The New Politics of Higher Education: Distributional Conflict in the Neoliberal Academy

This paper presents a power-distributional perspective on the new politics of higher education across the rich democracies. Over the past two decades, higher education has become widely recognized for its contribution to socio-economic adjustment, turning into a cornerstone for notions of a new social-investment welfare state. Yet, while scholars have delineated cross-national differences between worlds of human capital formation, the group politics of universities’ institutional reproduction and change have yet to be theorized. This paper probes the influence of inherited higher education policies on “organized combat” among the academy’s collective interests in the United States and Germany, two world-leading, contrasting and theoretically influential cases. Complementing – and in part correcting – research on the effects of electorates’ preferences on parties’ visions for the sector, the analysis theorizes the feedback of policy legacies on national trajectories, with case studies illustrating the mechanisms of path-dependence and reviewing divergent micro-level practices.