What way forward for the contemporary university? Critical University: Moving Higher Education Forward traverses fields in critical theory (Marcuse, Althusser), psychoanalysis (Kristeva, Freud), phenomenology (Husserl), and the philosophy of education (predominantly Freire and hooks) to analyze the direction forward for the contemporary university. Loughead’s writing style is lucid and accessible, yet provocative. She aims first and foremost for a pedagogical engagement with the reader, avoiding (or explicating clearly) the specialized vocabulary of her discipline. Though this book deals with complex philosophical ideas, its goal is not to merely tease out some abstract philosophical problem, but instead to intervene and provoke new directions in the contemporary discussion of the university in crisis, and to be part of a collection of works inspiring a more just society.

A remarkable indictment of how misguided business policies have undermined the American higher education system. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL Higher education in America, still thought to be the world leader, is in crisis. University students are falling behind their international peers in attainment, while suffering from unprecedented student debt. For over a decade, the realm of American higher education has been wracked with self-doubt and mutual recrimination, with no clear solutions on the horizon. How did this happen? In this stunning new book, Christopher Newfield offers readers an in-depth analysis of the “great mistake” that led to the cycle of decline and dissolution, a mistake that impacts every public college and university in America. What might occur, he asserts, is no less than locked-in economic inequality and the fall of the middle class. In The Great Mistake, Newfield asks how we can fix higher education, given the damage done by private-sector models. The current accepted wisdom—that to succeed, universities should be more like businesses—is dead wrong. Newfield combines firsthand experience with expert analysis to show that private funding and private-sector methods cannot replace public funding or improve efficiency, arguing that business-minded practices have increased costs and gravely damaged the university’s value to society. It is imperative that universities move beyond the destructive policies that have led them to destabilize their finances, raise tuition, overbuild facilities, create a national student debt crisis, and lower educational quality. Laying out an interconnected cycle of mistakes, from subsidizing the private sector to “the poor get poorer” funding policies, Newfield clearly demonstrates how decisions made in government, in the corporate world, and at colleges themselves contribute to the dismantling of once-great public higher education. A powerful, hopeful critique of the unnecessary death spiral of higher education, The Great Mistake is essential reading for those who wonder why students have been paying more to get less and for everyone who cares about the role the higher education system plays in improving the lives of average Americans.

An essential guide to incorporating critical research into higher education scholarship. Winner of the Outstanding Publication Award of the Post-secondary Education Division of the American Educational Research Association Critical theory has much to teach us about higher education. By linking critical models, methods, and research tools with an advocacy-driven vision of the central challenges facing postsecondary researchers and staff, Critical Approaches to the Study of Higher Education makes a significant—and long overdue—contribution to the development of the field. The contributors argue that, far from being overly abstract, critical tools and methods are central to contemporary scholarship and can have practical policy implications when brought to the study of higher education. They argue that critical research design and critical theories help scholars see beyond the normative models and frameworks that have long limited our understanding of students, faculty, institutions, the organization and governance of higher education, and the policies that shape the postsecondary arena. A rigorous and invaluable guide for researchers seeking innovative approaches to higher education and the morass of traditionally functionalist, rational, and neoliberal thinking that mars the field, this book is also essential for instructors who wish to incorporate the lessons of critical scholarship into their course development, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Essays by some of the world's leading educators provide a revolutionary portrait of new ideas and developments in education that can influence the possibility of social and political change. The authors take into account such diverse terrain as feminism, ecology, media, and individual liberty in their pursuit of new ideas that can inform the fundamental practice of education and promote a more humane civil society. The book consolidates recent thinking just as it reflects on emerging new lines of critical theory.

Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. Critical Terms for Media Studies defines, and at times, redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics. Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, technology, and politics, this exciting collection of essays explores our most critical language for dealing with the qualities and modes of contemporary media. Edited by two outstanding scholars in the field, W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, the volume features works by a team of distinguished contributors. These essays, commissioned expressly for this volume, are organized into three interrelated groups: “Aesthetics” engages with terms that describe sensory experiences and judgments, “Technology” offers entry into a broad array of technological concepts, and “Society” opens up language describing the systems that allow a medium to function. A compelling reference work for the twenty-first century and the media that form our experience within it, Critical Terms for Media Studies will engage and deepen any reader’s knowledge of one of our most important new fields.

Critical Perspectives on Education Policy and Schools, Families, and Communities offers scholars, students, and practitioners important new knowledge about how current policies impact families, schools, and community partnerships. The book’s authors share a critical orientation towards policy and policy research and invite readers to think differently about what policy is, who policymakers are, and what policy can achieve. Their chapters discuss findings from research grounded in diverse theories, including institutional ethnography, critical disability theory, and critical race theory. The authors encourage scholars of family, school, and community partnerships to ask who benefits from policies (and who loses) and how proposed reforms maintain or disrupt existing relations of power. The chapters present original research on a broad range of policies at the local, state/provincial, and national levels in Canada and the USA. Some authors look closely at the enactment of specific district policies, including a school district’s language translation policy and a policy to create local advisory bodies as part of decentralization efforts. Other chapters reveal the often unacknowledged yet necessary work parents do to meet their children’s needs and enable schools to operate. A few chapters focus on challenges and paradoxes of including families and community members in policymaking processes, including a case where parents demonstrated a preference for a policy that research demonstrates can be detrimental to their children’s future education opportunities. Another set of chapters emphasizes the centrality of policy texts and how language influences the educational experiences and engagement of students and their families. Each chapter concludes with a discussion of implications of the research for educators, families, and other community partners.

Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students is a guide for writing teachers who wish to embark on a journey toward increased critical awareness of the role they play, or potentially could play, in the lives of their students."--Jacket.

This enquiry into the principles and practice of reading literature brings together insights from cognitive studies, literary theory, empirical literature studies, learning and teaching research and higher education research. Reading is conceptualised as an active process of meaning-making that is determined by subjective as well as contextual factors and guided by a sense of purpose. This sense of purpose, part of a professional and conscious approach to reading, is the central element in the model of reading that this study proposes. As well as a conceptual aim, this model also has pedagogical power and serves as the basis for a number of critical and creative exercises geared towards developing literary reading strategies and strategic reading competences in general. These activities demonstrate how the main tenets of the study can be put into practice within the context of a particular institution of higher education.

Whether universities can survive as critical organisations in the current time is an open question which this volume seeks to address. The book examines particular aspects of three main themes: governance, critical regulation and regulated criticism; growth, equality, movement and instability in higher education systems; and teaching and learning. Topics range from ‘University Futures’ to an examination of governance by procedure and the loss of the social process of the university; a discussion of the meaning of academic freedom; and approaches to managerialism. Quality management is discussed, along with the question of whether European Liberal Education actually exists. Various aspects of the theme of teaching and learning are examined, from student participation in out-of-class activities, to the role of Centres of Excellence, and a consideration of widening participation. The book is international in its reach, and addresses the continuing dilemmas faced in higher education systems, within Europe and beyond.

This book critically and reflectively engages with the ‘Language Problem’ in the contemporary multilingual university. It paints a complex picture of the lived multilingual realities of teachers and students in universities across geographies such as Pakistan, Timor-Leste, South Korea, Bangladesh, Somaliland, Afghanistan, Fiji, Colombia, and the UK (including Northern Ireland) and focuses on three overall analytic themes: language and colonial epistemologies, language policies and practices, and language and research. Globalisation, global knowledge economy, and neoliberal governance has significantly impacted higher education by elevating colonial languages, particularly English, to a global academic lingua franca. Universities now collaborate and compete globally, with English emerging as the dominant language for education and research. The imposition, or uncritical adoption, of English poses profound political, cultural, and epistemic challenges for those who have to use the language in everyday university administration, research, and teaching and also intertwines with issues of race, gender, coloniality, and social class. This volume addresses this as higher education’s multifaceted Language Problem which requires interdisciplinary collaboration and critical debate, and ultimately aims towards understanding multilingualism in higher education across both the Global North and South. The contributions to this book continue to remind us of the coloniality of language and of the linguistic stratification that governs epistemological structures and power relations in the academy. It will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and practitioners of higher education, applied linguistics, education policy and politics, and sociology of education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Teaching in Higher Education.