If there is one thing all university rankings have in common, it is that they are the target of widespread criticism. This article takes the many challenges university rankings are facing as its point of departure and asks how they navigate their hostile environment. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we unveil two modes of ranking…

In the past years, there has been an intensive discussion on the topic of academic freedom in the university. More precisely, it has been criticized that the university is confronted with a growing intolerance and the request to limit free speech. This contribution takes a case at a German university as point of departure. It shows how the current…

This project is a study of the role interpretation has played during a few key moments in a culture war over the role of the university in society. It argues that in these key moments in which a political reflection has been undertaken regarding the way knowledge is produced and distributed, the nature and function of interpretation as such has…

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…

Purpose: In this paper we contribute knowledge to the postgraduate supervision discourses by reflecting on our socio-spatial experiences of being supervised by colleagues, a process that we refer to as colleague postgraduate supervision (CPS). Design/methodology/approach: We followed a duoethnographic research design by dialogically presenting and…

Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of…

Contemporary college student activism has been particularly visible and effective in the past few years at US institutions of higher education and is projected only to grow in future years. Almost all of these protests and demands, while explicitly linked to social and racial justice, are sites of resistance to the neoliberalization of the…

This article presents the results of an analysis of hierarchization strategies in public debate over unemployment among university graduates. The aim of the investigation was to grasp the way that discourse controls interact with one another to produce and reinforce a particular 'truth' about the university. The objects of our analysis were the…

The evangelical discourse makes a claim for online education's essence in connecting it with specific directions in university reform. Critics pick up on this and identify technology with economic rationalization in higher education. But even a brief glance at its history suggests that online education is capable of varying realizations…

This manuscript describes an approach to critical qualitative data analysis that combines (1) Carspecken's critical qualitative methodological framework with (2) the conceptual resources of critical discourse analysis (CDA), as framed by Fairclough and colleagues. Carspecken's methodological theory illuminates the connection between sociopolitical…

Several authors posit the notion that universities have experienced "moral loss" over the last 15 years under the sustained influence of neoliberal education policies. However, whilst some consensus exists around the causes and effects of moral loss, there appears to be little agreement about how "moral reconstruction" can be…

This analysis examines the preparatory and reflective online rhetoric available to potential and past academic travelers at the university level. Utilizing Martin Heidegger's (1977) notion of the ways in which technological processes "enframe" human experiences, the article scrutinizes the visual and verbal rhetoric found on the websites…

This article links colonial/neocolonial and feminist literature with discourses on international students to examine how a discourse of imperialism constructs and represents international students in U.S. universities. Applying a critical discourse analysis to 78 articles published in the "Chronicle of Higher Education" between 1996 and 1999, the…