ABSTRACT
Universities teach students and conduct research, but increasingly they are also required to produce and facilitate innovations to improve national economies. Furthermore, university activities are intensively monitored, from admissions and hiring to budget, research, and teaching management. In this book we investigate how two universities have engaged with those challenges and how those activities, in turn, have changed them, their teaching, research, and engagement with innovation in specific ways. This means that we critically and empirically challenge the idea of the neoliberal university as a singular construct. In this book we argue that some university practices are unsustainable and have been so for decades: financially, managerially, pedagogically, and intellectually. We discuss how to change those practices and how to enhance the work we find supports university sustainability. In this chapter, we describe changing university-society relationships, while positioning our work alongside that conducted in the fields of higher education studies and critical university studies, plus science and technology studies. We map four key concepts to navigate four transformations at work in our universities: addressed in the next four chapters where we explore the tropes of quality, governance, subjectivity, and mobility. We identify our questions, hypotheses, research strategies, and our key concepts of domestication, faultlines, co-morphing, and meshworking. We introduce our two field sites, two public universities, NTNU in Norway and UCLA in California, and show how they are differently situated in global political economies.
