2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The neoliberal paradigm, among other things, constructs knowledge creation and pedagogy in terms of market rationality. Current problems in higher education--low funding, the domination of universities by market mechanisms, the power of the administrator class, and the attack on faculty autonomy and students’ resistance—could be linked to neoliberal political economy. The neoliberal university is imagined more as a skill factory, producing workers for transnational corporations, and less as a space for critical engagements and debates. In this new vision of the university, an administrator class wields utmost authority and aggressively pushes the agenda of the state-corporate combine. The neoliberal rhetoric on higher education constructs teachers and students as docile salaried employees and obedient learners while it projects protest movements as nothing but aberrations. How do we preserve and protect universities as sites of learning, knowledge production, debates, and free expressions?