Over the past decades governments have sought to re-structure the higher education sector based on neo-liberal market —and new public management mechanisms. In the UK as elsewhere, students are increasingly conceptualised as consumers. A central rationale for student empowerment, however, has been the desire to disrupt the power of academic faculty who have been looked upon by government as self-interested providers who resist change.

As an important part of this development new categories of professional administrators or ‘market intermediaries’ have emerged, who, rather than servicing academics, challenge existing power relations, erode academic autonomy and act as conduits for the entry of external forces into higher education.

In this lecture, Rajani Naidoo considers the consequences of such commodification on higher education as a public and positional good, on quality, on the nature of the academic profession and on higher education’s contribution to equity and social justice.