addition to the current debate
over the private sector’s growing influence within the Canadian
university system—an influence that has been prompted in large part by
the universities’ need to secure alternative sources of funding. But
it is also a book that needs to be approached with some care, written as
it is by a faculty union negotiator on behalf of the Canadian
Association of University Teachers, a confederation of the country’s
institutional and provincial faculty associations. Not surprisingly, it
tends to cast faculty as the besieged protectors of the essential values
of the academy (academic freedom, unfettered social criticism, etc.)
standing against the unholy alliance of university administrations,
government, and private business.

Notwithstanding the provocative title, the book presents a balanced
history of the higher-education system and useful discussions of the
conflicts between faculty and administration that occasioned the growth
of unionization and collective bargaining. Tudiver argues that
formalization of procedures in hiring, promotion, tenure, performance
review, and so forth was necessary and, in the end, beneficial. This
position leads him to make an understandable but unsubstantiated
identification between faculty interests and core institutional
interests. Finally, he provides a useful analysis of the potential
dangers of increased corporate presence within the universities (dangers
that include control of intellectual property, imposition of
inappropriate technological change, skewing of academic priorities, and
silencing of criticism).

Universities for Sale is a good overview of a critically important
public-policy issue, as seen from the perspective of a central
component, the faculty association.