The febrile mood of several neoliberal universities seems to have triggered the death of critical thinking across the globe. While pedagogical inventiveness remains the declared norm of such universities, the learning outcomes are invariably linked to return on interest and customer experience. That said, these neoliberal universities are prettified by posturing the students at the center, which sounds very liberating and fascinating, at least to these students, since the expansion of customer sovereignty is ingrained within the DNA of neoliberal universities of our times. It is another matter that what is served and marketed as sovereignty leads to perspectival distortions about the worldmaking and one’s own thinking process, blurred as it is by the ‘feel good’ environment of such universities.
This maintenance and nourishment culture of students’ experience has undoubtedly led to the erosion of an autonomous self and the collapse of thinking minds. It is exhibited in the quotidian fanatical disavowal of knowledge transactions because what matters more are marks, job placements, and the ability to tread within the echo chambers of the corporate world. Universities, which were supposedly meant to be sites of creating impact and producing citizens of the world, have been morphed into locales of producing skills for the market. The burgeoning of such culture can be seen as the conversion of universities into factories. Such materiality of universities has resulted in the institutionalization and promotion of a plutocratic learning environment. A learning environment that only understands and breeds the sameness of capital. It can be claimed that capital remains both the starting and end point of neoliberal universities.
The corporatization of the universities has only produced a commodified version of knowledge, divorcing learners from pressing concerns of wars, racism, migration, demagoguery since the curriculum is singularly focused on preparing industry-ready employees. Such is the banality of neoliberal institutions that they mostly pivot around fiscal decisions, linked to instrumentality and profitability. Critical thinking and imagination are cramped and negated in this plutocratic setup. Almost 100 years on, the Whiteheadian caution has apparently gained the form of consummate truth:
A university is imaginative or it is nothing – at least nothing useful
… A university which fails [to impart information imaginatively] has
no reason for existence. This atmosphere of excitement, arising from
imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a
bare fact: it is invested with all its possibilities. It is no longer a burden
on the memory: it is energising as the poet of our dreams, and as the
architect of our purposes. (Whitehead, 1929, p 17)
It is no wonder that a setup entirely dedicated to admission number game and achieving a high level of infrastructural aesthetics is likely to harbour a foreclosure of meritocracy. As the Chronicle of Higher Education avers, “Ironically, despite the chorus of indignation lamenting the rise of the student as consumer, today the student is all too often precisely the person who refuses to consume their education.” (2023)
It is indeed a paradox that these neoliberal universities assign critical thinking to the domain of humanities, which in turn faces a perpetual crisis of peripheralisation and extinction. In other words, humanities is made subservient to the spiraling growth of STEM. Humanities is not only considered a burden by/on these profit-oriented universities but is given a space only in terms of its capaciousness to live up to the expectations of the market. To see this plutocratic rendition of neoliberal universities merely as corporatization would be an exercise in pureilism since the larger problem lies in the ways these sites are programmed to continue the colonization of minds and subjugation of sovereignty. A thinking mind and free inquiry are the declared enemies of a set up that is moored in extraction and unchecked accumulation of wealth. The death of critical thinking is systematically programmed to mark a rupture between the Universities and the public, thus leading to the much eulogization of education’s marriage with industries.
One can claim with conviction that the neoliberal education model is apparently a model suited to control and dominate a larger chunk of our world. By zooming in the entire focus of education to the ever-changing needs of the industries, the younger population is not only subjected to control but also kept under the constant gaze of vulnerability. Seen this way, neoliberal universities demonstrate an acute ambivalence in their functionality as exclusion and inclusion are embedded within their quotidian practices. That is, one could find a large number of philanthropists who are lured by this business model. Philanthrophy is the new euphemism for the custodians of our neoliberal education model. Precisely, why the inability of the universities to aling themselves with the needs of the industry is subjected to carping negativity and defunding.
Education, which was meant to serve society and inculcate the spirit of free inquiry has been turned into a cash cow for such philanthropists. A case can be made that not all philanthropists suffer from this syndrome. As David Gelles tartly observes in a New York Times article, “If a handful of billionaires want to spend their fortunes saving lives, why not simply applaud them? But as their ambitions grow, so too does their influence, meaning that for better or worse, a few billionaires are wielding considerable influence over everything from medical research to social policy to politics.” It is not puzzling to see why critique or critical thinking has run out of steam in many of our neoliberal universities. If critical thinking in neoliberal universities has run out of steam it is because these institutions have become a saleable commodity. If critical thinking has run out of steam it is also because that steam has been diverted to serve the insatiable belly of industries. It is also because we are equally culpable in letting this steam lose its vigour either due to our continuing silence or due to our rapaciousness for power and positions in such institutions. Those who chose to align with the language of power and profit have eventually turned our centres of learning into centres of human resources or human capital. Perhaps, we have forgotten about our priorities, perhaps, we have also forgotten the fact that there can be no future in the absence of critical thinking for humanities. No wonder we have reached that stage where critical thinking has a new definition: solving industries’ problems while societies are left alone to slog for their survival.
In 1996, Bill Readings pointed out, “The specificity of the modern University that the German Idealists founded was its status as the site of critique,” which has undergone a complete transformation in neoliberal times, subsequently marking a shift from the universities meant to produce citizens of the world to assigning its worldly value in compiling and extracting resources for the so-called philanthropists. It is also reminiscent of what Emile Zola said, “The imagination no longer has a function” since capitalist narration has triumphed over the normative functionality of universities. Exactly the reason why entrepreneurship seems to have become both norm and content of such neoliberal universities. It is not that the idea of entrepreneurship is bad but to limit and equate the entire idea of education around the notion of entrepreneurs needs rethinking.
The fusion of critical thinking with capital appreciation has signalled a foreclosure on the dialectical grasp of limitations and possibilities. It is indeed a pity that only the unchecked drive of capital is legitimized and celebrated. As our critical thinking seems to be gasping for breath, our collective future is also jeopardised, for in the absence of quality education the idea of freedom and equality turn out to be farce. The idea of self-governance and democratic ethos is sacrificed for the sake of corporate oligarchy that underpins several neoliberal universities.
