Towards a pedagogy of Justice: The role of academic faculty in resisting neoliberalism in the university and beyond.

The following is an essay from my MA course, given the news today in the UK around "free-speech" in universities I felt it timely to publish this. I've been meaning to publish it for some time, especially following the Insurrection attempt in the US. I often see people online claiming that "education" is what's needed to counter Far-right, neoliberalism; in this essay I hope I show that this claim is not true under our current education systems.

In this essay I argue that academic faculty have a key role to play in the undermining and eventual destruction of Neoliberalism. First, I define what I mean by neoliberalism, and provide some background to how it became the hegemonic global economic theory (Harvey, 2005).  I show that the rise of neoliberalism was not a natural evolution of economic theory but the Power Elite’s (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) backlash to the social justice movements of the 1960s (Harvey, 2005; Giroux, 2017; Chomsky, della Chiesa and Gardner, 2013). I show how the early neoliberalists targeted education and universities as a cornerstone in their plans to ensure their own economic and social power (Sum and Jessop, 2013; Giroux, 2005). I show how neoliberalism operates pedagogically, with education conceptualised under the ‘banking model’ and how the neoliberal call for ‘more educated populace’ is lip-service, meaning they want a populace that has been provided with the ‘right kind of education’ (Freire, 1974; Jessop, 2007; Chomsky, della Chiesa and Gardner, 2013; Sum and Jessop, 2013; Kauppinen, 2014; Swann, 2019). I provide a picture of what marketisation and neoliberal attacks on universities have done to academic staff, and to pedagogical practice in general (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004; Olssen and Peters, 2007; Sum and Jessop, 2013; Jabbar et al., 2018; Noble and Ross, 2019b; Swann, 2019; Tuckett, 2019). I outline the effects this neoliberalisation of education has had on wider society and democracy (Giroux, 2005, 2017). Finally, I present a picture of another way - of resisting, reclaiming, and reinventing Higher Education in order to work towards a more just society.

 The term ‘Neoliberalism’ has been used extensively in the Social Sciences; a search for the term on the JSTOR database returns just over 22,500 entries. The popularity of the term, and how it is used within Social Sciences is worthy of some attention; Venugopal (2015) argues that, within the Social Sciences, many researchers are using the term without defining what they mean. He argues that ‘Neoliberalism’ refers to an economic theory, but its use within the social sciences has come to be as a “…rhetorical device through which those outside mainstream economics grasp, label and attach moral sensibility to a range of contemporary economic, social, political, spatial and cultural phenomena” (ibid, p182). Furthermore, according to Venugopal (2015), the term is not used at all by Economists, or by those supposed proponents of it, such that it “..serves as a rhetorical tool and moral device for critical social scientists outside of economics to conceive of… a range of economic phenomena… which they cannot otherwise grasp or evaluate” (ibid, p183). Venugopal (2015) bases this argument on what he says are contradictory critiques of ‘neoliberalism’ by Social Scientists as both the ‘pursuit of economic growth’ and ‘the blind pursuit of market solutions’. What Venugopal (2015) fails to understand is that ‘neoliberalism’ is not a term that simply refers to an economic theory, but is a moral, political, and pedagogical ideology. Harvey (2005, p2) defines it thus:

 

“Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”

 

The contradictions which Venugopal (2015) identifies in the critiques of Social Scientists are in fact part of this same ideology and have been ‘baked in’ to the concept from its inception (Harvey, 2005; Sum and Jessop, 2013).

Neoliberalism developed in the 1970s in response to the economic decline that was taking place - the end of the 1960s saw a rise in unemployment and rising inflation which brought about a phase of global ‘stagflation’ (Harvey, 2005; Sum and Jessop, 2013). The Keynesian economics of the post-war period were now no longer producing the kinds of benefits they once had (Harvey, 2005). These Neoliberal Economists embraced Hayekian economics and argued that the state could never have the same level information on ‘matters of investment and capital accumulation’ as that which is contained in ‘market signals’ (Harvey, 2005). Following ‘experiments’ with neoliberal governance in Mexico, Chile, and New York, the Regan administration in the USA and the Thatcher government in the UK began to embrace neoliberal economic policies (Harvey, 2005).

Neoliberalism became the Hegemonic global economic policy following the ‘purge’ of all Keynesian influences at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1982 (Harvey, 2005). Under neoliberalism, there has been a massive increase in Financialisaton, through a combination of technological advances and reduction or elimination of regulations (Harvey, 2005). The Power Elite had succeeded in creating an economic system which was “…associated with the restoration or reconstruction of [their] power…” (ibid, p19). However, this did not necessarily mean the restoration of power to the same people. Under neoliberalism, the Power Elite becomes the CEOs and top businessmen, technological entrepreneurs and media moguls (for example Rupert Murdoch) (ibid).

     In order to ensure the political power of the Neoliberals, there was a necessity to convince the voting populace to support neoliberal economics and politics: The ‘Power Elite’ had created an economic system which would benefit them, but it would come at the expense of the masses. Early neoliberals were cunning in the manufacture of consent (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) for their new economic order - they appealed to ideals of ‘individual freedom’ and ‘individual rights’. They then framed all state intervention as imposing ‘restrictions’ on these personal freedoms. Furthermore, they argued that the best way to guarantee these freedoms is through freedom of the market and free trade (Harvey, 2005). Austerity was framed as the only solution to the economic crisis, and through stories in the press of ‘welfare queens driving Cadillac’s consent for dismantling of the welfare system was obtained (Harvey, 2005). This was repeated following the economic crash of 2008, with the Coalition Government in the UK bailing out the banks; whilst simultaneously cutting benefits for the disabled. The media colluded with this, through the publication of hundreds of stories of ‘benefits cheats’ and through the creation of television programmes such as ‘Benefits Street’ which were edited in such a way as to preserve the narrative of the ‘undeserving’, feckless, and lazy poor (for more on this see my previous pose: https://thepsychologysuper-computer.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-uk-medias-complicity-in-suffering.html).

     Furthermore, the myth of meritocracy or ‘The American Dream’ is used by neoliberals to entice the masses into ignoring the structural disadvantages that neoliberal policy imposes on them (Giroux, 2014). The focus on individual rights, also means individual responsibility and so people who are poor simply are not working hard enough: Poverty is seen as a consequence of moral weakness, laziness, or stupidity (ibid). Work is seen as the answer to poverty, and ‘hard-work’ is seen as signifying virtue within the neoliberal moral sphere (ibid). This can be seen in action in the current Covid-19 crisis in the anti-lockdown protests happening across the United States: These people are protesting because they need to go to work in order to avoid poverty; but rather than question why the economic order requires them to risk their lives in order to survive, they see state protections against the virus as an imposition on their individual freedoms.

 

 

The Neoliberals and Education

Although neoliberalism was presented by its proponents as a solution to the economic issues of the late 1970s, this was not the primary motivation of the Power Elite: neoliberalism also represents a backlash against the social justice movements of the late 1960s (Harvey, 2005). Communist and Socialist parties were gaining ground throughout Europe and even in the US there were calls for reforms and state interventions, as Harvey (2005, p15) states “[t]here was, in this, a clear political threat to economic elites and ruling classes everywhere…”. Early neoliberals recognised that universities were a key site in their battle against these political threats to their power. Thus began the ‘neoliberal war on higher education’ - a war designed to undermine education as a public good and with the purpose of creating critical democratic citizens (Giroux, 2014; Giroux, 2005; Freire, 1974); to replace it with education as ‘training’ to meet the demands of the changing labour market (Sum and Jessop, 2013; Giroux, 2014).

 Two documents from the U.S. present the clearest and best evidence for the neoliberal attack on Education (and higher education in particular): The Trilateral Commission’s “Crisis of Democracy” (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki, 1975) and ‘The Powell Memo’ (Powell, 1971). (NB. whether the aims outlined in these documents have been successful, is debatable; but what I am arguing here is not about their success, rather that these documents provide evidence that Neoliberals understand the importance of Higher Education in democracy). In a 2013 panel discussion (Chomsky, della Chiesa and Gardner, 2013), Noam Chomsky referred to these respectively, as the ‘soft-side’ and ‘harsh-side’ of the backlash against the social justice movements of the 1960s.

The “Crisis of Democracy” (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki, 1975) presents educational institutions as being ‘the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young’ and argues that throughout the 1960s and 70s these institutions had been failing to ‘properly indoctrinate’ the young (Chomsky, della Chiesa and Gardner, 2013).

 The Powell (1971) memo goes much further and is excoriating in its critique of university campuses. Originally intended to be a confidential memo written to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; this document outlines in specific detail the issues that the Power Elite have with the current economic and political climate, and how to go about changing this. Powell (1971) argues that the free-enterprise system in the United States was under threat, and that in order to combat it businessmen, and other economic elites need to come together to fight back. He then states that universities are ‘…the single most dynamic source’ of this attack and singles out the Social Sciences as particularly unsympathetic. Powell (1971) recognised the important role that universities play in society; he understood that universities teach the next generation and that this new generation of graduates were taking roles in the business world, politics, and policy. Powell (1971) argues that this next generation are being taught hostility to the ‘free-enterprise system’ and that consequently when they reach positions of power and influence, they will undermine it.

 What is perhaps most disturbing about the Powell memo (1971) is the detailed, step-by-step plan it lays out for the take-over of universities. Powell (1971) details exactly how the business elite should infiltrate universities - through having ‘experts’ who support free-enterprise installed in teaching, research and speaking roles; influence on text books and curriculum; putting pressure on university administrations to ensure ‘balance’ in their academic staff, through hiring more pro-business academics; and so on. Powell (1971) also acknowledged the need for the pro-business message to be presented to the public at large, and so outlined steps to take over both the media and scholarly journals. Powell (1971) states that the Power Elite already have the means to exert these pressures - they have the money which funds research, etc; they own the media outlets; they fund political candidates and campaigns; etc.

Reading the Powell Memo (1971) from today’s perspective it is clear to see how his plan was actioned. It is hard not to think that the Elite were successful in their take-over of the media and are very close to complete control of higher education. But the neoliberal war on education was not just about influencing teaching so that students are pro-business; it was also about a larger pedagogical project to undermine the democratic purpose of education (Giroux, 2014).

 

The ‘right kind’ of education

     Neoliberalism is predicated upon Schumpeterian notions of ‘creative destruction’ with a focus on innovation and the rise of the ‘Knowledge Based Economy’ (Harvey, 2005; Sum and Jessop, 2013). Early neoliberals recognised the need for a more educated populace in order to compete economically in a changing technological world (Harvey, 2005; Sum and Jessop, 2013).”

However, the focus of this education is important to the pedagogical project of neoliberalism; in this pedagogy education has come to mean ‘training’ (Giroux, 2014) (or what Freire (1974) referred to as ‘the banking model’ of education) and ‘knowledge’ has been replaced with ‘information’, in order to successfully commodify higher education (Kauppinen, 2014). Academic faculty have colluded with this commodification of ‘knowledge’ through their acceptance of their institutions using Intellectual Property Rights to marketise knowledge, and through their complicity in using this for their own entrepreneurial ends (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). This has been most common in Science, Technology and Medical fields, but also extends into the social sciences through the patenting/copywriting of standardised measures - a practice that is becoming increasingly common in Psychology for example. In neoliberal education all knowledge is ‘know-what’ knowledge, rather than ‘know-how’ and ‘know-who’. The former presents learning as solely about facts being transferred from ‘teacher’ to ‘student’; whereas the latter presents learning as developing skills in critical thinking, citizenship and solidarity (Kauppinen, 2014). As Giroux (2014, p6) states, “Critical learning has been replaced with mastering test-taking, memorizing facts, and learning how not to question knowledge or authority. Pedagogies that unsettle common sense, make power accountable, and connect classroom knowledge to larger civic issues have become dangerous at all levels of schooling”. In the panel discussion mentioned earlier scholar Bruno della Chiesa argues that neoliberals need to ‘raise educational standards, but not too far’, because a truly educated populace would be ‘too dangerous’ for the power elite (Chomsky, della Chiesa and Gardner, 2013).

 Through framing education in this way, neoliberals have realised their project of undermining higher education as a public sphere: they have successful commodified and designated higher education as personal, individual benefits (Giroux, 2014). This pedagogical project has allowed for the increase (and in the UK, the introduction) of student-fees; predicated on the argument that since a degree confers personal benefits (in terms of higher-earnings in the global labour market), then individuals should bear the cost of their own education. This slight-of-hand trick has also allowed neoliberals to increasingly exert influence over what and how academic faculty teach. In this marketised system, ‘value-for-money’ and ‘employability’ become taglines for the creation of new metrics, increasingly used to enforce changes in curriculum that benefit corporate interests. The Research Excellence Framework, the National Student Survey and the Teaching Excellence Framework are examples of these metrics within the UK; these metrics determine funding, student numbers and factor into staff performance evaluations.

This move to metrics and measurable outcomes of higher education provision is also being used to undermine particular subjects within higher education: the social sciences and humanities have come under increasing attack in recent years, with some disciplines on the verge of being completely eradicated (Swann, 2019). These tend to be the subjects and disciplines most linked to creating critical thinking citizens, such as Women’s Studies, Race Studies, Disability Studies, Philosophy, etc (Evans, 2019): subjects which have been dubbed “grievance studies” by the US right-wing (Mounk et al., 2018).

The reliance on ‘metrics’ and enshrining of quantitative measurements also has consequences on the types of knowledge which are considered valid. In the panel discussion della Chiesa refers to the “quantophrenia” of the Social Sciences; the move by the social scientists to rely on quantitative methods ‘in order to look more serious, like the natural sciences’. This obsession with numbers, della Chiesa goes on to argue, then produces research which is always only at a ‘surface’ level; it discourages any further in-depth analysis of what those numbers mean (Chomsky, della Chiesa and Gardner, 2013). This translates into research which can, for example, tell us how many people live below a certain level of poverty, but the idea of asking ‘why?’ those people are poor is considered radical.

  

The neoliberal university

Neoliberal marketisation of higher education is a global problem, from countries like the United States and Britain, to developing nations like Brazil, marketisation has become the chief organising principle of higher education policy (Tuckett, 2019). This has myriad negative effects on students, not least of which, the effect of encumbering them with huge amounts of debt upon graduation. But the effects on academic faculty are perhaps more prescient in discussions of the neoliberal pedagogical project. Marketisation has undermined the role of academic faculty in numerous ways; through metrics, increasingly impossible workloads, increased competition, pressure to publish, increased casualisation of the academic workforce and the clarion call of ‘student satisfaction’ (Knights and Richards, 2003a; Olssen and Peters, 2007; Wright, Cooper and Luff, 2017). Alongside this is the managerialism (Atkins and Vicars, 2016) and increased bureaucratic/administrative bloat that comes with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) behaving increasingly like profit making corporations (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004).

 In a marketised system HEIs are forced to compete for funding, from student fees, from research councils/funding bodies, and from the private sector (Sum and Jessop, 2013). These factors have an impact on what academic faculty teach and research: Constraints on teaching come from the requirement to recruit enough students to a course, with courses that do not recruit enough students being closed. Furthermore, the need to ensure ‘student satisfaction’ and it’s links to academic faculty’s career progression (Knights and Richards, 2003b; van den Brink and Benschop, 2011) mean that academic faculty are more pedagogically cautious in their offerings (Williams, 2011). Academic staff do not present more challenging or potentially ‘uncomfortable’ or controversial topics to the student body through fear of reprisals in their student evaluations. The shift to the ‘student as consumer’ model of higher education has created a model where students feel that since they are paying for their education they have the right to make demands of their academic faculty (Tomlinson 2017).

     The obsession of neoliberal HEIs with student satisfaction is even more problematic than it first appears. There are numerous metrics and systems used by HEIs to assess levels of student satisfaction, from small measures such as ‘module evaluation forms’ through to the NSS (at least in the UK). The problem is, that these measures are designed by people who think they know what students want. For the most part UK HEI leadership and recruitment teams have adopted the mind-set of ‘student as consumer’ and believe that students share this mind-set; this influences policy and practices within individual HEIs but also across the sector. The UK government has embraced a rhetoric of ensuring ‘value-for-money’ from university courses. However, value-for-money is determined by things such as contact/teaching time, degree classifications and graduate employment. The assumption is that all students now perceive their higher education as a cost of ensuring good employment and high earnings; the obtaining of a degree is solely about ensuring access to high earning positions on graduation and the ability for a certain type of consumer lifestyle (Giroux, 2003; Haywood, Jenkins and Molesworth, 2011). Several researchers have recently explored the links between marketisation and student expectations, and their findings indicate that for the most part students do not adopt a consumer mind-set towards their education, they do not see themselves primarily as ‘consumers’ of education and the things that they actually value and expect are the things that are not easily measured in standardised metrics - things like collaborative working, social impact, learning for its own sake (not just to get a job) and so on (see for example, Saunders, 2014; Borghi, Mainardes and Silva, 2016).

     Academic research is constrained in a similar fashion: through limited funding, academic faculty are forced to compete for research grants from funding councils, charities and private corporations. For some subject areas, any kind of research requires funding (Swann, 2019); for example, in pharmaceutical and medical research it is common for corporations to fund research. This requirement to obtain funding means that academic faculty have less control over what they choose to research - these decisions are constrained by the whims and fancy of research funders. In some cases, this even extends to the publication of results, with pharmaceutical companies often not publishing findings of research that show their products to be ineffective (Goldacre, 2012). Even in those subjects where funding is not a requirement to carry out research (such as philosophy), academic faculty are often required to find funding in order to ‘buy out’ time from their teaching (Noble and Ross, 2019a). Competition for research grants is fierce, and academic faculty spend large amounts of time preparing applications, for very little return (since success rates for grant applications are so low). If faculty cannot get funding for their research then they are forced to conduct research in their own time (Noble and Ross, 2019a). A good research profile is essential to academic career progression, and the advent of the REF in the UK, has meant that publishing research is part of academic faculty’s performance monitoring. Furthermore, Noble and Ross (2019) argue that the REF also encourages academic faculty to ‘split’ publications: if the requirement is to publish three papers per year, then there is a motivation to separate a longer, more in-depth paper into smaller papers to meet this target.

     Given that academic career progression is tied to publications (in the right journals), good teaching evaluations, and general student satisfaction (van den Brink and Benschop, 2011)); it is easy to see that all of these factors make for a hostile and stressful working environment for academic faculty. Add to this the fact that the academic workforce is increasingly becoming ‘casualised’ with the rise of short-term teaching only contracts, short-term research contracts, and even outsourcing of temporary academic staff to agencies (for example, UniTemps) (Noble and Ross, 2019a) and you have an academic faculty that “…feel underpaid, pressured, demoralised and demotivated” (Jabbar, Analoui, Kong, et al., 2018, p95). These conditions are creating an ever more competitive environment in academe: faculty compete for students, for grants, for publication in the best journals, for permanent posts (Olssen and Peters, 2005; Wright, Cooper and Luff, 2017), and for prestige (Bagilhole and Goode, 2011). This creates an environment of hyper-individualism, and a system where success is based on ‘survival of the fittest’ (Giroux, 2014). Given this, it would be plausible to argue for the presence of so-called ‘Successful Psychopaths’ (Hare, 1993) within University leadership teams. Hare’s work on so-called ‘Successful Psychopaths’ has demonstrated the existence of vast numbers of Psychopaths at the top of many leading professions - top businessmen, lawyers, doctors, bankers - all meet the criteria used to identify psychopaths (for example see, Hare, 1993). However, in a recent article Forster and Lund (2018) found that there are almost no published papers examining psychopathic traits in university leaders. Foster and Lund (2018) found a plethora of research in the business and corporate worlds, but academe was almost entirely absent. In a Times Higher Education article about their research they stated that this was due to researchers being warned off conducting this type of research, being told it would be ‘career suicide’ (Lund and Forster, 2020).

  

Consequences of neoliberalism

    Harvey (2005) states that thirty years of neoliberalism have “…not only restored power to a narrowly defined capitalist class. They have also produced immense concentrations of corporate power in energy, the media, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and even retailing” (p38). With neoliberalism the hegemonic global economic discourse for the last 3 decades, we have had sufficient time to assess the impact of its policies on economies, politics and people’s lives.

     Firstly, there have been huge increases in the gap between the richest and poorest 5th of the world’s populations: from a gap of 30-1 in the 1960s, to 74-1 in 1997 (Harvey, 2005). In the UK the share of national income of the top 1% of earners has increased from 6.5% to 13% since 1982 (Harvey, 2005). In the early 2000s the Occupy Wall Street movement brought to the world’s attention that the top 1% hold 44% of the world’s wealth (Global Inequality - Inequality.org, no date). The current Covid-19 crisis is putting this inequality in stark contrast, with recent reports that Jeff Bezos is set to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2026, despite the massive economic impact of the virus (Sonnemaker, 2020).

     Secondly, the neoliberal take-over of the media means that the Power Elite can control the messages that people receive: Manufacturing consent (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) today is easier than it has ever been; with many, many more channels through which neoliberal propaganda can be pushed to the general populace. This take over and manufacture of consent is so complete that people today find it difficult to even consider an alternative to neoliberal policy (Giroux, 2014). The ‘economic imaginaries’ (Sum and Jesssop, 2013) of the modern day have become so limited that anything other than free market capitalism is eschewed as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’; under the current climate, the Keynesian economics of the post-war period are seen as crazy, left-wing nonsense (Giroux, 2014).

     Thirdly, the combination of the concentration of such a huge proportion of wealth in such a small number of people, along with control of the media has meant that the Power Elite now have a “disproportionate influence over… the political process…” (Harvey, 2005, p38). Henry Giroux in numerous papers, books and speeches has argued that neoliberalism is undermining democracy and that “citizenship has increasingly become a function of consumerism…” (Giroux, 2005, p2). The good neoliberal citizen is one who is indoctrinated with neoliberal ideals of individual rights, individual responsibilities, and the ‘freedom of choice’; one who demonstrates their success through rampant consumerism and a drive for more and more material possessions and wealth. Furthermore, everything the good neoliberal citizen does must in some way be ‘profit generating’, such that even hobbies are monetised and made into income streams (such as the sale of handmade goods on sites like Etsy). As Giroux (2005, p2) puts it: “Under neoliberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit”.

     Fourth, the neoliberal focus on ‘individualism’ is creating a society which is more and more selfish (Giroux, 2014), to the point where the renowned Forensic Psychologist and Psychopathy expert, Robert Hare (when asked at a conference) confirmed that he did believe society is becoming more Psychopathic (Dutton, 2012).

     Finally, neoliberalism has caused a rise in fascism and right-wing Christian extremism (Giroux, 2005; Harvey, 2005). Harvey (2005) argues that early neoliberal proponents used ‘common sense’ (in the Gramscian sense of the phrase) in order to manufacture consent for their economic and political agenda. They did this through “…mobilising racism, xenophobia, sexism and religious extremism…” in order to mask their political intentions. This can be seen recently in the US and the UK. Donald Trump’s election campaign used outright racism, along with racist dog whistles in order to galvanise populist support. Similarly, Nigel Farage’s use of an image of Refugees during the Brexit referendum in the UK, used this same tactic. Giroux in a speech in 2017 argues that the election of Donald Trump as US President is the clearest example of the negative consequences of neoliberal politics:

 

“Trump is the living symbol and embodiment of a political catastrophe made visible in the plague of a growing culture of unbridled and naked selfishness. The systemic erosion of public goods, the collapse of civic institutions, and a ruinous anti-intellectualism, that supports a contempt for evidence and reason, that has been decades in the making…”.

Neoliberal pedagogy

The war on higher education has had devasting effects within academe, for both staff and students: the constant push for recruitment means that there have been increases in course cohort sizes, but the need to keep costs low means that there have not been concomitant increases in staffing: meaning that ever larger groups of students are being taught by ever small proportions of academic faculty; students are encumbered with massive debts which force them into employment in order to pay back their loans; staff are over-worked, stressed and in trying to survive in a highly competitive environment, they are constrained in what and how they teach and are increasingly being forced into ‘cookie-cutter’ pedagogical models similar to the ‘teach-to-test’ ethos of compulsory education in the UK.

 But this undermining of higher education has consequences for broader society and democracy: for a democracy to function, citizens need to be able to think critically and to hold power to account (Giroux, 2014). Under neoliberalism, education has been reduced to ‘training’ and critical thinking has become something to deride - how else to explain the rise of terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’? This lack of critical consciousness in the general populace creates an environment where the voting masses are easily manipulated. Manufacturing consent (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) is easier than ever, with a voting populace that does not have the critical thinking skills or the consciousness of their own oppression, to challenge the Power Elite. As Freire (1974) argues, the oppressed internalise the image of the oppressor, and without “Conscientização” (that is education as the raising of critical consciousness) they will act in ways which benefit the oppressor, even if that is against their own interests. This has produced a political climate which is ripe for authoritarianism and fascism to rise.

 

A pedagogy of justice

The neoliberals and the Power Elite have always known the power of Higher Education and academic faculty in shaping society, it explains their current attack on HE and on intellectualism in general. In order to defeat neoliberalism, current and future academic faculty need to: resist the marketisation of higher education and its consequences within their own institutions; reclaim the university as a public good, and defend what they do to a public that has nothing invested in higher education; and finally, to reinvent higher education, to create truly co-operative learning and learning as “Conscientização”, with the aim of creating citizens for whom the world is ‘never just enough’ (Giroux, 2017).

 Education as being critical to democracy is not a new idea within the British context, the 1919 Report on Adult Education states: “…ADULT EDUCATION IS A PERMANENT NATIONAL NECESSITY, AN INSEPERABLE ASPECT OF CITIZENSHIP, AND THEREFORE SHOULD BE BOTH UNIVERSAL AND LIFELONG” (emphasis in the original, cited in Noble and Ross, 2019, p252). There is a rich history of co-operative movements working with academics, going back to the ‘university extension movement’ and its links to co-operatives such as The Rochdale Pioneers (Woodin, 2019).

 The co-operative model could also be used to reshape research within the neoliberal university; academic faculty can apply co-operative principles to research methodology, to funding, etc (Swann, 2019). There are already academics who are researching and proposing new ways to fund research, and co-operative models in other fields provide good examples of how this can be done: crowdfunding sites such as ‘Experiment’ allow researchers to conceive of new ways to fund their research. Others have suggested a sliding scale membership fee for a research co-operative which would then share funding with members (Swann, 2019). At the more radical end, there are those who are arguing for a ‘universal basic income’ type model for research funding (Vaesen and Katzav, 2017). 

     Within the UK, The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 provides an opportunity for the creation of a new, radical HEI (Noble and Ross, 2019b). There is already a Co-operative College, and a movement to create a Co-operative University, with a federated model much like the Mondragon institution in Spain (Benson and Ross, 2019). International examples of co-operative universities already exist and provide lessons on how best to achieve the aims and values of truly co-operative higher education in the UK

 

 

Conclusion

As universities are “institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young” (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki, 1975) they are a key site in the fight against neoliberalism. Academic faculty (and others) who believe in higher education not just as a public good, but as an inalienable right for any democratic citizen, need to be able to defend this position against those with no stake in higher education (Giroux, 2003) . We need to be able to argue that higher education should be publicly funded and available to all. We need to defend education for its own sake, and for raising of critical consciousness. We need to be able to show how this type of education benefits everyone in society and so is worth paying for: not just for the economic competitiveness advantages it confers, but for its ability to constrain authoritarianism, to hold the Power Elite to account, to fight for and pursue social justice, and the end of oppression (Freire, 1974). We need to reclaim higher education as a public good, we need to fight for our students right to tuition free education and we need to aim for a radical pedagogy which raises consciousness and creates critically thinking citizens.

 Academics have the power to shape the next generation of young people, instilling them with values that they then take out into the wider world. So, let us teach them values which bring about a more just society; let us make them critical thinkers able and, more importantly, willing to hold power to account; let us arm them with the knowledge they need to understand their position in the world, to be able to see and name their oppressions and to be able to fight those same oppressions. Let us create a generation for whom ‘society is never just enough’ (Giroux, 2017).

References

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