Universities Are Selling Themselves Off Piece by Piece

American higher ed has become a mesh of corporate contracts and outsourced services. From dining halls to student records, private vendors now run many institutions’ most basic operations — atomizing workers and undermining the university’s public mission.

Much has been written on the corporatization of American higher education, the defunding of public universities, and the broader neoliberal project that turned students into customers and faculty into precarious contract labor. However, far less has been said about how the university has ceased to exist as a self-sustaining institution. The modern campus is no longer a community of administrators, students, scholars, and staff united under the umbrella of a discrete organization. Instead, the campus is a nexus of outsourced labor and pr