Universities in the Neoliberal Era

This book explores the question of how and to what extent the ongoing neoliberal transformation of higher education exerts influence on the university and academic everyday life in different societies. By listening to, observing, and comparing the critical voices of academics and students – the voices that matter – the book reviews first hand experiences from different societies and university cultures located within the European and semi-Mediterranean landscape, including the Czech Republic, Morocco, Turkey, and United Kingdom. 
By bringing together original fieldworks combining the structural analysis of the neoliberal shift with the academic individual’s repositioning, struggle and response, the book documents a number of similarities and differences experienced in different academic cultures. The chapters present a rich variety of subjects, including academic labor, academic identity and knowledge production, (un)employment, (in)equality, academic feminism, oppression and resistance from ethnographic, political and sociological perspectives. This timely and insightful volume will appeal to researchers, academics, students and advocates of academic freedom from different disciplines and academic cultures whose agendas prioritize higher education policies, university systems, academic production and academic labor.   

Hakan Ergül is an associate professor at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. He has teaching and research experience in Turkey and abroad in the areas of media and vulnerable groups, media ethnography, television and journalism studies and has published books and articles pertaining to these fields. He is currently conducting a comparative ethnographic research (with Simten Coşar) on neoliberal transformation of higher education.
Simten Coşar is a professor at Hacettepe University, Turkey, and has published on Turkish politics, feminist politics, and political thought. She is the co-editor of Silent Violence: Neoliberalism, Islamist Politics and the AKP Years in Turkey, and has been continuing  with her comparative research on the feminist encounters in neoliberal academia, as part of a broader comparative ethnographic research (with Hakan Ergül) on neoliberal transformation of higher education.

“The neoliberal transformation of universities has been lived  by academics, rarely analysed by them. We know most about its consequences in the US and UK, and little from anywhere about its consequences for daily practice and resistance. Hakan Ergül and Simten Coşar's courageous book is therefore doubly remarkable: for drawing together experiences from many countries outside the West, and for exploring ethnographically how neoliberal culture works and sometimes can be challenged on the ground. A landmark book in a long struggle.” (Nick Couldry, author of  “Why Voice Matters”, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)

“Not only an important book on the global influence of neoliberal ideology, policies, and practices on higher education, but a much-needed analysis of how these affect the lives and experiences of a diverse group of faculty and students within European and Mediterranean societies ... . Merging a critique of neoliberal assaults on HE with its effects on everyday practices, it provides a range of interventions to create a new space for understanding how neoliberal policies operate and what it might mean to resist them… A crucial book for assessing one of the most dangerous trends HE has ever faced, and should be read by everyone concerned about HE as a site of critical thought, the role of academics as engaged critical agents, and the mission of HE as a democratic public sphere.” (Henry Giroux, Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, McMaster University, Canada)