The Making of the Neoliberal University in Britain

Abstract

The making of the neoliberal university in Britain did not inevitably follow the apparent crisis of welfare capitalism that accelerated from the late 1960s, or the structural adjustment program instituted by the International Monetary Fund in 1976, or the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. It was not until the 1990s that a variety of discourses and practices—that were not reducible to a set of class interests, ideologies, or political formations—gradually marketized, privatized, and financialized higher education in Britain. In doing so they sought to establish a new type of academic subject and an economized common sense about the purpose, management, and experience of higher education. That common sense has been challenged by protests around rising student debt and the degradation of faculty pensions, which have both highlighted the precarious conditions of labor for those who teach and study at British universities.