Key Signposts to the Neoliberal University Rat Race

Key Signposts to the Neoliberal University Rat Race

Over the past 25+ years, higher education has been transformed by the neoliberal policies aiming to shrink and privatize the state, and run government services like businesses. How does neoliberalism turn education into a rat race?

SCARCITY
-Competition for scarce education funding has led to increased workloads for faculty and students, but this work speed-up leaves less time to study and think.
-Fewer students can afford college, leading to a re-segregation of higher ed.

QUANTITY OVER QUALITY
-Corporatized measures of university accountability judge quality by numbers of publications and students per faculty, fueling publication inflation and evaluation by bubble forms.

EFFICIENCY
-Emphasizing efficiency in midst of scarcity fuels a two-tier academic labor force featuring a shrinking percentage of tenure-track posts, while relying upon temporary faculty (inc. grad. students) for mass teaching.
-The increasing percentage of temporary faculty has led to cookie cutter content in part because such faculty members have few incentives to create a rigorous or politically challenging classroom.

ACCOUNTABILITY
-Emphasis on quantity and efficiency reinforces existing lines of research, with precious little time or incentive for creative, path-breaking work.
-Publishing has become more an instrument of technocratic university evaluations, and less a matter of peer dialogue and criticism. Are we accountable to peers or to numbers, and who enforces this?

ACADEMIC FREEDOM?
-Scarce funding stifles free intellectual engagement by reinforcing established lines of inquiry.
-Who are our peers? The resegregation of the university further limits who is able to participate in academic conversation within the classroom, and reinforces exclusionary and unaccountable publications.
-Students missing from the university for lack of funding do not have academic freedom.