ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism creates conditions for teachers and students which have many negative effects, including the lack of attention to students’ interests, saviorism and sentimentality, epistemological hegemony, alienation, and (self)-marginalization. It also fixates higher education on such concerns as swift completion, job placement, and homogenized approaches, and for public universities and colleges, often within the context of austerity. Neoliberal higher education is also characterized by material conditions such as larger class sizes, increased faculty workloads, over-reliance on an adjunct workforce, and a top-down, management-heavy hierarchical structure. Despite their distinct missions to provide higher education access to historically marginalized groups, community colleges are not immune to neoliberal policies. This chapter examines an urban community college in Connecticut and its 12-college system. It demonstrates how negative effects of neoliberalism shown in the scholarship manifest themselves in this open-enrollment context. The chapter also demonstrates how critical pedagogy provides practices to resist the oppressive forces of neoliberal higher education.
