There is growing discussion in many places concerning how to reform our universities in the face of common pressures we increasingly face to restructure along neoliberal lines. This post provides a clearinghouse for commentary both on this situation and on efforts to respond to it. In this way, it contributes to the central aim of CSPS to work towards a more just and equitable society in the spaces and places most intimate to those of us working as professional academics. If you have more resources you would like to suggest for this list please contact us. Click here for related postings.
National Senior Management Survey (UK)
Newcastle University: Newcastle University has said no to coercive performance management!
Rede Investigadores Contra a Precariedade Científica
University of Aberdeen: Reclaiming our University
University of Brighton: University and College Union
University of Minnesota: Academics United
Wageningen University: What it means to be a ‘Good Academic’ in the University today
Literature
Bal, E., Grassiani, E., & Kirk, K. (2014). Neoliberal individualism in Dutch universities: Teaching and learning anthropology in an insecure environment. Learning and Teaching, 7(3), 46-72.
Ball, Stephen J. (2012). Performativity, commodification and commitment: An I-spy guide to the neoliberal university. British Journal of Educational Studies, 60(1), 17-28.
Bauder, H. (2005). The segmentation of academic labour: A Canadian example. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 4(2), 228-239.
Bauder, H. (2015). The international mobility of academics: a labour market perspective. International Migration, 53(1), 83-96.
Berg, L. D. (2012). Knowledge enclosure, accumulation by dispossession, and the academic publishing industry. Political Geography, 31(5), 260-262.
Berg, L. D., Huijbens, E. H., & Larsen, H. G. (2016). Producing anxiety in the neoliberal university. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 60(2), 168-180.
Berg, M. and B. Seeper. (2016). The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto, Canada:
Brem-Wilson, J. (2014). From ‘here’to ‘there’: Social movements, the academy and solidarity research. Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 10(1).
Brown, W. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Edwards, Marc A., and Siddhartha Roy. 2017. Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition. Environmental Engineering Science 34(1):51-61.
Gaffikin, F., & Perry, D. C. (2009). Discourses and strategic visions: The US research university as an institutional manifestation of neoliberalism in a global era. American Educational Research Journal, 46(1), 115-144.
Gill, R. (2014). Academics, cultural workers and critical labour studies. Journal of Cultural Economy, 7(1), 12-30.
Ginsberg, B. (2013). The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Halffman, W., & Radder, H. (2015). The academic manifesto: From an occupied to a public university. Minerva, 53(2), 165-187.
Hall, T. (2014). Making their own futures? Research change and diversity amongst contemporary British human geographers. The Geographical Journal, 180(1), 39-51.
Hartman, Y., & Darab, S. (2012). A call for slow scholarship: A case study on the intensification of academic life and its implications for pedagogy. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 34(1-2), 49-60.
Kauppinen, I. (2012). Towards transnational academic capitalism. Higher Education, 64(4), 543-556.
Kuus, M. (2015). For slow research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(4), 838-840.
Lorenz, C. (2014). Fixing the facts: The rise of new public management, the metrification of “quality” and the fall of the academic professions. Moving the Social, 52, 5-26.
Mountz, A., et al. (2015). For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), 1235-1259.
Lynch, K. and M. P. Ivancheva. (2015). Academic Freedom and the Commercialisation of Universities: A Critical Ethical Analysis. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, 15(1), 1–15.
Nash, J. C., and E. A. Owens. (2016). Introduction: Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University. Feminist Formations, 27(3), vii–xi.
Olssen, M. and M. A. Peters. (2005). Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism. Journal of Education Policy, 20(3), 313–45.
Peake, L. J., and B. Mullings. (2016). Critical Reflections on Mental and Emotional Distress in the Academy. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 15(2), 253–84.
Peters, K., and J. Turner. (2014). Fixed-Term and Temporary: Teaching Fellows, Tactics, and the Negotiation of Contingent Labour in the UK Higher Education System. Environment and Planning A, 46(10), 2317–31.
Polster, C. and J. Newson. (2015). A Penny for Your Thoughts: How Corporatization Devalues Teaching, Research, and Public Service in Canada’s Universities. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Savigny, H. (2013). The (Political) Idea of a University: Political Science and Neoliberalism in English Higher Education. European Political Science, 12(4), 432–39.
Slaughter, S. and L. L. Leslie. (1997). Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
The Autonomous Geographies Collective. (2010). Beyond Scholar Activism: Making Strategic Interventions inside and Outside the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 9(2), 245–74.
Tyfield, D. (2012). A Cultural Political Economy of Research and Innovation in an Age of Crisis. Minerva, 50(2), 149–67.
“International Responses to the Academic Manifesto: Reports from 14 Countries.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (ISSN 2471-9560).
Other Resources
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