ABSTRACT
Commenting on the higher education in the UK, sociologist Martin Trow (1994/2010) observed that conservative governments like Margaret Thatcher’s 11 had used managerialism to gain more control over universities and did so by attaching government funding to external assessments of teaching and research. Along with this accountability measure, the privatization of public assets and anti-labor-union policies also typifi ed Thatcher’s conservative policies in the 1980s. Its American ideological and historical parallel took the form of Reaganomics — deregulation, reduction of federal spending, tax reform — all playing a role in the launching of the new “Gilded Era” in the US (McHugh, 2006 ). For the American research university, the era was one characterized by the weakening of the academic profession and the deepening of the authority of university presidents and chief administrators, and the expanded power of new market forces (Trow, 1988 ). These cultural and political conditions had their formative start in the Transformative Era and matured into our 21 st -century tribulations in the university — privatization, corporatization, and accountability.
