Critics of Corporate Power

Kenneth Westhues, University of Waterloo, 2007

Apologies! This page is still in preparation.

An important category of academic mobbings in the early 21st century is defined by efforts to eliminate professors who insist on more autonomy in their work than corporate sponsors and university administrations allied with them are willing to tolerate. The webpage about professors targeted for this reason is not yet finished. For now, visitors are referred to Aubrey Blumsohn's Scientific Misconduct Blog and the online documents about Nancy Olivieri maintained by the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

The phenomenon is hardly without precedent. Upton Sinclair published in 1922, a 500-page book entitled The Goose-Step: a Study of American Education, which described dozens of cases of professors run out of their jobs because they were not sufficiently respectful of private capital. The tactics then were less sophisticated than now, The webpage being planned will compare the cases Sinclair wrote about with more recent cases, as a way of illuminating today's political economy of science and scholarship.