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Neoliberalism and Culture in Higher Education: On the Loss of the Humanistic Character of the University and the Possibility of Its Reconstitution

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Abstract

This paper examines the loss of culture as a possible effect of the neoliberalisation of education, especially higher education. The paper opens with a brief comparison between the humanistic education founded on the idea of culture (i.e. Bildung) and its modern-day neoliberal form, with the help of José Ortega y Gasset’s reflections on the mission of higher education. It then discusses certain aspects of the historical development of libraries and of the figure of the public intellectual with a view to bringing into relief some negative repercussions that can, and already do affect the university. The paper also explores aspects of John Dewey’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s thoughts to draw lessons with respect to how experience and culture are not only essential components of education as a whole, but also elements of resilience amidst a series of contemporary challenges that threaten its purpose and meaning. The paper draws to a close with some suggestive yet inconclusive remarks on the promises inherent in existing and possible alternatives to the neoliberalised university.

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Notes

  1. For a more general critique of neoliberalism see Dardot and Laval (2010), La Nouvelle Raison Du Monde.

  2. Aaron Stoller detects a similar concern in Hans-Georg Gadamer, and uses it as a building block for his theory of knowing and learning as praxis. See Stoller (2014, pp. 83–85).

  3. Martin Trow’s theorisation of the “massification of higher education” offers a slightly different narrative here. For Trow, the main reason behind the shifts in higher education can be attributed to universities’ gradual evolution from “elite” to “mass” and subsequently “universal” institutions, and the concomitant pressures this transformation places on them (Trow 1973). Yet, despite its usefulness in making sense of some tendencies in contemporary higher education, Trow’s theory fails to fully appreciate the fact that the three categories are not mutually exclusive but coexisting, interpenetrating, non-sequential, reversible ones (Marginson 2016, pp. 28–35; Brennan 2002; Parry 2016; Doughty 2012; for Trow’s reply to this criticism see Trow 2007). In this regard, the neoliberalisation of the university and the devaluation of its cultural-humanistic dimension can be considered a more fundamental issue given that it occurs in elite, mass and universal higher education institutions, which today exist side by side. Hence, the University of Phoenix coexists with the Ivy League, or BPP Holdings Limited with Oxford and Cambridge, yet they all exhibit to a greater or lesser degree the symptoms described earlier. As a matter of fact, the massification of higher education itself can be largely construed, with the exception perhaps of the post-World War II demographic boom, as a symptom of the rise to hegemony of neoliberalism as a model of social, political, and economic organisation and governance (see, for instance, Busch 2017, pp. 49–51).

  4. Hence, for instance, a central element of the Association of European Research Libraries’ (LIBER) strategic plan for 2018–2022 is to collaborate “with other stakeholders to develop innovative metrics meant to monitor and evaluate research”, and to put in place “library services regarding Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) research data, such as support for data management during research projects and support for data archive/data repositories to store and publish research datasets, and linking data to publications”. See https://tinyurl.com/y6udaczu.

  5. On the concept of “platform” see Srnicek (2017), Platform Capitalism, 36–92.

  6. On the concept of Bildung see Geuss (1996), ‘Kultur, Bildung, Geist’Ringer, ‘Bildung’. On the relationship between Dewey and the German Bildung tradition see Good and Garrison (2010).

  7. Admittedly, Dewey’s conception of experiential, problem-solving education appears to be anchored to scientific rationality, as against a humanities oriented one. However, even if there is a strong scientific aspect in Dewey’s philosophy of education—he was a pragmatist, after all—he nevertheless always considered the arts and the humanities as being essential to the education of mature, critical and imaginative modern individuals. On this see Ibid., 157–60, 197–200, 202–11, 233–39; Nussbaum (2010), Not For Profit, 85–86; Ryan (1998), ‘Deweyan Pragmatism and American Education’.

  8. Adorno referred once to pragmatism as an American “vulgar ideology”. Notwithstanding, his view of Dewey, whose version of pragmatism he described as “wholly humane”, was a lot less inimical, if not congenial. See Adorno and Becker, ‘Education for Autonomy’, 106; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 14.

  9. Espen Hammer discusses this ambiguity in Adorno’s thought from a psychoanalytical point of view in Hammer (2006), Adorno and the Political, 58–61.

  10. Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the social role of the public intellectual is here particularly apposite, See, for example, King (1978), ‘The Social Role of Intellectuals’. See also, Fatsis (2018), ‘Becoming Public Characters, Not Public Intellectuals’.

  11. On dual use research see Rychnovská (2016), ‘Governing Dual-Use Knowledge’.

  12. On the dire situation of academics today see Gee (2017), ‘Facing Poverty, Academics Turn to Sex Work and Sleeping in Cars’.

  13. On the notion of “uberification”, especially in relation to education see Hall (2016), The Uberification of the University, 15–22.

  14. On the significance of “totality” as a critical interpretative category see Adorno (1977), ‘Introduction to the Positivist Dispute in German Sociology’, 12.

  15. Herbert Marcuse was already pointing in this direction in the sixties, See for instance Marcuse (1969), An Essay on Liberation, 14–16.

  16. For a recent example of this kind of activity see Kismihók et al. (2019), ‘Declaration on Sustainable Researcher Careers’.

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  1. School of Philosophy, University College Dublin (Alumnus), Dublin, Ireland

    Vangelis Giannakakis

  2. Laboratory of Artistic and Cultural Education, University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece

    Vangelis Giannakakis

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Giannakakis, V. Neoliberalism and Culture in Higher Education: On the Loss of the Humanistic Character of the University and the Possibility of Its Reconstitution. Stud Philos Educ 39, 365–382 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-019-09682-z

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