From E Pluribus Unum to Caveat Emptor: How Neoliberal Policies are Capturing and Dismantling the Liberal University

Abstract

This article provides an account of how neoliberal policies are currently in the process of capturing and dismantling the liberal pubic university that was constructed in various places around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article examines the political and epistemic relationship between liberalism, embedded liberalism, the state, and the organizational forms that the university would take throughout most of the twentieth century. It provides an overview of some of the specific neoliberal efforts to transform universities into servants of the economy and how business interests came to capture the university over the last few decades with the help of the new “enterprising state.” This article concludes by examining what these recent changes mean for the future of both the liberal university as we have known it, and the larger quest for education in a democratic society.