Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity

Universities remain the most important organisations involved in developing knowledge and providing means of social mobility. However, they are facing challenges from new providers facilitated by new technologies. Here, we propose an analysis of three challenges to established understandings of higher education: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity. Each of them proceeds through claims to disrupt established hierarchies, representing the existing university system as a form of cartel that embodies the interests of knowledge ‘producers’ against those of ‘consumers’ of knowledge, or the wider publics that fund it. In this way, a particular idea of the university as a ‘bundle of functions’ is challenged, with those functions disaggregated and addressed separately as problems for technical solution. What is at stake, we shall suggest, is both social and epistemological. Social in the sense that the university is re-directed from serving the public good (including conceptions of economic benefit) to serving the market, including that of student investors in their human capital; epistemological in the sense that the conditions of knowledge production are dramatically transformed.