Abstract

Higher education on the corporate model imagines students as consumers, choosing between knowledge products and brands. It imagines itself liberating the university from the dictates of the State/tradition/aristocratic self-replication, and putting it in the hands of its democratic stakeholders. It therefore naturally subscribes to the general management principles and practices of global corporate culture. These principles – transparency, accountability, efficiency – are hard to argue with in principle. But an abstract argument in political economy comes down to earth in the challenges facing the arts and humanities, after the ‘Education Revolution’, to justify their modes of life.