Abstract

England’s public university system has been groaning and
lurching toward privatization for decades. Until recently, however, it was still possible to argue that “the attempt to close off and render impossible the experience of education as a collaborative pursuit of a public good and
to make possible its full commodification has not yet wholly succeeded” here.1 Despite being deeply disillusioned with increasingly neoliberal forms of academic work, many academics have thus also maintained that these could never be totalizing; that their implementation could be mediated
through critical professional practice, and that social-democratic justifications for public higher education could prevail even within discourses that had become inhospitable to the very idea of the public itself. [...]