A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social and behavioral scientists
Funders from private industry — which represent two-thirds of funding in medical research, for example — can go great lengths to suppress the publication of findings which appear unfavorable. How can academic freedom be protected with this monumental funding shift?
With the exception of star academics and leading figures of the United Kingdom’s academic establishment, lecturers today are held in little regard, argues our Daniel Nehring. The specialized aspects of the academic experience are little recognized and even less honored.
The last few weeks have seen a growing public debate about the pay packages of Britain’s academic CEOs. The vice chancellors at a number of universities, including Birmingham, Bath, Bath Spa and others, have come under heavy pressure to justify salaries that far exceed £100,000, Oddly, all the arguments for and against this start with the assumption that universities are just like any other business.
Daniel Nehring sees a fundamental contradiction between the critically engaged scholarship on social inequalities and power structures that British sociologists still produce and the thoroughly financialized, individualistic, and highly competitive organisational logics of the universities in which they work.
Corporate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, have come to operate as self-enclosed power structures that are shielded from intellectually driven debate by their authoritarian structures and their anti-intellectual ethos.
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 recent and on-going reforms of higher education are enforcing an individualisation of academic labour. That academics would gamely play along with such a system is astonishing.
Sociology is a brand. To survive or even thrive in the academic marketplace, sociology needs to take care of its image. But at what cost?
Universities are starting to look like the behemoths of the US auto industry of the 1980s, with highly-paid CEOs buried in their offices looking only at numbers.
Even within its own narrow terms the Iraq war was appallingly costly. A bad decision to invade was compounded by shambolic and ineffective leadership of the warfighting itself. Why? The answer seems to lie in the ways in which contemporary large organizations behave
Many PhD graduates are forced into the troubled world of unemployment while, at the same time, being denied a public voice. How is it that extremely narrow standards of professional legitimacy are used to judge young scholars who simply cannot meet them?
