Troubling higher education

There has been a renewed interest in universities as sites of knowledge production and their contributions in the global knowledge economy. Originating in the reforms of the 1980s and spanning numerous countries, New Public Management (NPM) has stimulated a focus on commercialization, corporatization, and privatization across many areas of the public sector. Corporate sector principles and practices and new regimes of work that have culminated in a renewed focus on targets, measurement, cost centres and cost drivers, performance management, standards, and productivity are troubling for higher education. This is primarily because the production and management of knowledge has been reduced to what "counts" in the global marketplace. Higher education is increasingly becoming a "knowledge factory," but how is this knowledge produced? Why does this knowledge "count"? Whose knowledge is being produced? These are the central questions raised in this opening chapter.