European higher education is adopting a free-market or corporate-business discourse. Increasingly the academy is talked about in terms of a ‘knowledge industry’ or ‘revenue generator’, where intellectual resources are ‘leveraged’, and knowledge is a ‘commodity’. Critical analyses of the vocabulary, imagery, rhetoric and assumptions featured in popular business texts suggest a discourse which can be characterized as management-centred, ethically decontextualized, universalizing, libertarian, Darwinian, consumerist, and alarmist. Its adoption within the academy has important implications for the future of European higher education.
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