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Higher Education and Disaster Capitalism in the Age of COVID-19

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  • © 2022

Overview

Authors:
  1. Marina Vujnovic

    1. Department of Communication, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, USA

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  2. Johanna E. Foster

    1. Political Science and Sociology, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, USA

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    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Offers new cataloging of the policies and practices of disaster capitalism that will contribute to social and critical theory
  • Incorporates lived experiences of the authors as higher education administrators
  • Includes a set of recommendations for resistance that are both theoretically and practically informed

Part of the book series: Palgrave Critical University Studies (PCU)

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxviii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: Disaster Capitalism Comes to Higher Education

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 1-27

  3. A Newer Version of an Old Beast: The Higher Education Disaster Before COVID

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 29-55

  4. Bringing the F.U.D to Thin the Ranks

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 57-104

  5. “Cut to Grow” and the Spider Web of the New Global TEMPS

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 105-143

  6. Laundering Coercion: Restart Planning, “Pandemic Task Forces,” and the Dismantling of Shared Governance

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 145-154

  7. Campuses Respond to COVID: “Pandemia” Not Making the Science Grades

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 155-165

  8. Online Instruction and the “Hyflex Teaching ‘Shock Doctrine’”

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 167-180

  9. Ghosts of Intended Consequences: How OPMs’ Stealth Business Model is Redefining Higher Education

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 181-202

  10. Aspiring Diploma Mills Don’t Stop for Pandemics

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 203-218

  11. Tuition Increases Also Don’t Stop for Pandemics: Student Debt Realities in the Age of COVID-19

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 219-232

  12. Sacrificial Lambs

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 233-264

  13. Resisting the Spider Web of Pandemic Opportunism

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 265-286

  14. After Shock: Our Stories, Our Future

    • Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster
    Pages 287-317

  15. Back Matter

    Pages 319-406
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Keywords

About this book

This book reveals the layered effects of the corporatization of higher education, situated within the phenomenon of disaster capitalism. The authors argue that higher education administrators have seized on the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to advance a corporate higher education agenda consistent with the principles of disaster capitalism. This crisis deeply impacts what and how students in the United States learn, who gets to learn, and the very mission of the academy. Chapters also address neoliberalism as a policy statement that has reshaped and continues to shape higher education in the United States and in much of Western societies.

Reviews

Vujnovic and Foster's Higher Education and Disaster Capitalism is essential for understanding the state of play in contemporary American higher education. Their work provides a theoretical and conceptual grounding for understanding privatization as a large-scale phenomenon while situating the shifts in practice on the ground in context so that faculty, administrators, and advocates can understand from a bird's eye view what role they play.

-Stephanie Hall, Senior Fellow, The Century Foundation

Marina Vujnovic and Johanna Foster have vividly shown that covid-19 both exposed and worsened the business of higher education. This book is a must-read for anyone wondering what went wrong on campuses across the country. Their personal perspective and scholarly research deftly shows that the academy can never go back to their pre-pandemic “normal.”

 -Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Associate Professor of History, Loyola University Chicago

COVID and disaster capitalist opportunism have laid waste to college campuses and devastated the lives of faculty, staff, and students. Yet this precipitous chapter in higher education’s history has also sparked visible resistance. In these contradictory conditions, Higher Education and Disaster Capitalism in the Age of COVID 19 provides needed orientation: a comprehensive examination of how higher education has been rendered vulnerable to vampiric profiteers plus a roadmap to how faculty can join—and are joining—other workers to fight back. In this indispensable volume for our moment, Vujnovic and Foster arm readers to be both “traitors to the myth” that higher education has ever existed free from capitalist aims and injuries and “keepers of the dream” that through mass intersectional movements another kind of university, one in service to radical democracy and freedom, can be built.

Nancy Welch, Professor of English Emerita, University of Vermont

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Communication, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, USA

    Marina Vujnovic

  • Political Science and Sociology, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, USA

    Johanna E. Foster

About the authors

Marina Vujnovic is Professor of Journalism and Communication at Monmouth University, USA. 

Johanna E. Foster is Associate Professor of Sociology and Helen Bennett McMurray Endowed Chair of Social Ethics at Monmouth University, USA.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Higher Education and Disaster Capitalism in the Age of COVID-19

  • Authors: Marina Vujnovic, Johanna E. Foster

  • Series Title: Palgrave Critical University Studies

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12370-2

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Education, Education (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-12369-6Published: 10 November 2022

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-12372-6Published: 11 November 2023

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-12370-2Published: 09 November 2022

  • Series ISSN: 2662-7329

  • Series E-ISSN: 2662-7337

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XXVIII, 406

  • Topics: Higher Education, Media and Communication

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