Mayo refused renewal of university professorship, rails at ‘failed neoliberal state’

The university academic Prof. Peter Mayo has been refused a renewal of his full-time professorship at the University of Malta, in a decision by the Council to have him retire at 68.

Prof. Mayo, whose extensive body of work on adult education includes Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education, which is translated in seven languages, announced the decision on his Facebook profile, complaining that the Council had rejected a unanimous recommendation by the Faculty of Education and its Dean. The Council decided that Mayo will now serve as a resident academic.

“So many academics have been allowed to continue well into their late 70s. I leave it up to readers to compare the research track records of some to mine,” Prof. Mayo said, adding that he will be seeking new pastures.

“Shame on the University. Shame on the failed neoliberal state which is overrepresented on Council, which adds this to the insult of forcing me to go private to conclude a post-eye operation, pending since 2021, than wait for Godot.”

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Mayo said he had just designed an online MA course in Adult Education which, he said, had helped place the University on the map. “The signs l initially took lightly are finally laid bare. A Dean who is Council member recently had the gall to ask me, out of the blue, whether I should retire. My answer was that I feel I have given and will continue to give my best to students and the international research community... what I took lightly and playfully now took a sinister turn.”

Mayo was the University of Malta’s first UNESCO chair in Global Adult Education, an established post created in accordance with UNESCO.

Mayo has published well over 100 papers and has been serving as book series editor for Sense Publishers, Bloomsbury Academic, and Palgrave-Macmillan. “It is not just adult education and critical pedagogy to which I made a contribution but also sociology, including sociology of education and culture. And by contribution, I mean internationally not in the comfort and unchallenged zones of home,” he said on Facebook.

Mayo is a former head of the Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education at the University of Malta, and is responsible for the UNESCO Chair in Global Adult Education at the same university. He formerly served as the university’s head of the Department of Education Studies from 2008 to 2012.

He teaches in the areas of sociology of education and adult continuing education, and was a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Education, University College London during 2014.

He is also one of the editors for the refereed journal Postcolonial Directions in Education. He also serves on the editorial advisory boards of several international peer reviewed journals including the International Journal of Lifelong Education, Journal of Transformative Education, and Educational Philosophy and Theory.