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Keynote Address Within this neo-liberal context, to propose that uni-versities shall be linked as much to the constitution of democratic identities as to the production and repro-duction of knowledge for the purpose of increasing productivity, would be considered a romantic pos-ture. (Torres & Shugurensky, 2002, p. 450) The consequences of globalization are as yet unclear. As Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Google, noted, “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that human-ity doesn’t understand ” (Murray, 2007, p. 233). In much the same manner, we do not comprehend the full effects of glo-balization (which has been made possible, in reality, by Internet technologies), especially the full effects of global-ization on institutions of higher education. The shift from a national political economy to an international or global political economy has brought about shifts in funding sources; in the academic labor market, especially in the shift from tenured, full-time academic faculty to contingent and non-tenure-track faculty; in alterations in our perceptions of the faculty–student relationship (from tutor–student to shop-keeper–customer); in a restructuring of the curriculum toward increasingly international perspectives and away from a Western, European emphasis; in the restructuring of governance traditions, with a concomitant resurgence of centralization and subsequent loss of faculty power; and additionally with the metrics of quality evaluations of fac-ulty and institutional “product, ” away from teaching and the generation of basic research and toward a “culture of accountability, ” or the “audit culture ” (Strathern, 2000). A potent effect of the globalization of economies has been the direct capitalist intrusion into higher education, with its attendant commercialization of information and knowledge systems, and the products of faculty research