Black Feminism and the Failures of the Contemporary “Neoliberal” University Critique

Abstract

This article interrogates critiques of the contemporary university elaborated by scholars under the umbrella of critical university studies (CUS) by grappling with the theoretical and conceptual commitments to neoliberalism as a framework to discuss the political economy of higher education and its concomitant practices. Through a Black feminist critique of CUS’s engagements with the “neoliberal function” of higher education, this article suggests the inability of neoliberalism as an analytical frame to consider the history of colonization and chattel slavery in the structuring of the contemporary university. Put another way, the emphasis on neoliberalism in many cultural critiques of the contemporary university disallows an analysis of Black fungibility as the internal logic of neoliberalism and the necessary relation that stabilizes the modern university and allows for the reproduction of post-slavery university subjects. Specifically, this argument coheres to the materialized scene of the university as a site of struggle. Reading Black student leaders’ denigration of the university through a Black feminist lens, this article invites a reconfiguration of the contemporary university critique that both constitutes the current neoliberal paradigm and exceeds the onto-epistemic configurations of the educational subject that enable the emergence of the “neoliberal critique” of the university itself.