This concise volume presents a series of conversations conducted by its editor with internationally renowned educators, scholars and social critics. The primary focus is on a set of important social and cultural issues and the complex nature of the global contemporary crises in higher education and economics, and the values and goals educational institutions pursue and produce. Contributors to this volume discuss why the present systems of higher education are ailing almost everywhere, and which remedies have turned out to be their poison. The contributions here investigate how and why universities and the knowledge they seek have become hostages to an ideology based on neoliberalism, economism and a fundamentalism of the market. These ideologies have reshaped higher education and contributed to its commodification and commercialization, transforming educational institutions according to a model that originated in the domains of global business enterprises. Bureaucratization and the growth of a managerial class in higher education have led to universities that focus on what is purportedly marketable, while neglecting the commitment to the pursuit of truth, the education of character and the cultivation of civic values that informed older educational models. The contributors to this book argue, from many different angles, for resistance to these recent developments within higher education.

The book rejects the politics of power as inimical to the very becoming of the human and posits the politics of strength as a new possibility that breaks with the plantation system of organized violence and vampiric wealth production.

Capturing the voices of Americans living with student debt in the United States, this collection critiques the neoliberal interest-driven, debt-based system of U.S. higher education and offers alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and the corporatized university. Grounded in an understanding of the historical and political economic context, this book offers auto-ethnographic experiences of living in debt, and analyzes alternatives to the current system. Chapter authors address real questions such as, Do collegians overestimate the economic value of going to college? and How does the monetary system that student loans are part of operate? Pinpointing how developments in the political economy are accountable for students’ university experiences, this book provides an authoritative contribution to research in the fields of educational foundations and higher education policy and finance.

By drawing on qualitative research conducted in universities in Cyprus, this book presents an account of life in the academy from a feminist perspective. In doing so, the texts uncover new gendered identities emerging as a result of neoliberal and postfeminist discourses in Higher Education. Adopting a psychosocial lens, and drawing on theories of affect and performativity, this volume explains academics’ responses to growing levels of stress, anxiety, precarity and competition in their professional environment. Chapters offer rich observation of how academic staff and faculty negotiate aspects of femininity and masculinity within the academy, and so highlights the performance of ‘gendered academic subjectivities’ as a way in which academics deal with increasing pressures and anxiety. Ultimately proposing a typography of emergent, affective identities including industry academics, fossilised, family and wannabe academics, the volume yields important insights into the current workings of Higher Education and shows the personal and professional impacts of neoliberal dynamics. This volume will prove to be a useful resource for researchers and high-level scholars in the fields of education, sociology of education and gender studies. More generally, scholars and academics with an interest in the changing face of contemporary Higher Education will find this book informative.

The Challenges of Minoritized Contingent Faculty in Higher Education offers a probing and unvarnished look at the employment challenges of these faculty members in four-year institutions. With dramatic shifts in the faculty workforce and nearly three-quarters of instructional positions in United States institutions now off the tenure track, contingent faculty have become the essential, frontline workers of higher education. Remarkably little research attention has focused on the experiences of minoritized contingent faculty in this new academic underclass. Based on in-depth interviews coupled with extensive research, the book highlights the double marginalization that can occur due to secondary employment status in the academic hierarchy, and the exclusion resulting from the intersectionality of nondominant social identities including race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. As the first-person narratives reveal, these faculty often struggle for acceptance, recognition, and rewards in the day-to-day academic environment, and they can face devaluation of their contributions. As a pragmatic and concrete resource, this book offers proactive workforce strategies and key structural and policy recommendations that will assist academic and administrative leaders, including presidents, provosts, department chairs, and chief diversity officers, in building more inclusive working conditions for contingent faculty.

E explores, using textual (words) and visual (image) data from the corporate newsletters of two prominent Asian universities, how particular discourses and their associated discursive representations of neoliberal logic and subjectivity occur in higher education. In particular, she looks at the expression of both institutional priorities and state imperatives that lend themselves to a complementarity built upon two contradictory perspectives: individualism and communitarianism. She argues that the ever-increasing demand for, and utility of higher education in neoliberal society means that it no longer functions merely to provide knowledge and skills, but has implications for society, the individual and the state with regard to their ways of thinking, doing and being. Contributing to a growing corpus of literature on how higher education around the world is being shaped by neoliberal policies, E’s research is based on work done in the city-state of Singapore, a less-well represented context in current literature. While both higher education institutions possess significantly different institutional identities and backgrounds, the alignment of their varied representations of neoliberal logic and subjectivity with state-sanctioned imperatives that indirectly impose demands and constraints shows how neoliberalism as ideology adapts to the socio-political, socio-cultural and socio-economic dimensions that make up the Singapore context. The discursive representations of context-dependent neoliberal logics and subjectivity are discussed in terms of their ideological implications, focusing primarily on the complementarity between seemingly contradictory ideological positions. E’s work uses an innovative framework that integrates aspects of Discourse Theory with Critical Discourse Analysis and demonstrates the use of this framework through empirical linguistic and image analysis. Appealing to academics and graduate students in linguistics, especially those with an interest in critical multimodal discourse analysis, audiences from the domains of higher education research, critical geography, sociology and political science will also find this a useful book.

This edited collection combines quantitative content and critical discourse analysis to reveal a shift in the rhetoric used as part of the neoliberal agenda in education. It does so by analysing, uncovering, and commenting on language as a central tool of education. Focussing on vocabulary, metaphors, and slogans used in strategy documents, advertising, policy, and public discourse, the text illustrates how concepts such as justice, opportunity, well-being, talent, and disadvantage have been hijacked by educational institutes, governments, and universities. Showing how neoliberalism has changed discourses about education and educational policy, these chapters trace issues such as anti-intellectualism, commercialization, meritocracy, and an erasure of racial difference back to a contradictory growth in egalitarian rhetoric. Given its global scope, this volume offers a timely intervention in the studies of neoliberalism and education by developing a holistic vision of how the language of neoliberalism has changed how we think about education. It will prove to be an essential resource for scholars and researchers working at the intersections of education, policymaking, and neoliberalism.

This volume examines the role of neoliberalism and its impact on education in South Asia. It contends that education is in a state of crisis across the world. This is reflected not only in the way the state has withdrawn to pave way for private capital but also in the manner in which knowledge and ways of understanding the world are being challenged by manipulation and adverse influences. A process of ‘factoryisation’ is underway as disciplining of human minds and redefinition of the purpose of human existence are being geared to fall in line with the needs of private capital. The book brings together incisive contributions from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal to explore newer possibilities to deal with the educational crisis, and looks at a range of critical themes in education: pedagogy, teacher–learner relationship, teacher education, the state of the university, and policy. Rich in content, critical and insightful, this book will be a valuable addition for scholars and researchers of education and education policy, sociology, public policy and South Asian Studies.

This book sets out to examine the neo-liberal dimensions of globalisation and market-driven economic imperatives that have impacted higher education reforms. It critiques the notions of accountability, efficiency, academic capitalism, quality of education, and the market-oriented and entrepreneurial university model, based on a neo-liberal ideology. The expansion of economic rationality into the educational sector is one the most ubiquitous dimensions of neo-liberalism and one of its most powerful ideological tools, resulting in the commodification, commercialization, and marketization of education and knowledge. The book critiques structural changes in education and the impact of neo-liberalism and globalisation on educational systems around the world. With this as its overall focus, the respective chapters present hand-picked scholarly research on major discourses in the field of global neo-liberal education reforms. The book draws upon recent studies in the areas of globalisation, neo-liberal education reforms, and the role of the state. It critically assesses the neo-liberal ideological imperatives of current education and policy reforms and illustrates how these shifts in the relationship between the state and education policy are shaping current trends in education policy reform outcomes. Taken together, the chapters offer a timely analysis of current issues affecting neo-liberal education policy research, and outline future directions that education and policy reforms could take.

Understanding Education and Economics explores the multiple ways in which the field of education and schooling has become closely aligned with economic imperatives and interests, and the impact of this on learning and teaching. In particular, the increasing influence of economic arguments, economic ideologies and government involvement in education have made apparent that there is a need to reflect and talk about economic influences and trends in education. Drawing on the expertise of educationalists around the world, the book articulates key debates and theoretical perspectives which can give both students and staff across several courses within the study of education a framework for discussing and analysing how economics defines and shapes the nature and purposes of education. The chapters offer discussions and reflections on key issues, including: the historical developments that led to the creation of a formal education system in England and Wales; the ways in which neoliberalism underpins education, including the coercion of education to serve economic needs; the economics of the university as an institution. Addressing philosophical, sociological, historical, psychological and social issues in education and encouraging readers to pose questions about the nature of education, this book is a valuable resource for students and staff alike and will allow them to broaden perspectives on what education could be for, and what it should be for.