Higher Education Governance: Importance of Language and Voice

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:

The dominant forms of conformity toward academic capitalism from academics and

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.