Late Academe

"This book is a major accomplishment, one of the most compelling manuscripts on the politics and philosophy of higher education. Di Leo writes with energy, conviction, and intellectual courage, combining rigor with accessibility in prose that is elegant, persuasive, and clear. The project is impeccably organized, theoretically rich, and empirically grounded in the lived realities of academic life. It represents a significant and original contribution to the literature on neoliberalism, the university, and the fate of critical thought in the twenty-first century."
—Henry A. Giroux, Professor and Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Canada

“Late Academe proves one more time that Jeffrey R. Di Leo is one of our most informed and astute commentators on the American university. At a time when many of us stand idle by in the face of the far-right assault on higher education and acquiesce to neoliberal methods of ‘assessment,’ Di Leo is laying out a radical program for rebuilding a truly forward-looking and free-inquiry-fostering US academic system.”
—Christian Moraru, Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA 

This book offers a critical diagnosis of higher education’s decline under neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on political philosophy, critical theory, and educational thought, the book explores how market-driven metrics have eroded academic freedom, tenure, and the humanities, while undermining the democratic values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Di Leo interrogates the ideological and structural failures of contemporary academe and proposes acts of resistance as a path forward. This book reframes the university as a site of struggle between democratic education and neoliberal obsolescence. This book is essential reading for scholars of higher education, critical pedagogy, and political theory seeking to understand the twilight of academic life and imagine what might follow its collapse.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at Texas A&M University, Victoria, USA. He is the author and editor of over forty books on higher education, literary theory, and neoliberalism, including Dark Academe (2024), Catastrophe and Higher Education (2020), and Corporate Humanities in Higher Education (2014).