Contested Future of Higher Education

This book contributes to critical university studies by examining the corporatization of higher education at the University of Alberta, placing this experience in a broad comparative context, and drawing attention to aspects of the politics of knowledge that have often been overlooked in this genre.

The chapters in this collection provide a detailed account of the restructuring of higher education by successive neo-liberal governments in Alberta, Canada, with a focus on developments at the University of Alberta since 2019. They explain how a corporate model of executive management has been imposed which disempowers faculty and students while facilitating the indirect control of post-secondary institutions by right-wing governments. Elements of this story will be familiar to scholars of the “corporatization” of higher education in other contexts, but the book’s authors go beyond this analytical framework, highlighting the colonial and fossil capitalist drivers of post-secondary restructuring in the Alberta context and asking readers to consider what a university that was committed to decolonization and climate justice might look like and what obstacles must be overcome to realize such a vision. They argue that these obstacles lie not only in the power relationships that shape state regulation of post-secondary education, but also in the weaknesses of faculty and student collective action and in the patriarchal, Eurocentric, and extractivist perspectives that are deeply embedded in the knowledge systems of universities situated in settler-colonial states.

The Contested Future of Higher Education: Lessons from Alberta is an invaluable resource for anyone invested in the future of education in settler-colonial societies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

Laurie E. Adkin is Professor Emerita of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, where she taught and researched in the fields of comparative politics, environmental studies, and gender studies.