Neoliberalisation and the “Death of the Public University”
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2451
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 trans formative 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.
application/pdf
2239-625X
2451
1
en
Susan Wright
Anuac
Neoliberalisation and the “Death of the Public University”
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
5
Forum: Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
2016-08-13
2016-08-06
2016-08-13
46-50
1
Susan Wright
2016
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2451
46
Aarhus University, Denmark
2239-625X
1
en
50
Neoliberalisation and the “Death of the Public University”
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/2451/2084
5
                                                       2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90




                                                                                                      FORUM




Student-led demonstration, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, February 4, 2015. Overpass Light Brigade, Joe Brusky
photographer. Source: overpasslightbrigade.org/love-light-for-uw-fight-the-cuts/.



Anthropologists in/of the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
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, Jon P. MITCHELL.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)
Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2437
46                                                  ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY




Neoliberalisation and the “Death of the Public University”
Cris SHORE
University of Auckland
Susan WRIGHT
Aarhus University


ABSTRACT: 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 uni-
versity” as a model and its implications for academia. We argue that this model is having a trans-
formative 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.


   In February 2016 the Delhi University sociologist Satish Deshpande published an
article in the Indian Express entitled “Death of the Public University”. Deshpande ar-
gues that India’s once robust public university system – one of the few vehicles for so-
cial mobility in the country – is fast being destroyed. He cites three main reasons for
this: first, the rise of an increasingly detached Indian elite «who can afford first world
fees, and who no longer care about Indian institutions»; second, the encroachment of
private players into the lucrative Indian higher education market; and third, the steady
erosion of governance structures that has fuelled ad hocism, incoherence and a chronic
lack of care in policy-making. Academic autonomy, he says, has now become a «shield
for the arbitrary authoritarianism of pliant academic administrators eager to implement
every whim of the regime in power». He concludes «The net effect of all this is that the
public university is shrinking in stature; instead of the confident, open and liberal insti-
tution that it once was, it is becoming insecure, narrow-minded and conservative»
(2016).
   Deshpande was writing about India, yet his criticisms could equally be applied to
England, Chile, Australia or New Zealand. These countries have also witnessed the
opening up of higher education to private providers, the complicity of politicians in dis-
mantling the structures of governance that previously guaranteed autonomy and aca-
demic freedom, and the domination of once self-governing institutions by a bloated ad-
ministrative caste of senior managers for whom higher education is to be treated as a
business, much like any other commercial enterprise. These developments are the cu-
mulative outcome of a steady series of reforms, initiated during the 1980s by success-
ive neoliberal-inspired governments, which have sought to make public universities
more economic by rendering them more “responsive” to markets, commercial interests
and private providers. Prompted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and

2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                         47


Development (OECD) and other international agencies, many governments in the
1990s embraced the idea that the future of their countries lay in a “global knowledge
economy”. To these ends they set about transforming higher education into the engine
for producing the knowledge, skills and graduates to generate the intellectual property
and innovative products that would make their countries more globally competitive.
These reforms were premised on the idea of turning universities into autonomous and
entrepreneurial “knowledge organizations” by promoting competition, opening them up
to private investors, making educational services contribute to economic competitive-
ness, and enabling individuals to maximize their skills in global labour markets.
    As Deshpande shows for India, however, these reforms are contradictory and often
produce chaos and corruption rather than efficiency and effectiveness. They are also re-
defining boundaries of the university as its core values and distinctive purpose rub up
against those predatory market forces, or what Slaughter and Leslie (1997) termed
“academic capitalism”. Recasting public universities as transnational business corpora-
tions introduces new risks and market disciplines. Universities now face growing pres-
sure to produce “excellence”, deliver quality research and innovative teaching, improve
their world rankings, forge business links, and attract elite, fee-paying students. Many
are buckling under the strain and increasingly struggle to maintain their traditional
mandate to be “inclusive”, foster social cohesion, improve social mobility, and chal-
lenges received wisdom – let alone improve their records on gender, diversity and
equality.
    To what extent can we explain these trends in terms of “neoliberalism” or the rise of
the “neoliberal university model”? Neoliberalism is a problematic concept. Excessive
use of the term as a portmanteau for explaining everything that is wrong with contem-
porary capitalist societies has rendered it an empty signifier devoid of analytical value.
As a noun, it suggests something universal and ascribes uniformity and coherence to an
assemblage of processes and practices that are far from uniform, consistent or coher-
ent. Like Peck and Tickell (2002: 463), therefore, we prefer to use the term “neoliber-
alisation” as it highlights the multi-faceted and continually changing set of process as-
sociated with neoliberal reform agendas, which assume different forms in different
countries. That said, these reforms usually bear close “family resemblances”, to para-
phrase Wittgenstein. These include an emphasis on creating an institutional framework
that promotes competition, entrepreneurship, commercialisation, profit making and
“private good” research and the prevalence of a metanarrative about the importance of
markets for promoting the virtues of freedom, choice and prosperity. In Australia, New
Zealand and elsewhere this narrative has typically been framed as taking an “invest-
ment approach” to higher education, one that recasts public spending on education in
the short term and instrumental language of “return on investment”. This philosophy is
also epitomised in the withdrawal of government funding for the arts and humanities
and corresponding emphasis now placed on promoting the supposedly more “econom-
ically relevant” fields of Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (the STEM

                                             2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
48                                              ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY


subjects). The name of the game is now about generating new income streams –
through “export education”, forging partnerships with business, commercialising uni-
versity IP, leasing or selling university infrastructure, and developing spin-out compan-
ies. These have now become normalised and naturalised features of academia. In the
new university, what “counts” are those things that can be “counted”, quantified and
translated as financial returns to the institution. As one Danish minister summed it up,
the aim is speed up the translation of research from “idea to invoice”.
    Few countries better illustrate this than Britain, whose Conservative government has
gone further than most in its attempt to open universities up to the disciplines of the
market and the predatory interests of private capital. Not only are students in universit-
ies in England and Wales now charged some of the highest tuition fees in the world (for
which most are forced to take on massive levels of personal debt), but the universities
themselves are increasingly run as if they are for-profit businesses, chasing market
share and preoccupied with advancing up the league tables of world rankings – which
have become not only proxies for quality and social capital but also the basis of their
credit rating (Wright, Shore 2017). Academics joke (somewhat nervously) that Bri-
tain’s leading universities are at risk of becoming financial conglomerates with a side-
line in providing educational services.
    It would be hard to exaggerate the effect of all these processes on the culture of aca-
demia. Just as the mission of the public university is being transformed, so too are aca -
demic subjectivities and the nature of academic work. Academics are increasingly re-
quired to become more “entrepreneurial”. Indeed, their “performance” is now typically
measured in terms of quantifiable output targets to which financial numbers as well as
publications in star-rated journals are attached. One in six British universities have im-
posed targets quantifying the amount of external grant income each individual academ-
ic is expected to raise for their institution (Jump 2015). The casualization of the work-
force is another visible manifestations of this transformation. In Britain, 54% of aca-
demics and 49% of all academic teaching staff are now on casualised and insecure con-
tracts (UCU 2016). This is still far below the US, where even by 2005 over two thirds
of all academic labour force were precarious (Kalleberg 2009: 9). This is a rising trend,
and not just in Britain.
    The British government’s White Paper (BIS 2016), Success as a Knowledge Eco-
nomy, takes these trends even further promising a fundamental redrawing of the rela-
tionship between universities, the state, students and research. Its main proposal is to
open up British higher education to greater competition from private, for-profit pro-
viders by making it easier for new entrants into the “higher education market” to ac-
quire degree awarding powers (“DAPs”). The Minister of State for universities and sci-
ence justifies this on the grounds that it will provide more choice, competition and flex-
ibility for students as consumers.




2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                              49


    There are several business models for extracting profit from publicly funded uni-
versities (Wright 2016). These proposals enable private providers to access taxpayer-
funded student fees in a business model that has already proved enormously profitable.
One private provider grew from 496 students in 2010 to 3,366 students in 2012 with a
fee income from public-backed loans totaling £11 million in 2012–2013 – more than
any other private provider and more than the London School of Economics (Morgan
2014). Others seek to keep the public university as a carapace that protects its favor-
able tax and charitable status, and within it develop a “special services vehicle” to run
all its functions. Whereas a public university cannot distribute profits, private interests
can invest in a “special services vehicle” and extract an unlimited fee.
    Another model is to “unbundle” the university’s functions, competences and assets
so that these can be re-bundled by external private providers. In other industries, this is
usually termed “asset stripping”. As with the utilities, trains and roads, the vultures of
private capital are hovering. If the bill is passed, we can expect to see a feeding frenzy
as some universities go bankrupt, others are taken over by financial conglomerates, and
a plethora of small fly-by-night providers seek to capture the rents provided by the gov-
ernment’s student loan guarantee scheme.
    One of the main casualties of this process is the ethos that previously sustained the
traditional public university. Collegiality and professional trust are fast being replaced
by competition, surveillance and managerialism. These are defining features of what we
have elsewhere termed the rise of “audit culture” in higher education. More import-
antly, neoliberalisation has produced an erosion of academic freedom and the substitu-
tion of the idea of higher education as a public good with the notion that a university
degree is a private investment in one’s personal career. Unfortunately for those facing a
future of debt with a shrinking job market, that “investment” looks increasingly un-
likely to deliver the promised returns.
REFERENCES
BIS (Department of Business, Innovation and Skills), 2016, Success as a Knowledge Economy:
      Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility & Student Choice, Higher Education White Paper,
      May, London, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office.
Dreshpande, Satish, 2016, Death of the public university, The Indian Express, 1 February 1, in-
      dianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/death-of-hyderabad-central-university/ (acces-
      sed on 21 June 2016).
Jump, Paul, 2015, Grant income targets set at one in six universities, THE poll suggests, Times
      Higher Education, 11 June, www.timeshighereducation.com/news/grant-income-targets-
      set-one-six-universities-poll-suggests (accessed on 3 July 2016).
Kalleberg, Arne, 2009, Precarious work, insecure workers: employment relations in transition,
      American Sociological Review, 74, 1: 1-22.
Morgan, John, 2014, Campus close-up: GSM London, Times Higher Education, 22 May, www.
      timeshighereducation.com/news/campus-close-up-gsm-london/2013445.article, (access-
      ed on 3 July 2016).


                                              2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
50                                               ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY

Peck, Jamie, Adam Tickell, 2002, The urbanization of neoliberalism: theoretical debates neo-
      liberalizing space, Antipode, 34, 3: 380-404.
Shore, Cris, Susan Wright, 2015, Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings and the Reas-
      sembling of Society, Current Anthropology, 56, 3: 421-439.
Slaughter, Sheila, Leslie Larry, 1997, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entre-
      preneurial University, Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
UCU (University and College Union), 2016, Precarious work in higher education: A snapshot
      of insecure contracts and institutional attitudes, April, London: UCU, www.ucu.org.uk/-
      media/7995/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-a-snapshot-of-insecure-contracts-and-
      institutional-attitudes-Apr16/pdf/ucu_recariouscontract_hereport_apr-16.pdf, (accessed
      on 3 July 2016).
Wright, Susan, 2016, The Imaginators of English University Reform, in Stratification, Privatiz-
      ation, and Employability of Higher Education in the US and EU., Sheila Slaughter, Bar-
      rett Taylor, eds, Dordrecht, Springer: 127-149.
Wright, Susan, Cris Shore, eds, 2017, Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for
      Universities in the Knowledge Economy, Oxford, Berghahn (in press).




2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
