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Something has happened to the university—something that has been resonating through the corridors of academic institutions across the globe for several decades and something that introduced new ideals, a new mind-set, and a mode of knowledge production and exchange to the old academia. This thing, however defined, is epitomized in the increase in the individualization of academics as actors; in the increase in demands to open campuses to the free-market sphere; and in the seemingly contradictory increase in the need for the state’s hand to ensure that these demands are followed by academics themselves. As Alvin Burstein warns: ‘The danger today is not just the erosion of academic freedom and tenure, but the fate of general education, increasingly eroded by the pressure to produce job-ready graduates’ (Burstein 2016). He highlights the increasing free marketization of universities in the United States, alongside calls for authoritarian measures to adjust the established structures of academic freedom to fit the requirements of neoliberal times.

It is true that there has been much academic and intellectual debate going on in the First World on the neoliberal turn in higher education, including a complex of issues from academic job insecurity to graduate job guarantees, from academic research as a matter of inquiry for the sake of knowledge production to academic research as an endeavor that brings in its own funding to create its market value. The new pervasiveness of free-market dynamics in the realm of universities can be observed in various instances across the North American context, as exemplified in the rather top-down budget cuts imposed on universities by the state. 1

In her field research 2 on feminist-academics’ state(s) of being and their encounters in neoliberal campuses across the United States and Canada, Simten Coşar (2016) has persistently grappled with the rather difficult task of simultaneously acknowledging the indispensability of feminist solidarity among academics on the one hand and the unavoidable acceptance on the other of the call for individual competition through publications, courses taught, networks entered, and affinities formed on an individual basis. Despite all the differences across distant geographical contexts, the upsurge of individual competition, job insecurity, and authoritarian policies are among the common denominators regarding the state of universities globally. In the United States and/or Canada for instance, it might manifest itself as the rather disappointing developments regarding cuts in tenure positions, increasing job insecurity through the growth of the adjunct professor (in the United States) and contract instructor (Canada) positions, the widening gap between research and teaching through recruitment and employment policies, and boundary setting between teaching and scholarship (Bilgrami and Cole 2015; Berry 2009; Clausen and Swidler 2013; Coşar 2016; Horn 2000). In the United States, there are accounts of professors who have risked losing their jobs due to their critical stance toward Israel’s policies on Palestine (Berry 2009; Coşar 2016). In India, the throttling of academic freedom takes the form of direct state oppression of leftist students and academics on campuses (Akgöz 2016; Dutta 2016). Somewhere in between the two, in Turkey, the government has acted unlawfully against academics merely on the grounds that they signed a peace declaration. This latest episode demonstrates dramatic deterioration in Turkey’s human rights situation, which has cast an ominous shadow over fundamental academic rights and freedoms, which may or may not prove to be just temporary or trivial. 3 While these examples have taken place in different socio-political contexts, with different academic traditions and university systems, they converge on the seemingly contradictory coexistence of and harmony between free-market demands directly related to academic life and authoritarian recipes to ensure that these demands are met as much as possible. As summarized by Berry (2009), regarding a case where vulnerability in terms of academic hierarchy—adjunct faculty—met fragile political stances—vis-à-vis Israel’s policies on Palestine:

…the post-9/11 world where all references to Islam, Judaism, the Middle East, the Holocaust, Israel, and Palestine are especially contentious and dangerous to breach. This is both new and not new for contingent faculty [read as adjunct faculty]. Of course, there have always been periods where open discussion of some issue became inflamed and provided the incentive to restrict academic freedom and public discussion, generally. Here we are reminded of McCarthy-era anticommunism, the backlash to the Black Freedom Movement or the Vietnam War, as examples. However, added to these historic periods of political fragmentation is the new reality that the majority of today’s faculty lack basic job securities necessary to stand and defend their rights to enact or protect their academic freedom. It is this present condition that we all must confront, and better together than separately. (p. 10)

Although there is an ongoing and heated debate in the literature about the defining the characteristics of this shift and its potential impacts on higher education, there is almost a tacit agreement—at least in the fields of social sciences and humanities—that it is a global phenomenon with local particularities and that it comes or is even borrowed from somewhere that does not necessarily belong to the homeland of scientific knowledge. Neither does it appear to adhere to the funding principles traditionally applied to academia. The question of whether the shift represents a powerful panacea for long-lasting problems in higher education or an absolute deviation from the very values that define the academic world depends on one’s understanding of the university and its role in society—yet, few would deny that the level of one’s office in the academic hierarchy might also inform that understanding.

The change is obvious and did not happen overnight. On the contrary, it first gained a strong foothold in advanced capitalist societies in the 1970s before spreading across the world in recent decades, creating significant commonalities among higher education institutions and hidden injuries for academics (Gill 2010). The current situation makes some of us feel we are ‘at the wrong place in [our] old academic habitus’ (Münch 2014, p. 65), in some others’ home or merely indifferent. 4 Nonetheless, today, we have reached a point where we, students and academics from different environments, come across a sarcastic joke in a British daily, telling that ‘[t]here are no more ivory towers, though vice-chancellors may dream of buying one for themselves’ (Power 2016); we recognize our own academic habitus in it; our past and present. Whatever it is that has been happening to the university, for many of us in academia, it is bringing (or perhaps has already brought) the university to its end; at least, the university as we have been accustomed to know it.

This book is about that global change we identify as the neoliberal restructuring of higher education and individual academics’ responses. The emphasis is on both the structural forces that underlie similar tendencies in different academic environments and also the particularities that occur at local, cultural, and individual levels.

Drawing from the authors’ diverse backgrounds (e.g. sociology, anthropology, political science, feminist studies, media, and cultural studies) and profound experience in the field, the chapters 5 in this collection explore the question of how and to what extent the ongoing neoliberal transformation of higher education influences everyday university and academic life. The question is not new and, on the surface, may remind the reader of previous interventions (some of which will be mentioned later). Nevertheless, this collection is significant for its micro- and emic nature: listening to, observing, and comparing the critical voices from below, without excluding the authors’ own. Focusing on the academics’ and students’ own perspectives vis-à-vis the neoliberalization of their academic habitus, the authors review first-hand experiences from different university cultures located within the European and Mediterranean landscape, notably Britain, the Czech Republic, Morocco, and Turkey. The aim is to expose readers to different aspects of the phenomenon from a diverse range of approaches, academic cultures, and experiences.

The Ground We Stand On

Over more than two decades, the role of the university—particularly in terms of social sciences and humanities—has been questioned in various forums in capitalist societies. A considerable number of studies have tracked structural changes toward the neoliberalization of higher education and their consequences. Some have focused on the implementation of corporate style management in higher education and the marketization-cum-privatization of universities and the commodification of knowledge; others have analyzed the social movements staged against these developments in various countries, including Britain, Canada, Chile, France, Greece, Italy, the United States, Russia, Spain, and Turkey.

Many authors have already set off alarms, pointing out that the essential concepts of the Humboldtian model of university—such as academic freedom, self-governance, social responsibility, and knowledge as a public good—and its raison d’être have been hijacked by the global neoliberal shift touched on above. 6 Today, a number of researchers from different geographies demonstrate that academic communities across the world are experiencing a new setting, often referred to as ‘academic capitalism’ (Cantwell and Kauppinen 2014; Münch 2014; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004) or alternatively the ‘enterprise university’ (Marginson and Considine 2000), modeled by a new, more utilitarian set of parameters: academic performance, self-monitoring, accountability, auditability, flexibility, rankings, profitability, privatization, competitive funding schemes, and so on. Needless to say, this new paradigm, deeply embedded into a market-driven managerial logic (e.g. see Evans 2005; Graham 2002), would have not been implemented so effectively without a new generation of dedicated university leaders, who, for the first time, define their institution’s mandate as maximizing ‘entrepreneurial return’ from academic production (Washburn 2003, p. 70).

Existing work on the neoliberalization of higher education ranges in terms of topics, core questions, and problematizations from a critical political economy approach (Giroux 2014; Brown and Carasso 2013; Karl et al. 2004; Cooper et al. 2002; Tudiver 1999; Slaughter and Leslie 1997) to a policy-oriented approach—mainly produced as articles and/or working papers for specific policy recommendations—and finally to discussions on the state of science on the axis of proper knowledge accumulation and knowledge dissemination, which essentially stands for the idealized university (e.g. see Crosier et al. 2007; Readings 1999). While the literature that falls into the first two categories generally tends to elaborate on country-specific cases, the third sphere relies on a universalistic argument about theorization, methodology, and practice.

The common ground in all these spheres of problematization is that the research conducted rarely takes issue with the everyday practices in academic life, which is itself being neoliberalized, and the way that academia in general has been interacting—negotiating, mediating, and dissenting—individually and/or collectively with the neoliberal state of things. Among the exceptions 7 is work by Gill (2010) that focuses on individuals’ everyday experiences in neoliberal academia. Drawing on qualitative and ‘unscientific’ 8 data, the author shows that, despite the profound impact of recent transformations on academics’ ‘precarious lives’ within the neoliberal university, ‘these things are rarely spoken of within the Academy, and, if they are, they tend to be treated as individual, personal experiences rather than structural features of the contemporary University’ (ibid., p. 233). Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) also look at academia in the United States in the midst of neoliberalization. Their inspiring work presents accounts of both academics in key positions in the commercialization of the universities and academics placed at risk in this process. Similarly, Vatansever and Gezici-Yalçın (2015) elaborate on the accounts of academics working in Turkey’s foundation 9 universities. Based on their ethnographic fieldwork, they critically analyze the precarization of academics due to the neoliberal state of affairs in the universities. Their findings also hint at a transformation in the way academics themselves relate to knowledge production and dissemination. As with Slaughter and Rhoades’ work, this work too concentrates on one country. Newson and Polster’s (2010) contribution follows a similar line by offering critical accounts from Canadian academics themselves. Currie and Newson’s (1998) contribution, on the other hand, stands as an exception for taking a cross-country comparative perspective in order to show that the market-oriented transformation of higher education is not a unidirectional process with similar consequences across different academic environments. Focusing on countries from the advanced capitalist world, the volume develops a macro-approach to neoliberalization, without integrating an ethnographic, emic perspective into its general discussion.

We have attempted to do the same in this volume by offering a multi-dimensional analysis; however we go beyond this and merge comparative historical approach with ethnographic insights. We think that the volume will encourage further studies on the neoliberalization of higher education that do not merely consider the institutional, legal, or structural aspects of the process but which deepen the analysis by bringing in the subjects into the functioning of the structural dynamics. We believe that the diversity of the countries included make it possible to trace not only differences in the process of neoliberalization across socio-economic, religious-ethnic, and cultural specificities, which generate shifts and relocations in the meanings attributed to the university and its role in society, but also parallels across diverse cases.

The Story Unfolds Itself

This edited volume comprises three parts, each exploring different yet strongly interrelated aspects of recent neoliberal transformations of higher education. Part I, Emerging Cultures: Between Neoliberal Know-How and Academic Universals, includes a collection of chapters looking at the complex challenges and present-day concerns that are deeply rooted in the neoliberal restructuring of higher education. Drawing on emic insights, the authors address the dramatic shifts and transformations that have occurred at both individual and structural levels in higher education during the last three decades: changes that reflect serious concerns and give rise to a number of critical questions:

  • How and to what extent have the meaning and nature of academia, academic knowledge production, and public engagement shifted during recent decades in the European and Mediterranean higher education landscapes?

  • How do academic actors make sense of their (changing) social role, (transforming) self-image, and professional identity in the new context of neoliberal academia? What are the major challenges that they encounter in their everyday life and how do they cope with them?

  • What dramatic departures from historically accepted norms, values (e.g. the university’s social role, academic collaboration, knowledge as a public good, academic autonomy, and social impact), and ethics have been introduced to higher education under the pressure of neoliberal policies and reformations?

In the first chapter of this section, Beyond the Third Mission: Towards an actor-based account of universities’ relationship with society, Jana Bacevic invites us to discuss—and challenge—the prevailing political narratives seeking to develop universities’ links with society, predicated on the idea that academia needs to abandon the proverbial ivory tower and become more engaged with its environment. At the heart of the chapter are the following questions: What is it that academics do when they engage with their societies? What are the ideas, issues, and constraints surrounding these forms of engagement? How do they reflect and/or reproduce the concepts of (academic) authority? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 on public engagement in the UK universities, Bacevic clearly shows that such positioning of academic actors is ambiguous and falls outside the new realm of neoliberal academia, where public engagement inevitably and simultaneously requires both compliance with and resistance to neoliberal transformations.

This discussion paves the way for the next chapter, Searching for Authenticity and Success: Academic identity and production in neoliberal times. Continuing from where the previous chapter left off, Özgür Budak investigates the relationship between neoliberalism’s impact on academic careers and the reshaping of academic identity. Based on ethnographic fieldwork incorporating cultural sociological perspectives, Budak convincingly reveals that similar tensions, fluctuations, and criticisms have been voiced by actors in the university environment at the other end of the European continent: Turkey. ‘The new era in higher education’, the author argues, ‘is frequently associated with increased feelings of insecurity and uncertainty’ (see Chap. 3, p. 56). Using interview data with academics at the beginning of their career, Budak demonstrates that, in order to position herself or himself as a meaningful player in the neoliberal university environment, the academic feels obliged to internalize ‘the sense of the game’ and develop sophisticated survival strategies.

In the last chapter of this section, Turkish Academics’ Encounters with the Index in Social Sciences, Eda Çetinkaya pursues a similar line of investigation to explore the changing nature of the relationship between everyday academic life and knowledge production, although with a particular emphasis on the medium (indexing, language, networks, digital technologies, etc.) and its effects on academic success. Drawing on ongoing, long-term ethnographic fieldwork in different universities in Ankara, Turkey, and in-depth interviews with academics from various generations, Çetinkaya argues that performance-based evaluation systems influence academics’ understanding of scientific knowledge and publishing, generating new inequalities and coping strategies in neoliberal academia. Most academics feel neither safe nor empowered in neoliberal universities that manage them according to points, performance indicators, competition, academic titles, and time pressure. While the academics’ responses to such transformations vary between resistance and acceptance due to their different profiles and personal skills, for many, the neoliberal restructuring of university creates despair.

In Part II, Stories of Mediation, Negotiation and Resilience, we continue to observe first-hand experiences in situ and listen to academics’ voices in their natural, everyday habitat: the university. The fieldwork introduced in this section suggests a closer examination of the different university cultures and academic-political contexts where (seemingly) similar neoliberal higher educational policies have been implemented. Throughout the chapters, the authors seek to find answers to the following questions:

  • How and in what ways do existing university cultures and academic dispositions interrogate, confront, or ease the way to implement neoliberal policies?

  • How do recent neoliberal changes in higher education policy and university curricula, which prioritize the needs of capital rather than the social expectations and desires of the individual, influence post-baccalaureate (un)employment? What are the viable, constructive alternatives?

  • What are the neoliberal knots that bind the transformation of university education to the transformation in academic research?

  • What are the universal/global grounds that host different dynamics in different socio-political contexts to create similar transformations in university structures?

The section opens with Josef Kavka’s thought-provoking essay, Variegated Neoliberalization in Higher Education: Ambivalent responses to competitive funding in the Czech Republic. The author questions the success of neoliberal transformation in Czech higher education, widely recognized as being regulated by academic elites adhering to traditional academic values. Based on qualitative interviews with students and academics in two well-established public universities, Kavka shows that neoliberalism does not function as a monolithic process; instead, it follows an uneven course, identified as ‘creeping neoliberalization’, which has been spurred by a new funding framework involving competitive and performance-based allocation of public resources. Eighteen months after the author’s fieldwork, the students and academics from one of the universities under investigation organized demonstrations against the institution’s leadership in response to two prominent professors having their contracts terminated, an example, among many, showing that neoliberalization does not necessarily crush the academia via the main gate; instead, it creeps in through a side entrance while remaining powerful and uninvited.

The next chapter, Creating Jobs for the Social Good: Moving beyond the neoliberal model of education for employment, continues to interrogate higher education policies via a multi-level (macro-, meso-, and micro-) approach. However, instead of looking at academics’ present situation, Shana Cohen invites us to focus on the educational strategies that influence students’ futures: neoliberal higher education policies addressing high unemployment among university graduates. Drawing on actual examples from the southern Mediterranean higher education landscape (specifically, Morocco) and assessing the effectiveness of current educational-policy strategies, Cohen emphasizes the significance of what is often disregarded—the existential ‘meaning that jobs possess for individuals’ (see Chap. 6, p. 136). From her extensive qualitative research in Morocco and survey data, she argues that ‘making a contribution to society is often the most important aspect of a job to employees’. Therefore, ‘an effective policy strategy [would] highlight individual fulfillment in employment, which includes making a social impact, before outlining the reforms to higher education that would enable individuals to make this contribution in their jobs’ (see Chap. 6, p. 137).

To understand the broader impact of neoliberal educational policies, the phenomenon must be studied comparatively as a nexus that connects different university environments. The last chapter of this section, Transformation, Reformation or Decline? The university in contemporary Morocco and Turkey presents one such attempt. Hakan Ergül, Simten Coşar, and Fadma Ait Mous analyze the neoliberal phenomenon through comparative data from ongoing fieldwork designed as multi-sited ethnographic inquiry at both ends of the Mediterranean. Particular attention is devoted to the significant milestones—such as privatization of higher education and the implementation of market-oriented educational policies—during the last decade. The latter significantly refers to policy strategies (most prevalently the License, Masters’, and Doctorate reform and the Bologna Process [BP]) that envisage the transformation of higher education in Europe and its sphere of influence. The authors argue that the 2000s mark a transformation in both countries, albeit certainly in different styles, with different justifications and in different modes and most probably, with different consequences. The parallels, on the other hand, can be found in many aspects, including the Bologna Declaration as the shared reference certificate, the European Higher Education Area as the shared reference space, and the BP as the shared title for the neoliberalization of the higher education system through Europe-oriented legitimizing discourses and thus in terms of the discursive strategies resorted to and manipulated by the decision makers and implementers of the related measures. Drawing on a critical analysis of the legal arrangements and regulatory mechanisms alongside academics’ experiences from both countries, the authors clearly demonstrate that the national political context and autocratic interventions in education have influenced the reform process, altering and distorting the democratic, (pseudo-) inclusive, and progressive values advertised by policy makers. The focus is on academics from various levels of the hierarchy who have been actively involved in producing, adjusting to, or implementing the policies that have dominated the last decade in higher education in Morocco and Turkey.

The chapters in this section orient the reader to the final section of the volume by offering a general framework for reading both the options for negotiation with and adaptation to the neoliberalization of higher education and also possibilities for dissent.

With Part III, Voices of Dissent, we turn our attention to critical voices questioning the unquestioned and rejecting the taken-for-granted order of things in neoliberal academia. The authors are well aware that we live in a neoliberal world and in neoliberal times and that neoliberalism has become ingrained in the public mind-set, including many academics. Today, its operational rationale and market-oriented norms are seen as ethics in themselves and as such accepted as inevitable. This acknowledgment, on the other hand, should not prevent us from seeing that there have always been contestations as to the basics of the neoliberal mind, neoliberal functioning, and neoliberal policies. The chapters in this section come from just such a critical tradition, tracing the potential and/or existing epistemological and ethical oppositional stances, acts, and strategies, developed as a response to neoliberal influences. The following questions lie at the heart of these discussions:

  • How can one account for the encounter between feminist epistemologies and the neoliberal mind? What are the possibilities for dissent against neoliberalization that can dialectically spring from the gendered formation, intrinsic in the neoliberal mentality and gender-based reactions from within academia?

  • What are the defining characteristics of the ideal academic (social) type of the neoliberal university, who appears, at least on the surface, to be immune to the mal du siècle? What are the philosophical, epistemological, and ethical underpinnings of such neoliberal academic dispositions?

In their chapter, The Historico-Political Parameters of Academic Feminism in Turkey: Breaks and continuities, İnci Özkan Kerestecioğlu and Aylin Özman look at the historical evolution of academic feminism, which introduced new arguments and prospects onto the feminist agenda and the influence of cultural context. Despite the challenging account of feminist principles in the knowledge production process in the universities as similar to the West, the authors argue, the evolution of academic feminism in Turkey followed a divergent path both at the theoretical and practical levels and produced its own unique agenda. While taking issue with the risk of the pervasion of maleist academic culture into feminist academic concerns, the authors also highlight the potential of feminist academia to opt for a transformation in academic life to end the ghettoization of feminist and/or women and/or gender studies on campuses: ‘the only way for academic feminism to continue toward its ultimate aim of transforming women’s lives is to politicize itself in a way that eliminates the distinction between feminist activism and academic feminism’ (see Chap. 8, p. 205). This argument certainly emphasizes that feminist academic knowledge production is in itself a praxis; thus, it is impossible to separate feminist activism from feminist knowledge and vice-a-versa. It is this integration of a feminist way of knowledge production in and through everyday life that offers grounds for imagining a counter-utopia vis-à-vis what Žižek calls a ‘neoliberal utopia’ (2008). It is not utopian to recall Žižek’s earlier hope for a ‘heartening species of human solidarity’ (2008, p. 24), which for him cannot be derived from the liberal utopia. This hope can be linked to his more recent call for reimagining utopia. 10 Regarding academia, however, we shall suffice here to note that perhaps feminist academic culture hosts the venues for such a reimagination.

The last chapter of this book, ‘Homo academicus’ in University Inc.: The ‘Ersatz’ yuppie academic, presents a famous intervention by Hasan Ünal Nalbantoğlu, a renowned sociologist with a profound passion for the philosophy of social sciences. As the title suggests, Nalbantoğlu’s work (first published in Turkish in 2003) is a grounded and multi-dimensional discussion about the appearance of a new academic type, the ‘yuppie academic’ or the professor-entrepreneur, successfully ‘imported’ (see Chap. 9, p. 219) into Turkish academia. Drawing on an interdisciplinary analysis of the current state of affairs in neoliberal academia—one that moves between philosophy, sociology, social theory, and literature—the author asks (see Chap. 9, p. 219): ‘Is it possible to consider the question of what is happening to academics separately from the basically philosophical question of what is happening to academic ethos and academic morality under current conditions when the universities in Turkey have moved beyond specialization to increasingly internalize the model of a commercial enterprise?’ What adds to this new version of Nalbantoğlu’s earlier essay is Simten Coşar’s constructive, feminist responses, whose multiple affiliations with the author (as his former student and the translator of this chapter) give her an exceptional position to make such an intervention.

As the editors of this volume and organizers of a workshop on the same topic, as coworkers and coresearchers in the fields covered in our coauthored chapter, we think that the critical approach running through all the chapters is most vivid in the final two chapters since they directly address the spheres of opportunity to consider alternatives to neoliberalization. We also believe that the collaborative experience with the field on this topic, which calls us to the field while simultaneously being in our own fields, promises a small attempt to request an alternative means of academic work(ing) together. The alternative lies in slowing down, sharing responsibilities without calculating the hours, minutes, and seconds required for the work, sharing responsibility without calculating the speed of working/burdening, and finally reflecting on our respective academic-political stances that resonate cooperatively through the work at hand. That is, the ethnographic lenses that run through the structures of everyday academic life turn out to offer both paths to read into and strategies to effectively resist neoliberalization.

The collective response within this volume can thus be placed alongside previous critical efforts that ‘do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it!’, as Marx (1982) puts it. Instead, it is a modest, ethnographic journey intended to support other voyagers aiming to ‘develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles’ (ibid.).

Notes

  1. 1.

    One example comes from the University of Wisconsin system, where ‘inviting more conservative speakers to the campuses’ has been proposed as a basis for bargaining for government funds (Sommerhauser 2016).

  2. 2.

    Project No. SBI 2015 7766; Funding institution: Hacettepe University (Scientific Research Coordination Unit), Project Name: Küreselleşme ve Akademide Dönüşüm: Kadın Akademisyenler Üzerine Karşılaştırmalı Bir Analiz (Globalization and Transformation in the Academia: A Comparative Analysis on Women Academics), start Date: 07 September 2016; End Date: 01 January 2017.

  3. 3.

    Butler (2015, p. 296) identifies the meaning of academic freedom with the immediate practice of the right to academic freedom, revealing the dire state of academics in Turkey in terms of the right to freedom. In this respect, she notes ‘two sorts of rights violations: the one happens when an already established institution sets limits on its curriculum or faculty speech for political reasons; the other happens when the infrastructural conditions are destroyed or debilitated and render impossible the exercise of the right of academic freedom (and other rights as well, including the right to assembly and rights of mobility, presupposed by rights of access)’.

  4. 4.

    In her influential work, The Economic Horror, Viviane Forrester reminds us that ‘[a]chieving general indifference is more of the victory for a system than gaining partial support’ (1999, p. 36).

  5. 5.

    Except for two new contributions, the preliminary versions of the chapters were presented at an international workshop, University in the Neoliberal Era: Cultures, Stories, Voices that Matter, coorganized by the Centre Jacques Berque Les Études en Sciences Humaines et Sociales au Maroc (CNRS), Ecole de Gouvernance et d’Economie (Rabat, Morocco) and Hacettepe University (Ankara, Turkey), held on 19 June 2014 in Rabat, Morocco.

  6. 6.

    J.M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize winning novelist and professor, remembers these years as follows: ‘It was always a bit of a lie that universities were self-governing institutions. Nevertheless, what universities suffered during the 1980s and 1990s was pretty shameful, as under threat of having their funding cut they allowed themselves to be turned into business enterprises, in which professors who had previously carried on their enquiries in sovereign freedom were transformed into harried employees required to fulfill quotas under the scrutiny of professional managers. Whether the old powers of the professoriate will ever be restored is much to be doubted’ (Coetzee 2007, p. 35).

  7. 7.

    For examples of similar concerns, see Luxton and Mossman (2012), Newson and Polster (2010), and Currie and Newson (1998).

  8. 8.

    Gill (2010) explains the intention behind her methodological choice as follows: ‘My ‘data’ are entirely unscientific, but nevertheless, I contend, they tell us something real and significant about our own workplaces … [I]t seems to me that it is this level that remains silenced in most fora—yet insistently asserts itself in our aching backs, tired eyes, difficulties in sleeping and in our multiple experiences of stress, anxiety, and overload’ (p. 232).

  9. 9.

    Foundation universities, set up by prosperous families and educational foundations, first appeared in Turkey in 1984. While they are funded by the students and their foundations, most of them also benefit from the state donations. Despite their non-profit status, many foundation universities have been turning into for-profit institutions.

  10. 10.

    Here, we are inspired by Žižek’s call for ‘reinventing utopia’ when the issue cannot be ‘resolved within the coordinates of the possible, out of the pure earths of survival you have to invent a new space’. Although Žižek emphasizes that ‘utopia is not a matter of imagination; utopia is innermost urgency’, we think that imagination is the most urgent need, especially for those who work with and through knowledge. See Žižek’s presentation at https://vimeo.com/7527571, date accessed 10 June 2016.