A/Prof. Matthew Sharpe will be giving a Zoom lecture on Wednesday 3rd February (3:00-4:30pm):
Marketization of Higher Education and Crisis Tendencies: Australia & Germany Compared
Marketization of Higher Education, although presented as a neutral means to achieve ‘efficiencies’, inescapably produces “problem tendencies” (cf. Habermas, 1992; Crioni et al, 2015) within teaching, between casualisation and reduction of teaching staff and quality of instruction; within research, between free inquiry and applied, quantifiable research; and within institutional culture, between the uncommodifiable, collegial dimensions of academic work and the culture of auditing and compliance promoted by neoliberalism, as well as its attendant costs (Power, 1997; Craig et al, 2014). In this talk, I contextualise and examine figures from Germany and Australia, and try to explain why the Australian experience has been so much worse, as the responses to COVID-19 since March 2020 have highlighted.