Higher Education ‘Markets’ and University Governance

Abstract

It was one theme of my recent critical essay on managerialism in the universities that much loose policy talk about the market and universities has a superficial plausibility only because the conditions required for a genuinely competitive market are not explicitly acknowledged (Aspromourgos 2012). It is only some notion of the applicability of the benefits of competition to higher education and university research that can favour a market model for universities. To the extent that standard economic theory justifies ‘the market’ as a superior way of allocating resources relative to other modes of allocation, it is not the market as