Beyond the neoliberal university: Hopeful critique.

Abstract

What is to be done to save the university - and the critique of which it has been the bastion - has become a leading question of the left, particularly in the Anglosphere. Following Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1996), most critics lament the eclipse of what he calls the ‘university of culture’ by the ‘university of excellence’ or, to be more exact, the shift from a national and ‘rational’ academy to a neoliberal and instrumental one. They tend to agree on the drivers of this shift: the three M’s of massifcation, marketisation and managerialism that enable education to emerge as a private good and a prosumer product. Although they tend to disagree on how to deal with the shift, they don’t dispute that critique is the key to doing so. Ruth Barcan and Richard Hil offer a distinctly Australasian perspective on the university question. Hil addresses the ‘student experience’ in the neoliberal university through interviews with students, academics and others. He aims to ‘conscientize’ students (or their parents, perhaps) to demand the neoliberal university live up to its ambitious and lavish marketing claims, and share governance with them. Barcan addresses afect in the neoliberal university from the standpoint of academics. She aims to alert academics to the structural factors that infuence the afective atmosphere of the neoliberal university, particularly as it bears on academic identity and pedagogy. She draws on hope studies to make a case for ‘the classroom as a space of possibility’. Barcan, R. (2016). Academic life and labour in the new university: Hope and other choices. London: Routledge. Hil, R. (2015). Selling Students Short: Why you won't get the university education you deserve. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.