Marina Vujnovic & Johanna E. Foster 
Higher Education and Disaster Capitalism in the Age of COVID-19 [PDF ebook] 

This book reveals the layered effects of the corporatization of higher education, situated within the phenomenon of disaster capitalism. The authors argue that higher education administrators have seized on the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to advance a corporate higher education agenda consistent with the principles of disaster capitalism. This crisis deeply impacts what and how students in the United States learn, who gets to learn, and the very mission of the academy. Chapters also address neoliberalism as a policy statement that has reshaped and continues to shape higher education in the United States and in much of Western societies.

Table of Content

Chapter 1: Introduction: Disaster Capitalism Comes to Higher Education.- Part I: Covid Trojan Horses.- Chapter 2: Laundering Coercion: Restart Planning, “Pandemic Task Forces” and the Dismantling of Shared Governance.- Chapter 3: Flexing for the State: The Push for Hyflex Modalities in State Legislatures.- Chapter 4: Staff Furloughs for Some, Chiefs of Staff for Others (Expand Administration and Shrink the Rest).- Chapter 5: Bringing the F.U.D. to Union Bust.- Part II: Covid Sleights of Hand.- Chapter 6: For the Love of Remote Learning? Now We Love it, Now We Don’t.- Chapter 7: Aspiring Diploma Mills Don’t Stop for Pandemics.- Chapter 8: Don’t Look Now: Tuition Increases and Student Debt.- Part III: Sacrificial Lambs.- Chapter 9: (Further) Stealing from Poor Students: CARES Act Profiteering.- Chapter 10: Student Life and Death: When COVID Responses are Turned Over to Athletics and Student Affairs.- Chapter 11: COVID Testing on Campus: Not Making the Science Grades.- Part V: Anti-Corporatization Resistance.- Chapter 12: Students Demand Justice.- Chapter 13: COVID, Campus Essential Workers, and the Movement for Racial Justice.- Chapter 14: Faculty Fight for the Soul of Higher Education.- Chapter 15: Recommendations and Call to Action.

About the author

Marina Vujnovic is Professor of Journalism and Communication at Monmouth University, USA. 




Johanna E. Foster is Associate Professor of Sociology and Helen Bennett Mc Murray Endowed Chair of Social Ethics at Monmouth University, USA.