Modes of higher education enforce normalization of students to serve the biopolitical machine --- your weaponization of knowledge for competition PROVES you are a product of the educational system

Biopolitical analyses of higher education include examinations of various applications of political rationality aimed at investing in the life of multiple groups of people: students, faculty, staff, citizens, etc. In the application of biopolitical logic to the “knowledge economy,” the emphasis on publications and grants produces overstressed and overworked bodies of academics (Allen & Rasmussen, 2015) and contributes to what D’Hoest and Lewis (2015) call the “fatigue university.” The tiredness and exhaustion are not only a byproduct of the publication regime but also a constitutive part of academic life, a necessary illness that describes what it means to be a faculty member (D’Hoest & Lewis, 2015). In the biopolitics of managing student populations, standardized college admissions tests serve as a tool for categorizing students into hierarchies of achievement based on their racial, ethnic, and gender identities and parental education. Far from being an objective instrument external to the conditions that produce and maintain racialized, gendered, and classed achievement gaps, college admissions testing is part of a larger apparatus of measurement that is enmeshed in sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environments, policy contexts, and the testing preparation industry, all of which act upon and enact that hierarchized difference under the guise of educational equity (Dixon-Román, 2017).

Permeating U.S. college curricula, biopolitical logics aim at creating subjects of neoliberal market democracy dominated by whiteness. Pedagogical innovations in the scholarship of teaching and learning aim at transforming students and faculty into “entrepreneurial learners” who consume and utilize knowledge for competitive advantage (Servage, 2009). In science education in particular, the end goal is to create de-politicized citizens who are best prepared to function in a neoliberal market economy and to contribute to the country’s fiscal health and global competitiveness (Bazzul, 2017; Hoeg & Bencze, 2017). In teacher preparation, biopower manifests itself in defining a good teacher of color as a role model who overcame deficiencies of their race and ethnicity, thereby re-centering normative whiteness (Phillips & Nava, 2011). Through educational discourses at all levels from primary to postsecondary, biopolitical logics and governmentality shape, describe, and prescribe what it means to be a U.S. citizen, a construct that beyond nationality and democratic participation includes the normative attributes of a citizen-subject: whiteness and masculinity (Cary, 2001) as well as middle classness, heterosexuality, and ablebodiedness (Brandzel, 2016).