Neoliberal Higher Education Research Articles

Following the impact factor: Utilitarianism or academic compliance?

The use of impact factors has grown substantially in academia and publishing far beyond their original intended use. They are now used extensively in academic and research assessments as well as in the promotion of journals, publishers, institutions and individuals. The implications of such metricisation for understandings of research quality are discussed as well as for research strategies, the commercialisation of academic publishing, the disciplining of academic knowledge and publishing strategies, knowledge development and the further neoliberalisation of higher education. The paradoxes and problems of current and potential future directions are discussed including with respect to the development of open access publications.

Against Educational Technology in the Neoliberal University

In the Grundrisse, Marx argued that the circulation of productive capital was “a process of transformation, a qualitative process of value”. As capitalists sought to overcome the barriers to this transformatory process, they worked to revolutionise both the means of production via organisational and technological change, and circulation time via transportation and communication changes. Reducing friction in the production and circulation of capital is critical to the extraction of surplus value, and Marx argued that in this transformation “Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier [and]… the annihilation of space by time - becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.” Higher education is increasingly a space which is being recalibrated so as to increase the mobility or fluidity of intellectual production and circulation. Thus, technology, technical services and techniques are deployed to collapse the interfaces between space and time, and to subsume academic labour inside processes for valorisation. However, this collapse also reveals the stresses and strains of antagonisms, as the friction of neoliberal higher education reform deforms existing cultures and histories. Through such a deformation, it also reminds us of alternative historical and material re-imaginings and alternatives like the Chilean CyberSyn project, the Ecuadorian National Plan for Good Living, the Hornsey Experiment, and so on. This presentation argues that inside the University, the deployment of technologies, technical services and techniques enables education and academic labour to be co-opted for value-production. As a result, academics and students are defined as entrepreneurial subjects with limited power-to produce a world beyond value. A question is the extent to which pedagogical and transitional alternatives might be described, and whether in the process it is possible to uncover ways in which education might be used for co-operation rather than competition, as a form of resistance.Acknowledgement: This podcast is an audio recording of a talk Richard Hall gave in the Communication and Media Research Institute's (CAMRI) Seminar Series at the University of Westminster on March 25, 2015.

Wither the welfare state: The new global adventures of higher education

This summary article situates the articles in this collection within the historical unfolding of the commodification and neoliberalisation of higher education. From the 1970s to the present, the article suggests that commodification and neoliberalisation are two social forces that in many nations are difficult to disentangle. It is important to see these forces as analytically distinct as they set up contradictions whilst transforming higher education in many nations in the world. While commodification begins the process of turning university programmes and degrees into commodities that a consuming public buys, neoliberalism puts pressure on universities to document that people are getting value for the money they spend. Neoliberalism also questions how we measure the quality of a product. Together these forces create an increasingly contradictory space where faculty work becomes very conflicted. The article then goes on to situate each of the articles in this contradictory university space. Finally the article discusses some ways faculty can move beyond resistance and collusion and find ways to reclaim higher education.

Missions of the Japanese National University Corporations in the 21st Century: Content Analysis of Mission Statements

In 2004, Japanese national universities became national university corporations (NUCs). Many scholars have discussed the NUCs as Japan’s alignment with neo-liberalism in higher education. Under the new system, these NUCs have stronger autonomy in governing their institutions, while they remain under pressure to serve the country’s goals as government agencies. The present study examined the mission statements of 86 NUCs to explore their visions and roles. The findings based on content analysis revealed the NUCs’ strong commitment to improving education and research. A few select NUCs place stronger emphasis on research while others focus on education. These NUCs express a commitment to society and their regional communities—some more strongly than others. These NUCs recognize the importance of general and advanced specialized education. The paper discusses these findings in reference to the discourse of neo-liberalism in higher education and the unique Japanese contexts shaping these NUCs’ missions. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n3p197

Educational development for responsible graduate students in the neoliberal university

In this article, we examine how our work in educational development, specifically in graduate student training, enacts the logic of neoliberalism in higher education in Canada. We approach this examination through a collaborative autoethnographic consideration of and reflection on our practices and experiences as educational developers, the design and delivery of a graduate student survey and our own experiences of and identification with ‘self-actualizing graduate students’. Further, we illustrate how neoliberalism shapes the work of teaching and learning centres resulting in offering programming, which compels graduate students to act in ways that can be read as responsible and capable of navigating an increasingly bleak academic labour market. Throughout the article we call attention to the ways in which our role as educational developers may either reinforce or disrupt neoliberal discourses. While we urge a critical approach, we also reflect on constraints to such criticism.

Out of the box: Making space for everyday critical pedagogies

Under the sway of neoliberal forces, the university system is being reconfigured to produce certain types of knowledges, imaginaries, subjectivities, and practices informed by market imperatives. Considerable literature details the promises and perils of neoliberalism in higher education. In the past decade, this has included the growth of interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the potential of critical pedagogy as a site of contestation in the higher education sector. In this context, the notion of critical pedagogy provides a dialogical and imaginative starting point for opening up spaces for what is otherwise denied or ignored. Although critical pedagogy is a “big tent” movement, a number of cogent and hard‐hitting critiques have emerged highlighting its theoretical and political limitations. Concerns include the need for more attention to the complexities of how critical pedagogies are embodied or performed. This article argues that the performative dimension of critical pedagogy is important for putting into place the production of everyday spaces capable of transforming the boundaries of what is regarded as valid or legitimate knowledge and culture.

Moving through the city: visual discourses of upward social mobility in higher education advertisements on public transport in Santiago de Chile

Chile is one of the world's most neoliberal countries with a high level of privatised healthcare and education. The presence of advertising for both public and private universities points to the radically altered relationship between public and private higher education as a consequence of neoliberalism. Some authors describe the increasing similarities between the representations of public and private universities as evidence of their hybrid nature whereas others contend that what comes across as contingent hybridity is the dominance of a neoliberal discourse that has invaded public universities. This article looks at how public and private universities’ visual and textual representations of themselves evolve in a context of mobile, neoliberalised public spaces. The research is based on a mobile visual ethnography of higher education advertisements on public transport in Santiago de Chile in 2010. The visual and textual dimensions of the advertisements are analysed by means of critical discourse analysis. The universities’ particular sales messages with regard to promised upward social mobility and employability through education are reinforced by the intertwining of images, mobile spaces and actors. However, as the discourse analysis shows, the promises of equal upward social mobility are in contrast with the realities of neoliberal higher education and the increasing financial debt faced by students.

Neoliberalising the Fordist University: A Tale of Two Campuses in Frankfurt a. M., Germany

Abstract: In 2009, the central building of the new IG Farben Campus of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University (JWGU), Frankfurt, Germany was occupied by students protesting against the neoliberalisation of higher education. While similar occupations at the old Bockenheim Campus were usually tolerated, if not welcomed, by the university management, this time 176 students and members of staff were forcefully evicted after only 3 days, when the university's presidential board called in the police. To better understand this way of ending such protest, a level of oppression almost unheard of at a German university in the last 20 years, we reconstruct the way in which JWGU, as part of the state apparatus university, has produced the two campuses as particular places that are bound up in and expressions of the national and local condensations of forces of Fordism and neoliberalism respectively.

From ‘no’ to ‘yes’: postcolonial perspectives on resistance to neoliberal higher education

Various scholars have suggested ways to resist neoliberal conditions in higher education (HE). In analysing current neoliberal policies and practices in HE, I suggest that postcolonial theories of resistance can enhance our ability as faculty and administrators to understand and ‘resist’ these policies and practices. In this article, I review four modes of postcolonial resistance as described by David Jeffress (2008), mobilizing a critique of resistance as writing and cultural practice and challenging the reactionary nature of subversion and opposition. I argue that we need to place emphasis on transformational resistance, or the creation of new ways of being, knowing and doing in HE in order to transform the academy.

Policing the “Penn State Crisis”

Within this article, the authors critically introduce and interrogate the ongoing crisis/scandal at Penn State University within the intersecting vectors of institutional violence, the commodification of higher education, media coverage of the event and its aftermath, spaces of resistance, and the complicated legacy of Joe Paterno. Additionally, and on a broader scale, they argue that within the privileged spaces of academia, scholars have a responsibility to their communities to push for greater transparency and accountability within their institutions, join and support faculty unions, and resist the further neoliberalization of higher education.

Back to the Cave: Cold, Hungry and Cruel? An epithet for the World Bank’s neoliberal economy project

In this article, I show that the World Bank, along with other international financial institutions, is the primary architect of neoliberal policy of privatizing the formation of higher education and the migration of skilled labour from the Global South to the Global North. The Bank, through development gurus and theories orchestrating the pro-North development agenda, systematically manoeuvres the neoliberalization of higher education and migrant labour from the 1980s to the late 2000s with the promise of democracy, equity, justice and prosperity. Despite massive doses of The Bank-prescribed neoliberal development pills, the majority of the world’s population has yet to experience the promise. The Global South, through three selected countries that see the wisdom of wielding strong state roles in delivering social services, is able to partly parry the deadly sting of the 2008 global economic downturn. The South, immersed as it is in the North’s development agenda as shown in selected literature, has become a doppelganger of the North. In determining the South’s dynamic in service delivery, I turn to Habermas’ communicative rationality that likewise brings to bear similarly framed thoughts as the yardstick of the South’s critical voice against the North’s continuing espousal of neoliberal policy. It is this critical voice that further cultivates people’s micropolitics of beliefs, gender and language, and cries out “no” to The Bank-prescribed neoliberalized higher education and migrant labour – a prescription that leads to and simulates a “back-to-the-cave” circumstance.

Counter‐hegemonic regionalism and higher education for all: Venezuela and the ALBA

This paper employs new regionalism theory and regulatory regionalism theory in its analysis and theorisation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) as a counter‐hegemonic Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) regionalism. As (initially) the regionalisation of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, ALBA is centred around the idea of a twenty‐first century socialism that replaces the ‘competitive advantage’ with the ‘cooperative advantage’. ALBA, as a set of multi‐dimensional inter‐ and trans‐national processes, operates within and across a range of sectors and scales whilst the structural transformations are driven by the interplay of state and non‐state actors. The Venezuelan government's Higher Education For All (HEFA) policy, which is being regionalised within an emergent ALBA education space, assumes a key role in the direct democratic and participatory democratic processes upon which a bottom‐up construction of counter‐hegemony depends. HEFA challenges the globalised neoliberal higher education agenda of commoditisation, privatisation and elitism. Rather than producing enterprising subjects fashioned for global capitalism, HEFA seeks to form subjectivities along the moral values of solidarity and cooperation.

Neoliberal Policy in the Higher Education Sector in Bangladesh: Autonomy of Public Universities and the Role of the State

Since the 1990s, enormous changes have been made in the higher education sector in Bangladesh. The government promulgated the Private University Act in 1992, and formulated a 20-year Strategic Plan for Higher Education: 2006–2026 (SPHE). A critical review shows that the objective of the plan is to connect education with market-driven economic forces. This article argues that such a neoliberal policy in the higher education sector will have far-reaching socio-economic consequences in Bangladesh. With a critical investigation of the SPHE, this article explores how the autonomy of public universities is threatened, and how the role of the state is redefined through withdrawing government grants in the higher education sector. By providing three case studies, this article exposes the marketising nature of higher education in contemporary Bangladesh. This article also argues that the resistance against neoliberalism in higher education is another aspect which is organised by different socio-political groups in the higher education institutions.

Bologna in America: The Spellings Commission and neo-liberal higher education policy

This article summarises/analyses the higher education reforms proposed by the 'Spellings Commission' in the United States on quality assurance and accountability, and draws attention to the links I see between these reform proposals and the Bologna Process. I trace a brief history of the Spellings Commission and analyse it in order to produce questions for discussion about the 'parallel' processes of reform in higher education in the U.S. and Europe.

1 - Developing Contradictions: Diversity and the Future of the South African University

The manner in which the contemporary university is represented evokes an ‘either/ or’ conceptualisation of the university as either staying loyal to the fundamentals of teaching, research and outreach, or a wholehearted participation in the neoliberalisation of higher education. This paper begins by questioning whether this dichotomy is as clear-cut as is suggested. It proceeds to examine the idea of a market-driven university as an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and De- velopment (OECD) construct in an attempt to highlight the very different context and challenges faced by a developing country like South Africa. At the most obvi- ous level, the objectives of the White Paper (1997) and the National Plan for Higher Education (2001) pointed to achieving both equity and efficiency simultaneously by increasing access to address apartheid’s legacy and increasing cost savings and streamlined functioning. This dual imperative placed on the South African univer- sity has the benefit of opening up the institution to a range of possibilities that are neither exclusively ivory tower nor entrepreneurial. The remainder of the paper intends to unpack what these roles, functions and identities could be for the future South African university.

What Does Globalization Mean for Educational Change? A Comparative Approach

What Does Globalization Mean for Educational Change? A Comparative Approach

Managing Change in Higher Education: Assessing Staff Perceptions of the Impact of Semesterization

The background to the radical reform of higher education in the United Kingdom since the mid-1980s is given with stress on the idea that a motivating factor has been a misunderstanding of classical economics on the part of neo-liberal higher education administrators. Among the reforms that have been imposed, for the most part, from above have been modularization of the course structure and the semesterization of the academic year. Using a Likert-scale format, the authors have polled a sampling of faculty members at a given UK university. Their preliminary set of results, based on what they admit is a small sampling, indicates widespread faculty disapproval at the way modularization and semesterization were imposed at this university.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Neo-Liberalization of Higher Education: Constructing the “Entrepreneurial Learner”

This article examines the strong interest in the scholarship of teaching that has developed since Ernest Boyer introduced the idea in 1990. Although there are many benefits to be realized from a greater emphasis on teaching in higher education, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) “movement” has been subjected to little critical scrutiny. This work, however, proposes that SoTL is inextricably tied to the entrenchment of neo-liberalization in higher education. Marshall’s (1996) notion of “busno-power,” an extension of Foucault’s thinking on governmentality, is used to demonstrate how SoTL may be viewed as a force that shapes both instructors and students into “entrepreneurial learners” who conceptualize education primarily for its use value. The article concludes with a consideration of how this eventuality may be guarded against by using Foucault’s methods to situate SoTL sociologically, and historically.