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.

Nancy Abelmann’s The Intimate University is at heart a study of the relationship between a university and a social group. The university is the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; the group is that of Korean American students hailing from the Chicago area; and the relationship between them, as Abelmann effectively demonstrates, is tangled up in contradictions. Foremost among these is the matter of race; the Korean Americans she studies are caught in the bind of being an American model minority. They are not white enough to comfortably enact the American fantasy script of a universalist (but implicitly white and affluent), liberal, liberating and “fun” higher education, of a kind that would license “the luxury of ‘experience'” or a freedom from immediate vocational concerns (10-11). But they are “too white” and too affluent, from the point of view of national ideology, to comfortably identify with the nation’s oppressed racial groups. This implies a fraught relationship with other groups — one student describes her “bad impression” of “weird,” implicitly African American break dancing in one Chicago suburb (28) — but also a powerful “compunction to dissociate” from stereotypes of Koreanness, particularly with the Korean instrumentalism and “materialism” they associate with their petty-bourgeois immigrant parents (161, 7). This disidentification with their own group — or at least with its more problematic typifications — is, as Abelmann emphasizes, the product of a malicious American norm that identifies full individuality with whiteness, and ethnicity with groupness (161-2).

But Abelmann’s intervention, in spite of her subtitle (“the problems of segregation”), is in my view ultimately less about American racial dynamics per se than about the social and ideological uses of the university for one particular group, the Korean Americans. Although her conclusions emphasize race, her rich materials — drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and follow-up interviews in the late 1990s and early 2000s — lead her into a dense, hybrid analysis of a deeply overdetermined situation. She traces out a series of fault lines that divide up the Korean American world by class, gender, cultural capital and religious identity, showing how these fractures evolve along with views of the university. For instance Julie, an observant Christian student, explains with disdain that “When I’m in one of my [college] classes, I don’t feel like I’m learning about life. I’m not learning about who I am and who I should be” — which she contrasts with the more existentially significant sermons she attended at an evangelical church (52). Mary, a student from a poorer family, in turn trashes Julie’s church as “using this artificial [Christian] identity that they’ve made for themselves to exclude others” (81). For her own part, Mary longs to become a college professor, and thus to transcend “the contingencies of birth, bearing, or even education” (67). Yet she is deeply critical of her college education’s failure to live up to its own liberal ideals, eventually suffers a mental breakdown in the face of her family’s “[having] absolutely no monetary power to do anything,” quits college, and moves to Seoul (67).

We learn here how the university can fuel the fantasy of escaping one’s class origins, but also how it can discipline the children of the working class, encouraging students like Mary to accept a place on the margins. In Mary’s case, at least, this process of resignation corresponds to a progressive renunciation of criticality about the university. Paradoxically, Abelmann’s analysis suggests that Mary is most critical of her education when she is most attached to becoming a professor. Initially denouncing her undergraduate classes as “high-schoolish” and “random,” she asks “what’s the point of calling it ‘higher learning’ when it’s not higher?” (71). But as Mary becomes more depressed and leaves college, her doubts seem to shift away from her institution towards herself and her own future: “I’m never sure what’s going to happen, what I’m going to do. There are so many things I want to do, scared to do, I don’t know” (77).

The theoretical contribution of Abelmann’s project to an anthropology of the American university is thus to emphasize the significance, and the deeply unstable and evolving natures, of students’ “university imaginaries.” Abelmann reminds us of the complexity of students’ affective, moral, existential and symbolic investments in university education; she rightly emphasizes their (partial) attachment to the ideals of “liberal” education, and their recurring disappointments with the impossibility of its realization. Although Abelmann calls her book “the intimate university,” institutional intimacy for these students is largely an unrealized aspiration rather than a reality. One informant, Jim, emphasizes his disappointment with the university’s bureaucratic self-presentation, explaining that, after describing its programs and welcoming you to campus, the university rapidly dismisses you with a banal pleasantry: “Have a nice day!” (12). In spite of their alienating institutional environment, Abelmann finds that students generally have access to other domains of intimacy, particularly family spaces (ch. 5-7). But these other domains of intimacy seem somehow insufficient and partial, and it would seem helpful in future research to look comparatively and historically at these students’ fantasies of unalienated intimacy and fulfillment. Do they aspire, paradoxically, to a simultaneously more totalizing and more intimate university experience?

In closing, two methodological points. Abelmann’s data is primarily drawn from interviews, and her analysis is largely based on informants’ self-talk, rather than on observation of their practices. One is left wondering what remains to be learned about the inevitable dissonances between students’ accounts of themselves and their everyday activities. And second, what are the institutional conditions of possibility for a courageous reflexive project like Abelmann’s? She makes no effort to hide the fact that she is writing a critical ethnography of her own campus, and criticizing the campus’s structural racism in the process. Very few anthropologists have undertaken such extensive ethnographic research on their own workplaces. What made it possible in this case? If nothing else, knowing more about the making of this project would be instructive for anthropologists pursuing similar projects in other contexts.

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.