The Para-academic handbook

I have recently been struggling to find a word to describe the growing movement of resistance towards the ever more corporate mission of the university. I toyed at fist with calling this emerging body of people, ideas and practices the Subversity in recognition of its largely subterranean nature. But it is no longer an underground movement; the resistance may not be immediately apparent, it may not advertise itself overtly, but it is there, unseen in plain sight, functioning side-by-side with the corporate mission. I finally settled on the Paraversity, which I described as a subversive, virtual community of dissensus that exists alongside and in parallel to the corporate university. Had I thought of it at the time, I might well have also coined the term ‘para-academics’ for those individuals who work across and against the corporate agenda of what Bill Readings called the ruined university, whose mission is, as far as I can see, the generation and sale of information (the so-called research agenda) and the exchange of student fees for degree certificates (the teaching agenda). However, it seems that I have been beaten to it by Th Para-Academic Handbook.
[Bristol: 2014]

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