Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In those countries which have adopted, and then enthusiastically advanced the political-economic doctrine of neoliberalism the rationale proclaimed by public policymakers was that universities needed revolutionary reform in order to become more accountable, more relevant, more agile, and generally more attuned to the behaviour of a corporation in a hostile and brutally competitive world economy. One reaction has been that countless obituaries have been published recording not so much the reform, but the demise of these very university systems. Parsed for detail, the claim is that a way of life for both faculty and students, at all levels, in the pursuit of research and education, has been either extinguished or changed radically so that its successor states defy comparison with the past. They proclaim nothing less than that the university systems they refer to have been subject to a hostile takeover which has imposed conditions which are fundamentally inimical to learning and the search for knowledge and thus a threat to the body politic. Accordingly, since democratic norms demand accountability, the next logical steps should include public inquiries and judicial investigations with a view to ensuring that public policymakers are held responsible for egregious offenses against the national interest.