Michel Serres was a successful scholar who made a living within the university on two continents. However, he also viewed the university with great trepidation and tried to warn young scholars against falling victim to the university culture that encouraged a scholar to become a critic and not do original work. In place of the current university…

In this article I explore Serres' idea of science and how it impacted his overall work. This approach to understanding Serres' idea of science is much like working with Nietzsche. I look at the areas Serres viewed as the dangers of science including what he referred to as a tsunami of data and the primary focus on methods. I end with Serres third…

Decolonisation aims at exposing the ills of colonialism in an attempt to undo their long-standing effects. Important criticism of curriculum decolonisation has focused on potential conflicts with academic freedom. However, this criticism has to some extent suffered from a perceived lack of agreement on the concept and status of academic freedom…

This paper describes a neglected aspect of the critique of academic 'cultures of speed' offered by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeler in "The Slow Professor." I argue internalisation of the values and imperatives of cultures of speed can encourage the erosion of a range of academic virtues while also facilitating the development of a range…

The present article is dedicated to the hyper-hierarchization of small-scale organizational spaces (and the most immediate ones for most academics)--university departments. By using the anarchist critique of hierarchies to deconstruct the architecture of an undisclosed department located at one of the South African universities, the author…

In this piece the author provides a critical response to the new 'Looking at Our School' quality framework in Ireland and illustrates how policy overlooks critical scholarship. The author questions the claim that the updated policy reflects recent thinking and developments, and critiques the policy's stance on notions of both distributed…

The article presents the results of an analysis of the academic dispute about the scholarly ethos, conducted at the time of intense higher education reforms in Poland. Previous analyses of the academic debate on the change of the traditional university towards its entrepreneurial organization emphasize the polarization, that is, the criticism or…

Where and when do academics write and what are the feelings associated with it? Is the pressure to write a fulfilling process of joyful exploration, or is it stressful and wracked with self-doubt? Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis, this article explores the rhythmic dispositions and orientations of contemporary academic writing, exposing…

Academic achievement has too often been a metric by which students define their self-worth. For some students, this focus manifests itself through perfectionism, attaining high grades, and overvaluing extrinsic learning rewards. Students who consider their self-worth to be contingent upon their academic performance often suffer from withdrawal,…

In this article, I offer a critical reading of the higher education field-imaginary and its orienting assumptions, inspired by decolonial and abolitionist critiques. These critiques identify the constitutive and ongoing violence that underwrites modern institutions of higher education and, thus, the higher education field itself. In so doing, they…

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a long-standing critical tradition in the educational leadership literature through an analytical examination of the idiosyncrasies of leadership in Higher Education institutions (based on the UK example). It applies a postmodern way of thinking to the educational leadership phenomenon to problematise and…

In this article, the author uses storytelling to retell moments in the history of our field. Using personal anecdote alongside critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, she critiques the Writing About Writing movement by re-situating it in history: first narrating it as a contemporary of the Translingualism movement, and then comparing…

This paper offers a defense of Robin Barrow's main arguments in "Giving Teaching Back to Teachers", including additional material concerning the inability of the aggregate data and statistical methods employed in research in education (and research on teaching) to speak to individual teachers and students or to particular classrooms.…

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a reclusive and enigmatic philosopher, writing his most significant work off campus in remote locations. He also held a chair in the Philosophy Department at Cambridge, and is one of the university's most recognized even if, as Ray Monk says (1990, 401), 'reluctant professors' of philosophy. Paradoxically, although…

Despite the growing complexity and multidimensionality of the system of international research collaborations, the colonial discourse casting the collaborative relationships in terms of polarized North--South antitheses persists and continues to exert influence on the nature of power distribution in the relationships, as well as on the…