Resisting the Neoliberalization of Higher Education: A Challenge to Commonsensical Understandings of Commodities and Consumption

Introduction

In higher education scholarship in the United States, the term neoliberalism comes with a host of different meanings. This mirrors the broader body of social science scholarship on neoliberalism, in which the term refers to everything from being a dominant global, singular hegemonic project to a diffuse and contradictory series of multiple “neoliberalisms” (Saunders, 2015). We do not believe there is a single, static definition of neoliberalism. Instead, we understand its varying definitions to reflect the broad reach of capitalism within our world, the uneven development of capitalist projects, and the meaningfully different and changing material contexts in which neoliberalism attempts to operate. That is, because neoliberalism attempts to reshape and redefine most aspects of our society, scholars focusing on different social, cultural, and economic practices; institutions; and discursive representations will emphasize particular aspects of neoliberalism. These different foci help enable the political aims of critical scholarship, and to forcibly reduce “neoliberalism” to a singular definition risks undermining the potential for our work to contribute to meaningful democratic and emancipatory change.

Staying open to multiple operationalizations of “neoliberalism” within academic work, our discussion positions neoliberalism as the current, dominant form of capitalism. Understanding neoliberalism as part of a broader and historic capitalist project positions resistance to it within an ongoing struggle against the social relations and material practices within a capitalist economy. Moreover, understanding neoliberalism within a larger capitalist framework helps scholars to extend previous critiques of capitalism to the current material and ideological conditions in which neoliberalism is put into practice. We focus on the ideological aspects of the broader neoliberal project, and drawing upon Marx’s writings on ideology (Rehmann, 2013), we understand neoliberal ideology to be dynamic and contradictory, and aimed at creating and legitimizing particular material practices and discursive representations of individuals and social, cultural, and political institutions. As such, we discuss neoliberalization as the active processes through which neoliberal ideology in particular, and capitalism in general, comes to shape our social, cultural, and political worlds.

Neoliberal ideology is made visible through the extension of free-market logic to the social, cultural, and political spheres (Mirowski, 2013). As Brown (2015) states,

Neoliberalism does not merely privatize—turn over to the market for individual production and consumption—what was formerly publicly supported and valued. Rather, it formulates everything, everywhere, in terms of capital investment and appreciation, including and especially humans themselves. (p. 176)

These formulations help create a governing rationality that undergirds individual and institutional practices, including those associated with postsecondary education. Much of the critique of the neoliberalization of postsecondary education focuses on the ways in which higher education has been marketized and discursively represented as a private good produced for individual consumption (e.g., Bok, 2003; Naidoo & Jamieson, 2005; Shumar, 1997). We add to this body of scholarship by focusing on the production of education as a commodity and the processes through which that commodity is consumed; we engage in this inquiry by presenting alternative interpretations of commodities and consumption than those which we read as undergirding contemporary discussions within higher education literature. Our focus on commodification and consumption aims both to reinforce the idea that critiques of the neoliberal university cannot be separated from broader critiques of capitalism and education, and to position resistance to the neoliberal college/university as resistance to the processes that undergird those institutions. We present the following analyses as attempts to demonstrate the need to understand and articulate the foundations of critiques to the neoliberalization of higher education.

Commodification of Higher Education

It is common to identify critiques against the commodification of education, and these critiques rightly point to the ways in which commonsensical understandings of education frame it as being a one-dimensional economic activity that is focused overwhelmingly on increasing one’s earning potential (Naidoo & Jamieson, 2005). In such an educational world, one’s educational experiences become objects (commodities) to be purchased in a competitive educational market and bring with it an expected return on investment that justifies both individual and state expenditures. Much of the literature concerning the commodification of higher education focuses on a single nature of the commodity—it as an external object. This focus is consistent with the work of Karl Polanyi (1944), who while not often cited in higher education literature, presents what has become a common understanding of commodities within literature critiquing the commodification of social, cultural, and political processes (Dale, 2010). Polanyi uses what Ozel (as cited in Dale, 2010) describes as the “empirical sense” (p. 77) of the commodity by discussing that it is an external object that is bought and sold within a capitalist market. Within higher education scholarship, the empirical sense of commodities has been used to point to the problems associated with treating education as an object, including a focus on extrinsic rewards (Naidoo & Jamieson, 2005), the prioritization of efficiency in the creation of the education object and in its associated decision-making structures (Bok, 2003), the quantification and commensurability of the education object (which are necessary for the consumer to be able to make an informed purchase in the education market; Kvale, 2007), and the privatization of the costs and outcomes of higher education (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).

However, as Ozel states, “by reducing commodities to things, Polanyi’s concept contributes to the sort of reified understanding of social reality of which he is otherwise so critical” (as cited in Dale, 2010, p. 77). While commodities are, in part, external objects created for the purpose of capitalist exchange, we must recognize their “dual nature,” which, as Marx (1976) discusses, understands those objects as the manifestations of the labor power and social relations of capitalist production that led to their creation. Echoing Marx’s understanding of capital, which he saw not as a thing but a “definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical and social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing” (Marx, 1976, as cited in Rehmann, 2013, p. 46), a commodity is not only a thing but is an expression of definite social relations created within a particular historical and material context. Of course, capital aims to reduce these social relations to their objectified forms, as the inherently exploitative processes of capitalist production and accumulation are hidden within the objects, which come to have power over society. This fetishized understanding can be seen as an inversion of the actual processes of production, “because the producers have ceded their collective agency and planning-capacity to the commodity-form which has taken over the regulation of society” (Rehmann, 2013, p. 42).

Specifically within education, such a fetishized understanding of the education-commodity is made visible through commonsensical belief that one’s degree and resume “gets” her or him a job. Embedded within this belief is double exchange; the student gives money to the institution in exchange for the degree, which the student then exchanges for a job. Here, students’ education becomes abstracted from the creative processes and energies with which they engaged, and the educational object of the “degree” has the power to determine students’ future employment, regardless of their experiences, knowledge, bodies, privileges, and locations, as well as the social relations defining their engagement with their institution. That is, when education becomes viewed as a commodity, the exploitation of graduate students and adjunct faculty (Bousquet, 2008), the pervasive and destructive student-loan structures (Collinge, 2009), and the antidemocratic decision-making process that undergird postsecondary education in the United States (Washburn, 2006) are made invisible from our understanding of that education. In this context, education now takes the form of an external object, rather than an internal form of personal growth or a cultural practice that improves the emotional and intellectual public “good.”

Furthermore, discourses shaping students’ planning of their educational experience become shaped by the education-commodity. For instance, the process of choosing one’s academic majors slips into a conversation about becoming competitive on the global marketplace, engagement in cocurricular activities can be seen as driven by the need to strengthen one’s resume, and students are made visible within the institution as customers who are purchasing the educational commodity (Saunders, 2014). The representations of students’ educational experiences, which come into being in our world through the material objects of the degree and resume, become more important than the experiences themselves. To be sure, these fetishized understandings are supported through particular material practices within postsecondary institutions (i.e., “how to choose a major” workshops, career services programming, cocurricular transcripts), many of which that aim to support student success. However, such understandings inherently view educational processes as objects abstracted from the actual people who engage with them and the social relations undergirding those processes, and success as narrowly understood through the value of the education-commodity.

Resisting Neoliberalization

By understanding a commodity within a Marxian framework, both as (a) an external object created for the purpose of capitalist exchange and (b) as a particular formation and expression of social relations, scholars can take a non-economistic approach to critiquing the commodification of higher education. That is, capitalism does not only attempt to create and distribute wealth, but the processes of capitalist production aim to create particular subjectivities (Lazzarrato, 2012). Extending this understanding to higher education, we can critique the ways in which a commodified approach to higher education works to produce particular subjectivities that help foster consent to the broader neoliberal ideology that is shaping our world. This approach resists the disemplacement and disembodiment inherent within fetishized understandings of education, which are necessarily limited through their focus on the abstracted educational object. Instead, by focusing our critique on the people, social relations, and material practices undergirding processes of commodification, we are better positioned to intervene within our institutions and create alternatives (particularly those based on the emancipatory potential of education which inherently approach education as a creative, cooperative, and relational project) that will not as easily lead to a commodified and fetishized understanding of education.

In addition, understanding the commodity as the expression of particular social relations occurring within a specific historical and material context, resistance to the commodification of education focuses on the particular historical and material processes through which students, faculty, staff, and administrators collude to create that education. Our approach aims to undo the “inverted” understanding of education that is produced through its commodification, and recognize that education is not something that happens to students but instead of something created by and through them. That is, students are not passive recipients of an ossified education that is represented by their resume and academic credential but instead are active (co)creators of their educational experiences, which cannot be fully captured by a resume or reduced to a diploma. To be sure, students operate within particular limitations, which are as unevenly distributed as the privileges they have, and we are not suggesting that the neoliberalization of higher education can be resisted solely through a “proper” understanding of their productive roles within the institution. Such an idealistic approach is antithetical to the Marxian foundation upon which we build our critique. However, resisting the neoliberalization requires a recognition of our roles within the processes that undergird it, roles that are masked by the commodification of education and understanding commodities solely as external objects.

Engaging With Consumption in Higher Education

The previous section presented an analysis of commodities as social relations. Such analysis foreshadows that commodities are exchanged and consumed. Consumption has gained significant centrality in the context of higher education as neoliberal ideology hardens its grip on all aspects of university life. The idea that students are consumers is generally taken for granted in multiple higher education sectors (Saunders, 2014). Some refer to this reality as the consumerist turn in higher education (Naidoo, Shankar, & Veer, 2011). Also taken for granted is the idea that consumption is a process based on the exchange of commodities, on the part of rational actors, with the purpose of satisfying needs. As we discussed in the previous section, these ideas are positioned as commonsensical and therefore do not require articulation or defense. Nevertheless, if indeed neoliberalism implies a turn to consumers, and—as Lather (2012) suggests—the production of subjectivity in the neoliberal moment revolves around the “subject-citizen as consumer” (p. 1022), then, it is our contention that the concept of consumption requires further exploration.

Given the ubiquity of consumers and consumption in relation to higher education, the concept of consumption can be categorized as elusive, and understood as the shadow or reflection of something else. How to explore consumption is therefore very important given that we are interested in advancing generative ideas that can lead to disrupting the advance of neoliberalism in higher education. We acknowledge, then, the tension between recognizing on one hand that neoliberal ideology is contradictory and that consumption is an elusive concept, while on the other, seeking to clarify or simplify these concepts. As a result, we turn to poststructuralist ways of thinking, in particular to Jean Baudrillard (2000) who argued that “to cope with this paradoxical state of things, we need a paradoxical way of thinking” (p. 68). If the construction of students as consumers constitutes a hegemonic notion in the neoliberal university context, then, it is important to recognize the challenge of exploring the concept head-on. Instead, it seems necessary to address the specter of consumption in ways that are consistent with hegemony and discourse. Resistance in hegemony is “fascination and total ambivalence” (Baudrillard, 2010, p. 70).

To summarize, in this section we argue that exploring and deconstructing consumption is necessary to further understand and resist neoliberalization in higher education. Construing students as consumers presents the embodiment of the argument that the neoliberal university imposes. This argument frequently involves that efficiency and metrics are necessary to compete for students, who are the consumers of the educational commodities produced by colleges and universities. As such, the idea of students/consumers both emerges from and legitimizes the neoliberalization of the university.

To explore consumption, it seems necessary to first acknowledge the limits of arguments and analyses that rest exclusively on economic logics. This is important because, as we discussed in the beginning of this article, neoliberalization imposes economic rationality, grounded in capitalistic ideas, on all dimensions of life. Consequently, an analysis of consumption in higher education that is based exclusively on economic concepts is insufficient. Consistent with the Marxian understanding of commodities as social relations, Baudrillard (1975, 1981) was skeptical of critiques of capitalism that retain its code, which is economic logic; he sought to push “the logic of Marxism to its limits” (Lane, 2009, p. 78). This, however, is not to be taken as a dismissal of such economic language, much less as an understatement of the core concepts of Marxism. Such logic would run counter to our stated purpose of exploring commodities and consumption.

What does pushing theory to its limits mean for understanding consumption in the context of higher education? As a first step, there is a long tradition of theorists who have analyzed the concept of consumption in ways that decenter economic rationality. Many of these analyses have been based on the observation of non-Western societies (e.g., Bataille, 1985; Mauss, 2000). Such analyses have pointed out that consumption is not only intended to satisfy material needs but rather to engage in the construction of culture and to “establish social relations” (Douglas & Isherwood, 1996, p. 39). This idea could be applied to higher education in situations ranging from students’ college choice to faculty members’ conference attendance, to name just a few examples. To elaborate in this second example, there might be a material interest in presenting at a conference. In the neoliberal university, these activities become entries in annual faculty reports, which are often tied to merit-based salary increases. Nevertheless, from the perspective at hand, this economic logic is secondary to the interest of being inserted in the social institution of academic conferences. These perspectives move through the consumption of objects and into the analysis of the “consumption of signs” (Featherstone, 2007, p. 83).

Insights from non-Western societies around exchange, gifts, and the circulation of goods led Baudrillard (1998) to the realization that consumption is the organizing structure of postmodern society. It is important to note that these insights emerged before the establishment of neoliberalism as the dominant economic logic. However, the connection between neoliberalism and postmodernity is clear given that Jameson (1991) has characterized postmodernity to a form of late capitalism.

One idea that may prove generative involves Baudrillard’s (1975) skepticism toward needs. While many, mainly physiological, needs are important, some of these needs can be satisfied without consumption or outside of the market. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that consumption cannot be fully understood simply as the satisfaction of needs; rather, Baudrillard (1981) notes that “through objects, each individual and each group searches out his-her place in an order . . . Through objects a stratified society speaks” (p. 38). In the context of higher education, this means that the spheres in which students are construed as consumers, for instance college choice and student services, can be analyzed from this perspective of social organization and status seeking. An example that appears frequently in popular media is the growing competition among colleges and universities for providing state-of-the-art residential and recreational facilities. Given the rate at which campus administrators are devoting resources to building these facilities, it is plausible to assume that administrators consider these facilities important to remain or become attractive destinations for students. This assumes that students have significant leeway in their college choice.

A recent study of printed and electronic university branding campaigns (Blanco Ramírez, 2016) presents multiple examples of how higher education marketing campaigns deploy both to economic rationales, for example, “higher education, lower tuition” and symbolic, aspirational, and idealized arguments, for example, “You’re an original and we value your perspective” (p. 7). The neoliberalization of the university attempts to erase the distinction between individuals, students, and consumers. The consumer subjectivity is construed as central and encompassing of the other roles. Furthermore, what these neoliberal rationales have in common is the ossification of the individual as the only viable social unit. This logic can and must be reimagined.

While discussing commodities earlier in this article, we emphasized their dual nature both as objects and as social relations. This idea is crucial for understanding consumption: “every object thus has two functions—to be put to use and to be possessed” (Baudrillard, 1996, p. 92). From this perspective, consumption is—at the same time—a communicative process of one’s status (Baudrillard, 1981) and “an active form of relationship” (Baudrillard, 1996, p. 218). In other words, from this perspective, consumption is a system of social relations. These ideas on consumption bring into question the obsession with the individual that neoliberal logic imposes. They also suggest that consumption is a code, a language that requires an “other” to communicate with, someone to address—even if it is to establish relationships of differentiation. Understood as a set of social relations, consumption challenges commonsensical ideas about the inevitability of the neoliberal university. This view of consumption is incompatible with the expansive nature of economic logic that neoliberalism imposes. Privileging social relations provides not an alternative to the economic logic of neoliberalism but rather its reversal.

The reinterpretation of consumption we have presented here has implications for higher education that become evermore evident in the following quote:

Everyday consumer objects are becoming less and less expressive of social rank . . . We are already seeing the social hierarchy being registered in more subtle criteria: type of work and responsibility, level of education and culture . . ., participation in decision making. Knowledge and power are, or are going to become, the two great scarce commodities of our affluent societies. (Baudrillard, 1998, p. 57)

Following this logic, it seems necessary to reflect upon the role higher education has in structuring society. Furthermore, it is important for those of us who propel the university machinery to take position and give account of our involvement with the neoliberal university. Are we simply creating and promoting the latest and most relevant luxury good? As a form of capitalism, neoliberalism requires constant expansion to sustain production. Among other elements, this requires massive controlled consumption. The shift of higher education institutions toward branding and the projection of reputation and status presents new implications, when paired with the analysis of consumption we have presented. The technologies of branding, ranking, and ordering everything in higher education can be seen as mechanisms for managing consumption.

Rankings as Neoliberalization, Commodification, and Consumption

Having advanced the concepts of commodities and consumption in the context of higher education, it seems necessary to exemplify the use of our proposed theorization. To do so, we turn to a discussion of rankings. University rankings are one of the manifestations of higher education commodification that has gained prominence in the last two decades. We can understand rankings as an external object created to be bought and sold, both by the ranking agencies, as well as by the institutions that attempt to “sell” themselves to potential students and their reputation to the broader public. Scholars have discussed the widespread problems associated with such rankings, including their arbitrary measures of quality; the crude indicators of students, faculty, and staff; and the power they exude over institutional decision making, which has notably resulted in many high-profile incidents of cheating and manipulation of institutional data for the purpose of achieving a higher ranking (e.g., Erkkilä, 2014; Hazelkorn, 2011; O’Connell, 2013). At the heart of these critiques is the idea that the college or university was not created to be bought or sold via privately created rankings, yet its purpose becomes just that within the commodified world of postsecondary education.

While these critiques are essential in our resistance to the neoliberal university, we believe that by understanding commodities as both external objects created for the purpose of exchange, and expressions of particular social relations, we are better able to penetrate the institutional rankings regime. Examining the U.S. News and World Report rankings, the most immediate expression of social relations within the rankings is their heavy reliance on “undergraduate academic reputation,” which accounts for almost a quarter of the total rankings (Morse, Brooks, & Mason, 2015). Reputation is determined through a survey of “top academics—presidents, provosts, and deans of admission” who are “those in a position to judge a school’s undergraduate academic excellence” (para. 9) and whose views are included in the rankings to “account for intangibles at peer institutions, such as faculty dedication to teaching” (Morse et al., 2015, para. 9), as well as through surveying high school and college academic counselors. At this macro level, the rankings themselves are largely an expression of the social relations among institutional leaders and academic counselors.

A more nuanced critique of the embedded commodification within rankings occurs within institutions. There is a tension between the educational work and the simple, static expressions of “quality” the rankings allegedly report, and part of that tension centers on the social relations within colleges and universities. Continuing with the U.S. News and World Report rankings, student success is understood through first-year retention rates and 6-year graduation rates; faculty are understood through class sizes, student–faculty ratios, their salary, their degree, and their full-time status; students are made visible through their grade point average (GPA), SAT/ACT scores, and if they were in the top 10% of their graduating class; and alumni are understood by the percentage who donated to their school (Morse et al., 2015). In all of these cases, institutional actors and the relations among them become “informationalized” (Baez & Boyles, 2009); they are turned into manipulatable, commensurable, calculable, and reproducible empirical data points.

No longer are students and faculty in creative, imaginative, unpredictable, and educational relations. Instead, those relations become disembodied and disemplaced, and the individuals and institution become known in the higher education world through their commodity form (in this case, its ranking). A clear example of this can be found at Northeastern University, which engaged in a decade-long singularly focused attempt at a “systematic effort to influence” the U.S. News rankings, saying “we had to get into the top 100, that was a life-or-death matter for Northeastern” (Kutner, 2014). The president of the institution explicitly believed that the university’s life was given or taken away through its ranking, and the representation of the institution became the institution itself. Even though the institution cannot function without its internal social relations, those relations are rendered invisible, as they are not included within the ranking calculations in any non-informationalized manner. Such invisibility of social relations necessary for production is at the heart of the process of commodification.

If we can understand rankings as expressing the dual nature of commodities, we next need to think through how they are consumed. While having a long tradition in the United States, where even the federal government—through the College Score Card (https://collegescorecard.ed.gov)—implies that students are consumers, university rankings have become a global phenomenon. Some have portrayed rankings as a tool for consumer information and, therefore, as a form of university accountability. Critiques on rankings on the basis of presuming that students are consumers are many and well developed. However, we argue that understanding consumption as a symbolic process that implies position taking and communication with others presents a more complete view of this phenomenon. An even less frequently explored aspect is that, given that they are provided by profit-seeking entities (Chang & Osborn, 2005), university rankings constitute an example of the privatization of accountability and, consequently, illustrate the further neoliberalization of the university. The reversal of the argument is simply fascinating: The invasion of private rankings on higher education has been justified as serving public interests by advancing accountability and transparency while this process constitutes an instance of privatizing a public service, university monitoring.

University rankings have tightened their grip on higher education institutions not only by having already won the ideological battle of construing students as consumers. Rankings are commonsensical consumer information tools only to the extent that it is commonsensical to assume that students are consumers. Students consume rankings not only in the traditional sense of purchasing copies of ranking publications such as U.S. News and World Report or Times Higher Education and accessing their corresponding websites but also—perhaps most importantly—by reshaping the ways they relate to different institutions, for example, safety schools, top choice, based on rankings data. These examples highlight the importance of symbolic and relational aspects. Furthermore, rankings are turning higher education institutions from participants into consumers. For example, Times Higher Education now offers clients services such as “branding” and “strategic solutions” aimed at “helping universities improve through performance analysis and benchmarking” (Client Hub, 2016).

Conclusion

In this article, we have engaged with the concepts of commodities and consumption; we have engaged from our standpoint, which is grounded in our roles as faculty members and from particular theoretical traditions. Rather than understanding resistance exclusively as opposition, we recognize that resisting the neoliberal university can take many forms (Shahjahan, 2014). We have chosen to resist by exploring, infiltrating, and pushing the logic we wish to resist to its limits (Baudrillard, 2005, 2010). Rather than pushing against the advance of the economic logic that neoliberalism demands, we embrace but—at the same time—reinterpret commodities and consumption as social relations, which reverses the economic and utilitarian neoliberal assumption. We explored consumption and its many contradictions; we identified that consumption is necessary to sustain the system while at the same time, consumption is capricious. We identified that neoliberalism demands individuality even though consumption demands communication and interlocutors. The regime that neoliberalization imposes also charts a possible path for change. Can we move through and beyond economic language and rationality? Can we imagine collectivist and communitarian approaches to life and work in higher education? Can we engage mindfully and intentionally in activities that challenge the demand of production?

Fundamentally, this article attempted to demonstrate the ways in which concepts and terminology used to critique the neoliberalization of higher education need to be explicitly defined, and their embedded assumptions unearthed. The terms we use, and their commonsensical definitions, are not excluded from the potential influence of the forces we are trying to overcome. We have discussed how understanding a commodity solely as an external object or consumption as an individual process in which the autonomous individual consumer engages reinforces central tenets of neoliberal ideology, specifically the reformulation of social processes into abstracted objects and individual choices. The assumptions undergirding these commonsensical definitions work to reinforce neoliberal ideology even as our scholarship may explicitly challenge processes of neoliberalization. That is, the ways in which we make sense of the foundations of our critiques need to correspond with the goals of our inquiry, and such a project starts with the embedded assumptions we bring toward our scholarship.

Moreover, when we embrace commonsensical definitions of commodity and consumption, the “critical” edge of the concepts is dulled, and we as critical scholars lose valuable tools in our fight against neoliberalism. Higher education scholars who embrace a Polanyian understanding of commodities as external objects bought and sold on capitalist markets cannot connect their critiques of commodification to the broader body of Marxian scholarship on the topic, as these bodies of thought begin from different assumptions. Similarly, understanding consumption as an individual process in which an autonomous actor engages leaves the critical scholar without many allies in the fight against the creation of the “subject-citizen as consumer” (Lather, 2012, p. 1022). Importantly, scholarship that embraces the neoliberal-influence commonsensical definitions may work to obfuscate neoliberalism itself; that is, if we begin an argument aimed at challenging neoliberalism with assumptions consistent with neoliberalism, it is increasingly difficult to understand neoliberalism itself and even more difficult to challenge its manifestations in higher education.

Importantly, we are not arguing that we have presented the “proper” understandings of commodities and consumption, but only that our understandings of our terms have meaningful implications in the way we think through our scholarship, as well as the ways in which others engage with it. Given the monumental challenge neoliberalism presents to all those concerned with democracy and social justice, we believe scholarship challenging processes of neoliberalization must be connected to the broader, historical fights against the influence of capitalist ideology in our world. Notably, we do not believe that all those who critique the commodification and consumption of education support our personal understandings of critical scholarship or social justice, but our argument presented in this article holds true for them as well. These scholars would not want to implicitly embrace the capitalist critiques made by many who discuss commodities and consumption, and need to explicitly define their understandings and engage with those embedded assumptions to better ensure the political aims of their scholarship are achieved.

To conclude, we hope our discussion contributes to a broader call concerning the need for more explicit theoretical and conceptual foundations within education scholarship. Neoliberalism presents meaningful challenges to the emancipatory potential of higher education, scholarship, and critique, and to resist the neoliberalization of our educational world requires engaging in a Gramscian “War of Position” in which we attempt to reclaim space within the academy. It is our contention that such a reclamation can only be achieved if we eschew inherently neoliberal understandings of the foundations of our critiques and build more explicitly focused and defined arguments challenging the neoliberalization of higher education.