The ANU School of Sociology presents:
Intellectuals and Universities in Neoliberal Times
Emeritus Prof. Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney)
Location: The Auditorium, Australian Centre on China in the World Building, Fellows Lane, ANU.
Intellectuals are classically imagined as heroic individuals, smoking Gauloises in dingy cafes on the Left Bank; in reality intellectual labour, especially since the rise of the research university, has been increasingly collectivized.
A global economy of knowledge production and circulation has been constructed.
Knowledge institutions, in turn, have been increasingly impacted by the global neoliberal regime, commodifying their output, corporatising their internal processes, and undermining their sustainability.
The destruction of the public TAFE system in Australia in the last generation is an instructive case.
Australian universities too have seen a collapse of government funding, and a growing distance between corporate-style managers on the one hand, and an increasingly insecure intellectual and support workforce on the other.
In this lecture I will explore this story and discuss consequences for intellectual work and workers, and for the contemporary knowledge system.