Social Anthropology

The restructuring of New Zealand's universities is often considered a paradigmatic case of neo‐liberal reform and governance. While tertiary education is increasingly central to government's ideas about the future global knowledge economy, a new set of discourses has emerged around universities and their role that draws together different, often contradictory, agendas. This heralds not the death of the liberal idea of the university but a shift towards a new, multi‐layered conception in which universities are expected to fulfil a plethora of different functions. This article examines the implications of this emerging ‘schizophrenic university’ paradigm and its effects on academic subjectivities.

Fifteen years ago South Africa's first democratic government inherited a tertiary sector marred by racial segregation. Since then higher education policies have been implemented with the aim of turning the sector around. Using the historically black University of Limpopo as a case, this article examines the impact of these policies from the perspective of students. It does so by combining a situational analysis of the student protests that erupted in 2007 at the University's main campus with a critical review of the impact that the new policies have had on university funding and autonomy.

A series of events concerning the reform of higher education in Serbia, revolved around whether students who graduated prior to the formal adoption of the Bologna Process should be given the title of Masters, instead of Bachelors. It quickly became a matter of public contestation between different actors, resulting in a student protest that developed into a critique of the ‘neoliberal’ reform of higher education. This article analyses the sequence of events and the discursive strategies of the actors involved. In showing how the protests became part of power negotiations on the political scene in Serbia, the conclusion reflects on the relationship between power and discourse.

This article concerns the changes produced by the introduction of university reform in the Anthropology Department at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. It scrutinizes how the reform has been negotiated in relation to local traditions and habits by closely observing the practices of teachers and students, and by listening to and analyzing the narratives they produce. It analyses the relationships between university transformation and epistemic as well as institutional changes in a single discipline and puts forward the crucial question: how is anthropology changing inside the university in change?