The neoliberal university and its alternatives

Rustin, Michael

doi:10.3898/136266216819377057

Cited by 65 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…When they made their appearance in European universities as exiles, the Academics for Peace scholars found themselves confronted with an academic establishment in Eu-rope that had implicitly accepted neoliberal modes of knowledge production and work, including academic precariousness. Unlike their 1930s predecessors who escaped to (more or less) liberal regimes, today's exiled scholars seek refuge in European and North American universities that have been under neoliberal pressure since the 1980s (Thompson 1970;Altbach 2001;Radice 2013;Rustin 2016). Since that time, academia has been increasingly viewed as a system regulated by market principles and competition, thereby rendering the working conditions of academics increasingly more fragile and precarious (Gee 2017).…”

Section: The Transformative Potential Of Scholars In Exile In Neolibementioning

confidence: 99%

Exile and Plurality in Neoliberal Times

Özdemir¹,

Mutluer²,

Özyürek³

2019

Public Culture

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Today thousands of academics from Turkey, along with others from Syria, Iran, and Egypt are deserting their homeland in search of intellectual refuge in Western countries. These exiled academics have been attempting to practice diverse forms of teaching and researching, both in Turkey and in exile. We argue that the struggles of oppositional academics inside and outside Turkey today offer insight into the nature of the global crisis in neoliberal academia based on precarious working conditions of knowledge producers and commodification of education. Some of the answers to this crisis may lie, as they did in the 1930s and 1940s, in the hands of those same persecuted scholars who bring with them academic perspectives forged in oppressive regimes. In a short period of time Academics for Peace accomplished two goals. They have resisted through peaceful, anti-violent civil disobedience the political pressure brought to bear upon them by the increasingly authoritarian Turkish government, daring to demand and then create a new, more plural public Turkish space. Second, they have dared, even in the face of academic and civic precariousness, to take a critical stance toward the marketization and hierarchization of Turkish and European universities and in response to forge new autonomous ways of teaching and researching in their home and host countries. An approach that goes beyond humanitarianizing the support given to dissident academics has the potential to pluralize academy.

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Section: The Transformative Potential Of Scholars In Exile In Neolibementioning

confidence: 99%

Exile and Plurality in Neoliberal Times

Özdemir¹,

Mutluer²,

Özyürek³

2019

Public Culture

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“…The birth of the 'corporate university' has been discussed in reference to the ever more prevalent tendency for higher education institutions to be managed according to market principles and sometimes reorganised as corporate entities. This orientation has profound consequences for the system of tertiary education and its participants (see, for example, Clark 1998;Slaughter, Leslie 1997;Marginson 2013;Rustin 2016).…”

Section: Neoliberalism Higher Education and Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing Neoliberalism on Campus: The Vulnerability of Gender Equality Mechanisms in Estonian Academia

Aavik¹

2017

GaV

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This paper explores the construction of a gendered neoliberal rationality in postsocialist academic settings. Drawing on interviews conducted with key stakeholders in four major Estonian universities, I trace how three key gender equality policy measures are conceptualised -quotas, workplace fl exibility, and the involvement of men in efforts towards gender equality. The fi ndings suggest that Estonian academic stakeholders fi ll these key gender equality policy ideas with meanings that distort the original purpose of these solutions, and thereby render these policy ideas counter-productive as mechanisms designed to bring about change in gender relations. Instead, these conceptualisations serve the interests of the neoliberal university, enabling and reinforcing the atomisation and exploitation of academic labourers, particularly women. Collectively, these articulations constitute, along with other practices, the 'doing of neoliberalism' in post-socialist university settings. Academic stakeholders do not (just) refl ect an already established totalising neoliberal framework, but in fact discursively (and materially) create and reproduce what we have come to understand and refer to as 'neoliberalism' in academia. This has implications for devising and implementing gender equality policies in higher education in the post-socialist region, as the solutions applied elsewhere in Europe may not work in the same way in Central-Eastern Europe.

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“…This is the gradual, sometimes erratic and contradictory, but overall clear trend towards the loosening of national planning of the system of universities and its replacement by a system involving more competition between, and financial responsibility on the part of, individual universities (Henkel, 1998). The model of the provision of university education that is currently in place is a familiar one within UK, especially English, public (and ex-public) services : first, education is re-defined as a service to be consumed (Rustin, 2016); competition between service-providers is seen as helping drive up standards; therefore, service-users, in this case students, should be encouraged to expect as wide a choice as is practically possible of service providers, and be given the necessary information to exercise an informed choice among the providers (Vidler and Clarke, 2005). In recent years, as an aid to informed choice between universities a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have been identified which it is claimed relate to teaching quality and other concerns of students such as 'employability', and what is called in the jargon ubiquitous in UK universities at present, 'the student experience'.…”

Section: Framing Recent Changes In Uk Higher Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing turbulence in the academy: UK planning academics in a period of change

Thomas

2017

Town Planning Review

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Higher education in the UK is undergoing a process of significant transformation involving major changes in the roles of academics, including planning academics. The argument of this paper is that these changes can be usefully understood within an institutionalist framework as changes that have implications for the identity and roles of planning academics and the nature of planning education. Within this framework, influencing change requires understanding institutional traditions. The paper begins the task of assessing how familiar the academy is with traditions relating to higher education, with a view to initiating a more fruitful engagement with broader changes in the future.

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The neoliberal university and its alternatives

Cited by 65 publications

References 1 publication

Exile and Plurality in Neoliberal Times

Exile and Plurality in Neoliberal Times

Doing Neoliberalism on Campus: The Vulnerability of Gender Equality Mechanisms in Estonian Academia

Framing turbulence in the academy: UK planning academics in a period of change

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