http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/The+Post-Corporate+University
This is an interesting project on Liquid Books.
Here's what the initiators have to say :
The Post-Corporate University starts from an assumption that the University is in crisis and that this crisis has been caused by the social and economic characteristics of neoliberalism. Asking the question, Is Another University Possible?, it provides space for multiple answers and interventions.
Please visit the site, read Davin Heckman's chapter, 'Neoliberal Arts and the 21st Century University', and contribute to the discussions, the bibliography and the book.
About the Liquid Books Series
Culture Machine's online 'liquid books' - to which everyone is invited to contribute - are written and developed in an open, cooperative, decentralised, multi-user-generated fashion: not just by their initial 'authors', 'editors', 'creators' or 'curators', but by a multiplicity of collaborators distributed around the world.
They are freely available for anyone, anywhere, to read, reproduce and distribute. Once they have requested access, users are also able to rewrite, add to, edit, annotate, tag, remix, reformat, reinvent and reuse them, or even produce alternative parallel versions of them. In fact, they are expressly invited and encouraged to do so, as the project relies on such an intervention.
It is hoped that the Liquid Books project will raise a number of important questions for ideas of academic authorship, attribution, publication, citation, accreditation, fair use, quality control, peer review, copyright, intellectual property, content creation and cultural studies. For instance, with its open editing and free content, the project decentres the author and editor functions, making everyone potential authors/editors. It also addresses an issue raised recently by Geert Lovink: why are wikis not utilised more to create, develop and change theory and theoretical concepts, instead of theory continuing to be considered as the 'terrain of the sole author who contemplates the world, preferably offline, surrounded by a pile of books, a fountain pen, and a notebook'?
At the same time, in 'What Is an Author?', Michel Foucault warns that any attempt to avoid using the concept of the author to close and fix the meaning of the text risks having a limit and a unity imposed on it in a different way: by means of the concept of the 'work'. To what extent does users' ability to rewrite, remix, reversion and reinvent this liquid 'book' then render untenable any attempt to impose a limit and a unity on it as a 'work'? And what are the political, ethical and social consequences of such 'liquidity' for ideas that depend on the concept of the 'work' for their effectivity: those concerning attribution, citation, copyright, intellectual property, academic success, promotion, tenure, and so on?
To find out more, please go to the first Liquid Book, New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader:
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/New+Cultural+Studies:+The+Liquid+Theory+Read
er
For a quick and easy-to-read guide on how to collaborate on the writing, editing and curating of a Liquid Book, please visit:
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/How-to-Contribute-to-a-Liquid-Book
Clare Birchall and Gary Hall
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Monday, 22 June 2009
A Response to the University of Utopia
I found Ron Barnett’s proposals interesting, not least because I share the goal and strive to apply humanistic values to the university as a site of learning and intellectual work. His optimism about transforming the neoliberal university, I do find is a bit romantic or at least undeveloped. Returning to a 16th century or 19thcentury European “utopian” model hardly seems up to the task, and invokes the university as theme park, an artifice, not a site of authenticity, or I dare say, struggle. Further, the four critical concepts he proposes to create “utopian spaces” (alternate? oppositional?) appear perilously close to a mere Lakoffian “reframing” of the neoliberal agenda. Perhaps, I misread him, but I believe the student-consumer in North America already resides in the ‘therapeutic’ university: 24 hour services—gym, internet, coffee bars, food delivery service to the dorm room, health care and tutoring by residence staff—supplemented by 8 hour services of note takers, exam prep tutors, counsellors, etc., to relieve real stress that is caused by hours of work for pay, on and off campus. Equally, we all work or learn at a ‘liquid’ university. Students and faculty alike have mastered top down ordered change whether it is a ‘core curriculum’ devised by university boards of trustees or audit-assessment regulations. We engage in ‘team work,’ and we develop modules or majors relevant to business or government (music industry, institutional nutrition, forensics & criminology). We increase our work load by absorbing more administration. Over half of our students graduate with 500+ hours of volunteer work, another “skill set” which they cynically check off on their resumé. They learn to acquiesce not resist, in part because they see their “resistant” faculty who engage in challenging scholarship and activism become marginalized.
Yes, universities have been around for over a millennia, but not as unchanging safe havens, but as institutional “survivors” serving particular social formations. Overall, I fear these reframings of the neoliberal university are much like the policies and practices to control “difference” (e.g., racial, sexual) on US campuses such as the ubiquitous practice of designating “safe spaces.” Rather than engaged students and faculty being encouraged and supported to confront homophobia, the therapeutic university contains the problem, directing students to retreat to a supportive “space” for a few moments, lick their wounds, then return to the arena of social threat and be discursively constructed as the problem in need of safe space. Students are disempowered. In fact, there are no safe spaces for queers, no non-racist spaces for people of color, but there are and should be “critical” spaces! Sites for understanding and political action. Students and faculty need to claim those critical spaces exactly because they are not controlled by administrators and can become sites of resistance to humanize the neoliberal academy.
Barnett argues the “university should encourage authenticity?” How does the university become authentic in a culture of commodification of ‘authenticity’? How is authenticity measured in a culture of artifice? Does Barnett refer to the model offered by Rousseau, the inventor of modern authenticity, i.e., the revelation of one’s ‘essential’ nature in the context of an egalitarian society? If so, this is a troubling example, complicated by Rousseau’s racist & romantic notions of simpler cultures & noble savages. Fed by Rousseau’s ideas the dominant philosophy of our time as Alasdair MacIntyre stresses, has become emotivism: “all evaluative judgments, more specifically moral judgments, are nothing but expressions of preferences, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Alas, many US students have already been constructed in this mode where the rationale for any action is “I like it” or “I don’t like it;” and so, in those terms, an authentic action must be the immediate response to spontaneous feelings manifest in preferences. A campus example is the practice of student evaluations of lecturers and professors as deliverers of “knowledge.” Trawl “rate my professor.com” to see this in action: “Dr. Ed Jensen rocks! He’s the dude!; Dr. Sally Robinson is whacked, a mean bitch!” Such utilitarian notions produce the pursuit of what feels good, the avoidance of what feels bad, and reflect students’ subjectivities as consumers. Thus, students accept a neoliberal educational goal of “credentialing” not self transformation. Creating the conditions and offering the content for students to imagine alternate ways of being and acting on new critical understandings seem like preferable goals than shopping for better feeling courses/modules? We need to provide the critical space for them to determine whether they really benefit from the value of “course knowledge delivered” measured by the sexiness of the lecturer and post-grad salaries and status. How can we counter the complete subordination of intellectual life to the measure of money and the market? The “traditional values” of the academy, the driving motivations of intellectual work have been delegitimized and derided by the state, educational administrators and our broader cultures. The heralded humanist values of “knowledge for its own sake”, for social advancement, for self-liberation have already been delegitimized and identified as at odds with university self-definitions, and mission statements when they are decoded. How the return to an early modern utopian university will undermine this I fail to see.
Lastly, I too desire a university as an ethical space, but it seems to me that constructing such a space requires constant struggle, speaking truth to power, demonstrating courage and an alternative way of living rather than parroting the “inevitability” of globalizing marketization, a truly cynical and unethical stance. On the up-side, the current financial crisis now seems to offer an opportunity to challenge the neoliberal transformation of the academy. In 2008-9 as higher education funding has been cut and tuition raised, students in New York have taken to active protest or lobbying the state; grassroots union activism has increased among full time and contingent faculty, interestingly fed by the widespread practice of hiring foreign born academics who bring labor traditions from Poland, Korea, Peru, etc. At this juncture older approaches are not up to the task. The trade union model of workers’ rights defense will not provide the necessary coalition to stop the juggernaut. Rather, we academics need to tackle issues relevant to students and parents, e.g., rising costs of education, decreasing value of university degrees, the failure of neoliberal policies to create jobs and professions of meaning, and working conditions in those jobs which will sustain personal and cultural life. Students engage with cultural issues and ideas of political freedom rooted in 21st century experiences. All of this is to say that the chance to transform the academy may be better today as the contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism are so blatant and unethical.
K.O. (omarakk@oneonta.edu) State university of New York-Oneonta.
Yes, universities have been around for over a millennia, but not as unchanging safe havens, but as institutional “survivors” serving particular social formations. Overall, I fear these reframings of the neoliberal university are much like the policies and practices to control “difference” (e.g., racial, sexual) on US campuses such as the ubiquitous practice of designating “safe spaces.” Rather than engaged students and faculty being encouraged and supported to confront homophobia, the therapeutic university contains the problem, directing students to retreat to a supportive “space” for a few moments, lick their wounds, then return to the arena of social threat and be discursively constructed as the problem in need of safe space. Students are disempowered. In fact, there are no safe spaces for queers, no non-racist spaces for people of color, but there are and should be “critical” spaces! Sites for understanding and political action. Students and faculty need to claim those critical spaces exactly because they are not controlled by administrators and can become sites of resistance to humanize the neoliberal academy.
Barnett argues the “university should encourage authenticity?” How does the university become authentic in a culture of commodification of ‘authenticity’? How is authenticity measured in a culture of artifice? Does Barnett refer to the model offered by Rousseau, the inventor of modern authenticity, i.e., the revelation of one’s ‘essential’ nature in the context of an egalitarian society? If so, this is a troubling example, complicated by Rousseau’s racist & romantic notions of simpler cultures & noble savages. Fed by Rousseau’s ideas the dominant philosophy of our time as Alasdair MacIntyre stresses, has become emotivism: “all evaluative judgments, more specifically moral judgments, are nothing but expressions of preferences, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Alas, many US students have already been constructed in this mode where the rationale for any action is “I like it” or “I don’t like it;” and so, in those terms, an authentic action must be the immediate response to spontaneous feelings manifest in preferences. A campus example is the practice of student evaluations of lecturers and professors as deliverers of “knowledge.” Trawl “rate my professor.com” to see this in action: “Dr. Ed Jensen rocks! He’s the dude!; Dr. Sally Robinson is whacked, a mean bitch!” Such utilitarian notions produce the pursuit of what feels good, the avoidance of what feels bad, and reflect students’ subjectivities as consumers. Thus, students accept a neoliberal educational goal of “credentialing” not self transformation. Creating the conditions and offering the content for students to imagine alternate ways of being and acting on new critical understandings seem like preferable goals than shopping for better feeling courses/modules? We need to provide the critical space for them to determine whether they really benefit from the value of “course knowledge delivered” measured by the sexiness of the lecturer and post-grad salaries and status. How can we counter the complete subordination of intellectual life to the measure of money and the market? The “traditional values” of the academy, the driving motivations of intellectual work have been delegitimized and derided by the state, educational administrators and our broader cultures. The heralded humanist values of “knowledge for its own sake”, for social advancement, for self-liberation have already been delegitimized and identified as at odds with university self-definitions, and mission statements when they are decoded. How the return to an early modern utopian university will undermine this I fail to see.
Lastly, I too desire a university as an ethical space, but it seems to me that constructing such a space requires constant struggle, speaking truth to power, demonstrating courage and an alternative way of living rather than parroting the “inevitability” of globalizing marketization, a truly cynical and unethical stance. On the up-side, the current financial crisis now seems to offer an opportunity to challenge the neoliberal transformation of the academy. In 2008-9 as higher education funding has been cut and tuition raised, students in New York have taken to active protest or lobbying the state; grassroots union activism has increased among full time and contingent faculty, interestingly fed by the widespread practice of hiring foreign born academics who bring labor traditions from Poland, Korea, Peru, etc. At this juncture older approaches are not up to the task. The trade union model of workers’ rights defense will not provide the necessary coalition to stop the juggernaut. Rather, we academics need to tackle issues relevant to students and parents, e.g., rising costs of education, decreasing value of university degrees, the failure of neoliberal policies to create jobs and professions of meaning, and working conditions in those jobs which will sustain personal and cultural life. Students engage with cultural issues and ideas of political freedom rooted in 21st century experiences. All of this is to say that the chance to transform the academy may be better today as the contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism are so blatant and unethical.
K.O. (omarakk@oneonta.edu) State university of New York-Oneonta.
Comment on Gender Insurgency & Neo-liberal Reform:
In calling for the subversion of neoliberal governance on UK campuses, Richard Johnson suggested a “return to collective work, activism and the formation of ‘little networks’” along with greater demand for “representation” or democratic practices in “decision making.” This is a call worth heeding. One question, though, is under what conditions collective work is to be conducted? Is it within the approved and funded structures of a university, e.g., centres, institutes which are supported by an administration? Or outside it--without the financial support and required institutional assessment rules and with the costs born by individual researchers? Or if at a university supported centre will it become a site for contest over representation which might well supplant the “research” of a centre. The answer to this is critical for our fellow academics have heretofore surrendered to the rules of engagement set by administrators which pay our salaries in exchange for compliant employee behavior. I suggest that independent fora and short lived small networks constitute a preferable approach which can be further supported by blogs or other fora to assist in building networks. It is important to thwart the timidity and risk adverse behavior that Mayer, Fritschler and Bruce L. R. Smith of George Mason University have found predominate on U.S. campuses (see Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities). Working collaboratively outside university controlled entities may be the only way in the short run to circumvent the acquiescence to timidity manifest in practices such as publishing only in safe, mainstream journals, curtailing unconventional research projects, or hiring safe candidates for open positions.
K.O. (omarakk@oneonta.edu) SUNY Oneonta.
K.O. (omarakk@oneonta.edu) SUNY Oneonta.
Monday, 8 June 2009
The University of Utopia: Radicalising Higher Education
Thursday 4th June 2009, University of Lincoln
This conference echoed Thomas More’s (1516) call for universal civic education, where the highest pleasures are those of the mind. The conference asked whether there are alternatives to the current culture of vocationalism and academic capitalism in universities, and the questions of whether universities should serve the needs of the economy, or whether they should produce responsible, critical citizens.
The conference was organised by Prof. Michael Neary, Dean of Teaching and Learning at the University of Lincoln. This institution, he claims, has committed itself to a Humboldtian concept of a university where social considerations shape the university and the individual commits themselves to shaping the world around them as a result of their education.
Keynote speakers at the day conference were:
Ron Barnett, Institute of Education - who offered optimism based on the fact that universities have been around for centuries, and they are survivors. He argued for feasible utopias and the institution of four critical concepts which can take us into these utopian spaces: the therapeutic university (it should provide students with succour); the liquid university (it should enable us to deal with fluidity and change); the authentic university (as society encourages the inauthentic, the university should encourage authenticity); the university as an ethical space.
Antonia Darder, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana: “Breaking the Silence: A study into the pervasiveness of oppression”. This was a moving talk on a theme familiar to students and faculty from the cultural margins of the academy in the United States. Universities very often pay lip service to the notions of equal opportunity and diversity. Meanwhile the student body, faculty and administrations of those universities remain predominantly white in demographic and in ethos. The kind of radical scholarship which might transform them is often the object of suspicion, and its practitioners deemed irrational. Power structures in the university are not dislodged by their policies of diversity, rather the university itself is a vehicle of containment of oppositional voices. Just as long as marginal subjects conceal their social, historical and spatial origins, and alternative ways of being and thinking, then they are acceptable. If they challenge the prevailing structures, then they are viewed as renegades. Furthermore, within the curriculum or university structures, if there are attempts to acknowledge difference, these will be seen as indoctrination – so called ‘political correctness’. Professor Darder showed a movie, made by UIU-C students and faculty that captures some of the constraints and instances of resistance on that campus.
This conference echoed Thomas More’s (1516) call for universal civic education, where the highest pleasures are those of the mind. The conference asked whether there are alternatives to the current culture of vocationalism and academic capitalism in universities, and the questions of whether universities should serve the needs of the economy, or whether they should produce responsible, critical citizens.
The conference was organised by Prof. Michael Neary, Dean of Teaching and Learning at the University of Lincoln. This institution, he claims, has committed itself to a Humboldtian concept of a university where social considerations shape the university and the individual commits themselves to shaping the world around them as a result of their education.
Keynote speakers at the day conference were:
Ron Barnett, Institute of Education - who offered optimism based on the fact that universities have been around for centuries, and they are survivors. He argued for feasible utopias and the institution of four critical concepts which can take us into these utopian spaces: the therapeutic university (it should provide students with succour); the liquid university (it should enable us to deal with fluidity and change); the authentic university (as society encourages the inauthentic, the university should encourage authenticity); the university as an ethical space.
Antonia Darder, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana: “Breaking the Silence: A study into the pervasiveness of oppression”. This was a moving talk on a theme familiar to students and faculty from the cultural margins of the academy in the United States. Universities very often pay lip service to the notions of equal opportunity and diversity. Meanwhile the student body, faculty and administrations of those universities remain predominantly white in demographic and in ethos. The kind of radical scholarship which might transform them is often the object of suspicion, and its practitioners deemed irrational. Power structures in the university are not dislodged by their policies of diversity, rather the university itself is a vehicle of containment of oppositional voices. Just as long as marginal subjects conceal their social, historical and spatial origins, and alternative ways of being and thinking, then they are acceptable. If they challenge the prevailing structures, then they are viewed as renegades. Furthermore, within the curriculum or university structures, if there are attempts to acknowledge difference, these will be seen as indoctrination – so called ‘political correctness’. Professor Darder showed a movie, made by UIU-C students and faculty that captures some of the constraints and instances of resistance on that campus.
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Dr Joyce Canaan - Exploring a Neoliberal Moment in Higher Education Today
This was the last in the Spring/Summer 2009 Seminar Series at the University of Birmingham: Gender and Sexuality: The Discursive Limits of ‘Equality’ in Higher Education.
Joyce Canaan’s paper posed the question: “Are we in a post-neoliberal moment?” Given that it was a late arrival on the capitalist scene in the 1990s, the neoliberal dictum that There Is No Alternative seems exaggerated. And if that is so, then the current fashion by UK Vice Chancellors for “shock-doctrine” in universities offers a moment of vulnerability in which a resistance to its discursive regulation can be mounted.
The situation as perceived by government and Vice Chancellors is that HEIs must engage in market-led competition in order to ‘deliver’ maximally efficient courses for the knowledge economy. This efficiency has only been achieved by a 30 year decline in the public subsidy for universities to the point that the UK ranks lowest in this regard in the OECD.
Canaan’s next question was “why do we keep going along with it”. Answer: because of the carrot of self-actualization dangled before academics to ensure their compliance with the stick of regulation – QAA, RAE, benchmarking etc. These all render academics auditable, and allow the imposition of a neoliberal governmentality which works through a destabilization of established academic practices. And it never stands still, since we are impelled to go through permanent revolution, so that no practices ever fully establish themselves or achieve legitimacy. The ‘second order’ activities of audit take over and construct our very beings as academics. Our professional lives are dominated by the need to discursively provide evidence that we are compliant with the regime.
Canaan offered two thinkers who allow for possibilities outside of the crisis of economic rationalism and regulation: Raymond Williams and Judith Butler. Both question the fixity of the dominant and the supposed natural. Butler recognises that norms are only legitimated by constant citation, and we can choose to stop the repetition. Raymond Williams shows us that the hegemonic provides the basis for the counter-hegemonic, and that the residual can still be reactivated. There is also the emergent – that which a dominant social order represses or fails to recognize. This is the most crucial tool for dealing with the dominant and for allowing subversion, as the emergent seeks new forms or reworks old practices. Bourdieu argues for a scholarship with commitment, and in striving for that, we may create the social conditions for realizing utopias.
Joyce Canaan’s paper posed the question: “Are we in a post-neoliberal moment?” Given that it was a late arrival on the capitalist scene in the 1990s, the neoliberal dictum that There Is No Alternative seems exaggerated. And if that is so, then the current fashion by UK Vice Chancellors for “shock-doctrine” in universities offers a moment of vulnerability in which a resistance to its discursive regulation can be mounted.
The situation as perceived by government and Vice Chancellors is that HEIs must engage in market-led competition in order to ‘deliver’ maximally efficient courses for the knowledge economy. This efficiency has only been achieved by a 30 year decline in the public subsidy for universities to the point that the UK ranks lowest in this regard in the OECD.
Canaan’s next question was “why do we keep going along with it”. Answer: because of the carrot of self-actualization dangled before academics to ensure their compliance with the stick of regulation – QAA, RAE, benchmarking etc. These all render academics auditable, and allow the imposition of a neoliberal governmentality which works through a destabilization of established academic practices. And it never stands still, since we are impelled to go through permanent revolution, so that no practices ever fully establish themselves or achieve legitimacy. The ‘second order’ activities of audit take over and construct our very beings as academics. Our professional lives are dominated by the need to discursively provide evidence that we are compliant with the regime.
Canaan offered two thinkers who allow for possibilities outside of the crisis of economic rationalism and regulation: Raymond Williams and Judith Butler. Both question the fixity of the dominant and the supposed natural. Butler recognises that norms are only legitimated by constant citation, and we can choose to stop the repetition. Raymond Williams shows us that the hegemonic provides the basis for the counter-hegemonic, and that the residual can still be reactivated. There is also the emergent – that which a dominant social order represses or fails to recognize. This is the most crucial tool for dealing with the dominant and for allowing subversion, as the emergent seeks new forms or reworks old practices. Bourdieu argues for a scholarship with commitment, and in striving for that, we may create the social conditions for realizing utopias.
Professor Richard Johnson - Gender Insurgency and Neo-Liberal Reform: The Academy Twice Transformed?
A report on a paper by Richard Johnson delivered at the University of Birmingham 6th March 2009 in the series: 'Gender and Sexuality: The Discursive Limits of "Equality" in Higher Education'
This talk marked a kind of ironic homecoming for Richard Johnson, as he taught at the University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from 1974 to 1993. CCCS was, unfathomably, closed in 1991 and a new Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology formed. It, too, was closed by the University in 2002, in the wake of rumours that this was revenge for the centre’s oppositional stance to the University’s administration. At this point Richard left Birmingham, and at Nottingham Trent many of us were privileged to enjoy his generosity of time and spirit, until his retirement.
Richard argued that neoliberalism didn’t just start in 1975, but we are now seeing an intensification of its embrace. While noting Karl Polyani’s view that economies are embedded in cultures, Richard made the point that these dominant models never wholly expunge other trajectories. The fact that neoliberalism is not all-encompassing is what makes it possible to critique the structures which attempt to govern and regulate us in the academy. Furthermore, as much as these other perspectives exist alongside the dominant ones, there remains the possibility of a looking back to a previous existence and perhaps a re-installation of that ethos.
Richard’s talk took a biographical turn as he reflected on the phases and transitions across his own academic career. This began in Cambridge in a collegial, but gender and class-segregated setting. At Birmingham there was less segregation of class, and slowly there appeared more women colleagues as feminists fought their way into academic space and legitimacy. Alliances with the 1968 student movement resulted in a greater democratization of the university and of power relations between staff and students.
The neoliberal phase began with Richard’s move to NTU, more or less in concert with the accession to power of New Labour. He reports finding many echoes at NTU of the Blairite interventionist impulse to over-regulate, inspect, audit and punish those who do not comply. However, despite this he was delighted to find that cultural studies at NTU was not a marginalised project. It was well embedded in the academy and successful in research. Ironically, he found, much of the exciting collaborative work fell away under RAE pressures to perform individually. In his view, the decision to buy in experienced researchers (such as himself) resulted in a reproduction of patriarchy, a teaching/ research divide and a gender hierarchy.
Richard left us with a call to subvert the neoliberal governmentality he saw at NTU and more generally in the ‘new’ and ‘old’ universities. He offered two strategies: a return to collective work, activism and the formation of ‘little networks’ (let’s hope this blog is a start!); also a revitalised demand for democracy in universities, with real representation on key decision-making bodies.
This talk marked a kind of ironic homecoming for Richard Johnson, as he taught at the University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from 1974 to 1993. CCCS was, unfathomably, closed in 1991 and a new Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology formed. It, too, was closed by the University in 2002, in the wake of rumours that this was revenge for the centre’s oppositional stance to the University’s administration. At this point Richard left Birmingham, and at Nottingham Trent many of us were privileged to enjoy his generosity of time and spirit, until his retirement.
Richard argued that neoliberalism didn’t just start in 1975, but we are now seeing an intensification of its embrace. While noting Karl Polyani’s view that economies are embedded in cultures, Richard made the point that these dominant models never wholly expunge other trajectories. The fact that neoliberalism is not all-encompassing is what makes it possible to critique the structures which attempt to govern and regulate us in the academy. Furthermore, as much as these other perspectives exist alongside the dominant ones, there remains the possibility of a looking back to a previous existence and perhaps a re-installation of that ethos.
Richard’s talk took a biographical turn as he reflected on the phases and transitions across his own academic career. This began in Cambridge in a collegial, but gender and class-segregated setting. At Birmingham there was less segregation of class, and slowly there appeared more women colleagues as feminists fought their way into academic space and legitimacy. Alliances with the 1968 student movement resulted in a greater democratization of the university and of power relations between staff and students.
The neoliberal phase began with Richard’s move to NTU, more or less in concert with the accession to power of New Labour. He reports finding many echoes at NTU of the Blairite interventionist impulse to over-regulate, inspect, audit and punish those who do not comply. However, despite this he was delighted to find that cultural studies at NTU was not a marginalised project. It was well embedded in the academy and successful in research. Ironically, he found, much of the exciting collaborative work fell away under RAE pressures to perform individually. In his view, the decision to buy in experienced researchers (such as himself) resulted in a reproduction of patriarchy, a teaching/ research divide and a gender hierarchy.
Richard left us with a call to subvert the neoliberal governmentality he saw at NTU and more generally in the ‘new’ and ‘old’ universities. He offered two strategies: a return to collective work, activism and the formation of ‘little networks’ (let’s hope this blog is a start!); also a revitalised demand for democracy in universities, with real representation on key decision-making bodies.
Professor Mary Evans - For Us or Against Us: Coercion and Consensus in Higher Education
Abstract:
In debates about the admissions of state school pupils to Oxbridge those defending Oxbridge have challenged the idea that universities should be 'engines of social change'. At the same time Oxbridge, and other universities have accepted the responsibility of 'enabling' entrepreneurship and other market led initiatives. I want to explore some of the implications of this position in terms of the 'making' of the person in higher education and in particular the ways in which conservative refusals of radical gender and class change re-inforce structural inequalities.
Report:
Mary Evans produced a well-researched and structured argument in support of her thesis that neoliberal discourse and institutions (especially elite institutions) have produced a new kind of compliant and conformist female academic who completely accepts the new values of the university. Universities have embraced the values of the marketplace and models of social action based on enterprise. While embracing these new ideas, elite institutions have resisted moves towards greater diversity in student admissions.
The demands that the academic engages with the economic forces visited upon the university have in turn produced a new labouring self, perhaps a formulaic over-socialised persona, who is unrelentingly positive and engaged in academic entrepreneurship. This demands a negotiation with the institution which is gendered. Women analyse difficulties as failings of the self, rather than deficiencies in the institution. These latter become inadmissible, just as anger with institutional values becomes pathologized. Advancement through the hierarchy of the university is available only to compliant ‘good girls’. In this way, gender discrimination is no longer overt and categorical, but covert and is seen in pressure to conform to the ideal. For men, greater toleration of individuality is permitted, but women have to do more work to conform, squeezing out any possibility for ‘the person’ to emerge.
In terms of admission to elite institutions, the ideal remains the confident student with recognisable aspirations. Difference, if identifiable, must be articulated and accounted for. The person of promise and enthusiasm is the neoliberal ideal and privilege bestowed on that person will be seen as earned and legitimate. Perhaps this is the ultimate ‘confidence trick’ ?
In debates about the admissions of state school pupils to Oxbridge those defending Oxbridge have challenged the idea that universities should be 'engines of social change'. At the same time Oxbridge, and other universities have accepted the responsibility of 'enabling' entrepreneurship and other market led initiatives. I want to explore some of the implications of this position in terms of the 'making' of the person in higher education and in particular the ways in which conservative refusals of radical gender and class change re-inforce structural inequalities.
Report:
Mary Evans produced a well-researched and structured argument in support of her thesis that neoliberal discourse and institutions (especially elite institutions) have produced a new kind of compliant and conformist female academic who completely accepts the new values of the university. Universities have embraced the values of the marketplace and models of social action based on enterprise. While embracing these new ideas, elite institutions have resisted moves towards greater diversity in student admissions.
The demands that the academic engages with the economic forces visited upon the university have in turn produced a new labouring self, perhaps a formulaic over-socialised persona, who is unrelentingly positive and engaged in academic entrepreneurship. This demands a negotiation with the institution which is gendered. Women analyse difficulties as failings of the self, rather than deficiencies in the institution. These latter become inadmissible, just as anger with institutional values becomes pathologized. Advancement through the hierarchy of the university is available only to compliant ‘good girls’. In this way, gender discrimination is no longer overt and categorical, but covert and is seen in pressure to conform to the ideal. For men, greater toleration of individuality is permitted, but women have to do more work to conform, squeezing out any possibility for ‘the person’ to emerge.
In terms of admission to elite institutions, the ideal remains the confident student with recognisable aspirations. Difference, if identifiable, must be articulated and accounted for. The person of promise and enthusiasm is the neoliberal ideal and privilege bestowed on that person will be seen as earned and legitimate. Perhaps this is the ultimate ‘confidence trick’ ?
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