To sum up the week’s arguments:

However, I think there are two additional arguments around competition and markets which I may have skated over a little too easily and which I should address before ending this series.

The first is that while engaging in competition for students and student dollars is not inherently neoliberal (this was happening long before neoliberalism or even capitalism was a term), the effect of government cut-backs, which increase institutional reliance on tuition as a revenue stream, is a neoliberal one.  By pushing institutions closer to the market, this pushes institutions to have values which are more like those of a profit-seeking entity.  The second, essentially, is the same argument applied to research.  As public funding falls, research needs to pay its way, and this changes the financial calculus in the way institutions invest in science – i.e. with a view for a “profit”.

There is obviously a measure of truth here.  North American institutions do operate with a sharper business eye than they used to, and to the extent that sharp = corporate = neoliberal, then you can make a case for neoliberalism on this basis.  But two objections can sensibly be raised here.

The first has to do with agency.  In this telling, universities do not voluntarily become neoliberal, they have neoliberalness (neoliberality?) thrust upon them by penny-pinching governments.  This veers towards to what I think is the maximally-vacuous position that universities are neoliberal because they exist within neoliberal society.  By rendering the neoliberalness of institutions independent of any of their own behaviour, it deprives the term of much of its explanatory power.

The second is that presumably if the degree of the removal of government funding is an explanatory variable, then it would be possible to test the hypothesis by looking at changes in institutional behaviour based on either the extent of funding or the extent of the withdrawal of funding.

For instance, within Canada, universities in Ontario are substantially more tuition dependent than those in Quebec or Newfoundland or Alberta.  Does this make Western act in a more neoliberal way than Calgary?  Dalhousie more than Memorial?  There is room for reasonable disagreement here, but I think one would have a difficult time sustaining that argument.