Dictionary Environment 3/E CB

The modern university is sustained by academic freedom; it guarantees higher education's independence, its quality, and its success in educating students. The need to uphold those values would seem obvious. Yet the university is presently under siege from all corners; workers are being exploited with paltry salaries for full-time work, politics and profit rather than intellectual freedom govern decision-making, and professors are being monitored for the topics they teach. No University Is an Island offers a comprehensive account of the social, political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education's renewal. In an insider's account of how the primary organization for faculty members nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best. The book calls on higher education's advocates of both the Left and the Right to temper conviction with tolerance and focus on higher education's real injustices. Nelson demands we stop denying teachers, student workers, and other employees a living wage and basic rights. He urges unions to take up the larger cause of justice. And he challenges his own and other academic organizations to embrace greater democracy. With broad and crucial implications for the future, No University Is an Island will be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom.

Review :
" joins a growing chorus of case studies, memoirs, and research about the implications of the corporate university model... The sense of academic memory and action is what one takes from the book."-School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, SIS Blog, "At the time Nelson wrote "Manifesto of a Tenured Radical", he was deeply involved in the effort to bring graduate student unionization to his campus. Among the chief recommendation in that book were that graduate students on other campuses should also unionize and that faculty should assist. "No University Is an Island" makes these recommendations just as vociferously as ever, this time from the bully pulpit of one of American academia's most venerable organizations. In the end, the "tenured radical" has merely emerged in a new context. If the tone and terminology now seek greater consensus than before, it is with the aim of winning larger stakes in an ongoing struggle to resist the encroachment of economic instrumentalism into one of the few realms where knowledge for its own sake-- and cultural criticism-- have traditionally been valued and protected."-"College Literature", "Nelson is a lively polemicist and academic freedom offers a promising organizing concept for thinking about contemporary higher education."-The Australian: The Heart of the Nation, "Nelson's No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom reminds us that academic freedom is continuously under assault . . . His book, which developed out of conversations with academics all over the country, is a rich and comprehensive set of field notes on the challenges to academic freedom." -Jeffrey R. Di Leo, "symploke" "The battlefield is far more varied now than it was in 1915 or in 1940, when the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges issued the landmark ; but that is in part precisely because of the AAUP. Peer review, job security, freedom to pursue ideas- in this job mark? Tenure? It sounds crazy. As our professional control of our workplace is fast eroding, Neoliberal U is surely no island of paradise. It can be otherwise, exhorts Nelson. Join up."-Academe,