Institutional corruption and the marketisation of English universities: from financialisation and privatisation to unbundling and asset stripping

Cris Shore

Chapter 4 in Handbook on Corruption in Higher Education, 2025, pp 39-58 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Corruption in higher education, whatever forms it may take, invariably damages the academic enterprise. Taking up Lawrence Lessing's definition of institutional corruption as those systemic and strategic influences that seek to undermine, divert, or weaken an organisation's capacity to achieve its purpose, I explore how decades of government interventions, New Public Management, and neoliberal-inspired reforms have reshaped English universities. While these interventions are neither illegal nor technically corrupt, they have wrought profound changes and debasement to the mission and meaning of the public university. How should we conceptualise these processes? This chapter seeks to provide a theoretical framework for understanding how marketisation, financialisation, and the rise of audit culture are transforming the public university. Using ethnographic examples, I show how these techniques operate in practice. I conclude by arguing that these processes are producing forms of unbundling and dispossession that are both corroding and corrupting the university's public purpose.

Keywords: English public universities; Institutional corruption; Unbundling; Marketisation; Financialisation; Neoliberal reforms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035320233
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