Academe Degree Zero

Academe Degree Zero brings together ten essays that identify and critically examine the key issues facing professionals in higher education today. These include the nature and limits of anonymity in academic discourse, the ways in which affiliation and prestige temper academic judgement, and the role of collegiality in academic life. Through numerous essays, edited books and journal issues, Jeffrey R. Di Leo's cross-disciplinary work has consistently been at the edge of current thinking and critical efforts to lay bare the reality of contemporary academic life. Academe Degree Zero provides a snapshot of academic identity and relations in a time of major technological and economic transformation and in the context of growing corporatisation of higher education.

This book explores questions concerning personal identity and individual conduct within neoliberal academe. The author suggests that neoliberal academe is normal academe in the new millennium though well aware of its contested nature and destructive capacities. Examining higher education through a number of ideals, such as austerity and transparency, brings readers on a journey into its present as well as its past. If some of these ideals can be identified and critiqued, there is a chance that the foundations of neoliberal academe can be weakened. This book actively pursues pathways out of the neoliberal abyss--and offers that demanding a role for pleasure in higher education may be one of them.

How do humanists speak for and from the humanities in an academy which values them less and less and market-driven approaches more and more? Jeffrey R. Di Leo provides a thorough critique of the higher education crisis and a set of practical and reasonable remedies for shaping the study and practice of the humanities in the academy of the future.

As the nature of education generally, and higher education in particular, changes irrevocably, it is crucial to understand the informed opinions of those closest to the institutions of learning. This book, based on a survey of academics in 19 nations and conducted by leading global scholars, is a thorough sounding of the attitudes of academics to their working environment. As the post-WWII liberal consensus crumbles, higher education is increasingly viewed as a private and personal investment in individual social mobility rather than as a public good and, ipso facto, a responsibility of public authorities. The incursion of corporate culture into academe, with its ‘stakeholders’, ‘performance pay’ and obsession with ‘competitiveness’ is a matter of bitter debate, with some arguing that short-termism is obviating epoch-making research which by definition requires patience and persistence in the face of the risk of failure. This book highlights these and many other key issues facing the academic profession in the US and around the world at the beginning of the 21st century and examines the issues from the perspective of those who are at the front line of change. This group has numerous concerns, not least in the US, where government priorities are shifting with growing budget pressures to core activities such as basic education, health and welfare. Drawing too on comparable surveys conducted in 1992, the book charts the actual contours of change as reflected in the opinions of academics. Critically, the volume explicitly compares and contrasts the situation of American academics with that of academics in other advanced and developing economies. Such an assessment is critical both for Americans to chart the future of their indigenous tertiary enterprise, but also for shaping the response of the nations around the world who contemplate applying the American model to their own national systems.

The title of this book pays homage to Vittorio Gregotti’s The Territory of Architecture, but substituting the word territory for the word landscape, because the latter is a more personal concept and is related to the perception of the viewer. The goal of this book is to show Students and architects how the time devoted to architectural and landscape Design in all the years of our studies and professional life should be deeply related with research. The relation between research and teaching and research and practice is present in two complementary disciplines: architecture and landscape. Therefore, the book is organised into three main parts. The first is devoted to research, and its relation with learning and practicing. The second part deals with architecture and its relation with research. And the third is about landscape and its relation with the two previous parts. The title of each one of them is preceded by the particle “@” which not only means “at” but also “around”, studying these disciplines not only from its own autonomy but also from other parallel discourses.

Neoliberalism, Education, Terrorism: Contemporary Dialogues is a collaborative effort among four established public intellectuals who deeply care about the future of education in America and who are concerned about the dangerous effects of neoliberalism on American society and culture. It aims to provide a clear, concise, and thought-provoking account of the problems facing education in America under the dual shadows of neoliberalism and terrorism. Through collaborative and individual essays, the authors provide a provocative account that will be of interest to anyone who concerning with the opportunities and dangers facing the future of education at this critical moment in history.

This book asks what it means to live in a higher educational world continuously tempered by catastrophe. Many of the resources for response and resistance to catastrophe have long been identified by thinkers ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James to H. G. Wells and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Di Leo posits that hope and resistance are possible if we are willing to resist a form of pessimism that already appears to be drawing us into its arms. Catastrophe and Higher Education argues that the future of the humanities is tied to the fate of theory as a form of resistance to neoliberalism in higher education. It also offers that the fate of the academy may very well be in the hands of humanities scholars who are tasked with either rejecting theory and philosophy in times of catastrophe—or embracing it.