The Alienated Image of University Professors Under the Corporatizing Culture of Neo-Liberalism: Social Conscience or Academic Labor?

Taiwan universities have been undergoing drastic changes in many respects, since last 25 years, particularly initiated by the neo-liberalism to meet the demands of a globally advanced industrial labor market, which legitimately accelerate universities as corporations. The neo-liberalist conception, to be called ‘the corporatizing culture’, by an appeal to market-logic freedom, has signaled a radical shift in the notion of higher education/learning. The aims/academic values of public universities in Taiwan are under siege caused by entrepreneurial thinking from corporate capitalism. The meaning of university autonomy is replaced gradually by market vocabularies and ideologies. The effect is that professors will be called to public accountability and make their performance accessible to the multiple stakeholders in society. Their freedom for doing research projects is controlled more and more by evaluation schemes whose criteria are narrowly concentrated on utilitarian application and their capacities to do research is increasingly dependent on identifying and getting command of external sources of money. That is, they will work as academic labors. The implementation of curriculum and teaching will be directed toward workplace employment and therefore commercialized. The subjectivity and academic freedom of professors seem to be weakened by the management of teaching quality assessments. The author hence pertains to argue in this paper that the alienated images of professors such as de-subjective, non-ethical, and disposable, distorted by neo-liberal discourses, need to be addressed seriously, if the last Professors as social conscience and the voice of justice could last and fight back in the neo-liberal corporatizing world.