Corporate ideology has caused the meltdown of the financial markets, is accelerating planetary disaster and has hollowed out our society. It did this with massive taxpayer support, for example fossil fuel industries get more support than renewable energy.

Why we expect corporations to do anything apart from spin the truth to ensure profits for a minority is beyond me.

Well put lillian. The only interest our corporate 'leaders' have in academe is the generation, via research, of new and potentially profitable intellectual property - at public expense - which they then expropriate and convert into commercially saleable commodities ('wealth creation') by exploiting the 'cheap labor' of junior academics and manufacturing workers in foreign lands, 'killing' their opposition and accumulating yet more surplus value or 'private' profits for themselves and their pampered, self-indulgent families.

the only people who have benefited from the corporatisation of australian universities are hucksters and little hitlers. dilan imagines some fantasy corporatisation which actually would benefit the students and the community. but dilan's fantasy is so far from the current orwellian reality, i can't see the point of his article.

Hi every body The number of corporate universities has grown dramatically: More than 2,000 organizations operated such programs in 2001, compared to 800 in 1995. But, writes Mark Allen in The Corporate University Handbook, don't make the mistake of assuming this is a management fad. Corporate universities reflect a sound organizational development strategy, helping companies bring new skills into the workplace, develop corporate leaders, and attract and retain workers.

Just what are corporate universities? Allen, director of executive education at California's Pepper-dine University, describes them as ongoing programs, either operated by an employer or outsourced, that offer coursework geared toward teaching workers new skills or improving their current knowledge. Unlike traditional training programs, which react to skills gaps, corporate universities are strategic, reflecting company priorities.

The 14 essays in The Corporate University Handbook provide models for designing corporate universities and strategies for managing them. For example, in "Creating a Corporate University," Mike Morrison describes the launch of Toyota's University of Toyota in 1999. After a cross-departmental team identified corporate priorities, Toyota created centers of excellence to concentrate on specific areas of employee development.

Toyota University offers more than 1,000 courses, Morrison says. "Our strategic alliances with a number of providers of learning content continue to strengthen and broaden our capability."

Bushbasher, insults don't add much to the discussion. He raises some interesting points. But really universities are not designed to be corporations.

Quite often I get the feeling that, somehow, I have wandered into a parallel universe and papers like this one confirm that this is so. It is a funny sort of place and I can hardly think with the humming noise of Cardinal Newman spinning in his grave so loudly. Consider the function of the sections of the tertiary system before Dawkins "reforms": TAFE taught young people necessary skills for the workplace: CAE taught strictly vocational courses like nursing, primary teaching, Occupational Therapy etc – a few vocations snuck into University like Medicine and Dentistry. There were a small number of Universities whose primary function was to teach people how to think, how to critically evaluate new and old theories, to conduct "blue sky" research and to extend knowledge regardless of the needs of Toyota. To put it crudely there is not the brain power, or money. in a small population like ours to drive 38 "Universities". The technical term for what is happening is "Regression to the Mean".