ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author offers a sociological perspective of the effects of the neoliberal work ethic on academics working in the university. Drawing on a survey of social media sites, it adopts a global perspective to identify the current adjunct crisis in the USA, the proliferation of part-time and fixed-term contracts in the United Kingdom and casualized labor in Australian universities. Her study indicates new forms of loneliness in the marketized academy. She puts forward the view that the pervasive neoliberal culture within the university represents a new form of totalitarianism that renders some academics as isolated, lonely, or in the words of Arendt, as ‘superfluous’. Their professional identity is reduced to a unit of production, an instructor, a marker, servicing an increasing number of students now commodified as customers gaining credentials for the global market. Issues around gender and social class are recognized as significant factors in positioning women in subordinate positions within the masculinist and marketized culture of the neoliberal university and in so doing exacerbate intellectual isolation and loneliness within the maelstrom.
