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.
