Neo-liberalism and the Subversion of Academic Freedom from Within: Money, Corporate Cultures and ‘Captured’ Intellectuals in African Public Universities

Abstract

In the last two decades, neo-liberal thinking and practices, as outcomes of globalization, have shaped social, economic, and educational policies. Within higher education institutions, the application of neo-liberal practices has increasingly reshaped the institutions into competitive markets and brought about the privatization of various aspects of institutional culture. In Africa, public universities were forced to adopt neo-liberal practices as part of the reform packages to address the financial crisis that the institutions faced in the 1980s. The deepening of neo-liberal cultures in the institutions has trans- formed traditional notions of the university as sites of knowledge genera- tion, service to society and liberal education, into neo-liberal objectives articulated in entrepreneurial terms with knowledge as a commodity to be invested in, bought and sold, and academics as entrepreneurs, who are evaluated based on the income they generate. This article analyses and reflects on what ‘entrepreneurialism’ in public universities in Africa means for the exercise of academic freedom and social responsibility.