General Events

Attend a lecture in the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar "At Risk U: The Past, Present, & Future of Academic Freedom" lecture series with Rachel Ida Buff (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee).

A Threat to What? Private Consultancies Managing “Risk” in Higher Education 

In this presentation, Professor Buff will historicize the advent of private consultancies in the 20th century, a development that accompanied the ascendance of  managerial capitalism and the military industrial complex. These consultancies made their way into higher education during the 1980s as part of  neoliberal “reform” of education; they gained more traction through disaster capitalism following the Great Recession of 2008 and the Covid-19 Pandemic. The talk examines the practices and consequences of this ubiquitous for-profit, industry. Often invisible to students and academic workers, private consultancies are reshaping the contemporary university, with important consequences for workplace democracy and governance as well as academic freedom. 

About the Speaker

Rachel Ida Buff is Professor of History and Director of the Culture and Communities Program at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Her research and teaching interests include immigration rights, comparative ethnic studies, and diasporic cultural citizenship. She has published a multitude of books and articles including her latest book Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century and chapter publications in Deportation in the Americas, Histories of Exclusion and Resistance (2017), Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice in Palestine (2017), and New Routes for Diaspora Studies (2012). Her previous appointments include Coordinator of the Comparative Ethnic Studies program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and Associate Professor of History at Bowling Green State University. Buff holds a BA from Brown University and an MA and PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota.