Universities in Crisis: Markets vs. Publics?
411 views · Published 26 November 2013 · 1:36:03 · Indexed 16 October 2026
Channel: Trinity College Dublin · 2013 · Education
This talk will address the implications of recent reforms to higher education that align the university with a neo-liberal, global knowledge economy. It will suggest that the reforms are a response to the emergence of mass higher education, but involve a shift away from understanding education as a social right and the expression of an inclusive public interest to an understanding of it as an investment in human capital and the expression of a private interest of individuals. This involves giving priority to the marketization of the functions of a university and the displacement of those functions that cannot be marketised, including its functions for democracy. The talk will also address neo-liberalism as a theory of knowledge (and not simply of public policy) and its possible implications for the social sciences, including sociology. Speaker: John Holmwood, Professor at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. He is is President of the British Sociological Association and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. http://www.tcd.ie
