The Plight of Greek Higher Education

Greek higher education has been, for the past four years, under a double attack, both by crippling austerity-induced budget cuts and by an attempt to accelerate the imposition of aggressively neoliberal reforms towards an entrepreneurial model of higher education.

To understand the importance of these processes, we ...

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The Plight of Greek Higher Education

Austerity and Higher Education

The case of the United Kingdom

University reform in the UK can be understood in light of the following dilemma: the system must expand if it is to meet the demand for skill in the labour market, but the more it expands the less it fulfills its other major function of reproducing social division.

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Between Ideals and Realities

An overview of the General Seminar on the legacies of the University in Exile

Last Wednesday, on February 26th, there was a special meeting of The New School for Social Research’s General Seminar, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the University in Exile. Three faculty members and three graduate students were asked to address a foundational question: “What is the meaning of The University in ...

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Between Ideals and Realities

Old School versus New School?

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. In his original email to the faculty panelists, Will Milberg asked (and I quote) "what is the significance of the University in Exile for the New School of tomorrow?” (and ...
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Reimagining Our Institution

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. Dr. Wagner-Pacifici draws our attention to two states of event: event as particle, and as wave. Event as particle may feel more conceptually intuitive: an event has a “shape” and ...
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The Mission and Structure of NSSR

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. The cleavage between the stated mission of NSSR and its structure is gaping. The focus of social research is necessarily on deep, long-term and perennial concepts and challenges. The parsing ...
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Experimentation in Tandem with Exile?

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. I’d like to take up Robin’s invitation to think about what exile signifies and to ask, as she does, what are the consequences of having institutionalized the very singular, exceptional, ...
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Exile as Event

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. I want to start with the concept of exile itself; exile understood as an event that was produced, one might even say mandated, by an Event with a capital E. ...
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The Case for Thoughtful Educational Assessment

A long-ago mathematics colleague at another university told a story about his first semester in the classroom. He threw a bunch of proofs on the blackboard and then, in the last five minutes, asked if there were any questions. There were no questions. He was unnerved. These students were good. The ...

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The Case for Thoughtful Educational Assessment