This presentation considers the linguistic patterns found in marketing materials at a Canadian university. This survey looked for references to neoliberal language of market freedom, expediency, and economic mobility. These were then mapped onto ways that these linguistic forms reproduce a commodity form of higher education.
Childress (2019) describes how the process of adjunctification is linked to a value extraction model which seeks to obscure from public view the commodification and devaluing of undergraduate, and in some instances graduate teaching. Surplus value in this case is derived from the relatively low pay of adjunct faculty when multiplied by the fees that each of the students in a course would pay. In addition, adjunct faculty are further alienated from their labour by way of often being excluded from professional development and investment in facilities that tenured faculty benefit from, according to Childress. This proposed presentation will discuss how this maps onto the concept of commodity fetishism (Marx, 1977) and how this can be observed in the ways that universities market themselves. Childress (2019) alludes to this commodity form of education by reference to the transfer credit. By divorcing the human productive labour of individual instructors and students into a credit hour, the managerial class of the academy is able to obscure these human relationships and create a de jure currency. This is further entrenched in the ways that higher education is marketed as a gatekeeper to higher paying labour after graduation (Aronowitz, 2000). This presentation will consider one U15 university from Canada as a test case for considering this phenomenon, the University of Saskatchewan, where a survey of prominently featured webpages was conducted looking for keywords and themes relevant to neoliberal discourses (Holborow, 2015). References to economic mobility, choice and market freedom, and expediency were noted as promoting this commodity form. It will be further argued that this commodity form degrades professional dignity (Emerald & Carpenter, 2015; White, 2012) by increasing surveillance, challenging academic autonomy, and reducing or restructuring communal supports to be more hierarchical and managerial.
