[PDF] How The Neoliberalization Of Academia Leads To Thoughtlessness eBook

Author : Justin Pack
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 22,83 MB
Release : 2018-11-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1498584802

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Universities across the US have committed to a process of neoliberalization that is radically altering higher education: academia is increasingly being run like a business. As a result, the university is becoming less and less a place of wonder, self-cultivation and thinking and instead is becoming more and more a place to specialize, strategize, produce and profit. Students race through coursework to bolster job prospects while facing massive debt. Faculty scramble for the biggest grants and angle for the most prestigious journals. Sink or swim, publish or perish, triumph and win: there is no longer time to think and to wonder. This undermines the opportunity for students to develop into good citizens that can truly think critically and judge carefully. Thinking and judgment are, according to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the only things that can save us if the powerful machines of science or capitalism begin to work in ways they should not. Arendt saw Nazi Germany use the newest science and the best economic management to systematically kill six million Jews. She saw the disturbing inability of the populace and the intellectuals to capably resist the Nazi machine once it got rolling. Applying Arendt’s insights to modern academia, Pack argues that unless checked, neoliberalization threatens to turn the university into a place that discourages thinking and the development of judgment in favor of hyper-specialization and strategic action.

Author : Justin Pack
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 20,55 MB
Release : 2023-01-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 303122261X

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In this book, Justin Pack proposes a genealogy of the traditional suspicion of money and merchants. This genealogy is framed both by how money itself has changed and how different traditions responded to money. Money and merchants became heavily debated concerns in the Axial Age, which coincided with the spread of coinage. A deep suspicion of money and merchants was particularly notable in the Greek, Confucian and Christian traditions, and continued into the Middle Ages. These traditions wrestled with a new dialectic of purity that also appears with the widespread use of money. How were these concerns dealt with politically, socially and philosophically? How did they change over time? How did medieval Europe deal with money and how did this inform modern governmentality? To answer these questions, Pack turns to Hanna Arendt’s work. Arendt argues that one of the outstanding characteristics of our time is thoughtlessness. This thoughtlessness is related to how modern life, especially under neoliberalism, is increasingly structured by abstract systems, abstract calculative rationality, abstract relations, and the profit motive. Money both drives and embodies this machinery. The hyper-complex abstract systems of modernity discourage, to use Arendtian terms, “thinking” (wonder, questioning everything) in favor of “cognition” (problem solving). Too often the result is thoughtless cognition—the ability to make things more productive and efficient paired with the incapacity to question and challenge the implications and morality of these systems.

Author : Brandon Absher
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 197 pages
File Size : 33,52 MB
Release : 2021-08-20
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1793615993

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In The Rise of Neoliberal Philosophy: Human Capital, Profitable Knowledge, and the Love of Wisdom, Brandon Absher argues that the neoliberal transformation of higher education has resulted in a paradigm shift in philosophy in the United States, leading to the rise of neoliberal philosophy. Neoliberal philosophy seeks to attract investment by demonstrating that it can produce optimal return. Further, philosophers in the neoliberal paradigm internalize and reproduce the values of the prevailing social order in their work, reorienting philosophical desire toward the production of attractive commodities. The aim of philosophy in the neoliberal university, Absher shows, has become the production of human capital and profitable knowledge.

Author : Alpesh Maisuria
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 112 pages
File Size : 21,52 MB
Release : 2019-10-08
Category : Education
ISBN : 1000732568

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Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University investigates the impact of neoliberalism on academics in today’s universities. Considering the experiences of early career researchers as well as more experienced academics, it outlines the changing nature of working life in the university precipitated by the reality of de-professionalisation, worsening conditions of employment, and general precarious existence. The book traces the dramatic shift in the role and function of universities and academics over the last forty years. It considers how capitalist neoliberalism drives universities to operate like businesses in a cut-throat financialised education market place. Uniquely the book then provides a possible alternative in the form of the National Education Service (NES) and what this alternative system could look like. Thought-provoking and relevant, this book will be of use to postgraduate students as well as new, emerging, and established academics interested in the current state of higher education, academic life, and possibilities for the future.

Author : Justin Pack
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 10,87 MB
Release : 2019-10-17
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1498591353

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Love in many premodern cultures extended to and permeated the world or even the cosmos, but love in contemporary consumerist society tends to be sexualized, romanticized, and individualized. As a result, ancient visions of ethical love are difficult for moderns to comprehend, especially those rooted in premodern Western thought, or Native American thinkers that describe a love of the natural world that would help us live more responsibly on the Earth. This volume retrieves the significant narratives of love of the world and the concomitant ethical ramifications of those visions and argues that our age of science and technology has destroyed the ancient, living cosmos of previous visions and replaced it with a mechanical universe. This shift has resulted in various forms of destruction, diminishment, and forgetfulness. Overcoming modern world alienation requires recovering a sense of what it means to love the world and changing our practices to reflect our interconnection with it and our interdependency on it.

Author : Ryan Gunderson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 135 pages
File Size : 29,6 MB
Release : 2020-11-29
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1000191184

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This book examines the meaning and implications of the sociological maxim, ‘make the familiar strange’. Addressing the methodological questions of why and how sociologists should make the familiar strange, what it means to ‘make the familiar strange’, and how this approach benefits sociological research and theory, it draws on four central concepts: reification, familiarity, strangeness, and defamiliarization. Through a typology of the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification, the author argues that the primary barrier to sociological knowledge is our experience of the social world as fixed and unchangeable. Thus emerges the importance of constituting the familiar as the strange through a process of social defamiliarization as well as making this process more methodical by reflecting on heuristics and patterns of thinking that render society strange. The first concerted effort to examine an important feature of the sociological imagination, this volume will appeal to sociologists of any specialty and theoretical persuasion.

Author : Susan Gair
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 141 pages
File Size : 28,75 MB
Release : 2021-07-22
Category : Education
ISBN : 3030663183

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This open access book reflects on academic life under a neoliberal regime. Through collaborative autoethnographies, the authors share stories about the everyday experiences, dilemmas and conflicts of three academics: the struggle for promotion, teaching’s challenges, the race to publish, confronting bureaucracy and institutional politics, as well as the resulting emotional stress. These stories reveal the impact of neoliberal culture on ideological, economic, social, collegial, and emotional integrity which are integral to academics’ lives today. But along with the challenges, the authors present their vision of hope, and transformation through academic solidarity - and for the silenced voices to be heard, inside academia and beyond it. This is an open access book.

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 17,80 MB
Release : 2019-10-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 900441553X

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Neoliberalism and Academic Repression provides a theoretical examination of how the current higher education system is being shaped into a corporate-factory-industrial-complex. This timely collection challenges the neoliberal emphasis on valuation based on job readiness and outcome achievement.

Author : Dorothy Bottrell
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,32 MB
Release : 2019-01-12
Category : Education
ISBN : 9783319959412

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In light of the overwhelming presence of neoliberalism within academia, this book examines how academics resist and manage these changes. The first of two volumes, this diptych of critical academic work investigates generative spaces, or ‘cracks’ in neoliberal managerialism that can be exposed, negotiated, exploited and energised with renewed collegiality, subversion and creativity. The editors and contributors explore how academics continue to find space to work in collegial ways; defying the neoliberal logic of ‘brands’ and ‘cost centres’. Part I of this diptych illuminates the lived experiences of changing academic roles; portraying institutional life without the glossy filter of marketing campaigns and brochures, and revealing generative spaces through critical testimony, fiction, arts-based projects, feminist and Indigenous critical scholarship. It will be of interest and value to anyone concerned with neoliberalism in academia, as well as higher education more generally.

Author : Justin Cruickshank
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 415 pages
File Size : 41,45 MB
Release : 2022-04-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1538161419

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Higher education exposes a key paradox of neoliberalism. The project of neoliberalism was said to be that of rolling back the state to liberate individuals, by replacing government bureaucracy with the free market. Rather than have the market serve individuals however, individuals were to serve the market. The marketisation ‘reforms’ in higher education, which sought to reshape knowledge production, with students investing in human capital and academics producing ‘transferable’ research, to make higher education of use to the economy, has resulted in extensive government bureaucracy and oppressive managerialist bureaucracy which is inefficient and expensive. Neoliberalism has always had authoritarian aspects and these are now coming to bear on universities. The state does not want critical and informed graduate citizens, but a hollowed out public sphere defined by consumption, willing servitude to the market and deference to state power. Attempts to reshape universities with bureaucracy are now accompanied by a culture war, attacking the production of critical knowledge. The authors in this book explore these issues and the possibilities for resistance and progressive change.