Tolling academics: Rent-seeking and gatekeeping in the university space

Abstract

Assuming the ‘neoliberalisation’ of academic life to be axiomatic, this article delves into the operations of its political economy with the aim of expanding critical vocabularies, analytical categories and research trajectories. In particular, it indicates where an immanent critique of neoliberal academia can be begun. While the capitalist transformations of academic life are justified by ideological claims eulogising ‘production’, ‘competition’ and ‘marketisation’, the neoliberal regime has proven decidedly ineffective at fulfilling these claims. An effective critique of neoliberal reform must, therefore, explore and interrogate the degree to which the practical effects of neoliberal reform diverge from its underpinning theoretical claims, and why this might be so. The principal question here pertains to rent and rent-seeking behaviour in the academic space, as a mode of activity inconsistent with the legitimating tenets of capitalist ideology. To the extent that rent-seeking activities can be identified in neoliberal academia – in distinction to ‘value-producing’ labour or ‘profit-making’ entrepreneurialism – a more potent critique of neoliberal reform will be forthcoming and an immanent critique of the neoliberal regime of capitalist accumulation in the academic space put into motion. By positioning the neoliberal regime within a broader shift towards accumulation by ‘appropriation’ in the world-system, a strategic reason can be identified for the proliferation of rent-seeking behaviours in academic life and beyond. The article argues that these rent-seeking behaviours have materialised in a range of gatekeeping techniques across the academic space, with which many inhabitants of that space have become complicit, resulting in the increasing dispossession of surplus through the practice of tolling realised in those techniques. The article develops a Marxian critique with additional insights from world-system theory, critical social theory and critical geography. Examples of gatekeeping technique considered throughout the article include master degree programmes, journal publication structures, conference fees and Graduate Record Examinations.