Reviving the Issues-in-Academe Blog

I am reviving this "Issues in Academe" blog that compliments the blog on the culture-centered approach (CCA).

Because so much of what the CCA grapples with is about transforming structures, the role of the academe has emerged as the ongoing site of structural transformation. As you will note, I have increasingly become occupied with the question of what it takes to transform the academe through democratic processes of student, staff, and faculty participation.

Even as our unions have been gutted, faculty participation devalued, and staff collectivization rendered illegal across University campuses, Universities have been re-organized in managerial logics. These managerial logics form the foundational structures of the neoliberal University. University managers, often recruited from within the ranks, other times brought in from the private sector, are trained in techniques of accounting that consolidates the power of the modern University.

This consolidation of power is often carried out in processes and frameworks that are increasingly opaque, hidden behind bureaucratic processes, paradoxically as Universities talk about listening, engaging, and dialogue.

Along with the ongoing studies on University life housed in CARE under the labour, gender, racism, and academic freedom areas, this will serve as a space for ongoing conversations on key questions of University life. I will be inviting guest bloggers to join me in some of these conversations.