Abstract

At a recent seminar of the Campaign for the Public University, someone raised what is an increasingly pressing question. Why aren’t more academics speaking and acting out in greater earnest against the destructive policies of privatization, marketization and corporatization now being imposed on and from within universities? For unlike the remarkable new student movements and apart from professional projects to mitigate the excesses of the government’s programme of extreme neoliberalization, academic responses have been very muted indeed. Even within the critical corners of the universities, and outside of politicizing crises such as departmental closures or parliamentary votes, there have been few serious direct challenges, or articulations of alternatives to the prevailing narratives of inevitability. Why?