Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis

"Universities were always beach-heads of colonial practice. The Indigenous activist, artist and intellectual Klee Benally calls for academics to betray their institutions in the name of liberation. This book makes an iron-clad case why that's true. Everyone connected to a university needs to read it, learn treachery, and join the mutiny."

Raj Patel, Research Professor, University of Texas at Austin.

"Through research, scholarship and guiding students’ learning, universities influence our capacity to shape the future. This important book shows that transforming our universities is essential if we are to meet the challenges we now face, then demonstrates how this transformation can happen. It is required reading."

Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe AO, Griffith University, Australia.

"This timely, scholarly book identifies universities as part of the crises of global pandemics, climate change, racism and inequality. In what is a refreshingly original read, the authors insist that in confronting and overcoming the effects of colonialism and neoliberal economic systems, universities can become far more inclusive and democratic."

Emeritus Professor Stuart Rees AM, University of Sydney, Australia.

"The authors of Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis take readers on a journey across the past, present, and possible futures of higher education. They explore questions of how the many intersecting crises facing universities today can be seen as opportunities to open our horizons for radically reimagining and transforming them. The authors not only provide inspiration for recomposing universities with relocalized, regenerative, cooperative, decolonial cultures, but also offer practical guidance for realizing such transformation. Everyone who cares about the future of higher education should read this book."

Dr Eli Meyerhoff, author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World.

"To reclaim our universities from the unrepentant sickness of neoliberalism, and the pathogenic Presidents and virulent Vice Chancellors who spew its corporate pestilence, we must take action. Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis is ground zero in our battle for the future of critical thought."

Professor Simon Springer, author of Fuck Neoliberalism (PM Press) and The Discourse of Neoliberalism (Rowman & Littlefield).

"Universities are vital to the intellectual development of society yet face tremendous challenges as technology, academia, society and the climate change. Hil, Lyons and Thompsett have produced a must read book that focuses on a range of risks (particularly neoliberalism) to the future of universities and democracy. In doing so, they lift the lid on many tough yet fascinating questions, and set out a vision for a social and climate just university."

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg FAA, ARC Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland

"Universities were in failing health long before the pandemic hit. With the sector now in intensive care, the time for incremental tweaks and band-aids is over. Now is the moment for bold ideas and wider perspectives, and so this volume is arriving at exactly the right time. ‘Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis’ manages to weld clear-eyed critique with an ambitious visioning for what needs to come next. In less experienced hands this would come off as utopian; instead it reads as simple necessity. A roadmap for breaking our Universities out of the neoliberal chokehold, imagining instead how Universities might take their place within a decolonised, ecological society."

Scott Ludlam, activist, writer, former Australian Senator