Unspoken resistances

Abstract

Stefan Collini has been one of the most persistent and articulate critics of the massive changes in UK higher education over the last decade or so. His interventions, in the London Review of Books and in his influential book What Universities are for?, have charted and interrogated these shifts in significant detail and with an eye to articulating progressive responses. Speaking of Universities brings together a number of essays that engage with what he describes as ‘forces at work in shaping contemporary universities that are more powerful and more pervasive even than the question of replacing direct funding with a system of fees plus incomes-contingent loans’. These pieces are combined with new essays which usefully position current debates in relation to a longer history of critical writing on universities, and which signal his concern with scrutinising the terms on which universities are spoken and written about.