Inside Corporate U

Contrary to the old adage, female academics working at Canadian universities don't have to work twice as hard as their male counterparts — just 10 per cent longer. According to Statistics Canada, female faculty members work an average of 65 hours a week compared to 59 logged by their male counterparts. However, this difference may be the least 'gendered' consequence of corporatization on Canadian campuses, according to Inside Corporate U: Women in the Academy Speak Out, a collection of essays written by Canadian academics and edited by Reimer, an associate professor of women's studies at New Brunswick's St. Thomas University.

The experience of Reimer and her peers — including male academics — suggest that Canadian universities are becoming inhospitable to academic freedom, hostile toward non-corporate views and dismissive of feminist perspectives. The collection covers a range of topics including the corporatization of university residences, the perilous future of women's studies programs and corporate influence over scientific research. Athabasca University professor Ella Haley links current corporate intrusion into research to a 1915 gag order placed on industry-funded researchers at Harvard who discovered that young women working as radium dial painters suffered 'jaw rot' due to radiation exposure.

In her introduction, Reimer explains that the contributors employ unique methodologies to analyze the consequences of corporate intrusion on Canadian campuses. Indeed, the essays are persuasive in their authenticity, candour and critical analysis.

Inside Corporate U is a timely collection that explores the impact of the corporatization of higher education for women. Certainly other critical work takes up the corporate university and globalization, but this volume 'draw[s] on the unique experiences of women who, as a group, are seriously underrepresented in the upper echelons of power and privilege in the university setting' (12). The various authors in the collection analyze their positions in the corporate university and contemplate possible modes of resisting the corporate agenda.

The chapters cover a range of concerns within the corporate university and the editor achieves a nice symmetry between the four sections (fourteen chapters). The first section tackles working conditions in the modern university with individual chapters exploring women's professional autonomy, academic freedom, and the state of carrying out research with corporate sponsors. The next section takes up women's careers by examining the representation of women in universities, arguing that the gains women have made in universities are in danger of being undermined as 'the professor rank is still elusive' (116) and women are disproportionately located in 'low-attachment positions' (116). Further, the place of women's studies in the new corporate regime is explored. Reimer asks whether women's studies will survive since it does not garner the same research dollars that other programmes generate for the university. Two more chapters in this section take up intellectual property rights and women's position in university administration. Section three explores employment and educational equity in the corporate university focusing on the attempted regulation of feminist curriculum and pedagogy, university equity practitioners, and untenured women faculty. Paul's chapter nicely outlines how the concerns of untenure and contract faculty can be understood as gendered. The final section explores consequences for students in the new corporate regime. Here we see the shift of education into a commodity and students turned into consumers. The consequence is that under the new regime, university curriculum is meant to train students for the labour market with measurable skills.

The final chapter explores the role of computer-mediated technologies and the assumption that these technologies are value-neutral. Alexander argues that the 'opportunity exists to challenge the market-driven technological imperative and to destabilize inequitable gender relations on university campuses by designing and applying computer-mediate feminist pedagogical resources' (304). Overall, Inside Corporate U is a well-edited and well-organized collection. Editor Marilee Reimer's hope is that the collection 'will encourage women in the academy to continue speaking out against what we perceive to be a real danger to all that we have struggled to achieve' (25). As such, the collection is a must for all women working and studying in higher education.