Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake is a well-documented and systematic analysis of what we might call American-style neoliberalism, which applies itself more through market pressure and managerial ideology than through direct state regulation (as in many European cases). The book focuses on what he terms the “devolutionary cycle” of privatization of U.S. public universities. While these universities have remained legally public, Newfield defines privatization not in terms of formal legal status or ownership but in terms of practical “control”: who wields influence, sets expectations and creates incentives. One of the great conceptual strengths of the book is its demonstration that privatization as process can be at once partial and paradigmatic, a totalizing system that may nevertheless benefit from leaving occasional gaps that can serve it as alibis. As he observes, ”the privatization of public universities is a complicated pastiche of mixed modes, which is why so many people can plausibly deny that it is happening” (28). Nevertheless, as he discovers firsthand, the decline of public support and financing has become an unquestionable fact (rather than a contestable policy choice) for many senior administrators. “State money isn’t coming back,” Newfield gets told bluntly by an assistant to the University of California’s chair of the board (188).

Newfield’s analysis has two modes, one taxonomic and the other more deconstructive. On the taxonomic front, he proposes a useful series of conceptually distinct (though empirically overlapping) “stages” of privatization: (1) the decline of the “public good” as an institutional ideal; (2) the chase for outside money; (3) the permanent growth of student tuition and fees; (4) the decline in public funding; (5) the calamitous rise of student debt; (6) the (partial) privatization of educational processes themselves (e.g. via MOOCs, online course vendors); (7) the decline in student learning that corresponds to resource scarcity; (8) the sociological decline of the “middle class” (including the professional-managerial workers) via wage stagnation since the 1970s. None of these processes are unfamiliar to critical scholars of higher education, but Newfield brings new clarity to a wealth of detailed economic, institutional, pedagogical and policy data.

In his more deconstructive mode, Newfield also debunks a series of standard ideologies about the privatization process. For instance: The search for outside research grants actually costs more than it brings in, once the non-reimbursed overhead costs of institutional infrastructure are taken into account (85-93). The humanities, in spite of their small grant revenues, end up subsidizing the sciences by bringing in large student fees at low instructional cost (Figure 7, 99). The private banking sector is actually less efficient than the public sector at providing student loans, but it has manipulated the national regulatory framework to capture this lucrative lending market, while undermining the public Direct Loan Program (201). Student tuition increases are not always the result of cuts in public funding, but in fact often precede them; and they also teach legislators that public funding cuts can readily be offset by other revenue sources (133-138, esp. Figure 13). Finally, Newfield argues that privatization is not the cure for university’s wasteful spending (via market or austerity “discipline”). Rather, privatization is a key cause of budgetary expansion, since marketization forces universities to spend broadly on feature parity with their peers and to “engage in a perpetual scramble for cash” (146).

In the optimistic part of his conclusion, Newfield proposes that each of these stages of “decline” should be reversed — by restoring public funding, eliminating student tuition and debt, restoring a commitment to public goods, and so on. The aim would be to create a new “virtuous cycle” of “democratized intelligence” and “mass quality.” Yet Newfield’s conclusion also foresees the skeptical responses that his essentially social-democratic vision is apt to elicit. He is all too aware that no single reform can reverse decades of privatization doxa. Thus the real aim of the book is to constitute an alternative common sense. Newfield’s book summons the reader to adopt the views that higher education is a public good deserving of public funds; that higher education should not be stratified by race or class; that it should not subsidize for-profit enterprises or cater to philanthropic donors; and that equality should become both the ideal and the socioeconomic reality of American society.

I must note that Newfield’s optimistic counter-doxa must now face a deeply hostile political climate. In spite of gestures “away from privatization” during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign (319), the new Trump administration is likely to champion privatization and deregulation, not egalitarian public services. This context switch draws our attention to something that Newfield strategically downplays: the identity of his project’s logical opponents. These would presumably include the affluent (who would be taxed to pay for Newfield’s proposals); the private loan industry; potentially the for-profit and non-elite/non-profit private colleges (which compete with public institutions for working-class students); outside research funders, philanthropists and the educational tech sector; and the political Right, which is committed to shrinking the (non-military) public sector. Faced with this set of entrenched interests, is a renovated, non-racist social democracy even possible in the United States? And what might become of Newfield’s relatively non-partisan egalitarianism — which seeks to enlist university administrators and the general public, not just the academic left — in such partisan times?

But suppose for the sake of argument that this robust social-democratic (“egalitarian capitalist”) society were feasible. Certain further questions about Newfield’s program would still present themselves. Is it possible that Newfield still distantly idealizes higher education, and in particular the faculty? He notes that the UNIKE project in Denmark “helped suspend my churchy centrism toward the university” (xi), but his book still ascribes to the public university a unique potential for mass intellectual emancipation. The general ascription of emancipatory possibility seems fair enough (“universities can democratize intelligence”), but is it fair to go beyond that to claims about necessity (“only universities can democratize intelligence,” cf. 5)? After all, as many precarious intellectuals get forced out of the privatized university, alternative intellectual spaces and institutions are becoming more salient. Does the university, even Newfield’s hypothetical “mass quality” university, deserve a monopoly on intellectual virtue, in light of the forms of domination and hierarchy that, as Bourdieu showed, accompany professorial power as such? In my reading, the utopian component of Newfield’s analysis still leaves many open questions, but in any event, it is a great merit of this study to produce in one gesture a materialist analysis of our compromised present and a utopian wish-image of an egalitarian mass university. I would merely insist that all utopias are themselves social products calling out for further analysis.

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.

I usually prefer to talk about “New Public Management” instead of “neoliberalism,” though, because it more directly picks out a set of governing techniques (audits/markets/contracts + incentives) and leaves aside the question of the “philosophy” (if any) that lies beneath.

One of the papers that made a major impression on me in thinking about neoliberalism/NPM, in any event,  was Alexander Mitterle’s excellent “Un socialisme académique?” Mitterle shows that many of the institutional governance mechanisms that we call “academic capitalist” were already found in socialist East Germany. As I summarized his findings in my review of the edited collection where he published:

GDR research was largely funded by contracts that insisted on direct industrial applications; researchers were incentivised to compete for performance bonuses and symbolic rewards, subject to ‘comparative performance evaluation’ (p. 573), and expected to show individual initiative (while simultaneously being good interdisciplinary teamworkers). The system as a whole was oriented towards regional economic development, pushed towards ‘efficiency’, and perpetually reformed ‘against mediocrity and self-satisfaction.’

Mitterle’s sensible conclusion is, again, that governance mechanisms are one thing, ideologies are another. If state socialists can use neoliberal governance mechanisms, then clearly “neoliberal governance” is not necessarily linked to capitalist ideologies of the kind that Harvey describes.

I’m returning to this argument now because I came across an interesting comparison case that we can contrast with Mitterle’s interest in “things that look neoliberal under socialism.” This case comes from post-independence socialist Tanzania, in particular from its first president, Julius Nyerere. In 1967, Nyerere published a fascinating essay about post-colonial socialist education, “Education for Self-Reliance.” One of his most provocative arguments is that all secondary schools should contain farms. The claim is that having schools combined with farms will help break down the unhealthy distinctions between “the educated” and manual laborers, and will be educational in a quite holistic sense.

But look at how Nyerere thinks about the farm as a form of governance:

The most important thing is that the school members should learn that it is their farm, and that their living standards depend on it. Pupils should be given an opportunity to make many of the decisions necessary — for example, whether to spend money they have earned on hiring a tractor to get land ready for planting, or whether to use that money for other purposes on the farm or in the school, and doing the hard work themselves by sheer physical labour. By this sort of practice and by this combination of classroom work and farm work, our educated young people will learn to realize that if they farm well they can eat well and have better faculties in the dormitories, recreation rooms, and so on. If they work badly, then they themselves will suffer. In this process, Government should avoid laying down detailed and rigid rules; each school must have considerable flexibility. Only then can the potential of that particular area be utilized, and only then can the participants practice — and learn to value — direct democracy.

Nicholas Sarkozy was elected President of the Republic on May 6, 2007, and took office on May 16. He appointed Valérie Pécresse, a legislator and former UMP spokeswoman, as Minister of Research and Higher Education, and on May 18th, at a meeting of the Conseil des Ministres (Council of Ministers), officially assigned her to lead a reform of university autonomy. Such a reform had already been widely discussed during the presidential campaign, attracting support from Sarkozy, the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, and the centrist MoDem candidate François Bayrou. They differed, of course, on policy details. Royal emphasized a “national framework” that preserved more of a role for the French state, and for permanent institutional funding, particularly for research. Sarkozy, according to Le Monde, “wanted to go faster,” shifting research funding and universities alike towards a contract-based, short-term model. But policy differences and political tempos aside, there was a widespread public discourse on the necessity of university reform. “This [traditional university] system worked in its time, but the world has changed”: such was one fairly typical formulation that had appeared in Le Figaro earlier that year, in an op-ed by Vincent Berger, a French physicist active in university governance who later became president of the University of Paris-7 in 2009. In the face of globalized economic competition, Berger explained, “our country must maintain competitive and triumphant industries,” and he argued for closer links between research and industrial production, along with a better “equation” [adéquation] between economic demand and university supply.

The frequency of such arguments in political discourse would give the Sarkozy administration a powerful naturalizing argument for its university reforms, a chance to ally itself with the spirit of its time. Pécresse, as we will see, would frequently cast her reforms as a matter of obvious, objective necessity. But at the same time, there was a discourse of urgency and immediacy about the process. The Sarkozy administration wanted to put in place a number of major state reforms, dealing with everything from the university to labor regulations and criminal laws; and this multiplicity would be amplified by a very rapid governmental timeline.  “We’ll do all the reforms at the same time, and not one after the other,” Sarkozy remarked at the  May 18th meeting of his Conseil des Ministres. The Sarkozy government was also deeply committed to a particular fiscal policy, one typically called “austerity” by its opponents. State spending was to be cut; 50% of retiring state workers were not supposed to be replaced; and national debt was supposed to decrease. Even in such a moment, though, the university and research sector was slated for budget increases. It was said to be the government’s “primary fiscal priority.”

Still, it was generally understood that university reforms, whatever their fiscal and political priority, were a fraught topic. “Even if the chosen moment seems favorable,” remarked an editorialist in Le Figaro, “Valérie Pécresse will have to show great conviction and determination to succeed in such a sensitive subject. Numerous projects, for decades, have been abandoned or emptied of their content, so tenacious are the resistances, so much are they nourished by dogmatism.” In an initial effort to prevent discord, Prime Minister Fillon initially gave assurances that the two most controversial topics, selective admissions (termed “sélection”) and tuition hikes, would not be included in the reform. In spite of this, as Pécresse began official ministerial consultations at the end of the month, however, academic unions were already voicing concerns about the temporality of haste that the government was so attached to.

Thus on May 25^th Bruno Julliard, the president of UNEF (the largest student union), would “deplore the short time allowed for negotiations.” The Prime Minister, nevertheless, announced that the university reform would be taken up by Parliament that July. Soon thereafter, the Intersyndicale issued an official communiqué attacking the speed of the reform: “The chosen calendar permits neither a debate about the contents and priorities of a university reform, nor a genuine negotiation with the university community. The signatory organizations [of the intersyndicale] solemnly demand that the law not be hastily submitted during the next special session of Parliament this July.” Pécresse nevertheless continued on the official calendar, calling a meeting of the National Council of Research and Higher Education (CNESER) to review her reform proposals on June 22nd. To her surprise, perhaps, after seven hours of debate, her proposed reform was rejected by the assembled representatives of the university community.

The CNESER possessed considerable legitimacy, since it included representatives from all the major academic unions and from the prominent Conference of University Presidents. It made for media drama, therefore, when the presidents of the largest faculty and student unions, SNESup and UNEF, walked out of the room in frustration. The SNESup president called it “rash” (réforme à la hussarde); his UNEF counterpart termed it an “impending crisis — in my opinion serious.” Pécresse managed to smile for the cameras, saying that she remained optimistic and that the CNESER is only a “consultative body” (une instance consultative). Sarkozy, however, rapidly invited the union representatives to private meetings at the Elysée, and the government made rapid, though ultimately not fundamental, concessions. A proposal to introduce selective admissions at the master’s level was withdrawn, and a proposal to cut the size of universities’ administrative councils was scaled back somewhat. UNEF declared victory on these points (selective undergraduate admissions was said to be a “casus belli” for them), and the government, having quelled some of the earliest dissent, introduced the proposed law in the French legislature soon afterwards, on July 4th.

The next day, Sarkozy and Fillon released an official letter to Pécresse that spelled out the parameters of her ministerial reform mission. It stands as the best official statement of Sarkozy’s vision of university temporality.

At an hour when a worldwide battle of the intellect is underway, it is imperative that France should reform its system of research and higher education, to bring it to the highest global level. At the same time, it must put an end to the unacceptable shambles [gâchis] constituted by university dropout rates [l’échec universitaire], and by the inadequacy of many academic programs to the needs of the job market.

As Minister of Research and Higher Education, you are charged with a mission of the absolutely highest importance within the government and for France. Your objective must be to remedy the state of our research and of our system of higher education, and to rapidly lead more high school graduates into higher education, more college students towards degrees, and more college graduates towards employment.

At this summer’s special legislative session, you will present Parliament with a proposed law that will reform university governance, and allow them to secure new capabilities and new responsibilities within a period of five years at most. In every country in the world, academic success depends upon the universities’ broad freedom to recruit their teachers and researchers, to adjust their compensation and improve their situation, to plan their educational programs, to optimize the use of their facilities, to establish institutional partnerships. The universities’ access to these new responsibilities, in the framework of a modernized relationship with the State, will go along with supplementary funding.

…We consider that the mission incumbent upon you is among the most important and the most urgent for the future of our country.

A l’heure où s’engage une bataille mondiale de l’intelligence, il est impératif que la France réforme son système d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche pour le porter au meilleur niveau mondial. Elle doit parallèlement mettre fin à l’inacceptable gâchis que représentent l’échec universitaire et l’inadéquation de nombreuses filières d’enseignement supérieur aux besoins du marché du travail.

En tant que ministre de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche, vous êtes investie d’une mission absolument prioritaire au sein du gouvernement et pour la France. Votre objectif doit être de redresser l’état de notre recherche et de notre système d’enseignement supérieur et de conduire rapidement plus de bacheliers vers l’enseignement supérieur, plus d’étudiants vers le diplôme, plus de diplômés vers l’emploi.

Dès la session extraordinaire de cet été, vous présenterez au Parlement un projet de loi réformant la gouvernance des universités et leur permettant d’accéder à de nouvelles compétences et à de nouvelles responsabilités dans un délai maximum de cinq ans. Dans tous les pays du monde, la réussite universitaire repose sur une plus grande liberté des universités pour recruter leurs enseignants et leurs chercheurs, moduler leurs rémunérations et revaloriser leur situation, choisir leurs filières d’enseignement, optimiser l’utilisation de leurs locaux, nouer des partenariats. L’accès des universités à ces nouvelles responsabilités s’accompagnera, dans le cadre d’une relation modernisée avec l’Etat, de moyens supplémentaires.

…Nous considérons que la mission qui vous incombe est parmi les plus importantes et les plus urgentes pour l’avenir de notre pays.

The letter would also enumerate a number of concrete policy objectives, including a shift to contract-based research funding, the pursuit of “excellence” and world rankings for a select number of campuses, the improvement of student life, and the general Sarkozyist project of scrutinizing state budgets. It even proposed a curious incarnation of audit culture at the summit of the state apparatus: the Minister was asked to propose indicators by which the success of her own policies would be measured and assessed (cf. Strathern 2000). But what is important for our understanding of the protest movement that followed is the government’s striking image of the threatened, yet urgent future of the nation, which gave the proposed reforms the broadest possible ideological rationale.

A worldwide battle of the intellect is under way. Such was the premise of this neoliberal futurism. It upended the placid ideological image of a “knowledge society,” so familiar from European policy rhetoric (cf. French and Anglophone sources), and recast it in the form of a military confrontation between opposed, competitive, competing “intelligences.” While for Vincent Berger, universities and research were necessary inputs in France’s economic performance on the world market, for Sarkozy and Fillon, the images of world battle and international economic warfare were displaced into the interior of the academic world itself. The adduced evidence for the government’s vision of intense international competition was – predictably – largely quantitative. Sarkozy was fond of quoting a statistic that French academics published only half as much as their European counterparts, and policymakers often cited the poor performance of French universities in the Shanghai world university rankings. These classifications were themselves eminently contestable, as critics pointed out (cite), but it was ultimately beside the point to evaluate the empirical evidence for a “worldwide battle of the intellect.” Like any other ideological frame, its function was less to process empirical facts than to assert an a priori vision of the world and to rationalize a political strategy.

In fact, this grandiose discourse had a double ideological function and a double temporality: at once ideological and practical, its affirmative futurity was also a critique of the present. On an ideological level, it worked to establish a set of givens, to set up a framework of institutional perception, and to craft a discourse of historical necessity. Thus we find that Sarkozy’s letter employed a powerful rhetoric of impersonal, almost objective obligation: “It is imperative”; “it must”; “academic success depends upon…” Pécresse’s mission was claimed to be “the most important and the most urgent for the future of our country.” That, in this discourse, seemed to be the highest and most urgent task thing could possibly be envisioned, a sort of absolute summit of ideological projection and compulsion. At the same time, however, this discourse justified a parliamentary maneuver and a policy apparatus that we have begun to describe; it thus coupled its cosmic aspirations to a clear, immediate, and pragmatic function.

This doubleness was further redoubled at a temporal level. On one hand, it was a manifestly affirmative and positive ideology, invoking a glorious future of being among the global victors, conjuring a sense of progress, modernity and improvement, and beckoning towards a victory that would be simultaneously economic, political and social. It often cloaked itself in the language of “modernization,” a term which was seldom explained but which seemed to index some kind of historical motion towards rationality, instrumental effectiveness, and global institutional similarity. Naturally, this generic modernism served to naturalize and harmonize deeper ideological agendas.

One such agenda was nakedly pro-business — indeed, it aimed to equate the success of business with the success of the nation. Pécresse’s task, we recall, was “to rapidly lead more high school graduates into higher education, more college students towards degrees, and more college graduates towards employment.” In this discourse, which again echoes Berger’s, we see that there is an entirely naturalized link between education and wage labor, one further emphasized by the soothing, parallel structure of the  prosody itself. The other agenda, more narrowly focused on public-sector governance, was a claim about how a certain kind of neoliberal “freedom” was both instrumentally rational and necessary. Universities were to become “free” and “autonomous” in hiring their own faculty, managing their own budgets, and developing their own academic specialties, but, through a typical logic of neoliberal self-governance, this freedom was ultimately only supposed to fulfill the French state’s broader policy objectives. Universities were supposed to differentiate as much as possible, pursuing their own specific forms of “excellence”; this differentiation also presupposed an increasingly homogenous global academic field and increasingly homogenous institutional structures, in a typical case of homogenization through difference (Mazzarella 2004).

And the smooth, opaque, technocratic futurism of this political discourse, with its seamless vision of a university system becoming more competitive and more modern and more rapid, in turn concealed a second temporality, the temporality of a ruthless critique of the present institutional situation. The present French university is an “unacceptable shambles” (un gâchis); it urgently needs a “remedy.” Such a critique of the present was tacitly apparent as well in many of the more seemingly anodine formulations. If for instance the university needed new “capabilities” and “responsibilities,” then in part this implied that such capabilities and responsibilities were currently sorely lacking. If there will be a “modernized relationship with the state,” then tacitly, the current relationship with the state is traditional and obsolete. If “every country in the world” gives its universities managerial autonomy, then France is unfortunately deviating from global best practices. Technocratic futurism was, in short, a medium, maybe even a ruse, for an attack on the present and on the institutional frameworks of 20th century social democracy.

Media coverage around the same time made it apparent that a (neoliberal?) critique of the traditional public sector was crucial to Sarkozy’s university reforms. One segment about the start of Pécresse’s consultation process, which appeared May 31st on Soir 3 Journal, strategically emphasized one university president’s frustration with traditional state structures:

Jean Charles Pomerol, President of the University of Paris-6, a thin, gray-haired Frenchman, who was one of the most eager adherents to Pécresse’s university reforms, gazes out upon new construction work on his campus in central Paris: “If it’s the state, through the intermediary of a public establishment [like a university], that does the work, it’s fair to say that it goes about twice as slowly as if had been handed over to a private company. As soon as there’s a certain sum to spend in the public-sector market, things don’t really work.”

Pomerol: Si c’est l’état, par l’intermédiare d’un établissement public, qui fait les travaux, l’établissement public, on peut dire qu’il va environ deux fois moins vite que si ça avait été délegué à une entreprise privée. Des qu’il y a une certaine somme à dépenser pour faire un marché public, ça fonctionne mal.

In short, the traditional French state, the traditional bureaucracy, was slow; the new, modern, autonomous university, the university of the future, would be fast, enhanced by greater integration with the private sector. Such themes were elaborated by governmental officials as well. Consider for example an interview with Pécresse in early July, just as the university law was being introduced in Parliament:

The interviewer asked about the SNESup’s opposition to the reform, and about the changing role of nationalized disciplinary review in hiring.

I’d respond that eighteen months to hire a faculty member [un enseignant-chercheur], in the French university, is not tolerable any more. Today we’re in a global battle of the intellect. The universities must be responsive, or they must be able to hire the best researchers, the best teachers, when they show up at the campus door. That is, in a few months, and not in a year and a half. So we have to move, we have to reform teacher hiring protocols, faculty hiring protocols. The entire university community has said this to me — I believe that the forces hostile to change should be able to hear the message. We should move quickly, because if we don’t make progress, soon we’ll face competition not only from the Anglo-Saxon universities, but also from the Indian and Chinese universities.

Later, the interviewer asked about the consequences of Sarkozy’s close personal involvement in the reform process.

I believe it’s a stroke of luck for the university, for the reform, that the President is getting personally involved. First of all because he can guarantee the financial resources that will be given to the reform, and because he can guarantee the political will to make progress [bouger]. You know, the forces hostile to change, they’re very strong. They’re very strong within the university. People have been trying to get this reform for twenty years. For twenty years, it’s failed. All my predecessors left their marks on it; I think for me it’s very important to have the President of the Republic’s support, which perhaps was lacking for my predecessors.

We can see here that the government’s neoliberal futurism served as the vehicle for a political attack on two kinds of slowness. Firstly, there was the slowness of the traditional, inefficient state bureaucracy, the sort of organization that normally took 18 months to hire a new faculty member, that built new buildings “twice as slowly” as the private sector. Elsewhere in the interview, Pécresse would advocate new university foundations and alumni giving, complaining that it would be “ideological” to impose a barrier between public and private sector money, but she also sounded the predictable theme of fiscal discipline, insisting that money given out without an “objective” (objectif) is “going to be lost in the rain, the sands of the beach.” It was as if traditional (and perennially underfinanced) French universities were bound to waste money by their very nature. Pécresse thus pictured the university reform as a means of introducing a modern, vital haste into the university, of introducing new efficiencies and flexibilities that would put an end to wasted money and raise the university to new heights.

But there was also a more agentive, almost malicious force of slowness in this discourse: the “forces hostile to change,” who had apparently managed to prevent reform for the past twenty years. Pécresse would characterize them only in the most nebulous possible terms, but she said enough to set them up as the enemy. Indeed, they were both her personal opponent and the opponent of something like abstract historical necessity itself — the opponents of what what we “have to” do to win the “global battle of the intellect.” If the government thus sought to win the battle of the intellect and thereby to secure a competitive future for the French nation, then this battle would be won against enemies who were not only outside, like China and India, but also within. Inevitably, perhaps, in the face of her abstractly antagonistic framing of the situation, certain concrete groups within the French university would come forth to announce themselves as her enemy. But, as we will now see, the first move of this opposition was to turn the government’s temporality of neoliberal futurism on its head.

So without any further ado…

As the neoliberal university reforms associated with the Bologna Process have come to France over the last decade, a Francophone wave of critical social research has emerged to analyse and resist them. It tends to be a hybrid genre, mixing traditional social science styles with explicit and implicit political engagements; this particular collection originates in the work of an interdisciplinary, multinational research network called FOREDUC, run by Annie Vinokur and Carole Sigman at the University of Paris-10. The general intellectual orientation here could be termed critical policy studies, with many of the authors coming from political science; the focus is less on neoliberalism as a doctrine than on New Public Management (NPM) as a mode of contract- and incentive-oriented state policy mechanisms. The volume’s underlying analytical problem is to explain how neoliberal university reforms at once converge and diverge across national contexts; as the editors put it, ‘contrasting our experiences shows that, while management principles in higher education and research strongly tend to converge, the doctrine works out differently on the ground depending on the local balance of power between the actors involved, and depending on the intensity of the stakes of international competitiveness in the education industry’ (p. 484). This general process of homogenisation and differentiation, one familiar to anthropologists of globalisation in other spheres (Mazzarella 2004: 349–352), admits of multiple theoretical explanations; and the great merit of this volume is to constitute a virtual laboratory in which the authors’ differing intellectual approaches can be compared and synthesised.

Vinokur’s article takes the most macro perspective here, working in a tradition of critical political economy that seems influenced by Marxism. She gives a historical genealogy of the contemporary ‘knowledge economy’, beginning with medieval guilds’ monopoly on their professional expertise, and proceeding to trace a series of attempts to break the autonomy of labour and appropriate workers’ ‘tacit knowledge’. Higher education today, in her view, has become a key boundary zone between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of labour; she asserts provocatively that the function of post-war university massification has been to afford ‘not the mythical adequation of education to employment, but the production of a surplus of qualified workers on a global scale, necessary – though not sufficient – to put pressure on salaries and working conditions’ (pp. 495–496). And NPM becomes functional within this logic of capital, she argues, when firms find themselves needing a ‘strong political relay to deconstruct the social State’ (p. 497), whose twentieth-century social-welfare institutions could otherwise obstruct the push for a cheap qualified workforce, for newly commodifiable research and for new business opportunities within the higher-education sector.

Now, the difficulty with this functionalist analysis of NPM is that it tends to obscure the institutional and cultural autonomies that universities do retain in the face of economic imperatives. It would be helpful for Vinokur to elaborate how she sees the relationship between the global and the local. But the project remains, in my view, a very useful step towards a general analysis of higher education in terms of labour-capital relations. And at times her functionalism is more tempered: in an interesting historical aside, she remarks that NPM’s use of incentives was inspired by a ‘parental technology for managing recalcitrant children’, and hence has a sort of contingent historical origin. One learns from reading Vinokur’s article that while NPM is indeed functional, its (historical) origin and its (structural) function are quite separate things.

This historical contingency of NPM is much further explored in Alexander Mitterle’s stimulating article, ‘An academic socialism?’, which examines university policy in socialist East Germany. GDR universities, though initially organs of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, acquired an increasingly prominent role in research and industrial production during the 1960s and 1970s, as science was officially reclassified as a ‘productive force’ rather than a mere element of society’s ‘superstructure’ (p. 562). The policy instruments of this period, as Mitterle shows, are deeply familiar to analysts of today‘s neoliberalism. GDR research was largely funded by contracts that insisted on direct industrial applications; researchers were incentivised to compete for performance bonuses and symbolic rewards, subject to ‘comparative performance evaluation’ (p. 573), and expected to show individual initiative (while simultaneously being good interdisciplinary teamworkers). The system as a whole was oriented towards regional economic development, pushed towards ‘efficiency’, and perpetually reformed ‘against mediocrity and self-satisfaction’ (p. 565).

As Mitterle acknowledges, his research is based almost exclusively on GDR policy documents, and it would be useful to see further archival or interview research on the way these policies played out in day-to-day academic life. But the article remains a significant contribution to our understanding of the historical portability and ideological promiscuity of these practices: as Mitterle concludes, many of today’s neoliberal policy instruments are in fact ‘not specific to capitalist higher education policy’ (p. 577). This argument, one notices, is directed against a seeming assumption, among critics of academic neoliberalism, that neoliberalism is both fairly homogeneous and particular to contemporary capitalism. ‘It could be’, he remarks, ‘that the “apocalyptic tone” … adopted in critical analyses of current reforms has led to a certain blindness towards prior evolutions’ (p. 560) [my emphasis]. Yet it strikes me that Mitterle does not describe this tone or these critical analyses in any detail. Paradoxically, his analysis of ‘neoliberal’ policies is much more subtle than his depiction of their critics. And indeed, this collection lacks a serious analysis of the critics of neoliberalism, no doubt in part because the authors are themselves part of this critical community. One hopes that future research will offer a more reflexive sociology and intellectual history of these critical voices.

But while the opposition to neoliberalism is never adequately accounted for, the collection does provide a different complement to our analysis of NPM: it offers a set of accounts of how neoliberal university policy comes to appear totalising and naturalised. These accounts appear most clearly in Isabelle Bruno‘s Foucauldian analysis of EU research policy and Alan Scott’s comparison of Austrian and British university reforms. Scott, drawing on a theory of different modes of institutional change, shows how similar reform projects were dramatically successful in Britain but relatively ineffective in Austria. In Britain, he argues, neoliberal projects like the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were successful through institutional logics of ‘displacement’ and ‘conversion’, while in Austria, market-oriented reforms ran up against internal conflict and traditional national ideologies of Bildung, producing processes of ‘layering’, ‘placation’ and ‘reverse effects’. (It would be instructive to see this analysis expanded to a broader set of cases.) The British case affords Scott the occasion to advance an intriguing analysis of the ‘dramaturgy’ of the reforms: ‘Through repetition,’ he argues, ‘the RAE … acquired its sense of inevitability and the power of facticity’. (I quote Scott’s English manuscript here rather than translating from the published French, as the translation is imprecise on this point.) RAE results, for instance, were published months before their ‘financial consequences’ were released, leaving universities ‘in a state of suspense’ that had massive material stakes. Scott thus implicitly advocates a sort of phenomenological theory of naturalisation, wherein neoliberal policy comes to seem real through a process of repetitive stress and tribulation imposed on local actors.

For Bruno, on the other hand, naturalisation is less a matter of reiterated imposition than a feature of neoliberal policy’s own self-confirming logic. Her argument traces various steps in the development of the EU’s Lisbon Strategy, from 1990s discourses on the economic importance of knowledge to later policy imperatives of competition, new protocols of benchmarking, and increased integration of research with the corporate sector. The general picture is of a deeply business-oriented EU policy world, whose gestures towards culture and humanism are basically ornamental. Bruno, herself a prominent French faculty activist, ends by gesturing towards resistance, but to my ear, her analysis of power is more striking than her advocacy of counterpower. Implicitly chiding those social scientists who overestimate reflexivity’s emancipatory virtues, Bruno bases her theory of naturalisation on a form of dominating reflexivity. The Lisbon Process, she argues, is constituted through a ‘reflexive prism’: a governing discourse that organises how things are ‘reasoned … perceived, thought and coded’ (p. 541), refracting actors’ perceptions through its own patterns. The ‘reflexive prism’ in this case centres around the effort to install permanent competition in every sphere of social life, such that infinitely recursive competition becomes an unreachable horizon, ‘an unceasing tension towards an inaccessible goal’ (p. 536). Along with this project comes a self-verifying, hence self-naturalising interpretive schema. As Bruno notes, policy makers refused to interpret the Lisbon Strategy’s empirical failures as stemming from the project itself. Rather, they perceived all failures as contingencies, as ‘a lack of political will’ (p. 546). Though more ethnographic detail would be helpful, the image is one of policy makers fully entranced by the circular logic of their own discourse.

Bruno’s and Scott’s articles suggest two theoretical conclusions. First, an adequate analysis of neoliberal policy must explain how it is at once historically contingent and self-naturalising. Second, this naturalisation works differently in different contexts. Bruno’s European policy makers seem to be cognitive or ideological captives to their own reflexive forms. Scott’s British academics, on the other hand, apparently experience naturalisation as an experiential effect of forced enrolment in repetitive rites of evaluation. And in yet a third possibility, Bruno suggests at one point that neoliberal competition need not even be subjectively apparent to local actors, since neoliberal regimes act ‘not on the game’s players but on the game’s rules’ (p. 555, citing Foucault). The most effective form of naturalisation, we are reminded, is the one that bypasses local consciousness altogether, content to set the conditions of possibility for local action.

Three articles in the collection present case studies in state fiscal disengagement. Christopher Newfield writes in a more polemical style about the inequalities and irrationalities introduced by private funding and loans in the United States, as if trying to persuade fellow Americans that public funding remains urgent. Carole Sigman gives an institutional analysis of Russian university autonomisation, tracing a story of state entrepreneurialism, new rankings and international legibility pressures, new competition and differentiation in funding, and an effacement of the distinction between public and private sectors. The resulting governance regime seems to her unstable: perhaps, she suggests, the Russian state will ‘lose its grip’ (p. 600) on the newly autonomous universities. A yet more drastic university defunding case, that of the U.K., is sketched by Anne West, Eleanor Barham and Anthony West, who emphasise the instabilities introduced by dependence on uncertain private funds. Theirs is the only article in this collection to analyse seriously the effects of global economic crisis on universities, but their analysis unfortunately did not anticipate the 2010 defeat of the British Labour Party and the installation of a Conservative-led government, which has cut funding far beyond anything foreseen by these authors.

The last two articles here, by Sylvie Didou Aupetit and Tupac Soulas, explore the dynamics of international mobility. Didou calls attention to the class politics of student mobility in the Mexican case, showing that as government funding for study abroad falls, the elite tends to benefit at the expense of the underprivileged (p. 647). Soulas looks at universities’ foreign adventures, beginning with the additional revenue available from foreign students (13 per cent of U.K. university revenues in 2008), and moving to foreign university outposts that have opened up in places like Qatar, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. He argues that since these ‘foreign implantations’ are essentially driven by economic opportunity (shutting down, in some cases, for lack of profitability), the balance of power is likely to shift from the exporting countries, or the sponsoring universities, to the host countries which supply the resources for these foreign adventures. There is a useful theoretical reminder here. While articles like Bruno’s chart neoliberal discourse, these latter articles remind us that institutional action is not simply a product of policy ideologies: it is also, and often quite directly, sensitive to immediate variations in material and financial circumstance. A certain basic materialism (call it ‘resource dependency theory’) is still vitally necessary in this field. Indeed, it is probably the folk theory of many policy makers.

The collection ends without reaching final conclusions about the nature of NPM or academic neoliberalism. As in many edited collections, the connections between the articles are largely left for the reader to untangle. And a polemicist might point out that Vinokur’s political economy and Scott’s comparative institutional analysis, for instance, are ultimately at odds with each other on conceptual questions about social theory. But as a matter of improving our substantive understanding of contemporary university systems, the different approaches and levels of analysis tend to complement each other. One does wonder, nonetheless, if there is more to say about the role of theory in this field of research. Is the collective analysis of university neoliberalism, now well underway, bound to become a research paradigm with its own forms of ‘normal science’? What is the sociology of this subfield? The contributors, billed as ‘international’, are in fact mostly a mix of Francophones and Anglophones. And what is the relation between analysis and political intervention in this field? Implicit answers to these questions could be drawn out of this set of texts, but a more explicit discussion remains for the future.

References

Mazzarella, W. (2004) ‘Culture, globalization, mediation’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 345–367.

‎”… je sais que les ressources humaines sont le cœur de l’université. Naturellement, dans toute organisation les ressources humaines sont au cœur du système. Mais dans un monde où la production intellectuelle est tout, plus que jamais, « il n’est de richesse que d’hommes ». Ces hommes et ces femmes qui font l’université, je les écoute et je les entends.”

[“… I know that human resources are at the heart of the university. Naturally, human resources are at the heart of the system in any organization. But in a world where intellectual production is everything, more than ever, ‘the only source of wealth is men.’ These men and women who are making the university, I’m listening to them.”]

If you believe that ideology is at its most effective when it is perceived to be entirely natural and universal, then this remark was an ideological moment par excellence. For Pécresse’s assumption here is that every human organization depends on “human resources”; she makes no distinctions between organizations governed by contemporary business logic and any other kind of organization. And in invoking a 16th century proverb by Jean Bodin, she certainly suggests that the logic of human resources long predates contemporary capitalism.

At the same time, Pécresse’s discourse was hybrid. Even as it placed the image of human resources at the heart of the university, it allied itself with a very traditional conception of academic life: the conception where the faculty are the university, where the university is constitutively a site of the production of knowledge, of “intellectual production.” The logic is one of an extension of the traditional logic: yes, men and women make the university — as the traditional definition would have it — but what they are doing is (intellectual) production that constitutes wealth — which inserts a much more business-centered view of human activity into the traditional definition.

Pécresse generally seemed to believe in the success of her hybrid discourse. Her detractors tended not to, seeing her as an agent of naked “corporatization of higher education” (as it is called in English), and I suppose viewing her gestures towards traditional views of academia as idle rhetoric.

A number of significant reforms have been launched recently to breathe new life into public research by increasing its funding, but also by strengthening its organisation and governance. Creation of the Research and Higher Education Evaluation Agency (AERES) has laid the foundation for evaluating universities and research laboratories more systematically against criteria such as publications and patents. It is important that this principle be reinforced. Indeed, the recent decision to upgrade university career profiles is an opportunity to raise the performance bar for the entire teaching-research profession. The reform underway at the CNRS, designed to enhance its co-operation with universities and other national research organisations, is a welcome step and should also help improve the productivity of public research. As well, the newly created National Research Agency should be supported and its role expanded inasmuch as it promotes project-oriented public research, which will make for a more balanced allocation of resources in comparison with a situation where funds are awarded essentially on an institutional basis.

France is in fact the leader among G7 countries for the share of higher education institutions in the total number of patents filed by inventors living in the country, but few of them are actually brought to market. The spillover effects of public research could be enhanced by creating technology transfer and licensing offices in the universities, as a useful supplement to the “business incubators” policy. Finally, the “Universities Freedom and Responsibility Act” has laid the initial groundwork for autonomy in the French universities, which should boost the quality and efficiency of higher education. Notwithstanding the many helpful measures taken to date, however, the effort to reinforce university autonomy should be pursued further, particularly in the areas of budgeting and hiring and remuneration of personnel. This goal would be well served by allowing the universities greater freedom to select incoming students and to set tuition fees. Higher fees should be paired with an expansion of the system of students loans recently introduced.

I fear that this bit of text may present a spurious sort of transparency for an international reader. What strikes me as interesting, and may come as news to some of you, is that basically every claim here is presented as the epitome of simple common sense and yet every single claim would be radically contested by French faculty critics. Just to give a quick list, I’ve seen critiques of the National Research Agency and the idea of project-based research funding; I’ve seen critiques of the Research and Higher Education Evaluation Agency and of evaluation by quantitative measures of research productivity; I’ve seen critiques of the reorganization of the CNRS, and certainly of the idea of trying to orient research more closely around patents and commercialization; and above all there was an entire protest movement in 2009 dedicated to stopping the law on university “autonomy.” This movement, moreover, was particularly focused on stopping tuition increases (which the OECD supports) and stopping the deregulation of academic labor (which the OECD describes optimistically as “autonomy… in hiring and remuneration of personnel”).

My point here isn’t to take sides or to go through the pros and cons of these policy decisions, but simply to make the broader observation that the OECD writes as if none of their recommendations were in the least politically controversial, as if they were the product of a pure pragmatic desire to do whatever is most “helpful,” whatever will “breathe new life” into the system… as if all the critics were a bunch of fossils and the OECD was simply the voice of impartial practicality. It seems to me that, whether or not they’re right on the substantive issues, this elision of policy disagreement is telling, and intellectually unfortunate.

The Americans insisted on the right political conditions for aid [direly needed by post-war Europe]; they also demanded the right economic conditions. These were imposed by a series of missions in each European country receiving Marshall Aid… and bilateral agreements made with each recipient power. That with France was signed in June 1948, and the three brief ministries in power between 1948 and 1949 all pursued policies of economic austerity, balancing the budget by spending cuts and tax rises, and price and wage controls to bring down inflation. The Americans also required that all barriers to their exports and investment be removed, so France was inundated not only by American products but also by propaganda selling the American way of life. ‘Will France become an American colony?’ asked one book in 1948, exposing the threat from American Westerns and gangster movies, children’s comics such as Donald, Tarzan, and Zorro, and magazines controlled by Reader’s Digest, called Sélection in France.

The French won a minor victory in September 1948, when the French boxer Marcel Cerdan became world champion by beating an American in Jersey City. The real battle, however, was fought over Coca-Cola. Fed to GIs during the war, it was then the object of a sustained campaign to penetrate European markets. Coca-Cola was not simply a product, it was an image: that of the consumer society, on the wings of mass advertising, ‘the essence of capitalism’ in every bottle according to its president, James Farley, a weapon in the global ideological battle against Communism. Bottling operations were started in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in 1947, but in France there was great opposition, first from the Communist party, which argued that they would become ‘Coca-colonisés’ and that the distribution network would double as a spy network, and second from the winegrowing, fruit-juice, and mineral-water interests. The French government, concerned by the trade deficit and the repatriation of profits, turned down requests by Coca-Cola to invest in France in 1948 and 1949, and banned the ingredients from Casablanca.

A bill was tabled by the deputy mayor of Montpellier on behalf of the winegrowers to empower the health ministry to investigate the content of drinks made with vegetable extracts in the name of public health. Its passage through the National Assembly in February 1940 provoked a storm of controversy. Farley visited the State Department and the French ambassador in Washington. The Americans put pressure on the French government. An article appeared in Le Monde entitled ‘To Die for Coca-Cola’, mimicking the ‘To Die for Danzig?’ article of 1939. ‘We have accepted chewing gum and Cecil B. De Mille, Reader’s Digest and be-bop,’ it read. ‘It’s over soft drinks that the conflict has erupted. Coca-Cola seems to be the Danzig of European culture. After Coca-Cola, enough.’ The French government was caught between the anger of French public opinion and the need to retain the favour of the American government. In the end the matter was resolved by the French courts, which ruled that the contents of Coca-Cola were neither fraudulent nor a health hazard. The French government retained its honour and the Americans obtained their market.

I had always had a sense that Coca-Cola is at times perceived as some sort of symbol of America here in France, a sense that there is at times resentment of certain sorts of American commodities, particularly the ones that come to define mass culture. But I had always imagined that these resentments were mostly based on a sort of arbitrary cultural antagonism, a bit of commodity nationalism, and maybe a certain amount of more general geopolitical and historical distress that the French Empire is mostly gone while the USA has been globally ascendant. What to me is so striking about this tale of Coca-Cola is that, actually, no, things seem way more specific than that. Actually it seems that there’s a fairly direct reason why French people might be antagonistic towards Coca-Cola: in a word, that it was imposed on them as a condition of American post-war economic aid. That it was imposed, more broadly, as one facet of an American-imposed economic liberalization — meaning free access for American corporate goods and investments. (In passing, I have to say I was not really aware that this sort of coercive free trade policy had been imposed on Europe by the USA after 1945; these days it seems like it’s usually the global South that’s mentioned as resisting free-market policies.)

Now, I doubt that this Cold War episode about the introduction of Coca-Cola is likely known to a very large fraction of today’s French population. And it bears saying that Coca-Cola is a massively well-entrenched feature of consumer drinking culture here, available at virtually every restaurant and supermarket I can think of, brought on family picnics and widely consumed in campus cafeterias — and it’s almost never the object of any visible controversy. Nonetheless, the lesson for me is that, to the extent that there are lingering antagonisms towards Coca-Cola and other similar products (eg, McDonald’s), these may have a fairly concrete historical justification.

Of course, to push things one step farther, we also have to think about why Coca-Cola became the object of calculated opposition in the first place — why, in other words, it became an objectionable symbol of Americanization. According to Gildea, again, two groups led the opposition: the French beverage industry, which obviously had an economic interest in keeping out foreign competitors, and the French Communists of the time, who were presumably fairly anti-American in that period. Conversely, of course, Farley from Coca-Cola claimed that his product was the essence of capitalism in a bottle, which does make the ideological conflict with the French Communists seem inevitable…

I for one was happy to be reminded that even these hyperbanal products of everyday consumption, like Coke, have political histories. Of course, these political controversies continue in the present.

I find it interesting, therefore, to notice those rare occasions when some sort of class analysis manages to emerge from official academic discourse. If we look at the University of Chicago’s very odd Idea of the University colloquium from 2000-2001, we see that Don Randel, then the university’s president, expressed a very definite faith in his university’s collective attachment to wealth:

“We must hope that values and commitment are the principal reasons for which both faculty and graduate students want to be at The University of Chicago. But we cannot idly expect them to express their values and commitment through any very significant financial sacrifice. One of our greatest challenges for the future, then, will be to find the resources with which to ensure that neither talented faculty nor talented graduate students go to other institutions for the wrong reasons (though it is hard to imagine what a “right” reason could be).”

In other words, Randel argues that the faculty (and graduate students) must be well paid, lest they go elsewhere for the “wrong reasons” (i.e., for crassly economic reasons). The university has continued this argument in the meantime, incidentally; it was one of their main motivations for increasing graduate stipends in humanities and social sciences a few years ago. But Randel doesn’t only observe that many people are motivated by money; he also argues that we can’t expect any very significant financial sacrifice for any apparent higher purpose. Which is a way of saying not only that money matters, but also that it outweighs any foreseeable moral or political motivation. In other words, economic status — indeed, class status — is the bottom line.

Now, I can tell you that most of the responses to this colloquium’s speeches were terribly serious and profound. But the very last response was Andrew Abbott’s, and he seemed to have been appointed court jester for the afternoon. Abbott is one of those senior faculty who has dedicated himself partly to analyzing his own institution; his book Chaos of Disciplines has some genuinely unprecedented ideas about patterns of academic social relations, and he’s written an interesting history of the Chicago sociology department. In his comments on Randel’s speech he argued, half-seriously, half-ironically, that there was nothing special about the University of Chicago, that serious arguments were generally avoided in favor of “non-encounters,” that there was nothing at risk in the faculty’s parlor game of ideas, that “there is little on the line,” and that “we had better wake up and discover a commitment to something besides the nostalgic pleasantries we live with today.” But I was most struck by the moment where Abbott comments on Randel’s comments on class:

It is this kind of non-commitment [to serious intellectual disagreement] that forces Don to his most depressing conclusion, that “we cannot idly expect [faculty] to express their values and commitment through any very significant financial sacrifice.” Excuse me? The median salary of full professors in the Divisions is around the 93rd percentile of the American income distribution. Their children’s college tuitions are paid for. They have health insurance, disability insurance, university-paid trips to conferences, half-price at the lab school, office phones to use for personal long distance, all the usual privileges of the upper class. Do you think the taxi driver who brought me in from O’Hare last Sunday night thinks people who have all this but are in only the 93rd, not the 95th, percentile of income are making a sacrifice? Showing a special commitment? And that we can’t expect people to “express their values and commitment” at the price of that extra trip to London for spring break?

Needless to say, Abbott makes no concrete proposals for financial sacrifice; he goes on to complain about the “endless litany of self-gratulation and narcissistic blackmail” one hears from the faculty.

But if we stop and look beyond the shine of farce that enfolds this text, I’m struck by the fact that never before have I heard a faculty member at my university describe the (senior) faculty as “upper class.” Abbott, to his credit, doesn’t even present this as a revelation; he presents it as obvious. He only manages to muster a bit of indignation for those who imagine that these upper class faculty really can justifiably cling to every last penny of their wealth, to their “extra trips to London” and their easy taxi rides home afterwards. Abbott’s indignation, or is it mock indignation?, seems to be above all for those who believe that their privilege and their claims of moral virtue and “special commitment” are entirely coherent.

Given the serious threat that this argument ought to pose for faculty fantasies of their own virtue, I find it unsurprising that it only appears publicly in the context of a series of half-jokes. In the register of an “Excuse me?” with no practical implications. In the imaginary thoughts of an imaginary taxi driver, conjured up as a member of a lower social class, conjured up as an example of Abbott himself coming in contact with someone less well off.

You could call it a fantasy of class envy.

Maybe even a symptom of a fleeting moment of guilty class consciousness on the part of the professoriate.

The massification of higher education has not only had demographic implications. It has led to a certain trivialization of university faculty’s social position in developed countries — it is no longer rare to be an academic. At the same time, it is no longer rare to be a university graduate. This trend should increase in the years to come, in spite of the stagnation of demographic growth in developed countries as enrollments among 18- to 25-year-olds, by cohort [classe d’âge], tend to plateau or even decline. But official policies in most developed countries, as we enter the third millennium, nonetheless aim to increase access to higher education. In France, the objective of the post-2007 government, like that of its predecessor, is to bring 50% of each age class to bachelor’s [license] level. The idea is to facilitate underprivileged or underrepresented populations’ access to education, to encourage the pursuit of studies through graduation, to encourage further studies and teaching all throughout the life course. One should not thus expect a decrease in the population of university teachers in the years to come; one should expect growth, aimed at accommodating students with more and more diversified profiles in terms of age, sociological composition, motivation, etc.

These developments are often described as one of the signs of contemporary societies’ transition towards “knowledge societies” [sociétés de connaissance] one of whose notable characteristics is a break with the concentration of knowledges [savoirs] within a handful of heads. University faculty, as they become more numerous and come to play a central role in this process, will be less and less able to maintain the quasi-monopoly of knowledge [connaissance] expertise that they have held in the past.

The progressive loss of social prestige should thus continue — at least for the larger part of the professoriate, who won’t be in the avant-garde of scientific production, but will rather primarily contribute to the transmission of knowledge and the training of highly qualified personnel. This evolution has already been in progress for a long time and can be measured in particular by looking at salaries. University faculty salaries have evolved less favorably than those of professionals with the same level of education working outside academia (for France, see Bouzidi, Jaaidane and Gary-Bobo [2007]). This trend goes for most of the university models concerned [here in this study], whether quasi-completely public as in Europe or partly private as in North America, whether the academics are state functionaries or have private-sector contracts.

(Musselin, Les universitaires, 2006, pp. 25-26, my translation.)

My sense is that academics’ “status loss” is somewhat more complex than this, since, if you believe what you read on academic blogs, most American college students can’t tell the difference between an adjunct with really low institutional status and salary and a tenured professor. So on the level of everyday phenomenology of professional life, Musselin’s description seems a little hasty. But there is certainly a sort of myth, at the very least, that (American) faculty used to get more respect than they do now; and it may well be the case that students, on the whole, demonstrate less exaggerated obsequiousness than they once did. And it’s hard not to agree with Musselin that this shift likely is deeply related to  the massification of higher education: as if the more people go to college, the less prestige they gain from it – and the less prestige their teachers garner from teaching them. As if there was a kind of prestige mimesis, such that the lower status of today’s less elite student populations was contagious. Some longer meditations on the relation between prestige and scarcity may be in order here: Graeber’s, for example…

Management at the University

Managerial university administration supports itself with numerous organizational measures; computer software on the corporate model, for example, has already profoundly modified universities’ operations. And the language of entrepreneurial discourse — “efficiency,” “control,” “evaluation,” “project,” “objectives” — is being transposed onto centers of teaching and research which worked, until now, according to other logics. The critical and cumulative temporality of knowledge, after all, has nothing to do with a realized project’s profit timeline.

Nothing shows this penetration of managerial ideology better than the realization of university “newsletters” (journaux). We find in these newsletters a clear expression of this “enterprise culture,” a cleverly disguised and hence valorized means for the indoctrination of a firm’s employees, whose aim is an interiorization of the objectives of productivity and an acceptance of organized forms of domination. These newsletters aim to give a handsome image of the university, without wrinkles or folds, which has no more relation to reality than advertising icons have to social reality.

The newsletter delivers an official lie: “Everything is going great.” It is in no way a public space that would allow a debate about campus participants’ activities and conditions of existence. One doesn’t talk about the misery of foreign students who go to the hospital in a state of physical deterioration because of malnourishment, nor about the short-term jobs that other students string together, nor about anguish in the face of precarity, nor about academic failure. Neither does one talk about the working conditions in the university’s offices or among its laborers. One doesn’t talk in this newsletter about the faculty’s working conditions, nor about the reactions to the latest ministerial injunctions, nor about the problems of research work. The newsletters keep silent on the reforms imposed on university workers, even though they could be the best placed to forecast the University’s development.

As the University is also a center of research, one can only be amazed to see that the newsletter doesn’t open up its columns to notes on current research projects, on the ideas currently up for debate, or on the knowledges currently being developed. In reality, the newsletter is copying business newsletters: it wants to be the vector of an “enterprise culture.” But everything shows us that the University, a place of confrontation between different knowledges and truths and research projects, loses itself in wanting to “sell itself.” It ceases to be by wanting to be what it’s not.

(pp. 46-47).

I’d have to do some library research to be sure, but I get the impression that PR-style university newsletters are a very recent innovation in France, perhaps dating from the last fifteen years or less along with the rest of the “managerial” innovations that de Montlibert deplores. In some ways, these newsletters seem similar in form and function to the U.S. institution of alumni newsletters, but I suppose that even in the U.S., alumni associations are sometimes organizationally distinct from the university administration itself, so that even if they frequently dispense hollow propaganda, the origin of their propaganda is slightly different from something coming straight from a university P.R. office. My sense is that elite schools have long had alumni associations, serving to obtain donations and to maintain a sense of exclusive institutional identity. A quick look at JSTOR indicates that American alumni associations have been around for almost two centuries — the first one was formed in 1821 at Williams College. I initially guessed that American university public relations offices would be a much later creation than alumni associations, but interestingly enough, it turns out that they came into being as early as 1904, and formed a national association, the American Association of College News Bureaus, on the very same day in 1917 that the U.S. entered World War I. The next year, it appears that the alumni associations had grown to such an extent that they too formed a national group, the Alumni Magazines Associated. By the later part of the 20th century, in fact, the university PR association had even merged with the alumni association — which gives the lie to my supposition, earlier in this paragraph, that these are separate entities.

But in France the situation seems to be different. French public universities — which are quite different from, and much less prestigious than, the elite grandes écoles here — have never had alumni associations, although some groups currently advocate them. The grandes écoles, in contrast, seem to have quite strong alumni associations; the Ecole Normale Supérieure is famous for producing an elite academic fraternity that sticks together for life, and French engineering schools turn out to have had alumni associations since the late 1840s (caveat: I’ve only read that article abstract so far).

In the universities, however, it seems that the absence of alumni associations was coupled, until recently, to an equal absence of public relations departments. I suppose the centralized French university system, earlier in the 20th century, probably saw no reason to give each university its own press office; official communication probably used to be handled by the Ministry. But the more that French universities are asked to be autonomous, the more they need (or are forced) to develop and differentiate their identity. The campus newsletters that de Montlibert attacks, I suppose, are just one piece of the longer history of newly developed “branding” activities on French campuses. I’ve seen some curious examples of this here, which I’ll write about soon, I hope.

I also hope that de Montlibert’s comments speak for themselves (which would be a good indicator that my translation isn’t a total failure), but let me just signal in closing that I’m very curious about his emphasis on the university’s “being,” as if the university was constituted by a sort of transhistorical essence which consists in being the site of a perpetual confrontation between different “knowledges.” This, I would emphasize, is one major rhetorical strategy of the academic corps faced with neoliberal assaults: to claim that the reforms undermine the very essence of the university.

The problem, of course, is that these critics seldom manage to acknowledge that the university’s “essence” is itself largely fantasmatic. I suppose there’s a broader theoretical question here about whether or how much any institution can be rightly said to have an essence (is the essence of business to make money? is the essence of government to maintain a monopoly on legitimate use of force?), but I’ll leave that aside to point out that even by de Montlibert’s own provisional definition of a university, most universities aren’t and never have been universities. Most modern universities are places where interdisciplinary conflict is an exception to the rule and where conflict is averted by increasing hyperspecialization (which means that we seldom have to talk to people we deeply disagree with). Many universities have been places where knowledge was, if we believe Thomas Kuhn at least, neither extremely cumulative nor particularly critical. If the university has an essence, I don’t think we’ve figured out what it is yet.

But I can’t be too hard on de Montlibert, because there’s another interesting thing about this little passage. In short, there’s a sort of textual clash between his idealistic definition of what a university at heart “is,” and his list of all the university’s undiscussed problems. To me it seems contradictory for de Montlibert to define a university as home of a “critical and cumulative temporality of knowledge,” while immediately going on to acknowledge that campuses are rife with misery, precarity, bad working conditions, and malnourishment. The former points towards a defense of the university as it is or could be; while the latter tends to suggest that actual universities are deeply problematic institutions.

This thought crosses my mind: Shouldn’t de Montlibert also admit that the traditional humanistic definition of a university is itself another nice official lie? At any rate, he seems caught in the rhetorical tension between the actual and the desirable. But I won’t try to resolve things here. I just find it an interesting page in an interesting book. And I appreciate his historicization of a campus artifact that I might have otherwise taken for granted.

(One last note on translation: the polemic is about university journaux, which might sound like it should be translated as “campus newspapers,” but as there don’t seem to be student-run campus papers here in the American mode, I’m assuming he refers to the glossy little publications that campus administrations put out here to trumpet the latest local achievements. They tend to have carefully uncontroversial little stories, as far as I’ve seen.)

I’ve been listening to the results of your debates with great interest.

It’s remarkable that we’ve been able to bring students, young graduates, university actors and business representatives together for this debate on the “new resources for enterprise” that the human and social sciences represent.

The question that has been discussed here for the past three-plus hours is essential. It’s at the heart of my activities at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

There was a time when, among employers, the universities had a bad reputation in relation to other establishments of higher learning. This time has passed. For almost three years now I’ve led efforts that aim to restore the universities to their full place in the country’s instructional programs.

Graduates in the human and social sciences deserve to be supported in their search for employment. To be sure, three years after the end of their studies, graduates with a license in classics, languages or history have unemployment rates around 7%, which is actually lower than those with the same degree in physics (8%) or chemistry (12%). But these encouraging statistics should not hide a worrisome reality: these fields also see a process of unacknowledged selection — by failure. This failure extends to as many as 50% of enrolled students, in both the first and in the second years [of the 3-year license].

For too long, we have let things be without reacting.

The fields of social and human sciences have welcomed many of the students coming from the second wave of massification of university enrollments, the one that began in the 80s. But the democratization of access to higher education has remained unfinished. We have too often neglected to support these new high school graduates. They have been driven by the system’s inertia [les pesanteurs] towards the social and human sciences, without really having chosen them.

It was in order to reverse these tendencies that the law of 2007 set disciplinary and professional placement [l’orientation et l’insertion professionnelle] at the heart of the university’s missions. The “License plan” has offered universities the means to bring students up to speed and to better prepare them to enter professional life.

It was not acceptable that many enrolled students never showed up to take their exams, nor that the university had such high exam failure rates. From this point forward, troubled students should be able to leave the university better armed for professional life. And, starting this year, universities should furnish their professional placement indicators.

In other words, students and students’ issues have been brought back to the heart of the university. Henceforth it will be possible to respond to their legitimate needs for disciplinary placement, for training [formation] and for preparation for professional life.

In this room we have actors with years of experience in professional placement. But until these last few years, their initiatives remained isolated and lacked sufficient overall coordination. That’s why, for the last three years, I’ve pushed to regroup our job placement efforts and to make them more coherent.

Little by little, the universities have reorganized their forces of professionalization within job placement offices (BAIP). And placement indicators are just the start of an immense effort to constitute a set of figures, which will make it possible to closely follow the impact of degree programs on students’ employability. At the same time, universities are learning how to emphasize the competences that go along with each of their programs. This is essential for letting employers know where to turn to diversify their hiring.

The coming years will involve reinforcing and diversifying the job prospects [débouchés possibles] for all students who pass through the human sciences and social sciences. Taken together, these fields represent 56% of students at the university — and this figure remains stable from the license to the doctorate. That means that the human sciences and social sciences have an immense need for placement.

In addition to teaching posts, the public sector in general offers the human sciences and social sciences a number of openings. On one hand, this is a good thing: the renovated State of the 21st century will have a need for “general culture,” for the spirit of synthesis, for the attention to the human factor that we get from the sciences of man and society. But an efficient State does not multiply its employees until they stretch out of sight. One must go where jobs are being created. It is the private sector where one can expect the diversification of openings and the multiplication of jobs for the graduates of the human sciences and social sciences.

That’s what gives today’s meeting its importance. I’m happy that it has taken place so soon after the Council for the Development of the Humanities and Social Sciences suggested it, in the report that it submitted to me last January 14th. The large crowd we see here today confirms that this Council, with its eminent and rich reflections on the future of the sciences of man and society, was right to make reflections on professional placement a priority.

This morning’s debates will have contributed to the emergence of a new state of mind; they will have let people working on the same thing nation-wide meet each other; finally, they will lead to concrete progress on these issues.

I know that a certain number of you, among the university placement officials, are going to meet this afternoon, after this meeting, to get to know each other better, to discuss your experiences and to reflect, concretely, on how to improve placement efforts. Your experiences are diverse, often rooted in the regional reality of an employment pool. However, students’ expectations, universities’ ideas, and recruiters’ worries are often very similar across regions. You have much to gain by networking on the supraregional and even national scale.

On the recruiters’ side too, a holistic vision needs to be put together. Operation Phoenix has played a pioneering role in organizing high-quality recruitment at the master’s level in SHS [social and human sciences]. The graduates involved are being hired with permanent contracts (CDI) and are getting instruction that should rapidly adjust them to the realities of business. This involves a demanding procedure that makes some enterprises recoil: some feel that they don’t yet have the means to correctly evaluate the value of an SHS degree; others feel that they don’t have the size necessary to support the necessary financial engagement. Nonetheless, Operation Phoenix has the great significance of having constituted a reference: it sets the standard for best practices in professional placement in the human and social sciences.

Of course, faced with the realities of economic life, faced with the diversity of situations that businesses confront, it would be absurd to want to impose a standardized procedure. The Elsa procedure, which has also been in place for a few years now, has done very important follow-up work to better adapt student profiles and business demand. Other initiatives have been taken elsewhere, to adapt to particular regional contexts or sectors of activity. The variety of these formulas deserves to be encouraged, provided that one respects quality requirements and that SHS graduates are not treated as second-rate.

Over the term of its work on graduates’ employability, the Council for the Development of the Humanities and Social Sciences has recommended, among other things, the creation of a “good SHS placement label” that would be given to businesses that perform well in this domain and that follow a chart of best practices. The use of such a label would have the advantage of taking into account the diversity of experiences while still fixing quality requirements at the national level and in giving the means to “pass to higher speed,” to borrow the title of the second roundtable.

The considerable work done in Operation Phoenix or in the Elsa process has produced results that are qualitatively appreciable but that remain quantitatively limited. I would thus like to encourage the actors in these operations, and all those who work on similar initiatives, to imagine how such a label might be put in place. It would of course be necessary to consult the universities, especially via the Conference of University Presidents, in specifying the details [modalities]of such a labeling process. Everyone will get something out of this operation: students, universities, and enterprises alike.

There is no question here of confounding roles. The Ministry’s role is to guarantee the quality of educational programs and to officially recognize them. Its role is also to encourage the universities to rapidly constitute reliable placement indicators. Today, I think, the objective is not to multiply professional programs, but to make sure that programs in human and social sciences are recognized alongside the professional degrees. And the labeling we’ve discussed concerns recruiters too. I imagine that the promoters of Phoenix, of Elsa and of other similar operations will put in place a “labeling committee” constituted by independent actors, one whose first task will be to elaborate the guidelines for “best practices in SHS placement.” At this moment, it will be possible for the Ministry of Higher Education and Research to be represented on this committee.

A few quick translation notes… (a.) the license is the introductory French university degree, approximately like a bachelor’s but three years long and generally more specialized. (b.) I’ve had a lot of trouble translating formation, which is something like education but has the connotation of “forming” a person in a specific field. Often formation designates a sort of specialized education, more or less professionally oriented. (c.) “Placement” or is my translation of insertion, a word which means getting “inserted” into some professional workplace. I’m not sure it quite captures the same connotations, but it will have to do for now.

Also, as usual in this translation game, the text refers to other entities that I’m not well acquainted with. I’ve never heard of Elsa, but I did look up Operation Phoenix and it’s apparently a project that gets MA graduates (of some nine Parisian universities) hired at several major corporations: Axa, Coca-Cola Entreprise, Danone, HSBC, Marine Nationale, L’Oréal, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Renault, Société Générale. It’s paradoxical, to say the least, that there would be so much emphasis on finding jobs for French graduates at the same time that precarious labor within the university system is so low on the ministry’s priority list.

I’m interested by a number of other features of this speech, from the bureaucratic and organizational futures it envisions to its absolutely unquestioned emphasis on job placement (which infuriates so many of the faculty critics here), from its vision of a shrinking French State to the emphasis on “quality” and “best practices” combined with clear job outcomes. But above all I’m struck by the fact that, in this vision of things, the integration of public higher education into the business world is total. Total.

Davydd Greenwood, an economic anthropologist turned action researcher from Cornell University, has been writing critically about social science and higher education for at least a decade now. In a long stream of essays, often co-written with his collaborator Morten Levin, he has castigated the “inhumanities and inaction research” that he views as leading to socially useless theoreticism, commented on Taylorist organization in university structures, and argued for far more extensive social research on academic institutions.

In a recent essay that I want to talk about here, Greenwood takes up what he calls “Bologna in America,” which is to say, the belated importation of neoliberal reform projects into U.S. higher education. His primary symptom of this phenomenon is a 2006 report put out by George W. Bush’s secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, which advocated a program of newly imposed “accountability” regimes for American universities, a “reform through imposed free market discipline.” Greenwood is quick to point out the contradiction inherent in the “imposition” of a “free” market:

“If [these would-be reformers] actually believed in the free market, this would make no sense. After all, by free market logic, institutions that are not accountable, not transparent, not affordable and not efficient would simply be put to death by the market itself. However, in their world view, the free market always needs the oversight of authoritative policymakers who know better than the consumers and producers what they all need” (22).

Now oversight, as the Spellings Report imagines it, consists of several things: a changing regulatory and financial structure, a new push towards policy integration of university and economy, and particularly a new regime of “transparency and accountability.” Accountability here largely involves instituting “output controls” instead of “input controls” — “output controls” meaning measuring the results of an education (demonstrable skills afterwards, job placement) rather than the inputs (money spent, teacher qualifications, or whatever). Greenwood notes correctly that no reasonable person could be against understanding the results of educational processes and trying to improve them, but as he points out, the Spellings Report’s version of accountability involves reducing educational processes to a set of uniform, quantifiable outcomes.

The report itself complains that it is currently hard to measure “how much students learn in college or whether they learn more at one college than another” (Spellings 13). This presupposes, first of all, that learning can be adequately quantified: they think of learning as what linguists call a mass noun, like a heap of grain, susceptible to indefinite expansion and to precise measurements of how much learning has happened. And second, clearly, it presupposes that all college educations are fully, quantitatively comparable to each other.

There is an elaborate fantasy later in the report (20f) about creating a massive national “consumer database” that will track every student and thus make possible centralized data on all universities’ aggregate student outcomes. Though Greenwood notes that this proposal raised major privacy concerns, it strikes me that a great deal of useful critical sociology could probably be derived from such a database. At any rate, the system was never implemented (we will return below to the outcome of the Report). But it’s interesting to see that this database, clearly envisioned as the primary means of evaluating higher education, would have contained a massive tacit bias towards a uniform, fully quantified, and almost entirely vocationally-oriented view of higher education. For educational “results” for the Spellings Report largely means “job placement.” That’s a sign in itself of the ongoing integration of higher education into the American system of labor and class reproduction, but also a symptom of not-entirely-satisfied corporate desires for universities to produce an even more “prepared” workforce.

This integration with the American labor system is one that permeates the very definition of learning employed by the report writers. When they explain what they think is wrong with American college education, they say that college students are “not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today’s workplaces” (3). What they mean by “critical” thinking is itself interesting here. Needless to say, what’s optimistically called critical thinking in the American liberal arts is often not allowed in work contexts, since critique can threaten or at least annoy the established order. The famous cartoon about the grad student deconstructing the Mexican takeout menu might end in dismissal if it was the cook doing the deconstructing.

But “critical” is a word seldom used in the abstract in this report. “Critical” occurs nine times in the report’s text; by my count, they mention abstract “critical thinking” skills twice, but seven times they talk about education being critical to something else. Certain disciplines are “critical to global competitiveness” (15); the workforce has certain “critical needs” (24); literacy is “critical to the nation’s continued success in the global economy” (26). Criticality here, in short, means economic instrumentality; what’s critical is what’s economically useful. (I note in passing that, while many humanists would instinctively critique such a definition of critique, any defense of non-economic critical values is likely to have its own economic conditions of possibility which quite often are concealed in the defense of supposedly higher values. Humanists still get a paycheck.)

Greenwood suggests that there is practically nothing about actual teaching in the report, but I’m struck myself, reading it over, by its emphasis at certain moments on an incredibly crude and low-level set of educational indicators. These consist essentially of performance on standardized tests of literacy and math. According to the report, as of 2003, 31% of college graduates were “proficient in prose literacy,” 25% in “document literacy,” and 31% in “quantitative literacy” (13). I have no idea what these numbers really measure or how accurate they are, but they certainly sound astoundingly low in every case. Less than one in three students is apparently “literate” in any of these senses. As my friend Mike Bishop might put it, whatever you may think about schooling reform, people ought to leave being able to read… but as Greenwood points out, it is equally mistaken to blame schools and universities for lacking or unequally distributed resources that are controlled by broader sociopolitical forces. Just to take Connecticut where I grew up as one example, variation between schools seemed to be largely the product of wealth differences between different towns coupled to a mainly town-based system of school funding. Apparently there was no effective mechanism for equalizing wealth (or cultural capital) disparities between towns. Any purely internal reform of education is misguided in such circumstances (a point which has been stressed by critics of No Child Left Behind).

At any rate, the Spellings Report cited bad test scores for basic skills and lack of (quantified, standardized) accountability mechanisms, in addition to a bad financial aid system, unequal access, impossibly rising costs, and lacking “innovation,” as the main areas needing remedy in American higher ed. In fact, however, the Spellings Report didn’t directly yield major reforms. As Greenwood notes, the major difference from a European Minister of Education is the U.S. Secretary of Education has no power to directly control American universities. Her powers mainly cover the dispersal of federal funds and the control of accreditation agencies for colleges and universities. Spellings had no power to directly reform university practice.

Moreover, the Spellings Report got in trouble over its proposal for an invasively comprehensive national student database, and, Greenwood tells us, Spellings’ policy approach was eventually repudiated by a prominent Republican, Lamar Alexandar. However, and this I think is one of Greenwood’s most provocative claims, the apparent defeat of the Spellings initiative did not spell the end of neoliberal “accountability” reform in American universities. In Greenwood’s view:

“Everywhere in the U.S. now, every institution and all accreditation bodies are scrambling to create output controls, systems of evaluation and accountability like the ones envisioned by the Commission… [there is] a clear recognition that gestures in the direction of quality assurance and accreditation are necessary to keep the federal government from taking even more authoritarian actions to control higher education. The higher education press I read and the people I talk to make it clear that they believe the only strategy is to keep your head down and appear to play along. The secretary’s agenda for output measures and input controls is therefore not being implemented by executive fiat but by universities’ doing it to themselves” (24).

As if in a ruse of neoliberal history, the decentralization of American higher education, which provides such a powerful defense against the kind of top-down neoliberal reforms that have happened in other nations, makes it possible to adopt a seemingly “voluntary” route to neoliberal audit cultures. Greenwood’s reading is pessimistic, as if resistance was almost impossible. “There can be very little question,” he comments, “that accountability and increased transparency in higher education are with us now for the long haul” (34). To be sure, he is no historical determinist; it is just that, in his analysis, the faculty with the power to mobilize for better reforms are currently too ignorant and passive to do so.

I would have liked, at this point, to have seen some consideration of the various activist movements that do currently exist within the university. Unionization efforts and labor movements among adjunct faculty and graduate students are one major new phenomenon, perhaps the most pragmatic; there have been social justice campaigns on campus over the years, though not always successful ones; currently there seems to be significant mobilization in the University of California. I would have liked also to have seen more substantial ethnographic examination of the internal life of American university administrators and of the new forms of auditing that they are supposedly all implementing. Greenwood, who has occupied various administrative tasks, would be well placed to conduct a real ethnographic study of that world, which is inaccessible to younger researchers like myself.

And I am not sure of his blanket statement that “all” American universities are voluntarily implementing audit controls on the scale of the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency. I would like to hear more empirical details about this, since it isn’t something I have seen personally in the US. For the time being, however, it crosses my mind that there is a broader lesson to be drawn here about neoliberalism. While Greenwood writes as if neoliberal reform was almost inevitable, we could equally view the political ups and downs of the Spellings Report as a sign that the political results we call neoliberal are somewhat historically unstable, contingently instituted, dependent on the shifting balance of political forces in a given national moment, and, far from an inevitable historical force, necessarily mediated by a local political process.

It might thus be better to think of neoliberalism as being more like a pliable, portable political ideology than a concrete set of historical results, though that would then raise the problem of the relation between the ideology and the remarkably uniform set of neoliberal institutional reforms around the world. But let’s give Greenwood the last word. “To me,” he says, “the ‘neo’ in neo-liberalism seems out of place. What is taking place is a reversion to commodity capitalism, with its pseudo-free markets, state and elite control and the imposition of discipline on non-state actors whose survival requires them to accept subjection to a particular version of the market that serves elite interests. Rather than ‘neo’, it marks a return to the end of Robber Baron capitalism” (7). Which seems a thought worth pondering.

The story about South Korea, Japan and Taiwan is familiar neoliberal territory, at any rate. Korea apparently has been trying to create “business universities,” which, as Myungkoo Kang’s article comments, “refers to the commercialization of management, finance, [and] knowledge-production and the training of a workforce that directly serves the interest of industry” (197). This involves reshaping of the undergraduate curriculum, and, as in Taiwan, new research assessment measures, which are problematically based on English-language, American-run, quantitative citation indices.

Japan, for its part, has merrily been “corporatizing” its universities, according to Ozawa Hiroaki’s piece; this involves decreasing state funding (187), worsening working conditions for teachers (186-7), quantification of research output targets (183), contract-based research funds (184), and top-down, “dictatorial” decision-making (185-6). Yes, it sounds pretty much like the usual list of neoliberal reforms. And, as in the cases I considered in my last post, the reforms depend on this peculiar logic of neoliberal nationalism, where universal compliance to global neoliberalism becomes the national project. As Ozawa comments in closing, ” ‘Society’ has become analogous to the ‘industrial world’, and ‘public’ and ‘universal’ are not allowed to cross the boundaries of the nation-state” (189).

What I want to dwell on here in more detail is the use of the American Model and the peculiar figure of America in global university neoliberalisms. As Davydd Greenwood and Morten Levin (among others) have pointed out, new European university models — as well as Asian university models, as we’ll see — are “built on fundamental misconceptions about the university in the U.S.” (98). If we look at the Japanese case that Ozawa presents, we can see that he presents a deeply partial vision of American universities, one which apparently inspired reforms that seem to bear little resemblance to current U.S. higher education.

Ozawa describes this policy vision as follows:

…The times are now changing to informational capitalism (knowledge capitalism), which creates differences through the commercialization of information (knowledge). This understanding of the current situation gave birth to the ‘magic words’ of a ‘knowledge-based society.’ That is, in order to realize a ‘knowledge-based society,’ a societal system that formulates human capital and generates innovation needs to be constructed. For this goal, the university needs to become a source of industrial/technological talent, and thus, a transformation towards a research system, based on the production and protection of intellectual property rights, is desirable. (181-2)

Here, the argument is cast in terms of universal, global economic transformations. The “nation” isn’t mentioned, and the “society” is figured as a unit that must adapt to fulfill its economic function, an abstract functional unit in a global system. But in the very next paragraph, Ozawa goes on to tell us about the origins of this discourse:

This type of discussion originates from the United States of the 1980s. The US of this time, hoping to escape from the 1970s recession, aimed to fulfill both the desires of the industries, which were suffering from declining business, and the academe/universities, distressed over the tightening educational budget, resulting from insufficient tax revenues. In order to address both concerns, the US converted from anti-patent (technological freedom policies as represented in anti-trust laws) to pro-patent policies (policies encouraging the acquisition of patents). In this system of university-industry research collaborations, the universities would obtain patents, and would provide exclusive operational rights to a particular company. From it, the university would earn licensing income. This was established by a series of legislations, starting with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. This federal measure is sometimes referred to generally as the Bayh-Dole System. In this way, university research turned from open to closed system (while open to the particular company), and the state set the path for the fusion the industries, state, and academe by mediating the university-industry collaborations. (182)

Now, I rather suspect that an older generation who was working in 1980s American universities might remember the decade just a bit more complexly than this. In the humanities, it seems to have been a moment of “culture wars” and quarrels over the literary canon taught to undergraduates, the moment of “high theory” in literary studies, a moment of the controversial appearance of “postmodernism” in anthropology and elsewhere, of the contorted ending of the Cold War (which obviously has some bearing on the apparent shift away from military research towards more corporate research in academia), of the early stages of the Internet, of falling enrollments with the end of the Baby Boom, and so on.

In spite of Ozawa’s depiction of American reforms, most American academics, I would speculate, have never heard of the Bayh-Dole Act; and as others have shown (though I can’t find the citations offhand), this ostensibly “American system” of highly commercialized, patented university research is really a phenomenon of the top few dozen research universities, which tend to monopolize the big, lucrative research operations. And even there, big research is mainly carried out in certain branches of the sciences, like biotech and material science; there are no patents issued to the English Department. Not to mention that nowhere in Ozawa’s description of Japanese policy discourse does one find mention that “THE United States” does not exist as such, as some kind of intentional state actor — and above all not in the arena of university policy, which is often tenuous in the US, given its massive decentralization of universities across states and into the private sector.

My point here isn’t to give a serious history of 80s American universities, but rather to sensitize us to the fact that there is an epistemology of university models at work in this passage from Ozawa. It’s not a terribly rigorous epistemology; it’s one that tends to seize on key texts and key events, that tends to schematize and stereotype, to eternalize things like the “liberal arts college” model or the “Humboldtian research university model” by stripping them of all but the bare minimum of historical particulars. And people who work within this epistemology have, among other things, seized on the Bayh-Dole Act as if it were the dominant moment, the policy epitome, of 80s American university reforms; I hear it mentioned elsewhere, casually, always magnified out of proportion. University models, I’m gradually coming to understand, are an ideological phenomenon in themselves — a topic for further research. Here let me just note that Japanese policy discourse, as Ozawa presents it, seems to have depended on a massive leap from a global theory of capitalism and “knowledge-based society” to a very particular reading of U.S. legal changes at a particular moment. This blind equation of the general with the particular appears not to have been recognized as such.

But no matter; as Ozawa informs us,

In 1989, during the ‘Lost Decade of Japanese Economy’ after the bubble economy burst, Japan attempted to catch up with to the American Bayh-Dole system. This took place in the form of comprehensive policies by agents such as the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI, formerly Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI) and Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren). [New policies, though I’m skipping the parade of acronyms, involved research development, technology licensing, research patenting, industry review of educational programs, private capital used at universities, etc.] (182)

The Toyama Plan, submitted to the Economic Financial Consultative Conference in June 2001, presented the ‘policy for university structural reform,’ and listed the following articles: (1) boldly pursue the reorganization and consolidation of universities (national universities) to revitalize through ‘scrap-and-build’; (2) implement management approaches based on ‘private sector ideas‘ to national universities to a speedy transition to a new ‘national university corporation’; (3) introduction of third-party evaluation to universities, and introduce the principle of competition to create a ‘Top 30’ ranking system of national, public, and private universities, and create the highest quality universities in the world. These articles shocked and stunned university actors… However, this Toyama Plan was a rehash of the ‘Hiranuma Plan,’ which was submitted by the METI two weeks earlier. The term ‘Total War by Industry, State, and Academe‘ is used, in ‘Points to Stress for the Creation of New Markets and Employment’ (Hiranuma Plan, 31 May 2001)… in order to refocus resources to ‘fields of strategic platforms/fusing technologies.’ The university was positioned at the frontline of this battle, as the peons of this total war. Also in 2001, the second term of the Science and Technology Basic Plan was laid down… through this [plan], Japan will march towards the new national strategy ‘Constructing the Nation through Intellectual Property/Capital‘ (183)

The combination of global economic and national military logics here is striking, in my view. The “total war” of the universities seems to invoke Imperial Japanese military policy, but paradoxically this total war isn’t against any other nation, exactly. Rather, this is total war not to destroy a foreign country but to emulate one — and that country is the United States, of course. The USA stands here simultaneously as a particular national global competitor and as the universal sign of global dominance, as at once a particular place and a universal paradigm. There is a kind of seamless, invisible logical chasm, to my eyes, in the jump from “adapting to the global economy” to “trying to catch up with the United States,” a funny play of universals and particulars. And the identity between nation and capital is strong here; the slogan, “constructing the nation through intellectual property/capital,” really says it all.

Except that I’m still not quite sure what this “all” is. I only feel sure — as I think Ozawa would agree — that these reforms are more ideologically contradictory than policymakers make them out to be. The title of his essay is “domination by money power: one year after the corporatization of national universities” and I’m sure that the United States stands — though this is changing in the crisis, probably — precisely as a symbol of money power, as a sign of corporatization of the national, so to speak.

There’s more to say about this for the Korean and Taiwanese cases too, but I’ll leave that for my continuing dialogue with Zach, who raises questions about the local (=national?) production of knowledge and the “coloniality of power” which I don’t find easy to answer.

Let me pause for a moment and say that this topic is somewhat new for me, since for years I’ve felt somewhat skeptical about ‘neoliberalism’ as a concept. I remember when I had no idea what it referred to and felt that it was some kind of meaningless sign that signified primarily that someone (probably someone academic) really didn’t like something. Then, later on as I did classroom ethnography, I began to feel that neoliberalism was part of broader metanarratives about universities that were abstract and often irrelevant to ordinary academic life. Now, though, as I slowly get a better comparative sense of national university histories, I’ve changed my mind about neoliberalism, because it seems that the term, in the context of university reforms, really does designate a historical process that’s happening worldwide. As far as I can see, ‘university neoliberalism’ designates the process that brings together many of the following phenomena (not necessarily all at once, but as a set of loosely linked processes with clear common themes):

• Newly hierarchical, bottom-line, market-oriented academic management. Universities look more like corporations in their organizational and behavioral structure. Corresponding decline in faculty governance, pedagogical and disciplinary autonomy.
• Withdrawal of public (i.e., state or governmental) money and a turn towards private sector funding.
• Casualization (sometimes also taylorization) of academic labor.
• Decline of the idea that education is a public good or a right; and a corresponding rise of ideologies of education as a commodity, and universities as an investment.
• Privatization and branding of universities. Increasing provision of consumer services to students.
• Development of systems of competition, ranking, evaluation and audit within and across academic institutions.
• A shift from universities as small, elite institutions to mass institutions deeply involved in vocational reproduction and “economically useful” knowledge (one could take this as a particular ideology about what role universities should play in mass social reproduction). New ideas about the relation between education and job-related skill-building.
• Increased organizational intimacy between universities and business enterprises – business-funded research, corporate partnerships, and the like.
• Rise of the international and global context as the relevant context in which universities should be evaluated.

These things are global: I’ve read about neoliberalisms of this ilk in, for instance, the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Austria, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia and Cameroon — just to take the list that spontaneously comes to my head.

However, the first thing to learn from this week’s set of readings, as Zach points out, is that “such convergences [in what we call neoliberalism] are always historically and geographically specific, [and] that ‘neoliberalization’ can have wildly different effects and discursive articulations.” To give a thumbnail summary of this variation: in New Zealand, neoliberal reforms since the 1980s have introduced new forms of auditing, benchmarking, consumerization, and generally quantitative forms of management; according to Larner and Le Heron, this was partly embraced by academics themselves, and at any rate does not seem to have generated large opposition. There was a general consensus among academics that reform was needed, they say.

In Mexico, on the other hand, neoliberalism provoked violent reactions. An effort to charge tuition (at the relatively low rate, to US eyes, of $90/semester) provoked a student strike that shut down the National Autonomous University from April 20, 1999 to February 6, 2000. Ultimately, the strike foundered on internal differences between its “radical left wing” and more “moderate” students, and was shut down in the end by a raid of 2,400 police, without having achieved its political goals. Political discourse centered on a conflict between populist, social-justice-motivated students, who claimed the constitutional right to free higher education for all, and “market-driven philosophies,” related to the Mexican government’s desire to better integrate the country into the global economy.

This conflict was, of course, framed differently by different sides. Some conservatives claimed that “politics had no place in an academic institution” (quoting Imanol Ordorika, p.352) — a political move in the guise of an antipolitical move. Among the leftist students, on the other hand, an interesting variety of nationalist universalism surfaced.

“This is not only a national problem but an international problem,” one student commented; “The imperialist politics that have been planted in Mexico and abroad have driven privatization not only in education but in all public sectors. For the most part, and in the near future, all that is the common people or nation will no longer be. We will be in foreign hands, the hands of the United States” (343-4).

As if the international were the locus of capital and imperial force, while the national remains the locus of the people and the common. As Rhoads and Mina put it, “antiglobalization and proautonomy rhetoric characterized the student strikers” (336). And indeed, a specific national role for the university was invoked by students, who said things like: “The university is the cradle of culture for the country.” I call it a nationalist universalism because it associates the nation, Mexico in this case, with seemingly universal goods like culture, justice, and democracy. Recall that in Bill Readings’ influential 1996 book, The University in Ruins, he argued that the university as bearer of national culture was dead. We can see here that this conclusion, drawn half a decade before the UNAM strike, was premature. (My guess is that Readings over-generalized from the North American case he knew.)

And to make matters still more complicated, it isn’t only the opponents of neoliberalism who lay claim to national values. The proponents of neoliberal reforms themselves are nationalists, of a sort: nationalists who (claim to) believe that the nation’s best interests lie in an embrace of the global economy, in a new merger between education and market, in the embrace of international standards and institutional forms. The New Zealand case illustrates this well: as Larner and Le Heron say themselves,

“[The] role of the university [has changed] from that of an institution premised on, and constitutive of, a national economy and a national society, to that focused on a particular understanding of international competitiveness in which the aspiration is to identify points of difference and areas of strength through which national institutions can be linked into global flows and networks.” (845-6)

Is neoliberalism therefore a new sort of national strategy? Or is the nation slowly being restructured by transnational neoliberalism? Paradoxically, it would seem to be both at once. (I’m dimly aware that scholars have quarreled about this for decades, but it’s not my field.) And as we examine the clash in Mexico between neoliberal reforms and social justice protesters, we can observe universities becoming the scene of a clash of different kinds of universalisms: a universalism of the market, of economic exigency, opposed to a universalism of transcendental values and of political emancipation. This is too abstract and schematic to be worth much, I realize, but it reminds me of a pair of opposed political slogans from May 1968 in France.

1. “Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible.” (Be realists, demand the impossible.) It’s a slogan which makes a famous appeal to a radical and transcendental political role for academic protest.
2. “Soyons réalistes : pour bouffer, il faut de l’argent.” (Be realists: to eat, you need some money.) This slogan, a parody of the first, makes a bluntly practical appeal to the economic necessities of survival.

Anyway, I wish I had more time to develop this peculiar ongoing link between university and national, political and economic logics… and I also wanted to write more about sub-national identifications with universities. In Cameroon, there were years of violent ethnic clashes over the universities, based in part on an ethnic and linguistic identification between the Beti and “their” university. Konings says: “The self-styled Direct Action group… openly declared that the University of Yaounde was on Beti land and thus should fall under Beti control. It often declared that the Anglo-Bami students should either recognize Beti control or ‘go home’ ” (188). This should remind us that there are very common, quite deep identifications between peoples, places, and universities, often at scales other than national — state universities in the U.S., for instance, are located in their state, named for their state, and intended to educate the people of that state, for instance. But this species of university totemism, for lack of a better word, will have to wait for further elaboration.

Next week we’ll be reading from a special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies on neoliberal knowledge in Asian universities. Stay tuned.