The University in the Shadow of Neoliberal Rationality

Abstract

This study analyzes the neoliberal transformation of the university not merely as a technical policy revision, but as an crisis reconfiguring the nature of knowledge, institutional structures, and the academic subject. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and critical neoliberalism literature, the study examines this crisis across four axes. At the macro level, it investigates the commodification of knowledge and the heteronomization of the scientific field through “academic capitalism.” At the meso level, it discusses how “audit culture” reduces academic production to content-free “rituals of verification” while liquidating the humanities. At the micro level, it highlights the “terror of performativity” imposed on academics and the shift of the student-academic relationship toward a service-consumption axis, leading to pedagogical “infantilisation.” Finally, the Turkish context is presented as a unique case of “authoritarian marketization,” differing from Western models by transforming quality assurance processes into a “bureaucratic simulation.” The article concludes by calling for the reconstruction of a truth-based, autonomous academic ethic against the university’s “slow death.”