Far from ‘competition’ supposedly driving ‘innovation’, Connell (2013) argues that it does the reverse. In the first instance, what a neo-liberal conception of the university produces, is the ‘reproduction of global dependency’ (p. 2)—through a ‘neocolonial dependence...built into performativity through international rankings of journals, depart-ment and universities’, whereby local intellectual cultures are under-mined and obliterated through an unhealthy reliance on ‘impact factors and ‘citations’ (p. 2). Secondly, the ‘entrenchment of social hierarchies in knowledge production and circulation’ (p. 2), act to further sediment privilege in the already advantaged—institutionally, in Australia in the older so-called ‘sandstone’ universities, and individually in the scions of the privileged who attend them.

rgues that the very fibre of democracy which we understand to be ‘individual and collective self-rule’ and which we take to be ‘a perma-nent achievement of the West’ and that cannot be ‘lost’, is in the process of being completely ‘overwhelmed and ... displaced by the economium to enhance capital value, competitive positioning, and credit ratings’ (p. 10)