A devastating analysis of what is happening to our universities Does 'marketization' threaten to destroy what we most value about education? Will this new era of 'accountability' distort what it purports to measure? What do we mean by a 'public' system of higher education and how should we defend it? Globalization has transformed the economic horizon. At the same time governments have systematically imposed new regulations for funding, governance, and assessment. Increasingly, universities behave more like business enterprises in a commercial marketplace than centers of learning. In recent decades there has been an immense global surge in the number of universities and the size of the student population. Technology has created new ways of learning and teaching. In Speaking of Universities, historian and critic Stefan Collini analyses these changes and challenges the assumptions of policymakers and commentators. This is an urgent call to 'focus on what is actually happening and the cliches behind which it hides; an incitement to think again, think more clearly, and then to press for something better.'
Author
Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University. After degrees at Cambridge and Yale, he taught at the University of Sussex before moving to a post in the Faculty of English at Cambridge in 1986. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, and other periodicals, and an occasional broadcaster. His research includes the relation between literature and intellectual history from the early 20th century to the present. Current research focusses on the cultural role of, and the historical assumptions expressed in, literary criticism in Britain from c.1920 to c.1970. Recent work has dealt with the question of intellectuals in 20th-century Britain, the relation between academic critics and 'men of letters', the role of cultural criticism, as well as individual essays on figures such as T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart. Also work on the history, and public debates about the role, of universities in Britain.
