Governmentality and academic work : shaping the hearts and minds of academic workers

The single most important feature of neoliberal government is that it systematically dismantles the will to critique, thus potentially shifting the very nature of what a university is and the ways in which academics understand their work. Through establishing a new cultural hegemony as Gramsci (1997) said, you can occupy people’s heads, and their hearts and hands will follow. Within neoliberal mentalities of government “welfare,” or government responsibility for the well-being of the people, is constituted as a degraded mentality, and competitive market mentalities are elevated and given monolithic status. The market becomes the singular discourse through which individual and institutional acceptability will be recognised (Bok, 2003; Marginson & Considine, 2000). In this paper we draw on Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism, and its practices of shaping individuals through specific modes of government in order to analyse the phenomenon of the market oriented, audit university. We analyse the discourses taken up by managers and academics as they speak into existence the neoliberal subjects of the new university.