Stanley Fish, a humanities guy, has done an interesting piece on Neoliberalism which he gets pretty well pretty well:

The assumption is that if free enterprise is allowed to make its way into every corner of human existence, the results will be better overall for everyone, even for those who are temporarily disadvantaged . . .

He then reports a humanities based, values centered critique of neoliberalism:

The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs “freely” pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

But there is more here than this. With neoliberalism we have lost not only justice and equity. We have also lost economic growth and potential output. Which brings Wonks Anonymous to the story of Economics Departments in the Neoliberal University. Paraphrasing a critic of neoliberalism Fish says:

institutions that don’t regard themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal principles — privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the proliferation of markets. These are exactly the principles and practices these critics find in the 21st century university,

Which pretty much hits the nail on the head as far as Wonks Anonymous academic experience goes. Put simply, public and private universities get their resources from two sources: student tuition and private/government research grants. Departments now spend most of their time competing for these scarce resources.

Tuition revenue - or capitation payments for public institutions - is attracted by filling classes. Students choose classes based on their value as entertainment and the likelihood that the classes will produce good grades with minimal work. While the subtleties of economics requires a command of simple algebra and significant practice at problem solving, these things are not easily acquired. Students do not like to do the problem sets that are required to learn and shy away from the essay questions that would prove their knowledge.

Present the students with two faculty members, one of whom gives serious assignments and the other of whom has them play economics games and write about "their experiences". Guess who gets the most students?

Meanwhile the teaching faculty, who are mainly part timers because budgets are tight and ex graduate students are plentiful, have no time to invest in the hard work of teaching and every reason to expect that they will be punished by student complaints if they do. Because many of the parents of students are staunch advocates of "free market" ideologies, teachers may also fear that deviations from this doctrine will lead to complaints and failure to secure new contracts.

Undergraduates matriculate with no preparation for difficult or complex analysis. Their understanding of economics is largely limited to the simplistic ideas found in Milton Friedman's more polemical works. In many case these students are entirely ignorant of major thinkers in economics. For example they do not know what it was that Keynes actually said.

After this "education" students need to go out into the world to actually learn something useful. What they learn will probably not be economics.

Nor is the fate of the economics faculty and graduate students much better. Faculty are selected by their ability to attract research funding which brings in grant administration fees. In many cases this is directed at the solution of specific mathematical and technical problem that might prove useful in business and finance. Graduate students are encouraged to concentrate in these areas since they will offer tenured positions or, as a fall back, lucrative private careers in financial engineering.

The economics that has been produced by this atmosphere is abstract to the point of incomprehensibility. With a few exceptions the economists who produce it are entirely inaccessible to the lay person.

Which leaves us to ask what the social value of the Neoliberal Economics Department really is. The education that it provides is more or less an empty ritual while the research that it has fostered has served mainly to grease the skids down which we now slide to financial and economic ruin.

Unless we are prepared to accept the ultimate neoliberal tautology - Outcomes that the market produces are valuable and outcomes that it does not produce are worthless - we must conclude that neoliberalism is not only unkind but also inefficient.