The rise of the managerial class has effected a fundamental reversal of priorities in the University sector, such that academic staff now exist primarily in order to serve the demands of management. With managerial jargon in the ascendancy, political argument about the nature of the sector falls into cliché; and cliché precludes the yielding of any knowledge that is based in thinking, because it reduces thought to prejudicial clichéd banalities. In this state of affairs, there can be little legitimacy for a critical position that might challenge the supposed primacy of economic rationaliszation of all aspects of University life and of knowledge. The result is that the privatization of knowledge and the attendant commercialization of information assumes a normative force. The University is complicit with a general political trajectory that leads to the corruption of politics and of intellectual work through the improper insertion of financial rationales for all decision-making. The chapter explores the pre-history of this in Thatcherism and Reaganomics; and it demonstrates that the logic of University privatization is essentially a state-sponsored subsidy for the wealthy and for the ongoing protection of existing privileges.

The prevailing cult and culture of managerial audit and measurement systemically translates qualities into quantities. Further, it requires that those measurements be inserted into a form of warfare that we normalize as ‘league-table competitiveness’. The system as a whole then operates in a neo-Hobbesian state of war of all against all, which serves the interests of none and which damages the world’s intellectual and natural ecologies. Ecology is subsumed under economics. This chapter considers what must be done to construct a new model of the institution that will help not only to shape the good society but, even more fundamentally, to preserve and sustain the society itself in a time of ecological disaster. What should be the University’s proper relation to the state of nature? The chapter argues that the contemporary institution must reject all forms of political fundamentalism – including especially the dominant prevailing modes of market fundamentalism – if it is to work against any and all forms of political terror. The chapter situates the question of the survival of the University within the abiding question of the survival of the species and of our social existence.

The contemporary institution fails to understand the real meaning of ‘mass higher education’. A mass higher education should address the concerns of those masses of ‘ordinary people’ who, for whatever reasons, do not attend a University. Instead, the contemporary sector simply admits more individuals from lower social and economic classes. Behind this is a deep suspicion of the intellectual whose knowledge marks them out as intrinsically elitist and not ‘of the people’. An intellectual concerned about everyday life is now seen as suspicious, given the normative belief that a University education is about individual competitive self-advancement. This intellectual is now an enemy of ‘the people’, and incipiently one who might even be regarded as criminal in dissenting from conformity with social norms of neoliberalism. There is a history to this, dating from 1945, and it sets up a contest between two version of the University; one sees it as a centre of humane and liberal values, the other as the site for the production of individuals who conform to and individually benefit from neoliberal greed. The genuine exception is the intellectual who dissents; but dissent itself is now seen as potentially criminal.

The crisis in higher education is also simultaneously a crisis in constitutional democracies; and the two are intimately linked. The corruption of language that shapes managerialist discourse makes possible a corruption in the communications among citizens that are vital in any democracy. Democracy becomes recast first as an alleged ‘will of the people’, but a will whose semantic content is prone to political manipulation. In turn this opens the way to a validation of demagogic populism that masquerades as democracy when it is in fact the very thing that undermines democracy. When the University sector becomes complicit with this – as it is in our times – then it engages in a fundamental betrayal of the actual people in the society it claims to serve. Populism thrives on the celebration of anti-intellectual ignorance and the contempt for expertise, preferring instead the supposedly more ‘natural’ claims of instinctive faith over reason. Lurking within this is a form of class warfare that treats real and actual working-class life as contemptible.

Between 1945 and 1989 we can trace a growing conflation of economic liberalism with social and cultural liberalism, such that social liberalism becomes engulfed by neoliberal capital and subsumed under market fundamentalism. As a consequence, there emerges a political debate about liberal societies – in Popper’s terms, ‘open societies’ – and their relation to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and institutions. However, this misses the point that, when social values are essentially monetized, the institutional values of academic freedom – characterized by an ‘open university’ – are potentially compromised. The chapter examines the historical constitution of the UK’s ‘Open University’ – as an explicitly democratizing institution – and sets that against the contemporary logic of zero-sum competition, which envisages the failure and closure of some Universities as a sign of the success of the national and global system. The paradox is that, as more Universities open, so the range of intellectual options for critical thinking actually diminishes. The consequence is the enclosure of the intellectual commons and the re-establishment of protected privilege and the legitimization of structural social inequality. Organizations such as the Russell Group embody this entrenching of inequality.

Education involves the search for good judgement, and thus also institutes the principles of criticism. It does this in the interests of extending the range of human possibilities and of extending and distributing those possibilities democratically. In this, it is structurally opposed to the logic of privatization. This chapter explores how it is that existing social and class privilege has tried to prevent the University from extending such democratic engagements, in the interests of protecting those very privileges. The Browne Review was central to this project. In a peculiar self-contradiction, Browne fundamentally reconstructs the University as an ‘ivory tower’ institution, one that legitimizes privilege by radically reducing the scope and ambit of the University’s roles and social responsibilities. After Browne, the University seeks to entrench the very ideology of privilege, by translating the demands for justice or good judgement into a logic of self-advancement via competition. It institutes the culture of acquisitive individualism or greed over the extension of democracy and freedoms.