Beyond Measure: On the Marketization of British Universities, and the Domestication of Academic Criminology

In this short essay, I discuss two interrelated processes. First, I will address the marketization of British universities. Here, I claim that—despite appearing regularly in the public proclamations of government ministers and university leaders—the core ideals of the university no longer play a significant role in Britain’s higher education sector and rarely intrude upon the working lives of British academics. The university’s traditional telos was tied to the pursuit of truth and the expansion of human knowledge. However, only vague traces of the university’s grand ideals can now be found throughout large expanses of Britain’s university system. These traces take a ghostly form: their substance appropriated, these ghosts attempt but are unable to exhort an influence upon unfolding social reality (as originally discussed in Derrida 2006). Only flickering representations of the university’s grand ideals remain. In their true form, these ideals are for the most part consigned to the realm of memory, and with every passing year seem at ever-greater risk of being forgotten completely.