The scholarly framework that explains why Canadian universities manage people the way they do.
Academic capitalism is the phrase I reach for when I need to explain, in a single sentence, what kind of institution I spent twenty-five years working inside. It names something I lived long before I had the vocabulary for it. Slaughter and Leslie (1997) defined it as the systematic orientation of universities toward market or market-like behaviours in response to declining public funding. I would define it more plainly: it is what happens when an institution stops asking what it owes the people inside it and starts asking what it can extract from them.
This page situates that concept in its scholarly context. It explains where the idea comes from, what it does to the people who teach and learn inside these institutions, and why it is load-bearing for this dissertation.
Where the Concept Comes From
Slaughter and Leslie (1997) gave the concept its name. Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) sharpened it: under academic capitalism, universities develop new circuits of knowledge production that link scholarly output to commercial application, and they restructure governance along corporate lines to facilitate that linkage. The institution becomes a market actor. Knowledge becomes a commodity. And the people inside the institution, the ones who generate both, become inputs.
The concept has since been applied across national contexts. Each context is different. The underlying logic is the same. Neoliberal restructuring follows recognisable patterns. What varies is the local governance structure, the political economy, and the cultural history that mediates how those patterns land.
| National Context | Mechanism | Scholars |
|---|---|---|
| Canada | Provincial funding contraction; federal research grant competition; aggressive international student recruitment as revenue replacement | Slaughter & Leslie (1997); Kezar et al. (2019) |
| Finland | University restructuring under national innovation mandates; performance-based research metrics embedded in institutional governance | Poutanen (2023) |
| Iran | Selective adoption of market mechanisms operating inside state oversight; hybrid model blending neoliberal logic with political control | Ramezani (2024) |
| Latin America | Contradiction between public university mission and private revenue generation; entrepreneurial university models imposed on access-oriented institutions | Somers et al. (2018) |
For this dissertation, academic capitalism is the structural backdrop. It is the condition that makes the study necessary.
What It Does to the People Who Teach
When public funding contracts and performance-based allocation systems replace stable base budgets, institutions respond by expanding contingent, contract-based faculty positions. This is rational from a management perspective. It transfers employment risk from the institution onto the individual. It allows staffing to flex with enrolment. It keeps costs low and options open. Arnold and Bongiovi (2013) and Kezar et al. (2019) document this pattern extensively. I do not need to read the literature to understand it. I lived it.
For nineteen years I taught at Thompson Rivers University as a contract faculty member. My contracts were renewed semester by semester at the institution’s discretion. Semester-by-semester renewal is a mechanism of informal control: the threat of non-renewal disciplines academic labour without requiring explicit policy justification, without a performance review, without due process. The institution simply declines to offer another contract. The relationship ends. You were never permanent to begin with.
In May 2025, I received the Faculty Council Teaching Award. That same month, I was laid off. Two documents arrived within weeks of each other. Two logics. Two entirely separate bureaucratic pathways that never consulted each other. The institution declared me exemplary and expendable in the same breath, and saw no contradiction in doing so.
Kezar et al. (2019) call this the gig academy: the university that has systematically dismantled stable employment in favour of contingent, flexible, expendable arrangements. The concept of labour market segmentation names the structural division that results. These two groups teach in the same buildings. They do occupy the same institution.
| Condition | Tenure-Track Faculty | Contract Faculty |
|---|---|---|
| Employment security | Permanent appointment after review; dismissal requires cause and due process | Semester-by-semester or annual renewal at institutional discretion; ends without process |
| Teaching load | Reduced to allow research, supervision, and service contributions | High; teaching-only contracts are common; research time is unpaid and informal |
| Institutional support | Office space, research funds, travel budgets, professional development access | Minimal; often no dedicated office, no research budget, no professional development allocation |
| Governance participation | Full voting membership on curriculum, hiring, and policy committees | Excluded or marginally included; decisions affecting contract faculty are made without them |
| Disciplinary mechanism | Formal review processes with rights of response | Informal: renewal is declined; no justification required |
| Professional identity | Institutional affiliation stable; career trajectory legible | Perpetually provisional; professional identity built on insecure ground |
What It Does to the Students
Academic capitalism does to students what it does to faculty. It converts them from members of an educational community into revenue sources whose belonging is conditional on continued payment and compliance. This dynamic is most visible with international students, who are recruited aggressively as premium revenue generators, charged fees two to four times those of domestic students, and then managed through enrolment conditions that tie immigration status to continuous institutional participation.
Sidhu (2006) and Stein and Andreotti (2016) document the central contradiction: students are celebrated as contributors to campus diversity while navigating institutions structured around domestic student norms, Western epistemologies, and English-language cultural assumptions. They pay more. They receive less. They are expected to be grateful. And when the institution’s fiscal or political priorities shift, as they did dramatically with the 2024 federal study permit cap, international students absorb the cost of restructuring they had no role in creating. Their circumstances did change. The institution’s relationship to them did too.
| Condition | Domestic Students | International Students |
|---|---|---|
| Tuition and fees | Provincially regulated; subject to cap increases | Unregulated; typically two to four times domestic rates; the primary institutional revenue target |
| Institutional belonging | Assumed as the norm; curriculum, services, and campus culture centred on domestic experience | Conditional; celebrated rhetorically as diversity while navigating institutions built around domestic norms |
| Epistemic recognition | Dominant knowledge frameworks align with domestic educational backgrounds | Western epistemologies centred; prior knowledge systems frequently marginalised |
| Immigration exposure | Enrolment status carries no immigration consequence | Enrolment continuity tied to study permit; interruption can trigger loss of legal status |
| Policy vulnerability | Protected by provincial consumer and education frameworks | Exposed to federal immigration policy shifts; 2024 study permit cap restructured participation without student consultation |
| Institutional recourse | Access to student advocacy, ombudsperson, formal grievance pathways | Structural barriers to complaint; fear of immigration consequence; power asymmetry is acute |
This is where my concept of asymmetrical precarity comes from. Contract faculty and international students share a structural condition: conditional belonging, expendability when economically inconvenient, and exclusion from the institutional decisions that shape their lives. The conditions rhyme. The stakes are radically different. A contract faculty member loses a job. An international student loses the legal right to remain in the country. Asymmetrical precarity holds both the connection and the difference at once. It insists on structural solidarity without collapsing the asymmetry.
The Canadian Context
In Canada, higher education is a provincial responsibility. Neoliberal restructuring has unfolded unevenly across jurisdictions: each province has developed its own funding formulas, performance metrics, and accountability frameworks. The patterns are consistent, even when the mechanisms differ. High rates of contract faculty employment across the country. Aggressive international student recruitment across the sector. A growing gap between institutional equity rhetoric and the structural conditions experienced by the populations that rhetoric claims to serve.
| Level | Key Mechanism | Effect on People |
|---|---|---|
| Federal | Competitive research funding (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) embeds performance-based logic; immigration policy regulates international student flow | Institutions chase grant revenue; international students become policy instruments; 2024 permit cap restructured participation without consultation |
| Provincial | Domestic tuition caps; operating grant formulas tied to enrolment metrics; performance-based funding pilots | Institutions recruit internationally to replace capped domestic tuition; enrolment volatility creates staffing instability; contract faculty expand to manage cost |
| Institutional | Governance restructuring along corporate lines; strategic planning language of markets, outputs, and brand; internationalization as revenue strategy | Academic values subordinated to financial targets; contract faculty excluded from governance; international students managed as a revenue category |
| Individual | Contract renewal uncertainty; semester-by-semester employment; immigration-linked enrolment conditions | Self-censorship; labour complicity; conditional belonging; chronic precarity without institutional acknowledgement |
The federal government shapes this landscape indirectly: through research funding bodies, immigration policy, and competitive grant programs that embed performance-based logics into the sector even where provincial policy has been more protective. The 2024 study permit cap is the most visible recent example. Federal policy restructured the conditions of international student participation without consultation with students, faculty, or the institutions most directly affected. The people who bore the consequences were the ones with the least power to influence the decision.
Thompson Rivers University, where this research was conducted, sits at the intersection of many of these pressures. It is a comprehensive teaching university in the interior of British Columbia. It has a substantial international student population and high rates of contract faculty employment. Its institutional identity is built around access, community, and inclusion. It is exactly the kind of institution where academic capitalism’s contradictions are most visible: the gap between the rhetoric of belonging and the structural conditions that make belonging conditional is wide. The people living inside that gap are the research participants at the centre of this study.
Why This Is Load-Bearing for This Dissertation
Academic capitalism is the structural explanation for why the problem this dissertation investigates exists. It explains why contract faculty positions proliferate while tenure-track lines shrink. It explains why international students are recruited and then managed as revenue sources rather than members of a learning community. It explains why institutional diversity rhetoric escalates at the same time that material conditions for marginalised members of the institution deteriorate.
Every original concept this dissertation contributes does its analytical work inside this structural frame. These are concepts for naming what academic capitalism produces at the level of lived experience. The framework explains the system. The concepts name what the system does to people.
| Original Concept | What It Names | Where It Operates |
|---|---|---|
| Asymmetrical precarity | The shared structural condition of conditional belonging and expendability, with radically different stakes, across contract faculty and international students | Employment and immigration policy; institutional decision-making |
| Malperformative inclusion | Institutional diversity gestures that perform inclusion while leaving structural exclusion intact | Strategic planning language; equity initiatives; hiring rhetoric |
| Ghost data | The institutional absence of data on contract faculty and international students that makes their structural conditions invisible to governance | Human resources; institutional research; policy reporting |
| Blended witnessing | The methodological stance of holding insider and outsider positions simultaneously as a source of insight rather than a conflict of interest | Research design; positionality; knowledge production |
| Performative silence | The institutional refusal to name structural problems that are widely known and experienced, producing complicity through inaction | Faculty governance; administrative communication; policy language |
The full theoretical framework, including the five scholarly domains this dissertation draws upon, is developed in the Conceptual Framework and Literature Review pages in Section Two.
References
Alibašić, H., Atkinson, C. L., & Pelcher, J. (2024). The liminal state of academic freedom: Navigating corporatization in higher education. Discover Education, 3(7). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-024-00086-x
Arnold, D., & Bongiovi, J. R. (2013). Precarious, informalizing, and flexible work: Transforming concepts and understandings. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(3), 289–308. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764212466239
Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. T. (2019). The gig academy: Mapping labor in the neoliberal university. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Poutanen, M. (2023). From R&D innovation to academic capitalism in Finland. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 27(1), 29–52. https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.v27i1.10969
Ramezani, S. G. (2024). The hybrid model of academic capitalism in Iranian higher education: A complex interplay of neoliberal and state-controlled practices. Higher Education Policy. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-024-00364-1
Romanovskyi, O. O., Romanovska, Y. Y., Romanovska, O. O., & El Makhdi, M. (2022). Innovative academic entrepreneurship as a driver of transformational change in higher education and science. Scientific Notes of the University of Finance and Economics, 65, 65–78. https://doi.org/10.31652/2412-1142-2022-65-65-78
Sidhu, R. K. (2006). Universities and globalization: To market, to market. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Somers, P., Davis, C., Fry, J., Jasinski, L., & Lee, E. (2018). Academic capitalism and the entrepreneurial university: Some perspectives from the Americas. Roteiro, 43(1), 21–42. https://doi.org/10.18593/r.v43i1.13088
Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2016). Cash, competition, or charity: International students and the global imaginary. Higher Education, 72(2), 225–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9949-8
Full citations for all scholars referenced throughout this site appear in the Annotated Bibliography.