ABSTRACT

This text provides a framework for understanding higher education in the US and other western countries since the 1970s whereby the logic of the market place has increasingly come to dominate all arenas and, in context, the education system. The author calls this process "commodification" and he describes the transformation of universities in the US and elsewhere as they attempt to accomodate the enforced changes on their academic lives and those of their students.; The book chronicles changes with the increasing focus on career and the movement towards the instrumental functions of education; the financial crisis and the development of a more corporate approach to education; of consumption that produce universities heavy with expensive, well-equipped and powerful administrations and decreasing numbers of ever more disenfranchised faculty.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

chapter Chapter 1|26 pages

Commodification

chapter Chapter 2|20 pages

Elements of Bureaucratic Identity

chapter Chapter 3|17 pages

Recent History of Higher Education

chapter Chapter 4|24 pages

Political Economy of Higher Education

chapter Chapter 5|12 pages

Imagination and the University

chapter Chapter 6|12 pages

Collective Bargaining in Higher Education

chapter Chapter 7|16 pages

Planning, Advertising and Consumption

chapter Chapter 8|18 pages

Symbolic Struggles

chapter Chapter 9|16 pages

Real Struggles

chapter Chapter 10|11 pages

Conclusion