Abstract:
The machining of the modern university.
The present state of tertiary education and the external forces that inflect the governance of universities in almost every quarter of the globe beg some fundamental questions about the purpose of the modern university that its current managers have little interest in answering except in the brochure-speak of the fund manager’s report. The story so far is by now an oft-told tale. The presidents, vice-chancellors, deans and everyone else who officially ‘run’ the universities of our time, under the pressure of sundry fiscal crises, have been compelled to respond to government funding imperatives that, commonly, have pursued the mercantile, utilitarian and monetarist principles of neoliberal economics. These read all social exchanges in the light of reductive costbenefit analyses comparable to deciding whether or not to purchase this expensive cut of meat or that insurance policy. ‘Economic rationalism’, it’s sometimes called. The marketplace, along with the rational (or so at least it is assumed) choices we make among the goods and services it offers, constitutes a mechanism for assigning value to every aspect of our lives.
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