Pedagogy of the Privileged: Elite Universities and Dialectical Contradictions in the UK (original) (raw)
Resisting the English Neoliberalising University: What critical pedagogy can offer
This paper seeks to contribute to current efforts of left academics to shift the English public university away from its present state of what I below call ‘deep neoliberalisation’. I utilise the concept of neoliberalisation rather than the more common concept of neoliberalism to frame what was an initially gradual and, under the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat government, a deepening reorganisation of the university as a marketised, commodified and financialised entity. I then explore the key tenets of critical pedagogy that a small and growing number of academics are adapting to develop a left counter to this process. I conclude by suggesting that there are limits to realising critical pedagogy in the university that is leading some academics to seek its realisation outside.
Neo-liberalism and the state of higher education in the UK
Journal of Further and Higher Education, 2017
Abstract This article reports findings from a research project on the impact of neo-liberalism on university life in the UK. Unusually, data collection includes interviews with senior management such as heads of departments and senior professors, as well as with lecturers and union representatives. Interviewees reported that the nature of institutional and individual pressures has changed and intensified over the last 30 years, resulting generally in negative experiences for staff and students; yet grounds exist for rejecting a purely deterministic thesis on the impact of neo-liberalism on higher education. Certain aspects of university work were described in positive terms and individual senior managers seemed able at times to mediate external pressures. Creative strategies of resistance were evident which provided some relief from an otherwise gloomy scenario.
Beyond the consolations of professionalism: resisting alienation at the neoliberal university
Soundings, 2023
The British university system is in a deep crisis, born of a two-pronged assault. The crisis is born firstly from decades of neoliberal marketisation and the rise of a remote and authoritarian executive elite presiding over a downwardly mobile and culturally deprivileged academic profession. We call this process neoliberal managerialism. It is born secondly from the ideological and political assault on universities, currently led by the Tories, reflecting the resurgence of anti-intellectualism since the millennium. The paper argues that although these currents embody ostensibly conflicting values, they combine and reinforce each other. We illustrate this argument by discussing lacunae in the decolonisation of British universities, notably the colonial ideologies and practices inscribed in neoliberal university governance and management. The final section reflects on how to resist and overcome the crises engulfing UK higher education. Framed by reflections on the positionalities of the authors, it argues that no consolations can be found in old-style academic professionalism, which historically was no less regressive than neoliberal managerialism and often complicit in its rollout. We conclude that academics could instead embrace the ineluctable dynamics of de-professionalisation and work towards an authentic and solidaristic public intellectuality.
Institutionalising critical pedagogy: Lessons from against and beyond the neo-liberal university
Power & Education, 2017
This article approaches the question of how far critical pedagogy can be institutionalised through a series of historical and contemporary examples. Current debates concerned with the co-operative university are examined, as well as histories of independent working-class education and the free university movement. Throughout this history, critical pedagogy has occupied a difficult space in relation to higher education institutions, operating simultaneously against and beyond the academy. The Deweyian concept of 'democratisation' allows the institutionalisation of critical pedagogy to be considered as a process, which has never been and may never be achieved, but is nevertheless an 'end-in-view'. The article concludes by offering the Lucas Plan as a model of radical trade unionism that could be applied to the democratisation of existing universities and the institutionalisation of critical pedagogy.
Introduction: Left Intellectuals and the Neoliberal University
T his American Quarterly forum builds on a symposium held in 2011 at Wesleyan University on the relationship between academia and activism. Our symposium was inspired by a pair of concerns: that academics too often either romanticize activism as the site where "real" political work happens or else ascribe an abstracted radical politics to quotidian academic work. These concerns emerge especially within interdisciplinary fields-fields like American studies, women's and gender studies, queer studies, and critical race and ethnic studies-that are grounded in social movements and becoming institutionalized in an increasingly corporatized university.
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
ELiSS-Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences, 2008
This paper, based on the reflections of two academic social scientists, offers a starting point for dialogue about the importance of critical pedagogy within the university today, and about the potentially transformative possibilities of higher education more generally. We first explain how the current context of HE, framed through neoliberal restructuring, is reshaping opportunities for alternative forms of education and knowledge production to emerge. We then consider how insights from both critical pedagogy and popular education inform our work in this climate.
Working in, against and beyond the neoliberal university
This paper explores some contemporary issues and challenges facing those working in Adult and Higher Education and possible responses: - contexts and critiques of the ongoing neoliberalisation of both university and wider society - possible responses rooted in critical educational theories speaking to the need for educations for eco-social justice
Analysing a ‘Neoliberal Moment' in English Higher Education Today
LATISS—International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences Volume 3, Number 2, Summer/Winter 2010 , pp. 55-72(18), 2010
English higher education, like other parts of the public sector and higher education in other countries, is currently undergoing considerable change as it is being restructured as if it were a market in which universities, departments and academics compete against one another. This restructuring is producing new processes of subjectivity that discipline those who work and study in higher education institutions. Feminist poststructuralists have suggested that this restructuring is enabled partly through new forms of accountability that seemingly offer the 'carrot' of self-realisation alongside the 'stick' of greater management surveillance of the burgeoning number of tasks that academics, amongst others, must perform. This paper, located in the context of these changes, builds on Judith Butler's insight that processes of subjection to the dominant order through which the self is produced entail both mastery and subjection. That is, submission requires mastery of the underlying assumptions of the dominant order, which concomitantly introduces possibly subversive responses to subjection. This paper explores a 'neoliberal moment' I recently experienced when I had to fill out a form introduced for modules that failed to reach newly introduced marking 'benchmark' criteria. As I suggest, the process of being subjected to the disciplining that this new criterion demanded, brought me the mastery necessary to avoid such disciplining in future. However, individual subversion did not significantly challenge these forms of accountability; only a collective 'scholarship with commitment' could do so.
The neoliberalization of higher education in England: An alternative is possible
In this article, we provide a critical explanation and critique of neoliberalism. We attempt an innovative focus ranging from the wider contemporary political and ideological shifts, to the way in which neoliberal policy specifically influences higher education and the consequences thereof. We follow a narrative logic in three parts where we first explore the bigger picture, then concentrate on specific examples, finally taking a long-term perspective with regard to class struggle. In the first part, we lay out neoliberalism and explicate its basic principles in abstraction. This is necessary for part two, where we contextualize neoliberalism specifically within the English higher education system with specific reference to the policy agenda of successive governments since 1979. In the third and final part of the article we suggest an alternative higher education model that simultaneously exists and flourishes along with and against the neoliberal hegemony. We conclude by