EDUCATION, MARKETS, AND AN AUDIT CULTURE

Abstract

In this article I discuss some of the ways in which certain elements of conservative modernization have had an impact on higher education and education in general. I point to the growth of commodifying logics and the audit culture that accompanies them. In the process, I highlight a number of dangers that we currently face. However, I also urge us not to assume that these conditions can be reduced to the automatic workings out of simple formulae. We need a much more nuanced and complex picture of class relations and class projects to understand what is happening--and, while I have not done this here, a more sensitive and historically grounded analysis of the place of racial dynamics in the vision both of 'a world out of control' that needs to be policed and of 'cultural pollution' that threatens 'real knowledge' in the growth of markets and audit cultures. Becoming more nuanced about such constitutive dynamics will not guarantee that we can interrupt the tendencies upon which I have focused here. But it is one essential step in understanding the genesis of what is at stake in a serious politics of interruptio