Chapter 7: When the Neoliberal University Doesn’t Want You Anymore: Exit Cultures in the Market Era of Higher Education

This chapter argues that the termination of university staff is not simply a by-product of financial constraints or toxic management cultures but a deliberate and strategic outcome of reforms aimed at maximising market-driven efficiency in higher education. For these reforms to succeed, professional identities must be reshaped to align with market demands, and staff who fail to conform must be regarded as expendable. This chapter specifically examines how the rise of neoliberal university policy has fostered exit cultures in which an implied or real threat of termination is used to suppress dissent. Attention is given to how management complicity with the marketisation agenda has eroded institutional autonomy and increased intellectual and contractual precarity but also to how academics themselves contribute to perpetuating a system that prioritises individual careerism over more collective scholarly goals. Ultimately, staff exit is conceptualised as a necessary feature of the neoliberal higher education policy environment, aligning universities more closely with market logics and diminishing space for critical, independent scholarship.