How far have universities in post-Communist states adopted the practices
and habits of their branded and consumer-oriented equivalents in the
English-speaking world? While not assuming that university education in
those states reflects in any mechanistic way the regulated, business-led
system long established in places like the US, and now being
dramatically realized in countries like Britain, this edited collection
identifies some marked shifts in the direction of what might best be
described as 'neoliberalisation', examining its particularities in local
situations where establishment ideologies were, until the early 1990s,
deeply alien to all kinds of commercially driven entities. Many of the
authors are concerned not only with the linked issues of commercialism,
instrumentalism, bureaucracy, and managerialism, framed locally and
nationally, but also with the meaning and purpose of universities
outside or against their status as efficient gatherers of income. The
collection makes specific reference to Lithuania, Hungary, Azerbaijan,
Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia, and comprises theoretical as well as
empirical studies of diverse but connected subjects, including the
marketization of the academy, regional reactions to globalization as
expressed in the representational rhetoric of specific curricula, the
role and place of civic education, comparisons between educational
settings, pedagogies for a critical and ethical consciousness, corporate
and state demands and their effects on academic freedom, and the
positive potential of new communication technologies. In all these
cases, the system of neoliberalism, or rather an uneven process of
neoliberalisation, forms a backdrop to the particular issues discussed.
