Dark Academia

"Fleming's books are sparklingly sardonic and hilariously angry"—Guardian "An excellent and important book"—Journal of Education, Innovation, and Communication To Professor Peter Fleming, there is a strong link between the neo-liberalization of higher education over the last 20 years and the psychological hell now endured by its staff and students. He believes that impersonal and unforgiving management hierarchies have supplanted academic judgement, collegiality, and professional common sense. He bemoans the modern system of higher education and shines a spotlight on what’s gone wrong and why. While academia was once thought of as the best job in the world, one that fosters autonomy, craft, intrinsic job satisfaction, and vocational zeal, you would be hard-pressed to find a lecturer who believes that now.
Fleming delves into this new metrics-obsessed, overly hierarchical world to bring out the hidden underbelly of the neoliberal university. He examines:
*Commercialization
*Mental illness and self-harm
*The rise of managerialism
*Students as consumers and evaluators
*The competitive individualism which casts a dark sheen of alienation over departments
*And much more! Arguing that time has almost run out to reverse this decline, this book shows how academics and students need to act now if they are to begin to fix this broken system.

To Professor Peter Fleming, there is a strong link between the neo-liberalization of higher education over the last 20 years and the psychological hell now endured by its staff and students. He believes that impersonal and unforgiving management hierarchies have supplanted academic judgement, collegiality, and professional common sense. He bemoans the modern system of higher education and shines a spotlight on what’s gone wrong and why.

'Fleming's books are sparklingly sardonic and hilariously angry'
Guardian 'Our foremost critic of management ideology, Peter Fleming, turns his talents to the corporate university and what he rightly calls its authoritarian turn, and he does so with devastating results'
Stefano Harney, Honorary Professor, Institute of Gender, Sexuality, Race and Social Justice, University of British Columbia 'A brilliant exposé of the scourge of neoliberalism and its dark transformation of higher education into an adjunct of sordid market forces. This is a book that should be read by anyone concerned with not only higher education but the fate of critically engaged agents, collective resistance and democracy itself'
Henry Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest & The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy 'An excellent and important book'
'Journal of Education, Innovation, and Communication'