The Neoliberal University: Part 1

Summary and Review of “Universities in a Neo-Liberal World” by Alex Callinicos (Bookmarks 2006)

Although the scale of both the neoliberal assault and student/worker resistance has increased dramatically in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the privatization of higher education has been underway for decades. While written in 2006 and from a British perspective, Alex Callinicos' pamphlet “Universities in a Neo-liberal World” provides a valuable overview of that transformation and of the new form capitalism is imposing on the University.

Callinicos finds the ideological foundation of the modern University more broadly within Neoliberalism, but specifically within the concept of the “Knowledge Economy” which came to the forefront during the dotcom bubble of the 1990's. Essentially the advocates of the knowledge economy advance the idea that with a shift in production from material to service goods production becomes more knowledge intensive, relying on highly trained workers, “human capital” which is the key to maintaining global competitiveness. Although the claims of “knowledge capitalism” are highly questionable, as are the claims of a relationship between a nation's “competitiveness” and the actual well being of it's poor and working class, it remains the dominant ideology driving a turn towards neoliberalism and competition within the University.

In line with most of the practice of neoliberalism the neoliberal university is not only leaner and more “efficient” but where it is funded it serves as a direct public subsidy to corporate interests. As Capitalism has come to rely on increasingly more and more advanced technologies the cost of research and development has skyrocketed, causing major corporations to move from in house research to a reliance on external firms, whether research powerhouses, smaller venture capitalist sponsored enterprises, or public and private Universities. It is as a research powerhouse for corporate projects that Universities, which have had their standard budgets gutted, are to reborn as “efficient” and “competitive” institutions.

As the logic of capitalism has imposed itself on the University it has been reflected not only in budget cuts and overcrowded classrooms but increasingly in the measurement and production of academic work. Seeking to quantify knowledge and creativity the new business oriented management of Universities has constructed elaborate and bureaucratic evaluation systems which privilege quantity and “quality” of academic publishing in determining the future of academic workers.* These evaluate academic employees based on crude measurements of research output which become harder to live up to as more workers adhere to and seek to compete within the framework. Ironically Neoliberalism, the pure logic of capitalism, finds that it's academic reflection bears more in common with the absurdities and inefficiencies of a Stalinist bureaucracy, desperately and tragicomically attempting to judge theory and knowledge by the same categories as tractor production.

Particularly in Britain the competition among individual workers to speed up academic production has been reflected in a broader acceleration of competition and selectivity among Universities. Competition is fierce to attract the most renowned researchers and maintain the kind of "efficiency" which attracts the bulk of state and corporate funding. The results are that “At both the institutional and individual level, success and the rewards associated with it come from research performance”. This despite and seemingly in contradiction to the growth of a “now all pervasive ideology that treats students as customers exercising freedom of choice when applying for courses”. Yet the development in Britain reflects international trends towards a minority of renowned research powerhouses and a majority of underfunded teaching institutions, with a middle ground desperately trying to make it into the former rather then be dragged into the latter.

This transformation of the University has led in turn to a transformation of the class dynamics at work within it. A definite managerial elite, bureaucratic, hierarchical and emulating the corporations they seek to bring the University close to, sits at the top. Vice Chancellors act as the new CEOs, with a mix of former Academics and business school graduates comprising their well paid managerial arm. While a minority of renowned researchers and publicists remains well paid, most university teachers are increasingly “reduced to the condition of highly qualified wage laborers” with temporary lecturers and graduate students taking on the most precarious and poorly paid positions within the system. At the other end is a growing mass of students, increasingly overburdened with debt and low pay retail work, struggling to attain the education that will bring them into the middle-upper strata of the working class.

The acknowledgement of these dynamics however is more then a sad overview of the existing state of affairs, it provides a key to understanding the resistance they must provoke. Callinicos, writing in 2006, points to student uprisings in France and the coherence of a labor movement among lecturers and Britain as the main signs of the potential for resistance in the University. Today it's easy to expand the list of such actions to a student movement which has emerged from Germany to California, as well as a small resurgence in labor organizing in the US by lecturers and graduate students in particular.

For any movement seeking to oppose the neoliberal forces transforming academia and education an effective theorization of the development and direction of the University is essential. Callinicos' Pamphlet while mostly limited to the British context draws out many trends which are being applied by Capitalist governments and corporations internationally. As such it can provide a valuable and effective, if not complete, guide to the neoliberalization of Universities here in the United States and around the world.

The PDF of "Universities in a Neoliberal World" is available here

[Part 2 will explore more in depth the development of these trends in the United States and specifically in California where a significant new movement has emerged to oppose the privatization of Higher Education]

*(For a more in depth and theoretical analysis of the emergence of “Academic Taylorism”, I would recommend “Cognitive Capitalism and the Rat Race” by Massimo de Angeles and David Harvie in Historical Materialism 17)