My High Horse Is Dying: Agitating Internalized Neoliberalism in Higher Education With(Out) Compassion

Abstract

This critical, poststructural autoethnography agitates internalized neoliberalism in the higher education context. Provocative and experimental, it is intended to trouble neoliberal norms that shape professional selves and higher-education-the-collective, while also interweaving what it means to be/come a scholar. Nonlinear flares, manifested in theorization, images, vignettes, checklists, and poetry illuminate the subtleties of inescapable neoliberalism at individual and systemic levels. Offering compassion as a throughline of inquiry, I wonder if/how it is possible for compassion to disrupt neoliberalism through the precarity of individual and systemic enaction. As higher education goes on, and uncertain institutions contemplate staff/faculty retention, along with the telos of college education, how do we come to terms with neoliberalism’s stronghold that stifles emancipating onto-epistemic possibilities? Can/does compassion create breeches for new possibilities?