Knowledge For Sale

How free-market fundamentalists have shifted the focus of higher education to competition, metrics, consumer demand, and return on investment, and why we should change this. A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In Knowledge for Sale, Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach. The rationale for the current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. The market-influenced changes to higher education include shifting the cost of education from the state to the individual, turning education from a public good to a private good subject to consumer demand; redefining higher education as a search for the highest-paying job; and turning scholarly research into a competition based on metrics including number of citations and value of grants. Students, administrators, and scholars have begun to think of themselves as economic actors rather than seekers of knowledge. Arguing for active resistance to this takeover, Busch urges us to burst the neoliberal bubble, to imagine a future not dictated by the market, a future in which there is a more educated citizenry and in which the old dichotomies—market and state, nature and culture, and equality and liberty—break down. In this future, universities value learning and not training, scholarship grapples with society's most pressing problems rather than quick fixes for corporate interests, and democracy is enriched by its educated and engaged citizens.

How free-market fundamentalists have shifted the focus of higher education to competition, metrics, consumer demand, and return on investment, and why we should change this. A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In Knowledge for Sale, Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach. The rationale for the current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. The market-influenced changes to higher education include shifting the cost of education from the state to the individual, turning education from a public good to a private good subject to consumer demand; redefining higher education as a search for the highest-paying job; and turning scholarly research into a competition based on metrics including number of citations and value of grants. Students, administrators, and scholars have begun to think of themselves as economic actors rather than seekers of knowledge. Arguing for active resistance to this takeover, Busch urges us to burst the neoliberal bubble, to imagine a future not dictated by the market, a future in which there is a more educated citizenry and in which the old dichotomies—market and state, nature and culture, and equality and liberty—break down. In this future, universities value learning and not training, scholarship grapples with society's most pressing problems rather than quick fixes for corporate interests, and democracy is enriched by its educated and engaged citizens.

In the same way that it has become part of all our lives, computer technology is now integral to the work of the legal profession. The JURIX Foundation has been organizing annual international conferences in the area of computer science and law since 1988, and continues to support cutting-edge research and applications at the interface between law and computer technology. This book contains the 16 full papers and 6 short papers presented at the 26th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2013), held in December 2013 in Bologna, Italy. The papers cover a wide range of research topics and application areas concerning the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, including computational techniques for: classifying and extracting information from, and detecting conflicts in, regulatory texts; modeling legal argumentation and representing case narratives; improving the retrieval of legal information and extracting information from legal case texts; conducting e-discovery; and, applications involving intellectual property and IP licensing, online dispute resolution, delivering legal aid to the public and organizing the administration of local law and regulations. The book will be of interest to all those associated with the legal profession whose work involves the use of computer technology.

Already delayed at the point of origin, having missed a connecting flight, required to spend another night in an interim hotel in a foreign country, and now this! It was as if destiny was preparing him well for this journey of unknowns that he had embarked uponAs Gyana sat in the room alone and looked at the single window with bars, it felt like being in a jail, waiting to be rescued from suspicion. Will they be able to verify his paperwork and identity? Will they do it in a timely manner to enable him to continue with his travel plans? What will happen if they are not able to verify the documents? A multitude of questions played havoc on his mind, with no answers in sight. excerpt from Smile with Knowledge Describing the ground realities faced by an Indian couple when they moved from India to the United States in the early 90s in an age without internet or cell phones, this is a first hand account of the life as foreign students in the U.S., along with its myriad perks and challenges. Relating a true story of success while balancing life on a shoestring budget, this is also a tale of small hopes, small pleasures, small battles, and small victories, and yet how all these small things together formed a memorable journey that was larger than life.

Based on leading empirical psychological research from around the world, this book offers valuable insights on women who sell sex. It synthesizes the extensive body of scholarly work on the topic of women selling sex from a psychological perspective in order to understand why women choose to do so. In turn, the book highlights a range of important sociocultural contexts surrounding the sale of sex that are major sources of stress, and examines how women cope with these circumstances. Illustrating the multi-faceted nature of selling sex, the book will contribute to debates on individual and societal responses to this major sociopolitical—and at the same time, deeply personal—issue. Including original case material and outlining future directions for researchers, it offers an informative and engaging resource for academics, researchers, students and professionals around the globe.