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Tag: Neoliberalism

Studying Higher Education Decision-Making

One of the things that I find most interesting about higher education studies is how there are all these completely different regional/national literatures that pay almost no attention to one another.  For instance, in North America, higher education studies mostly come out of sociology and mostly deal with how institutions and institutional policies affect students.  In Latin America, there is a quite immense literature on things like pedagogy (seriously – go into any decent bookshop and there will be an

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November 26, 2020 1 Comment

How Not to Write About a Pandemic

So, I think I have found what is definitively the worst possible take on COVID-19 and universities.  It is called: “The Academy’s Neoliberal Response to COVID-19: Why We Should Be Wary and Why We Should Push Back”, by St. Jerome’s University’s Honor Brabazon and it was published by Academic Matters, the house organ of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (a shorter version also was published by CAUT). Do read it because it’s a classic of academic narcissism: 100%

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June 8, 2020 9 Comments

Governance, Management and Balancing Acts

Higher education is a hard thing to generalize about. Superficially, universities look the same the world over, but scratch beneath the surface a little and you’ll see that there are enormous differences in structures, policies, and cultures. Nevertheless, it’s still pretty safe to say that over the last 40 years (in some countries longer) three major trends have emerged more or less the world over:  first, in every country, there has been pressure to expand systems and accommodate greater participation in

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March 27, 2019 2 Comments

The Great Mistake

In the last couple of weeks, I have discovered an entirely new category of book: ones which you enjoy reading and contain plenty of fantastic information and insightful observations, but whose central thesis is demonstrably wrong and does not hold up to scrutiny.  The first was Masha Gessen’s The Future is History, about Russia’s transition from Gorbachev to now, and the second  – more relevant to this blog – is Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How

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December 1, 2017 No Comments

Last Orders on Neoliberalism in Universities (Neoliberalism Part 5)

To sum up the week’s arguments: Neoliberalism is about markets.  There are actually very few genuine markets in higher education and where there are they can be quite beneficial especially with respect to access. Neoliberalism is about competition.  There is competition in higher education, especially status competition but it mostly predates actual neoliberalism. Some people claim neoliberalism is about managerialism and performance metrics but this is a genuinely terrible and ahistorical argument. However, I think there are two additional arguments

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November 24, 2017 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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