Neoliberalism and the Death of the Public University (original) (raw)
Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
2017
Questo Forum prosegue il dibattito aperto da un precedente Forum di Anuac (vol. 5, n. 1, giugno 2016) sulle trasformazioni dell’accademia al tempo del neoliberismo e le relative conseguenze sul futuro dell’antropologia. Auspichiamo che queste ulteriori testimonianze e commenti inducano chi lavora e studia all’universita a formare una coalizione transnazionale capace di immaginare nuove visioni di universita. Il Forum presenta contributi di Virginia R. Dominguez, Sam Beck, Carl A. Maida, Martin A. Mills, Berardino Palumbo, Alan Smart, Ger Duijzings, Alexis M. Jordan & Shaheen M. Christie, Boone W. Shear, Alexander Koensler & Cristina Papa, e del Reclaiming Our University Movement.
Anthropologists in/of the neoliberal academy
Forum analysing the state of universities today, edited by Tracey Heatherington and Filippo M. Zerilli. Short pieces by Cris SHORE & Susan WRIGHT, Vintilă MIHĂILESCU, Sarah GREEN, Gabriela VARGAS-CETINA & Steffan Igor AYORA-DIAZ, Tracey HEATHERINGTON, Dimitris DALAKOGLOU, Noelle MOLÉ LISTON, Susana NAROTZKY, Jaro STACUL, Meredith WELCH-DEVINE, and Jon P. MITCHELL. Piece by Sarah Green entitled "The universities of Manchester and Helsinki: Different paths"
Neoliberalisation and the “Death of the Public University”
Anuac, 2016
The advance of neoliberalism is often linked to what many authors describe as the "death of the public university". Taking up this theme, we explore the idea of the "neoliberal university" as a model and its implications for academia. We argue that this model is having a transformative effect, not only the core values and distinctive purpose of the public university, but also on academic subjectivities of the professional ethos that has traditionally shaped academia.
Collective editorial on the neoliberal university
Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 2020
This collective editorial on the neoliberal university follows eight days of strike action at sixty UK universities called by the University and College Union (UCU) in two separate legal disputes, one on pensions and one on pay and working conditions. Anticipating the recent labor strike after previous industrial disputes in 2018 at UK universities, the work included here emanates from two dialogues at the Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM) in summer 2019, a public meeting called Protest Pub and a conference session on the neoliberal subject and the neoliberal academy. After an opening statement by the editors, this collective endeavor begins with the urgent collaborative action of graduate students and early-career academics and is followed by reflections on life in the neoliberal academy from those involved in the dialogues at the NGM 2019 in Trondheim. Additionally, the editorial introduces the content of the present issue.
Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume I
2019
Aims of the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and with little understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed. The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage, and publish scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direction of these reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a much-needed forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and will do this with particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The series explores these changes across a number of domains including: the deleterious effects on academic work, the impact on student learning, the distortion of academic leadership, and the perversion of institutional politics. Above all, the series encourages critically informed debate, where this is being expunged or closed down in universities.
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
Academic critique of neoliberal academia
Sites, 2015
Academic critiques of neoliberalism do work: positioning their authors and their readers as subjects invested in the moral logic the critique establishes, and thereby moralising the collaborative accomplishment of the reader-writer relation. This relation and its constitution is a feature of contemporary leftist academic culture, and of the mechanics of critique as a social or ‘solidarising’ form of writing/reading. The academic critique of neoliberal academia warrants scrutiny particularly, given the casualisation of academic work and the emergence of a majority precarious academic labour force. Attending closely to it highlights some vulnerabilities of the academic critique of neoliberal forms, and illuminates the extent to which it constitutes its object in problematic ways: in terms of the political consequences or otherwise of critique as intellectual practice, of the model of subjectivity posited by the critique, and of the historical relations between academic practices and neoliberalism itself.
Interrogating the University as an Engine of Capitalism: neoliberalism and academic 'raison d'état
Policy Futures in Education, 2010
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. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. (Marx, from the 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte-in McLellan, 1975, p. 43) It's not a question of emancipating truth from every system of power-which would be a chimaera, because truth is already itself power-but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony (social, economic and cultural) within which it operates at the present time ... (Foucault, 1977, p. 14