"The Neoliberal University and the Neoliberal Curriculum"

These critiques revealed the relationship between the transformation of the American university and the emergence of corporate capitalism and an imperial state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each of them observed that university governance, administrative organization, financial controls, teaching methods, curriculum content, and research agendas were being systematically reconstructed and realigned to support corporate capitalism and an emergent American empire. With the advent of economic globalization, and a renewed push by corporate and political elites to further integrate higher education into the new social structures of accumulation, 2 contemporary scholars have built a cottage industry on this foundation and extended it to an analysis of contemporary higher education. 3

Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University, 2019

Precollege Economic Education and the Future of Neoliberalism: A Case Study of Curricular Change in the US, 2018

This thesis is motivated by what I see as a need for making up for the insufficient attention paid to the topic of precollege economic education within the neo-Gramscian literature dealing with the hegemonic struggle unfolding in the neoliberal period and more specifically in the years following the onset of the global financial crisis of 2007-8. My purpose of studying this topic is to discuss how social forces seeking to transcend neoliberalism in particular, or even capitalism in general, might improve or even formulate the basis of their strategies for if and how to grapple with the question of precollege economic education and thereby potentially improve their overall political positionings. I first provide a theoretical argument that neoclassical economics, insofar as it is being widely disseminated to multiple generations of non-elite actors such as via young people’s enrolment in the precollege educational system, contributes to giving rise to an overall depoliticized conception of economic relations which might then dampen the mobilization of social forces pushing for hegemonic change, thereby precluding the destabilization of neoliberalism even in the context of severe socioeconomic fallout. I then invoke arguments by Bob Jessop in order to hypothesize that successful dampening is predicated on particularly the actors responsible for formulating the neoclassical curricular content of precollege economic education succeeding at revising this content via strategic navigation vis-à-vis the shifts in the sociopolitical context following the onset of the Global Financial Crisis. I examine this curricular change by studying how the Voluntary Content Standards in Economics, a document published by the US-based Council for Economic Education and a document that the curricular content of economic education across a large share of US states is strongly influenced by, has had its representation of neoclassical economics shifted from its first version of 1997 to its second version of 2010. I find that while even though discourses external to neoclassical economics are drawn on to a larger extent in the 2010 version, neoclassical economics still remains as the hegemonic conception of economic relations. Since my analysis thereby shows the ease with which frequently elevated criticisms of neoclassical economics that point to the empirical existence of market imperfections are integrated into the curricular content so that it can be updated and thus stay attentive to a relatively wide range of voices calling for curricular reform without however having its hegemonic representation of neoclassical economics jeopardized, it points to the strategic futility associated with disseminating such criticisms. I therefore conclude that social forces should refrain from disseminating those; rather, I suggest, they should devote more organizational resources to disseminating radical criticisms of neoclassical economics that have at their heart politicized conceptions of economic relations. Future research on this topic should then pick up where I leave and then in particular study the conditions under which various attempts at such dissemination might be (un)successful.

Rapid and profound changes are occurring in higher education that we ignore at our peril. Struggling against shifts toward privatization, Dr. Robert Price, a professor at City College of San Francisco, described the changes proposed for his campus as a tsunami and Jack Hassard cautioned lest the "slow creep of privatization does not turn into an avalanche" . These are apt descriptions for the formidable changes that are poised to sweep away everything in their path, with immediate and devastating consequences for educators, students, and the institutions they attend. The curriculum is also affected and this in turn determines what knowledge is most valued. These transformations have a tremendous influence on how we as a society understand, value, and put education to use, as well as how we as educators practice our profession, generate, and use knowledge. These disastrous changes have not come without warning however. They are reflective of the neoliberal project and have the potential for far-reaching, negative social, political, and economic outcomes. Integral to neoliberalism is a belief that the market has the best answer for a range of social concerns and that it is most capable of delivering results for a variety of social functions, among them education. Acknowledging and understanding these changes can aid in the struggle to resist the effects of the privatization of higher education.

2018

Once upon a time, the U.S. college experience was simply what a student experienced when attending college, and was heavily associated with elite institutions and liberal arts education. That notion certainly lingers. But in contemporary higher education, the idea of experience has also become a property of specifi cally defi ned and administratively structured activities that students do: fi rst-year experience, study abroad, internship, and service-learning, much of it under the rubric of experiential learning. All these experiences are assigned value comparable and complementary to academics, and are treated as assess-able in parallel ways, perhaps even on extracurricular " transcripts. " Administrative structures and even ancillary industries have arisen to manage them, and they have become an important element of college marketing. The idea that education could be grounded in an organic, subjectively distinct experience and at the same time reifi ed and marketed as a product has its origins in two distinct developments in the history of U.S. higher education: the philosophy of educational experience proposed by John Dewey, and the relation between educational administrations and business interests critiqued by Thorstein Veblen. These developments emerged in the very early twentieth century and remain intertwined; indeed, since the 1990s, the second has taken on new life, enfolding the fi rst into an education product. Strong (this volume) lays out Dewey's belief in a mutually integrative and informative relation between education and experience, with practical activity leading to re-fl ection and enhanced understanding. Contemporaneously, as Handler (this volume) points out, Veblen warned about the emergence of, as he put it, " captains of erudition " heading universities while working in tandem with the profi t-oriented businessmen (and they were in fact all men) who dominated boards of trustees, undercutting what Veblen saw