This chapter demonstrates how higher and vocational education have long faced and continue to face a more insidious crisis than COVID: coping with the fallout from neoliberal capitalist ideology and its hand-maiden, the political and corporate logic of new public management (NPM). The disruption of the pandemic, together with digital ruptures, contribute to a feeling of perma-crisis experienced by workers in the university akin to long COVID. Drawing on vast literature and voices from lived experience expressed as autoethnography, the chapter examines how crises experienced as consequences of capitalist, corporate neoliberalism have transmuted into a real and present crisis of neoliberalism, which is itself the disease. Using pathology as a metaphor for the spread of disease, the study draws on scholarship to understand the schizophrenia of higher education and the ways it audits multiple users to death, sometimes literally, via vested and unsustainable corporate models of performativity. It also examines the types of living dead within what commentators have dubbed 'the zombie university' and suggests that a zombie form of Foucault's homo oeconomicus is constructed as its most desirable citizen. Although it is increasingly clear that neoliberal logic is returning cockroach-like as the undead in COVID's wake, the paper concludes with a hopeful view of educators protecting their identities and well-being via resistance to regimes of performativity, through collective activism and by applying such strategies as slow scholarship. Managerialists learned little from the reflectivity that COVID could have afforded, but both genuine crisis leaders and authentic educators may yet see hope in fighting for sustainable education with transforming learners at its heart. © The Author(s), 2024. All rights reserved.
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