The courtyard of the mandarins: essay on academic fetishism

Abstract

The economic world is currently in a global process of transformation with the growth of the financial global economy. This change is affecting universities and the production of knowledge. However, this process is very different in Spain because Spanish universities are public universities leaded by public servers independent of the market. In Spanish universities, the ideology of the fetishism of the market is growing as an apparatus of control and alienation of the academic communities. This ideology is an inverse representation of reality. This paper studies the trends of the world economy and how power relations are structured at Spanish universities, according the Marxist concepts of ideology, fetishism and alienation.