ABSTRACT
Two trends since the 1970s have resulted in a drastic re-tooling of university space. The first is marketization, defined as ‘the process by which the state uses market principles and disciplinary apparatuses to create greater efficiencies in non-market institutions’ (Canaan and Shumer 4).1 The second is a step-change in the production of academic capitalism, understood as the way in which university faculty increasingly are made to adopt market-like behaviours – in particular, internecine competition for funding provided by bodies external to the university, and (self-) branding as a way of academic life (Slaughter and Leslie). Both trends have had profound effects on the three kinds of labour conven-
tionally associated with universities: teaching and learning, research, and administration. The most dramatic effect can be seen in the conversion of students into ‘consumers,’ which, while conferring upon them certain ‘rights’ and powers, severely curtails their engagement with the kind of critical thinking that is fundamental to higher education. As Thomas Docherty and others have argued in the UK context, the paranoid focus on ‘student experience’ works to foreclose the possibility of any meaningful learning. A similar effect can be seen on the teaching side of the equation, perhaps most obviously in the area of examination. Docherty suggests that in today’s university, exams operate more as tactics of ‘containing’ intellectual enquiry and ‘managing’ information than of genuinely testing knowledge (7, 20). Instrumentalization of teaching is mirrored in instrumentalization of research.
