Category Mistake 101: The Idea of the Desocialising University and the Last Intellectual

Abstract

A considerable and growing body of literature has engaged in a critical reading of the nature and substance of shifts in not only the business practices, but the conditions for the very raison d’ėtre or telic identifiability of universities under current strategic political arrangements. Moving beyond the practices of academic economy in the business of higher education that reduce the intellectual worker to academic labourer enduring multiple forms of alienation, the paper considers what kind of critical setting there may be for reimagining the university in non-nostalgic ways. While the paper takes its cues pre-eminently from the Australian Higher Education Provider sector, it draws on the overlapping political theorising particularly from the N. American critics Wendy Brown and Henry Giroux. From their critiques of neoliberalism, the paper argues that asking what universities are for does not fare well when higher education institutions are subjected to neoliberal rationality.

1. Introduction

In his book on the common good in considerations of the ethical life, theologian Herbert McCabe asks why one should study ethics (McCabe 2005, pp. 3–4) To this question he provides two reasons. Firstly, to understand more about ethical decisions, and the conditions for making moral judgments. Secondly, to comprehend and appreciate what counts as an ethical mistake. This set of claims does not map well onto studying institutions such as the universities. McCabe was reflecting on the inquiry of persons interested in considering how moral judgments are made, and in interrogating them to enable moral improvement. This mapping does look interesting, though, when applied to the academic staff of universities. So, a study of academic work can be conducted in order to reflect on what academics do; and this, at least broadly occurs in a way that overlaps with something of what McCabe was after with his second argument: to identify ways of improving academic performance and practices of learning. The question of what constitutes a ‘mistake’ is not only crucial in this process, but is itself considerably complicated—operating on the basis of having some idea of what it is that the academic ought to do, but makes a mistake in not doing.1

On the one hand, in many contexts outside of certain wealthy institutions, performance measures or KPIs (key performance indicators) have been applied. Indeed, they have been imposed on academics from above, Richard Roberts in a British context bemoaned two decades ago (Roberts 2002). Academics, when construed under this particular disciplinary regime, become pawns in political manoeuvres driven pre-eminently by efficiency (read ‘the need to save public money’) and market value (read ‘value for money’). A mistake, in such a bureaucratic scheme, would be one in which academics fail to fulfil the exacting targets of specified measurable KPIs. That, of course, assumes there are many full-time academics left to be measured in this way as several national university sectors, especially that of the Australian, increasingly casualise lecturing through hiring adjunct academic staff. On the other hand, there may be another way of asking what counts as a mistake, and this would move beyond the practices of academic economy in the kind of business of higher education that reduces the intellectual worker to academic labourer who endures multiple forms of alienation. This alternative offers a critical setting for the very bureaucratisation of higher education, historicising it, and asks, pointedly, what is educating about higher education provision? What constitutes the intelligibility of the university as a distinctive provider of a set of educational activities?

The question of what is involved and what is at stake, then, is not as simple as one addressed by considering the phenomena of universities so that it can be addressed through attempts to adjust certain local practices or functional outcomes, perhaps through the modification of government’s interventions. Here, the thinking of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri can set the analysis as critique on its way by indicating the substantiveness of what is at stake. Criticising the “excess focus on the concept of sovereignty” inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on Carl Schmitt’s Hobbesian depiction of sovereign power as being a political theology, Hardt and Negri explain that sovereign power is less a secularised theology than something which “occupies a transcendent position, above society and outside its structures.” (Hardt and Negri 2009, p. 4). Instead, the pair argues, “The primary form of power that really confronts us today, however, is not so dramatic or demonic but rather earthly and mundane.” (ibid., p. 5). Where the concept of sovereign power has descriptive legitimacy is in terms of the territorial control of statist borders. However, it fares badly when utilised to make sense of a largely runaway world, to draw on an image from Anthony Giddens’ Reith Lectures of 1999, in which power is located in financial processes that overspill any efforts to retain post-Westphalian sovereignty through walling in sovereign control as if the walls are not distinctly leaky, to use an image from Wendy Brown (Giddens 2002; Brown 2014). Here is where Hardt and Negri’s work takes shape around the deterritorialization and decentring of biopower in the “new reality of capital” as comprehensive ordering, framed by the distinctly limited concept of “Empire”.2 “The real subsumption of society by capital”, they argue, “means that the entirety of social life is caught up in capitalist relations” of accumulation and domination (Hardt and Negri 2008, p. 4). This leads to a rather broad and quite imprecise exhortative rhetoric: “We need to stop confusing politics with theology.”3 What is important here, though, is to recognise what theological ethicist William Cavanaugh calls the “migrations of the holy”, or the relocation of desire-regulating meaning and value, and to exact it to the most rigorous forms of demystifying critique (Cavanaugh 2011). What is at stake in this is, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, nothing less than “the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique” that can contest all forms of mystified transcendentalist logic by locating responsibility within the flourishing of social liveability.4

To engage in a critical analysis of the global pressures on the contemporary university sector, this paper takes the following route: in the first place, there needs to be a consideration of the nature of university-crisis talk of the kind that is proliferating in the critical literature. From here, a range of issues permeating the critical theorising of the contemporary university will be identified. The second step involves indicating the context that is provided by critical reflection on the neoliberal disciplinary conditions for the reshaping of the very nature of the university. The work of Wendy Brown and Henry Giroux is significant at this point. The third stage pays attention to the shape of the reconfiguration of the university, particularly in its role as a socialising enterprise. The fourth, and final, stage considers this interrogative trajectory in terms of the university’s capacity to be publicly truth-telling in a non-banal fashion (a subtle cypher for Brown and Giroux’s concerns about democracy).

2. Battery Higher Education: The Non-Telic End of the University?

Leaving aside the proliferation of alarmist rhetoric across disciplines, there is something concerning about the emergence of multiple voices proclaiming a crisis in higher education. There is not any consensus, however, on what constitutes the crisis. Theologian Carl Raschke announces in an attention-grabbing headline statement that “Higher education has been in a ‘crisis mode’ for so long now” (Raschke 2002, p. vii). For Raschke, the crisis is pre-eminently one of the pedagogical conditions caused by new teaching and learning technologies. His study endeavours to counter the “fierce resistance to change” by extolling the possibilities opened by the “digital and computer-mediated learning” technologies and the necessary advent of the “hyperuniversity” (ibid., pp. vii and viii). Even though his attention to educational cybersystems usefully analyses the new spatio-temporal conditions for considering pedagogical theory, policy, and practice, he distinctly fails to reflect on the way in which shifts in technological usage are not merely expressive of human endeavour, but, in fact, regulatively reconstitute it.5

A considerably more insightful ringing of the relevant alarm bell has come from religion scholar Richard Roberts in his paper ‘The End of the University and the Last Academic’. This study’s title alludes to at least three sources (Roberts 2002, chp. 4). In the first place, Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man, and that title, in turn, references both Alexander Kojeve’s rendering of Hegel’s philosophy of history and Friedrich Nietzsche’s image of ‘the last man’ (Fukuyama 1989a, 1989b, 1992). In The Gay Science, the mid-nineteenth century German philosopher depicts persons who have become listless, devoid of purpose, and languishing (Žižek 2008, pp. 24–25). These are marshalled in the effort to articulate what Roberts passionately describes as the launching of a “permanent [bureaucratic] revolution from the top”, of the reconfiguration of the university under the auspices of “totalitarian managerialism”, in many of the British universities since the 1980s (Roberts 2002, pp. 86, 91). The panopticon-like internalisation of what has been enforced upon the sector results in “a uniform self-policed mediocrity” among academics, and a type of institution that “fails in its claims to be a university.” (ibid., pp. 91, 107).

Thus, when talk of ‘crisis’ takes a more materially interesting form than what one discovers in Raschke’s work, it is manifest through a number of developments, all of which are increasingly familiar to anyone not shielded by the power of endowed university wealth that can enable certain forms of resistance to the trajectory all others have to endure, or anyone not hiding behind the kind of common academic inattention and comprehension that Roberts laments as a failure to appropriately and intelligently exercise “critically reflexive thought”.6 While Roberts identifies only a few concrete features that emerge from these shifts, an explosion of literature on the subject in more recent years has suggested at least twelve features of the neoliberalised university. These are sufficiently substantive as to reorder the universities’ mission, values, and professional performance, so that Raewyn Connell pointedly cautions that “There is an obvious risk of hypocrisy in university folk offering their thoughts on justice while their institutions are busy” undermining the capacity for what Eagleton calls “humane critique.” (Connell 2019; Eagleton 2015).

(A caution needs to nevertheless be offered at this point with regard to the more generalising tendencies of much of the critical literature. The impact of the described politico-economic shifts may be differentially experienced given the unevenness of the distribution of arrangements of disciplinary power across the sector, with some large departments in well-resourced universities being less economically and governmentally pressured than others. Many academics can, thereby, remain shielded, for now at least, from the range of pressures identified below. At their most insulated, though, critical observations on these strategically reconditioning trajectories can sound like a ‘let them eat cake’ rhetorical moment to those considerably more exposed.)

Firstly, with public spending cuts, in many countries, especially in Australia, the universities have been subjected to the logic of the market that operates according to the competitive rules of an economic Darwinian winner-takes-all. This, according to David Harvey, amounts to “accumulation of capital through dispossession” which “is about plundering, robbing other people of their rights”.7 Rather than understand other higher education providers as co-operative endeavours in the generation of knowledge, universities are set antagonistically against each other for student/consumer enrolments, the financial benefits of lucrative research grants, corporate or industry investment, and for the production of prestige markers. In fact, even within universities themselves, the competition is increasingly regulative of the way academic colleges, faculties, schools, departments, and even of academics themselves relate to each other (Bourdieu 1998). The result is a thoroughgoing self-interested survivalism. The Murdoch University Strategic Plan 2012–2017 explicitly admitted that under the conditions of educational productivity in support of the national economy, “A key imperative for Murdoch is to ensure that it is equipped to survive and thrive in these new conditions.” (Murdoch University 2012, p. 11). As a gathering of the professoriate, a newly appointed Vice-Chancellor admitted she “would not get out of bed for a research grant worth less than $500,000”, thereby irritating most of those gathered for whom the exceptional size of awards available to the likes of medical researchers would never be an option.

Secondly, governmentality secures the compliance of the universities and its academics who are reduced to labourers of marketable or impact-rich knowledge-providers, especially as the workforce is casualised under management’s euphemisms of budgetary responsibility and employment flexibility. This rendering of work as precarious, as insecure, and of workers themselves as disposable labourers according to Kathryn Tanner, is used by “finance-dominated organizations … to induce worker compliance through fear.” (Tanner 2019, p. 65). The instrumentalised precariousness of staff and students has been highlighted by several critics as having been particularly evident during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. With senior ‘leadership’ demanding the reopening of campus classrooms, in a deadly fashion, “the transposition of health onto the economy did not just transfer a human attribute to the markets; it literally drained health from living bodies to establish health for the economy.” (Butler 2022, p. 52; Cf. Giroux 2021, p. ix). So argues Judith Butler.

Thirdly, the students themselves are predominantly valued by corporatised universities as consumers of university goods, as finance generating customers for the “factory for the production of human capital, … [that] is tasked with creating subjects suitable for the globalized knowledge economy.” (Absher 2021, p. 109). In one large Australian university, for instance, when a report was filed on health and safety concerns caused by bulging class numbers that forced many students to stand at the back of the lecture hall or sit on the steps for three hours, the responsible faculty office manager responded that “there is no need to allocate a larger room since most of those students will not attend the class by this time next week.” On the one hand, this may be comprehensible should there be no other resources for relocating that particular class. This, though, was not, in fact, the case. In week two, classrooms tended to be reallocated according to numerical demand. The decision raises the question, also, of whether the experience of declining numbers in subsequent weeks was influenced by students’ experiences of being underprovided for, or whether it was more legitimately generated by a range of other pressures. The experiences of other lecturers at this particular institution did not match this cynical managerial decision, with numbers of attendees remaining consistently high throughout the semester.

On another occasion, a gathering of the professoriate was entreated to a Vice-Chancellor’s floating of the idea of removing class by contact altogether so that students could enrol on any MOOC (massive open online course) relevant to their degree programme, with the university simply paying inexpensive academic assistants to set and grade appropriate assessment items. As Gary Rolfe declares, “the university is no longer necessary or even required for the learning of facts in order to pass examinations. … If the corporate university has less and less influence in student learning, then at least it still has a monopoly on the awarding of degrees” in what is fast becoming an “assembly-line production of graduates” (Rolfe 2013, p. 101). The professoriate’s consequent disdain for this Vice-Chancellor’s thought-bubble was driven less by concerns about the loss of that university as a teaching institution or about what students would lose in their learning process, and more by anxiety over the employment prospects for these full-professors.

Fourthly, and concomitantly, as Paolo Freire argued several years ago, “Currently, education is no longer understood as formative, but simply as training.” (Freire 2007, p. 4). Within knowledge generation and delivery, students are reduced from learners to individuated corporate trainees being inculcated in a set of industry-profiting skill sets. Of course, this is not entirely new to the twenty-first century university given the lengthy delivery of Law and Medicine, and the reduction of Theology to clerical training, as exhibited by the early nineteenth-century design of the The Berlin Model, and the presence of the likes of Engineering, Social Work, Accountancy, and Education over recent decades.8 Degree programmes here could be reduced to self-help activities on the part of students planning for their own careers. However, in an Australian context in particular, the vocational sensibility has intensified to the point of demanding courses ‘relevant’ to current business interests and the momentary fashions of the market. Literature becomes supplemented and even replaced by disciplinary training in Creative Writing, in Dramatic Performance, or in Journalism; aesthetics gives rise to the likes of Fine Art and Film and Media degree programmes, the substantive critical study of traditions of belief by units on spiritual practices and meditation, and so on. Stories proliferate of maximising student satisfaction in order to provide the sense of gratification that will survey well at both the end of their unit of study and the degree programme. Eagleton, for instance, concedes that “there is pressure on their professors not to fail them, and thus risk losing their fees. The general idea is that is the student fails, it is the professor’s fault” (Eagleton 2015).

Furthermore, Joanna Williams challenges the political and university marketing rhetoric that suggest that higher education degrees produce equal employment opportunities. “It remains the case that, in general,” she argues, “the students who secure professional careers and highly remunerative work tend to be students who have attended the highest-ranking institutions and studied the most academic courses.” (Williams 2013, p. 75).

Fifthly, in addition to this, there is a non-trivial question relating to the quality of the education that students are atomisedly engaging in, and that in spite of all the self-interested rhetoric being pumped out by universities regarding “student-centred learning”. “[T]he [British government’s] Browne Review [of 2010] suggests that the creation of a market, and active competition between institutions within the HE sector, will drive up the quality of the student experience and improve provision across the whole sector” (Williams 2013, p. 12). Of course, this belongs to the same kinds of rhetoric as those that laud policies of privatisation. Yet, the burgeoning among Australian Higher Education Providers of relying on the cheap labour of adjunct lecturers entails that there are instances in which the learning process is not being facilitated by those who are most current in their scholarly knowledge, or are able to benefit from appropriate educational professional development activities. Moreover, for all its talk of the possibilities open to online and distance learners, the ability to engage together in solidarity-making collegiality is mitigated—the atomisation of subjectivity becomes thereby accentuated in digitalised space and the detemporalised instantaneity of the technological access to information rather than curtailed. Consequently, Watts argues, “the universities of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia are fast becoming a fraud perpetrated on the citizens of these countries. … With some important exceptions, too many students are being short-changed by grossly inadequate teaching.” (Watts 2017, p. 9). Watts’s study proceeds to argue that as a consequence, “There is a really serious gulf opening up between talking about ‘student-centred learning’ and the actual reliance on ‘thin learning’” provision (ibid., p. 15). This is not to evade the accountability of governmental audits (such as the Quality Assurance Agency in the UK and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency in Australia), nor the practices of peer-observation of teaching and peer-support for research. The “thin-learning provision” occurs even under the watch of these audit systems.

Full-time academics, particularly those who are more professionally senior, are increasingly removed from the classroom by either the demands of generating research outputs and income or for administrative service. As Eagleton argues, “There has been less incentive for academics to devote themselves to their teaching … [since] Academics are most likely to boost their institution’s status by taking temporary leave of it, taking time off from teaching to further their research.” (Eagleton 2015). The problem for Eagleton, however, is that even research output audits (for instance, the Excellence in Research Australia and the Research Excellence Framework in the UK) function as ways of dissolving research quality by increasing the pressure “to produce for production’s sake, churning out supremely pointless articles, starting up superfluous journals online, dutifully applying for outside research grants regardless of whether they really need them” (ibid.). At least, it must be admitted, the British governmental research output audit (the Research Excellence Framework) provides considerably fewer demands on the quantity of assessable research outputs than does the Australian research assessment audit (Excellence in Research Australia). Even so, Conrad Russell identified a shift in both research sensibility (to a ‘publish or perish’ model) and in the quantity of pure research. This contributes to what he describes as “Battery higher education”, with the commodification of knowledge being supported here by conveyor belt research output production.9

Sixthly, given the costs of HE as well as the increasing connection between education and vocationalisation, students increasingly select degree programmes and disciplinary pathways deemed more sufficiently employable-preparatory, those perceived to make them capable of graduating “job ready”.10

Seventhly, critics frequently ask what else of educational value is being displaced by transforming students into customers or consumers of higher learning in such a way as to place “emphasis upon extrinsic rewards and sanctions rather than an intrinsic sense of reward gained from having mastered new knowledge.” (Williams 2013, p. 95). Paul Trout some years ago maintained that “Students who think of themselves as customers study only when it is convenient (like shopping), expect satisfaction regardless of effort … and assume that academic success, including graduation, is guaranteed”.11 According to Williams, “In treating students as consumers needing to be satisfied, universities can play a role in infantilising students through reducing intellectual challenge to the completion of modules and replacing academic relationships with customer care contracts.” (Williams 2013, p. 10). Student feedback has been an important feature of lecturers’ pedagogical reflexivity for some time, enabling, as it does, attention to the range of learning capacities and interests within a student cohort. However, with the introduction of a Student Satisfaction Survey in addition to student feedback surveys as an element in the evaluation of university performance, and the feedback results becoming significant performance markers for evaluating academic staff promotion requests or even employment applications, there is created a range of difficulties. Not least of these is “the subordination of academic staff to unaccountable student criticism”, and the difficulty of measuring satisfaction itself (Roberts 2002, p. 91). After all, argues Williams, “‘Student satisfaction’ in effect measures nothing more than how students subjectively feel at a particular point in time; their success on the programme to date (in terms of grades); and the extent to which any demands they have made of lecturers have been met. … This demand to produce satisfied consumers potentially has an impact upon pedagogy, as it may lead some lecturers to avoid making intellectual demands of their students and provide ‘entertainment rather than education’.” (Williams 2013, pp. 99–100; citing Morley 2003, p. 30). Williams’s work traces the direct connection between students’ sense of satisfaction, couched in terms of “value for money”, and high grades during their degree programmes, with the implication being that “‘value for money’ could be assured for all students by eroding academic judgement and awarding everyone high marks irrespective of actual achievement levels.” (Williams 2013, p. 88).

Eighthly, as consumers, an increasing share of the cost-burden of the degree is placed squarely on students’ financially narrow shoulders as they engage in higher learning as an ‘investment’ in their professional future. Where this burden is felt as particularly onerous is among those whose personal finances require them to find support through employment conducted simultaneously with their studies. Christopher Martin explains that “It’s therefore understandable why some critics believe that higher education has become just one more way for the already advantaged to distance themselves from those who are not.” (Martin 2022, p. 3). “There is a danger … that academic liberal education comes to be perceived as the preserve of the wealthy whilst non-traditional students focus upon employability in order to repay debt. This is ironic given that the focus upon social mobility arises out of efforts to promote widening participation to precisely such non-traditional students.” (Williams 2013, p. 74).

Ninthly, in a society of the spectacle, universities allocate substantial resources for expensive outlays to generate spectacular brand identities and numerical student growth through financially speculating on public advertising campaigns. “Money coming into the universities may be directed away from teaching and research and towards marketing departments.” (ibid., p. 12). Leaving aside the question of whether such practices are demonstrably successful in generating new student business, and that is not an unimportant matter in its own right, there remains a question of the intelligibility of the message of these materials.12 Invariably, and without any chastening hesitation, Australian university providers often vigorously promote themselves as providing “world class” education and where they are a little more modest they remain producers of “excellence”. This “imposed discourse, … pervasive Newspeak”, or mediocrity masquerading as meritoriousness, signals their having succumbed to a loosening of universities’ public integrity for the purposes of brand recognition and recruitment measures.13 Recruitment brochures regularly display not merely staged photographic moments, but involve the hire of outsiders to pose as excited students.

Moreover, “Commercialisation also refers to other ways in which universities make money, such as selling services to business; seeking sponsorship from business for particular departments, sporting activities or even lectureships [chairs, and research projects]; renting campus space to businesses so that student common rooms, for example, may become taken over by brand-name coffee shops; or simply renting campus space to advertisers.” (Williams 2013, p. 13; Cf. Giroux 2020, p. 130). A New York Times article in November 2022 ran with the headline: ‘How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies “Caesarized” Campus Life’ (Betts et al. 2022).

What is of more material interest than the corporatisation of the campus as its services are opened to private providers is the impact that there can be on teaching, learning, and research when beholden to corporate or political interests. For instance, in one recent case involving academics finding their resistant voices, corporate and ideological efforts at the reshaping of research priorities was in evidence over the controversy sparked in Australia over the ideological implications of a massive sponsorship offer by the Ramsay Centre to offer courses in ‘Western Civilisation’ and its implications for academic freedom. It was the Australian Catholic University, appearing to have had fewer ethical and intellectual qualms about the proposal, which became the university partner of the enterprise (Baker 2020). Inevitably, finance-strapped and financially competitive educational institutions are forced to court all manner of industry funding to enhance and diversify their income streams.

Tenthly, the expense of universities’ expansion in staffing costs has been principally in the areas of a proliferation of administrators and senior managers or corporate ‘leaders’. Additionally, Trevor Hussey and Patrick Smith observe, there is a tendency of these bureaucracies “to become focused upon their own concerns rather than the concerns of those they were created to serve, and … change what they manage for their own purposes and to the detriment of the original function.” (Hussey and Smith 2010, p. 21). Watts claims that the “administrative bloat” is largely the consequence of “the self-fulfilling wish of administrators to expand their own power and status by inventing new work which they alone could do.” (Watts 2017, p. 182). Interestingly in this regard, one Australian-located Vice-Chancellor, for instance, suggested that for the apparently cash-strapped institution, as a cost-cutting measure, that the most senior staff would no longer have their own offices, but would “hot-desk”, thereby providing savings that could expand the administrative staffing further.

The fattening of the bureaucracy embeds within higher education the reduction of the political more generally, that which in Chantal Mouffe’s terms involves “a technocratic form of politics according to which politics was not a partisan confrontation but the neutral management of public affairs.” (Mouffe 2018, p. 4). The question is what is being masked by any and every naïve claim to ‘neutrality’ and ‘impartiality’. Paolo Freire’s concern with talk of educational neutrality can be appropriately applied to similar rhetoric regarding management and institutional strategy: “There is no such thing as a neutral education process.” (Freire 1996, p. 56). If we cloak strategising and tactical implementation in this kind of rhetoric, then the discursive conditions deflect appropriately interrogative attention away from, to adapt a claim made by Butler, “the consequential ways that the human is being produced, reproduced, deproduced.” (Butler 2004, p. 222). From a simple pragmatic perspective, Watts observes that “scholars now spend a considerable, and increasing, part of their working day accounting for their activities in the managers’ terms.” (Watts 2017, p. 248). For instance, in one higher education provider, staff spend considerable periods of the week completing daily time-sheets to justify each hour to the business productivity of the College.

Eleventhly, while critical attention often alights on ‘managerialism’, this is largely a product of another shift, that of the centralising and hierarchicalising nature of governance in the reductions of university services to managerialitarianism. It is from this that there has come less the devolved form of academically collegial form of governance exercised as a civic duty, than an intensively authoritarian manager class. Supposedly in order to ensure that all this functions smoothly, university governance intensifies institutional hierarchies, thereby confusing the responsible service of leadership with that of sovereign governing control. To be clear, this is not properly a performance of ‘centralising’ power as much as hierarchicalising it. As Carl Schmitt once observed, “where there is no discussion there is dictatorship.” (Schmitt 1985, p. 78). In an echo of Schmitt’s account of political theology, it is accordingly not uncommon for senior university ‘leaders’ to become sovereign exceptions to the boundaries of policies and rules of accountable conduct that their subordinates are required to abide by, to function with minimal strategic consultation, and to engage in ruthless restructuring activities when they deem it necessary for the achievement of strategic goals and to exercise budgetary restraint. Employment survival “depends on the individual academic’s standing with deans, department heads and other leading administrators in the university.” (Valero et al. 2019). Eagleton sneers with good reason that “vice chancellors who behave as though they are running General Motors” (Eagleton 2015). All the while, academics and their leadership teams in moments of cowardice or complacency sign away their capacity to exercise the kind of authority that can hold their institutions and their senior managers accountable in the totalising creep of managerialitarianism. In other places, the question arises as to whether academics are distracted by their own research or teaching to notice the implications of the shifts.

Twelfthly, and finally for now at least, as universities take on the mantal provided by the neoliberal revolution of goods and services, the academic ‘leadership’ uniformly shifts senior managers into more corporate pay-scales and performance bonuses. It reveals what is pre-eminently valued in the corporate university, that cost-cutting activities are mismatched with enhanced expenditure on senior management salaries. “[I]t appears that the high salary structures are compensated by staff cuts, perhaps a case of ‘Nero fiddled while Rome burned’. … This is ultimately likely to lead to a reduction in academic working conditions, but the same approach does not apply to senior management.” (Bergami 2019, pp. 51–52). What is more, this self-inflation of the power and financial support of senior managers, according to numerous critics, does not come with evidence of requisite managerial skill and ability. In fact, according to Watts, for instance, “University academics rated their job satisfaction, trust in senior management, and perceptions of procedural fairness as low. About half the academic staff considered their managers to be incompetent.”14 Most tellingly, Watts continues, there is the decline of faith in university ‘leaders’ to tell the truth about their purposes and standards of performance since the rhetoric of “modern managers of universities … is determined by its capacity to satisfy certain interests” (Watts 2017, p. 339). As theologian Murray Rae once wrote, “the intention to pursue the truth [is not] taken without question to be constitutive of the university’s existence, and … figure[s] hardly at all in the mandatory ‘aims and outcomes’ of university education.”15

Early on in his paper, Roberts speaks as if the problem is one generated by what he calls the introduction of the “student bio-mass” in what Conrad Russell calls “battery higher education” (Roberts 2002, pp. 97, 88). In contrast, it could be argued that this massification of higher education is a move that can positively enhance the democratisation of higher education through increasing its accessibility. Questions of quality relating to aptitude and academic capacity, then, could at least be dealt with through sustaining robust processes for rigorous learning-provision and assessment. Yet many universities are increasingly shy of implementing and sustaining such processes of academic rigour and support. Peer-observation of teaching, for instance, is not mandated in the Australian HEP sector and remains abnormal in practice. Even where there are provisions for such evaluative practices, they tend to lack significant teeth in promoting pedagogical improvements by not being acted on by senior management, that is, until the lecturer applies for promotion after several years of service. This business-by-avoidance of issues of performative quality is an indication not so much of the difficulties caused by accentuating accessibility, but instead of ideological shifts towards that result in providing relatively undemanding vocational training and generating finance by not merely productive tactical recruitment activities but also through vigorous efforts for retaining on-course students.16 Robust systems of assessment certainly remain in place for disciplines within the medical sciences, engineering, and so on. After all, ignorant and incompetent graduates from these programmes can cost lives when entering the relevant workforce. When seen in these terms, then, the issue would seem to be that there has been a loss of confidence that disciplines such as those within the humanities, and even educational training, are remotely comparable in terms of affecting real conditions of the liveability and flourishing of those other than the graduates themselves. It is little wonder, therefore, that humanities are often reduced in public rhetoric to matters of personal interest, as if they are little more than part of the entertainment industry, or, at best, a feature of individuals seeking some kind of ‘spiritual authenticity’. The disciplines most associated with encouraging humanising thoughtfulness are in the process of being compressed into, at best, romanticised versions of the self’s interest or ‘taste’, a reduction from humanisation to an aesthetic couching of ‘contemporary relevance’. Here, the aesthetic mode is construed apart from noetic and ethical value, and when the Humanities are spoken of in terms of ‘values education’ they are so in particularly vague ways that are not only materially light but undisruptive of not only the educativeness of scientific endeavours but the reduction of knowledge and thought to training or self-satisfaction.17

3. Disciplining the Subject

Roberts’s critique largely lacks a crucial contextualising framing, but for a handful of throwaway comments regarding the fact that the shifts began to occur through the 1980s, and that “what has happened in the university is a microcosm of societal abuse characteristic of Britain as a whole since 1979.” (Roberts 2002, p. 88). With hindsight, it is clear that it was not merely Thatcher’s Britain that embarked on such sweeping changes to the nature of higher education and higher education funding, but that this was, in fact, a global shift in the way that government and capital relate, and in terms of the services they provide—in fact, even in terms of the very rationale for those services and the shape of the cultures that sustain them. As Harvey argues, from the epicentres of the US, China, and the UK, “revolutionary impulses seemingly spread and reverberated to make the world around us in a totally different image.” (Harvey 2005, p. 1). Consequently, he continues, the years 1978–1980 were crucial in reconfiguring the very idea of ‘the public’, and accordingly of the practices of public service provision. Accordingly, the disciplinarity of the corporate revolution subjects the universities to the regulation of the market, to the dictate of the all-powerful flows of capital that fluidly overflow geographic circumscriptions of sovereign and bordered place. The sovereignty of nation-states is itself refigured by this disciplining so as to more agilely free up capacity for attracting capital investment.

The disciplinary intentionality is that of the logic of neoliberalism. “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” (Harvey 2005, p. 2). However, any rhetoric that constrains neoliberalism’s impact to the economic sphere is inattentive to its sweeping regulative demands. Critics such as Wendy Brown, for instance, have described this logic as an embracive economisation of life through “governing rationality” (Brown 2015, p. 176). Likewise, theological ethicist Daniel Bell Jr., drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, speaks of this as “ontological capture” (Bell 2005, p. 200), Hardt and Negri frame it as “the production of subjectivity itself” (Hardt and Negri 2009, p. x), and Michael Sandel depicts the market society that is constituted by the extension of the competitive market and its evaluative structure into all areas of life so that everything becomes commodified, sellable (Sandel 2012). The very notion of ‘the public’ has thereby been subjected to increasing modes of privatisation. Decreasing government expenditure on welfare support and care services is stained with a distinctly Hobbesian hue, or at least a Hobbesian private interest one when dragged through a Benthamite majoritarianism and emphasis on the subject’s desire.18 While public support of the military industrial complex and domestic border patrolling remains perpetually robust, in conjunction with ideologically driven tax-breaks for the wealthy, university funding from the public purse has been in significant decline.19 In other words, it is due to a politically driven ideology of the economy that the financial burden is laid squarely across the shoulders of the students themselves so that the economic form of neo-Darwinism takes shape in terms of the survival of the richest, precisely what Thomas Henry Huxley had in mind when reconceiving Darwin’s account of species mutation for American business interests. Within strategies of economic “rationalisation” that have been intensively operative in the Australian higher education landscape for quite some time, higher educational providers have been ‘encouraged’ to court private industry investment, students to engage in consuming the goods and services of what can be characterised as ‘McUniversity’, and the telos of education is increasingly relocated to the training of students in skills for personal employability. That higher education has been subjected in this fashion and continually subjected to regular public audit reveals the irony of talk of ‘free markets’ since these markets require state intervention to free them for market competition and to sustain that freedom, and this intervention serves pre-eminently to serve certain interests rather than others (Absher 2021, p. 22). Accordingly, Harvey observes that “The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force, if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary.” (Harvey 2005, p. 2). McUniversity is continually subjected to the disciplinary regime of public evaluation audits, reporting on research finances, teaching quality, research outputs, and so on. Despite the porousness of national borders under the fluidity of the power of capital, in many ways, “Far from disappearing, the state is becoming stronger today” as the manager of certain forms of access to the global market (Žižek 2019, p. 13).

Echoing a comment made some years earlier by George Orwell, moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre describes an apocalyptic scenario as an attention-grabbing route into his After Virtue’s claims that the very notion of common ethical rationality is unavailable.20 The suggestion is that while there remain fragments, or linguistic and conceptual echoes, of a form of ethical rationality, these now belong to a markedly different theoretical setting so that their very practices of meaning and significance are changed. This image can be developed to suggest that while there remain some echoes of the educational vision and values of the pre-neoliberal disciplining of the academies, those echoes are both distorted towards a different ordering, an order of economisation, and little more than artefacts now dislocated from more substantive frameworks of educational meaning. Just such a claim has been explicitly made by Henry Giroux: “while the American university still employs the rhetoric of a democratic public sphere, there is a growing gap between a stated belief in noble purposes and the reality of an academy that is under siege” by neoliberalism’s instrumentalised rationality (Giroux 2009, p. 670). The problem, then, is not merely one of the privatisation of that which has been in public hands and conceived of as being for the public good, and the ‘crisis’ that a number of critics identify is considerably more troubling than one that can be solved with more adequate funding arrangements, or more thought on how to integrate the range of available technologies into higher educational pedagogies. As Brown argues, “Neoliberalism thus does not merely privatize—turn over to the market for individual production and consumption—what was formerly publicly supported and valued. Rather, it formulates everything, everywhere, in terms of capital investment and appreciation, including and especially humans themselves.” (Brown 2015, p. 176). Brown’s critique focuses on the way this subjects the very formation of selfhood and agency to conditions and values rationally ordered towards market ends. As Chantal Mouffe explains, under the hegemony of “biopolitical capitalism … individuals are now totally subjugated to the control of capital. … We have all been transformed into passive functions of the capitalist system.” (Mouffe 2013, p. 86). New configurations of culturally productive practices, such as art and formal education, within the universality of the neo-capitalist trajectory, foster relations that are discursively productive of subjectivities themselves. What is more, their configurations and tactics belong to an emancipatory discourse. In a discursive framing that would rather neatly slip into Martin Luther’s depiction of the theologia gloriae in the theses of the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, bondage to unstable market forces are promoted as freedom, precarious and temporary employment opportunities are lauded as flexibility, the denigration of social bonds is euphemistically couched as personal authenticity, and where the contingency of the system shaped by intentionality is hidden by talk of there being no alternative (Žižek 2019, pp. 20, 41). Žižek’s complaint about colonialism can be neatly applied to most university’s talk of offering “world class education” and “quality” support services: “what makes the liberal Western powers so unbearable is that they not only practise exploitation and violent domination, but that, to add insult to injury, they present this brutal reality in the guise of its opposite, of freedom, equality and democracy.” (ibid., p. 149).

4. Desocialised Higher Education

The mood of Roberts’s critique occasionally veers towards the nostalgic. Something has been lost that once was on offer, and this is a problem that needs attention to be drawn to. Yet at one point, he does admit that “As regards the history of the ‘idea of the university’ there is, of course, no one single conception.” (Roberts 2002, p. 93). While the claim is followed by a rather bland mention of “the control of the church” that had been offset by the French Revolution and “an ever more ambitious and power-hungry state”, and the political implications of these rather simplistically conceived shifts go undeveloped in the paper, the statement remains important in one respect: any nostalgic appeal to ‘the idea of the university’ that should return requires a considerably more complicating story.21 In his massive study, Sheldon Rothblatt explains that “For two centuries a particular kind of debate has gone on, revived in every generation, concerning the role and purpose of a university and the education it provides.” (Rothblatt 1997, p. 1). This supports Roberts’s observation here, although the reference to “debate” is peculiar when read in the light of Roberts’s remarks on the stealthiness of the neoliberal revolution of the university and the silent complicity of most academics in the process. Rothblatt continues by claiming that “A single idea of a university has never truly existed, although in some periods fewer alternatives were available.” (Rothblatt 1997, p. 1). The implication of this claim is that universities were and remain plural educational performances, and he says as much on one occasion.22 Hardt and Negri’s work on the new empire of capital, or Brown’s on the subjecting of all things to neoliberal rationality, would suggest that Rothblatt is a little naïve when mitigating any capacity to recognise the very monochromisation of the parameters of the vision of a university under current conditions of the political economy. Equally distracting is Martha Nussbaum’s belief that “Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through.” (Nussbaum 2010, p. 2). The point the likes of Brown, Giroux, and others make is that they have indeed been thought through, only that the strategy is for processes that redirect political economic arrangements and their impact upon the design of the university. In this regard, Gary Rolfe more sensibly argues that “the university has merely replaced the Enlightenment narratives of grand narratives of truth and emancipation with an unquestioning acceptance of the liberal capitalist grand narrative of the market.” (Rolfe 2013, p. 8).23 The work of Brown and Giroux, among many others, indicates that the shifts have indeed been planned by particular neoliberal agendas. “What we are witnessing is not simply a political project but also a reworking of the very meaning of education both as an institution and as a cultural force.” (Giroux 2019, pp. 106–7). Nussbaum, at least, does come closer to recognising this when she indicates that the thirst “for profits” has resulted in universities “heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive.” (Nussbaum 2010, p. 2).

Because of the role the universities played in developing and sustaining the modern state’s tasks, they were fit for purpose as state institutions. As Bill Readings observes, because of its cultural role (in both studying the sum of all knowledge and cultivating the development of character as a result of rational study), the German university, for example, “becomes the institution charged with watching over the spiritual life of the people of the rational state, reconciling ethnic tradition and statist rationality. The University, in other words, is identified as the institution that will give reason to the common life of the people, while preserving their traditions and avoiding the bloody, destructive example of the French Revolution.” (Readings 1996, p. 15). That means that the university came to serve as something of “a microcosm of the national-state.” (ibid., p. 167). The point is not lost on Louis Althusser, according to whom education has served the purpose of assuming, reproducing, and, therefore, securing the prevailing capitalist class structure and its legitimating ideology.24 “[I]t is by apprenticeship in a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e., the relation of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced.” (Althusser 1972, p. 156; Aronowitz and Giroux 1986, p. 69). Within such a system and its pedagogical performance, educational establishments inevitably perpetuate socio-political inequalities, and thereby confirm and legitimate the discursivity of the contemporary social order which is consequently experienced as ‘natural’. In other words, institutions of formal education are reflections of the political, cultural, and social hegemonies they serve, without critical memory of their social particularities and of cultures as contested historical sites, and therein habituate students’ embrace of social conditioning and the flow of power cleansed of their disruptable contingency.25 Ivan Illich, then, criticises “Any attempt to reform the university without attending to the system of which it is an integral part” (Illich 1970, p. 39). As early as 1970, Illich was warning that the school was “the reproductive organ of a consumer society” (ibid., p. 74).

Why is this significant? Whenever any particular political or social problem is identified, frequently there is a naïve appeal to ‘education’ as being the solution without specifying more critically what is required. For instance, in a rhetorically loose moment, Giroux proclaims that “Education has never been more imperative as a political tool that can offer the resources to challenge the ideological, educational, and militant practices deployed by emerging right-wing and fascist groups.” (Giroux 2021, p. xv). This is precisely the kind of claim that can suggest that by offering education states can solve substantive socio-political difficulties, as if the educated are intelligent in making responsible moral judgments, or that education involves something far less complicated than thinking through a range of disparate perspectives and options, many of which are irreconcilable. In Hannah Arendt’s terms, then, even the formally highly educated can be utterly stupid (Arendt 1994, p. 314).

It is within this context that Absher reasons that “Critical thinking is as useful for building the weapons systems of tomorrow as it is for solving world hunger.” (Absher 2021, p. 65). The culture of higher education, including, more specifically, theological education, can actively support colonial expansionism, Kriegstheologie, jackbooted strongmen, and accountability-evading claims that difficult questions and alternative accounts are always merely “fake news”. The upshot of Freire’s critical pedagogical analysis is that as a disciplinary mechanism, formal educational provision can actually be dehumanising. He consequently identifies forms of education that, even when the dehumanising processes be masked by expansively emancipatory rhetoric, reduce learners to “automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.” (Freire 1996, p. 55). Accordingly, Freire proclaims that “Education is not the key, the lever, the instrument for social transformation. … [T]he great problem of the country is education—as if top-down education were able to rearrange the society that is out there.” (Freire 2007, pp. 63–64). Freire, then, draws attention to the value assumptions embedded within educational practice as well as in theory, and this is echoed by theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas who warns that “all education, whether acknowledged or not, is moral formation” (Hauerwas 2007, p. 46). The question remains as to what the values are in any given instance, and these, Freire identifies as values designed to support certain powerful interests. As the Cologne Charter of the G8 summit of 1999 declared, “Globalisation is … the organising framework within which current ideas and beliefs about adult learning are given value and priority by politicians”.26 That is why, when reflecting on the politics of literacy and literary enculturation, Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, deeply influenced by Freire’s critical pedagogy as they have been, declare that “the rebellion against privilege is frequently accompanied by an attack against the intellectuals. … [I]ntellectuals are typically servants of the mighty; they often provide legitimacy for deeds of state, private violence, and exploitation.” (Aronowitz and Giroux 1991, p. 33).

The overlapping point made by these critiques is that with regard to accommodation to the neoliberal order, the context of the decline of the political significance “of the nation-state as the primary instance of capitalism’s self-reproduction” and of the citizen-subject, higher education “has effectively voided the social mission of the university.”27 It is here that the title of a book in which Brown subjects the neoliberalising of the university to exacting critique is, hauntingly, Undoing the Demos.

5. Expansively Concluding with the Trivialising University in “Dark Times”28

In his Reith Lectures, Edward Said claims that “today’s intellectual is more likely to be a closeted literature professor, with a secure income, and no interest in dealing with the world outside the classroom” or, we must add, the next research project (Said 1996, pp. 70–71). Of course, this criticism predates the reduction of academic labourers to a precarious existence under the terms of policy-regulating rhetoric, such as ‘cost-cutting’ and euphemisms of ‘flexibility’, and the intensification of professional accountability with the annual performance audit. Said’s following point remains interesting, though. Research outputs within this professional logic are designed “mainly for academic advancement and not for social change”, and are specialist projects couched in “increasing technical formalism.” (ibid., pp. 70–71). Here, Said draws attention to the peer-to-peer evasion of socially interesting research driven by political research auditing policy. What is evident throughout recent developments, Said maintains, is the taming of the intellectual-as-scholarly-expert remote from responsibility as a citizen subject for socially performative intellectual work that cannot be reduced to its productive and consumptive function.29 Of course, the government research audits in the UK and Australia do now come with enhanced Engagement and Impact reporting exercises, and this might suggest that Said’s socially critical case needs to be recast.

An image of Freire’s is of the teacher as “cultural worker”, and this image is designed to conceive of the responsible educational participation in ethically significant, counter-cultural, critical accountability that attends to cultural representations, social formations, and the politics of pedagogical practices (Freire 2005). On the one hand, this image provides the sense of moral ends and the common good of politically attentive critical reasoning, capaciously able to subject processes of subject-constitution and educational discipline to informed analysis. For Giroux, the academic as intellectual or cultural worker should be properly accountable for encouraging robust critical conversations about flourishing and wellbeing, and be unflinchingly truthful about where that so-called flourishing is conducive to brutally rendering persons and societies disposable, an image that Giroux develops from Zygmunt Bauman’s non-persons in a waste society (Giroux 2021, p. x; Cf. Bauman 2004, 2011). These conversations are not well served by what Giroux opines as the “disimagination machine” of contemporary political and cultural life, of the “zombie politics and casino capitalism”, or the utilisation of instrumental rationality that subjects all to the capitalist subject.30 Recently, he has spoken of this in terms of a “pandemic pedagogy” that regulates “a system of knowledge, ideas, values, and desires that constitute particular identities, relationships, and specific versions of the present and future.” (Giroux 2021, p. xii). Accordingly, the “crisis of education” is a reflection and the artifice of broader shifts in political culture and modes of governance (ibid., p. ix). This involves discerning the ideological trajectory and assumptions of “those everyday pedagogical spaces where identities are produced”, values are manufactured, and tactics are strategically designed (Giroux 2022, p. xvii). What drives the analysis is the observation that “the value of critical education as a public good” is in retreat, overlapping with the sense that “democracy is emptied of any substance” (Giroux 2022, p. 1). He laments that universities under this political discipline are not forming citizens, and are not preparing persons for informed democratic participation (Giroux 2015, chp. 9–10). His concerns are for the shape of a society now increasingly unable to distinguish truthfulness from fake news, that is replete with power-plays to resist accountability to public judgment, and that diminishes the national capacity to remember well a history that has damaged many in order to continue to perpetuate these exclusionary mechanisms. Like Brown, Giroux trenchantly maintains that the transformations of higher education contribute to the contemporary peril that democracy itself has been enduring with the contemporary surge towards what he hyperbolically proclaims to be “an updated version of fascist politics.” (Giroux 2021, p. x.; Cf. Brown 2015, chp. 6).

If Freire continues to maintain that even within its “limited efficacy” formal education is “nonetheless indispensable to social transformation”, it can only be through radical critique and a resistant performance against the socially diminished value-laden practices of neoliberal rationality (Freire 2007, p. 65). The problem is that neoliberalised higher education-as-battery-vocational-training-in-McUniversity is not only ill-positioned to address ever deepening socio-cultural difficulties that reflect inequitable power arrangements, difficulties that project the rage of those rendered abject under neoliberalised conditions into artificial blame of a range of causes including “the social and the democratic version of political life”, but becomes itself a reflection of its regulative logic that redistributes power and wealth in a concentrated intensity and that immunises itself from critique (Brown 2019, p. 11). In this regard, the making of docile bodies ordered by the market, or as Brown maintains, providing the “governing rationality”, renders the universities themselves an actual threat to practices that sustain and enhance the fragile project of participative democracy as valued agonistic agency (Brown 2015, p. 176). Several years ago, Giroux confessed that:

Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public realms available, though hardly breathing, where we can provide the educational conditions for students to embrace pedagogical encounters as spaces of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, to imagine different futures, to become border crossers establishing a range of new connections and global relations, and to embrace a language of critique and possibility that responds to the urgent need to reclaim democratic values, identities, and practices.

(Giroux 2009, p. 691)

However, such a sentiment appears more difficult to sustain in the contemporary ecology of the university. In the first place, neoliberalised universities materially disseminate neoliberal values through their increasing focus on vocationalising the curriculum, and their relaxing of the emphasis on students demonstrating a critical learning engagement with knowledge production. After all, Brown observes, “Democracies are [now re]conceived as requiring technically skilled human capital, not educated participants in public life and common rule.”31 In the second place, university practices that individuate students and enforce hierarchicalised management are belief-soaked, exhibiting the kinds of desocialising concerns natural to the competitive relations and autocratic forms of control produced by neoliberal ideological subjectivation. “The saturation of higher education by market rationality has converted higher education from a social and public good to a personal investment in individual futures, futures constructed mainly in terms of learning capacity.” (Brown 2015, p. 181).

Under such conditions, Giroux declares, universities have become incapacitated as potential resisters to the cultural pedagogies of “manufactured ignorance and ethical somnambulance [which] now shapes the collective consciousness of millions of Americans who cannot envision a future that does not imitate a present plagued by an ascending authoritarianism.” (Giroux 2022, p. 22). Rothblatt has argued that “At stake is the soul of the university.” (Rothblatt 2000, p. 23). It is certainly the case the question of what universities are educations in that is of substantive social value needs to be pressed hard. Numerous commentators argue, for instance, that the confluence of the market and education produces a category mistake (Watts 2017, pp. 166, 172–73). Yet Rothblatt’s claim is still fairly glib. Brown, Giroux, and others force the matter in such a way as to require a deeper reading of the issues over McUniversity and its incoherent and socially consequential dissolution of education as a public good. At stake is the soul of civic society itself in dark times of political antagonism, environmental terror, the evacuation of responsible social solidarity to the benefit only of powerful interests, and the influential of resistance incapacitating rhetoric of “the post-political view that there is no alternative to the present order.”32 To put things in Charles Taylor’s terms, without some “socially endorsed conception of the good”, democratic regimes simply cannot survive the fragmenting consequences of unrestrained liberal freedom.” (Taylor 1989, p. 172). The provocation, then, is to think, and to think honestly, regarding the shape of human life within a networked world wherein social dependencies are not to be understood as chains to be broken, but rather cultivated to enable flourishing together.33

Even so, it is arguable that the issue is not one of competing rational perspectives that can be engaged with through reasoned deliberation and argument. According to Absher, “the failure to persuade those in power has arisen from … [a] fundamental misunderstanding. Attempts to cut, change, stratify, and reorient mass higher education in the United States [as well as the UK and particularly Australia] are not about confusions concerning its value.” (Absher 2021, p. 158). Instead, they are ordered towards engineering the economy and the parameters of social to support certain configurations of powerful self-interest on the part of a wealthy elite. Public complicity has come from a particular beast, according to Brown: “the aggrieved, reactive creature fashioned by neoliberal reason and its effects, who embraces freedom without the social contract, authority without democratic legitimacy, and vengeance without values or futurity! … [T]his one is angry, amoral, and impetuous, spurred by unavowed humiliation and thirst for revenge.”34

That then leaves a crucial question for the role of educational responsibility as a socially accountable activity, and it is well articulated by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis: “How will we form the next generation of … intellectuals and politicians if young people never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumentalized university is?”35 The implications of the decisions made regarding the identity, role, and practical shape of universities is not, then, a matter contained within some politically neutral educational space, but is of substantive significance for the very health of reflections on the nature of social configuration.