Academic publishers rip us off !

George Monbiot in the Guardian on Monday 29th August argues that academics and universities are poorly served by an exploitative industry of academic research publishing.

Public no more

Martin O'Shaughnessy of NTU writes:
The British higher education sector is facing cuts of a greater severity than other areas of public service which are hardly being spared themselves, such is the enthusiasm with which the current coalition pursues its radical anti-state sector agenda. The cuts are being accompanied by a sharp rise, a more than doubling, in tuition fees that, at over £3 000 per annum, were already tremendously high by Western European standards. The combined effects of the cuts to government funding of university teaching and the rise in fees amount to nothing short of a revolution in British higher education. The revolution is a multi-faceted one, yet only one dimension of it, the tremendously increased costs to students, is being discussed to any extent, with the result that the true nature of what is happening remains almost uncommented on. Little is as yet being said, for example, about the numbers of lecturers who may lose their jobs, the departments that may close, or the universities that may face bankruptcy. Yet even these potentially disastrous consequences are only a part of a bigger change. What is planned is effectively a privatization of the university system as state funding of it is shrunk to a much smaller proportion of its overall income. One could argue that, when New Labour brought in the £ 3 000 per year tuition fees, we were already well on the way to a marketized system, but the marketization was partially compensated for by state funding that still expressed a recognition that the university system was a collective, public good. It is this recognition that is now to be swept away, with very little public debate as yet about its consequences. At the same time, the remaining state funding is not to be distributed equally across all areas of the curriculum: so-called STEM subjects (Science, technology, engineering and maths) and perhaps languages are to be at least partially protected while others (notably the humanities) are, it seems, to get nothing at all. This selectivity is justified by its defenders in terms of national economic performance and economic competitiveness: in the process, education sheds any broader civilizational or, heaven forbid, critical role and becomes merely an instrument whose role it is to support the economy. At the same time, and as part of the same set of interconnected processes, students are cast very firmly in the role of customers whose collective task it will be to discipline universities and their staff by their allegedly informed consumer choices: paying twice as much as before, or more, or pushed towards economically ‘useful’ subjects, students will be, it is felt, hyper aware of the value of their degree on the jobs market and will shift their resources away from less bankable courses and less prestigious universities. Faced with this customer pressure, the theory goes, universities will be forced to deliver greater student satisfaction and, notably, to improve on teaching standards that, we are told, are too poor, although no studies are cited and no evidence produced, such things presumably being part of the tired arsenal of self-indulgent academics nostalgically attached to critical thinking. The depressing thing is that none of these changes are really surprising: to some extent they merely confirm processes that have been underway for a considerable number of years, in the universities as in other areas of public service. Yet they also represent a very sharp radicalisation of the sort that only an event of the dimensions of the current crisis would permit and again underscore how the crisis is being instrumentalised by the political right, applying its own dose of shock therapy.
There is of course something paradoxical about the whole process underway. What is being presented as a removal of state interference and liberation of educational consumers is in fact being driven by the state, as evidenced not least by its setting of the rules about student loans and its distortion of market mechanisms through selective funding of subjects. The irony here is that Humanities subjects that seem likely to suffer greatly as the cuts bite have been very popular with students: it seems that many of those educational consumers not put off by the already high levels of student debt choose subjects deemed not to be of immediate economic utility. The state now clearly feels the need to persuade its ‘freely’ choosing consumers to choose in ways more in line with its own priorities. Whereas once the student was to be educated as a rounded citizen, he or she is now to be an entrepreneur of the self, making wise investment choices when selecting a university subject, calculating the profit-loss ratio between lifelong earnings and long-term debt, ready to take his or her place in the entrepreneurial society, alongside the entrepreneurial university and the enterprise state [1].
We have been here before, of course. A key part of the Thatcherite revolution was the aim to generate new subjectivities: the mass sell off of public housing and of state owned industries combined with the calculated and sustained attack on trade unions was meant to produce a nation of share and home owning individualists, no longer dependent on collective instances or tied to traditional solidarities. This new revolutionary wave is meant to continue the transformation. Yet something has also clearly changed: despite the many traumas associated with the changes it wrought, Thatcherism could at least seem to make a positive appeal by its promise of a democratisation of home and share ownership. Now, what is being democratised seems to be debt and constraint: we are all competing against each other and to compete effectively, we must take on debts that will constrain our future choices. As neo-liberalism’s seductions wear thin, the constraints must be cranked up.
Where is France in all this?! Comparing France and the UK, one is struck not only by the capacity of young French people to resist and their high level of awareness of what is at stake but also by the sustained discussion of the impact of neo-liberalism in the French public sphere, not least because public intellectuals still play an important role. A question that would then arise is why the British university sector has not played a more prominent role in the generation of critique. Could it be that we too have been effectively disciplined by the constraints and incentives of the entrepreneurial university? [2]
[1] To place this in the broader contexts of new modes of governance associated with neo-liberalism, see Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s important work La nouvelle raison du monde. See also their article here http://lafranceetlacrise.com/2010/10/26/%c2%abje-lutte-des-classes%c2%bb-resistances-et-contre-conduites-sous-le-neoliberalisme-par-pierre-dardot-et-christian-laval/ , and for a series of video interviews with them, see http://www.journaldumauss.net/spip.php?article462).
[2] A piece that helped me get my own thoughts straight and which is well worth a look is James Vernon’s ‘The end of the public university in England’ http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/the_end_of_the_public_university_in_england
For a French site devoted to defence of the public university, see http://www.sauvonsluniversite.com/

Defending the Humanities !

Liz Morrish wrote to the Guardian to argue with Simon Jenkins comment piece on July 16th.

David Harvey animation

Here's an excellent explanation of the current crisis of capitalism. Thanks to Joyce Canaan of BCU for sending this.

Liz Morrish writes occassionally for the newsletter of the United University Professions union in the USA. Here is her account of the recent 'review' of the Sociology department at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Here in Academia-UK we mount another defense against the neoliberal insurgency. Colleagues in the department of Sociology at the University of Birmingham face redundancy after the university administration announced the results of a recent 'review'. No meaningful consultation with faculty or students has taken place, and yet administrators have made plans to transfer responsibility for the undergraduate degree program in Media and Cultural Studies to another department (Social Policy), with only three of the current teaching complement of 17 to deliver it. All this will happen behind the breastplate of 'quality assurance' vaunted by Birmingham and every other UK university, and almost certainly without any murmur of dissent from the discredited Quality Assurance Agency.

Let me put this controversy in some context. Academia-UK is governed by league table lottery, however, this operates in unpredictable ways, a bit like snakes-and-ladders. So, despite their excellent results in terms of teaching quality, student satisfaction, etc., Sociology at Birmingham performed less well than expected in the recent Research Assessment Exercises. Birmingham is a 'Russell Group' university, equivalent to US Research tier 1 universities. Since this group seeks to dominate the research rankings, and certainly the research grants awarded on the basis of RAE performance, no slippage is tolerated by university heads. Quite simply, Birmingham Sociology is being punished pour encourager les autres. To call this short-termism would be to miss several ironies. Firstly, Birmingham is a large multi-cultural city and the university makes a claim to be diversifying its student body through its 'widening participation' agenda. Sociology would seem to provide a resource and a natural home for many of the target demographic for such a mission. Secondly, the next RAE (which will be titled the REF) will place an emphasis (and allocate funding) partially on 'impact'. Impact is widely interpreted as economic, but in the arts, humanities and social sciences, impact on social and cultural policy will be assessed. Funding is likely to be bestowed on departments which 'transfer knowledge' to social policy agencies, NGOs, local government etc., - precisely the sort of work encapsulated by the department's Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Culture. The website offers this description of its work: “It is a focus for the department’s engagement with the local community (and wider policy agendas), while the community’s multi-ethnic character brings the global ‘home’”.

The loss of Sociology at the University of Birmingham will represent a loss to the wider world of research in the field and to the local community. Perhaps an enduring loss to the university will be to its recruitment of both staff and students. Who will now take the risk of planning a career at the University of Birmingham, whether that should be as a lecturer, researcher or as an undergraduate, if the structures within which you work are not likely to endure for the extent of your ambitions?

Neoliberal U – Australian version.

It is always interesting to be an onlooker at the internal workings of another university, as opposed to viewing the public face of an institution at a conference, and I was fortunate this summer to spend time at an Australian university which has frequently been cited as a trailblazer for the neoliberal academy. Through a local contact, I managed to secure a place on a staff development workshop, designed to groom mid-career academics in the image of the ideal university employee. Normally, at my own institution, I would have scorned such an opportunity. However, this was a chance to be a fly on the wall and to decode the culture of another university's management.

The presenter was offering the participants the benefit of his experience in effective networking and collaboration. The advice he extended seemed to be geared to the rather younger academic than the assembled mid-career constituency rather reluctantly gathered before him, as he revealed that, early on, he had decided to “surround myself with excellence”. How to do this? One brief role play required us to imagine this scenario – you are at a conference and find yourself at lunch standing next to the keynote speaker. What 'chat up' line would you use, in order to make yourself memorable to this heavyweight, who might subsequently facilitate your self promotion strategy? Apparently, the route to advancement is mediated through high quality academic partners who “make you look good”. I listened with my jaw progressively slackening; I had never been exposed before to such shamelessly direct exhortations to actualise self-serving sycophancy.

Building your network should feature high on your one-page career plan, which should be complemented with evidence of your esteem indicators. Your network should be viewed as an asset, and as essential to your CV as any actual professional accomplishments. However, networking and collaboration were defined in extremely limited ways. Partnerships were only viable if they led to outcomes – publications, grant application etc. There seemed to be no room for conversation, mentoring, interest groups, blogging etc. Instead, you were to be measured by the size and geographical spread of your network, and critically, by the status of its participants.

This presenter viewed networking as purely strategic. On the other hand, for many of us , it is experienced as a series of happy accidents, fortuitous collisions of minds, and sometimes bodies, at conferences. Collaborations are driven as often by personal or romantic liaisons as they are by pure intellectual attraction. Seminars, collegiate encounters and academic partnerships are as often organic as they are planned. I was startled at the apparent contradiction between the stated aim of the workshop – collaboration – and the rather vulgar focus on individualism which animated this particular model of the developing academic career. I wondered how this sat with the HR representative in charge of the academic development program, positioned at the back of the room – how was this aligning with the wider mission of the university which surely is not just a vehicle for furthering the priorities of the individual?

At Neoliberal U the individual academic is also responsible for managing their time so that the proliferation of demands must be accommodated unproblematically. In the presenter's own department, he has forbidden staff to claim they are too busy to take on new projects, organise seminars, work with new partnerships. The individual should just learn to 'work smart'. The self-managing academic must become the over-worked academic apparently.

I was also concerned that institutional impediments to networking were discussed, but I felt they were unlikely to be addressed. University managers have, for some years, sought to dismantle academic culture and sense of community. It is threatening to managerialist governmentality, and subject affiliations are seen as dangerously off-message. Part of this strategy has been the removal of social spaces where academics might actually mingle and coincidentally realise commonalities and opportunities for research. RAE culture in the UK has, because of the inbuilt competition, set limits on inter-unit collaboration.

I did come away with some good ideas and a recognition of a few truths about networking and collaboration. Go to conferences and talk to people you don't know, not the other people from your institution. Look for collaborations outside of your own department within your university. I think I knew this already, but maybe I'll go ahead and do it. Look for me on the NTU website as employee of the month sometime soon.

University Mission Statements

It’s August and traditionally the silly season for newspapers – blogs, too, maybe. I thought this might be the time to roll our eyes skywards at one of the more incongruous features of universities in the UK – the mission statement.

Universities, Marketization and Missions
Over the past two decades, universities have been encouraged to serve the needs of the economy, and also to reposition themselves as simulacra of business. Indeed, so far has the association cemented itself in the governmental mind, that universities in 2009 have become the provenance of the newly-formed Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). Part of pretending to be a business has been the espousal of a mission statement.

The work that I have been doing with Helen Sauntson, of the University of Birmingham, aims to examine the impact of mutually reinforcing discourses of neoliberalism and marketization on universities in the UK. We take as a particular case study mission statements – what they represent and what they communicate, and we present as evidence the linguistic analysis of three electronic corpora of all of the available mission statements for UK universities in the (elite, research-focussed) Russell Group, (smaller research-intensive) 1994 Group and Million + group (comprised of ‘new’ post 1992 universities). We hope to show the extent to which mission statements represent uniqueness, or whether this claim is tempered by findings of discursive uniformity and standardization.

What is a Mission Statement?
Pearce and David (1987: 109) provide the following definition of a mission statement, “An effective mission statement defines the fundamental, unique purpose that sets a business apart from other firms of its type and identifies the scope of the business's operations in product and market terms….. It specifies the fundamental reason why an organization exists”. As we know, hardly anyone, especially not academics, pays any attention to the university’s mission statement – so why do they exist?

What are we finding?
There are apparently just 21 frequently occurring nouns (more than 10 occurrences in each corpus) from which Russell Group universities construct their mission statements. !994 Group universities make do with 22 frequent nouns, while creativity rests among the members of the Million + Group who recycle 35 frequent nouns. This evidence would lead us to agree with another commentator who describes mission statements as “promotional ‘discourse kits’ with which to construct a brand” (Atkinson, 2008). Surely such standardization must compromise universities’ claims to ‘distinctiveness’ and ‘unique selling points’ that are so fearlessly marketed to students.

There are cheeringly still a few relatively enlightened mission statements, and by that I mean that they portray values that most academics would raise a hat to. Honourable mentions, then, to Kingston University which claims to be liberal, critical leaning, radical and public; University of Birmingham which is the only Russell Group university describing its (historic) mission as radical; and Goldsmiths University which mentions intellectual, freedom.

There are also, of course, some neoliberal nightmares, so let us enjoy the embarrassment of the following anonymised universities, which can be identified by a simple Google search for these publically available documents, produced with public money. All of these belong to the Million + Group of new universities. A controversial university in London appeals to the following abstractions: benchmarked, seedcorn, sustainable, corporate, robust, stakeholders, supradepartmental. Despite Laurie Taylor’s ridicule in the Times Higher, only one university describes itself fawningly as business-facing. Another university, with campuses lining the M4 corridor, styles itself as the “foremost employer-engagement university”. But the prize goes to a Scottish institution, characterized by “Exploring and exploiting the ‘whitespace’ interfaces between disciplines so as to create and transmit new knowledge and learning in new ways”. What an aspiration!

Skills aren’t mentioned as often as we might suppose in these times when universities are administered under the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Predictably, most mentions come from within the Million + Group, with the fewest mentions in the academically aspirational 1994 Group. The Russell group has no customers at all, but even this buzzword only occurs twice among the missions of the Million + group. However, the latter do recognise stakeholders.

An interesting adjective is sustainable and its related noun sustainability. It appears to be trading on a kind of eco-friendly acceptability (just in case any potential students might be reading), but this is often a smokescreen for its neoliberal function, since it frequently collocates with, or refers to financial management!

We have to conclude that universities construct mission statements simply because they feel they have to. It is part of what Richard Johnson calls their ‘corporate boast’. No doubt there are committees of highly paid university managers who are almost permanently engaged in this, as it is clear that these mission statements are constantly under revision. As government behests change, universities must comply, at least discursively, even though these discourses fail to be internalized by the majority of people who work within university walls.