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Neoliberal Discourse and Rhetoric in Croatian Higher Education

Soon after the global economic crisis broke out in 2008 'the crisis narrative' departed from its source domain (the economy and finance sector) into the public discourse of religion, politics, law, communication, education and science, where it began functioning as the primary interpretative paradigm for the understanding of new social realities and relations. The deeply ideological discourse of crisis brought about new discursive concepts and rhetoric strategies which, among other things, aimed at establishing new academic policies and influenced the financing – and thus the survival – of particular sciences and scientific disciplines. The documents which regulate European and Croatian educational and scientific policies clearly state that in the future financing will be provided only for those sicentific projects which promise rapid, tangible and easily quantifiable results, ready for translation into action in the economy and labour markets. Such restructuring of the field of science and the academic models that support it may be described as a gradual replacement of the traditional Humboldtian model of the university, which achieves the individual self- awareness and intelectual freedom by „isolating or insulating the university“ (Weber 2001: 31) , for a liberal-pragmatic model which proposes technicalization and bureaucratisation of the university and „holds the educational subjects accountable to the sources of financing and to the needs of the public, namely the tax-payers“ (Polšek 2004: 261) . Thus the marketisation eats into the very core of academic processes, and yet the topic remains paradoxically absent from most interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary research undertaken in the field of the humanities. That is why this paper is concieved as an interdisciplinary critical analysis of the strategic documents which regulate the field of science and higher education in Croatia, within the framework guidelines set by the European Union (Strategy for Education, Science and Technology, Act on Scientific Activity and Higher Education, Strategic Plan 2016-2018, Horizon 2020, Europe 2020 etc.). The paper is based on the hypothesis that the rhetoric of these documents contains traces of the interdicursive incursion of the neoliberal discourse from the economy sector into the sector of science and higher education. For instance, in the afore mentioned documents the typical conceptual metaphors of neoclassical economy (e.g. economy is a building or economy is a machine) give way to different metaphors we might call 'crisis metaphors' (e.g. the metaphor of economy as a living being, namely, a sick person). We believe that the swinging of this metaphorical pendulum is deeply ideological in nature. Antropomorphization of the economy and depersonification and instrumentalization of science represent not only a rhetorical, but also a discursive turn which aims at establishing new relations between economy and science, forming a hybrid concept of market- oriented academia. This is why we have chosen critical discourse analysis (Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Marnie Holborow) as our methodological framework which will combine different tools and theories: the critical theory of conceptual metaphor (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Willie Henderson, Arjo Klamer, Johnatan Charteris-Black), the rhetoric of economics (Deidre McCloskey) and critical stylistics (Lesley Jeffries). We believe that these tools will help us argue that the Croatian strategic documents on science and higher education employ a complex process of rhetorical and metaphorical cloaking as well as the background 'crisis narrative' in order to facilitate the implementation of neoliberal policies into the sector of science and higher education. Without pretensions that this paper will have the performative power to slow down or stop the described processes, which we openly deem harmful, we still believe it might prompt further research as well as the conceptualization of new and different discursive practices, both in economy and in academia.

neoliberalism, discourse, rhetoric, higher education

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