University / Academia

Three new texts can be found on the website of anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen. The first one is a translation of an article published earlier in the Norwegian newspapoer Morgenbladet and deals with the commercisalisation of Norwegian universities:

On the fundamental uselessness of universities
Politicians try to make the universities more efficient, in accordance with the gospel of New Public Management. Many countries have now introduced quantitative techniques for ‘measuring’ the efficiency of academics, and have finally made the long-expected connection between funding and productivity, measured in student credits and publications. The universities become a kind of industrial enterprise. University employees are well on their way to becoming musicians who have been instructed to play twice as fast, so that productivity can be increased. >> continue (a bit farther down the page)

I haven’t read the other articles and as I’m on my way out, I’ll just mention them quickly (Focus on security and trust seems to be a hot research issue):

From obsessive egalitarianism to pluralist universalism? Options for twenty-first century education
Although there are important, sometimes disturbing, connections between neoliberalism and certain forms of knowledge pluralism, I do not propose to explore them here. Instead, I shall focus on conditions for the transmission of knowledge in our time, arguing that it is necessary to find a third way between the Scylla of fixed, authoritarian knowledge and the Charybdis of relativist confusion. >> continue

Risking security: Paradoxes of social cohesion
Although the concept of human security, as it is currently being used in the worlds of development studies and peace and conflict research, was introduced as late as the mid-1990s, it can be used to address questions which are as old as the social sciences themselves. >> continue