The University Under Illiberal Modernity: Tertiary Enrollments in Engineering and the Social Sciences, 1960 to 2017

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: Expansion of Higher Education

Abstract

How does the rising tide of illiberalism affect the university? Scholars have generally emphasized dynamics of repression. We add complexity to the story: illiberal regimes and ideologies may generate an instrumentalized variant of the university, purged of its more liberal elements. Illiberalism, as a global ideology, includes modernizing ideas that support the university as a tool for economic and military advancement, even as illiberal regimes may attack aspects of the university seen as a political threat. Specifically, illiberalism may generate a subordinated form of the university centered on fields like engineering, while curtailing the more “liberal” social sciences – as exemplified by troubling attacks on the study of race, gender, and sexuality in the United States and elsewhere today. We examine country-level enrollments in the social sciences and engineering to explore the evolution of the university under liberal versus illiberal regimes and eras. We use a new field-disaggregated tertiary enrollment dataset covering up to 129 countries from 1960 to 2017 to examine how national and global measures of illiberalism affect enrollment shares in these fields. We find that measures of illiberalism are negatively associated with enrolment shares in the social sciences, and positively associated with enrolment shares in engineering. These findings complicate prevailing scholarly narratives, suggesting that under illiberal conditions, the university is not simply suppressed – it is refashioned.

Authors

• Julia C. Lerch, University of California-Irvine

• Evan Schofer, University of California-Irvine

• David John Frank, University of California-Irvine