Interrogating the University as an Engine of Capitalism: Neoliberalism and Academic ‘<i>Raison D'état</i>’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the era of knowledge capitalism, universities are consistently regarded as potential ‘engines' of capital accumulation and state prosperity. This article will argue that as regards their teaching and research functions – but with specific attention to the research function – universities can be seen to be enacting a type of neoliberal discourse/discursive practice that corresponds to the particular notion of ‘ raison d'état’ raised by Foucault in his 1978–79 Collège de France lectures on neoliberalism. The positioning of monetary accumulation and expansion in the rawest sense as the ultimate desirable goal of universities serves to enact the type of ‘limitation of self-regulation’ which Foucault describes as a function of the (new) liberal state, conditioned as it is to build itself, and condition all of its behaviour, on the principal goal of economic growth and accumulation, enacting a form of neoliberal governmentality, in Foucault's (and others') terms. Subsequently, a neoliberal conception of science as necessarily wedded to a narrow instrumental-economic idea of technology continues to animate public discourse both at the government and university levels, resulting in a complex – and at times contested – political terrain which revolves around a particular economic regime of truth predicated in growth and accumulation before any other consideration. In this context, universities must grow and expand, but particularly in the ways that are demanded by the particular regime of truth which is hegemonic at the time, which revolve around what is understood here as the neoliberal discourse of knowledge capitalism. This argument is offered with the example of Canada in mind in particular, but with cognizance of related trends active in other countries impacted by the ‘knowledge economy’ discourse in the OECD group of countries, for instance, and beyond.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".