Knowledge for Sale: The Neoliberal Takeover of Higher Education (Infrastructures)

The Market For Knowledge -- Crises -- Liberalisms And Neoliberalisms -- Beyond Neoliberalisms -- Administration -- Education -- Research -- Public Engagement And Extension -- Consequences -- Can Our Universities And Research Institutions Address These Crises? -- Remembrance Of Things Future: Some Specific Proposals For Change. Lawrence Busch. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 139-155). Contents 8 Preface to the English Language Edition 12 Acknowledgments 20 The Market for Knowledge 22 Crises 24 Climate change 24 Rising and more volatile food prices 25 Water shortages 26 Rising energy costs 26 Widespread obesity 27 Financial crises 28 Liberalisms and Neoliberalisms 32 Human knowledge is always limited 36 An irrefutable logical model can transcend the limits of human knowledge 36 Institutions must be reshaped so as to fit the logical model 38 The ability of States to intervene in markets must be limited 38 Social justice as both a concept and a set of policies is rejected as a mirage 39 Selves are to be reconstructed as isolated and entrepreneurial 39 Beyond Neoliberalisms 42 The self is social 42 Each institution promotes certain kinds of selves and rejects other kinds 43 People, institutions, and things make society together 44 Communities of scholars and invisible colleges are essential to the creation of knowledge 45 Markets are forms of governance 45 Educated citizens are essential for democracy; without democracy, liberty is illusory 47 Addressing the crises that confront us requires that we imagine, debate, and enact new futures 47 Administration 52 Changing roles and increasing numbers of administrators 53 Shift from academics to managers as administrators 60 Creation of administrative careers 60 Growth in salaries of top administrators 60 Growth in advertising and marketing of universities and research institutes 61 Growth in numbers of part-time and temporary (adjunct) faculty 62 Changing sources of university and research institute financial support 63 Universities by the numbers 64 Education 70 From public good to private good 70 Shift from public support for higher education to individual support 73 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs 76 A decline in foreign language instruction 77 Education solely as a means of maximizing one’s salary 78 Growth in testing and standardizing of knowledge 79 Plagiarism 82 Dumbing down higher education 83 Research 86 Counting publications 86 Counting citations 88 Checking prestige of journals 92 Downgrading of books and book chapters 95 Competing for grants 96 Greater incidence of fraud 98 Ghost and honorary authorship 99 Forced citations by journal editors 100 Rising costs of journals as a few publishers corner the market 101 Conflicts of interest in research 102 Changes in intellectual property rights 105 Public Engagement and Extension 112 Decline in public support 113 Growth of private extension-like services 114 Wider gap between research and extension 114 Decline of public interest research 115 Rise of strongly ideological think tanks 115 Consequences 118 Higher education is being rapidly altered 118 Research is more and more dominated by immediate (often economic) ends 119 Increasing corporate domination of the research enterprise 120 Discouraging innovation and high-risk research 121 The university as a growth machine 122 Isolated scholars and organizational solidarity 122 Can Our Universities and Research Institutes Address These Crises 128 What kinds of universities and research institutes do we want 128 How can we grapple with the wicked problems facing us 129 Remembrance of Things Future: Some Specific Proposals for Change 130 Make universities and research institutes (more) secure places 132 Make universities and research institutes into models of democracy, deliberation, and discourse 137 Help build more sustainable societies 139 Better integrate research and education 143 Recognize the importance of slow scholarship 143 Bring the arts and humanities back in 145 Teach each other and various publics 146 Perform differently 147 Conclusion: Toward a Plural World 152 Notes 156 References 160 How free-market fundamentalists have shifted the focus of higher education to competition, metrics, consumer demand, and return on investment, and why we should change this. A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In Knowledge for Sale , Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach. The rationale for the current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. The market-influenced changes to higher education include shifting the cost of education from the state to the individual, turning education from a public good to a private good subject to consumer demand; redefining higher education as a search for the highest-paying job; and turning scholarly research into a competition based on metrics including number of citations and value of grants. Students, administrators, and scholars have begun to think of themselves as economic actors rather than seekers of knowledge. Arguing for active resistance to this takeover, Busch urges us to burst the neoliberal bubble, to imagine a future not dictated by the market, a future in which there is a more educated citizenry and in which the old dichotomies--market and state, nature and culture, and equality and liberty--break down. In this future, universities value learning and not training, scholarship grapples with society's most pressing problems rather than quick fixes for corporate interests, and democracy is enriched by its educated and engaged citizens. A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In "Knowledge for Sale", Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach. The rationale for current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. Arguing for active resistance to this takeover, Bush urges us to burst the neoliberal bubble, to imagine a future not dictated by the market, a future in which there is a more educated citizenry and in which the old dichotomies -- market and state, nature and culture, and equality and liberty -- break down. -- From publisher's description