Abstract
Corporate structures are now so deeply embedded in American universities that intellectuals have finally been imprisoned by Max Weber’s “iron cage” of bureaucracy and engulfed by its “polar night of icy darkness.” Despite a plethora of books and articles on the corporate corruption of American higher education, these critiques of corporatization have been like Cassandra’s prophecies falling on the deaf ears of university faculty. Their manifest resignation is widely echoed in an ancillary genre of books on “the fall of the faculty” and “the last professors” as it is now indisputable that traditional forms of faculty organization, influence, and resistance have failed to even slow down the final stage of corporatization. Thus, as a disenchanted intellectual, I found myself maneuvering within my own institution to create a personal zone of independence and self-sufficiency outside the iron cage.
I had already prophesied to the people
of my city their awful Fate….How shall
I tell the end?
– Cassandra in Agamemnon by Aeschylus (458 BCE).
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Barrow, C.W. (2018). From Radical Resistance to Quiet Subversion. In: The Entrepreneurial Intellectual in the Corporate University. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63052-6_3
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