From E Pluribus Unum to Caveat Emptor: How Neoliberal Policies are Capturing and Dismantling the Liberal University

Abstract

This article provides an account of how neoliberal policies are currently in the process of capturing and dismantling the liberal pubic university that was constructed in various places around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article examines the political and epistemic relationship between liberalism, embedded liberalism, the state, and the organizational forms that the university would take throughout most of the twentieth century. It provides an overview of some of the specific neoliberal efforts to transform universities into servants of the economy and how business interests came to capture the university over the last few decades with the help of the new “enterprising state.” This article concludes by examining what these recent changes mean for the future of both the liberal university as we have known it, and the larger quest for education in a democratic society.

Notes

¹ Andrew Gamble, The Free Market and the Strong State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988).

² Mark Constadine, Enterprising States: The Public Management of Welfare-to-Work (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

³ John Clarke and Janet Newman, The Managerial State (London, UK: Sage, 1997).

⁴ Bob Jessop, “The Transition to Post-Fordism and the Schumpeterian Workfare State,” in B. Burrows and B. Loader (eds), Toward a Post-Fordist Welfare State? (London, UK: Routledge, 1994), pp. 13–37.

⁵ Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011).

⁶ Wilhelm Röpke, The Social Crisis of Our Time in Annette and Peter Schiffer-Jacobsohn (trans.), (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1950), p. 103.

⁷ Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 154. This echoes Milton Friedman's statements on education that began in the mid-1950s.

⁸ A copy of the memo can be found at http://law.wlu.edu/deptimages/Powell%20Archives/PowellMemorandumPrinted.pdf.

⁹ Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

¹⁰ Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008).

¹¹ Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in G. Bennington and B. Massumi (trans.), (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 58.

¹² Christopher May and Susan Sell, Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienners Publishers, 2006).

¹³ L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (London, UK: Williams and Norgate, 1911).

¹⁴ John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935).

¹⁵ Ibid., 36–37.

¹⁶ John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (London, UK: Hogarth Press, 1926), p. 12.

¹⁷ Walter Lippmann, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1937), p. 182.

¹⁸ Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

¹⁹ Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, p. 132.

²⁰ Bruno Amble, “Morals and Politics in the Ideology of Neo-Liberalism,” Socio-Economic Review 9:1 (2011), pp. 3–30.

²¹ Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, in J. Kahane (trans.), (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), p. 428.

²² Wilhelm von Humboldt in Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in G. Bennington and B. Massumi (trans.), (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 32.

²³ Wilhelm von Humboldt in UNESCO, “Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1767–1835,” Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 23:3 (1993), p. 616.

²⁴ J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government (New York, NY: Dutton, 1951), p. 88.

²⁵ J.S. Mill, “Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews,” in John M. Robson (ed.), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI -Essays on Equality, Law, and Education (London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 218.

²⁶ Andrew White in S. S. Schweber, “Big Science in Context: Cornell and MIT,” in P. Galison and B. Hevly (eds), Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 149–183, p. 153.

²⁷ Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993 [1918]).

²⁸ J.D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (London, UK: George Routledge & Sons, 1939).

²⁹ Michael Polanyi, “The Republic of Science,” Minerva 1 (Autumn 1962), pp. 54–74.

³⁰ Daniel Kevles, “The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Post-War Research Policy, 1942–1945: A Political Interpretation of Science—The Endless Frontier,” Isis 68:1 (1977), pp. 4–26.

³¹ Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier, A Report to the President (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1945), p. 12.

³² Don Price, “Federal Money and University Research,” in H. Orlans (ed.), Science Policy and the University (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1968), pp. 23–51.

³³ Bush, Science, p. 33.

³⁴ Henry Etzkowitz, The Triple Helix: University-Industry-Government Innovation in Action (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008).

³⁵ James Buchanan and Gordon Tulloch, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962).

³⁶ The phrases “roll back” and “roll out” neoliberalism are taken from J. Peck and A. Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space,” Antipode 34:3(2002), pp. 380–404.

³⁷ In one version of this in the spring of 2014 Penn State University auctioned off its intellectual property at a public auction with limited success. See http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2014/03/penn_state_to_be_first_univers.html

³⁸ US Department of Education, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Direction of U.S. Higher Education, A Report of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 2006).

³⁹ National Committee on the Inquiry into Higher Education, Higher Education in a Learning Society (Retrieved from: bei.leeds.ac.uk/Partners/NCIHE/, 1997).

⁴⁰ US Department of Education, A Test of Leadership, p. 13.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Ibid., 21.

⁴³ Steven Ward, “The Machinations of Managerialism: New Public Management and the Diminishing Power of Professionals,” Journal of Cultural Economy 4:2 (2011), pp. 205–215.

⁴⁴ See Leslie Barry, “Faculty Governance in the New University,” Academe 99:5 (2013), pp. 17–22.

⁴⁵ Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey, “The Changing Academic Workforce,” Trusteeship 3:21 (2013), at http://agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-workforce.

⁴⁶ It is worth noting that the Apollo Group, parent company of the University of Phoenix, spends twice as much on marketing as on teaching. Also, at for profit colleges 17.4% of annual revenue was spent on teaching while almost 20 percent was distributed as profit. In Stefan Collini, “Sold Out,” London Review of Books, October 24 (2013), pp. 2–3.

⁴⁷ American Council on Education, ”State Funding: A Race to the Bottom,” 2012, available at http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.aspx

⁴⁸ Stefan Collini has described the situation in UK as one where the “coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies.” Collini, “Sold Out,” p. 14.

⁴⁹ This phrase “actually existing neoliberalism” contrasts the more ideal typical neoliberalism with the modifications it underwent in the actual realm of politics. It is taken from N. Brenner and N. Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Liberalism,’” Antipode 34:3 (2002), p. 351.

⁵⁰ Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 75.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven C. Ward

Steven C. Ward is Professor of Sociology at Western Connecticut State University. His most recent book is entitled Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education (Routledge, 2012). His work has also appeared in journals such as the American Sociological Review; Sociology; The History of the Human Sciences; The Canadian Journal of Sociology and The Journal of Cultural Economy.