CONCEPT
The Corporatized University
Berg and Seeber's name for the institutional formation that has progressively replaced scholarly judgment with productivity metrics, audit regimes, and managerial authority — the template through which AI's effects on knowledge work can be read.
The corporatized university is Berg and Seeber's technical term for the structural transformation of higher education over the past four decades — the progressive replacement of collegial self-governance with managerial hierarchy, of scholarly judgment with quantified metrics, of tenured faculty with contingent labor, and of liberal education with workforce preparation. The concept is diagnostic rather than merely descriptive: it identifies the specific institutional logic that makes certain forms of scholarship increasingly difficult to sustain, and that provides the template for understanding how similar logics operate in other knowledge-intensive domains. The AI transition, in their framework, is not a break from this trajectory but its intensification — the same productivity logic that hollowed the university now applied at machine speed to every knowledge worker.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The corporatized university emerged from a specific historical process: the reduction of public funding for higher education, the rise of tuition-dependent revenue models, the application of