After the tuition fee protests, before the market-friendly White Paper on Higher Education was silently abandoned, there was a crucial space for reflection on the English university. Was it facing a neoliberal attack? Or essential reform? What was the ideal university? And how could it be realised
The instrumentalisation of research and successive governments' preoccupation with 'impact' have gradually eroded the independence of British academia. Business and politics alike are narrowing funding and skewing outcomes.
The track record and ideology which won Malcolm Grant the chair of the Health Minster's NHS Commissioning Board are the very same reasons students have rejected his leadership of University College London.
Following the resignation of financial man Howard Davies, the appointment of radical academic Craig Calhoun as director could signal a sea change for the London School of Economics, hopes a Student Union sabbatical officer.
Fred Halliday has been vindicated in his long battle with the LSE over taking Gaddafi money. But the underlying reason - corporate and government pressure on the university is not addressed by the Woolf Report into the scandal.
What are the consequences of the marketisation of higher education in England? Our consumerist society may get the education it deserves, but will it be the education it really wants or needs?
The privatisation of English higher education is bitingly analysed in this essential collection of essays. Does the book mark a new wave of opposition to corporate ideology from within England's universities?
This year will be a watershed in the transformation of universities from communities of scholars to cheap degree shops competing for ‘customers’ - unless concerted and localised resistance can prevent it.
A co-operative education centre is opening in England, with no fees and no formal distinction between students and staff. A radical alternative to the Coalition's marketisation of higher education, the Social Science Centre, Lincoln, is set to open in the next academic year.
Hundreds of academics have signed a new paper arguing against the UK government's higher education reforms. Universities are not about private benefit alone, the paper argues - democratic public values should be at their heart.
