Aliakbar Jafari
Universities are increasingly criticized for moving away from being a public good to becoming commercialized businesses operating in a neoliberal economic system. In such a system, like for-profit corporations, universities must compete over resources (e.g., revenues coming from student fees, industry consultancy, and/or government funding). Such competition has instigated the development of different tools (e.g., Research Excellent Framework, Knowledge Exchange Framework, and Teaching Excellence Framework) for assessing universities’ performance and reputation (i.e., ranking). The main problem with these assessments is that universities’ key performance indicators can be incompatible. For example, better research performance for an institution may mean less time for students, and better performance in teaching can mean that academics have less time for research.
Having spent over 13 years in the Department of Marketing, I am delighted to say that my colleagues and I have been navigating these institutional complexities extremely conscientiously. Despite facing increasing pressures in the HE sector, we continue to remain focused on our students’ learning. Fully devoted to our students’ personal and professional development, we are loyal to the University of Strathclyde’s original vision (i.e., the place of useful learning). Embedding markets in society, we train our students to be able to see markets from a broader societal perspective, i.e., understand how markets, as reflections of their societies, generally function. While mastering the cutting-edge technical knowledge of marketing, our students develop a series of key skills such as social intelligence and critical and innovative thinking. Pivotal to their learning is the application of marketing NOT as a profit maximization instrument but as a useful tool for the sustainable development of human society at large.
Thanks to the collective contributions of all those who have served the Department over the past fifty years, our students can proudly and confidently take up different roles (e.g., in industry, policy, and research and education) after their graduation work towards addressing very challenging problems.
Dr Aliakbar Jafari
Department of Marketing
