Brett de Bary
Published: 2010-01-01
Total Pages: 410
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The fate of the university has become an object of urgent concern for academics in many disciplines around the globe, as higher education has been commercialized by the global movement to “reform” toward new managerial structures common in business and industry. In English-language academic publishing, the future of the university has attracted the attention of critical theorists, but most works discussing the effects of profit-oriented corporatization on curriculum and pedagogy have focused on North America. Drawing on examples of university restructuring in China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan, Russia, and the United States, these trenchantpersonal essays take global transformation of the university in the age of informatic capital as an urgent question. Prominent scholars in humanities, cultural studies, translation, critical theory and postcolonial studies discuss theemergence of cognitive capitalism, neo-colonialism and the hegemony of academic English, academic freedom, and the rise of new, exploitative regimes of self-management that have implicated the university in a profound reorganization of labor dissolving distinctions between the “mental” and “manual.”