Democracy’s Nemesis

Abstract

This essay focuses on how higher education has been reshaped under the influence of a market rationality, however devalued recently, that continues to license out the university as a storefront, reconfigure governance on the model of a discredited business model, reduce faculty to contract labor, and position students largely as customers. Against the increasing corporatization of higher education, the essay calls for reclaiming education as crucial to the project of democratization, educating students to be willing and able to engage the relationship between equality and social justice as fundamental to public life, and provide the conditions for educators to connect their teaching to broader social issues.