The COVID-19 Crisis as an Opportunity to (Further) Extend Neoliberalism into the Higher Learning

Philip Mirowski’s, book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, describes how crises are used by neoliberals to extend neoliberal policies and adjust institutions in such a way as to strengthen and further entrench neoliberal values and goals. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis that created an opportunity to extend and further entrench neoliberal policies, goals, and values into higher education in the U.S. and elsewhere. We argue higher education is becoming irreversibly neoliberal because neoliberalism has transformed higher education from a process of developing the critical thinking skills and the goals of classical liberal education in the humanities, arts, and sciences to create a citizenry capable of sustaining a democracy, into a system for training and producing compliant workers for employers who will not, because they cannot, question the underlying neoliberal construction of the society and the disembedded economy. Thus, achieving the “total depravity” in higher education that Veblen described in his classic, The Higher Learning in America.