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Re:Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower by robertlagrant on Sunday December 04, 2022 @05:47PM (#33858853)
> and posits that such management excess wouldn't happen in a market driven degree mill

Where are you seeing this? Can you quote it?

Re:Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower by defrost on Sunday December 04, 2022 @06:07PM (#33859024)
I read these closely located quotes:

> As Catherine Liu argues in a recent book, the PMC is comprised of educated professionals who embrace a moralizing progressive ideology while believing that it can be realized only in a top-down, hierarchical manner.

...

> Consistent with Liu’s description of the PMC, university administrators “labor in a world of floating signifiers, statistics, analytics, projections, predictions and identity performativity, virtue signaling, and affectual production.”

at first as describing the opinion that US university admins are disguising their busy work behind a cloud of "liberal progressive" smoke and that presumeably other locales and times would see other topical issues being used (ie. it's not intrinsically linked to a political ideal)

However they were followed by:

> While there is no denying that many professors are politically liberal, many still adhere to the principles of pluralism and recognizing the existence of multiple viewpoints on controversial issues.

> More than the faculty, the academic PMC is the source of the dogmatism that haunts contemporary academia.

which had me wondering; I'm not in the US and I'm always struck by the apparent ever present need to shoehorn "Left" V. "Right" and at best gently curse with backhanded references ( "despite being politically liberal, many of the common staff still lack blinkers" etc).

The conclusion is that all this needs to be flushed away:

> Whether they have any commitment to preserving the complex ecology required by institutions of learning in a market-driven society is another question entirely.

and that conclusion follows what I saw as weak and weasly implication that (US) progressive liberal values were tied somehow to administrative self perpetuating at the expense of that they were supposed to serve.

I'll admit it's a weak bias, but it comes across as white anting all the same (to my non US eye).

Re:Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower by robertlagrant on Sunday December 04, 2022 @10:34PM (#33861135)
Sorry, I don't know what white anting is. I will say the latter section you quote seems to undermine your claim, not support it.