universities in particular

…follow up to "what bureaucracies stand for:" this round is about universities, academic culture and markets. It is not specifically about contingent academic labor, elephant subtext in the room even so. Read through that lens.

From UN Chronicle, a special issue on higher education. Clifford Tan Kuan Lu, Nottingham:  Do University Rankings Matter for Growth? Alexandre Afonso (King's College): How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang.


...Stefan Collini reviews Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education by Roger Brown, with Helen Carasso; and The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education by Andrew McGettigan (and more).

...A revolutionary mission statement — improve the world: Addressing global problems should be the academy’s raison d’etre, argues Nicholas Maxwell. How to break the stranglehold of academics on critical thinking: New social movements such as Occupy need institutions to help elaborate their ideas — where will a modern collective intellectuality spring from? 

Catch the rest of "universities in particular" at BookForum's Omnivore