University, production of knowledge and evaluation

Abstract

This paper focuses on changes that occurred in the public university system during the last decades of the 20th century, when the work carried out by this institution started to be evaluated according to entrepreneurial criteria. At the same time the public funding of academic activities and research was reduced. As a consequence, the competitiveness between groups of professors and researchers was intensified, reinforcing the lack of solidarity and producing all sorts of exclusions. Thus, the stress felt by professors and researchers as well as by graduate students increased enormously. In such an atmosphere, a major part of the public universities’ production is developed on the basis of “moral mobbing”, “psychological terror” and “burn-out syndrome”.

Key words: expansion and differentiation of higher education, teaching, commodification of knowledge, university research, moral mobbing, evaluation criteria.