By Geoffry D. White (ed.)

Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000

522 pages; $34.95

CAMPUS-BASED RESISTANCE TO CORPORATISM is pivotal to society's struggle against corporate control. Their idealism, energy and intellectual sophistication make students and academics leaders in the struggle to block the all-consuming and insatiable appetites of giant corporations. In recent years, students have successfully led campaigns to kick Nike and other sweatshop-based manufacturers off campus, cut off school contracts with food service contractors tied to corporations that exploit prison-based labor, and spoil the recruiting efforts of big polluters.

These and other efforts to block administration partnerships with corporations reform curricula to reflect real-world economics, and build solidarity with union organizing efforts by janitors and teaching assistants have brought to campuses a variety of activism not seen since the 1960s.

Collectively, these can be viewed as the logical response to the ongoing corporatization of institutions of higher education. If universities are the conscience of the culture, then the invasion of corporate culture into every interstice of campus life should be deeply disturbing. Not only do corporate logos regularly appear on college athletic jerseys and scoreboards, but corporations directly fund courses, endow chairs (increasingly named for the corporations themselves) and sponsor "research centers" that bend the research agenda towards the benefit of corporations themselves.

All of this has increasingly undermined the methods of independent inquiry that have been the signature of academic life. When the pursuit of money supplants the pursuit of knowledge, students are converted into consumers, education into job training (with curricula that fail to serve the corporate paymasters -- such as the liberal arts -- gradually starved budgetarily out of existence), professors into consultants and researchers for hire, and campuses into corporate research parks and profit centers.

The phenomenon is not limited to the United States. The very existence of independent centers of education around the world is threatened by neoliberal economic policies. In Mexico, for instance, the government (with urging from the World Bank) attempted to increase tuition fees for the National University (UNAM), which would have deprived the poorest students of an education that was traditionally guaranteed by the nation's constitution. The move caused a major student revolt, establishing one of the country's biggest fronts of resistance against neoliberalism.

In Campus, Inc., Geoffry White has collected useful essays by student activists, well-known academics and organizers who explain the various ways corporations are now controlling much of the higher learning agenda. It is a solid effort whose themes deserve considerable follow-through.