Through a textual analysis of four episodes comprising the ITV 1 psychological thriller "Cheat," this paper explores depictions of the English Higher Education [HE] landscape and of the lived experiences of being an academic in the television drama. We achieve this through a focus on the fictional HE institution where the drama is set --…

This article reports findings from a research project on the impact of neo-liberalism on university life in the UK. Unusually, data collection includes interviews with senior management such as heads of departments and senior professors, as well as with lecturers and union representatives. Interviewees reported that the nature of institutional and…

Higher education in the UK is under increasing pressure to manage the workload of its academic staff in a way that maximises the outputs from teaching and research. The emergence of this trend can be traced back to 1989 and the government legislation that introduced neo-liberal managerialism into the sector mirroring the laissez-faire approach to…