The Resistible Rise of Utilitarian University

Abstract

The decline of the traditional university model, labeled as old and outdated, is the result of prevailing utilitarianism, focused on the production and consumption of material goods, under a novel ideological impetus since the beginning of the millennium. Based on the axiom that education and training are synonyms, “modern” universities have progressively turned into businesses, further assuming that this transformation was essential to meet the needs of the community, to use public and private resources in the best way, and to meet current employment requirements from agriculture, industry, and tertiary. The primacy of management control plays the major role in ruling the change, as it occurred in parallel with what happens in other professions that are deeply modifying the organizations they work for, such as health services. Managers control the system under the commitment of centralizing decisions without any effective opposition by professors and students due to job insecurity, precarious jobs spread out, and the need for increasing the workload, part of a misunderstood race for productivity.

Ignorance is never better than knowledge

Enrico Fermi