Universities under neoliberalism – market inspired reforms of Swedish higher education

Abstract

The owl of Minerva is known to only fly at dusk. After three decades of more or less unbroken dominance – not even the 2008 financial crisis brought it down (Crouch, 2011) – neoliberalism now sees its foundations seriously eroded. Therefore, there is no reason to reflect on what it has actually meant and entailed, not least for research and higher education. In the anthology Universities Under Neoliberalism, due to be published in March 2023, we have collected texts from six researchers, who from different perspectives shed light on how neoliberalism has shaped academic practices in Sweden (Benner & Holmqvist, 2023). That country is particularly interesting for several reasons. Perhaps the most important is that Sweden is such an unlikely case, as the long-standing bastion of a social democratic model of society (Esping-Andersen, 1990). In Sweden, neoliberal ideals should therefore have had difficulty taking hold, more so than in other systems where market dominance was already enshrined in the social model (Brown & Carasso, 2013; Cole, 2016). Neoliberalism is a broadly and not always very precisely used term. For our part, we see neoliberalism from three perspectives: as ideology, as discourse, and as practice. Ideologically, it is related to changed views of the objectives of organizations and institutions. For example, the universities’ role in society, which once was that of bastions of democracy and safeguards of social mobility, has been shifted in the direction of market conformity – building human capital and being relevant to business, focusing on ‘employability’. As a discourse, Neoliberalism redefines the guiding principles of the task. We can see a shift from intrinsic qualities to externally defined benefits, competitiveness, relevance, and usefulness. Finally, in terms of practices, Neoliberalism is associated with a shift from intrinsic academic principles to governance through objectives and measures defined by others, such as the state, stakeholders, organizations outside the academy’s sphere, with the market emerging as the ultimate reference point. Neoliberalism is therefore not primarily about reducing the size of the state – although this is also an important driving force – but rather about changing it, from acting as a corrective to the market to supporting it and enforcing its logic, including within the state, where universities and colleges in particular can serve as important instruments (Gamble, 1988). For higher education and research, neoliberalism has therefore not primarily meant changes in the role of universities. Although the universities of today have an expanded direct commercial role and function – in Sweden manifested in holding companies and innovation offices, and collaborative units with broad mandates – their main tasks remain education and research. Research is still managed and evaluated primarily according to academic criteria and collegial feedback, through mechanisms such as peer review and citations. Education is also fairly stable – if anything, it has been lifted out of local contexts and is shaped by global (academic) formulas (Drori et al., 2003). However, a closer look, with Sweden as a lens, reveals radical shifts. In her contribution to the book, Ylva Hasselberg highlights how a kind of trivial internationalization has taken hold, where researchers are encouraged by their employers to publish frequently. Confidence in academic judgement and professional competence is limited. Alexandra Söderman and Johan Söderman study how commercialized social media shapes the students’ perceptions, also a kind of trivial internationalization of attention and impact, which is far from a traditional ideal of erudition or Bildung to put it in German. One of the