The Silenced Students: Student Resistance in a Corporatized University

Abstract

A silenced student merely receives pedagogical messages, consumes educational goods and is supposed to obey taken-for-granted orders of the university. In this article we illustrate how silencing happens as a consequence of a structural change in the balance of power between the Finnish government and the universities. The universities try to play safe due to the increased directive power of the government. This has had effects on how universities define the roles of students: in the changed conditions, the universities see students as clients whose purpose is to study and graduate, but not to revolt or act as political beings.

Dissolving the Dichotomies Between Online and Campus-Based Teaching: a Collective Response to The Manifesto for Teaching Online (Bayne et al. 2020)

“…Due to Covid-19 restrictions on campus, the university managers launched the plan knowing that we teachers and students did not occupy the university building as we did a few years ago (see Suoranta and Fitzsimmons 2017). As I write this comment, the case is still in process.…”

Student resistance in the classroom—Functional‐instrumentalist, critical‐emancipatory and critical‐functional conceptualisations

“…The managerial university may facilitate functionalistic concepts of resistance since it clashes with the ideas of critical pedagogy. Students become silenced because, as clients, they are expected to consume knowledge, to obey the institutional order set by the university, and to graduate in time to be able to exchange their degree for a career (Suoranta & FitzSimmons, ). In turn, university teachers become hegemonically positioned as the ones who should deliver educational goods ready‐made for easy consumption.…”

“…These circumstances may contribute to students' ‘preference for the instructor as the authority for parsing out the important information for the learner, who can then be able to review it for an exam’ (Owens et al, ). More profoundly, what Marie and McGowan () call the consumerised Higher Education sector neither positions students as political beings (Suoranta & FitzSimmons, ) nor university teachers as fostering engagement and the liberation of voice (Seale, Gibson, Haynes, & Potter, ). In this sense, what this review terms the critical‐functionalist understanding of student resistance narrates authors' stories of struggle, effort, pain, frustration, failure, and partial success of those over‐worked and under‐represented academics, who continue to practice what Giroux () termed as person‐centred democratic education under the conditions of neo‐liberal university education.…”

I just want to be somebody: Exploring students' motivations and experiences in universities

“…Such voicelessness of students conforms to a key characteristic of the neoliberal university. The emergence of the neoliberal university has generated the silent student (Suoranta and FitzSimmons 2017). A "silenced student" merely receives pedagogical messages, consumes educational goods, and is supposed to obey "taken-for-granted orders of the university" (Ibid.…”