Terry Eagleton on “the hot pursuit of the student purse”

Terry Eagleton, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education on “The Slow Death of the University.” Here he addresses institutions’ willingness to see students as customers:

One result of this hot pursuit of the student purse is the growth of courses tailored to whatever is currently in fashion among 20-year-olds. In my own discipline of English, that means vampires rather than Victorians, sexuality rather than Shelley, fanzines rather than Foucault, the contemporary world rather than the medieval one. It is thus that deep-seated political and economic forces come to shape syllabuses. Any English department that focused its energies on Anglo-Saxon literature or the 18th century would be cutting its own throat.

In the same issue of the Chronicle, an article about video trailers for college courses.

[N.B. (as we say in academia): Both articles are behind the paywall.]