How Public Is Public Higher Education? Challenging the Neoliberal Rationality Crisis in Higher Education

• In Event: 35.082 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 35.082-11 - Austerity Education and the Pedagogies of Debt

Abstract

This paper examines the current outcomes of reforms in higher education within the context of neoliberal policies. In so doing, the paper dissects how, within commonsense, the neoliberal ideological matrix unleashes a rationality crisis that underpins the financial asphyxiation of public higher education. The discussion also frames such fabricated crisis within the dated framework of Western Eurocentric modernity. That is Western Eurocentric modernity per se is an exhausted model to question, let alone to address the major issues addressing not only society, but also specifically one of its towering ideological/repressive apparatuses, such as higher education institutions, thus shaking the very political meaning of public education. As a clear evidence of how neoliberal policies and practices fail, we end our approach arguing that the challenge of the current rationality crisis in Higher Education – which is an ideological matrix – implies that one begins from the beginning, initiating a real global public higher education, a system that champions the struggle for social and cognitive justice.

Author

• João Menelau Paraskeva, University of Massachusetts