Resisting Neoliberal Schooling: Dismantling the Rubricization and Corporatization of Higher Education, edited by award-winning author and professor Anthony J. Nocella II, is the first book that critiques the use of rubrics in assessment and evaluation within education and the effects of the rubric as a tool for social and intellectual control. This powerful theoretical intervention goes beyond the most dangerous academic repressive theory, standardization, and critically interrogates the next step in academic control, rubricization. Nocella, a public intellectual on the school-to-prison pipeline and academic repression, gathers together brilliant scholars from around the world to write on the mass normalization, assimilation, homogenization, and commodification of knowledge learning, creation, and analysis. The most important theme of this book is the challenging, resisting, and explaining of neoliberalism in education. This thought-provoking and engaging anthology has writings by Clifton Sanders, Roderic Land, Ashley Cox, Lauralea Edwards, Anthony J. Nocella II, David Robles, Emily Thompson, Elisa Stone, Lea Lani Kinikini, Elizabeth Vasileva, Will Boisseau, Adalberto Aguirre, Jr., Rubén Martinez, Richard Van Heertum, Victor M. Mendoza, Laura Schleifer, Riley Clare Valentine, Steve Gennaro, Doug Kellner, Frank A. Fear, Caroline K. Kaltefleiter, David Bokovoy, Anthony J. Nocella, and Paul R. Carr.
This book could not come at a more urgent time. At a moment when we are facing multiple existential crises, it has never been more critical for the universities to be freed from the ravages of neoliberalism and restored to their potential role in providing humanity with skills, knowledge and ideas needed to meet the challenges of our times. From calling out the exclusivity, elitism, labor exploitation and commodification of higher education under neoliberalism, to examining how the corporations have taken over and used academic fields as forces of indoctrination into neoliberal ideology, to exploring liberatory and even anarchistic ways of freeing the universities from neoliberalism's death grip, Resisting Neoliberal Schooling: Dismantling the Rubricization and Corporatization of Higher Education is exactly the sort of education the corporate ruling class is buying out the school system in order to prevent you from getting! -Laura Schleifer, Co-Director, Institute for Critical Animal Studies