From unbundling to market making: reimagining, reassembling and reinventing the public university

ABSTRACT

In Britain and New Zealand the neoliberal assault on universities has shifted from new public management and funding models to the special status of the public university. The project aims to complete neoliberal business initiated 25 years ago by more fully marketising and financialising universities, starting with ‘unbundling’ and outsourcing and culminating in new forms of privatisation, rent-extraction and rebundling. This paper analyses two documents commissioned beyond government to create political momentum for this project: Avalanche is Coming and The University of the Future. These both capture the zeitgeist of reform while simultaneously creating the university futures that they portend. We examine the market-making work they perform in reimagining and reinventing universities ahead of policy reform. We argue that claims made to support fundamental restructuring of public universities lack substance or evidence. Rather, each is underpinned by different configurations of ideology and self-interest that together envelope universities in new agendas of marketisation, financialisation and privatisation. We suggest that in this latest restructuring of public universities critics should pay more attention to the work of consultancies and think tanks alongside the micro-details of market making. By doing so, they too might reimagine public universities, but for a different political project.

KEYWORDS:

• Public universities
• market making
• unbundling
• New Zealand
• privatisation

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the UNIKE University Futures Conference in Copenhagen, June 2016. We would like to acknowledge members of the panel, the audience and the UNIKE fellows and partners (including Susan Wright, Susan Robertson, Roger Dale, Pavel Zgaga and António Magalhåes) for their feedback. We would particularly like to thank Chris Muelleleile for his good advice for honing the theoretical argument and the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term ‘ginger group’ refers to an activist group within a larger organisation or association that enlivens or radicalises its parent body (Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014).

2 How ‘arms length from government’ is questionable as ministers will appoint the Chair, Chief Executive and non-executive Board members of the OfS (2016, 61).

3 Justin O’Connor, personal communication. O’Connor is professor of Communications and Cultural Economy at Monash University and a regular commentator on Australian higher education policy.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Auckland's Cross-Faculty Research Initiative Fund.