NEOLIBERALISM AND THE UNIVERSITY

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of a problem that, despite its relevance, due to a strange combination of circumstances, quite rarely attracts the attention of scientists as a direct research object. The essence of this problem is that neoliberalism as a theory and practice is academic in origin. Its history can well be presented as a series of individual and collective “university projects”, the initiators of which were quite clearly aware of their political component. By its nature, “academic neoliberalism” was initially an international phenomenon. The formation of neoliberalism as an “intellectual network” was initially associated with ideologically oriented projects directed against the ideas of a planned economy and collectivism. It is also an important historical fact that the role of the university as an incubator of ideologies was initially endorsed, if not supported, by the state itself in its attempts to formulate a systematic secular definition of its own powers and prerogatives. The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s-1990s. fundamentally changed public institutions and traditional universities. Within a few short decades, the social democratic model, which views education as a fundamental human right, was replaced by a commercialized neoliberal university based on the principles of rationality and individual preference characteristic of an updated version of homo economicus. The neoliberal concept of education initially contradicted the goals and objectives of the university, substantiated in the works of J.H. Newman, M. Oakeshott, A. Flexner, M. Adler, K. Jaspers, K. Kerr, J. Pelikan. It should be recognized that in modern political theory at the moment the problem of overcoming the “neoliberal syndrome”, as well as political practices that constantly provoke the latter, is so far being solved mainly at the level of intellectual projects, which often have precisely a utopian “context”.

Keywords:

neoliberalism, university, politics, education, state, democracy, ideology, bureaucracy, habitus, utopia