Neoliberal Debt Culture in Global Higher Education

Global Higher Education (GHE) is undergoing direct and indirect underfunding, which results in institutional instability. Direct underfunding refers to the abrupt withdrawal of state subsidies to the public university, as witnessed by the political reaction of the Trump administration to Palestine solidarity movements in American higher education, among many others around the world. Indirect underfunding refers to the austerity measures being applied to the public university by governments advancing the neoliberal world system. These two connected underfunding measures birth systemic attacks on the civil liberties of students and staff, and they erode the core purpose of the public university. An underfunded public university in the market economy is compelled to take on debt to survive, and this creates an institutional crisis of instability. Paul Zeleza’s reading of GHE as a triad of a nationalist, developmental, and neoliberal university provides the theoretical depth to this study of this global phenomenon from its origins of colonial hierarchy, particularly from the six regions of the world with contested traditions of higher education: North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The article adds two perspectives to critical studies of GHE: a critique of debt culture as the dominant option of running the public university, and a proposal to return to the original and liberating promise of the public university.