Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Knowledge Societies and Knowledge Economies -- Education and Ideologies of the Knowledge Economy -- Globalization and the Crisis in the Concept of the Modern University -- Poststructuralism, Marxism and the University -- Lyotard, Marxism and Higher Education: The Problem of Knowledge Capitalism -- The University and the New Humanities -- Universities, Regional Policy and the Knowledge Economy -- ‘Development Education’ in the Global Knowledge Economy -- Higher Education, Development, and the Learning Economy -- The Rise of Global Science and the Emerging Political Economy of International Research Collaborations -- Higher Education, Globalisation and the Knowledge Economy: Reclaiming the Cultural Mission -- The University ‘After’ the Disciplines and ‘Before’ the New World Economy -- Neoliberalism, Performance and the Assessment of Research Quality -- Research Quality, Bibliometrics and the Republic of Science -- Degrees of Freedom: Open Source, Open Access and Free Science -- References -- Biographical Note.

Prophetically, almost thirty years ago Jean-François Lyotard forecast the end of the modern research university based on Enlightenment principles. He envisaged the emergence of technical institutes in the service of the information-rich global multinationals. This book reflects on the post-war Western university and its discourses charting the crisis of the concept of the modern university. First, it examines the university within a global networked economy; second, it adopts poststructuralist perspectives in epistemology, politics and ethics to appraise the role of the contemporary university; third, it introduces the notion of 'development' in a critical fashion as a way of explaining its potentially new regional and international learning roles; fourth, it analyzes the rise of global science and the disciplines in the context of the global economy; and, finally, it raises Lyotard’s 'logic of performativity' and the assessment of research quality within a neoliberal economy, linking it firmly to the question of freedom and the republic of science.

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