Universities in the Anglophone world of 2020, where teaching posts are ever fewer and contracts are ‘fixed term’ to use the preferred HR euphemism—meaning precarious, temporary and renewed if at all only at the whim of institutions—armies of management and… Read More ›
Ross Abbinnett
The Making of Bullshit Leadership and Toxic Management in the Neoliberal University, John Smyth
My over-arching argument in this article is that both academics and students in universities have been afflicted by a set of relations that Lauren Berlant refers to as ‘cruel optimism’ (2011). Cruel optimism according to Berlant, constitutes the holding out… Read More ›
Towards a Schizoanalysis of the Contemporary University, Andy Broadey and Richard Hudson-Miles
The history of the university has been read as a cycle of foundational paradigm shifts, wherein emergent socio-cultural forces destroy dominant-hegemonic university problematics and rebuild the institution in their own image. Most famously, Bill Readings (1999, 54) identifies a sequence… Read More ›
The Neoliberal University and the Common Good, Raphael Sassower
The intense “audit culture” and digitally enhanced monitoring of faculty’s production resembles the “pre-neoliberal” or “feudal university” as much as the neoliberal university (Cruickshank 2019). Is higher education no different from other institutions plagued by the neoliberal regime of economizing… Read More ›
Geographies of the Knowledge Economy on the Semi-Periphery: The Contradictions of Neoliberalisation and Precarity in Portugal, Adam Standring and Simone Tulumello
The recent special issue of Social Epistemology (33.4, 2019) and the ongoing debates in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) point to many of the challenges faced by universities as sites of knowledge production and dissemination situated both… Read More ›