Rethinking Higher Education and the Crisis of Legitimation in Europe - Paperback

by Ourania Filippakou (Author)

Building on Ourania Filippakou's previous work on higher education in the fields of governance, neoliberalism, university entrepreneurialism and marketization, institutional and social stratification, Rethinking Higher Education and the Crisis of Legitimation in Europe contributes to the debate on higher education from a critical policy perspective. Introducing new ideas on the relationships between the alleged pursuit of excellence in higher education and the ways in which both deploys and reflects how power is wielded in Europe and other neoliberal capitalist societies. The term "legitimation" is here coined to emphasize how new coercive strategies, political decisions, and management styles have emerged in the age of excellence in higher education. The book concludes with a more personal reflection on the neutrality of higher education and its illusory promises.

Author Biography

Ourania Filippakou is Reader in Education and Director of Teaching and Learning at Brunel University London. Her research focuses the politics of higher education, critical pedagogy, and cultural politics with particular reference to comparative historical analysis, university entrepreneurialism, and marketization. She has published widely in a number of scholarly journals. In 2007 she was elected as a council member of the Society for Research into Higher Education and served as co-editor for the British Educational Research Journal from 2018-2021. Currently she is a co-editor for the Routledge book series Critical Interventions: Politics, Culture and the Promise of Democracy.