Student Subjectivity in the Marketised University.

Geoff Bunn,Susanne Langer,Nina K Fellows

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.827971

Abstract

We present data from an exploratory qualitative interview-based pedagogical research project on the development of student agency in higher education. Our aim was to respond to Nick Zepke’s claim that what is often missing from the current neoliberal discourse of higher education ‘is students having a voice in what and how they learn and how they can action their voice in the wider community as agentic citizens.’ Informed by Lacanian discourse analysis, our project investigated the opportunities and threats facing some of our undergraduate students as they struggled to exercise agency and develop autonomy in the marketised university. Repeat interviews (n = 15) with final year students focussed on the psychosocial categories of power, affect, intersubjectivity and desire. The analysis was guided by Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, an account of the vicissitudes of agency. We found that students can move between discourses depending on the extent to which their agency (operationalised here as Lacan’s ‘object cause of desire,’ the objet petit a) was enabled or thwarted. Our critique of the metaphor of the ‘student journey’ addresses the implications for learning and teaching and the university’s mission to develop its students in light of perceived commercial pressures.

Highlights

Informed by neoliberal ideology, the global higher education sector is being profoundly reshaped by a combination of information technology and the rhetoric of economic accountability to develop entrepreneurial, global-facing, market-oriented universities (McGettigan, 2013; Clarke, 2019)
The result is the introduction of teaching quality assessment devices and student satisfaction surveys and
Two of the four discourses produce impoverished modes of student agency, we argue, despite being the most prevalent discourses in contemporary higher education

Summary

Introduction

Informed by neoliberal ideology, the global higher education sector is being profoundly reshaped by a combination of information technology and the rhetoric of economic accountability to develop entrepreneurial, global-facing, market-oriented universities (McGettigan, 2013; Clarke, 2019). National and international league tables, expensive and prestigious building projects, research assessment exercises and other putative indicators of excellence inform and enact institutional policies and practices (John and Fanghanel, 2016). One key problem is that metrication systems designed to afford and measure returns on their investments for students, parents, and universities alike are eroding the long-standing traditional ambitions of higher education to produce well-educated and ethically informed citizens (Molesworth et al, 2011; Nixon et al, 2016). The Marketisation of Higher Education the ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’.1. Such instruments are designed to facilitate competitiveness between institutions and fabricate a so-called free-market in order to sanction increasing tuition fees and engender market exit for failing institutions. A rhetoric of student-centred provision accompanies such innovations, together with an avowed emphasis on social mobility and consumer choice (Gourlay and Stevenson, 2017)

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Conclusion