Neoliberalism, Higher Education and Anti-Politics: The Assault on the Criminological Imagination

As (many) students become more narrowly instrumentalist and less socially aware or concerned, higher education has become eager, in return for their custom, to give them an 'experience' that 'satisfies' these limited aspirations. The student is encouraged to become a simple aggregation of those knowledges and skills that they can sell in the marketplace, and to aspire only to a life defined by the consumption that this will enable. As service consumer and producer respectively the student and the university are fast becoming mere numbers in education by spread-sheet, and in the anti-politics of the market. Notions that education should involve learning about society itself - its past, its present or its future, its unfairnesses, its dangers and its brutalities – or of the student's own life and responsibilities within it, are fast becoming eccentric.