Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University is a ground breaking book. It not only details with great rigor and clarity how higher education has become an outpost of neoliberal violence, it also points to how it has created an existential crisis for those faculty, students, and others who believe that the university has an obligation to cultivate those capacities, forms of knowledge, and values that deepen and extend the practice of freedom essential to any democracy.This book should be read by everyone who refuses to give up on higher education while recognizing the need to struggle over its most democratic possibilities.
Henry Giroux
McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest
The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy
Author of Neoliberalism's war on higher education
Higher education is now lived as an experience of neoliberalism. This book explores these experiences and changes and the damage they do to academics, and the university itself, which has become a key site of neoliberalism. Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University is a chilling read but important because the critical analysis is dire but the alternatives presented are optimistic.
Stephen J Ball FBA
Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, University College London
Author of The Education Debate
Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University grounds critique of the everyday experiences of academics and students against the structures of neoliberal control that demand toxic performance management. Alpesh Maisuria and Enja Helmes present a dialectical engagement between theory and concrete, lived experiences grounded in the humanities and social sciences, in order to critique the economistic obsession with human capital that demands competition in the construction of specific academic-types. In addressing the impact on mental health and the generation of ill-being across universities, the authors challenge us to reconsider the potential for alternative structures, governance and regulation surrounding higher education. The book culminates with a provocative argument for a National Education Service (NES) based on co-operative principles and practices, which should ignite much needed discussion and action. As a result, this is an important book in addressing the potential for the democratic production of the University infused with a humanist tradition.
Richard Hall
Professor of Education and Technology, De Montfort University, and National Teaching Fellow
Author of The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University
