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Towards neoliberalism: The dominant philosophy driving higher education policy globally

CHEF Talk with Nitya Nanda Timsina.

Info about event

Time

Thursday 24 February 2022,  at 15:00 - 16:00

Location

Online (Zoom)

Organizer

CHEF

Speaker:

My name is Nitya Nanda Timsina. I would not like to introduce myself with the status like ‘researcher’ or a ‘scholar’. I simply prefer to call myself a lifelong learner or a student of higher education who is learning to confront the facticity of education in terms of economic development and how in this process the Nepalese higher education come to derive its name and legitimacy “decentralized” and “autonomous”.

Chair:  Dr Søren S.E. Bengtsen, Co-Director of CHEF, Aarhus University, Denmark

Time: February 24th, 2022 at 15.00-16.00 Central European Time (CET)

Place: A Zoom-link will be shared with the participants closer to the event

Abstract:

In this talk, I will argue that the dominant philosophy driving higher education policy globally is “neoliberalism”—a constitutive part of globalization. It is concerned with economic survival of nations and economic security for individuals. It lays the blame on low growth rates and unemployment to welfare policies and labor market barriers created by the interventionist state. It calls for the minimalist state. It ascribes learning to earning. It is concerned with deriving richness of life through market futures in education, competitive salary, comparable jobs and competitive exams. It takes an individual like the figure of a supermarket to earn profit or perish. It creates winners and losers in education as in a horse race. It objectivizes students as “entrepreneurs” of education or as “money-earning creatures”. It devalues other forms of education which do not produce economic values. It is, in short, the economic theory of modern states, concerned with global markets, or a ‘managerial state’. It refers mainly to the experiences in the OECD countries. It makes us imagine that the rest of the world is void and empty of meaning.