ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the origins of the university as enterprise, and how enterprise and entrepreneurial are used in relation to universities and students in official documents and to what effect. It describes how enterprise displaces the economic reality of reduced funding on to another plane with specific ideological intentions. The chapter traces the origins of this use of enterprise to international bodies and national states that have authorized enterprise in higher education for their own specific interests. It also traces the source of the neoliberal keyword enterprise to influential think tanks and to Irish state bodies. Austerity reinforces a concealment of the original cause of the crisis, vividly illustrating the tight cross-over between ideology and language. When the language is objected to as part of a general critique of the privatization of universities, it is met with a sympathetic response and critiques of neoliberal language are often an integral part of campaigns to defend the public university.
