Neo-liberalism and the Subversion of Academic Freedom from Within: Money, Corporate Cultures and ‘Captured’ Intellectuals in African Public Universities
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Date
2012
Authors
Ogachi, I.O.
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Publisher
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa
Abstract
In the last two decades, neo-liberal thinking and practices, as outcomes of
globalization, have shaped social, economic, and educational policies. Within
higher education institutions, the application of neo-liberal practices has
increasingly reshaped the institutions into competitive markets and brought
about the privatization of various aspects of institutional culture. In Africa,
public universities were forced to adopt neo-liberal practices as part of the
reform packages to address the financial crisis that the institutions faced in
the 1980s. The deepening of neo-liberal cultures in the institutions has trans-
formed traditional notions of the university as sites of knowledge genera-
tion, service to society and liberal education, into neo-liberal objectives
articulated in entrepreneurial terms with knowledge as a commodity to be
invested in, bought and sold, and academics as entrepreneurs, who are
evaluated based on the income they generate. This article analyses and
reflects on what ‘entrepreneurialism’ in public universities in Africa means
for the exercise of academic freedom and social responsibility
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Citation
HEA/RESA Vol. 9, Nos. 1 & 2, 2011, pp. 25–47