Problems on Campus? Blame ‘Neoliberalism,’ Shoddy Study Says

A recent academic study has found a new bogeyman on campus: “neoliberalism.” And it’s supposedly a driving force behind college student-government campaigns, at least in Florida.

Authors Michael A. Goodman, Sarah Simi Cohen, Alexa Lee Arndt, and Ben Parks are all employed at public universities. They published their study in the Journal of Campus Activities Practice and Scholarship, a peer-reviewed social-science journal of the National Association of Campus Activities (NACA). It investigated 18 student-government campaigns across nine Florida colleges and universities and found that “much like higher education more broadly, student governments, in turn, are complicit in upholding neoliberalism and capitalism in higher education.”

“Neoliberalism” is a term used loosely outside of academia and defined rather loosely within academia. The ideology is vaguely connected to individualism and capitalism, yet a favorite pejorative within academia. Phillip Magness and Robertas Bakula have aptly described its status as a convenient boogeyman:

The body of supposedly neoliberal tenets is like the labile substance of a ghost, briefly appearing on the ritualist’s call and disappearing again into oblivion by the end of the seance. Sometimes, the tale goes, it manifests in Western, market-oriented democracies in the form of “laissez-faire” non-interventionism of the government in the economy, globalism, internationalism, and free trade. But other times, the spirit possesses autocratic regimes in the developing world and takes the form of a welfare state, economic nationalism, trade protectionism, and government stimulus packages.

The ambiguity allows academics easily to evoke suspicions of individualism and markets.

I have personal experience of neoliberalism being used in this manner in an academic setting. The study of neoliberalism was part of the syllabus of a Global Capitalism college course I took. A podcast episode assigned for the course described neoliberals as the “sort of people who embrace a kind of liberal capitalist ideology and free market solutions to what would sort of historically be viewed as something in the public sector.” The podcast also cited Steven Pinker as “the ideological godfather of this new kind of Neoliberal Optimism Industry” and accused him of advancing “alt right-y positions.” Of course, Steven Pinker — a Harvard professor of cognitive psychology who has explicitly criticized the alt-right for their “repellent conclusions” — shares no common ground with alt-right figures such as Nick Fuentes. Pinker does not even consider himself right-wing in any regard. Yet the unintelligible pejorative of neoliberalism enables far-left academics to classify anyone they oppose as associated with the alt-right, under the expansive umbrella of neoliberalism.

Like a fictional villain, neoliberalism gets a nefarious origin story. “Neoliberalism became prominent in the U.S. through the Reagan administration as a wave of thought that prompted dangerous ideals promoting individual, competitive work under the guise of meritocracy, resulting in social stratification,” the research study alleges.

The study’s authors do not shrink from linking neoliberalism to anything and everything abhorrent. They write that “neoliberalism seeks to uphold capitalism through interlocking systems of oppression, highlighting the ableist, classist, cis-heteronormative, and white supremacist underpinnings of our systems.” Even if student government campaigns oppose these “interlocking systems of oppression,” when these campaigns employ what the authors call “neoliberal logics,” they only further these oppressions within higher education.

What are “neoliberal logics”? The authors cite two examples frequently espoused by student campaigns: “financial transparency” and “accountability.” According to this study, when students use these terms, they implicitly promote various forms of oppression. The authors explain that students may not always be aware that they are upholding various forms of oppression. Their use of such terms is “perhaps as a consequence of neoliberal norms.” That is, the forces of neoliberalism use naïve student campaigns to further a sinister plot. Indeed, the authors explained that they chose neoliberalism as the framework of the study to “examine how students are affected and used as tools of neoliberal agendas.”

Yet the supporting evidence for how, precisely, student campaigns espouse neoliberalism is tenuous and strange. For example, the study notes that student campaigns now use social-media platforms rather than create their own websites. Do the authors argue that this shift has taken place because fellow students can be reached and connected more effectively through social media, which is free, in contrast to website domains, which require monthly fees? No. Rather, this shift is evidence of “neoliberal consolidation.”

Similarly, the authors highlight a student campaign that criticized rising tuition fees and advocated more state funding for the university, but only to decry the student campaign for its failure to state outright “the explicit connection to neoliberalism as a driving force of student financial burden.” The authors not only allege that neoliberalism is directly related to “student financial burden” without providing any economic rationale or measurable data as to why; they also claim that failing to acknowledge this wide-ranging effect of neoliberalism is further proof of how pervasive neoliberalism is.

Elsewhere in the study, the authors call the failure of student campaigns to address certain national and statewide political issues “shocking.” None of the campaigns studied addressed issues of gun violence or abortion access. Even though the study researched Florida universities and colleges exclusively, the authors noted that none of the campaigns acknowledged state legislation such as the Stop WOKE Act, the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, or the Parental Rights in Education Act. The authors reject the notion that these issues were perhaps not relevant to student governments:

Across the board, campaigns did not recognize the harsh political climate many of their constituents are living and fighting through daily, especially in Florida with bills such as the notorious Don’t Say Gay Bill and the countless anti-transgender and anti-Critical Race Theory-esque policies being eschewed and enforced. The lack of attention to these Florida-specific policies demonstrates how neoliberalism demands people (students) to portray a picture-perfect campaign that seeks to uplift certain social justice efforts without acknowledging some of the deeper-rooted issues.

This is unduly partisan for a peer-reviewed study published in a journal from a nonpartisan organization. The authors’ justification for exclusively researching universities and colleges within Florida is more of the same. They claim that Florida’s “extreme political turmoil” contributed to their decision to focus on the state. They further stressed that the dominance by Republicans of all branches of state government since 1999 has enabled these “recent legislative efforts” that are “intended to remove freedoms.”

The authors’ brazen hostility toward political opponents is unsurprising given their view of neoliberalism. Their presumption is that it is omnipresent and responsible for many, if not most, of the ills plaguing humanity. Casting any event they dislike as yet another neoliberal sin makes it seem all the more threatening.

This inevitably results in exaggeration and caricature. As Samuel Gregg explained in National Review:

Left-leaning thinkers have blamed neoliberalism for things ranging from the aftermath of the second Iraq War to some of the worst forms of social dysfunction in America today as well as its high incarceration rate. Neoliberals, they insist, are all about making the world safe for multinational corporations to do whatever they want whenever they want wherever they want.

Neoliberalism is everywhere, and it is bad. So if something is bad, it must be neoliberalism. QED. All that’s left to solidify neoliberalism as an unequivocal force of evil is to remove any notion of well-intentioned neoliberals. Sometimes this manifests in conspiracy narratives, where “neoliberalism is seen as a highly malevolent force, directed by a ‘neoliberal thought collective’ that operates in the shadows because it knows that neoliberalism’s agenda of limitless economic freedom and growth-at-all-costs would never be accepted if presented in the open,” as Gregg described. Similarly, when left-wing journalist Adam Johnson designates Steven Pinker as “the ideological godfather of this new kind of Neoliberal Optimism Industry,” he furthers the conspiratorial narrative of a powerful, secretive, neoliberal industry that “gaslights us into complacency and political impotence.”

Such conspiratorial paranoia prospers in academia. Public university professors Samuel Museus and Lucy LePeau, for example, concluded that “​​exploitation is at the core of the neoliberalism regime.” Unsurprisingly, Goodman et al.’s study cited this conclusion to support its claim that universities use students as “institutional agents” who “attempt to demonstrate their power relationship” by “embracing the neoliberal goals to gain as much revenue as possible from their constituents.”

The authors of the research study recommend solutions that “educate unaware students of neoliberal resistance.” Lost on the authors are a few possibilities: that neoliberalism is not as pervasive as they claim; that it’s not the stereotype they imagine it to be; and that some social problems are attributable to other ideologies. They would rather see their caricature of neoliberals lurking in every corner — and leverage their paranoia to justify hostility toward those supposedly scary specters they imagine as neoliberalism’s unholy spawn: individualism and free markets.