Higher Education Governance: Importance of Language and Voice (Educational Governance Research, 28)

This book elaborates on and critiques the global neoliberal reform movement in higher education in university contexts in Ethiopia, South Africa, Sweden, and the USA in two distinct ways.  Firstly, by showing both the constitutive form and deprecating effects of global neoliberal reforms on university fields through the adoption, and consequences of academic capitalism and the dominance of corporate governance strategies. Secondly, by identifying and critically analysing the ways academics maintain and promote professional agendas for and against academic capitalism, by means of strategies of accommodation, ambivalence, resilience, and resistance, respectively that together illustrate:  

1. The dominant forms of conformity toward academic capitalism from academics and 
2. A volume of ambivalence, a significant measure of moral outrage, and the development of strategies of resilience and resistance toward the neoliberal project of academic capitalism in higher education. 

The book also problematizes resilience as protective and adaptive in its relationship to academic capitalism, before foregrounding the moral foundations of resistance toward the proto-capitalistic transformation of universities. This is illustrated by local efforts to protect important constitutive elements of a moral education system from economic control and exploitation. In this way, the book provides examples of erudite opposition to and critique of the marketization of higher education in general and the creation of selfish, ego-centric and narcistic individuals through the education system. In addition to this, by using examples from Ethiopia, South Africa and Sweden, the work critically reviews linguistic colonialism and the efforts for decolonizing national/local languages. 

The book is a valuable academic resource to students from advanced levels upwards in higher education in different subject fields including education and education work, didactics and higher education policy and politics.

Getahun Yacob Abraham is Associate Professor of education at the Faculty of Library, Information, Education and IT, at the University of Borås, Sweden. He is involved in research on critical pedagogy, early childhood education, and internationalization. He is interested on educational issues related to higher education, transformative learning, social justice, and education in relation to citizenship and democracy.

Dennis Beach is Emeritus Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education Department of Education and Special Education, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His main research focus is on the politics and sociology of education and ethnography of higher education policy, with a particular interest in the transformation of Nordic countries from well-developed welfare states with emphatic systems for the delivery of public goods and services, to neoliberal welfare societies. The implications and consequences of this transition in relation to schools and higher education are of particular interest.  Issues of social justice and equity connected to youth and social exclusion, identity, learning and territorial stigmatization in the emergence of post-industrial society form a main strand of research. 

Rajendra Chetty is Professor of Language Education at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His transdisciplinary research leans on postcolonial and social justice ideas on academic activism. He has engaged extensively with the decolonial turn in the humanities. His books include Fatima Meer: Choosing to be defiant; At the edge: the writings of Ronnie Govender; Narrating the new nation; and Transnationalisms and diaspora.  He was Fulbright Visiting Professor at the City University of New York (Graduate Centre) in 2015 and received two prestigious national awards.