Neoliberalizing the University: Implications for American Democracy

Sanford Schram

Οκτ 2017 · Routledge

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This collection brings together essays to address the crisis of Higher Education today, focusing on its neoliberalization. Higher Education has been under assault for several decades as neoliberalism’s preference for market-based reforms sweeps across the US political economy. The recent push for neoliberalizing the academy comes at a time when it is ripe for change, especially as it continues to confront growing financial pressure, particularly in the public sector. The resulting cutbacks in public funding, especially to state universities, led to a variety of debilitating changes: increases in tuition, growing student debt, more students combining working and schooling, declining graduation rates for minorities and low-income students, increased reliance on adjuncts and temporary faculty, and most recently growing interest in mass processing of students via online instruction. While many serious questions arise once we begin to examine what is happening in higher education today, one particularly critical question concerns the implications of these changes on the relationship of education to as yet still unrealized democratic ideals. The 12 essays collected in this volume create important resources for students, faculty, citizens and policymakers who want to find ways to address contemporary threats to the higher education-democracy connection. This book was originally published as a special issue of New Political Science.

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Sanford Schram is Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, City University of New York, USA. His latest book is The Return to Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy (2015). Schram is the 2012 recipient of the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award from the Caucus for a New Political Science.