‘What is driving university reform in the age of globalization?’

IThe critical narrative we often hear about current institutional reforms of higher education is that, regardless of where they are taking place and what flag they are flying,theyhaveasingularobjective:todissipateorganizationalandcollegialautonomy in order to better saturate the university field with market-oriented principles (e.g. knowledge as commodity, faculty as wage labour, administration as management, student body as consumer public, university as marketplace). I don’t think anyone could seriously deny that these principles have become centralised and normalised in contemporary higher education. This special issue provides an impressive series of snapshots of educational neoliberalism-in-action, a phenomenon, which, as the articles amply testify, has become near-global in its political reach and institutional effects since the 1980s. But one also wonders who or what lies behind this reform wave. The question is not trivial since if we cannot locate some source of individual, collective or structural agency for the neoliberal reform of higher education, if we cannot locate pressure points of transformation, then can we truly expect our critical and analytical labours to be something more than chronicles of metamorphosis and decline? Although ‘who’s’ abound and are easily named in individual organizations, a global class of ‘who’s’ is more difficult to identify. If we were to look solely at the case of the United States, we could perhaps persuasively localise blame in the figure of the university trustee. American university trustees typically are responsible for electing university presidents (who remain accountable to them), for high-level fund-raising, influence-peddling and networking on the university’s behalf, and, although always elite, in the post-war period they have increasingly been recruited from the ranks of the business elite in order to satisfy ever-spiralling demands for private donations (even at nominally ‘public’ universities) to build infrastructure, to offset faculty salaries, to purchase expensive scientific equipment, and to offer financial aid that modestly insulates student populations from equally spiralling tuition costs. University trustees are usually personally very wealthy and highly educated and they represent both American mainstream political parties in significant numbers. Their social networks are elite, business-friendly, and their public discourse typically invokes what we could describe as the liberal triad of individuality, family/community and markets as the appropriatepillarsofcivilisedsociability.