This book offers a systematic, sectoral, and in-depth Marxist perspective on the critique of political economy of higher education. It proposes an original method of analysis of higher education as a field of capitalist production, grounded at the intersection of mainstream higher education research and contemporary debates in Marxist theories. At the same time, it imbues a political perspective based on the embedding of higher education within the wider social network of antagonistic relations that traverse the capitalist economy at large.
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. On Method: A Critique of the Political Economy of Higher Education.- Chapter 3. Capital not Market: the Limitations of the Liberal Political Economy of Higher Education.- Chapter 4. Is There a Classical Marxian Circuit of the Industrial Capital in Higher Education?.- Chapter 5. Status and Prestige: The Political Economy of the Academic Field.- Chapter 6. Measure: Capitalist Takeover of Value Signaling in Higher Education.- Chapter 7. Knowledge: Capitalist Contradiction of Open Access.- Chapter 8. Mechanisms of Subsumption of Academic Labour Under Capital.- Chapter 9. Productive and Unproductive Academic Labour.- Chapter 10. Conclusion: Beyond Capital.
Krystian Szadkowski is Assistant Professor in the Scholarly Communication Research Group at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.
Capital in Higher Education is a rewarding, and demanding, exploration of academic publication in higher education. More than the relatively modest claim to provide a toolbox , however, it is a model of an alternative way to do higher education research, and a provocation for those of us working, teaching, and researching in higher education to ourselves push beyond . (Andrew G. Gibson, Higher Education, Vol 89 (5), 2025)
