September 10, 2015  

One of the New Far-Right Buzzwords Appears to Be “Cartel”

ACADEME BLOG

This buzzword has actually been around for a while:

Higher Education Is a Government-Created Cartel

By Conn Carroll

August 6 2013

Washington Examiner

The government-created accreditation cartel is one of the biggest reasons why college costs continue to rise and there is very little innovation in the higher education industry. It is no accident that the Fortune 500 company list from 1983 looks nothing like it does today, but the US News College Rankings have been virtually unchanged since they began in 1983.

Higher Education Cartel, Meet Creative Destruction

By Charles Hugh Smith

September 10, 2013

Modern colleges and universities have collectively become a rent-seeking cartel, an alliance of nominally competitive institutions that maintains a highly profitable monopoly of accreditation.

Correspondent Mark G. succinctly summarizes why higher education is ripe for the creative destruction of its cartel model. His brief account captures the essential dynamics so well that I made it…

View original post 197 more words

About martinkich

I am a Professor of English at Wright State University's Lake Campus, where I have been a faculty member for more than 30 years. I have served four terms as the president of the WSU chapter of AAUP, one term as the president of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, and three terms as an at-large member of the executive committee of AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congress. I was elected to the Ohio Conference Board ahead of the statewide effort in 2011 to repeal by referendum Ohio's Senate Bill 5, which would have eliminated collective-bargaining rights for all public employees in the state. As co-chair of the Ohio Conference's Communication Committee, I began to do much more overtly political writing during that campaign. It was a tremendous learning experience, though often quite overwhelming. At the beginning of 2018, our chapter at Wright State went of strike for three weeks. The second longest strike by a public university faculty in U.S. history, it was necessitated by an effort to gut our contract. Everyone who stood firm to preserve our contract paid a substantial financial as well as emotional price to do so, but the sense of solidarity--not just with our Wright State colleagues, but with our students, the faculty at other Ohio institutions, the members of other unions, and many community supporters who joined our picket lines and helped in countless other ways--was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I have sustained my activism over several decades, and at the risk of stating the obvious, I have very much enjoyed the work, I have been grateful for what we have sometimes managed to accomplish, and I continue to cherish the great friendships that I have made. Receiving AAUP's Sternberg and Tacey awards for those efforts has been a great honor, but also has seemed a little redundant. Beyond my blogging, I have been a fairly productive writer of articles and reviews for academic journals and more general periodicals. I have written one book and co-authored another, and I have co-edited a collection of essays. I am currently working on two book manuscripts.

Leave a comment