Cite as:
Okune, Angela. 2018. "Politics and Practices of the Neoliberal University." In PhD Orals Document: Decolonizing the African University. University of California, Irvine. October.
This section elaborates on threads from earlier sections looking at the expansion of the university in terms of market value. As the university increasingly fills a role of supporting corporate competitiveness and training future laborers of a global, knowledge-based economy, scholars such as Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) have argued that the fundamental social roles of public higher education to provide increased upward mobility for underserved populations have been displaced by the economic role of serving corporations’ global competitiveness. This section includes critical university scholars who have taken issue with how modes of power within the university structures are exercised upon the daily lives of minoritized subjects and knowledges, noting new configurations of power marked by acknowledgement and sometimes even valorization of minoritized subjects and knowledges (Ferguson 2012). Many of these works look at higher education in the United States and hold lessons and insights for the university system beyond the US borders. As Simpson (1998) highlights, university-based development studies and projects predicted and required worldwide triumph of modernity and contemporary forms of global capitalism. Much of this work highlights the continued battle over what types of questions may be asked (both from within and from outside the academy) and whose results taken as legitimate and responsible.
This essay is part of a broader orals document on Decolonizing the African University. Additional sub-essays within the document can be found through the following links:
Ethics and Responsibility | Colonial Policies and Practices of Education in Africa | Bretton Woods and Investments in Education for Development | Politics and Practices of the Neoliberal University | Proposals for Alternative Approaches to Education | Tech Philanthropy | Openness and Academic Infrastructures
This essay is part of three orals documents submitted by University of California, Irvine Anthropology doctoral student Angela Okune i n partial...Read more
Abstract: "Between 1980 and 1985 representatives of academic science changed their policy positions, moving from veneration of basic or fundamental research to promotion of entrepreneurial science. This change is examined through research university presidents' testimony before the U.S...Read more
Abstract: " Emphasizing how profoundly the American research university has been shaped by business and the humanities alike, Ivy and Industry is a vital contribution to debates about the corporatization of higher education in...Read more
Abstract: " The history of African American Studies is often told as a heroic tale, with compelling images of fists raised in a black power salute and white administrators bowing to the demands of passionate African American students. In this watershed book, Noliwe M...Read more
Abstract: "An essential American dream—equal access to higher education—was becoming a reality with the GI Bill and civil rights movements after World War II. But this vital American promise has been broken. Christopher Newfield argues that the financial and...Read more
Abstract: "The restructuring of New Zealand's universities is often considered a paradigmatic case of neo‐liberal reform and governance. While tertiary education is increasingly central to government's ideas about the future global knowledge economy, a new set of discourses has emerged...Read more
Abstract: " This book provides the first national study of this intense and challenging struggle which disrupted and refashioned institutions in almost every state. It also illuminates the context for one of the most transformative educational movements in American...Read more
Abstract: "In the 1960s and 1970s, minority and women students at colleges and universities across the United States organized protest movements to end racial and gender inequality on campus. African American, Chicano, Asia American, American Indian, women, and queer activists demanded...Read more
Abstract: " This book explores some of the major forces and changes in higher education across the world between 1945 and 2015. This includes the explosions of higher education institutions and enrollments, a development captured by the notion of massification. There were also...Read more
Abstract: " A Third University is Possible unravels the intimate relationship between the more than 200 US land grant institutions, American settler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connections between...Read more
AO: In this recent piece from the London Review of Books, Mamdani explains two different approaches and orientations towards the African university that emerged at decolonization. He sees these differences as embodied between Ali Mazrui and Walter Rodney: Mazrui believed in the classical model...Read more
Ferguson, Roderick A. 2012. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Difference Incorporated. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.
Kapoor, Dip, ed. 2011. Critical Perspectives on Neoliberal Globalization, Development and Education in Africa and Asia. Rotterdam: SensePublishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-561-1.
Krücken, Georg, Anna Kosmützky, and Marc Torka. 2007. Towards a Multiversity?: Universities between Global Trends and National Traditions. transcript Bielefeld.
la paperson. 2017. A Third University Is Possible. University of Minnesota Press.
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2018. “The African University.” London Review of Books, July 19, 2018.
Newfield, Christopher. 2003. Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980. Durham: Duke University Press.
———. 2008. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Ochwa-Echel, James R. 2013. “Neoliberalism and University Education in Sub-Saharan Africa.” SAGE Open 3 (3): 2158244013504933. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244013504933.
Rogers, Ibram H. 2012. The Black Campus Movement Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rooks, Noliwe M. 2006. White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. Boston: Beacon Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=3117983.
Shore, Cris. 2010. “Beyond the Multiversity: Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Schizophrenic University.” Social Anthropology 18 (1): 15–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2009.00094.x.
Slaughter, Sheila. 1993. “Beyond Basic Science: Research University Presidents’ Narratives of Science Policy.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 18 (3): 278–302. https://doi.org/10.1177/016224399301800302.
Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sorlin, Sverker, and Hebe Vessuri. 2007. Knowledge Society vs. Knowledge Economy Knowledge, Power, and Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10171516.
Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. 2016. The Transformation of Global Higher Education, 1945-2015. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe, Adebayo O. Olukoshi, and Codesria, eds. 2004. African Universities in the Twenty-First Century. Dakar, Senegal : Oxford, UK: Codesria ; Distributed elsewhere by African Books Collective.
Orals Commitee members are requested to use the form (link below) to submit any feedback response in your evaluation of the essays and candidate. The authors and advisor have drafted...Read more
Angela Okune: This 2007 book chapter by Georg Krucken, Anna Kosmutzky and Marc Torka expands on the concept of the "multiversity" and look at some theoretical approaches for understanding the contemporary university; emphasize the role state regulation and new forms of governance play in the...Read more