We do not know what the tightening of funding for scientific research that has taken place over the past 40 years would have done, but this we can be sure of: utilitarian approaches to higher education are dominant now, to the point of monopoly.
The administrative burdens and stultifying oversight structures throttling today's scholars come not from Soviet-style central planning, but from the application of market principles—an irony that the sociologist Lawrence Busch explores exhaustively in his monograph Knowledge for Sale.
Busch explains how the first neo-liberal thinkers sought to prevent the rise of totalitarian regimes by replacing governance with markets. Those thinkers believed that markets were safer than governments because they were cybernetic and so corrected themselves.
Busch provides ghastly disproofs of this neo-liberal vision from within the hall of academe, from bad habits such as a focus on counting citations and publication output, through fraud, to existential crises such as the shift in the ideal of education from a public to a private good.
But if our ingenious, post-war market solution to the totalitarian nightmare of the 1940s has itself turned out to be a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity (as journalist Matt Taibbi once described investment bank Goldman Sachs), where have we left to go? We have to remember that the point of study is not to power, enable, de-glitch or otherwise save civilisation. The point of study is to create a civilisation worth saving.
New Scientist 18 March 2017 p. 143.
The administrative burdens and stultifying oversight structures throttling today's scholars come not from Soviet-style central planning, but from the application of market principles—an irony that the sociologist Lawrence Busch explores exhaustively in his monograph Knowledge for Sale.
Busch explains how the first neo-liberal thinkers sought to prevent the rise of totalitarian regimes by replacing governance with markets. Those thinkers believed that markets were safer than governments because they were cybernetic and so corrected themselves.
Busch provides ghastly disproofs of this neo-liberal vision from within the hall of academe, from bad habits such as a focus on counting citations and publication output, through fraud, to existential crises such as the shift in the ideal of education from a public to a private good.
But if our ingenious, post-war market solution to the totalitarian nightmare of the 1940s has itself turned out to be a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity (as journalist Matt Taibbi once described investment bank Goldman Sachs), where have we left to go? We have to remember that the point of study is not to power, enable, de-glitch or otherwise save civilisation. The point of study is to create a civilisation worth saving.
New Scientist 18 March 2017 p. 143.
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