Cathal Larkin examines the effects of neoliberalism on higher education.  

An ideology has reached its highest form when its ideas appear as common sense, empirical fact, or objective social necessity. That it is currently the tenets of neoliberalism – privatisation of public assets, individualisation of social issues and subjectivity, commodification of all resources, and the fetish for quantifying even the most elusive concepts like, for example, teachers’ productivity – which appear as such, reveals the hegemonic position of this ideology. The centre ground of politics has had to respond with a sizable shift to the right. The previously dominant economic ideas of Keynesianism that encouraged progressive taxation to fund public goods like education, healthcare, public transport and social welfare are now only consistently advocated in Ireland by the ostensible revolutionary socialists of the ULA (although Labour and Sinn Féin are mostly Keynesian when in opposition, they’re neoliberals when in government – and for their all-island nature Sinn Féin suffer the schizophrenia of being both at the same time).

In higher education the effects of neoliberalism have been severe. The college registration fee has increased more than tenfold since the late nineties, and student grants have been reduced and become more difficult to access. Without rich parents or a scholarship, post-graduate education is now only possible through loans such as Bank of Ireland’s new extortionate student loan scheme (interest is paid during the period of study, and the capital plus 10% interest is paid after graduation). University academics have been hit by the increasing casualization of many positions, and the pressure of being assessed based on their contribution to the university’s world rankings. Quality teaching, publishing books, and public engagement don’t contribute any points, and the criteria of most ranking systems show a shameless bias against the arts, humanities and social science. The objective pursuit of knowledge through the natural sciences is also under threat due to increasing collaboration of university scientists with private industry. The Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) is explicit that the telos of scientific research should be to develop commercial products – despite the importance to scientific advancement of open collaboration among experts.

On the horizon for Irish third level education appears more of the same. The 2011 government-commissioned Hunt Report recommended further commercialisation, privatisation and quantification in order for universities to support ‘Ireland’s economic renewal and growth.’ In his damning indictment of the report, Dr Colin Coulter noted that: ‘At the heart of the Hunt Report is a vision of the university that clearly derives from the discredited doctrines of neoliberal capitalism. If the recommendations set out in the document were to be implemented in full, higher education in Ireland would not merely come to serve even more fully certain corporate interests, it would itself become a corporate interest.’

With that bleak future in store, the question is how do we defend and reclaim the university as a space for public intellectual development that’s accessible to all? Putting any hope in our student representatives is definitely not a wise option. John Logue, the new President of the Union of Student of Ireland (USI) was elected on the promise to no longer have a national student march against college fees. Instead he proposed lobbying as the principal way to protect students’ interests. Regardless of the USI’s skills of persuasion, it is hard to imagine them out-lobbying the IMF and multinational corporations with larger economies than most countries. At a local level, the newly elected UCC Students’ Union President is Eoghan Healy. One of his three reasons to vote for him was, according to his campaign leaflet, ‘realistic, achievable ideas: i.e. more plug sockets in the old part of the library.’ Yes, hardly an awe-inspiring manifesto. And he doesn’t even know how to abbreviate ‘for example’ (either that or, even worse, he actually sees each individual plug socket as a realistic, achievable idea!).

Anyway, even if Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos were elected as our representatives, it would still be up to students themselves to organise and mobilise to make social change happen as unions can achieve very little without an active membership. A starting point should be challenging the neoliberal assumption that college is solely a place to add value to your labour power before competing with other graduates to sell it to a corporation. Instead, the enlightenment idea of the university being a space to promote the public use of reason should be foregrounded. Students in this vision are engaged social actors, not the homo economicus individualist consumers of neoliberalism. The most well-known historical moment for the socially engaged student is probably the sixties in America. The movement challenged US imperialism and institutionalised racism (apart from the great work in the civil rights and black liberation movements, an interesting story of this struggle is how on campuses across the country students demanded, and got, classes on black history). They permanently changed the contemporary repressive norms of sexual behaviour and recreational drug use, and formed part of a wider milieu which spawned the environmentalist and gay rights movement.

It’s interesting to note the student movement mobilised in a period of increased access to third level education and economic growth – it was still during those three post-World War II decades historian Eric Hobsbawm calls ‘the golden age of capitalism.’ In contemporary Ireland we face the exact opposite conditions, ones that should be more conducive to the social movement building necessary to effect change. It is the collective political subjectivity that we lack, but hopefully not for much longer.