Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"My friend is an  adjunct . She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like  67 per cent of American university faculty , a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care. In a  searing commentary , political analyst Joshua Foust notes that the unpaid internships that were once limited to show business have now spread to nearly every industry." Written in 2012 The closing of the American academia

How treating students as customers turns the idea of meritocracy into a joke

 “PPE is seen as part of the apparatus of the state … privilege connected to public service” – at a time when fewer and fewer voters believe such a thing is possible. Once widely regarded as “highly qualified people with good intentions”, as Davies puts it, PPE graduates are now “bogeymen”. How did a mere undergraduate degree become so important? The Oxford degree that 'runs' Britain

“Dialogue” is one of those words, like “diversity”, that can mean all things to all people. It is often used to define shallow, skating-on-the-surface conversations which give the impression of an exchange but which touch upon nothing substantive. It can also mean proper, dig-deep contestations through which we test each other’s ideas and in which we show ourselves willing to be uncomfortable as we ourselves are tested. In universities, and in society at large, there is today too little of the latter and too much of the former; too little real engagement and too great a desire to stay within our comfort zones. Are Soas students right to 'decolonize' their minds from Western philosophers?

"The Great Shame of our Profession"

England's corporate education: tuition fees

Education in Britain (source:  bbc ) But researchers highlight some other questions muddying the waters. Students do not enter university unshaped by what went before.  How much of higher earnings in later life might be linked to coming from high-income parents, rather than anything to do with higher education? A key finding of the income research was that graduates from wealthy families ended up earning more than than those from poorer families, even if they studied the same course at the same university. But there is no escaping the growing sense of stratification in the university sector and differences in status. Belonging to the Russell Group [i.e. elite universities] has become a kind of self-conferred status symbol for its membership.

Britain Part-time Lecturers on Precarious Work

Occasionally, I get across a rarity, a non-conformist among the complacents, the career-seekers: " The point that you made about people blaming the ‘ignorant uneducated American’ is also very evident amongst my Facebook friends who are predominantly university-educated people. I feel that most of these people live in their university educated-upper class bubbles, completely oblivious to how neoliberal policies are affecting people that live in the ‘real world’." — Pieter Dockx, an LSE student. Will Trump call Sanders? 

Britain’s university system now “serves a renewed patrimonial capitalism and its ever-widening inequalities.”  —  John Holmwood’s 2014 valedictory message as British Sociological Association president.      The Rise of the Corporate University in the UK

" Servicing warfare and neoliberalism is a terrific path to scholarly eminence. Those who condemn warfare and neoliberalism become uncivil goblins, impenitent radicals, sloppy polemicists, immature agitators, scourges on the good name of the profession. Ruling-class sycophants, meanwhile, don’t encounter trouble for their service to power. It’s the same around the world: dissenters are the ones to get fired, arrested, even murdered. It’s almost comically obvious, and yet plenty of academics persist in recycling the mythological virtues of tone and civility as criteria for fitness as an academic, as if those descriptors are detached from norms of power — as if using a civil tone means you can’t articulate ugly ideas." Six ways to unsettle colleagues and irritate administrators Six ways of resistance, but the eradication of corportae universities should be the solution.