Academics Producing Knowledge for the World Bank

The trend of neoliberalization that is experienced in all spheres of life also has its impact on the academia in the forms of managerialization and entrepreneurialization of universities, increasing workloads, increasing pressures on academics to generate funds, transformation of knowledge into a product that can be exchanged in the market, alienation of academic researchers from the knowledge they are producing, and an increasing degree of specialization and division of academic research labor in the developed and developing countries alike. Especially for the second group of countries, international organizations like the World Bank indeed have a major role in the development and spread of neoliberalization in academia. Limited resources for research lead the academics to look for external funding opportunities and international organizations like the World Bank emerge as important suppliers of funds for doing research in these circumstances. Doing research and producing knowledge for the World Bank create certain outcomes both in the short and long terms for these researchers themselves and also for academia in general. This paper demonstrates how the academics’ experience of producing knowledge for the World Bank fosters the neoliberalization of the university in Turkey. Depending on interviews with academics, the paper looks at the impacts of doing research for the World Bank. It concludes that although these academics are forced to act as entrepreneurial subjects, they haven’t necessarily internalized this neoliberal mentality.