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Research and Policy in Education

entrepreneurship and the neoliberal game of academic ‘excellence’ – undercuts any general claims about the totalising effects of neoliberalisation. We are also told that universities are largely ‘selfgoverning institutions’ whose professional interests are guided by the ‘imagined judgement of those whose opinions they [academics] care about’ (74). The take-home message being that it is dangerous and misguided to collapse academic work and the life of the university to an effect of the market or managerial deference. Doing so only impoverishes theorisations of the messiness and slippery dynamics of actually existing higher education. A core strength of the book is its nuanced approach to the question ‘what is the neoliberal university’. It challenges us to avoid reducing all our grievances and discontents to some over-determinate, neoliberal bogeyman, and to resist the ‘politics of pessimism and nostalgia’ (271) that often pervades water-cooler discourse among academics on campus. Instead the authors urge us to remain optimistic about the future of higher education and point to evidence of resistance and hope taking hold and gaining traction despite the onslaught on neoliberal common sense.