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.

Good discussion site

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

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.

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.

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.

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.