The Corporatized University

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.