ABSTRACT
Criticisms of the university are animated, in large part, by particular visions of what higher education ought to be and, correspondingly, how far the current state of higher education falls from that purported ideal. This chapter focuses on the critique of domination: "the discourse of power which creates and sustains the social practices that control the dominated". The discourses presented here operate within the world of the 'taken-for-granted' where university faculty are paid handsomely, work little, and are protected from the ordinary vagaries of employment, including obnoxious supervisors and difficult coworkers, by the system of tenure which functions as a publicly paid sinecure. This rhetoric focuses on the three primary tasks of the professoriate: research, teaching, and service. Each of these, in turn, is constructed, through a variety of discursive practices, to be woefully lacking in both quantity and quality, and the impact is argued to be not merely deleterious for students, and the whole of society, but potentially catastrophic.
