A couple of caveats. The “new public management” is widely known and deployed in the US and a number of us have made the link between NPM and neoliberalism a point of departure (e.g. Chris Newfield, Marc Bousquet, me).

A word on my own trajectory might be useful as a way of reinforcing what Eli and Vinokur are emphasizing. I began academic life as an “economic anthropologist” teaching the work of both Marx and Polanyi alongside the neoclassical school, the so-called “formalist/substantivist” debate. It was not particularly enlightening as a debate and evolved into yet another academic parlor game.

However that teaching ended up affecting my analysis of the then intense Basque nationalist movement I experienced in the 1970s and the political economy of the Spanish Constitution that created a context for all kinds of race/ethnic fantasies with real world consequences. Tiring of race/ethnic othering in Europe when I had quite enough experience with it in the US, I moved on eventually becoming the director of number of fairly large centers and programs in the university. My experience of the irrationality and moral cupidity of so many academics and academic administrators who more intent on their narcissistic goals forced me to observe they repeatedly blocked all the necessary steps to create and conserve academic integrity and quality in these organizations. Only then did I begin to connect the dots between my previous experience with economic anthropology, the political economy of ethnogenesis, and these ills of academia. This was reinforced by reading the works of Naomi Klein, Michael Lewis, Thomas Picketty, and others for whom the academic story I was living was simply one more example of the play of larger forces.

One consequence is this realization is that it makes addressing the problems of neoliberal academy a much larger project. If academia is only one more instance of a brutal set of larger forces that have laid waste to so many of pro-social, public goods producing organizations, then reforming academia cannot be done merely by organizing a group of academics as some kind of political movement.

It also raises a curious question for me. The plutocrats and oligarchs of neoliberalism have an outsized hatred and fear of universities. In my experience, most universities are socially passive, self-interested, often dull, stifling places. Yet to the Alt-Right, we seem as dangerous as the anti-Christ. Their fear of such generally passive organizations remains a puzzle to me.