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The Financialization and Destruction of Universities..
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Universities are a curious invention.
Once before these institutions were wholly committed to the business of nurturing of young minds, with a view to building successful and productive societies.
It certainly was the thinking in Morocco, in Italy and in England, when Al-Quaraouiyine, Bologna and Oxford universities, came into being, in the 8th, 11th and the 13th centuries.
And as agrarian societies embraced industrialism, the value of learning took on much greater importance, with courses like engineering and sciences taught to those who could attend university.
And we must appreciate that for the very longest time, universities were all about exclusion and not inclusion: Blacks, Jews and women, however intellectually gifted, could expect not to be admitted to tertiary institutions.
This was true in the United States and in the United Kingdom.
Harvard, Yale, NYU, Columbia, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge et al were all guilty of this sin.
For every William Edward Burghardt Dubois who attended Harvard, there were thousands more who couldn’t. And the authorities at Oxford were horrified to discover that among the Rhodes Scholars who came from America in 1907 was a Black man…