Amazingly, this disdain for aggressive marketing and self-promotion is matched or exceeded by academe’s aversion to the kind of structural, systemic … - Michael Bérubé

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Amazingly, this disdain for aggressive marketing and self-promotion is matched or exceeded by academe’s aversion to the kind of structural, systemic change that has made the American economy so remarkably productive. While it is true that American universities have adopted some of the most constructive developments of the business world — boosting the pay of dynamic executive officers to almost a million dollars a year while maintaining a flexible, “as-needed” workforce for outsourceable tasks such as physical plant maintenance and freshman composition — it is also true that not a single American university to date has shown enough basic business sense to register its name as a commercial trademark. This has had a strongly negative impact on universities’ mobility, and therefore prevents them from seeking out optimal wage environments in New Delhi and Singapore. But it also speaks more generally to academe’s cluelessness about how the world actually works.

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About Michael Bérubé

Michael Bérubé (born 1961) is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies. He is the author of several books on cultural studies, disability rights, liberal and conservative politics, and debates in higher education.

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Alternative Names: Michael Berube

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Additional quotes by Michael Bérubé

Buddhists speak of learning to see the world with “beginner’s mind,” and that’s precisely what you have to do every semester: begin again, from scratch, knowing that anything can happen — seeing those ten, or fifty, or even five hundred students, like the two thousand students you’ve seen before, with beginner’s mind. Our anxiety dreams, surely, are the index of our secret fears of failure and inadequacy. But they’re also the measure of how very difficult it is — and how very exhilarating — to begin each semester with beginner’s mind.

Universities can try, with a little imagination, a little nerve, and a little more money, to provide a humane working and living environment for every human being they employ and every human family in every form of human social arrangement. A few are already doing so. And like those universities that have adopted livingwage policies and have negotiated in good faith with campus unions, they are setting an example for the rest of American business culture to follow — and perhaps even an example for which our children and our gay colleagues will someday thank them.

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