Interrogating Neoliberal Market Rationality and the Exclusivity of Higher Education

Abstract

The perpetuating market rationality imposes havoc on public universities and the accessibility of higher education in developing countries like India. In addition to the hastened process of restructuring higher education towards profit goals, the impact of market rationality is visible in the forms of jeopardizing academic freedom, curriculum restructuring for market impulses and assault on critical thinking. The market compulsions for knowledge production cripples the public universities’ institutional autonomy and their financial sovereignty. In this situation, public universities were asked to generate internal resources and start market-oriented courses to meet corporate demands. The increasing cut in grant to public universities and the removal of subsidiaries on education lead to the increase in fees and cut in teachers’ salaries. The influence of neoliberal market rationality transformed university as market provider and student as consumer leading to greater depoliticization. It imposes instrumental rationality on universities through standardization of rules and regulations, while public universities’ main objective was to ensure social justice through instruments of recognition, representation, and redistribution. The increasing role of the market rationality in knowledge production has implications for the social conception of citizenship, thereby impoverishing certain social classes as it breeds inequality and displacement. The growing material inequality hampers the very idea of social citizenship thereby leading towards more exclusivity. The chapter gives an elaborate theoretical journey of neoliberalism and analysing the role of market rationality and its impact on the higher education sector in general and in India, particularly.