In many ways, the restructuring and marketization of universities in the United Kingdom is more advanced than in the United States, precisely because of Britain’s more centralized and consolidated model of higher education. opponents of these trends have the most to learn from their British counterparts.
Those wishing to resist the tendencies outlined above thus lack the strategic means of fighting back, often falling into the very ideological traps (reification, commodity fetishism) that they seek to overturn. Too often, critical analyses begin and end with a shallow treatment of neoliberalism-a notion often presented in purely ideological terms, constituting little more than abstract verbiage, with scant consideration of material and structural relations. Yet while all these processes are by now more or less well-known, they are nonetheless treated superficially and piecemeal in most left analyses, with little deep, critical understanding of their inner political-economic logic, the means by which these changes are introduced, or the intentionality of the people and groups driving this restructuring of the university. Together these changes represent a frontal assault on academic freedom as well as critical and creative thinking throughout the university system. Seventh, forms of scientific management have been introduced, forcing qualitative modes of knowledge, teaching, and research into narrowly quantitative metrics of “value added”-ostensibly to increase efficiency and raise academic standards, but really to undermine faculty power and as a means of marketizing and controlling all levels of higher education. Sixth, wealthier universities have amassed huge surpluses and endowments, in some cases totaling billions of dollars, which are invested in the financial sector. Fifth, state universities increasingly depend on private donors who drive decisions on the direction of higher education. Fourth, administrative bureaucracy has steadily grown, especially at large research universities, where the share of school budgets going to administrators now frequently surpasses that for total faculty salaries, and university presidents and provosts often receive Wall Street-level compensation. Third, both the new for-profit institutions and traditional universities increasingly rely on non-tenure-track faculty-adjunct and visiting professors, lecturers, and others-to do more and more of the teaching, with a resulting increase in academic hierarchies, including the proletarianization of teachers at the bottom rung. Second, for-profit universities have expanded rapidly, with an often predatory focus on non-traditional students and online courses, also made possible by loans. First, public funding for most state universities has sharply declined, leaving the system increasingly dependent on student loans, whereby students bear the costs and risks of their own education, in what is presented as a “consumer” model. Nevertheless, a number of broad trends in higher education have become clear. This is mainly because neoliberal restructuring at the university level has seemed until recently much less advanced and crisis-ridden than in elementary and secondary education, but also because of a shortage of critical, political-economic analyses that go to the root of the problem.
However, we have paid considerably less attention to related developments in higher education (with notable exceptions, such as David Noble’s Digital Diploma Mills and Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower).
Giroux’s America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, Howard Ryan’s Educational Justice, and Gerald Coles’s Miseducating for the Global Economy). Over the last few years, MR and Monthly Review Press have published several special issues and books on the restructuring and privatization of K–12 education (see the July–August 2011, June 2013, and March 2016 issues of MR, along with John Marsh’s Class Dismissed, Henry A.
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