Overcoming contemporary academic attachments: developing even-mindedness in neoliberal cultures of excellence

While academics are aware of the drawbacks of the neoliberalist system within institutions of higher education, paradoxically they are partly complicit in perpetuating it. Drawing upon Bowlby’s (1969) attachment theory and a Buddhist perspective on attachment, we develop a Bowlby–Buddhist lens to unpack this paradox and the complicity of academics, whose fear and craving for self-excellence and careerism prompt anxious and avoidant attachments that sustain the very system they critique. These attachments confine academics to a conventional state of being, in which clinging to instrumental outcomes and metrics masks the impermanent, fundamentally unsatisfactory, and interdependent nature of reality. To overcome such an embodied paradox in academia, we propose a mindful response, through which academics can develop the personal power to liberate themselves from the entrapments of anxious and avoidant attachments engendered within neoliberal academia, affording opportunities to reinvigorate academic agency and reclaim scholarly vocation.