The neoliberal toxic university: Beyond no is not enough and daring to dream a socially just alternative into existence

This article deploys critical sociology to examine institutions of higher learning, worldwide, within a context of a more utopian set of possibilities. The article contests the idea of universities as marketplaces–competition, commercialisation and vocationalisation; the synthetic values of docility, conformity, and image/impression management; the calibration and metrification of all facets of university activity; and the containment of universities as places of dissent and social critique, shackling them instead to the whims of capitalism. As an alternative, the author explores Klein's elements of a social imaginary that involves extirpating the alien interloper neoliberal ideology that has been allowed to invade and colonise universities, and instead allowing indigenous ideologies to emerge from the discourses of those who do academic work. The austerity logic that has so poisoned universities, is replaced by the humanising and democratising practices and voices of those who have been wilfully excluded. Above all, what the author pitches towards is not ‘fixing’ our broken universities, for that would be in Klein's terms ‘fitting into the box’ that has been constructed for universities over the past half-century, but rather an ‘exploding of the box’. Examples from the author's prior community-based research are used to illustrate humanising, transformative possibilities.