Richard Murphy on neoliberal academia

It is undoubtedly true that our universities are in crisis. But that crisis is not just financial. It is existential. They have helped create the conditions for their own decline by swallowing the neoliberal promise of efficiency, competition and ‘value for money’, never apparently having the imagination to foresee that this would inevitably lead to a future where knowledge is only worth what it can be sold for, and where anything that cannot be sold is simply scrapped …

… The tragedy is that our universities should have been the places that warned us all of this. They should have provided the intellectual resistance, the historical perspective, and the moral arguments against reducing every human endeavour to a transaction. They did not do that.

A dear friend took me to task the other week. “Why”, she asked, “are you so hard on Richard Murphy? He does such good work.”

He does, and I credit him for that when he’s applying his considerable expertise and Quaker informed moral intelligence to expose the UK’s Starmer, Reeves and Streeting for economic illiteracy, if we’re taking a lenient view, Hobin Rood transfers of wealth from poor to rich if we aren’t. ¹

My issue is with the abuse of his platform to hold forth on matters he knows nothing about; having it seems decided – in a textbook case of Gell-Mann amnesia – that media which, as he knows better than most, spout power-serving drivel on how economies work can somehow be trusted to speak truth and wisdom on other matters vital to ruling elites. The most important of these being a stubborn insistence, in the face of a litany of compelling evidence, that at root of the proxy war in Ukraine, provoked over decades by the US deep state – and, counter to the interests of their citizens and economies, by European leaders groomed in Washington ² – is a land grab by Vladimir Putin.

This is dismaying. Richard does great work in countering ‘common sense’ – read: ideologically drenched – narratives relayed by systemically corrupt media ³ to justify inequalities no less dysfunctional and democracy-corrosive than they are morally repugnant – with light on how Britain’s fiat currency obviates any need for government borrowing from “the markets”. And not only is it wrong in the way – prioritising specious narrative over facts and science – he so ably exposes in Chicago School sorcery. The professor’s grasp of the root drivers of Washington’s war against Russia in Ukraine is also wrong in ways that, as I will argue on my return to UK in a few days, bring us closer – because that war is linked to those in the Middle East and (looming) South Asia – to world war three with each passing day.

But, hey, there I go again with my glass-half-empty  scribbling. Let me make amends by hosting Richard Murphy in fine form just yesterday on a subject dear – Roddis v Sheffield Hallam – to my heart: the debasement of higher education. And how CEOs in its now corporate institutions were driven by vanity, venality and myopia to embrace marketisation now have every cause to rue their unseemly zeal.

Universities never realised they were harbouring the ideology that now seeks to kill them

There’s a bitter irony at the heart of modern higher education, which too few universities, and even fewer of their leaders, seem willing to confront. This is that universities have, for decades, nurtured within their own institutions the ideology that now aims to destroy them. That ideology is neoliberalism.

Let me explain.

Firstly, neoliberalism’s core is anti-thought. At its heart, neoliberalism is not just an economic project. It is a project to restrict the whole basis of debate, of imagination, of critique. This should be obvious, and yet apparently it has not been. Neoliberalism insists that there is:

• no alternative to markets,
• no alternative to private property,
• no alternative to profit maximisation as the ultimate measure of success.

Anything that dares to challenge these assumptions is dismissed as naive, dangerous, and, ironically as ideological. That argument has been used against me for a long time.

Secondly, let’s not pretend otherwise, our universities eagerly imported this ideology. Beginning in the 1980s, universities across the UK, and across much of the world, embraced market models. Their leadership welcome the idea for one simple reason: they saw an opportunity for personal gain from doing so. As a result, they welcomed competition for funding, league tables that reduced education to a race for rankings, and a commercial mindset that turned students into customers. They applied “return on investment” logic to courses, to research, even to the arts and humanities. They sold off their own assets, outsourced their services, squeezed their staff, and congratulated themselves on running “efficient” businesses, and were very happy to be treated as such as they used this status to justify their excessive salaries and bloated PR functions that were engaged to maintain this myth.

Third, universities even changed what counted as knowledge. Neoliberalism infiltrated academic disciplines. Economics departments became dominated by neoclassical models that ignore power, inequality, and the environment. Business schools churned out managers trained to cut costs and maximise shareholder value, but rarely to serve society. Even humanities departments too often tied themselves to corporate partnerships and employability agendas. Intellectual autonomy was surrendered for the promise of private sponsorship, and the ability to attract that private money was seen as the true indication of academic success.

Fourth, now all of this has backfired, spectacularly. Neoliberalism never did believe in competition, or access, or diversity. All it believed in was the accumulation of power and wealth for a few. And now we see the consequences of that.  Across the UK universities are cutting courses and making job cuts and despite this they are unable to contain the financial crises in our universities. The arts, languages, and critical social sciences are especially at risk. Meanwhile in the US, where the US goes the UK usually follows, the far right is explicitly attacking universities, cutting funding, banning diversity programmes, dictating what can and cannot be taught. And they can do that because once you persuaded a whole generation that education is just a market good to be valued solely by short-term economic returns then anything that encourages people to think differently, whether that be to question power, to explore history, culture, ethics, or alternatives to the market, is just a threat.

Fifth, then, universities sowed the seeds of their own crisis, and the attack upon them. By embedding neoliberal metrics, for example, by treating students as consumers, staff as costs, and education as a business, universities made it easy for political opportunists to finish the job. If a course is judged by immediate graduate earnings alone, why fund philosophy, or sociology, or even fundamental science? If knowledge has no worth beyond the pay packets it produces, why not let politicians decide which degrees are “low value” and shut them down? The point we have arrived at is not an accident: it was created by design.

Sixth, and importantly, the same ideology that is dismantling universities is also dismantling the NHS, local councils, the BBC, even the right to protest. Neoliberalism despises:

• • anything collective,
  • anything that is rooted in shared endeavour,
  • anything that might empower people to question the rules of the game.

It demands compliance, not curiosity. The requirement is loyalty to markets, not loyalty to truth.

It is undoubtedly true that our universities are in crisis. But that crisis is not just financial. It is existential. They have helped create the conditions for their own decline by swallowing the neoliberal promise of efficiency, competition and ‘value for money’, never apparently having the imagination to foresee that this would inevitably lead to a future where knowledge is only worth what it can be sold for, and where anything that cannot be sold is simply scrapped.

The tragedy is that our universities should have been the places that warned us all of this. They should have provided the intellectual resistance, the historical perspective, and the moral arguments against reducing every human endeavour to a transaction. They did not do that. Instead the economics departments of every major university promoted the culture of neoliberalism as if it was based on a human truth when very obviously it is destructive of everything of true value.  And now, unless they rediscover the courage to champion thinking for its own sake, to defend knowledge that serves society rather than markets, they may find they have little left worth defending at all.

The question is, will our universities and the academics within them fight back against the neoliberalism that has paved the way for the fascist thinking that is now seeking to destroy their freedoms, or will they succumb? The biggest ever challenge in intellectual history mighty be under way. Who will win?

* * *

1. Those poor to rich transfers, it is now abundantly clear, are overseen by ministers with one eye on that famously revolving door between public ‘service’ and, after a period of optics-driven purdah, fat salaries in the sectors they’d been charged with regulating.
2. When the Canadian political economist, Professor Radhika Desai, was asked by the host of a discussion last September why Europe’s leaders act manifestly against the interests of their citizens, she replied:

   The entire Left in most Western countries – by ‘Left’ I mean the Social Democratic Left, the Green Parties and perhaps most of the entire political establishment – is now led by individuals who have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow type programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen and Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that at the present moment the United States is in this sweet spot where the people it has groomed have taken power in major European capitals.

3. I say ‘systemically corrupt’ because for the most part the distortions I speak of – lies of commission and more commonly of omission – need not suppose mendacious media practitioners. In the main the self interest present in all of us suffices. That and the fact they are no less propagandised than the next guy. As I’ve said often over the years:

   Journalists who know what’s good for them please editors. Editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors. Proprietors need advertisers and/or wealthy sponsors. All are affected by dominant ideology which they imbibe as much as they contribute to, and which assures us all, 24/7 in ways gross and subtle, that west is best.