Challenging Times: Markets and Emotions as Modes of Governance in the University
Abstract
This article describes setting up a University of Edinburgh Challenge Course called ‘Wicked Problems: Reason and Rhetoric’, and some resistance to it. The course aims to help students understand the nature of argument and disagreement, and how to engage in these productively in their university work and beyond. The article then explores the culture of modern universities, seeing them as shaped by processes of neoliberal marketisation, and discursive emotionalisation, rendering students as simultaneously free consumers and psychologically vulnerable persons. We see these as forms of social control that interfere with the culture of universities, as sites of autonomous intellectual development.
Fields of Study & Subjects
University Challenges and Reforms
Higher Education Governance and Development
Foucault
Power
and Ethics
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Scottish Affairs
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 41–57
- Publication date
- 28 January 2026
- Language
- EN