Martin Aidnik (2024) The Public University as a Real Utopia: Towards a Renewal of Higher Education. Palgrave Critical University Studies

Aidnik’s The Public University as a Real Utopia is the twenty-first title to appear in the Palgrave Critical University Studies book series. The series began in 2016 with a mission to foster scholarship that is “troubled by” the “unprecedented changes…being inflicted upon universities” and “imposed by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and little understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed.” In this particular volume, Martin Aidnik argues that—in spite of all the damage and destruction being wrought on higher education across the globe—the public university persists as “an enclave of freedom” and “interstice of difference” with the capacity for renewal (Aidnik, 2024: 28, 146). More than this, if the “real utopian” dimensions of the public university are recognised and fully harnessed, the university can serve as “the avant-garde of change” and harbinger of “social betterment” (ibid.: 200, 203).