Major changes in the governance of higher education and the public sciences have taken place over the past 40 or so years in many OECD countries. These have affected the nature of authority relationships governing research priorities and the evaluation of results. In particular, the increasing exogeneity, formalisation and substantive nature of governance mechanisms, as well as the strength and extent of their enforcement, have altered the relative authority of different groups and organisations over research priorities and evaluations, as well (...) as creating some new ones. These shifts in authority have occurred to different degrees in differently organised public science systems. As a result, the diversity and longevity of many research projects, the intensity of competition for disciplinary reputations and the coordination of research goals and outcomes across universities and national boundaries have changed to different degrees in different countries. (shrink)

Neoliberal precepts of the governance of academic science-deregulation; reification of markets; emphasis on competitive allocation processes have been conflated with those of performance management—if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it—into a single analytical and consequent single programmatic worldview. As applied to the United States’ system of research universities, this conflation leads to two major divergences from relationships hypothesized in the governance of science literature. (1) The governance and financial structures supporting academic science in the United States’ system of (...) higher education are sufficiently different from those found in many other OECD countries where these policies have been adopted to produce political pressures for an increase rather than a decrease in governmental control over university affairs. (2) The major impact upon academic science of performance measurement systems has come not externally from new government requirements but internally from the independent adoption of these techniques by universities, initially in the name of rational management and increasingly as devices to foster reputational enhancement. The overall thrust of the two trends in the U.S. has been less a shift as experienced elsewhere from bureaucratic to market modes of governance than the displacement of professional-collegial control by internal bureaucratic control. (shrink)

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism. Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between (...) the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task--and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity.". (shrink)