Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Can We Understand? Can We Resist and Survive? Can We Become Without Neoliberalism?

Historical and Contemporary Performances of Neoliberalism (in Higher Education)

For some time, scholars (and others) in higher education have written about the impact of capitalism on higher education. Furthermore, some have always, and already, viewed higher education as a Western tool for continued colonialization (of the mind and life practices). See various postcolonial discussions such as Postcolonial Theory (Gandhi, 1998) and “Decolonising Our Universities” (2011). Others have critiqued higher education as patriarchal and inequitable, even without considering capitalist and/or neoliberal practices and impositions. See, for example, Anti-Feminism in the Academy (Clark, Garner, Higonnet, & Katrak, 1996). However, contemporary neoliberal circumstances (a) reinforce these impacts and continued oppressions while often masking them as no longer problems, as having been solved, and (b) create layers of co-optation in the name of enterprise and competition while creating new forms of capitalist, audit subjectivity imposed on already oppressed and marginalized bodies.

The range of perceptions and interpretations by scholars and others of neoliberalism is absolutely consistent with the notion of multiple neoliberalisms, as well as its ability to co-opt culture, circumstance, and individual understandings, biases, and perceptions. As examples, Giroux (2013) has described neoliberalism’s co-optation of the purpose of teaching; Lincoln (2011) has interpreted neoliberalism as saturation that abridges faculty rights. Furthermore, some scholars approach neoliberalism as historically grounded, but even diverse historical foundations are used that may range from the broad-based (more dominant) histories that have tied public education to the continuation of democratic society to histories of oppression, whether through the construction of racist, colonial power or through the history (and practice) of gendered power. Other scholars engage in interpretations that reconceptualize dominant capitalist constructions or focus on local contexts as sites for thinking about, understanding, and/or perceiving the performance of neoliberalism. All of these standpoints are both limited (in outlook) and extremely important as we struggle to comprehend the complexities and impositions of neoliberalism in our every day and professional lives (as well as to the nonhuman, material, and changing conceptual world all around us). Furthermore, others describe the rhizomatic performances and invasions of capitalism in the current neoliberal environment. The authors in this first section expose us to their own diverse histories and perspectives as regarding neoliberalisms, serving to expand our understandings of its divergence and complexities, as well as its ever changing, yet continuous power.

In the first manuscript, “Democracy Distracted in an Era of Accountability: Teacher Education in an Age of Neoliberalism,” Patrick M. Jenlink takes an historical view of neoliberalism and demonstrates the importance of understanding this history as related to contemporary political agendas. Using the history, Jenlink discusses the neoliberal threat to democratic education broadly and the role of education in perpetuating a democratic society. The author problematizes technical-managerial standards of accountability that have become a mainstay of the neoliberal agenda, reminding the reader that there are multiple potential meanings for accountability. The notion of standards of complexity as an alternative is put forward. He then challenges the field of teacher education to advance this notion of accountability as a counter narrative to neoliberalism.

Reminding us that we are always embedded within a racialized, colonialist global imaginary, Sharon Stein and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti complicate even the common critiques of neoliberalism in “Higher Education and the Modern/Colonial Global Imaginary.” The authors illustrate paradoxes between the exploitative history of public higher education as always embedded within violent social relations, while also considered a site for resistance. Their purpose is to grapple with the limits of resistance in such a continued colonialist imaginary, believing that examining these attachments is the only avenue for generating new possibilities for, and understanding of, resistance.

In “Beyond Intellectual Slut Shaming: Traversing Cartesian Dualism, Shame and Self-Blame in the Neoliberalized Post-Structuralist Critical Classroom,” Joanna Perkins also problematizes traditional challenges to neoliberalism in higher education by associating those critiques with the shaming that is used against women (and men) who are constructed as embodied rather than rational. The mind-body dualism that remains part of the critique is further dismantled as she uses Spinoza’s work to overview the shared structures that generate both the Cartesian and the neoliberal subject. Possibilities are generated for moving beyond the neoliberal subject using Sharp’s (2012) notion of a politics of renaturalization to construct a “pedagogy of renaturalization” for university instruction. To avoid the loop of intellectual shame, a radical form of self-reflexivity is discussed that would move toward an ethical joy.

Some scholars choose to understand and critique neoliberalism in higher education using the very constructs that are used to facilitate neoliberalism and its servant, capitalism. Daniel B. Saunders and Gerardo Blanco Ramirez attempt to address the limits of neoliberal logic by exploring conceptualizations of commodity and consumption in “Resisting the Neoliberalization of Higher Education: A Challenge to Commonsensical Understandings of Commodities and Consumption.” The authors emphasize the need to understand the problems with higher education discourses that construct students as consumers, create faculty as service providers, and privilege revenue generation. This understanding is considered a location from which counter scholarship, reconceptualization, and new forms of action can be generated.

In “The Responsibilised Consumer: Neoliberalism and English Higher Education Policy,” Andrew Morrison explores the capitalist notion of consumer that has morphed into the neoliberal ideal of the entrepreneurial self. From within the context of the United Kingdom and using a specific policy document titled “Students at the Heart of the System,” Morrison identifies values at the “heart” of the government’s mobilization of a higher education neoliberal agenda. Furthermore, this agenda that would use higher education to develop a citizenry that is individualistic, self-reliance, and entrepreneurial within a declining welfare state is problematized.

Luca Scacchi, Angelo Benozzo, Domenico Carbone, and Maria Grazia Monaci interpret higher education within the Italian context in “Neo-Liberalism in the Italian University: Encroachment and Resistance.” These authors contextualize changes over the past 20 years made for the specific purpose of creating an Italian workforce adaptable to the neoliberal labor market. A higher education system is examined that now fosters three models of higher education that emerged using the principles of autonomy, evaluation, job insecurity, and corporatization. These models include a system that allows for two-way movement that connects academic and vocational degrees, a system that limits possibilities for changing a field of study, and a system that allows for cross disciplinary practice. From within this change, the authors describe the resultant decreases in public spending on higher education, course closures and eliminations, as well as loss of staffing.

Finally, neoliberalism is performed and emerges rhizomatically in all aspects of our professional lives, as layer of small and large, overlapping and fluid assemblages; the invasion is complex, messy, and not easily definable. The last two articles in this section illustrate this complexity in the practice of publishing specifically and the messiness of functioning as a qualitative researcher in neoliberalism more broadly.

In “Qualitative Publishing in a Neoliberal Universe and University,” Mitch Allen discusses the rapid transformation of academic publishing as big data and bigger search engines have led academic consumers of information to expect immediate availability in amount and formats, ranging from a single word to massive databases. The centralization of information flow has led to ever-larger organizational structures in technological industries, mimicked by the consolidation of academic publishing into fewer and fewer multinational media corporations (or titans) who provide information to scholars in aggregated and disaggregated forms. Resistance by academics has lead to the construction of open access scholarship, a practice that, however democratic, is virtually impossible to sustain. Allen further points to the traditional reward system of academia (usually some version of tenure) as the only current practice that, to some extent, counters this expanding, capitalist, inequitable system.

Julianne Cheek explains the messiness of our qualitative research problem in “The Research Market Place.” First, she discusses the neoliberal challenge to qualitative inquiry as a mess, and as overlapping systems of problems. Second, she focuses on the need to understand the connections between these problems. Finally, believing that we probably cannot escape the neoliberal mess, she proposes ways of functioning for qualitative researchers that could potentially improve the situation.

Individual and Collective Struggles With Neoliberalism

This neoliberalism, which is multiple and embedded within diverse modernist histories, interpretations, and impositions, is rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and all-invasive (Foucault, 2008), leaving individual faculty in higher education apprehensive regarding their own survival. This concern is not only legitimate and warranted but also the exact fear and narcissism that is desired in the perpetuation of neoliberalism. The notion of the entrepreneurial individual may actually foster faculty’s self-centered apprehension that denies histories and experiences of others, as well as commonalities across the faculty experience. Furthermore, neoliberalism has so thoroughly saturated already existing modernist and critical practices in higher education that most cannot recognize what was not, yet has become, neoliberal. Histories and diversities have been silenced by neoliberalism, placing scholars (and especially those who are early in their careers) in positions without collaborative texts or historical colleagues. Common examples include (a) expectations for tenure, and (b) the existence of diverse forms of critical pedagogy.

To illustrate, for generations, tenure in colleges and universities has tended to involve expectations for publication and most often in particular positivist/postpositivist journals. Although expectations for publishing in particular journals remain common, social constructionist and critical perspectives (e.g., feminisms, post/anticolonialism, poststructuralism) have generated conversations, journals, books, and courses that did not exist as resources for those who would teach and obtain tenure in past generations. Although the modernist focus on publication has continued within the emergence of neoliberalism, avenues for publication, as well as the content that is accepted has expanded because of scholars who throughout their careers have focused on diversity, multiplicity, and justice. Yet, this history, and the broadened possibilities that it has generated, is often forgotten by scholars attempting to survive in the current neoliberal contexts.

The second illustration can be made clear by examining the courses and programs that were available to many senior scholars as compared with courses and forms of instruction generated by critical, feminist, anticolonial scholars over the past 30 years. New PhD/EdDs have, since the 1980s, completed dissertations that are qualitative, critical, and some even anticolonial, as they have taken coursework that engaged critical and feminist pedagogies. Much can be learned from these past practices and attempts to teach in ways that increase justice and challenge researcher power historically; again, multiple critical pedagogies have emerged since the 1980s. However, in the last 10 to 15 years, a capitalist, and especially neoliberalist rhizomatic character has invaded university instruction. As new content (i.e., case in point, qualitative research) has gained recognition, capitalism has invaded, resulting in an environment that would generate funds through the instruction of qualitative research, and would accept that anyone who can generate funds using this content is also qualified to teach the content; generating funds (numbers of students, etc.) makes the entrepreneur successful, rather than knowledge of content. This is the complexity in which junior scholars and teachers of today function, the complexity generated by neoliberalism that again denies histories and the experiences of others. Diverse forms of pedagogy exist and have been practiced, but they have been overshadowed by narrow neoliberal focus on profit, competition, and entrepreneurialism (or perhaps worse, co-opted by neoliberalism) related to qualitative research.

The excessive focus on money generation and the availability of resources, as well as the emphasis on “star entrepreneur scholars” who play the game (meaning either generate capital or conduct research that supports neoliberalism) is unprecedented in the neoliberal context of higher education. Although power within this context has never not been tied to finances, particular fields were, at least historically, recognized as not connected to capital (in this case literally meaning “money”) but rather valuable as locations for diverse content, diversified knowledge, and human understanding. This appreciation for knowledge, diverse ways of being, and human “betterment” and education for all that are not connected to the generation of funds tends to no longer exist. Furthermore, money did not historically always determine major decisions in higher education. Again, this is no longer the case. Today, higher education focuses, almost exclusively, on money—from decisions regarding hiring—to the construction or elimination of departments, programs, even academic colleges within universities.

As the first editor of this special issue, I will provide two examples from my own employment context that illustrate the change. When I was a faculty member at Texas A&M University 20 years ago, the College of Business said “NO” to funds from a rich business person who wanted to decide the research agenda for a scholar whose position he would partially fund; and this was a college of business that turned down the money. More recently, however, just after I left Arizona State University to work in New Orleans (immediately following Hurricane Katrina), the president of the university eliminated the existing graduate college of education as he received a huge donation from Teach for America (an organization critiqued by many education scholars as neoliberal, capitalist, a mechanism for the privatizing of education and the elimination of teacher education, and certainly harmful to public higher education). The money was not just gratefully accepted; but also, critical faculty member lives and conceptualizations of democratic public education, justice and fairness were marginalized, discredited, and placed under erasure. A range of critical faculty either changed colleges or had to leave the institution. Neoliberalism in higher education has certainly resulted in a focus on money over all else; individuals are judged as smart, competent, and valuable to the institution if they generate (and do not critique) money. Regardless of all other past (and continued) power issues, neoliberalism has resulted in higher education that is too often all about capital (i.e., money).

Authors in this section describe their own concerns from within this “monied” emphasis within neoliberalism using their diverse critical locations. These sites include the great concern for individual survival, locations from which dominant expectations are perceived as increased for those who represent diversity, and scholar body as location for both purposeful and unconscious transformation that would challenge neoliberalism. One group of scholars even join together in an exploration that would reconceptualize the notion of “scholar” in ways that would transform higher education as others attempt brief escapes into countering neoliberalism.

In the first article, “Navigating the Corporate University: Reflections on The Politics of Research in Neoliberal Times,” Kyle S. Bunds and Michael D. Giardina provide an astute example of conversations and sharing, debate and dialogue between faculty in differing historical positions as neoliberal higher education emerges. As a mentor and a mentee, the authors construct a series of vignettes. These evocative representations question and explore everything from tenure and promotion to purposes and conceptualizations of one’s research agendas.

Brandi Lawless and Yea-Wen Chen acknowledge that faculty with diverse backgrounds and from differing locations may experience neoliberal higher education differently. In “Multicultural Neoliberalism and Academic Labor: Experiences of Female Immigrant Faculty in the U.S. Academy,” the authors describe a qualitative research study in which 29 female immigrant faculty employed in the United States participated. Using interviews, the researchers explore the various ways that dominant ideologies position diverse identities, proposing that the immigrant female faculty believe that they are expected to function within a context that commodifies education, constructs them as the individual body of multiculturalism, and would impose higher expectations for productivity than for nonimmigrant faculty.

“Body as profession, or what is it with Irma?” by Anne Beate Reinertsen represents a scholarly exploration into “becoming educator” who brings forth research complexity and ambiguity as strengths in a time of neoliberalism. Reinertsen desires to use new materialist approaches and their bodily applications to foster and build cultures of innovation. She problematizes immanent critique by constructing what can be referred to as “material eco/edu/criticism.”

The Collective (Jessica Van Cleave, Sarah Bridges-Rhoads, Jennifer Wolgemuth, and Teri Holbrook) works against the oppressive insistence on academic coherence in “I am Nel: Becoming (In)Coherent Scholars in Neoliberal Times.” Believing that there are few avenues for resistance in neoliberal higher education, the Collective uses the work of Hembrey (2011) to create multiple, fictional “coherent” scholars, that actually broaden the notion of coherence while challenging it. These fictional characters therefore represent thinkable spaces of resistance. Butler’s (2004) discussion of intelligibility, as well as the notion of (de)subjectivation (Butler, 1997; Foucault, 1985; Hoy, 2005) underlie these creations. Further purposes are to make possible this (in)coherence by working as a collective that foregoes hierarchy, thus creating further oppositional locations.

Finally, short descriptions of scholar experiences, emotional responses, creative interactions that would counter neoliberalism are included in the section titled ESCAPES. Daisy Pillay, Kathleen Jane Pithouse-Morgan, and Inbanathan Naicker use poetry to collaboratively explore the influences of qualitative inquiry on the researcher in “Self-Knowledge through Collective Poetic Inquiry: Cultivating Productive Resistance as University Academics.” In the Escape, “In Response to a Call: Evoking a Keynote,” Alison Laurie Neilson and Rita Sao Marcos construct a Council of Animals as a nontraditional collaborative academic experiment.

Becoming “Without”/Resisting Neoliberalism

Diverse knowledges, multiple ways of being/living, critical multiculturalism, justice education, and practices of reconceptualization connected with support for performances that directly counter commodification and profiteering provide a range of locations from which to counter, resist, even become without, neoliberalism in higher education. As already mentioned, the field of qualitative research has constructed unlimited avenues for scholarship that could challenge neoliberalism. Cultural and gender studies are also locations from which to function and strategize, especially if scholars join to resist the co-optation of diverse knowledges by capitalism.

However, Giardina and Denzin reminded us in 2013 that “what we’ve been doing isn’t working” (p. 446). They encourage us to avoid becoming those scholars who “find favor in the corporate university” (p. 450). The authors of the final four articles in this issue have certainly taken up the challenge. They take direct actions, from teaching using traditionally marginalized knowledge to rethinking university as a performance that is not neoliberal—that becomes entirely different—that is without neoliberalism.

“EDG 6931 Writes Back!: Black Studies as Emancipatory Resistance to Neoliberal Tyranny in Teacher Education” by Melanie M. Acosta provides a complete description of the use of Critical Studyin’, a Black Studies pedagogy, enacted in an education course on social justice. Critical Studyin is explained philosophically, along with course activities and an example student collaboratively constructed assignment. Acosta acknowledges the contextual layers that have obfuscated issues of race, gender, and economic level in education in the United States using the work of such scholars as King (2008). Finally, she discusses the implications for the use of Critical Studyin both in teacher education and to directly challenge the power of our neoliberal circumstance in higher education.

In “Silenced Students: Resistance in a Corporatized University,” Juha Suoranta and Robert FitzSimmons illustrate how student silencing happens as a consequence of a structural change in the balance of power between the Finnish government and the universities that have been economically more autonomous since 2010. University administrators tend to avoid risks because of the increased directive power of the government, which remains a major funder. This, in turn, has had effects on how universities define the roles and functions of students. In the changed conditions, the universities see students as clients whose purpose is to study and graduate, but not to revolt or act as political beings. The authors describe two case studies of student protest to demonstrate both the limits and political possibilities of student actions.

Ryan Evely Gildersleeve takes the knowledge imperative in higher education as the central concern in “The Neoliberal Academy of the Anthropocene: Retaliation of the Lazy Academic.” The author characterizes the two fundamental realities shaping higher education today, neoliberalism and the Anthropocene. Along with the related discussion of neoliberalism, the Anthropocene is recognized as the social consequences for our current geologic period in which humans are the primary agents of affect and effect on the planet (Braidotti, 2013). Such science forces us to socially grapple with the consequences of human agency not as separate from nature, but constituent and simultaneously constituting of nature. Gildersleeve argues that these two conditions reconfigure the knowledge imperative of higher education requiring those in the professoriate to function differently. In discussing self reconceptualization as the potential lazy academic, methods that have been defined as the responsible methodologist (Kuntz, 2015) and delineated as within the slow-scholarship movement (Mountz et al., 2015) are used to generate becomings that are outside and without neoliberalism.

Finally, in “A Slow Reading [of] Notes and Some Possibilities of Liberated, Open, Becoming Universities,” Mirka Koro-Ljungberg and Teija Löytönen acknowledge the neoliberal problems with higher education. However, they choose to take a step forward, discuss, dream, and image diverse possibilities or universities to come. In this final article, the authors leave the reader considering unlimited possibilities by imagining, pondering alternatives, and reading notes (to be read slowly) about fragile futures of liberated, open, and becoming universities.

Perhaps even within the most difficult neoliberal saturation, we are still only limited by our collective willingness to reimagine and take action. The “newly” reimagined university has a task of societal protest. It is one mode of protest. Furthermore, (a) functioning differently as scholars (even as lazy academics) while acknowledging the life’s work of our academic activist ancestors; (b) revisioning the purposes of our programs, courses, and content while acknowledging diverse knowledges and ways of being in the world; and (c) supporting students who would counter neoliberalism serve as both protest and sites from which direct action can be taken (however dangerous) within the reimagined university. In addition, scholars from around the globe are concerned as they continue to critique and practice both hope and direct action (Chomsky, 2015; Giroux, 2014, 2016). Let us further meet, gather, discuss, participate, debate, and collaborate to create and support diverse cultures of thinking and acting, where scholars and activists (even from outside Academia) work together to counter and eliminate forces of neoliberalism.