Neoliberalism: The Secret Agent Confiscating our Agency (Part I)

The previous post here offered a timeline of neoliberalism. I detailed the increasing influence of business, industry, and mainly private corporations, on higher education here in the U. S. In that post, I also made a rather extraordinary claim, that tertiary education had been morphed from a public good into a private benefit. That needs to be unpacked, because, in the U. S., post-secondary education wasn’t designed to be a public good, nor has tertiary education ever genuinely been a public good in the United States, except for perhaps a brief period. The one certainty is that now, it is not. Perhaps nowhere across the globe does post-secondary education fit the definition of a public good. This is now the second post in what will be at least three posts.

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“Public good” is an economics’ term referring to a ‘good’ that is non-excludable (meaning we provide it for everyone) and non-rivalrous (which means that when I consume it, it comes at the expense of no one else). Historically, the tertiary education system has been perhaps the most exclusionary and rivalrous system in our 385-year developing-history of what is now the U. S. So why does the literature suggest otherwise? As I detailed in the first post of this series, much research has been conducted that traces the negative effects of neoliberalism (and globalism) on post-secondary education in the U. S. (and worldwide). How did we get there? Deconstructing that requires a deeper look at society, politics, and culture in the United States.

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As I was recording a lecture (focused on community colleges) for a course I’m teaching (online) this spring, it struck me suddenly that community colleges (collectively) were the most likely source of this identity crisis for higher education in the United States. This may read like I’m veering off-topic; I’m not. The Truman Commission Report (The Report) laid out a new plan for higher education in the United States. The Report was prepared as the United States was male-dominated, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, segregated, and experiencing extreme divides in terms of poverty everywhere, in urban and rural areas. The Report called for ending barriers to higher education access based on race, gender, religion, income, and geographic location. The vehicle recommended by The Report to catalyze that change was the community college. Up until the time of The Report, less than 10% of the U. S.’ college-aged population was enrolled in any form of higher education: hardly a public good by any stretch of the imagination. The report claimed that everyone was capable of enrolling, but that we had barriers preventing the massification of education in this country. The Report did two things: A) it attempted to do away with the pejorative term “junior colleges” which were historically created as cast-offs, and treated that way too; and B) it laid out a crystal clear vision for the organizations that became the United States of America’s community colleges. Over the next five decades, the percentage of people attending some form of post-secondary education skyrocketed to over 60%. As a consequence, education was gradually elevated (through a collective consciousness) to the status of a public good. Because of the immense positive change that community colleges effected on our society and educational practices in this country we began to assume that everyone should be able to attend college or university. We seemed to have decided that by extension, the entire higher education system in our country had become a catalyst for equality and then, a public good. Despite the growing sentiment, U. S. higher education as a system has never crossed the non-excludable nor the non-rivalrous thresholds. There is no empirical research that suggests otherwise.

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That is not to say that tertiary education in the U. S. has no positive characteristics, nor am I arguing against making education a public good in this post. But it is important to recognize that despite what many may think and believe, education is not and has never been a public good in the U. S. My point is that by blaming neoliberalism for something that hasn’t happened, we divert our attention from the real, (potentially resolvable) issues in our systems that may be resulting from neoliberalism’s encroachment into our day-to-day practices in higher education. But in some cases, neoliberalism is a force for good, right? Haven’t we seen millions of people escape poverty since its resurgence? Wade (2004), Tomohara (2011) and most recently Asteriou, Dimelis, Moudatsou (2014) have shown that neoliberal policies enacted through globalism may have positive effects locally, but negative effects globally. Focusing on education as a public good may be a worthy endeavor, but it distracts us from what we ought to be doing. This is why I’ve titled this particular blog as such, we (higher education professionals) are losing our agency to forces of neoliberalism, but perhaps not exactly in the ways we may have been led to believe. We should mount an effort to reclaim our agency. To do that we have to understand what agency is, and to whom (and through which processes) we are losing it.

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So, what is agency? I was introduced to the term by studying sociology, and my earliest exposure was generally through reading the works of Durkheim, Goffman, Giddens, Mills, Collins, Martineau, and Bourdieu. One might lump those into a group that wrote about the sociology of practice, or what happens in day-to-day interaction rituals between members of in-groups. The current Wikipedia definition aptly summarizes that view: (paraphrased more to my liking) “the capacity of individuals to act freely and make their own independent choices.” For the discerning academic that prefers a more nuanced view, Emirbayer and Mische (1998) disaggregated agency into three (iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation) areas; I recommend that article for a deeper understanding of what I mean when I use ‘agency’ as a term. It is important to note that agency is generally considered to have a relationship to ‘structure’ (some examples include class, religion, biological sex, gender, physical ability, religion, etc.) which may or may not constrain an individual’s capacity for agency. Structure is further divided into macro, meso, and micro categorical descriptions.

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There are several forces in play here that have a much greater cumulative effect than they might individually. In order to identify those clearly, we might employ other theoretical perspectives, outside our higher education bubble. Scholars such as Light (2008, 1995, 2014) and Freidson (2001) provide useful organizational paradigms describing how professions make countervailing claims of dominance over tasks. Extending those ideas, Leight and Fennel (2008) examined professions with respect to the institutions in which they are housed. Those frameworks will grant us agency as researchers to explore how for example, faculty and administrators may unintentionally be encouraging the advance of neoliberalism by struggling against each other (in terms of group interactions). I will look at the works of Powell & Dimaggio (1991), Meyer and Rowan (1977) and Greenwood & Hinings (1996) who all build on work of the sociologists I lumped into a “sociology of practice” (and others!) to illuminate how day-to-day operational practices in higher education environments may not be direct consequences of ‘market-driven’ forces as much as they are responses to neoliberalization based on existing norms, beliefs, and values of the institutions. What are some of the mechanisms enforcing our socialization? Are we hopelessly roped into those responses and practices? What are we able to change now? What do we need to work on together (faculty/staff/administration) in order to change? Perhaps research by Dacin & Dacin (2007) might inform us as we look do de-institutionalize some of our ineffective responses and practices. Recent work by Deephouse, Bundy, Tost & Suchman (2017) will be useful as we begin to understand organizational legitimacy, and conversely, what it might take to de-legitimize some systemical practices and responses. Those are some of the concepts I want to use to frame and explore, in this series of posts.

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I’ll continue with part II of this neoliberalism-stealing-our-agency in the next post, perhaps two more posts. Why? It is important to understand neoliberalism for what it is, and for what it is not. There are no political candidates standing in front of us—as we head into an election year for our country’s highest position—running on the tenets of neoliberalism and claiming its virtues. Some scholars (Brennan and Magnus, 2019) have recently claimed that neoliberalism is a great hoax, nothing more than a conspiracy theory. Whatever we determine that neoliberalism is, and whether or not we determine that it is a ‘ grand plan’ is not as important as working to challenge the outcomes; we must change what is happening. Critically, the effects of private industry coupled with deregulation have created a pattern of events that are preventing us from disaggregating the resolvable issues inside our (higher education) system. Our agency has been imprisoned. In the next post, I will outline how that is happening, posit the two greatest threats to resolution, and depending on how long (i.e., how many words) that takes, write another post recommending what we might want to do, but definitely what we need to do.

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