No, it's not

For some time I've been thinking about the new direction universities seem to have taken. The European Higher Education Space, tightly intermingled with dogmatic neoliberalism, is bound to transform the traditional purpose of universities and rule their operation.

The EHES is, in no doubt, quite an interesting challenge in some ways. But one suddenly notices that, under the current changing environment, we have assumed as self-evident truth many statements that are more than questionable. We have open our minds to new approaches to higher education; and we've done that for good reason, but with such opening we've allowed some really bad ideas to come inside disguised as modernity. So I wanted to cry out loud against some of them.

Only the basic shouting here. I expect to discuss each statement in isolation in future posts (maybe I'll have to break them into smaller pieces, though).

• A university is not a company.
• Students are not raw materials.
• A graduate is not a product.
• The main customers of universities are not the companies.
• The success of a teacher or university is not measured by students success rate.

There are many, many corollaries to the above statements; in some senses they are even inter-related themselves. I expect to unravel these topics in a near future.