Différance in the Differentials: A Deconstructive Reading of Differential Tuition

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 1:45 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Temporalities, Difference, and Educational Futures

Abstract

This argument approaches the postsecondary finance policy of differential tuition, a policy charging different rates based on academic major, through a Derridean lens to interrogate the policy’s ideological underpinnings. Rather than working within the typical economic framework for critiquing the equity effects of the policy, deconstruction allows examination of how differential tuition inscribes market-based values onto degrees, privileging some while devaluing others, and a deconstructive method further exposes instabilities in the meaning of value upon which the tuition policy depends. Absence haunts the logic of the policy. Deconstruction provides a radical mechanism for critiquing policy and the positivist and neoliberal assumptions upon which higher education constructs policy.

Author

• Jonathan Barefield