What's Really New about the Neoliberal University? The Business of American Education Has Always Been Business

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 62-86
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Young People ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
American Education ◽  
Student Debt ◽  
Business Support ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Complete Overhaul

Abstract Journalists, academics, and ordinary Americans wrongly bemoan the student debt and college financing crises as two separate unhappy endings to a mythical story of unprecedented postwar federal and state support for higher education. Rarely have they considered that either catastrophe has anything to do with the labor question. Yet the thousands of Americans in debt and the many colleges facing bankruptcy (even before the pandemic) are intertwined disasters, which reveal that Americans never had genuine economic security or basic social welfare, a basic truth that has historically hurt and still overwhelmingly harms residents of color, particularly women, who disproportionately hold the most debt. Colleges and universities have always had to rely on tuition and business support because they never received adequate sustained funding from lawmakers, who had far more interest in offering young people and their families ways to creatively finance tuition in order to get the credentials needed to just compete for well-paying work. Business needs and demands did a lot to shape postsecondary schools before the emergency of the neoliberal university, supposedly a late twentieth-century phenomenon. As such, seemingly radical solutions, like forgiving debts and unionizing adjuncts, are not enough to transform universities into the progressive strongholds that they never really were. Lawmakers, taxpayers, and faculty would have to embrace a complete overhaul of how higher education is funded as well as how students are assisted in studying.

Unity of science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordi Cat
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Molecular Genetics ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Unity Of Science ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Disunity Of Science ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

How should our scientific knowledge be organized? Is scientific knowledge unified and, if so, does it mirror a unity of the world as a whole? Or is it merely a matter of simplicity and economy of thought? Either way, what sort of unity is it? If the world can be decomposed into elementary constituents, must our knowledge be in some way reducible to, or even replaced by, the concepts and theories describing such constituents? Can economics be reduced to microphysics, as Einstein claimed? Can sociology be derived from molecular genetics? Might the sciences be unified in the sense of all following the same method, whether or not they are all ultimately reducible to physics? Considerations of the unity problem begin at least with Greek cosmology and the question of the one and the many. In the late twentieth century the increasing tendency is to argue for the disunity of science and to deny reducibility to physics.

“Wir leben, indem wir leiben”

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Joel Michael Reynolds ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Life Worth Living ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Bodily Difference ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Awaiting execution, Socrates asks, “Is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition (μοχθηροῦ καὶ διεφθαρμένου σώματος)?” “In no way (Οὐδαμῶς),” replies Crito. While one can only conjecture whether Heidegger would agree with this precise formulation, the specter of (the corruptibility of) the body loomed large during his later years and in much scholarship to follow. Among the many scholars who have addressed the question of the body in Heidegger, nearly all agree that he—early, middle, and late—maintains that Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), not the reverse. Adducing the discussion of Sein-zum-Tode in §§51-53 of Being and Time and the role of der Sterbliche in the Bremen Lectures, I argue that this relation is instead mutually reciprocal, for Heidegger’s own accounts of the role of mortality demonstrate that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being. I term what this thinking proffers a corpoietic understanding of the body, and I conclude by discussing what light this might shed on past indictments of Heidegger’s (non)treatment of the body and on late twentieth-century attempts to think bodily difference.

Student Lives in Crisis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenza Antonucci
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Young People ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Student Debt ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Family Resources ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Family State

With rising levels of student debt and precarity, young people’s lives in university are not always smooth. Lorenza Antonucci has travelled across England, Italy and Sweden to understand how inequality is reproduced through university. This book provides a compelling narrative of what it means to be in university in Europe in the 21st century, not only in terms of education, but also in terms of finances, housing and well-being. Furthermore, this book shows how inequality is reproduced during university by how young people from different social classes combine family, state and labour market sources. The book identifies different profiles of young people’s experiences in university, from ‘Struggling and hopeless’ to ‘Having a great time’. Furthermore, the book discusses how the ‘welfare mixes’ present in the three countries determine different types of semi-dependence, and reinforce inequalities. The book identifies a general trend of privatisation of student support in higher education, which pushes young people to participate in the labour market and over-rely on family resources in order to sustain their participation in university. Not only does this protract young people’s semi-dependence, but it also increases inequality among different groups of young people. In addition to the current policy focus on access to higher education, and transitions to the labour market, the book calls for a greater attention on the policies that can change young people’s lives while in university.

The Wisdom of Indigo Children: An Emphatic Restatement of the Value of American Children

2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 60-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah W. Whedon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Attention Deficit Disorder ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
New Age ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Children ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In late twentieth-century America the notion of Indigo children emerged. Said to have indigo-colored auras and unique spiritual abilities, these young people have had difficulty fitting into social institutions and are often diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. This article argues that good children turned bad through psychological illness were reinscribed as good with the aid of New Age beliefs and practices. These New Age components included ideas about auras, millennialism, and personal transformation.

scholarly journals The Myth of Perfect Fidelity

2021 ◽  
pp. 16-43
Author(s):  
Melle Jan Kromhout
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Noise Reduction ◽  
Random Noise ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Sound Media ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Chapter 1 gives a brief history of the noise of sound media from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, tracing the development of different concepts of noise in dialogue with and reaction to ever more complex and sophisticated technologies. It explores the many ways in which inventors, engineers, producers, and musicians have sought to prevent, reduce, and eliminate this noise. The chapter thereby draws the contours of a myth of perfect fidelity or the idea that reproduced sound can in principle be separated from the noise of the medium and complete similitude between original and copy can be achieved. This myth is illustrated by two examples of noise-related technologies: Dolby analog noise reduction, which actively reduces the noise of sound media, and the counterintuitive practice of “dithering” in digital recording, by means of which small amounts of random noise are introduced to reduce digitization errors.

scholarly journals Archival Artistry: Exploring Disability Aesthetics in Late Twentieth Century Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 75-95
Author(s):  
Lauren Beard
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
State Institution ◽  
Section 504 ◽  
Disability History ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Disability Rhetoric

Jay Dolmage’s (2014) Disability Rhetoric encourages scholars to search beyond normative Aristolean bounds of rhetoric and embrace a critical lens of rhetorical activity as embodied, and disability as an inalienable aspect of said embodiment (p. 289). To that end, this project posits an innovative structure for rhetorically (re)analyzing disability history in higher education through a framework of disability aesthetics. In Academic Ableism, Jay Dolmage (2017) argues that an institution’s aesthetic ideologies and architecture denote a rhetorical agenda of ableism. In Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers (2010) asserts disability is a vital aspect of aesthetic interpretation. Both works determine that disability has always held a crucial, critical role in the production and consumption of aestheticism, as it invites able-bodied individuals to consider the dynamic, nonnormative instantiations of the human body as a social, civic issue (p. 2). Disability, therefore, has the power to reinvigorate the sociorhetorical impact of both aesthetic representation and the human experience writ large. With this framework in mind, this project arranges an archival historiography of disability history in higher education in the late twentieth century at a mid-sized U.S. state institution. During this time, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act was finally signed into law, and universities confronted a legal demand to allow all students access. Ultimately, this project seeks to demonstrate how disability scholars and historiographers can widen the view of both disability history and disability rhetoric in higher education through a focus on student aesthetic performance and intervention.

scholarly journals The Postcolonial Crescent

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-150
Author(s):  
Deonna Kelli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Islamic Identity ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Identity politics has become the catch phrase of the postmodern age. Withconcepts such as "exile," "migrancy," and "hybridity" acquiring unprecedentedcultural significance in the late twentieth century, the postcolonial age givesway to new identities, fractured modes of living, and new conditions of humanity.Literature is a powerful tool to explore such issues in an era where a greatdeal of the world is displaced, and the idea of a homeland becomes a disrupted,remote possibility. The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact onContemporary Literature, is an attempt to discuss how Muslims negotiateidentity at a time of rapid and spiritually challenging transculturation. The bookuses fiction written by Muslims to critique the effects of colonialism, counteractmodernity, and question the status of Islamic identity in the contemporaryworld. It also can be considered as the primary introduction of contemporaryIslamic literature into the postcolonial genre. Muslim writers have yet to submit a unique and powerful commentary on postcolonial and cultural studies;this work at least softens that absence.The Postcolonial Crescent was conceived as a response to The SatanicVerses controversy. Therefore, it is “intimately involved in the interchangebetween religion and the state, and demonstrates that the roles Islam is playingin postcolonial nation-building is especially contested in the absence of broadlyacceptable models” (p. 4). Conflicting issues of identity are approached byinterrogating the authority to define a “correct” Islamic identity, the role ofindividual rights, and the “variegation of Islamic expression within specificcultural settings, suggesting through the national self-definitions the many concernsthat the Islamic world shares with global postcoloniality” (p. 7) ...

From Religious Eulogy to War Anthem

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-454
Author(s):  
Beeta Baghoolizadeh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Black Representation ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Religion And Nationalism ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Abstract This article looks to two songs, “Layla Said” and “Mammad, You Weren't There to See,” to examine the politics of representation, race, religion, and nationalism in late twentieth-century Iran. “Layla Said,” a religious eulogy sung by Jahanbakhsh Kurdizadeh, would serve as inspiration for the most popular song of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in terms of melody, rhythm, and lyrics. Kurdizadeh, a visibly Black Iranian, is not popularly remembered as the source of the eulogy, an omission that compounds many of the politics of Black representation in Iran. Through an investigation of film, aural recordings, photographs, and more, this article follows the many mutations of the eulogy-turned-anthem to identify the various ways ethnography and documentary works frame blackness in Iran. Kurdizadeh's life and marginalized legacy highlights the tacit erasure of blackness on the national stage in Iran.

The Physical University: Contours of space and place in higher education

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-74
Author(s):  
Michael Haggans
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an extended book review of “The Physical University”. Design/methodology/approach – This article takes the form of a literature review focusing on one title. Findings – This is an uneven collection of fragments of conventional late twentieth-century thinking about the physical campus. The future of the physical university, the campus is in doubt. Yet, only two of the dozen authors engage in this existential question. Originality/value – The collection of articles ranges from purely philosophical to moderately practical. It is a poor summary of current thought and offers little guidance for dealing with the evolving future of the physical university.

Generational Expectations and Experiences of Higher Education

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
Jennie Bristow ◽  
Sarah Cant ◽  
Anwesa Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Young People ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Student Debt ◽  
Observation Study ◽  
The Public ◽  
Progressive Development ◽  
Public Imagination

This chapter draws on qualitative data from the Mass Observation Study and interviews with students to explore how members of the general public, and prospective and current students, frame the meaning of Higher Education, both in policy terms and according to their own experience. This analysis highlights a central contradiction within the position held by the 21st century University in the public imagination. On one hand, expansion is regarded as a progressive development, and there is a striking generosity and optimism in the ways that the provision of this experience for more young people is discussed. On the other, there are widespread concerns about the motivations and effects of massification, including the normalisation of student debt, the diminishing value of degrees, and the quality of education provided.

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