SECURITY REGIMES
The UK’s governing strategy and rational of security has begun to permeate into the culture and institutions of Higher Education (HE.) Despite the UK’s long democratic tradition, the prevailing security-logic, enacted through incidents of student monitoring, faculty surveillance, PREVENT and the ‘hostile environment’ policy, for example, indicate an increasing instability of the UK University’s core principles of institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and inclusivity. Continue reading
POLITICAL CONFLICT
A recent surge of geopolitical conflicts including the authoritarian turn, the migration crisis, Brexit, and the rise of the Global Right create a new constellation of pressures upon the Higher Education sector. Further, the current upheaval in national political governance, exemplified through the successive resignation of Conservative Prime Ministers in the UK, increasingly draconic anti-protest laws, and the dearth of political power allocated to new generations of citizens demanding… Continue reading
POPULISM
The university has become a key site of the ‘culture wars’ as notions of objectivity in social science, neutrality and academic freedom have recently come under scrutiny. Academics and departments have become objects of ‘ideological targeting’, often criticised for holding a ‘liberal bias’, or conversely for propagating racialised and eugenics rhetoric under the name of freedom of speech. These conflicts often emerge through anti-elitist rhetoric, anti-intellectualist arguments, and… Continue reading
NEW MANAGERIALISM
The UK Higher Education sector has been beleaguered by new reforms and organisational interventions that shift the university from a publicly managed institution to a corporate management framework. This manifests through the proliferation of increased bureaucracy, monitoring and evaluation methods as a container for research, rampant casualisation, budget cuts, austerity policies, increase in student enrolment and tuition fees, for example. Continue reading