Archive for the 'neoliberalism' Category

Coca-Cola and postwar market liberalization

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

From time to time I find myself reading about episodes in French history that, while not strictly related to the university system, nonetheless seem like important points of historical reference. This one will, I guess, probably be well known to any French historian, but it was a surprise to me. It has to do with [...]

Class analysis as farce

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

One of the things that always bothers me about universities is how cagey they are when it comes to talking about their place in class reproduction. (For those of you who are uneasy about “class,” try asking yourself about the possible place of universities in hierarchical, even antagonistic social systems of status, prestige, exploitation, wealth, [...]

Professors’ status loss

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

Christine Musselin, a French sociologist of higher education, ventures an interesting interpretation of the changing relation between professional status, salary, and the overall size of the academic profession. In short, she argues that the larger academia gets, the lower status professors will have. The massification of higher education has not only had demographic implications. It [...]

“Everything is going great”: the official lie of campus newsletters

Monday, May 10th, 2010

As someone who’s young, as someone who hasn’t known the academic world for decades and decades and decades, this hadn’t occurred to me, but it turns out that something as seemingly innocuous as the campus newsletter may have a political history. At least that’s what I infer from this fairly bitter critique of campus newsletters [...]

Pécresse, business and the human sciences

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

I started to feel that I’d been over-privileging the protestors in this blog, so I thought I’d translate a recent speech by the Minister of Higher Education and Research, Valérie Pécresse. Pécresse has had a controversial time in the Ministry and is now running for regional offices in Ile-de-France. This week she spoke at a [...]

University neoliberalism in America: Greenwood on Spellings

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

I hadn’t meant to take such a long break from the blog. I will try to write weekly, at least, since there is so much here in France to write about. But for the time being, one more in a series of posts on neoliberalism… Davydd Greenwood, an economic anthropologist turned action researcher from Cornell [...]

America, national neoliberalism, and epistemologies of university models

Monday, September 28th, 2009

My obligatory vacation from last week is over, alas. Anyway, continuing the project of reading about academic neoliberalism in global perspective, this week we’re looking at a set of papers on “Neo-liberal conditions of knowledge” from Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. We read about South Korea, Japan and Taiwan; one of the papers we didn’t read goes [...]

Universities, nationalism and neoliberalism

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

I’ve begun a little reading group with Zach SW and Eli M. We’re trying to get a more comparative, more historical sense of what “neoliberalism” means and does in universities. We started out reading four articles: Andrés Bernasconi on the endangered Latin American university model; Robert Rhoads and Liliana Mina on a major student strike [...]