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Category: Academia

Universities and Competition (Neoliberalism Part 3)

One of the key accusations about universities and neoliberalism is that the system is too obsessed with competition.  On the face of it, this looks like the easiest argument to make about neoliberal universities: neoliberal thought does put a lot of emphasis on competition, and institutions do talk a lot about “competing” for students and staff and governments like the notion that institutions “compete” against one another.  Among faculty members, institutions “compete” for research funding; in some countries, they literally compete

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November 22, 2017 No Comments

The Canadian Way of Higher Education Co-ordination

Yesterday I talked a little bit about how competition, not co-operation, is in Canadian universities’ DNA (east of Manitoba, at any rate).  But that has never stopped governments from trying – usually fitfully and half-heartedly – from trying to create more co-ordination within the system.  David Cameron, in his 1991 book More Than an Academic Question (still probably best single-volume history of Canadian higher education), analyzed these attempts in some detail.  What’s interesting is how things have changed over time. One obvious

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November 17, 2017 2 Comments

Cognitive Dissonance in Academia

On a pretty regular basis, some academic or other pens a piece in the popular press talking about overproduction of PhDs.  Take for example this 2015 Jonathan Wolff piece in the Guardian with a  piece entitled “Doctor, doctor we’re suffering from a glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs” in which he obsesses about a figures in a 2010 Royal Society document suggesting that of 200 people who complete a PhD only seven will get a permanent academic post and one will become

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November 13, 2017 1 Comment

Unconscionable Disciplinary Selfishness

Everyone knows this story, or a variant of it, even if it never hits the papers and no one wants to name names.  It goes like this: Professor X simply won’t retire.  It’s not that he/she (though it’s mostly he) is staying on for themselves, you understand. It’s for the department.  If he/she (mostly he) left, there simply wouldn’t be any guarantee that a new tenure line would go back to the department.  That position might go to another department

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October 20, 2017 7 Comments

How Sessionals Undermine the Case for Universities

Last year, I wrote a blog post about what sessionals get paid, and how essentially it works out to about what assistant profs get paid for the teaching component of their jobs and that in this sense at least one could argue that sessionals in fact are getting equal pay for work of equal value. I got a fair bit of hate mail for that one, mostly because people have trouble distinguishing between is-ought arguments.  People seemed to think that because

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October 11, 2017 4 Comments
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