C. Wright Mills and the Neoliberal University

“They talk and talk, they sell and sell ... the victory of the technician over the intellectual”: C. Wright Mills and the Neoliberal University

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03098168251353410

Abstract

In this article, the conceptual antecedents of the neoliberal university in the prescient writings of C. Wright Mills identified, explicated and discussed. His detailed observations of and analysis of the transformations in the structure, form, and mode of knowledge production in the universities of his time provide insights into the social dynamics of the genesis of the global neoliberal academy much before the term gained currency. Drawing upon Marx and Weber’s concepts of alienation and rationalization respectively, C. Wright Mills provided valuable sociological insights into the emergence as well as the consolidation of the neoliberal ethos and norms in the academy.



The sociological gadfly C. Wright Mills obviously never invoked the term ‘neoliberal university’ to make sense of the transformations in academia that were well underway in his time. Although the economic ideas that eventually fuelled the neoliberal juggernaut that continues to wreck and wreak havoc on societies have a long and sordid history, their influence did not quite gather momentum until they informed and infused policies in the 1970s. It was not until after that other September 11 of 1973 when the CIA supported bloody coup deposed Chile’s elected President Salvadore Allende and the installation of the dictator Augusto Pinochet that the ideas of the ‘Chicago Boys’ or the Chilean economists trained by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago were inflicted as economic and social policies on a real society. The consequences of what Friedman described as ‘shock treatment’ and hailed by its supporters as the ‘Chilean Miracle’ were unambiguously and unsurprisingly disastrous. With the consolidation of global capitalism now fully aligned with the postwar American empire, neoliberal policies were pushed and enforced globally. Pinochet’s 17 years of dictatorship provided the institutional support for the initial testing and application of neoliberal policies in Chile that, with various permutations and combinations, were later replicated elsewhere, including Britain under Thatcher and the United States under Reagan (Frank 1976; Greider 2005; Harvey 2005; Letelier 1976; Mirowski & Plehwe 2015; Slobodian 2020).

The key characteristics of the contemporary reincarnations of neoliberalism are too well known to be spelled out here (Brown 2015; Harvey 2005; Metcalf 2017; Monbiot 2016; Ong 2006). The ongoing ‘accumulation by dispossession’, the gig economy, the rise of the precariat, the forever wars fuelled by the many military-industrial complexes and the ongoing climate crisis – are by no means limited to the economy alone (Woodcock & Graham 2019; Baber 2008; Scranton 2017). Despite resistance, their octopus-like tentacles have reached and infused all spheres and aspects of human lives with the so-called ‘logic’ of the so-called ‘free market’ and relentless privatization. As Stephen Metcalf succinctly puts it, neoliberalism ‘is not simply a name for promarket policies ... it ... quietly has come to regulate all we practise or believe ... it strips away the things that makes us human ... it has invaded the grit of our personal lives ... the attitude of the salesman (sic) has become enmeshed in all modes of self-expression’ as it has become ‘the idea that swallowed the world’ (Metcalf 2017). Their idealized self-perception of objectivity and neutrality notwithstanding, over the years, universities as the key institutions of knowledge production have also been dramatically transformed and aligned with the overall goals of neoliberal global capitalism.

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