Staging a Battle, Losing the Wars? International Studies, ‘Science’ and the Neoliberalisation of the University (original) (raw)
He who rides on the back of a tiger may wind up inside ' -Chinese proverb In the late 18 th century, the great German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, had been embroiled in what he called 'the contest of the faculties' (1979 [1798]) in which he argued for the priority of philosophy over theology, law and medicine as the protector of the critical power of reason in the university. Thereby, he effectively opened the way for the subsequent resurgence of academic inquiry as a political force in the wider context of society, and thus gave the modern university its mission. Today, indeed for some time already, we witness a recurrence of the conflict of the faculties. In the meantime, however, the tables have been turned. The natural sciences have long since established themselves as academic disciplines, representing our most prestigious form of knowledge and, serving as conduit for the entry of capitalism and industry into the university, together with technology took over the role of leading productive force. As a consequence, philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences are left languishing in little more than a marginal position. The late 20 th and early 21 st century 'contest of the faculties' thus takes on a completely different complexion than in the time of the Enlightenment.
Interdisciplinarity, neoliberalism and academic identities
Journal of Education, 2017
This paper explicates the growing interest in interdisciplinarity as a form of knowledge organisation at the University of Botswana (UB). It accomplishes this by locating this development in a global context of a growing instrumentalisation of knowledge, partially occasioned by the advent of the knowledge society. Generally, the paper argues that interdisciplinarity is not some neutral, apolitical technical re-arrangement of knowledge, as often presented. Rather, it is a political technology implicated in attempts to break academics’ monopoly on the processes and products of higher education (HE). It attributes interdisciplinarity’s rise to the emergence in the 1970s of neoliberalism as a social settlement that privileges market rationality. There is, therefore, affinity between interdisciplinarity and neoliberalism, and it is a relationship in which the former is being deployed by the latter in HE to produce ‘neoliberal academic subjects’. The case of UB is presented as a specific ...
Interrogating the University as an Engine of Capitalism: neoliberalism and academic 'raison d'état'
In the era of knowledge capitalism, universities are consistently regarded as potential 'engines' of capital accumulation and state prosperity. This article will argue that as regards their teaching and research functions – but with specific attention to the research function – universities can be seen to be enacting a type of neoliberal discourse/discursive practice that corresponds to the particular notion of 'raison d'état' raised by Foucault in his 1978-79 Collège de France lectures on neoliberalism. The positioning of monetary accumulation and expansion in the rawest sense as the ultimate desirable goal of universities serves to enact the type of 'limitation of self-regulation' which Foucault describes as a function of the (new) liberal state, conditioned as it is to build itself, and condition all of its behaviour, on the principal goal of economic growth and accumulation, enacting a form of neoliberal governmentality, in Foucault's (and others') terms. Subsequently, a neoliberal conception of science as necessarily wedded to a narrow instrumental-economic idea of technology continues to animate public discourse both at the government and university levels, resulting in a complex – and at times contested – political terrain which revolves around a particular economic regime of truth predicated in growth and accumulation before any other consideration. In this context, universities must grow and expand, but particularly in the ways that are demanded by the particular regime of truth which is hegemonic at the time, which revolve around what is understood here as the neoliberal discourse of knowledge capitalism. This argument is offered with the example of Canada in mind in particular, but with cognizance of related trends active in other countries impacted by the 'knowledge economy' discourse in the OECD group of countries, for instance, and beyond.
The Century of Science: The Global Triumph of the Research University
The Century of Science: The Global Triumph of the Research University, 2017
In The Century of Science — edited by Justin J.W. Powell, David P. Baker, and Frank Fernandez — a multicultural, international team of authors examines the global rise of scholarly research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health (STEM+) fields. At the beginning of the 20th century, the global center-point of scientific productivity was about half way between Western Europe and the U.S., in the North Atlantic. Then, the center moved steadily westward and slightly southward—reflecting the burgeoning science capacity of the U.S. supported by America’s thriving public and private universities, technological innovation, and overall economic growth. After WWII, this began to change as the course of the world’s scientific center of gravity turned and for the next 70 years traveled eastward, the direction it still travels, especially due to the rise of China and other prolific East Asian countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Europe continues to be the center of global science. Focusing on these developments, this volume provides historical and sociological understandings of the ways that higher education has become an institution that, more than ever before, shapes science and society. Case studies, supported by the most historically and spatially extensive database on STEM+ publications available, of selected countries in Europe, North America, East Asia, and the Middle East, emphasize recurring themes: the institutionalization and differentiation of higher education systems to the proliferation of university-based scientific research fostered by research policies that support continued university expansion leading to the knowledge society. Growing worldwide, research universities appear to be the most legitimate sites for knowledge production. Countries like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan began the 20th century with prerequisites in place to realize the emerging model of university-based research. Over the past several decades, China, South Korea, and Taiwan, with different historical legacies and conflicts in education and research policy, have witnessed explosive growth, sustained by public and private funds. Qatar recently embarked on an ambitious government-driven effort to develop a world-class university sector and cultivate academic STEM+ research from scratch. These more recent entrants to the global scientific enterprise pose the question whether it is possible to leapfrog across decades, or even centuries, of cultivating university systems, to compete globally. Simultaneously with international and regional competition, world-leading science increasingly implies collaboration across cultural and political borders as global scientific production and networking continue to rise exponentially. This volume’s case studies offer new insights into how countries develop the university-based knowledge thought fundamental to meeting social needs and economic demands. Despite repeated warnings that universities would lose in relevance to other organizational forms in the production of knowledge, our findings demonstrate incontrovertibly that universities have become more—not less—important actors in the world of knowledge. The past hundred years have seen the global triumph of the research university.
Language and Intercultural Communication, 2018
In the years since the second Thatcher government (1983–87), and continuing until the present, universities in the UK have been subjected to a series of neoliberal reforms which have had a deleterious effect on academics’ working conditions and on the kind of research they are required to produce. 1986 saw the introduction of regular sector wide audits of research and scholarly activity designed to make academics more ‘productive’ and the institutions in which they worked more ‘competitive’. This article takes as the object of its investigation the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the most recent iteration of the UK government sponsored assessment exercise. It adopts a transdisciplinary approach which draws on political economy, social theory and critical discourse analysis. The analysis exposes the ways in which the Research Excellence Framework constructs an illusion of intellectual excellence and innovation whose true purpose is the neutralization of the university as a centre of independent knowledge creation and learning, and hence as a potential locus of intellectual opposition to the neoliberal hegemony. The article concludes by calling on academics to refuse the narrow model of research valorized by the REF and to reclaim the idea of the university as a public good.
“A strange modernity”: On the contradictions of the neoliberal university
2017
While many commentators see neoliberalism as a monolithic force changing universities into businesses, in reality its shared veneer of rhetorical vocabulary obscures profound and irresolvable practical contradictions – contradictions that make university life impossible, even in “business” terms.
Science and neoliberal globalization: a political sociological approach
Theory and Society, 2011
The political ideology of neoliberalism is widely recognized as having influenced the organization of national and global economies and public policies since the 1970s. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the neoliberal variant of globalization and science. To do so, we develop a framework for sociology of science that emphasizes closer ties between political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and organizational sociology and that draws attention to patterns of increasing and uneven industrial influence amid several countervailing processes. Specifically, we explore three fundamental changes since the 1970s: the advent of the knowledge economy and the increasing interchange between academic and industrial research and development signified by academic capitalism and asymmetric convergence; the increasing prominence of science-based regulation of technology in global trade liberalization, marked by the heightened role of international organizations and the convergence of scientism and neoliberalism; and the epistemic modernization of the relationship between scientists and publics, represented by the proliferation of new institutions of deliberation, participation, activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization.
Specters of Weber: Science as a Vocation in the Age of Neoliberalism
Featuring essays by Ivan Ascher and Will Roberts, this critical exchange shows how the work of both professors and students is deeply structured by the demands of the neoliberal marketplace. Directing our attention to the precise economic conditions under which scholarship is produced and students are molded, these essays illuminate that academic work is complicit with the fantasies of free choice and passionate attachment.
Setting up a discipline, II: British history of science and “the end of ideology”, 1931–1948
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2004
For the history of science the 1940s were a transformative decade, when salient scholars like Herbert Butterfield or Alexandre Koyré set out to shape postwar culture by promoting new standards for understanding science. Some years ago I placed these developments in a tradition of enduring arts-science tensions and the contemporary notion that previous, ''scientistic'', historical practices needed to be confronted with disinterested codes of historical craft . Here, I want to further explore the ideological dimensions of the processes through which the academic study of science became institutionalized. Butterfield's generation of science historians moulded perception of science in highly specific ways. Whereas the scientist-historians of the 1930s put scientific innovation into its socio-economic contexts, postwar accounts portrayed the birth of modern science as an intellectual revolution. Anti-Marxism formed a defining feature of the process by which the image of scientific work as a disinterested journey of the mind came to be institutionalized. Rather than spelling the end of ideology, appointments processes in the early Cold War years reveal disagreement about what science was to be invariably coextensive with dissent about social and political order. Rather than testifying to irreconcilable conflicts between interestedness and historical craft, the work of both the 1930s and 40s speaks of surprisingly productive relations between the two. #
In various nation-states (including the UK) universities (or institutions of higher education) are being reformed along similar lines – to ensure that their aims and substance are closer to the ‘needs’ of the economy. This development undermines the historic aims of universities as sites where the widest range of people get access to the widest range of knowledge that society and the world needs. The crisis of the university is part therefore of the wider crisis of voice in neoliberal democracies. Moving beyond that crisis requires a counter-culture that defends and rebuilds the values of the university against the force of neoliberal culture. This article argues that in the today’s global crisis of finance and democratic legitimacy what societies need is precisely the open thinking about alternative futures that universities were once empowered to provide. The defence of the university against neoliberal attack is therefore part of the wider defence of democracy
The “new spirit of academic capitalism”: Can scientists create generative critique from within?
2016
The 21st-century university is a contested site of neoliberal transformation. Its role is moving away from that of a hub of culture, knowledge and critique to that of a provider of skills and employability for the market. The move towards a lean business model in the management of knowledge production is not an isolated phenomenon, but integral to the shifting economic, political and moral landscapes of global capitalism and the knowledge society. The literature discussing the changes in higher education, which could be collectively termed “critical studies of academia”, remains fragmented and is yet to yield tangible resistance or envision viable alternative models of academic governance. This article discusses the possibility of generating constructive critique of “the new spirit of academic capitalism” from within. French Convention Theory is employed as a conceptual toolbox for unpacking the worlds of worth, conventions and justifications which operate beneath the surface of the...