Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Higher Education

By Beth Mintz

Republished from Marxist Sociology blog.

I recently published an article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology that uses the “student as customer” to help understand why college is so expensive. I explore three factors that contribute to high costs:  1) contemporary understandings of education as a private, rather than a public, good; 2) the ways that schools are funded; and 3) the “marketization” of higher ed.  These processes produce students who are customers, but it is important to point out that this change is rooted in a set of neoliberal assumptions that frame the way that we think about, organize, and fund education, rather than any fundamental change in young people.

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of this historical moment. It includes a belief in the following:  the efficiency of the free market and the deregulation and privatization of the public sector that markets require; tax reduction; abandoning the welfare state; and replacing the notion of the public good with a personal responsibility for one’s own welfare.  It has informed public policy in every Democratic and Republican administration since the Reagan years, and it currently structures much of our economic and political lives. This includes the university, where it has shaped institutional practice and individual action.

Neoliberal thought considers higher education a financial investment for students, and it assumes that colleges and universities should compete for customers, just like any other sector. These beliefs have laid the foundation for formal higher educational policy and internal institutional procedure. They have not made the academy more efficient, however, but instead have contributed to the runaway expenses that we see today.

In the United States, ideas about the funding of education turn on whether it is considered a public good; that is, whether the whole community benefits from an educated population, or if it is an investment made by the individual, yielding a return in the form of future earnings. In recent years, the latter vision, that of a private good, has gained ascendancy and this has had a profound impact on financing. It helps explain why so much need-based financial aid takes the form of loans rather than grants, and why public colleges and universities are being systematically defunded.

Moreover, although theorists have long argued that schools reproduce the class system, the victory of the neoliberal agenda has intensified the role of education in solidifying advantage. That colleges and universities survive on those who can pay the bills translates into the structural requirement of privileging the affluent, with the needs of many low and middle-income students ignored.  It also has a profound effect on student behavior as education becomes a commodity to be used for competitive advantage in the labor market, turning students into customers to be pursued.

To attract students in a highly competitive environment, colleges and universities invest in all sorts of things to distinguish themselves from other institutions. The way markets work, however, everyone adopts successful practices, and this means that many very expensive innovations eventually become commonplace. This includes the fancy dorms, dining halls and cutting-edge classrooms so common on campuses these days. Indeed, academia has gone on a multi-decade building spree, often financed by long-term borrowing. Between 2002 and 2012, interest payments almost doubled, growing from  $6 billion to $11 billion for four-year (nonprofit) schools. The University of Colorado, for example, owed approximately $1.5 billion in 2019, with 3.6.% of its annual operating budget going towards debt servicing.

Expanded student services are also common recruitment vehicles, and although they do not typically require large capital outlays, they fuel the growth of administrators. Defined narrowly, about 8.4% of spending in private (nonprofit) four-year institutions and 4.9% for comparable publics is on student services. This contributes to the decline in instructional spending as a percentage of total expenses in both the public and private (non-profit) sectors which, in 2017-2018, accounted for 27% and 31%  of four-year schools’ budgets, respectively.  Add to this nearly a half a billion dollars spent on advertising each year, and the role of competition and marketization in tuition escalation becomes clearer.

Among upper middle-class families, prestige has become the centerpiece of college aspirations. When education is viewed as a vehicle for competitive advantage in a labor market – as a private good – and attending a prestigious school is believed to distinguish one from the large pool of competitors, students pursue prestige as a rational strategy for investment maximization.

Colleges and universities understand this well, and, thus, increasing one’s prestige rankings is a central part of many a recruitment strategy.  Indeed, this explains the attention that schools pay to the U. S. New and World Report lists. Attentive institutions have figured out ways to raise their scores and a very common — and expensive – tactic is tuition discounting, where merit scholarships are offered to high achieving customers who would contribute to a school’s selectivity profile. Over time, this practice has spread through academia, so much so that few students now pay full freight. On average, private nonprofits collected  55% of published figures in 2018, with nearly 82% of undergraduates receiving discounts.

Public universities, particularly flagships, use merit aid to recruit academically successful out-of-state students, who contribute to institutional prestige and – theoretically — also counter decreases in state funding by paying higher tuition rates than state residents. But, here again, once everyone has incorporated an innovation, it becomes less effective in distinguishing an institution from its competitors, while the practice remains.  Preliminary research  has found this approach is so pervasive, and the competition so intense, that it may lower total tuition revenue, suggesting that state universities have become particularly vulnerable to the market failure of tuition discounting.

Moreover, merit money privileges the wealthy; it has grown at the expense of need-based scholarships and it goes predominately to upper income students, with awards tending to increase with income levels. This has led to  decreases in the proportion of low income and minority undergraduates in college in general, with public sector schools especially hard hit.

Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of this historical moment, has contributed to the rise of the “student as customer” with costly ramifications. The contemporary view of education as a private-good, for example, justifies the massive underfunding of higher education and helps explain why we are transferring its cost from the community to the individual. Given the belief in the power of the market, the non-profit world now follows the logic of the private sector, with colleges and universities developing institutional practices to help survive marketization and privatization. Dependence on students who can afford to pay the bills explains many of the strategies that have been widely adopted, but instead of providing advantage in the competition for revenue, they have created very expensive necessities. This contributes to skyrocketing tuition, while affecting the class and racial/ethnic composition of contemporary campuses. When compared to the conventional wisdom of trust the market, then, the conclusion is that corporatization and marketization are important drivers in tuition cost escalation.

Beth Mintz is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Vermont.  Her research interests include occupational segregation, corporate structure, gender, and health care.

To read more, see: Beth Mintz. “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology” in The American Journal of Economic and Sociology 2021.

[Image by Kevin Dooley via Flicker (CC BY 2.0)]

Paywall or Open Book?: Power Dynamics in Academia and Higher Education

By Marcus Kahn

Academic spheres have a reputation among progressive and radical groups as being out-of-touch and disconnected from grassroots activist efforts. There is a long and troubling history of exclusion and deference to power leading right up to the present that lends weight to this perspective. Academic culture is deeply entrenched within networks of institutional decision-making power and is structured in ways that reinforce interlinking brands of elitism (classist, patriarchal, nationalist, ableist, and racist), despite optimistic rhetoric to the contrary. There are obvious systemic flaws in the U.S. higher education system, from the racial and socioeconomic inequities that selectively distribute resources and access, to the ways in which prestigious universities are implicated in the reproduction, growth, and maintenance of concentrated power. These sharp divisions rely upon the impermeability of academic spheres and the public’s inability to access knowledge and participate in knowledge production. By breaking down the physical, digital, and cognitive walls that keep knowledge contained, and opening doors for the public to participate in the closely guarded world of ‘intellectuals’, academic work can start to disentangle and detach from the constraints on perspective and action that limit its social relevance and reinforce social division, and take concrete steps towards the transformative deconstruction of existing power systems.

Barriers to Entry

The National Center for Education Statistics noted that in the U.S., “Of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall 2018, some 40 percent were White males; 35 percent were White females; 7 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males; 5 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females; and 3 percent each were Black males, Black females, Hispanic males, and Hispanic females.” Furthermore, “among full-time professors, 53 percent were White males, 27 percent were White females, 8 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males, and 3 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females. Black males, Black females, and Hispanic males each accounted for 2 percent of full-time professors.”

To enter into academic discussion, individuals need to ascend through a series of clear-cut stages. Attaining a PhD is a prerequisite for participation in academic discourse, which takes an investment of time and money most cannot afford. Of course, to get a PhD you need to have at least a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Huge segments of the population are effectively filtered out at each successive stage based off of the closely intertwined pressures surrounding wealth, gender, ability, nationality, and race, or else face the prospect of a completely unsustainable lifestyle.

Academic discourse tends to exist in its own world apart from the general public, filtering only indirectly into public awareness. Noam Chomsky cites the work of an early 20th century ‘pioneer’ in the field of communications often referred to as the ‘father of public relations’, Edward Bernays. Bernays distinguished the ‘bewildered herd’ (the public) from a ‘specialized class’ who understands their needs and the ways to provide for them. This viewpoint may not always be articulated as explicitly as it was by Bernays but emblemizes common attitudes within ‘intellectual’ circles.

Needlessly complex language and highly theoretical content can further serve to ostracize people who don’t devote their time to deciphering dense and convoluted academic texts. Chomsky has suggested that for the most part, core concepts and arguments in the social sciences can be conveyed at a high school level. The supposed complexity and impenetrability of social issues serves to exclude the majority of the population that isn’t highly versed in academic jargon, so that ‘laymen’ are unable to participate in the discussion of issues that pertain directly to their lives. This separation ultimately serves to disempower the public in determining its own affairs, since elites can justify their decisions and leadership roles through claimed ‘expertise’.

Institutional Interlocking

Academic research and higher education often conform to and serve the interests of dominant configurations of power. To take a few symbolic examples, Stanford was founded by a proto-Bezos, construction at UC Berkeley was funded by William Randolph Hearst, Princeton’s policy school is named after Woodrow Wilson, and Harvard’s political science school is named after John F. Kennedy. Academic institutions interlock with other dominant institutions in the public and private sectors, maintaining a mutualistic relationship which limits the ability of researchers and educators to examine institutional power with critical clarity and work towards meaningful social transformation.

Centers of concentrated power directly impact the research objectives of even the most seemingly ‘objective’ or value-free sciences. Highly technical fields such as physics, engineering, and computer science require intensive years-long training in university education systems. Major consulting firms, financial institutions, multinational corporations, and government agencies recruit talent from what essentially serves as a farm system to fill institutional ranks. Curriculum and the dominant intellectual culture that guides it are heavily instrumentalist, preparing students to enter uncritically into institutional roles with the ‘correct’ skills and mindset, so that by the time an engineer is developing ICBMs or an economist is assessing trade policy they have learned not to question or resist the ultimate impact of their work.

Research questions are often determined by the needs of these interlinked institutions, and research efforts within universities have consistently and directly informed the development of high-octane tools of oppression. Scientists trained and employed in U.S. universities have played critical roles in developing military and communications technology, as resources are continuously re-devoted to the pursuit of institutional objectives. Fields such as political science, history, economics, communications, and sociology are far from immune to the distorting effects of power on the trajectory of research and pedagogy. In the Science of Coercion, Christopher Simpson investigates the parallel development of communications research and government efforts to fine-tune methods of psychological warfare. Simpson maintains that “the U.S. government’s psychological warfare programs between 1945 and 1960 played either direct or indirect roles in several of the most important initiatives in mass communication research of the period.” He identifies a “positive feedback cycle” of funding, prestige, and participation that “tends to confine intellectual innovation to established formats.”

Breaking Down Silos

Library Genesis, an open-access online repository of books, published a Letter of Solidarity in 2015 that reads, “This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience.” This sentiment reflects the critical role of knowledge distribution and knowledge production in effecting transformative social change. Opening access to education and knowledge is a vital aspect of participatory public spheres in a democratic society. The artificial scarcity of instruction and resources is a means of enabling and exacerbating preexisting social divisions in a society that purports to provide equal opportunity, but ultimately filters out marginalized groups from attaining not only wealth and prestige, but also knowledge and participation in knowledge production. To continue quoting LibGen, “We have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and a much lower cost to society.” In their critique of limited access, LibGen further argues that the current system “devalues us, authors, editors, and readers alike. It parasites on our labor, it thwarts our service to the public, it denies us access.” With these points in mind, there are very direct ways to increase public access to academia to the benefit of both academics and the public.

1.      Universal access to higher education

2.      Aggressive affirmative action in both admissions and faculty hiring processes

3.      Open-access digitized libraries like LibGen

4.      Lowering paywalls on academic journals and databases

5.      Recording and uploading all lectures onto the Internet

6.      Public participation in review and publication of articles and books

7.      Reducing technical language when unnecessary or simultaneously publishing parallel versions for public consumption

It’s no secret that higher education is artificially expensive and highly exclusive. This seemingly a priori late-stage capitalist reality is even more apparent in an era of skyrocketing college debt and overpriced digital education. Paywalls serve to reinforce barriers to entry and maintain the rigid stratigraphy of a society that can easily afford to distribute knowledge. The profit-driven world of academic publishing works in tandem with academic institutions that thrive on exclusion. Yet the focused and systematic pursuit of knowledge is critical to our collective well-being, and the resources of universities and publishers can be redirected to the benefit of the population. In order to advance transformative change, we need to enable knowledge redistribution, and take pragmatic steps towards enhancing the discourse between academics and the public, rather than allowing the public to remain the passive object of inquiry. Academic work can be invaluable or profoundly harmful depending on the interests driving research and pedagogy. At its worst, academia has unabashedly and effectively served elites. Increasing public access and participation can help flatten intersectional social hierarchies and transform how the public goes about solving its most pressing problems. 

Academia's Other Diversity Problem: Class in the Ivory Tower

By Allison L. Hurst and Alfred Vitale

"How can you know anything about the working class?" asks Ernest Everhard, the protagonist of Jack London's 1908 dystopian novel, The Iron Heel as he addresses a group of liberal do-gooders and college administrators. They can't possibly know the working class, he argues, because they don't live where the working-class live. Instead, they are paid, fed, and clothed by "the capitalist class." In return, they are expected to preach what is acceptable to that class, and to do work that will not "menace the established order of society". While this was written over 100 years ago, for many working-class academics (those of us who grew up poor or working class and climbed into academia), this conversation rings true. Many of us have presented some variation of it at one time or another to our more privileged academic colleagues.

Watching this past election cycle has been difficult for us. It has reminded us of the gap between the places we currently inhabit (the so-called Ivory Tower) and the places we originally came from, which we still visit from time to time. We cheered Bernie when he came on the scene, because he appeared to understand this gap and promised to make things better for the people we loved. When Trump began overtaking other candidates, we were not as surprised as the people around us seemed to be, because we understood that his message, cloaked as it was in misogyny, nativism, and racism, was directed at real issues long overlooked by the Democratic Party. We held our breaths, hopeful that Sanders would take down Trump, that his message was the message of change and kindness rather than change and hate. After the primaries, we crossed our fingers but felt the DNC had made a major blunder in nominating a candidate who stood for everything that people seemed to be fighting against - business as usual, neoliberalism, paternalism.

Both academia and the DNC have a class problem. They don't know anything about the working class because they have isolated themselves from working-class people. We have been struggling for years to change this within academia. In 2008, after a few years of discussion among comrades, a group of us formed the Association of Working-Class Academics (AWCA), a group for people like us with lives that straddled the working class and middle class. We wanted to bring class into the academy, to get people talking about it, aware of it, doing something about what we saw as an unsustainable growth of economic inequality. We had parents without retirement income, brothers with back-breaking jobs, sisters without the ability to pay for childcare, generations who faced joblessness or an attempt at a local college, with accompanying debt. We knew firsthand that things had shifted somewhere in the promise of the American Dream, that good jobs were harder to come by, that many people didn't have the luxury to plan and save and think about retirement. We thought that having more faculty with backgrounds like ours would provide natural checks-and-balances on academic discourses that tend to move far away from the reality of class as lived by the overwhelming majority of the population.

It hasn't exactly worked out that way. Discussion of social class has always been relegated to the margins of academia. In turn, public discourse about class is muted. By denying the opportunity for social class to be a valid academic subject in itself, or to be considered an authentic form of social identity, educated folks (academics, pundits, campaign managers, and journalists) didn't just silence the voices of the poor and working-class, they also denied the possibility of critically engaging the problem of affluence. How to critique Trump without this? His status as a member of the billionaire class was not seen as problematic, despite all we know about the power and impact that class has on the very real experiences of the vast majority of Americans. He was lampooned as a buffoon, then excoriated for his bad manners, and finally deplored for his many bad acts, all of which left the essential issue of a billionaire running on a platform of economic populism relatively unquestioned. When we saw the picture of the Trumps and the Clintons hobnobbing in evening wear, we thought, "This will nail him!" But that picture was never used by the DNC, because it would target their candidate as well. Plus, it wouldn't have been polite.

A society more sensitive to the complicity of the ruling classes, more willing to eschew the sycophancy and reverence given to the already overwhelmingly privileged, more capable of resisting the urge to lionize the affluent, and more attentive to the ubiquitous power handed over to the 1%, would have appropriately vilified Trump and dismissed him well before his name went on the ballot. We can spend time looking at any number of reasons for his victory, but we must ask the bigger question of why an unabashedly greedy billionaire glided through the primaries and general election without any real resistance. Could it be the case that we have consistently neglected to blame, unequivocally, the economic elites for inequality, and to hold them accountable for it? Where was the critical intellectual attack on the damages reaped by the excesses of the 1%? This takes us back to Jack London's protagonist Mr. Everhard, and his suggestion that such critique would "menace the established order of society." It may be true that many university researchers have studied poverty and made it their social justice duty to try to understand and ameliorate it. But the lens is most often focused downward, to poverty, and there has been virtually no research directed upward at the practices and mechanisms by which the affluent cause, exacerbate, benefit from, and rely on the steady continuation of inequality. And the occasional whispered squeaks of condemnation for the wealthy fade quickly, subsumed by the jingoistic, pragmatic liberalism of the well-educated in an academic world increasingly shaped by the whims of the donor class.

This form of economic censorship, justified by the neoliberal fabric of institutions of higher education, ensures that no acceptable critique of affluence will become sewn into the fabric of pedagogy. It is our contention that if academia was proportionately represented by faculty and students from the poor and working-classes, the influence of the donor class on the institutional structure could be counteracted at the immediate level of teaching and research as a matter of course, rather than as an occasional garnish on the obligatory "race, class, gender" courses offered in many college departments. Discourse would create a resistance to the universalizing narratives compressing "poverty" and equalize it through a reciprocal comingling with intersectional narratives condemning the oppressive presence of affluence. If social class is duly acknowledged as salient, we will have to problematize and identify the systemic sources that shape the dominant narrative. Such a critique will require an indictment of capitalism as it stands, and therein lies the problem: how can we expect a real, class-sensitive critique of affluence in a milieu that tacitly condones its pursuit and happily reaps its benefits?

But, you may be asking, is there some problem here? We all know that academia can seem far removed from the day-to-day social worlds of most people, so what does it matter if academia doesn't want to indict affluence? Let's consider this question in light of the recent failures of the Democratic Party, and its slow slide away from economic populism and into neoliberalism since the days of Bill Clinton. Let's acknowledge that the increased dismissal of social class discourse in academia coincides with the current chasm in understanding between those who run the Democratic Party and those whom it purports to represent.

In many ways, the Democratic Party is like the Ivory Tower. They have both distanced themselves from a class awareness that they profess to have-so much so that they have forgotten and refused to acknowledge what social class means to actual people in the world. They have nominally acknowledged oppression, but have not really invited the oppressed into their circles; consequently, they assume they will have the support of the oppressed when it's needed. Diversity (or, rather, the lack thereof) remains a major problem in both academia and the Democratic Party. Both the party and academia have come to rely on a cadre of affluent donors, thereby shifting their priorities to fund-raising, advancement efforts, and the doling out of reciprocal favoritism, influence and rewards to the philanthropist class.

This diminishing attention to social class, both culturally and academically, paralleled the decline of unions in the United States, the crumbling of rust belt cities, and a sweeping upswing in inequality. The poor and working-classes ceased to have even a small amount of power, and were picked clean by things like predatory lending, healthcare costs, student-loan debt and skyrocketing college costs, jobs moving overseas, and major cutbacks in the social safety net. Relatedly, while scholarly attention to other factors in human experience such as race or gender grew exponentially - and it is true that there are deliberate efforts at most universities to invite more faculty from diverse race and gender backgrounds - there remains a relative and concerning scarcity of minorities as faculty members or students, and in particular, of working class and poor faculty and students. It may be the case that the very structural class dynamics most liberal professionals have neglected could help explain why they're having such a hard time ensuring equitable racial and gendered distributions in the University and the meritocratic beyond.

Although access to higher education has helped some members of the poor and working-classes "move up" in the world (we are witnesses to that), the numbers remain stubbornly small. Our colleges continue to serve children of the elite, or at least children of the highly educated. Proportionately speaking, faculty in universities do not reflect the existing social class strata that exists outside the walls of the Ivory Tower. This is not likely to change. Many academics from poor and working-class backgrounds are in disproportionate amounts of debt because they had to pay for the academic entry-fee themselves, and the tuition prices went up as the lines got longer. As it becomes more expensive to fund a graduate education, we will continue to find a smaller percentage of employed academics that come from poor or working-class backgrounds. The academic system keeps out the rabble, as it always has. This, in turn, comforts the donor class, who are assured that their role as instrumental philanthropists (i.e., manipulative tax-avoiders) will continue to garner them the reverence that their economic power naturally deserves - all without any means for resistance by the masses.

Thus it stands that the absence of real class awareness and the glacial pace of diversity efforts plague both the Democratic Party and institutions of higher education. Perhaps both the ivory tower and the DNC shouldn't be publicly trying to recruit the poor and working-class to become members of the liberal elite, and privately insulting them if they aren't. Instead, maybe we should ask ourselves what we can do to make academia privilege the voices of disenfranchised people, rather than the elite group speaking on behalf of them. Perhaps then, maybe in 2020, our collective voices will shout to the elites the same words spoken by Jack London's Ernest Everhard:

"We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So we have preached power. By the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from you."

Alfred Vitale, Ph.D. and Allison L. Hurst, Ph.D. are two co-founders of the Association of Working-Class Academics, a non-profit that was recently absorbed into Working Class Studies Association.

Democracy, Higher Education, and the Ivory Tower Critique of Neoliberalism

By Jacob Ertel

Few dedicated to any semblance of left politics are celebrating the state of higher education in the United States today. From unprecedented student indebtedness to budget cuts to attacks on tenure, the future of academia looks bleak. Yet for the general concurrence on the symptoms resulting from the neoliberalization of the university, it is less established how this process of neoliberalization is best conceptualized. Analyses of neoliberalism tend to fall largely into two camps: one that describes a series of economic policy moves with varying degrees of deliberation or foresight, and one that describes a markedly new form of governmentality. These critiques are not mutually exclusive, but they often do diverge in their understanding of capitalism's historical progression, its underlying logic, and its most pronounced effects. In particular, the latter camp (largely comprised of cultural theorists) that evaluates neoliberalism as a paradigm shift in governmentality risks romanticizing the Fordist-Keynesian regime of publicly financed mass production and consumption, and the nominal freedoms typically associated with post-war governance. By adhering to the paradigm shift schema, this line of thinking loses sight of the historically contingent movement of capitalism, and in doing so erroneously leaves open the possibility of a return to a prior era. This is not only inaccurate analytically, but entails a range of counterproductive assumptions regarding the political nature of capitalism and liberal democracy. Looking at the higher education system in this light can be instructive for thinking through the political-economic changes of the last several decades, as well as how we can re-conceptualize resistance to ongoing processes of neoliberalization without resorting to a nostalgic imaginary.

Of central importance to any discussion of neoliberalism is that we know what we want. To be sure, since the 1970s inequality has increased, along with the privatization of public goods and services, the incorporation of poor and working class people into the financial sector, and the disembowelment of the already precarious welfare system. While these trends are serious and palpable, and emerge from a range of contradictions endemic to the Fordist-Keynesian arrangement-including low growth, high inflation, worker militancy, and destabilizing foreign inflows of capital-we need to be careful in discussing neoliberalism as a veritable paradigm shift. This is not to understate the realness of neoliberalism, but to argue to that it represents a historically contingent escalation of capitalism's underlying tendencies towards capital concentration, uneven development, and crisis. This distinction holds implications for formulating any sort of left political imaginary. If we accept neoliberalism as a paradigm shift, how much inequality under capitalism are we comfortable tolerating? A common response might entail what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten would term a 'restorationist' argument, which laments neoliberalism's abandonment of ostensible democracy or democratic institutions. Restorationist arguments can have radical theoretical origins, but fall more fully in line with humanist and social democratic affiliations that critique neoliberalism on the grounds of its moral baseness rather than its concrete functionality. Such critiques can be useful in helping us articulate our relationship to political and economic centers of power, but they often idealize pre-neoliberal iterations of such power. Instead, we should look to reconfigure our relationship to neoliberal institutions, especially if we decide that our objections to them come not from their neoliberalization but from their social function throughout capitalism's development.

Wendy Brown's critique of the neoliberalization of the university exemplifies a kind of restorationist nostalgia. In her recent Undoing the Demos, Brown portrays neoliberalism as a distinctly new governing rationality that constitutes a clean break from post-war governance. In so doing, Brown idealizes the university's historical role within the United States while equating democracy with liberal arts education. Brown conceives of neoliberalism as "an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life."[1] For Brown, the notion of the free market as a governing rationality fundamentally reconfigures our self-understanding-we become "homo oeconomicus" (a term borrowed from Foucault), or human capital, that constantly must work to leverage our ability to compete and enhance our self-worth.[2] Brown contrasts neoliberal from liberal rationality in three ways. First, whereas liberalism allowed for a degree cultivation of personal interests, under neoliberalism our identity as human capital becomes a singular and ever pervasive subject position. Second, as opposed to the impetus under liberalism for human capital to compete in order to participate in the purchase of use-values, neoliberalism mandates the infinite appreciation of self-as-exchange-value. Finally, neoliberal human capital operates in the sphere of financial or investment capital, rather than entrepreneurial capital. [3]

Brown explains that this neoliberal rationality is dangerous less so because of the material consequences of intensified economic polarization, but because it undermines our potential to effectively participate in democracy (broadly articulated as the ability for people to control their own political decision making process). This limitation is not due to a repressive state power or the impact of financialization on people's livelihoods, but to what Brown calls a reconfiguration of the higher education system in accordance with neoliberal rationality. For Brown, "Citizens cannot rule themselves…without understanding the powers and problems they are engaging," and that understanding must come first and foremost through education, and liberal arts education more specifically.[4] If "the dramatic thinning of key democratic values coupled with this intensification of nondemocratic forces and conditions threatens to replace self-rule with a polity in which the people are pawns of every kind of modern power," then the only way to combat "people's wholesale ignorance of the forces shaping their lives and limning their future" is through an educational model that challenges neoliberalism's professionalizing imperative.[5] This model looks to the post-war period in which, Brown claims, the university "promised not merely literacy, but liberal arts to the masses…it was a time in which a broad, if not deep college education-one of the arts, letters, and sciences-became an essential element of middle-class membership."[6] Here Brown misrepresents the university's social function as fundamental to the production of the "intelligent citizenry" needed for democratic self-rule. Though she often provides stipulations when discussing the pre-neoliberal university in the United States, such disclaimers are effectively rendered mute by her insistence on the university's (and in particular, the public university's) construction as a means for egalitarianism, social mobility, and democracy.[7] According to Brown, this conception of the university destined citizens "for intelligent engagement with the world, rather than economic servitude or mere survival."[8] Brown admits that this model is a classically liberal ideal, but one that is founded on a commitment to egalitarianism, humanism, and the public good. [9]

Yet why should economic mobility rest on a liberal arts education? Why should entering into the 'middle-class' be contingent on any particular kind of education? And how is classical liberalism commensurable with any kind of redistributive ethos? The goal here is not to take up Brown's understanding of the pre-neoliberal university as an institution of egalitarianism by arguing that the university is a purveyor of false consciousness or brainwashing. Rather, it is to assert that her views regarding what constitutes intelligence are rooted in unfair assumptions about education and democracy, and thus fail to provide an alternative to the tendency towards professionalization that she argues is unique to the neoliberal university. Even if we set aside the race-blind character of her analysis here, Brown's equation of liberal arts education to democracy is fundamentally elitist: its corollary is that those without such an education are unfit for participation in self-rule, as if exposure to Plato and Aristotle rather than accounting or marketing better qualifies one to truly understand one's own interests. This line of thinking is of course disengaged from the lived experiences of those who voluntarily seek vocational training (there is no voluntary activity for Brown), or those whose livelihoods depend on such preparation. One's contribution to society is determined through one's access to a particular kind of education. In making such claims Brown paradoxically accepts the neoliberal logic she writes against, and she does so without questioning the undemocratic nature of pre-neoliberal institutions themselves. Brown's democracy implies a flattened understanding of power, one that takes the notions of citizenry and nation-state for granted.

In particular, the claim that a university-educated citizenry precedes democracy performs a theoretical sleight of hand, as it inadvertently refers back to a logic of social intelligibility that codifies competency via institutional validation. Brown calls for a return to the vague democratic pluralism that has been eroded by the requirement for "skilled human capital, not educated participants in public life and common rule." [10] This understanding of democracy actually occludes an engagement with power, as such pluralism is distinct from the power-ridden selection process that determines which desires are legitimized and enacted. If we follow Brown's claims about the democratic nature of the post-war educational system, then it is puzzling as to why such a system would have eroded in the first place, unless neoliberalism is the natural outcome of a democratically engaged polity. In this sense, construing neoliberalism as a paradigm shift in governing rationality from the Fordist-Keynesian period-while avoiding a serious discussion of that regime's engrained racialized inequities, its economic contradictions, and its deepening militarization-fails to examine how the intensification of these tendencies under neoliberalism is endogenous to capitalism itself. This shortcoming is particularly acute when it comes to the academia: the professionalization Brown laments is part and parcel of the university under capitalism.

Here we may find Harney and Moten's work on the university instructive. In contrast to Brown's view of the pre-neoliberal, liberal arts university, Harney and Moten aver that self-identified critical academics must by nature of their position recognize and be recognized by the university. In other words, some buy-in is required. So-called critical education, apropos of Brown's appeal to the liberal arts, is thus constituted "in an opposition to the unregulated and the ignorant without acknowledging the unregulated, ignorant, unprofessional labor that goes on not opposite them but within them." [11] Academia's purpose is not to encourage a free flow of ideas-it is a striated and hierarchized field that envelops and regulates, but is also fallible in its own capacities. In contrast to Brown, Harney and Moten understand the university as a space of conflict that can serve as refuge but never enlightenment.[12] True subversion lies not in the call for a more critical education, but in stealing from the university what one can, in rendering oneself unintelligible within its mode of professionalism. Critical education's paradoxical relationship to professionalization entails a negligence of those who operate both within and outside of the university through a politics of deception, of theft, and of a true unprofessionalism. Such negligence then constitutes the crux of professionalization, while this professionalization is the means through which negligence is carried out.[13] To recognize or accept this logic is to simultaneously render oneself intelligible to it, and thus to adhere to Brown's call for pluralism. Such reasoning does not include this unprofessional group (for Harney and Moten, "the undercommons") in its understanding of democracy, and in so doing it accepts the claim that participation in the polity requires institutional codification. Meanwhile, the unintelligible sneak in to these institutions and work to bring them down. If this is what democracy actually means-institutionalization-then perhaps we need to reconsider our axes of opposition to neoliberalism. We need to go beyond the critique of the neoliberal university, to consider the intimate linkages between critical academia and the professionalizing tendencies endemic to the university under capitalism, neoliberal or not.

The problem with Brown's ivory tower critique of the neoliberalization of the university is not about an error in identifying this process's outcomes; the effects of neoliberalization are quite clear. The argument here is simply that rather than understanding neoliberalism as a new governing rationality, we should look to it as an exacerbation of capitalism's internal logics. Analyzing the conundrum of the neoliberal university in this way allows us to begin to analyze capitalism in a way that Brown is unwilling to do: we are better prepared to analyze the relationship between democracy and the state, more attuned to the experiences of the poor and the working classes, and able to move away from restorationist nostalgia.

Notes

[1] Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 30.

[2] Brown, Undoing the Demos, 10.

[3] Ibid, 33.

[4] Ibid, 175.

[5] Ibid, 179.

[6] Ibid, 180.

[7] Ibid, 184.

[8] Ibid, 185.

[9] Ibid, 187.

[10] Ibid, 177.

[11] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 32.

[12] Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 26.

[13] Ibid, 31.