The "College of the Future" (formerly "ATEP")

     This just in. We have it on good authority that district decision-makers have decided to rename ATEP (i.e., the Advanced Technology and Education Park) the “College of the Future,” and that they are close to settling the question of which of SOCCCD’s remaining campuses shall have its name changed to the “College of the Past.” (Surely that will be Saddleback.) The remaining college, of course, will be given the moniker the “College of the Present”—or just “The College.”

     I'm not making this up. (Not all of it, anyway.) [UPDATE: See College of the Future - Planning Assumptions - a district slide presentation dated July 2013]

There's a great big beautiful tomorrow,
Shining at the end of every day.
There's a great big beautiful tomorrow,
And tomorrow is just a dream away.
Man has a dream and that's the start.
He follows his dream in mind and heart
And when it becomes a reality,
It's a dream come true for you and me.
So there's a great big beautiful tomorrow,
Shining at the end of every day.
There's a great big beautiful tomorrow,
Just a dream away. 
                  —Carousel of Progress

Disneyland's Monsanto "home of the future"

The business model

Chomsky: How America's Great University System Is Getting Destroyed (AlterNet)

     …So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed....
     That’s one aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite familiar from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management—a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up. There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style of massive administration and levels of administration—and of course, very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model….