The discursive construction of academic capitalism in HE: the case of Catalan university websites

ABSTRACT

Academic capitalism is about how progressively more academic activity is valued according to its capacity to accumulate human, financial and corporate capital. It is on the increase in Higher Education (HE) worldwide and in this article we examine its implantation in Catalan universities. We begin with an exploration of the bigger picture, focussing on the impacts of neoliberalism on HE worldwide, leading to the arrival of the ‘toxic university,’ as part of the rise of academic capitalism. We then provide a critical account of these transformations in European universities. Against this backdrop, we examine the webpages of state-run universities in Catalonia, highlighting their relationships with the business sector. Our key finding is that academic capitalism is alive and well in the construction of a certain worldview within these universities, according to which knowledge is only valid if it is marketable, researchers are entrepreneurs and HE and research are at the service of global capitalism and neoliberal rationalities. We conclude with comments on possible remedies in the current situation, arguing that any measures taken on a local level are not likely to be transformative if nothing is done to change how the global economy functions.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank John Gray, Will Simpson and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful critical comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Pau Bori’s part in this article was supported by a María Zambrano fellowship, funded by European Union-NextGenerationEU, the Spanish Ministry of Universities and Recovery and the Transformation and Resilience Plan, through a call from Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article is a considerably expanded version of an article published previously in Catalan by Pau Bori (2023).

2. Space does not allow a thorough discussion of this key aspect of the neoliberalisation of HE. Still, it is worth mentioning that this Englishization of HE (Phillipson, 2003) inevitably brings with it with some degree of domain loss for local languages, no longer useful for now-globalized academic communication. It also has deleterious effects on the day-to-day functioning of classroom interaction in those cases in which English-medium instruction (EMI) has gained a prominent position (Block & Khan, 2021). In such contexts, both professors and students are often unprepared for the entirety of their activity to be carried out in English. Ultimately, then, Englishization and the introduction of EMI may come to constitute a dark side of internationalization of HE (ibid), one which can be as toxic as any of the other trends previously cited.

3. There is obviously a lot more that could be said about neoliberalism as the backdrop to our discussion here, especially how it is not only about economics but the transformation of society and people inhabiting and constituting it. For a thorough account of the history of neoliberalism and its multiple characteristics and effects, see Block (2018a).

4. Like many terms used in education today, ‘quality’ has a triple status. It is first of all a keyword in Raymond Williams’s sense of the term. It is, thus, a word that is ‘strong … and persuasive … in everyday usage.’ In education, an institutionalized and specialized context, it has ‘become … common in descriptions of wide[…] areas of thought and experience’ (Williams, 1983: 14). As a result of its ubiquity in educational discourses, ‘quality’ has become a buzzword, that is, it is a word which not only is key to discussions of education but also one with a special cutting edge inflection to it. It is, in other words, cool, fashionable and of-the-moment in those contexts in which it is commonly used. Third and finally, the use of ‘quality’ has become so common that it has status as what Claude Levi-Strauss (1950) called a floating signifier, defined by Daniel Chandler (2022) as:

a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified. Such signifiers mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean. In such an unSaussurean state of radical disconnection between signifier and signified, a sign only means that it means. (p. 89)

Quality thus has become a vague term, the exact meaning of which may well be more in its effect and the connotations associated with it (it sounds important and essential) than in any clarifying function it might have in discourse. This feature of the term is manifest in the different uses of it that appear in this article.

5. Like ‘quality,’ ‘transfer’ is also a keyword, a buzzword and a floating signifier in education policy today. From its basic meaning – indicating the moving of an object from one location to another – it is now fully immersed in neoliberal discourses in which it links knowledge, which was previously an un-monetized, non-commodity, to what some would call a ‘market of ideas’ in which it can be bought and sold as it becomes embedded in the world of copyright and patents. See Ward (2012) for an interesting discussion of knowledge in neoliberal times.

Additional information

Funding

The work was  funded by European Union-NextGenerationEU, Ministry of Universities and Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, through a call from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona).