This book fills a gap in studies of meaning by providing detailed case studies of attested corpus data on the meanings of words and phrases.

The university has lost its way. The world needs the university more than ever but for new reasons. If we are to clarify its new role in the world, we need to find a new vocabulary and a new sense of purpose. The university is faced with supercomplexity, in which our very frames of understanding, action and self-identity are all continually challenged. In such a world, the university has explicitly to take on a dual role: firstly, of compounding supercomplexity, so (...) making the world ever more challenging; and secondly, of enabling us to live effectively in this chaotic world. Internally, too, the university has to become a new kind of organization, adept at fulfilling this dual role. The university has to live by the uncertainty principle: it has to generate uncertainty, to help us live with uncertainty, and even to revel in our uncertainty. Ronald Barnett offers nothing less than a fundamental reworking of the way in which we understand the modern university. Realizing the University is essential reading for all those concerned about the future of higher education. (shrink)

Where not so long ago professors "owned" the tools of scholarship, controlled the labor process, and certified the quality of our product, the process of McDonaldization has torn this relation asunder. Rapidly increasing student faculty ratios, mass classes, and the use of low-wage teaching assistants and adjunct faculty have changed the job of professor (p. 64 ff.). Faculty are pressured to recruit and retain students seen as "customers" (p. 67) and to compete with private for-profit [End Page 368] universities (p. (...) 71-72). With declining government aid for higher education, students increasingly see education as a form of consumption and demand control, choice, and "edutainment" (p. 64 and elsewhere). This is seen most obviously in "course evaluations" which some of the authors refer to as "customer satisfaction surveys" (p. 36, 132, 147). At the same time, faculty are relentlessly pushed to publish, engage in funded research, and develop new technological competencies. Control over product is threatened as universities make demands on ownership of intellectual property including patents and licenses, publications and courseware (p. 79-81). From the perspective of faculty, McDonaldization represents a dramatic loss of pedagogical authority. Simultaneously, the state, which still pays for much of the cost of education as a "public good," is increasing demands for accountability and standards. This takes the form of schemes for standardizing promotion and tenure, quantifying and measuring the product being delivered, and attempting to assure quality. (shrink)