Conceptualizing capitalist transformations: Marx’s relevance for higher education research

This article opens a space for dialogue between Marxism and the field of higher education research. First, it demonstrates to what extent Marx is present in the theoretical and methodological discussions within the field and it examines the reasons behind his absence, i.e., the development of two perspectives regarding capitalist transformations, namely academic capitalism and exceptionalism. Second, it introduces Marx’s method of critique, conceived as the integrity of three different analytical moments and it further explicates how those moments can be translated into the general research program. It does so in reference to a) ontological assumptions; b) sector’s political economy; c) students and academic protests; d) ideas about the alternative. Finally, it uses those four areas to reflect on the key differences between Marx’s critique and the two perspectives discussed. By doing so it opens up paths for further dialogue between Marxism and higher education research.

Subsampled Rényi Differential Privacy and Analytical Moments Accountant

We study the problem of subsampling in differential privacy (DP), a question that is the centerpiece behind many successful differentially private machine learning algorithms. Specifically, we provide a tight upper bound on the Renyi Differential Privacy (RDP) [Mironov, 2017] parameters for algorithms that: (1) subsample the dataset, and then (2) apply a randomized mechanism M to the subsample, in terms of the RDP parameters of M and the subsampling probability parameter.Our results generalize the moments accounting technique, developed by [Abadi et al. 2016] for the Gaussian mechanism, to any subsampled RDP mechanism.