Philosophical Interventions in Neoliberal Higher Education

Brandon Absher

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978765221
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

In this edited collection, philosophers and critical theorists develop theoretical tools to conceptualize and evaluate the neoliberal university, working together both to interrogate how it reproduces systems of oppression and exploitation and to identify more liberatory and egalitarian alternatives.

Acting and organizing within and against neoliberalized higher education in the Western capitalist world, the international group of scholars included in this volume experience the contradictions and possibilities of the contemporary configuration of the university daily. And yet the crisis in higher education is only one aspect of a much broader social crisis in which neoliberalism and related social inequalities, rapid climate change, de-democratization, rising authoritarianism, war, and genocide interconnect. Edited by Brandon Absher, this volume critiques and intervenes in higher education in the midst of this unprecedented social and natural crisis; at once to expose its structure and inadequacies and to envision an alternative based on the principle of the commons.

What can higher education be, and how might it contribute to a more just, egalitarian, and liberated world?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Intervening in Neoliberal Higher Education
• Part
• 1 Theorizing the Post-pandemic University: Making Live and Letting Die in Neoliberal Higher Education
• 2 The Conflict of the Faculties Redux: Subject-formation, Capital, and the State
• 3 Is It Morally Wrong to Publish?
• 4 One-dimensionality and Critical Education in Herbert Marcuse
• Part
• 5 “It Was a Bright Cold Day in April, and the Clocks Were Striking Thirteen”: The Orwellian State of Higher Education in Florida
• 6 University as a Space of Resistance: The Case of Boğaziçi University
• 7 Authoritarianism and Democracy in Higher Education
• Part
• 8 Brainwashing in the University: Astro-education and Collective Critique
• 9 Diversity in Modern Philosophy: A Productive Contradiction
• Part
• 10 Higher Learning and Critical Social Theory Today: Ecosocialism, Ecofeminism, and Ecopedagogy
• 11 From the Neoliberal University to the University of the Common
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Imprint