Compliance and contestation in the neoliberal university

The chapter is based on a narrative analysis of 22 academic life histories conducted during 2014 and early 2015. The UK higher education (HE) system, driven by the neoliberal project of successive governments, has seen significant reforms to its financing and structure in recent years. Furthermore, despite having produced a substantial critical literature on HE reform, UK social scientists do not seem to have been very effective in resisting HE neoliberalisation, and in many cases could be said to be relatively compliant even complicit with the very measures critiqued in the literature. At the end of 2010 the UK Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition government decided to radically restructure funding for English universities. For science, technology, engineering and mathematics teaching that cannot be covered by tuition fees alone Higher Education Funding Council for England 2015 funding was reduced, but not terminated.