This collection of essays provides a timely analysis of the current state and potential future of higher education and its subsequent impact on society. The multinational and multidisciplinary contributors analyze the variety of professional, intellectual, social and political factors that govern our individual and collective behavior, and how these forces undermine society's traditional goals for higher education: critical and intellectual development, and civic engagement. These historical democratic-social values are coming to be replaced with those of production and consumption in service to the global economy. The competing and contradictory demands placed upon higher education are often at odds with the traditional notions of liberal education that persist as performative facade, an idealization of the academy existing primarily in the lore, rituals, and mission statements of most colleges and universities, but not always in the outcomes faculty are expected to produce.