Saving the Academic Commons from Enclosure

Another thought-provoking piece from OnTheCommons, this time about the academic commons and the threats it faces:

One of our most valuable commons are universities: a special non-market system for generating reliable and valuable knowledge. This is precisely why so many businesses are trying to privatize the academic commons.

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One way that academia can begin to fight back, I believe, is by developing a stronger, more coherent analysis for why its open sharing and collaboration represent a “value proposition.” The academic commons is at least as generative as the market, but you rarely hear that stated or explained. Until it is, administrators and even many professors are likely to see more value in cold, hard cash than in the norms and ethics of the academic commons.