Levidow: "Marketizing Higher Education: Neoliberal Strategies and Counter-Strategies"
Copyright © 2000 by Les Levidow and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087
Marketizing Higher Education:
Neoliberal Strategies and Counter-Strategies
Les Levidow
Underlying the market orientation of tertiary education is the
ascendance, almost worldwide, of market capitalism and the
principles of neo-liberal economics.
-- World Bank report (Johnstone et al., 1998)
1. Introduction: marketization agendas
Higher education has special stakes for capitalist rule. Universities define the skills of
professional workers for labour markets, reinforce ruling ideologies, and represent the
needs of the state and industry as those of society. Despite that prevalent role, students
and staff often succeed in creating spaces for critical citizenship, even for overt
challenges to capitalist agendas.
That tension has been played out on several fronts. Student numbers have increased,
while teaching has been under-resourced and so appears as an 'inefficiency' problem, to
be solved by standardizing curricula. Knowledge has been packaged in textbook-type
formats, so that students become customers for products. Moreover, higher education has
become more synonymous with training for employability, e.g. skills to solve problems
which are set by one's superiors. As a US critic once remarked, 'the various universities
are competitors for the traffic in merchantable instruction' (Veblen, 1918: 65).
Recent tendencies have been called 'academic capitalism'. Although university staff
are still largely state-funded, they are increasingly driven into entrepreneurial competition
for external funds. Under such pressure, staff devise 'institutional and professorial market
or market-like efforts to secure external monies' (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997).
Beyond simply generating more income, higher education has become a target for
marketization agendas since the 1980s. Universities are urged to adopt commercial
models of knowledge, skills, curriculum, finance, accounting, and management
organization. They must do so in order to deserve state funding and to protect themselves
from competitive threats, we are told. These measures threaten what many people value
in universities, e.g. the scope for critical analysis and broad social access, and thus
provoke new forms of resistance. An extreme case was the 1999-2000 student occupation
of UNAM, the Autonomous National University of Mexico, which became a test case for
potential privatization of all public services.
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Recent conflicts over educational values have been amplified by the emergence of
Information and Communication Technology. ICT is designed and used in ways which
can favour some agendas rather than others, though the precise link remains open to
struggle. In the ruling ideology, marketization is attributed to the socio-economic
imperatives of ICT.
Those developments can be analysed within wider neoliberal strategies for reshaping
society in the image of a marketplace. The neoliberal project seeks to undo past collective
gains which limited labour exploitation and maintained public goods, instead fragmenting
people into vendors and consumers. As this article will argue, neoliberal strategies for
higher education have the following features:
• marketization is justified as self-defence by dealing with all
relevant constituencies as business relationships;
• educational efficiency, accountability and quality are redefined in
market terms;
• courses are recast as instructional commodities;
• student-teacher relations are mediated by the consumption and
production of things, e.g. software.
Neoliberal strategies have been devised for marketizing higher education on a global
scale. Each region provides an extreme case and component of more general tendencies.
These must be analysed globally in order to develop effective counter-strategies and
alternatives. Towards that aim, this article has the following structure:
• the 'information society' as a paradigm for ICT;
• the World Bank 'reform agenda' for the self-financing of higher
education;
• Africa, where higher education is being forcibly marketized and
standardized through financial dependence;
• North America, where some universities attempt to become global
vendors of instructional commodities;
• Europe, where state bodies adopt industry agendas of labour
flexibilisation under the guise of technological progress;
• UK, where ICT design becomes a terrain for contending
educational agendas; and
• implications for global counter-marketization strategies.
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2. 'Information society' paradigm
Central to the neoliberal project is the 'information society'. According to this
paradigm, the management, quality and speed of information become essential for
economic competitiveness. Dependent upon highly skilled labour, ICT will be used in
order to increase productivity and to provide new services, we are told.
A related concept is the 'knowledge economy'. This suggests that greater 'human
capital' will be necessary to enhance worker creativity, to use information productively,
to raise the efficiency of the service economy, to achieve economic competitiveness and
thus to maintain employment. The 'human capital' concept individualizes skills that can
exist only in a social collectivity or network (for a critique, see Fine, 2000).
In the 'knowledge economy', moreover, jobs will have a greater requirement for
'transferable skills' and cognitive capacities, we are told. Labour markets will face a skills
shortage, and workers will need reskilling so that they remain flexibly employable in a
labour market beset by insecurity. Therefore societies must invest more in 'human
capital'.
Yet there is evidence that jobs are following contrary trends. 'Knowledge' workers
face an overload of information to evaluate, spend more time dealing with it, and thus
may have even lower efficiency than before. An information overload may even reduce
capacity for new ideas. In any case, it is difficult to demonstrate such input-output
correlations in practice (Garnham, 2000).
Moreover, job specifications have generally not increased the requirement for
cognitive capacities. Nevertheless many employers have required workers to have
qualifications beyond those needed to carry out the job. As a UK student lamented, 'You
have to work harder to get a worse and worse job' (quoted in Ainley and Bailey, 1997).
This 'qualification inflation' is due to excess supply rather than any inherent demands
of the job. In the USA, for example, skill levels have risen while wage levels have fallen
for comparable jobs (Gottschalk, 1998). Indeed, job structures often reduce 'knowledge'
to information-processing, rather than require the skill of evaluating information, much
less producing new knowledge.
Further to neoliberal ideology, universities must raise their own productivity in order
to survive, we are told. They must package knowledge, deliver flexible education through
ICT, provide adequate training for 'knowledge workers', and produce more of them at
lower unit cost. While this scenario portrays universities as presciently guiding social
change, there is evidence of a reverse tendency: that they are becoming subordinate to
corporate-style managerialism and income-maximization. For neoliberal strategies, the
real task is not to enhance skills but rather to control labour costs in the labour-intensive
service sector, e.g. education (Garnham, 2000).
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ICT usage can define skills and restructure education in various ways. It can help to
democratize educational access, e.g. by helping students to learn at their own pace, or by
creating 'virtual communities' of interest in particular issues. Alternatively, it can help to
commodify and standardize learning, e.g. by extending the authoritative approach of
textbook-based knowledge (Johnston, 1999).
According to some educators who design internet-based courses, their use can lower
personal contact and thus reduce student motivation: 'Many students need the personal
interaction'. Thanks to ICT, moreover, 'We have cleverer ways in which we can search
for information, but it still needs to be filtered, sifted', i.e. interpreted (interviews quoted
in Newman and Johnson, 1999). This illustrates a long-standing issue, though rarely
debated as such: how to define the societal problems for which information should be
sought and evaluated, and therefore how to design technology.
Indeed, computer systems are designed by selecting a metaphor (rather than others)
and translating it into hardware or software: 'And this is where technology can become
ideological: if you believe that information technology as such inevitably brings markets,
or hierarchies, or freedom, or modularity, or conflict, or God-like control over human
affairs, then you may not even recognize that you have choices' (Agre, 1999).
In such a way, the 'information society' paradigm plays an ideological role. Some
current tendencies are projected into an inevitable future, to which we must adapt -- or
else suffer. That future is represented as an inherent property of technology. Relations
between people take the form of relations between 'transferable skills' and ICT, for
example.
In that vein, the 'information society' has similarities with capitalist ideology in
general. Through commodity exchange, social relations are actively reified as relations
between things. 'To the producers, the social relations between their private labours
appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons
in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations
between things' (Marx, 1976). This appearance may seem natural in capitalist society, yet
it is always an unstable result of attempts at extending commodity exchange to more
areas of social activity.
As another pervasive feature of capitalist society, people's knowledge is codified and
embedded in technologies. As human qualities take the fetishized form of properties of
things, those things acquire human-like qualities -- e.g., smart weapons, environmentally
clean products, precise techniques, efficient technologies, etc. This fetishism is not
merely a false appearance; it is a real material process of investing qualities in things.
Like commodity exchange, efficiency too can be analysed as a class relation.
According to Herbert Marcuse (1978), '. . . rational, "value-free" technology is the
separation of man from the means of production and his subordination to technical
efficiency and necessity -- all this within the framework of private enterprise'. Modern
bureaucracy homogenizes diverse, heterogenous qualities into universally comparable
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ones, thus allowing social qualities to be quantified. This process is 'the precondition of
calculable efficiency -- of universal efficiency. . . .'
As Marcuse further argues, technology is specially designed for such purposes:
'Specific purposes and interests . . . enter the very construction of the technical apparatus'.
Through a pretence of neutral technical efficiency, social values are both embedded and
concealed in technology. As various critics have argued, technologies have been specially
designed for managing, disciplining, exploiting and/or expelling human labour.
We can ask: efficiency for what kind of society? 'information' for whose interests and
control? With such questions in mind, key terms can be analysed as both ideological and
material. They provide weapons to naturalize, impose and legitimize a future scenario of
marketizing social relations.
3. World Bank 'Reform Agenda'
In the neoliberal worldview, trade liberalisation generates a virtuous circle of market
access, technology, efficiency, etc. For example:
Markets promote efficiency through competition and the division of
labour -- the specialisation that allows people and economies to do what
they do best. Global markets offer greater opportunity for people to tap
into more and larger markets around the world. It means that they can
have access to more capital flows, technology, cheaper imports, and
export markets (IMF, 2000).
On the contrary, as many critics have argued, trade liberalisation is generally designed to
serve capitalist profitability. It throws people into more intense competition with each
other on a global scale, thus preventing people from deciding collectively 'what they do
best' and what kind of economic relations to develop with each other. Prime agents are
the IMF and World Bank, which elaborate the strategies of their paymasters in the
dominant OECD countries. In the neoliberal project, US capital serves both as a prime
driving force and as a model for its imitators or partners elsewhere.
For several years the World Bank has been promoting a 'reform agenda' on higher
education. Its key features are privatization, deregulation and marketization. According to
a World Bank report,
The reform agenda . . . is oriented to the market rather than to public
ownership or to governmental planning and regulation. Underlying the
market orientation of tertiary education is the ascendance, almost
worldwide, of market capitalism and the principles of neo-liberal
economics (Johnstone et al., 1998; quoted in CAUT, 1998a).
From a neoliberal standpoint, what is the problem -- and opportunity? As a private good,
higher education is in limited supply, not demanded by all, and is available for a price.
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Consumers (business and industry) are 'reasonably well informed', while the providers
(administrators and faculty) are 'often ill informed -- conditions which are ideal for
market forces to operate'. Fulfilling the demand therefore requires measures to make
higher education completely self-financing.
Having defined the problem in this way, the report identifies the traditional university
and its faculty members as the main obstacles to a solution:
Radical change, or restructuring, of an institution of higher education
means either fewer and/or different faculty, professional staff, and support
workers. This means lay-offs, forced early retirements, or major retraining
and reassignment, as in: the closure of inefficient or ineffective
institutions; the merger of quality institutions that merely lack a critical
mass of operations to make them cost-effective; and the radical alteration
of the mission and production function of an institution -- which means
radically altering who the faculty are, how they behave, the way they are
organized, and the way they work and are compensated (Johnstone et al.,
1998).
This diagnosis identifies teachers and their traditional protections as the obstacle to
market-based efficiencies. In its future scenario, higher education would become less
dependent upon teachers' skills. Students would become customers or clients. As the
implicit aim, private investors would have greater opportunities to profit from state
expenditure, while influencing the form and content of education. Business and
university administrators would become the main partnership, redefining student-teacher
relations.
The World Bank report soon become a political weapon for recasting academic
freedom as a commitment to neoliberal futures. University administrations have sought to
characterize academic freedom as a duty 'to uphold the balance' between 'the spiraling
demand for higher education on the one hand, and the globalization of economic,
financial and technical change on the other'. At a UNESCO conference in October 1998,
this conflict was ultimately fudged by declaring that faculty members should enjoy
'academic freedom and autonomy conceived as a set of rights and duties, while being
fully responsible and accountable to society' (quoted in CAUT, 1998b).
Presumably the university administrations meant responsibility to a neoliberal
globalization agenda, not to the forces resisting it. Indeed, academic 'accountability' often
means subordination to accountancy techniques. In response to these attacks, professional
societies have defended academic freedom as a right of free expression, as if it could
mean autonomy from all political-economic pressures. When academics pose research
questions or set curricula, however, these cannot be entirely autonomous from the wider
struggle over public resources, ruling ideologies and class interests.
Although the World Bank agenda have little support among educators, some aspects
may be implemented. Indeed, it may describe proposals which are being driven by wider
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political-economic forces and already implemented around the world. We need to analyse
their various practical forms, how they may complement each other, and how they
appropriate ICTs. Let us survey Africa, North America and Europe as different examples
and components of a neoliberal globalization project.
4. Africa: SAPs for recolonization
Higher education has become a casualty of the overall neoliberal policies imposed on
highly indebted countries of the South. By the late 1970s these countries faced a 'balance
of payments' deficit for many reasons -- e.g. because their main exports suffered a world
decline in prices, while oil imports became more expensive. As these countries could no
longer repay even the interest on their national debt, their currency lost value, and they
were denied credit for further imports.
The IMF and World Bank turned these national debts into an opportunity to impose
Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in the 1980s. Indebted governments were
required to reduce spending, to privatize industry and services, to cheapen labour, to open
up markets to multinational companies, to relax controls on capital movements, to
weaken environmental and labour protection laws, to devalue their currencies, etc.
'Growth-oriented loans' were granted to countries which accepted those
'conditionalities'. According to the World Bank, such measures would help governments
to reduce budget deficits, reduce the balance-of-payments deficit, control inflation, and
thus create conditions for resumed growth. In practice, local industries were driven out of
business, many jobs were lost, rural people lost their access to cultivable land, and fees
were imposed for health and education services. The main 'growth' has come from people
working more in order to pay more than before for goods or services -- apart from the
'growth' of MNCs buying up local assets on the cheap (see examples in FGS, 2000).
Consequently, higher education has suffered in all Southern countries, especially in
Africa, which was singled out for special treatment. According to World Bank reports on
African countries, investment in higher education was benefiting mainly the social elites
there, and it had a lower social return than investment in primary education. As yet
another conditionality, therefore, they were told to reduce funding of higher education, in
the name of both egalitarian and efficiency criteria. Thanks to SAPs, governments would
have an opportunity to 'increase the efficiency of resource use', declared World Bank
consultants.
That attack had different motivations than the publicly stated ones. African
governments were regarded as too weak to discipline labour for foreign investors and
thus as inadequate managers of public services. More importantly, university faculty and
students there were foremost critics of SAPs, often catalysing wider political opposition.
In many cases universities were invaded by repressive forces or simply shut down
(Federici et al., 2000).
Given the great resistance, the neoliberal strategy was to create means by which
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African universities could be intellectually recolonized, in at least two senses. The
general effect of SAPs, combined with tuition fees, effectively limited university access
to an elite -- far more so than beforehand. Eventually the World Bank acknowledged the
worsening quality of African higher education, though not its own responsibility for this
outcome. As a remedy, the World Bank promoted 'capacity building' there through direct
funding. Through this financial dependence, African universities could be pressurized to
change their educational content along lines acceptable to the World Bank (ibid.).
Under neoliberal constraints, then, universities substitute new staff, standardize
pedagogical materials, and marginalize local knowledges. Meanwhile governments
repress any resistance such 'reforms'. Moreover, these changes potentially create
customers for global educational commodities -- hardly the sort of 'growth' which was
promised. Within Africa and elsewhere, resistance has been publicized by solidarity
activists through the Campaign for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA).
5. North America: instructional commodities
In North America many universities have adopted entrepreneurial practices. They act
not only as business partners, but also as businesses in themselves. They develop profit-
making activities through university resources, faculty and student labour (Ovetz, 1996).
Within an entrepreneurial agenda, universities have developed on-line educational
technology, i.e. electronic forms of course materials. Of course, this medium could be
used to enhance access to quality education, and to supplement face-to-face contact, as
some European universities have been doing for a long time. In North America, however,
the aims were clearly different -- namely, to commodify and standardize education.
Those aims have been resisted by students and teachers. For example, in 1997 UCLA
established an 'Instructional Enhancement Initiative', which required computer web sites
for all its arts and sciences courses. Its aims were linked with a for-profit business for
online courses, in partnership with high-tech companies. Similar initiatives at York
University led to a strike by staff, backed by the students. They raised the slogan, 'the
classroom versus the boardroom' (Noble, 1998).
What problem was the new technology supposed to solve? After university rules were
changed to permit profit-making activities, their research role was commodified.
Substantial resources were shifted from teaching to research activities which were
expected to result in patents and royalties. With less staff time devoted to teaching,
student-teacher ratios increased, thus increasing the burden on them both. This result of
profit-seeking was represented as an inherent problem of educational inefficiency.
From that standpoint, the logical solution is to increase efficiency by standardizing
course materials. Once lectures are submitted to administrators and posted on webpages,
these materials can be merchandised to other universities. Better yet, the course-writing
can be outsourced on contract to non-university staff. By transferring control to
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administrators, the technology can be designed to discipline, deskill and/or displace
teachers' labour.
This approach changes the role of students, who become consumers of instructional
commodities. Student-teacher relationships are reified as relationships between
consumers and providers of things. This marginalizes any learning partnership between
them as people.
Students readily become objects of market research. In Canada, for example,
universities have been given royalty-free licenses to Virtual U software in return for
providing data on its use to the vendors. When students enrol in courses using this
software, they are officially designated as 'experimental subjects', who grant permission
for the vendor to receive all their 'computer-generated usage data' (Noble, 1998).
A marketization model can be extended to sell courses, potentially to anyone in the
world. Even third parties can sell new commodities which redefine educational skills. For
example, by 1998 IBM's Lotus Corporation had already sold its Total Campus Option
software to more than a million students. The company hoped that these future workers
would thereby acquire 'a Lotus brand preference and relevant skills: the campus is the
starting point of the sales cycle to the corporate world with whom we conduct business'.
6. Europe: ICT for flexible learning
The European education debate has been ideologically framed by the supposed
imperatives of an 'information society'. This is conceptualized differently by 'market'
models versus 'social' models of Europe (de Miranda and Kristiansen, 2000). So far
dominant has been a neoliberal agenda of individual flexibilized learning for labour-
market needs.
ERT agenda
A neoliberal agenda has been promoted effectively by the European Round Table
(ERT) of Industrialists since the 1980s (Balanyá et al., 2000). Its problem-definitions
have been adopted by leading politicians and European Union officials. In particular the
ERT has sought to change the form and content of education.
The ERT has regarded education and training as 'strategic investments vital for the
future success of industry'. European business 'clearly requires an accelerated reform' of
educational programmes. Unfortunately, however, 'industry has only a very weak
influence over the programmes taught', and teachers 'have an insufficient understanding
of the economic environment, business and the notion of profit' (ERT, 1989; cf. ERT,
1998).
They further argued: 'As industrialists, we believe that educators themselves should be
free to conduct the same kind of internal searches for efficiency without interference or
undue pressures exerted on them'. European industry has responded to globalisation, but
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'the world of education has been slow to respond', the authors lamented. As a remedy,
'partnerships should be formed between schools and local business' (ERT, 1995). More
recently they have promoted Information and Communication Technology as an essential
learning tool -- in schools today and for work tomorrow. As the key virtues cited, ICT
opens up the world of knowledge, allows individual enquiry, and powerfully motivates
learning (ERT, 1997).
ICT has a more specific role in the neoliberal business agenda, as critics have argued
(Hatcher and Hirtt, 1999). First, it facilitates the individualized and flexibilized learning
which is required for the modern worker, who must become individually responsible for
managing his/her own human capital in the workplace. Second, ICT diminishes the role
of the teacher -- a desireable change, e.g. because teachers have 'an insufficient
understanding' of business needs, and because their present role hinders 'internal searches
for efficiency'.
European Commission: industry needs
As President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors basically accepted a
neoliberal diagnosis in his 1993 White Paper on 'Growth, Competitiveness, Employment'.
Identifying the future as an 'information society', it counselled adaptation to inexorable
competitive pressures: 'The pressure of the market-place is spreading and growing,
obliging businesses to exploit every opportunity available to increase productivity and
efficiency. Structural adaptability is becoming a major prerequisite for economic
success', e.g. by disseminating the skills essential for ICTs (CEC, 1993: 92-93).
Moreover, the Paper mandated the public authorities 'to remove the remaining
regulatory obstacles to the development of new markets'. Although not specifically
mentioning education, it welcomed marketization of public services:
The ordinary citizen can have access to 'public services' on an individual basis, and
these will be invoiced on the basis of the use made of them. Transferring such services to
the market-place will lead to new private-sector offers of services and numerous job-
creation opportunities (ibid.: 94).
Within that framework, European Commission documents and official speeches put
forward arguments similar to the ERT's. According to the chief of the Directorate-
General which funds research, the ICT market is 'too weak and penalises our industry'.
Therefore support is necessary to 'give our market the dimension which our industry
needs' (Cresson, 1995). With such language, society's needs are either ignored or else are
equated with industry's needs.
Soon the supposed threat was made more explicit: 'It is doubtful if our continent will
keep hold of the industrial place it has achieved in this new market of multimedia if our
systems of education and training do not rapidly keep pace' (CEC, 1996). For the
solution, government must subsidize the European ICT industry.
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Moreover, official documents foresee and welcome a decline in the dominant role of
educational institutions:
Even within the schools and colleges, the greater degree of
individualisation of modes of learning -- which are flexible and demand-
led -- can be considered as supplanting the formulas that are too heavy and
dominated by the provider. It announces the consequent decline in the role
of the teacher, which is also demonstrated by the development of new
sources of learning, notably by the role of ICT and of human resources
other than teachers (CEC, 1998).
Through such language, the empowerment of vendors and business partners is
represented as greater freedom for students. A student-teacher learning relationship is
potentially replaced by an individual consumer-producer relationship.
7. UK: university as a borderless business?
As the vanguard of the neoliberal project in Europe, the UK epitomizes pressure
towards marketizing higher education. As academics there have found since the 1980s,
many developments have 'eroded the protection from pressures to render their work more
commensurable with the commodity form of value' (Wilmott, 1995: 995).
The government has pressed for a substantial increase in student numbers, while
providing little increase in funds. Under pressure from the Research Assessment
Exercise, many university departments have shifted resources from teaching to research,
while seeking more research funds from industry. For both those reasons, there have been
less resources for student-teacher contact, and thus greater pressure to standardize
curricula and assessment criteria. Similar pressures come from formal assessment
exercises which require teachers to produce explicit 'learning aims and outcomes'.
Students have become more subject to accountancy versions of educational values. In
the late 1990s the government abolished maintenance grants for most students and
introduced tuition fees. As these changes led students into greater debt than before, they
felt under pressure to choose academic programmes which would lead to more highly-
paid jobs, rather than arts or humanities programmes, for example. Student protests have
opposed tuition fees, while linking this burden to more general dependence upon private
finance. For example:
In providing this funding, business is assuming more direct and indirect
control of our education system. . . . Students should not be forced to
choose on the basis of what [courses] businesses are prepared to make
available (CFE, 2000).
UK marketization agendas link two business meanings of flexibility. First, student-
customers (or their business sponsors) seek learning for flexible adaptation to labour-
market needs, e.g. through 'transferable skills' for employability. Second, universities face
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threats from global competitors which flexibly design and sell courses according to
consumer demand.
For many years, such a competitive threat has been linked with ICTs. 'In due course,
just-in-time electronic education, delivered to your living room by commercial
companies, will undermine the most hallowed names in higher education' (Michael
Prowse, Financial Times, 20.11.95). As an Australian vice-chancellor warned his UK
counterparts, non-universities will provide electronic courses, offer degrees and not
bother with being accredited, 'thus competing with universities in the education market'
(quoted in McLeod, 2000). To protect themselves, they must further commodify
educational goods as individual learning packages.
Taking that logic further, one neoliberal militant has declared: 'Higher education is
now a no-value commodity unrelated to real costs and no basis whatsoever for an
effective and efficient business . . . the future is always best left in the hands of discerning
customers close to the marketplace' (Hills, 1999). Again, university corporatization is
represented as greater freedom for the student as customer.
According to the UK's committee of university executives, the solution is to abolish
borders between the university and business, as well as those between domestic and
international 'markets' for educational goods. The executives promote internet-based
delivery as a key means to become a 'borderless business'. Going further than the ERT
diagnosis, they describe the university as already a business, albeit a deficient one which
must be fixed according to corporate principles:
[Universities must create] new systems of operation which disaggregate
function, increase specialisation and where outsourcing is a strong feature.
It follows that universities need to give priority to identifying their core
business, niche opportunities and specialist functions. . . . (e.g.) consistent
delivery through a customer-focused approach to education and training; a
widening of educational values to include company certification, learning
outcomes relevant to the workplace, personal development and flexibility
(CVCP&HEFCE, 2000).
According to the executives' chief, Prof. Howard Newby, universities 'are an integral part
of the knowledge-based economy', thus echoing a neoliberal paradigm. 'At present we
seem to be rather like the British motor industry in the 1960s -- on the brink of
participating in a global market, but poorly organised to take advantage of the
opportunities available'. He identifies changes in undergraduate delivery: from a 'just-in-
case' general intellectual training, to a more flexible 'just-in-time' ethos, and then to 'just-
for-you' forms of learning (Newby, 1999).
Newby emphasizes opportunities as much as threats. In his account, critical analytical
skills are to be supplanted by life-long adjustment to the needs of a flexibilized labour
market. Extending the business logic, he advocates government investment in higher
education as 'a sector which is absolutely central to the development of the UK as a
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prosperous and competitive knowledge-based economy'. He also advocates performance-
related pay in order to modernise 'our human resources management'.
Thus educational dividends are to be quantified as human capital. Once the
'investment' metaphor is reified, it can become literal. Universities may be held
accountable for delivering the goods in measurable terms (Demeritt, 2000: 309).
In planning an electronic-University, some educators emphasize that high quality
cannot be achieved at low cost. Partly for this reason, many UK universities have formed
a consortia for jointly providing and evaluating prospective course material, so that they
do not compete among themselves for students. At the same time, a private-sector partner
will handle 'the commercial aspects of content procurement to match demand', among
other aspects (McLeod, 2000). Companies may play a role in defining students as 'market
demand' for some types of content rather than others. Such arrangements readily conflate
the needs of business and society, e.g. through 'flexible learning' for the labour market.
Electronic media have a double-edged potential. They can broaden access to quality
material and social networks which enhance critical citizenship, provided that the design
includes resources for creative student-teacher and student-student interaction. Given the
political will, argues one academic, scholarly values 'may survive in the multi-media
environment. But the tension between digitized means and these values may sharpen as
learning becomes more commodified' (Harris, 2000). The effect on education depends on
social design of electronic media.
8. Conclusion: what global counter-strategies?
In order to develop effective counter-strategies, it is necessary to analyse the various
forms of marketization.
Marketization strategies
Marketization strategies should be understood as both ideological and material at the
same time. As analysed above, here are some key features.
• Efficiency as progress
In neoliberal ideology, employment insecurity is attributed to a deficiency of 'human
capital' appropriate for the 'information society'. This problem is cited to justify
pedagogical changes for adapting students to labour-market needs. Educational 'reforms'
are presented as universal progress on grounds that they enhance efficiency, extend
access, flexibly customize the content for individual needs, facilitate learning through
ICT, provide accountability to students and society, yield a better return on state
investment, etc. These benefits are to be measured according to 'human capital' criteria,
or even according to money transactions. Whether they are literal or metaphorical,
accountancy methods define the efficiency of educational progress, thus naturalizing
marketization.
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• Commodification
Prospective students are represented as customers/markets in order to justify
commodifying educational services. Knowledge becomes a product for individual
students to consume, rather than a collaborative process for students and teachers.
Individualized learning both promotes and naturalizes life-long re-skilling for a
flexibilized, fragmented, insecure labour market. By standardizing course materials,
moreover, administrators can reduce teachers to software-writers or even replace them
with subcontractors. Through ICT, neoliberal agendas take the apparently neutral form of
greater access and flexible delivery. In all these ways, student-teacher relations are reified
as relations between things, e.g. between consumers and providers of software.
• Globalization
A global competitive threat and opportunity is invoked to justify commodifying all
institutional arrangements. People are actively linked around the world through new
market relations -- as business partners, competitors, patrons, clients, customers,
assessor-consultants, etc. This neoliberal internationalism is promoted within and across
countries. As SAP conditionalities forcibly marketize and standardize higher education in
Third World countries, people there may become more willing customers for
instructional commodities elsewhere, e.g. through distance education. Perhaps as a self-
fulfilling prophecy, this marketization intensifies (or even creates) the competitive
pressures from which universities needed protection in the first place.
Counter-strategies
In response, what counter-strategies are being developed? As a defensive approach,
teachers' organizations have re-asserted their professional prerogatives as experts in
educational content, and they have defended academic freedom against state interference
disguised as societal 'responsibilities'. Students have opposed plans to replace human
contact with software products, while demanding educational access as a right rather than
a commodity.
More imaginative efforts will be needed to counter the neoliberal agenda. In
particular:
• Demonstrating links among various measures
Marketization measures extend far beyond formal requirements of SAPs. The
pressures take more subtle forms -- e.g., ideological language, funding priorities, public-
private partnerships, tuition fees, cost-benefit analysis, performance indicators,
curriculum changes, new technology -- which often conceal the ultimate implications.
Critics need to demonstrate how all these aspects are linked, how they change the content
of academic work and learning, and how they arise from efforts to discipline labour for
capital, as part of a global agenda.
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• Linking resistances across constituencies and places
Neoliberal strategies are turning us all into fragments of a business plan, e.g.
competitors, partners, customers, etc. In response, we need an international network for
several purposes: to link all targets of the neoliberal attack worldwide, to circulate
analyses of anti-marketization struggles, to enhance solidarity efforts, and to turn
ourselves into collective subjects of resistance and learning for different futures. Such
networks need to span all relevant constituencies (teachers, students, NGOs), as well as
the geographical regions which are supposedly competing with each other.
• De-reifying Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
ICTs can be designed in ways which either facilitate a marketization agenda, e.g. by
reifying student-teacher relations -- or else hinder marketization, e.g. by enhancing
critical debate among students and with teachers. In that vein, we need to distinguish
between various potential designs for ICT, in order to dereify them as social relations.
For example, Computer-Supported Cooperative Learning (CSCL) techniques are being
developed to retain the collective aspects of learning at a distance. Although ICTs are
widely used for distributing critical analyses, we need to ensure that these are included
and used imaginatively in accredited courses.
• Developing alternatives
It is inadequate simply to oppose marketization or to counterpose whatever existed
beforehand. Resistance would be strengthened by developing alternative pedagogies
which enhance critical citizenship, e.g. debate over the collective problem-definitions of
society (e.g. Hill, 1999; McLaren, 2000). If we advocate educational methods and content
along those lines, then we can link academic freedom with responsibility to public debate
over potential and desirable futures.
Acknowledgements
My interest in these issues was stimulated by 'Reclaim our Education', a conference of the
Campaign for Free Education in August 2000 at the University of East London. This
conference led me to emphasize higher education in a later talk, 'Neoliberal Technologies
and Collective Resistance', at the INPEG Counter-Summit (Initiative against Economic
Globalization), 22-24 September 2000 in Prague, just before the IMF-World Bank
meeting there. I would like to thank the organizers for the opportunity of presenting my
ideas there. For helpful comments on the text, I would like to thank Liz Delowee, Anne
Gray, Alv de Miranda, David Harvie, David Margolies, Korinna Patelis and Glenn
Rikowski.
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