Rachel Luker

WRTG 2010
Professor Richards
Mapping the Conversation
The topic of higher education can go in many different directions. Doing a simple
internet search of the term will bring countless articles and papers. For this paper,
however, the theme will be changes occurring in higher education, ultimately the adverse
changes, and several other areas of life involved and affected by these changes. This will
be done by taking the author or authors views towards these changes, and mapping the
conversation between them. By mapping the conversation, it will show common ideas and
themes between authors, as well as points of divergence; points of agreement and points
of disagreement. The major cluster/camps will be Society, Corporate Funding, Ethics
and Morality, and Educational Quality. These cluster/camps will then be broken down
into sub-cluster/camps being further influenced in response to the major cluster/camp
being affected. A total of ten sources will be included in this map, including: Andrew
Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Are Colleges worth the Price of Admission (July 11, 2010),
Sarah Bonewits and Lawrence Soley, Research and the Bottom Line in Todays University
(July 11, 2010), Adrianna Kezar, Obtaining Integrity: Reviewing and Examining the
Charter between Higher Education and Society (2004), Jeffrey J. Williams,
Deconstructing Academe: The Birth of Critical University Studies (February 19, 2012), L.
Lennie Irvin, What is Academic Writing? (2010), Diane Reay, Jacqueline Davies, Miriam
David, and Stephen J Ball, Choice of Degree or Degrees of Choice? Class, Race and the
Higher Education Choice Process (2001), Bob Hanke and Alison Hearn, Introduction: Out
of the Ruins, the University to Come (2012), David Foster Wallace, This is Water (2005),
Sylvia Hurtado, Linking Diversity with the Educational and Civic Missions of Higher
Education (2006), and David Bartholomae, Inventing the University (1986). These
articles will be referenced by last name of the author or authors in both the paper and the
map.
The first camp/cluster to be identified is changes in higher education concerning
society. As Kezar explains, there is a charter between higher education and the public
good. Kezar also shares that this charter between higher education and society is being
compromised (p. 429). She goes on arguing that many critics agree that higher
education is foregoing its role as a social institution and is functioning increasingly as an
industry with . . . economic goals and market oriented values (p. 430). In Choice of
Degree or Degrees of Choice the authors argue within the Choice and Availability sub-

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camp that changes in the university also affect the choices made by prospective students,
bringing up that there are important issues in relation to race, class and higher education
choice processes (p. 855). They also bring up the various mechanisms of social closure
which operate to reproduce existing inequalities within the higher education sector (p.
855). Another article included in the Opportunities/Diversity sub-camp is from Sylvia
Hurtado. Hurtado claims that diversity is linked with the central educational and civic
mission of higher education (p. 185). She goes on to include that changes within higher
education need to include the evidence from research performed showing the educational
benefits of diversity (p. 193). The last sub-camp, Economics/Student Debt includes the
article by Hacker and Dreifus. Hacker and Dreifus argue that while the cost of tuition is
heavily increasing, the value of an education is not and that many, if not most, universities
have lost track of their educational purpose. The purpose of the camp is to explain how
changes in higher education are subjecting society as a whole to change.
The next camp to be discussed is Ethics and Morality. The sub-camp Social
Issues includes Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice, as the authors challenge
contemporary political discourses which position widening access and the advent of a
mass system of higher education as unproblematically positive advances (p. 855). They
go on to argue that the experiences of non-traditional applicants to higher education . . .
are qualitatively different from those of their more privileged, middle-class counterparts,
highlighting key class and racial differences and inequalities (p. 855). This argument also
spills in to ethics and morality of the Availability sub-camp. The last sub-camp goes over
the ethics and morality towards research, corporate funding, and professorships. Bonewitz
and Soley explain how the corporate funding of research can cause ethical dilemmas, such
as furthering the benefactors ideological agenda or achieving a profitable outcome for
the funding source, rather than furthering sound scholarship that can withstand profession
review (p. 82). They go on to bring up another problem where there is faculty being
bypassed in academic decision making and of an upsurge in corporate-like approaches to
accountability, causing an implication that research is severed from teaching (90). This
camp goes to show the ethical and moral changes occurring with the changes in higher
education.
While corporate funding was discussed in the Ethics and Morality camp, it goes on
to become its own. Under the Corporate Funding camp, the first sub-camp is Research.
Bonewitz and Soley had described how corporate funding has ethically harmed research,
and they go on explaining how this type of funding in research can steer research into

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areas that cant hurt [the industry], or the funding source (p.83). Kezar also explains
costs that have been documented as outcomes of the move toward commercial research
including a decline in basic research, conflicts of interest, and a shift in graduate
student research foci to more applied topics with marketable orientations (p. 445). In his
paper Deconstructing Academe, Williams also claims that consequences of corporate
methods and goals have been corrupting research. Another adverse of corporate
funding is mapped in the sub-camp Labor Issues. This is introduced by Bonewitz and
Soley claiming that as research at the University is thriving on outside funding, there
seems to be a decline in the priority place on instruction at the institution (p. 84). This
declining priority is exhibited by the proliferation of part-time/adjunct professors hired in
place of full-time tenured faculty (p. 84). Williams, and Hacker and Dreifus, also make
claims on the adverse effects of corporate funding on labor in the university. The claim by
Bonewitz and Soley is also seen again in the Educational Quality camp, further the
mission of the Corporate Funding camp to show how it is negatively affecting higher
education.
The final camp is Educational Quality and how changes in higher education are
affecting that quality. Just as Hurtado explained the importance on including diversity in
higher education for the sake of society, it can be seen again under the Diversity subcamp. Through her project, Preparing College Students for a Diverse Democracy,
Hurtado found that students with more diverse peers were ultimately better-rounded as
students (p. 191). The last sub-camp not previously mentioned is Liberal
Arts/Humanities. In his article, Williams argues that under corporate methods, research
often occurs at the expense of teaching, especially in the humanities. Hanke and Hearn
also make a stand on the importance of humanities by quoting Jacques Derridas idea that
work done in the humanities and the humanities-oriented social sciences cannot be
disassociated from a reflection on the political and institutional conditions of the work (p.
11). Under the Corporate Involvement sub-camp Bonewitz and Soley also bring up that
claim that the new university system casts teaching as secondary to the aims of the
institution (p. 90). In this camp, it is argued that educational quality is becoming overrun
by practices destructive in academic terms (p. 90).
While this map shows the ways in which the authors come together on certain
claims, and how they argue on the same claim while possibly leading in different
directions, it also ended up with an additional agenda. After finishing the map it has shown
the intersectionality of topics; how topics or sub-camps appear in multiple camps. This

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intersectionality is also shown in the way that authors are spread throughout the map.
Kezar, for example, shows up under all of the camps showing how her article encompasses
all of the main ideas of the map. Another example is from Williams, who appears in both
sub-camps of the Corporate Funding camp, and Hanke and Hearn, who appear in two of
the three sub-camps of Educational Quality. This intersectionality goes to show that the
changes within higher education involve much more than what is being immediately
affects, they ultimately trickle to nearly every aspect of an institution.