Dissident Knowledge In Higher Education

Dissident Knowledge challenges the audit-based, neoliberal culture that is threatening the foundational values of higher education institutions everywhere.

Higher education exposes a key paradox of neoliberalism. The project of neoliberalism was said to be that of rolling back the state to liberate individuals, by replacing government bureaucracy with the free market. Rather than have the market serve individuals however, individuals were to serve the market. The marketisation ‘reforms’ in higher education, which sought to reshape knowledge production, with students investing in human capital and academics producing ‘transferable’ research, to make higher education of use to the economy, has resulted in extensive government bureaucracy and oppressive managerialist bureaucracy which is inefficient and expensive. Neoliberalism has always had authoritarian aspects and these are now coming to bear on universities. The state does not want critical and informed graduate citizens, but a hollowed out public sphere defined by consumption, willing servitude to the market and deference to state power. Attempts to reshape universities with bureaucracy are now accompanied by a culture war, attacking the production of critical knowledge. The authors in this book explore these issues and the possibilities for resistance and progressive change.

A clarion call to shut down the business school!

This anthology of 19 articles documents the pain & misunderstanding that lesbian, gay, bisexual, & transgendered people have experienced in the very recent past and demonstrates the real progress, both in theory & in practice, that has been made in the struggle for equity & social justice. The articles include autobiography, testament, fiction, poetry, and traditional personal & analytic essays, from authors with different intellectual perspectives: human rights, social reform & human justice, feminist, liberationist, and queer theory.

This publication is based on the discussions of the 2004 Global Colloquium on Research and Higher Education Policy of the UNESCO Forum for Higher Education, Research and Knowledge, held in Paris in December 2004. It contains contributions from 17 international experts in the field of higher education which explore the global rise of the 'knowledge society' and its implications for higher education and for sustainable human development in the future.

A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis. Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past fifty years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this time, from mildly left-leaning to almost exclusively leftist. He explains how astonishing historical luck led to the success of a plan first devised by a small group of activists to use college campuses to promote radical politics, and why laws and regulations designed to prevent the politicizing of higher education proved insufficient. Ellis shows that political motivation is always destructive of higher learning. Even science and technology departments are not immune. The corruption of universities by radical politics also does wider damage: to primary and secondary education, to race relations, to preparation for the workplace, and to the political and social fabric of the nation. Commonly suggested remedies—new free-speech rules, or enforced right-of-center appointments—will fail because they don’t touch the core problem, a controlling faculty majority of political activists with no real interest in scholarship. This book proposes more drastic and effective reform measures. The first step is for Americans to recognize that vast sums of public money intended for education are being diverted to a political agenda, and to demand that this fraud be stopped.

A significant contribution to the understanding of systemic racism in Canadian institutions, this collection of essays arising out of the unique Prairie context interrogates how professionals practicing in law, education, health, and other helping professions engage with issues of race and culture. This book examines the challenges and resistance found within professional groups working with Aboriginal and racial minority peoples. For teachers, social workers, healthcare providers, and professors, the greatest barriers to working across difference may be themselves and their assumptions about what the nature of the "problem" of difference is considered to be. The authors in this volume advocate, question, and critique the uses of what are often considered to be binaries of race and/or culture. They offer examples from professional fields that illustrate the complexity of teaching that finds problems in a culturalist approach as well as a critical orientation that is still found wanting. Will addressing inequality as a race, gender, class, or sexual orientation issue provide greater forward movement than focusing on cultural issues? The answers in this collection are never either/or and must look beyond theoretical orthodoxy for inspiration, if not new questions.