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Andrea Peto on How to Survive Illiberalism’s Attacks

“Illiberalism in higher education operates outside of the previous consensual knowledge framework as it does not aim to produce facts nor to create a mirror image of reality,” our Research Affiliate Andrea Peto writes in University World News.

“The optimism of my colleagues working in higher education that illiberalism will not impact tenured academics, their academic freedom and the status of higher education in the global higher education landscape – or rather their sleepwalking approach to illiberalism – seems to be unfounded,” she argues.

“The policy measures introduced by illiberal states in the field of higher education, such as direct control over the finances of universities, deleting previously accredited study programmes or inventing new disciplines, were first tested in the Hungarian laboratory,” she continues, adding that “for illiberals, higher education is not a space for critical reflection and the transfer of knowledge, but a place for quickly and efficiently educating an adaptable workforce and a site that should be ruled and dominated to achieve their ideological aims.”

She also highlights the four strategies of illiberalism:

  1. breaking the academic norms,
  2. bending the rules,
  3. using extra-legal methods,
  4. de-specification which involves the reorganization of educational programs.

Read the full article here.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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