``As to the more specific point about collusion: in my experience the self-consciousness of "progressive" professors is largely limited to posturing. Taking correct positions and denouncing the right things (combined with writing checks to elect Obama) establishes one's credentials. All of this is largely divorced from any self-critical examination of the conditions of production of one's own position.'' (DW)
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I want to clarify what I meant by collusion. I'll substitute the word coordinate. Other polite words are collaborate, pardnership, etc. In the past I posted extensively on this general subject, and took it for granted it would be understood...
Many academics don't get to see this relationship much outside of research fields which heavily depend on public and private grants. It's the grant process and its guidelines that are the medium through which capitalist, government officialdom, and education systems like the UC system coordinate their policies and research activities.
The basic idea is simple. Money is available to produce research that will likely benefit a particular industry. The UC administration tends to call these lines of work productive research. What they mean by productive is some additive quanity of public or private dollars to their budget through overhead other service fees deducted from the grants.
The giant agricultural corporations have development divisions to produce and refine their product lines, and that's were the jobs for bio-science PhDs are located. The same is true of the pharmaceutical industries, medicine, etc. The advanced level of chemistry is another, as is geology for oil and petro-chemical industries.
The last grant I helped with was part of NSF's education division. The codes words NSF used were something along the lines of ``demonstration of distribution and dissemination potential'' which means who can you say will buy this? We were trying to design teaching aids for disabled students in science. So I looked up who manufactured teaching materials. The answer was textbook publishers. So I tracked some of them down to find out what they offered in the lines of manipulatives and teaching models. That's where we might fit, so I listed some of the better companies as potential distributors. Thank god I didn't have to actually contact them.
Now I came to discover this business end of higher education from art, a dept that was all but erased at UCB in the early 90s during a state budget crunch. Art History hangs on by a bare thread.
My thoughts were, ah, so this is were the money goes. This why UC treasured the bio-sciences and abandoned the humanities, languages, and arts, the core of what used to be a liberal education.
CG