Workshop details: intellectuals, higher education and their responsibilities...

We can now (finally) announce the details of the workshop on the responsibility of intellectuals and 'the university,' examining why activists in the UK have been so critical of universities recently, where increasing corporate involvement in universities might take us, what intellectuals should be contributing to social and environmental struggle and why doing so is the exception amongst British academics, not the rule.
The discussion leaders will be:
Siobhan McGuirk, who has been active in the Reclaim the Uni campaign in Manchester. The campaign has staged demonstrations and building occupations, as well as engaging in debate and contributing position pieces to student publications, protesting at falling student teaching hours, poor standards of teaching and feedback, unaccountable management and disenfranchisement of the student body at a time when the university is undergoing major changes.
She'll be joined by Hilary Wainwright, the socialist-feminist scholar and editor of Red Pepper magazine. Hilary is also a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam and a research fellow of the International Labour Studies Centre at University of Manchester and the Centre for Global Governance at the London School of Economics. Formerly on the editorial board of New Left Review, she is now on the National Council of the Catalyst thinktank, the only such body on the Left in the UK which does not accept corporate sponsorship, a position it is able to maintain thanks to sponsorship from the trade union movement.