Lest we forget... DEFEND the ARTS and HUMANITIES gears up for more campaigning in the New Year by posting links to two invaluable items: an activist video -- above -- that may serve to remind us just how angry many in our societies are about badly-broken, politicians' promises, and an anger-inducing article -- below -- that deftly traces some of the ideological origins of the Higher Education financing reforms of recent times.
Indeed, Simon Head's cool-headed essay for the New York Review of Books is one of the best analyses of the neo-liberal attacks on higher education to have yet appeared. It makes for chilling but essential reading.
DEFEND the ARTS and HUMANITIES will be back in the New Year!
The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the one thing upon which their worldwide reputation depends: the caliber of their scholarship. The theories and practices that are driving this assault are mostly American in origin, conceived in American business schools and management consulting firms. They are frequently embedded in intensive management systems that make use of information technology (IT) marketed by corporations such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP. They are then sold to clients such as the UK government and its bureaucracies, including the universities. This alliance between the public and private sector has become a threat to academic freedom in the UK, and a warning to the American academy about how its own freedoms can be threatened. (Read the rest of this article here)
With thanks to SG for the latter link.
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