Canadian universities are being slowly but inexorably corporatized. Casualizing academic labour, remaking students into consumers of education, implementing corporate management models and commercializing academic research all point to the ascendance of business interests and values in Canada’s higher education system.

Academia, Inc. examines the tensions that result from the merging of two fundamentally incompatible institutions — the university and the corporation. Brownlee argues that moving from liberal education to corporate job training, public service to profit-making and critical research to commercial invention radically undermines the goals of higher education. Investigating the history, causes and impacts of corporatization, this book explores how this transformation has taken shape and its ramifications for both universities and society as a whole. Brownlee suggests several strategies for resisting this process.

Jamie Brownlee is the author of Academia, Inc.: How Corporatization is Transforming Canadian Universities (2015, Fernwood) and Ruling Canada: Corporate Cohesion and Democracy (2005, Fernwood). He holds a PhD in Sociology and Political Economy from Carleton University. Using information collected through Access to Information requests, his doctoral research examined the influence of corporate power in the sphere of higher education.

Kevin Walby is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Touching Encounters: Sex, Work, and Male-for-Male Internet Escorting (2012, University of Chicago Press), the co-author of Municipal Corporate Security in International Context (2015, Routledge), and the co-editor of Brokering Access: Power, Politics, and Freedom of Information Process in Canada (2012, UBC Press) and Policing Cities: Urban Securitization and Regulation (2013, Routledge). He is also the Prisoners' Struggles editor for the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.

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