A Small Note to My Readers
I’m trying something new with my writing.
For some topics, I’ll be creating two versions of the same idea — one for the academic community, using theoretical frameworks and references, and another for general readers, where the same ideas are explored in a more accessible and less jargon-heavy way.
The aim is simple: to make complex ideas travel across different spaces without losing their depth.
(And now, here is the version of the blog for readers in the academic world)
Higher education today is increasingly driven by metrics, markets, and measurable outcomes.
But education was never meant to be only about productivity—it was also about thinking, questioning, and imagining otherwise. This piece asks: what happens when knowledge is valued only for its economic return?
A Faustian Bargain? Rethinking the Future of Higher Education
What if the transformation of higher education today is not merely reform — but a bargain?
And not just any bargain, but a Faustian one — an agreement that promises power, efficiency, and global relevance, while quietly demanding something far more valuable in return.
Literature, Theory, and the Question of the Present
The relationship between literature and theory has always been deeply intertwined. Theories often carry a certain literariness, while literary narratives generate conceptual frameworks through which we interpret reality.
It is from this intersection that we may begin to understand the present crisis of higher education.
Literature does not merely tell stories — it gives us metaphors to think with. And perhaps no metaphor captures our current moment better than the Faustian bargain.
The Faustian Temptation
In German folklore, Faust makes a pact with Mephistopheles, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge, pleasure, and power. Later popularized in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1594), this story has come to symbolize reckless exchanges — short-term gains for long-term loss.
Today, higher education appears to be entering a similar pact.
Universities promise:
global competitiveness
employability
innovation
measurable success
But what is being surrendered in return?
When Market Logic Becomes Common Sense
To understand this transformation, we must first examine the spread of neoliberal rationality.
As Sam Binkley and Jorge Capetillo-Ponce observe, neoliberalism does not operate only at the level of the state. It emerges from everyday practices of buying and selling, gradually expanding into all spheres of life. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79), they note how economic logic becomes a model for understanding subjectivity itself:
neoliberalism produces “uniquely economic subjectivities—the entrepreneurial self, who undertakes her own self-government as an economic enterprise” (Binkley & Capetillo-Ponce, 2009).
Foucault’s broader project was precisely to examine
“the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (Foucault, 2009).
Under neoliberalism, the subject is no longer simply social or political — it becomes economic.
From:
homo sapiens (biological being)
to homo sociologicus (social being)
to homo oeconomicus (calculating, self-investing individual)
Education Reimagined as Investment
What happens when this logic enters higher education?
Education is no longer primarily about knowledge. It becomes:
an investment
a productivity enhancer
a pathway to employability
a measurable return
As Gary Becker (1992) puts it, education enhances “the productivity of people in market and non-market situations.”
The student becomes an entrepreneurial self:
building portfolios
curating CVs
branding identity
constantly upskilling
Universities become training grounds for self-management.
Governmentality and the Entrepreneurial Self
Foucault’s concept of governmentality helps us understand this shift.
He defines it as:
“the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections… that allow the exercise of this very specific… power that has the population as its target” (Security, Territory, Population, 1977–78).
Neoliberalism extends economic reasoning into previously non-economic domains:
“the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic” (Birth of Biopolitics, 1978–79).
Education, then, is no longer outside the market — it is fully absorbed into it.
The Audit University
This transformation is accompanied by the rise of what Michael Power (1997) calls the “audit society”—a world governed by measurement, verification, and quantification.
We now live in an academic culture defined by:
rankings
citation indices
impact factors
performance metrics
As Theodore Porter (1996) puts it, we increasingly place our “trust in numbers” rather than judgment.
Marilyn Strathern (2000) observes that audit has become a universal logic:
“applicable to all kinds of reckonings, evaluations and measurements.”
In universities, this produces what Stephen J. Ball (2000, 2003) calls a culture of performativity, where academics must constantly demonstrate measurable productivity.
Ball describes how these pressures are lived:
tensions are “played out in the everyday/everynight lives of individual academics.”
Under such conditions, institutions and individuals engage in what Ball calls “fabrications”—performances designed to satisfy evaluation systems.
Here, Foucault’s insight becomes crucial:
power “produces reality… domains of objects and rituals of truth” (Discipline and Punish, 1975).
And Butler’s concept of performativity reminds us that these practices are:
“reiterative and citational” (Butler, 1993).
Knowledge becomes visibility.
Visibility becomes value.
Knowledge as Commodity
The transformation of education is inseparable from the transformation of knowledge itself.
As Jean-François Lyotard (1984) observed:
“Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold… it loses its ‘use-value.’”
Knowledge is no longer pursued for its own sake. It becomes:
exchangeable
marketable
commodified
David Harvey (2005) captures this broader shift:
neoliberalism seeks “to bring all human action into the domain of the market.”
This leads to what Canaan and Shumar (2008) call the transition from the welfare state to the market state.
Universities now resemble marketplaces:
students become consumers
degrees become investments
knowledge becomes product
As Aronowitz and Giroux (2000) note:
universities are increasingly seen as “training grounds for corporate berths.”
Inequality and Academic Capital
This shift also reshapes academic hierarchies.
Pierre Bourdieu (1977) reminds us:
culture and education are central to “the reproduction of social differences.”
When economic capital dominates academia:
STEM fields gain prestige
Humanities are marginalized
critical inquiry loses value
“Cultural capital” itself becomes monetized.
Debt and Discipline
Another dimension of neoliberal education is financialization.
Declining public funding leads to:
rising tuition
student loans
institutional debt
As Pettifor (2017) notes, austerity is justified through the claim that “there is no money.”
This produces a cycle of:
debt → dependency → compliance
Debt becomes a disciplinary mechanism.
Students choose careers not based on passion, but repayment.
The Managerial University
Universities themselves are changing.
Henry Giroux (2002) warns:
civic discourse has been replaced by “commercialism, privatization, and deregulation.”
He argues that this transformation produces:
“compliant workers, depoliticized consumers, and passive citizens.”
Bill Readings (1996) describes the modern university as organized around the empty ideal of:
“excellence.”
Everything must be measured, optimized, justified.
Vice-Chancellors become CEOs.
Academic labour becomes precarious.
Research aligns with market priorities.
The Emotional Costs
Neoliberal academia is not only structural—it is affective.
It produces:
anxiety
burnout
competition
insecurity
As Ball (2003) puts it, academics live under the “terrors of performativity.”
Failure becomes individualized.
Structural issues disappear.
Personal inadequacy takes their place.
The Digital University
In the present moment, this transformation is intensified by digital technologies.
We live in what Esposito and Stark (2019) call a “society of rankings.”
Education is increasingly datafied:
learning analytics
AI assessment
behavioural tracking
Drawing on Shoshana Zuboff (2019), this can be understood as part of surveillance capitalism.
Education becomes optimization.
As Lyotard (1984) warned:
the computerization of society may become an instrument of control governed by “the performativity principle.”
Can Universities Still Resist?
Despite these pressures, universities are not fully lost.
Alternative pedagogies continue to exist:
feminist classrooms
decolonial curricula
critical pedagogy
community-based learning
These practices remind us that education can still be:
reflective
ethical
democratic
The Question Before Us
The neoliberal university promises:
efficiency
innovation
global relevance
But we must ask:
At what cost?
If education becomes entirely governed by markets and metrics, we risk losing something fundamental:
critical thinking
intellectual freedom
collective imagination
And once lost, these may not be easily recovered.
A Final Reflection
Faust’s tragedy was not that he desired knowledge.
It was that he accepted a bargain without fully understanding its cost.
Today, as we reshape higher education, we must ask:
Are we doing the same?
Because what is at stake is not just the future of universities—
but the future of thinking itself.
References:
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Ball, Stephen J. “Performativities and Fabrications in the
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Ball, Stephen J. “The teacher’s soul and the terrors of
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