Building on Ourania Filippakou's previous work on higher education in the fields of governance, neoliberalism, university entrepreneurialism and marketization, institutional and social stratification, Rethinking Higher Education and the Crisis of Legitimation in Europe contributes to the debate on higher education from a critical policy perspective. Introducing new ideas on the relationships between the alleged pursuit of excellence in higher education and the ways in which both deploys and reflects how power is wielded in Europe and other neoliberal capitalist societies. The term "legitimation" is here coined to emphasize how new coercive strategies, political decisions, and management styles have emerged in the age of excellence in higher education. The book concludes with a more personal reflection on the neutrality of higher education and its illusory promises.

Ourania Filippakou is Reader in Education and Director of Teaching and Learning at Brunel University London. Her research focuses the politics of higher education, critical pedagogy, and cultural politics with particular reference to comparative historical analysis, university entrepreneurialism, and marketization. She has published widely in a number of scholarly journals. In 2007 she was elected as a council member of the Society for Research into Higher Education and served as co-editor for the British Educational Research Journal from 2018-2021. Currently she is a co-editor for the Routledge book series Critical Interventions: Politics, Culture and the Promise of Democracy.

Dedication
Acknowledgments

Part I: Higher Education and the Crisis of Politics in Europe
Chapter 1: Rethinking the changing landscape of higher education
Chapter 2: Higher education and critical pedagogy: A path forward

Part II: Neoliberal Ideology and the Politics of the Quality Agenda in the UK and Europe
Chapter 3: Confronting the quality agenda: A case study
Chapter 4: Legitimising the quality agenda: Evolution and the politics of normalization

Part III: The New Managerialism and the Changing Face of Higher Education
Chapter 5: The changing politics of governance in higher education under neoliberalism
Chapter 6: Rethinking higher education beyond the neoliberal paradigm

Part IV: Challenges and Possibilities
Chapter 7: Critical pedagogy in the age of multiple pandemics (with Henry A. Giroux)
Chapter 8: Conclusion: Why higher education policy, pedagogy, and research should not be neutral: Reclaiming higher education as a public good