Austerity Blues is a must read for people engaged in public higher education and an important addition to Critical University Studies.
Radical Teacher
They [Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier.] draw on a wealth of scholarship and journalism across several disciplines and topics, uniting and analyzing phenomena often examined in detailed isolation. These include the broad structural factors shaping ... Read morepublic higher education, the incentives that influence university-level decision making, the ways that austerity policies intensify inequality within university systems, and the role of technology in all of these processes. The resulting synthesis reveals the long history and present extent of the impoverishment of public higher education, and what it will take to protect the public university as a democratic experiment firmly planted in the public commons.
The Gotham Center for New York City History
Austerity Blues leaves readers wanting to know more about the forces that have facilitated this trend... Fabricant and Brier's analysis raises important questions about the kinds of political change that will be necessary to reverse the austerity policies that they describe and what it will take to realize those changes. As such, this book establishes a powerful agenda for future research.
Academe
Austerity Blues raises many crucial questions about the purposes of public higher education, pervasive (and growing) inequality, and the consequences of divestment and austerity politics. Most importantly, it ends by asking: What's next? And in that question, it urges each one of us to individually and collectively think about the future and our contribution to that future.
Josipa Roska Show Less