Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Neoliberal capitalism and dynamics of injustice in the academic world

Presentation on Saturday, May 28, 2022 at the roundtable “The Academic Community & Injustice” of the twentieth conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, held in Sacramento, California, United States.

David Pavón-Cuéllar

Capitalism subsumes more and more spheres of life and culture. The academic world is no exception. The academy is increasingly dominated by capitalist economic logics, including those of commodification and free competition, which are accentuated by neoliberalism and which are at the core of the academic capitalism described by Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie.

Now I will try to show how commodification and free competition involve forms of injustice, inequity and arbitrariness, which are suffered by academics around the world. We will see how in the academy, as in any other field, free competition is not truly free or fair, while commodification enables exploitation practices also marked by injustice.

Let’s start with free competition in its best known manifestation, that of academics competing with each other for resources. The academics who get the most resources are generally the most productive, those who produce the most papers, quotes and other products. Apparently they are the ones who most deserve to receive resources, in a meritocratic logic that is proclaimed as a fair play.

The truth is that the supposed free competition cannot be fair because academics do not start from the same place. In the academy there are determinant class divisions between those who worked and those who did not work to pay for their studies or receive their scholarship, between those who had and those who did not have enough money to pay for certain schools or universities, to learn other languages, to live in other countries to study, and to have their PhD before the age of 30. This is all partly about class and money, but there are other variables.

There are insurmountable inequalities in the academy between the respective experiences of women and men, whites and people of colour, people considered able or disabled, children of intellectuals and children of illiterate parents. These inequalities put some academics above others and mean that some are excluded, segregated or discriminated, and that for them everything is more difficult, sometimes even impossible.

Inequalities among academics are replicated across institutional and geographic contexts. Universities in the global south generally have smaller budgets than universities in Europe, the United States, Israel, Canada, and the other rich countries. For universities in poor countries, this means worse facilities, fewer resources for research, fewer books in libraries, fewer subscriptions to journals, lower wages and more teaching and office work for academics, and therefore less time to read, research or write. All this inequality is even more unjust than it seems, as we know that it is produced and reproduced by unequal trade, by the international division of labour, and by the neo-colonial plunder and exploitation of the global south. If neoliberal capitalism imposes a competition between academics from different regions, this competition is neither free nor fair.

Another way in which the injustice of academic capitalism manifests itself is a consequence of the process of commodification. This process leads to more and more research and teaching of what can be sold and make a profit. On the contrary, what is not profitable for the capitalist system, however important it may be for society or culture, is sacrificed, receiving lesser or even null resources. This is the case of critical thinking. This is unfair, but the greatest injustice results from the commodification of the academics themselves subsumed in capitalism.

Like other workers, academics are exploited as commodities. Their cognitive ability, their commodified intellectual labour force, is bought for the price of their salary (in which their exchange value is expressed) in order to exploit their use value (their productivity as professors or researcher). Productivity must be greater than salaries to produce a surplus value that is more and more for capital, less and less for society, even in public education. All this is quite unfair for society and for exploited academics, but, as if that were not enough, there are academics more exploited than others, which is an injustice within injustice.


OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
David Pavón-Cuéllar (28 de mayo de 2022). Neoliberal capitalism and dynamics of injustice in the academic world. En lugar de la psicología. Recuperado 11 de febrero de 2026 de https://doi.org/10.58079/umkk


Deja una respuesta

Tu dirección de correo electrónico no será publicada. Los campos obligatorios están marcados con *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.