3. The neoliberal university
✦ The commodification of education: universities are run like
corporate institutions, competing with each other for
(international) students and funds
✦ The skyrocketing of tuition fees: students as consumers
✦ The increase in precarity and casualised labour
✦ Growth of management: the rise of a new generation of
managers from corporate backgrounds (accountants, auditors,
corporate lawyers, public relations, and human resource
practitioners), at the expense of professions associated with
teaching and research
✦ 6 institutions reward their Vice Chancellors a salary of
over £500,000
4. The commodification of education
✦ Between 1992 and 2018, student numbers in the UK doubled:
from 984,000 to 2,3 million
✦ Tuition fees introduced by New Labour in 1998; initially capped
at £1000/year, but rose to £3000 in 2004, and tripled to £9000 in
2010 (replacing government grants)
✦ The average UK graduate carries more than £50,000 in debt
✦ Universities now depend heavily on income from tuition fees
and from their estates (eg rents for student accommodation up
56% over the last 5 years)—Overall an incentive to increase
student numbers while cutting back of research funding, teaching
hours, salaries, and pensions
✦ Sussex increased by 4,000 students over the last 5 years
✦ Real estate developments to attract students—but who pays for
this?
5. Precarity and casualised labour
✦ The number of academic teaching staff rose at about the same
rate as the student population…
✦ …but “almost the entire increase in the number of teaching
staff… is made up of workers who are not full-time, who are
not permanently employed, and who are unsure from semester to
semester whether they will have any teaching at all and if so, how
much” (Parfitt, 2016)
✦ Today 37,000 (24% of) teaching staff are on fixed-term
contracts—most are part-time and hourly paid
✦ Another 71,000 teachers are employed on “atypical” contracts
(meaning they are not visible on the staff record)—typically
hourly paid, part-time, and with few employment rights
✦ UCU estimates that “atypical academics” do 25-30% of all
teaching in most universities; 45% of the work they do is
estimated to be unpaid
✦ The outsourcing of cleaning and catering staff
6. Ultimately…
✦ Average pay for those at the most senior levels have
continued to rise, while support staff suffer pay cuts,
early career researchers are faced with increased
precarity, and students are saddled with skyrocketing
debt
✦ How is this gendered and racialized?
7. Race and gender in higher education
✦ Pay inequality: BAME staff earn significantly less on
average compared to similar white men. The pay
penalties are largest for black men and women, but
are still significant for Asian men and women
✦ White women earn more than all minority ethnic
groups except for Asian men
✦ Over and under-representation: BAME staff
significantly more likely to work in lower grades (on
precarious contracts) and less likely to be employed in
the most senior roles
✦ Only 25 black British female professors (vs
12,000 white male professors and 4,000 white
female professors)
8. Race and gender in higher education
✦ BAME students are less likely to gain admission to
top universities (despite being more likely to leave
school with top grades); once at university they attain
lower grades, are more likely to drop out, and don’t
earn as much afterwards
✦ Hostile environment—visa costs, surveillance,
attendance monitoring, deportability
✦ Prevent—demonisation and surveillance of Muslim
students
✦ Off-shore investments in fossil fuels, prisons, arms
manufacturers etc.
✦ Campus development as an instrument of
dispossession, gentrification, and urban
regeneration—predicated on displacing poor
communities of colour
✦ Transphobic and ableist
9. ✦In spite of this, most analyses of the neoliberal university sideline questions
of race and gender, or treat them as after-thoughts.
✦But… what if racism and sexism are not just accidental co-features, but built
into the institutional core of the university?
10. Rethinking neoliberalism
✦ The standard story of neoliberalism and austerity privileges the
standpoint of the white middle class
✦ But… The conditions that we today identify with neoliberalism—
zero-hour contracts, stagnant real wages, high unemployment,
rising poverty—might be new for those who previously reaped
the benefits of the “wages of whiteness” (Du Bois), but
historically they have been part of the ordinary and everyday
experiences of non-white populations—well before the onset of
neoliberalism
11. Rethinking neoliberalism
✦ Ultimately, what is new about the current conjuncture is not
precarisation per se, but that previously economically privileged
groups increasingly are being “drawn into precarious social and
economic circumstances, in which minority women have always
had to struggle” (Emejulu and Bassel, 2017: 40)
✦ Crucially, increased precarity and lower pay and pensions
continue to disproportionately affect women, people of colour,
and women of colour in particular
12. Racial capitalism
✦ Racial inequality cannot be explained by individual
prejudice alone—it is created, maintained, and reproduced
by the capitalist system
✦ Capitalism has always and everywhere relied on racial and
imperial projects that assign differential value to human
life and labour—such as chattel slavery, settler colonial
dispossession, racialized indentured servitude, and the
exploitation of immigrant labour
✦ There can be no capitalism without racializations—hence
racial capitalism (Cedric Robinson)
✦ Marxist feminism (Federici, Jones, Davis) suggest that the
same is true for sex and gender
✦ What has been the university’s role in upholding and
legitimising this system?
13. The imperial university
✦ The university has never been a bastion of progress,
fairness, and objective learning for the “common good”—to
the contrary, universities have always excluded individuals on
the basis of race, class, gender, citizenship etc.
✦ The history of the university is deeply entangled with the
history of empire, colonialism, and enslavement
✦ In the US, “human slavery was the precondition for the
rise of higher education” (Wilder)
✦ Knowledge-production in the service of colonial and
capitalist exploitation, predicated on the erasure of
Indigenous knowledges (Smith, 1999)—reflected in the
ongoing commitment to Eurocentric and colonial curricula
14. What does all of this mean?
What are the implications?
15. “No nostalgia for the past”
✦ Reclaiming the public university?
✦ “We have no nostalgia for the fabled university of the past,
the mythical ivory tower of meritocracy, civility and white
collegiality: that supposedly utopian place never existed, at
least not for anyone outside the raced, classed and gendered
elite” (The Undercommoning Project)
✦ No nostalgia for the innocent or neutral “Keynesian
university-that-never-was”
✦ What if the recent neoliberal transformation of the university
is not new, but a continuation and intensification of the
capitalist and colonial function that universities have always
had?
16. “No nostalgia for the future”
✦ Those of us who make demands for greater
diversity and inclusion paradoxically share the
starting assumption of our enemies: namely, that
the university is supposed to be a space of
enlightened thought and meritocracy
✦ But what if the university is not perfectible? What
if it can’t be “fixed” or “repaired”?
✦ “The fully racialized social and epistemological
architecture upon which the modern university is
built cannot be radically transformed by ‘simply’
adding darker faces, safer spaces, better training,
and a curriculum that acknowledges historical
and contemporary oppressions. This is a bit like
asking for more black police officers as a strategy
to curb state violence” (Kelley, 2016)
✦ What if the university is not the opposite of the
prison, but they are two sides of the same coin?
17. The undercommons
✦ Give up on the university, but do not give up on learning?
✦ The undercommons as a mode of study, resistance, and
subversion which has always been central to Black
radicalism
✦ A bottom-up, autonomous, and collective style of learning for
radical social change that “exists within, outside and in spite
of the university” (The Undercommoning Project)
✦ Those who are in, but not of, the university: precarious
academics, students, cleaners, librarians, administrative support
staff etc. who “refuse to ask for recognition and instead want to
take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now,
limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to
access the places we know lie beyond its walls” (Harney and
Moten, 2013)
18. “THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO
THE UNIVERSITY TODAY IS A CRIMINAL
ONE
/… /
It cannot be denied that the university is a place of
refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university
is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these
conditions one can only sneak into the university
and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to
spite its mission, join its refugee colony, its gypsy
encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of
the subversive intellectual in the modern
university.”
19. Bibliography
Bassel, Leah and Emejulu, Akwugo (2017) Minority Women and Austerity.
Chakravartty, Paula and da Silva, Denise Ferreira (2012) “Accumulation,
Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism”, American
Quarterly, 64:3
Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and
Black Study.
Kelley, Robin D.G. (2016) “Black Study, Black Struggle”, Boston Review.
Parfitt, Steven (2018) “Lecturers on Strike”, The Jacobin.
Robinson, Cedric (1983) Black Marxism.
Smith, Linda Tuwahi (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples.
The Undercommoning Project, www.undercommoning.org
