University classification systems as ideological systems: the process of university differentiation and class division

Abstract

We are currently witnessing a progressive and accelerated process of change in public universities, which has intensified over the last two decades and presents numerous paradoxes. The complex institutional crisis facing universities, linked to that of our societies, is accompanied by a recurring appeal to numerical governance as the only possible way out of it. This reflection is part of a critical and dialectical investigation into the ways contemporary university is changing. As a concrete illustration, we examine the evolution of its specific modes of organisation and legitimation, as manifested in a system of discursive practices about the university that stem both from both inside and from outside its confines. We argue that the replacement of the autonomous government of the university by its mathematical government sets in motion not only key processes within a field of ideological production —which we can relate both to the imaginary, symbolic, and real registers of the psychic realm and to the processes of mythification, mystification, and fetishisation of the social domain— but also specific forms of domination linked to the economic ethics of contemporary neoliberalism.