In the last few years several institutes for higher education got into financial trouble. In 2012 the VU introduced a major program to cut back costs, that involved large scale layoffs. At the background of this were derivatives and real estate investments.

The Financialized University in an Age of Crisis (Real World Economics)

Amarantis, a conglomerate of over sixty schools and 30.000 students, collapsed in 2012 under the weight of financial problems that were related to real estate investments.

In this RWE session we try to get to the roots of this by looking back to the decades of neoliberal transformation and how this effected the inner functioning of academia in the Netherlands.

Speakers: prof. Henk Overbeek (International Political Economy, VU), dr. Dimitris Pavlopoulos (Labour Economist, VU) and dr. Rodrigo Fernandez (Financial Geographer, UvA)