1st Edition
Rethinking Higher Education and the Crisis of Legitimation in Europe
Building on Ourania Filippakou’s previous work on higher education in the fields of governance, neoliberalism, university entrepreneurialism and marketization, institutional and social stratification, Rethinking Higher Education and the Crisis of Legitimation in Europe contributes to the debate on higher education from a critical policy perspective. Introducing new ideas on the relationships between the alleged pursuit of excellence in higher education and the ways in which both deploys and reflects how power is wielded in Europe and other neoliberal capitalist societies. The term "legitimation" is here coined to emphasize how new coercive strategies, political decisions, and management styles have emerged in the age of excellence in higher education. The book concludes with a more personal reflection on the neutrality of higher education and its illusory promises.
Biography
Ourania Filippakou is Reader in Education and Director of Teaching and Learning at Brunel University London. Her research focuses the politics of higher education, critical pedagogy, and cultural politics with particular reference to comparative historical analysis, university entrepreneurialism, and marketization. She has published widely in a number of scholarly journals. In 2007 she was elected as a council member of the Society for Research into Higher Education and served as co-editor for the British Educational Research Journal from 2018–2021. Currently she is a co-editor for the Routledge book series Critical Interventions: Politics, Culture and the Promise of Democracy.
"The brilliance of Filippakou’s book not only on the unmatched critical analyses of the interplay of neoliberal austerity measures and the steady shrinkage of spheres for intellectual pursuits and critical thinking, but also her courage to dare to razor focus on the elephant in the room in higher education reforms that deform: market ideology.By framing her analyses away from the usual euphemisms that hide ideologies that generate, shape, and maintain the ever-increasing bureaucratization of institutions of higher education through market cost analyses, Filippakou empirically demonstrates how the neoliberal ideology imposes power asymmetries, massive inequalities, and stunts democracy. This book is a clarion alert that we cannot have liberation without autonomy, democracy without education, and freedom without radical imagination."
Donaldo Macedo, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Liberal Arts and Education, University of Massachusetts Boston
"Rethinking Higher Education and the Crisis of Legitimation in Europe offers not only a scorching criticism of the neoliberalization of the university and a spirited call for the overtly political, public, and democratic purposes of higher education. It also deftly illustrates the present dangers of rising fascism, cynicism, and apolitical complicity shot through higher education. Filippakou compellingly details the imperative for critical pedagogy as educational and social movement as part of a broader effort for resistance and democratic renewal. This is a book that breaks new ground in bringing the aspirations of critical pedagogy to educational policy. Though centered on the European context it is global in scope and must be read by educators, administrators, policy makers, and anyone who is willing to fight to bring us back from the precipice."
Kenneth J. Saltman, University of Illinois Chicago, author of Scripted Bodies: Corporate Power, Smart Technologies, and the Undoing of Public Education
