ABSTRACT
Education internationally has become increasingly fraught with stress, confl ict, and professional disappointment, producing an increasingly diffi cult work environment. The external causes are multiple: downsizing and restructuring brought about through the New Public Management in the early 1980s, forcing schools and universities into the competitive marketplace; decreasing levels of public confi dence; demographic changes; globalization and internationalization; and technologization. All of these place new demands and pressures on the university that have diminished trusting relationships. Speeding up the educational process, using distance education and streamlining students into cohorts, does not provide the time necessary for relationships to form, particularly cross-cultural or multicultural classrooms, a condition Case and Selvester refer to as the McUniversity (2002: 240; Parker and Jary 1995; Ritzer 1993).
