Knowledge becomes 'information', a commodity to be manufactured, packaged, bought and sold, and intellectual work a matter of goods being cost-effectively manufactured on a production line. Criticism and resistance become extremely difficult. Intellectuals are expected to think and perform according to the problematic in play, or find themselves dead in the water. The commodification of higher education to serve the market is revolutionising our entire practice, from institutional image through to management, jobs and curriculum. In the university's new mission, what gets taught or researched matters less than that it is excellently taught or researched, that is, that it satisfies market demand.
Academics pride themselves on their careful use of language and ideas.
Yet in falling for slogans trumped up by bankers and purveyors of hamburgers, they seem to admit that they are incapable of finding an approach to change rooted in their own value system and culture. But if academics have fallen for the jargon of business, this pales against the extent to which the culture of business has colonised university administration. This is changing. University CEO's appointed on the basis of their 'struggle' credentials soon discover that their function is to ease the transition from struggle culture to the culture of the market, and the strategy employed to secure this new intellectual economy is simple but effective. At first, struggle idiom is used to legitimise the project and disarm criticism.