Social, Behavioral Scientists Eligible to Apply for NSF S-STEM Grants
Solicitations are now being sought for the National Science Foundation’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, and in an unheralded […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given the ferocity of the current assault on academic freedom, argues Daniel Nehring, it seems to me that we may be close to a point of no return, past which ‘tone of voice policies’ and similar control mechanisms may become a norm into which coming generations of academics will be socialized as a matter of course.