Hiromi_X

If UT Austin is anything like my old university, then the university administration is to blame.

Starbucks has a coffee monopoly on my campus. The university owns and operates six Starbucks coffee stands across the campus. The university never bothered asking the students for feedback; they just inked a deal and the stands sprung up over night. We also have several other chain fast food restaurants on campus--again, the students were never asked for their opinion on these matters.

Why don't independent businesses exist around the campus? Because the university controls most of the real estate adjacent to the campus. In a few cases, they bought out the property of independent businesses and forced them out through high rents and unreasonable renter's policies. The university also favors leasing out the property to chains rather than independent businesses because chains are more willing and capable of paying high rents. Again, they never gave the students an opportunity to participate in these decisions. The only reason these chains continue to do business in the area is because they're only places within walking distance where one can grab a quick coffee or lunch between classes (I'm guilty of this as well).

There are independent coffee shops, book stores, restaurants and art theaters that are popular among the students. It's just that they are located in another neighborhood that isn't polluted by my university's shady administrators.

I don't think you're paranoid. I swept under my bed just the other day and out came a Fortune 500 CEO along with the less glamorous dust bunnies.

He mumbled something about getting a half-caf, low-fat, extra frothy vente latte and then heading off to take over the world, starting with someplace in Texas. I think it started with an "A".

Or, he could have just been drunk on power. It was hard to tell with all the cash he was holding twixt his teeth.

Yeah, our students even protested the Starbucks, along with some of the faculty. It's still there. I think Tirade is right- the administration at a number of universities has no interest whatsoever in the wishes of students or faculty, or in the concept of an academic community. The corporatization of higher ed would make a great muckraking book or documentary, if it hasn't already.

Having been to the Dobie quite a few times, I think this is needlessly complicated: the Dobie is an awful place for a business - your business will be completely invisible at all to people on the Drag, and there really aren't enough people in the building itself to make up for it. They end up with a food court with a combination of bad local businesses and bad national businesses - and, honestly, if the service and quality is bad, do we really care if they're local? It's a typical result from a 1960s-1970s attempt to bring enclosed malls into an urban area.

There's plenty of non-corporate local stuff around UT; but one thing I've noticed is that local business, despite the popular conception, often suffers from a lack of vision when things change - ref: local businesses infesting awful pedestrian-hostile strip malls on Anderson or Burnet because the rent's a bit cheaper today; ignoring places where they could actually get a toehold in areas with more pedestrian traffic today and way more going forward (West Campus/Drag).

IE, they focus entirely on rent cost and not at all on future revenues. And it's not just because of deep versus shallow pockets; if you talk to some of these people, they honestly can't conceive of going more urban, period.

Sadly, it's probably all about the money. University funding for public schools is always decreasing, so they have to make it up somehow. They used to just raise tuition, but that's gotten to be too much. So they sign exclusive contracts with big national chains who are willing to pay for the monopoly. The luxury dorms are all the craze these days with parents willing to spend the money so their kids can live in style. Ridiculous, but true.

Funky, eclectic stores rarely make the $ the land/building owners want as rent. $tarbuck$ and Ikea do. It's economic.

I guess it wasn't so hard to find...

http://www.amazon.com/University-Inc-Corporate-Corruption-Education/dp/0465090516

There are a bunch of other books listed with this one. I think what you're getting at is something a lot of us are concerned about. The old idea of a university was that it basically spent money and, in return, provided something of value to society- namely, educated people. Society made the investment for the social good of having educated people, or just slow and patient thinkers. But, as a business model, it's lousy.

Part of what's going on is what GBB mentions- public funds are drying up for higher ed. Another part of it is that, as society apparently decided that all adults need a college education, higher ed's become something of a spoiler's paradise. From professors assigning their students 'customized textbooks' so they get a cut of the profits or even just assigning their own book, to 'activity fees' that the students have no say in, to the gift shops and snack shacks, to the ridiculously inflated tuition and ridiculously top-heavy administration, to the totally unnecessary TAs, like myself... well, it's definitely become profitable. The ones who are really getting shafted are the working class kids who can't afford a university education anymore, right when society has mandated it for any sort of mobility. Those of us in higher ed are sort of the gatekeepers of the class system. You can understand why I cringe when tenured professors start waxing poetic about Marx.

Oh, and the sports programs at most American universities are a money pit of epic proportions. Of course, I dare you to campaign in the streets of Austin for getting rid of football!

Oh, and the sports programs at most American universities are a money pit of epic proportions. Of course, I dare you to campaign in the streets of Austin for getting rid of football!

To be fair, the biggest sports teams at my university--football and basketball--are completely self-sufficient. The less popular teams, namely wrestling and track, receive only partial funding from the university (a few hundred dollars at most every semester, which is pennies compared to the amount of money in the budget).

The corporatization of higher education was one topic of a writing course I took a few semesters ago. There is plenty of material about it. Unfortunately, most of that material was from scholarly articles and not easily accessible to non-students.

And I actually hope to see more correspondence program offered by brick and mortar universities. In my last semester of college, I was required to do most of my coursework online. It was great! The exams and assignments were creative and challenging and not the typical multiple choice or short answer garbage that I was assigned in my traditional courses. There were no lectures to spoonfeed notes and exam answers to students, thus requiring critical thinking and actual work to get a good grade. And the best part of all was that I got to work at my own pace. I felt that I learned a lot more from using this method than I did from traditional, lecture-based courses. I'm hoping that I can find a similar, online-based grad school program (that is accredited of course!).

The other complication, then, is that UT doesn't have any leverage at all with Dobie (well, I guess they could rent some of its space and then hand it out to whomever they want). Dobie, despite appearing to be on campus, isn't - it's a private dorm with a private mall (you probably already knew this, but some of the commenters sounded like they didn't).

Maybe a case of "if all you have is a hammer", but I think the insistence for years on preventing anything tall from being built in West Campus basically meant only chains could survive on the Drag (also not under UT's influence, of course). As for Wendy's on campus - there's no excuse for that.

Now that West Campus is finally being allowed to grow up, and more students will be living without easy access to cars, maybe the market will diversify enough to improve the stuff on the Drag. I hope it will; but I don't know how confident I am in the taste of the UT undergrads.

But then again, the non-chain stuff at my own college's student union really sucked, closed really early, and made typically surly fast food service seem like a 5-star restaurant. I'd have killed for a Wendy's.

I can't speak to UT Austin specifically, but I would agree with all the posters who guess it's money. Universities are looking for any way they can to raise money, even if it means selling out the students and faculty to corporations. Even apparently non-commercial services are run by corporations. E.g., at my current university, Sodexho runs all campus dining services and Barnes and Noble runs the bookstore, despite both being labeled with the university name, no "Barnes and Noble" or "Sodexho" anywhere in sight.

My undergrad university actually *did* run its own bookstore and food service and the difference is stark. The bookstore sells *gasp* useful and interesting books!, rather than just textbooks and expensive insigniawear, and the dining service is good enough that they win some sort of college food service award every year. Heck, they roast coffee beans in-house and sell deep-fried foods from midnight to 2am. Notably, this was a very well-endowed university, where the administration viewed campus services as actual services rather than profit centers, and that probably makes all the difference.