The paper provides a philosophical insight into the contemporary critical trends in the university life, and an outline of possible solutions based on the historical overview of an idea of university. The particular section is devoted to the depiction of situation in Slovakia. The author suggests that the creative reconstruction of academic practices is the key to the future of university.

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on the representation of the notion of employability and the job-seeking ‘reality’. It is part of a wider research project that looks closely into the careers services se...

ABSTRACTThis paper explores specific forms that neoliberal discourse and culture in academia today take in the field of Israeli Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The article applies various textual and contextual interrogation strategies to the language, narratives and the unsaid in interviews with leading scholars in the field, in order to construe what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘political unconscious,’ particularly that arising from the use of market as a conceptual metaphor. Contextualising this field of discourse within neoliberal academia, I deconstruct (...) the work ‘demand’ and ‘interest’ do, and highlight the dialectical dynamics of experts’ dependence on audience. I argue that, in this field, the economic discourse shelters Zionist logics, presuppositions and praxis, such as recruitment logics and fundraising practices that effectively address Jewish and Zionist students and donors. (shrink)

Shifts in funding and a worldwide trend towards marketising higher education have led to a new emphasis on the quality of the student experience. In the UK this trend finds its strongest expression in recent policy proposals to simultaneously increase student fees and student choice so that students themselves become the drivers of higher education. We trace the policy developments of this shift over recent years and rehearse some of the criticisms against it. Accepting that there is good reason to (...) support improving the student experience, we then consider ways in which this might be achieved that foreground the relation of university teachers with their subject matter and students’ engagement in this. A higher education, we argue, should expose its students to disciplines whose standards are rightly contested and to a form of learning that intensifies or unsettles desires rather than simply aspiring to satisfy them. (shrink)

Shifts in funding and a worldwide trend towards marketising higher education have led to a new emphasis on the quality of the student experience. In the UK this trend finds its strongest expression in recent policy proposals to simultaneously increase student fees and student choice so that students themselves become the drivers of higher education. We trace the policy developments of this shift over recent years and rehearse some of the criticisms against it. Accepting that there is good reason to (...) support improving the student experience, we then consider ways in which this might be achieved that foreground the relation of university teachers with their subject matter and students’ engagement in this. A higher education, we argue, should expose its students to disciplines whose standards are rightly contested and to a form of learning that intensifies or unsettles desires rather than simply aspiring to satisfy them. (shrink)