Page 81 - Šolsko polje, XXIX, 2018, no. 1-2: The Language of Neoliberal Education, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 81
r. leyva ■ unpacking the usage and implications of neoliberal language ...
funding against public and private for-profit educational organisations.
B) Increase public-private partnerships whereby selective school functions
are outsourced to the private sector, or where businesses and corporations
provide funding to schools in exchange for publicity, advertisement space,
or research and development. And C), lead to the implementation of cor-
porate style managerial practices and accountability metrics to help elimi-
nate wastefulness, incentivize positive performances, fire or discipline un-
derperforming faculty, and measure student-customer satisfaction (Ball,
2012; Boyles, 2005; Mountz et al., 2015). In the specific context of higher
education, these policy inputs and outputs have manifested in and trans-
formed this sector in the following ways.
To start with, universities currently have to prioritize and produce re-
search that as Mohrmana, Ma, and Baker (2008: p. 9) put it is “beyond the
intellectual curiosity of the investigator; [as] scholars are expected to push
their ideas to application and ultimately to the market”. This means that
contemporary academics are continuously pressured to engage in research
with industrial, medicinal, or other instrumental applications in order to
bring in revenue. Such pressure normally comes in the form of perfor-
mance targets, whereby an academic researcher’s chances for promotion
or, in many instances simply their job security, is tied to specific amounts
of publications in leading journals and procured research income. These
now common institutional practices and imperatives also mean that re-
searchers are explicitly less incentivized to pursue basic science or abstract
research aimed at gaining a fundamental understanding of natural, so-
cial, and mathematical phenomena. In other words, pursuing knowledge
for its own sake has according to several accounts of individual academ-
ics, become untenable, because prestigious journals, grant funding bod-
ies, and university administrators are primarily interested in promoting
and rewarding applied research that has the potential for immediate com-
mercial application or social policy impact (Chubb & Watermeyer, 2017;
Gaffikin, & Perry, 2009; Lojdová, 2016).
Furthermore, as Gaffikin, & Perry (2009) argue, university de-
gree programmes now pursue a more vocationally oriented pedagogy,
“pitch tuition fees on a more lucrative basis, and are valued in terms of
their output of knowledge-intensive human capital” (p. 120). That is, uni-
versities are now primarily concerned with ensuring financial solvency
through maintaining continuous annual recruitment of fee-paying stu-
dents, and their managers generally seek accomplish this in three main
ways although these will vary by university. The first means is by ex-
panding the construction of new teaching buildings, information tech-
nology systems, and student accommodations – which is often done via
79
funding against public and private for-profit educational organisations.
B) Increase public-private partnerships whereby selective school functions
are outsourced to the private sector, or where businesses and corporations
provide funding to schools in exchange for publicity, advertisement space,
or research and development. And C), lead to the implementation of cor-
porate style managerial practices and accountability metrics to help elimi-
nate wastefulness, incentivize positive performances, fire or discipline un-
derperforming faculty, and measure student-customer satisfaction (Ball,
2012; Boyles, 2005; Mountz et al., 2015). In the specific context of higher
education, these policy inputs and outputs have manifested in and trans-
formed this sector in the following ways.
To start with, universities currently have to prioritize and produce re-
search that as Mohrmana, Ma, and Baker (2008: p. 9) put it is “beyond the
intellectual curiosity of the investigator; [as] scholars are expected to push
their ideas to application and ultimately to the market”. This means that
contemporary academics are continuously pressured to engage in research
with industrial, medicinal, or other instrumental applications in order to
bring in revenue. Such pressure normally comes in the form of perfor-
mance targets, whereby an academic researcher’s chances for promotion
or, in many instances simply their job security, is tied to specific amounts
of publications in leading journals and procured research income. These
now common institutional practices and imperatives also mean that re-
searchers are explicitly less incentivized to pursue basic science or abstract
research aimed at gaining a fundamental understanding of natural, so-
cial, and mathematical phenomena. In other words, pursuing knowledge
for its own sake has according to several accounts of individual academ-
ics, become untenable, because prestigious journals, grant funding bod-
ies, and university administrators are primarily interested in promoting
and rewarding applied research that has the potential for immediate com-
mercial application or social policy impact (Chubb & Watermeyer, 2017;
Gaffikin, & Perry, 2009; Lojdová, 2016).
Furthermore, as Gaffikin, & Perry (2009) argue, university de-
gree programmes now pursue a more vocationally oriented pedagogy,
“pitch tuition fees on a more lucrative basis, and are valued in terms of
their output of knowledge-intensive human capital” (p. 120). That is, uni-
versities are now primarily concerned with ensuring financial solvency
through maintaining continuous annual recruitment of fee-paying stu-
dents, and their managers generally seek accomplish this in three main
ways although these will vary by university. The first means is by ex-
panding the construction of new teaching buildings, information tech-
nology systems, and student accommodations – which is often done via
79
