Join QCAA and Queen’s Students Vs Cuts on Tuesday, February 13th, 5:30-7:30pm, on the 2nd floor of the Grad Club, for a Reading Group about austerity, vampiric consulting firms, and university restructuring.

Verhoeven, D., & Eltham, B. (2023). “Nousferatu”: Are corporate consultants extracting the lifeblood from universities? Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2023.2290972

Abstract and more resources below.

Please feel free to come even if you aren’t able to read the article. We look forward to seeing you there!!

Abstract: Universities and management consultants are locked in a
danse macabre. We turn to the vampire genre to elaborate on the relationship of consulting companies to the university sector, focusing on the University of Alberta in Canada and Monash University in Australia. We are academics with long experience of the consequences of change management and the employment of consultants in universities. Deb is sufficiently “long in the tooth” that her entire career spans the period of heightened government and private sector intervention in Australian universities that began in the late 1980s and more recently she has had the experience of watching this process occur again, at speed, in Canada. Ben is a representative of the National Tertiary Education Union at Australia’s largest university. He is also an experienced journalist who has reported on Australian higher education and public policy for more than two decades. The essay argues that consultants and universities are engaged in a mutually dependent relationship designed to sustain each other at the expense of the public.

Note: For more information, we have compiled some further readings on university restructuring and some samples of case studies and reports from Nous.