U Wannabe U

There's a new book out by a sociologist who critiques the new, corporate university and a review of the book here.

Also, there's a critique of the book which includes this synopsis of the book from James Garland's "Saving Alma Mater" blog:

Public universities are increasingly headed by job-hopping professional managers. Like the “efficiency experts” of yore, these new corporate wannabes seek to root out waste and duplication and shed programs that don’t make money. But they mostly chop the academic side of the enterprise, siphoning off money to expand their empires. They have little loyalty to their university and its principled values. They measure their success not by the advancement of learning and the personal growth of students but by the size of their salaries and the bottom-line numbers on balance sheets. They arrive on campuses spouting banal clichés from the business world (“doing more with less”), and their seldom-justified strategies for transformation are mostly empty rhetoric.

"Job hopping professional managers..." who most likely, have a PhD and understand academic culture to some degree. I work at a rather "corporate" university, and I believe that sometimes these sort of approaches are beneficial. Also I'd like to be a "job hopping professional manager." It's funny, though, what I'm discovering in my research is that faculty love to lambaste the dean, whether it be for being too corporate or not protecting them enough or any other host of complaints. It's a difficult job, being dean, and I think that no matter what the era or what the new complaint flavor of the day is, there will always be tension between faculty and administrators.