Higher education and the myth of neutrality: Rethinking the cultural politics of research in the age of instrumental rationality

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the current state of higher education with particular—although not exclusive—reference to the issue of neutrality in research, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. My main concern is less with the complex details of the politics of higher education than with the milieu of the dominant higher education neoliberal paradigm. I set out not just to expose the myth of neutrality but to argue for the vision of a just society and a refusal to acquiesce in the barbarism of the contemporary world.