Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship
Intellectual labor comes to be largely external to the objectives of the bureaucratic regimes that dominate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, and academics whose careers were built on intellectual labor turn out to be deskilled workers in organizational settings indifferent to their concerns.
New Teaching Excellence Framework Shows the Power of Marketing
The UK’s proposed Teaching Excellence Framework focuses strongly on ‘value for money,’ which, argues our Daniel Nehring, further elides the intellectual dimensions of scholarship and replaced it with the reduction of academics’ labor to the production of a skilled labor force.
From Agora to Shopping Mall: Tone-of-Voice Policies, Marketing and the Re-making of British Universities
Tone-of-voice policies raise serious questions about the future of academic freedom in Britain and the extent to which academic labour may come to be subject to the financial and political objectives of the corporate managers that form universities’ leadership.
The Image-Driven University
While academics have not just recently become image-conscious, noted Daniel Nehring, the increasing infiltration by corporate interests into universities is changing the face of what that consciousness results in.
What Will Happen to the Cosmopolitans?
Despite what he calls the poisonously xenophobic tone of politics and public debates in Britain, our Daniel Nehring still finds it a colorfully multicultural and sometimes, in some places, cosmopolitan society. One place he’d especially like to protect that virtue is in British universities.
What’s Distinctive About Britain’s New Corporate Universities?
British universities are changing at rapid pace, notes Daniel Nehring in the first of a new series of article on the so-called corporate university. The consequences of these changes are cause of concern for many academics, who worry about their working conditions and the future of academic freedom.
The Response to Tim Hunt’s Sexist Remarks is Deeply Flawed
Despite the hoopla over Nobel laureate Tim Hunt’s recent comments, says Daniel Nehring, they will continue to be ignored as long as universities continue to be portrayed mostly as motors of economic growth and their transformative potential in political and cultural terms is forgotten.
Loony Lefties, Trolls and Public Debates About Higher Education in the UK
All the arguments for a critique of the new authoritarian, hierarchical, business-minded corporate universities are in place, says Daniel Nehring. The ways to insert these arguments into public life still need to be found.
