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Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education: Palgrave Critical University Studies
Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education: Palgrave Critical University Studies
ACADEMIC LABOUR,
UNEMPLOYMENT AND GLOBAL
HIGHER EDUCATION
Neoliberal Policies of Funding
and Management
Edited by
Suman Gupta, Jernej Habjan and Hrvoje Tutek
Palgrave Critical University Studies
Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and
most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed
by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and little
understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed.
The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage, and publish
scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direction of these
reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a much-needed
forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of
ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and will do this with
particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have
hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The series explores the
effects of these changes across a number of domains including: the nature
of academic work, the process of knowledge production for social and
public good, along with students’ experiences of learning, leadership and
institutional politics research. The defining hallmark of this series, and
what makes it markedly different from any other series with a focus on
universities and higher education, is its ‘criticalist agenda’.
Academic Labour,
Unemployment and
Global Higher
Education
Neoliberal Policies of Funding and Management
Editors Jernej Habjan
Suman Gupta Slovenian Academy of
English Department Sciences and Arts
The Open University Ljubljana, Slovenia
Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Hrvoje Tutek
Department of English
University of Zagreb
Zagreb, Croatia
The Critical University Studies Series has a distinct and clear agenda. The
overarching intent is to foster, encourage and publish scholarship relat-
ing to universities that is troubled by the direction of reforms occurring
around the world.
It is clear that universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented
changes. What is much less clear – and there are reasons for the lack of
transparency – are the effects of these changes within and across a number
of domains, including
Most of the changes being inflicted upon universities globally are being
imposed by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion,
and with little understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or
destroyed. Benefits, where they are articulated at all, are framed exclusively
in terms of short-term political gains. This is not a recipe for a robust and
vibrant university system.
What this series seeks to do is provide a much-needed forum for the
intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of ill-conceived and
inappropriate university reforms. It does this with particular emphasis on
v
vi SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
those perspectives and groups whose views have hitherto been ignored,
disparaged or silenced.
The defining hallmark of the series, and what makes it markedly different
from any other series with a focus on universities and higher education, is its
‘criticalist agenda’. This means that it directly addresses questions such as:
John Smyth
Professor of Education and Social Justice,
University of Huddersfield, and
Emeritus Professor, Federation University Australia
CONTENTS
ix
x CONTENTS
Index 247
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
S. Gupta ()
English Department, The Open University,
London, UK
J. Habjan
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts,
Ljubljana, Slovenia
H. Tutek
Department of English, University of Zagreb
Zagreb, Croatia
are often at the expense of the integrity of research; and (7) systemically
reducing, therefore, academic freedom—in the undertaking of teaching
and research—and the social and economic freedom of students, teachers,
and researchers (down to the increasing dependency on managers and
within families).
These kinds of moves are premised on two principal assumptions. First,
that higher academic work is a privilege, and those engaged in it are apt
to waste public resources and ‘skive off’ unless they are heavily controlled.
And second, that employment is a matter of application and is simply ‘cre-
ated’ (almost altruistically) by non-academic ‘industry’, and such employ-
ment simply exists out there and is available only to graduates who are
‘fitted’ to the purpose. The hypothesis on which this book is based takes
the opposite view. For the first, academic work is not a privilege but a pub-
lic necessity, and cautions about ‘waste’ are premised on the misguided
attribution of ‘privilege’. For the second, employment in every sector of
productive industry is to a significant extent created by diverse and often
unpredictable and apparently theoretical research (without an immediate
investment in application) and pedagogic enterprise, and academic free-
dom and the social freedom of academics are crucial for this input not to
become stultified. Moreover, academic freedom is at the basis of every area
of social equity and progress.
Further, the hypothesis that this book opens to question could also
lead to exploring the determinants of the seven prevailing moves outlined
above. It is possible that the designing of academia now to effectively
produce unemployment has a deliberate ideological agenda. This edited
volume does not speculate on what that agenda may be, but it does not
accept an easy assumption that the current moves are simply thoughtless
or misguidedly well meant.
With this hypothesis in view, the manner in which academia is being
restructured, and the lives of academic workers and students configured, is
opened to exploration here under four broad headings (proceeding from
the material conditions of academic work, through their impact on both
institutional and personal practices of academic workers themselves, to
the ways in which these workers might in turn collectively take charge
of their material conditions): the political economy of higher education
policy initiatives and institutional functioning now, in relation to teach-
ing and research; management and leadership against academic freedom;
generation gaps and economic dependency in academic life; and the scope
of collective action in academia.
4 S. GUPTA ET AL.
***
6 S. GUPTA ET AL.
are out of work for more than 6 months are left to fend for themselves,
as is the case with Hajimichael’s interviewees, who increasingly rely on
their families as sources of alternative income and support. A similar phe-
nomenon is also noticeable in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, all
economies that are undergoing different forms of austerity, Hajimichael
adds. In his view, there is a need today for a more critical awareness in edu-
cation, one that addresses precariousness, exploitation, and social inequal-
ity. The current austerity measures have struck graduates just as much as
Thatcherite laissez-faire policies had hit Hajimichael himself as a graduate
in Great Britain back in the 1980s. After experiencing a similar situation
than his five interviewees, only in the Thatcherite Britain rather than the
post-haircut Cyprus, Hajimichael repatriated to Cyprus around 1994,
where there was far less unemployment than in Britain. Today, however,
youth unemployment in Cyprus is one of the highest in Europe. It peaked
at around 40 % just after the Cypriot ‘haircut’, the bailout crisis of March
2013, and it now stands at 31.7 %. This could be seen as an improve-
ment, but it remains unacceptable, Hajimichael concludes, that one in
three young people in Cyprus still has ‘no future’, as Johnny Rotten used
to sing on the eve of those Thatcherite 1980s.
Ivana Perica’s chapter is devoted to the New Public Management in
the global academia, specifically to the ways in which it manifests itself in
its pedagogic effects as it institutionalises the academic field’s new peda-
gogy. Focusing on examples from academic experience in Austria, Perica
makes a twofold point: first, the structure of the ‘old’, multilevel aca-
demic hierarchies has been translated into a structure based on the ossified
poles of ‘professors’ and ‘mid-level academic positions’. The inequality
between these poles manifests itself not only as a wage difference but also
as a difference in participatory rights and employment duration. While
professors—who, due to their management position, are constantly short
of time for research—have long-term appointments, mid-level academic
staff must deal with short-term contracts, frequent employment applica-
tions, exposure to greater peer pressure, and expectations of conformist
behaviour, in order to avoid conflicts that might jeopardise their already
precarious position. However, Perica is careful to point out, the distinc-
tion between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ academia is easily blurred, and one
cannot avoid the impression that the ‘old’ pedagogical hierarchies are in
some way re-established in the horizontal structures of the ‘new’ academia.
Therefore, in order to determine the specificities of the ‘new’ academia,
she argues that while in the ‘old’ academia the relations between assistants
INTRODUCTION: ACADEMIA AND THE PRODUCTION OF UNEMPLOYMENT 13
consider how the absence of security and stability affects people’s lives and
their capacity to develop as researchers and teachers. They address dete-
riorating working conditions and consider how they prevent a growing
number of academics from engaging productively with their colleagues,
caring for their students, or even caring adequately for themselves. The
authors suggest that by outsourcing work previously carried out under
permanent contracts of employment, universities demonstrate a stubborn
refusal to contribute to the formation of secure occupational identities
among those hoping to live and work as academics. Contracts of indefinite
duration, although indeed offering the best approximation to job security
amid increasingly destructive commercial forces, are a half-hearted solu-
tion that can also be used as a tool for antagonising further the ever more
stratified academic community, warn Ivancheva and O’Flynn in their con-
clusion. Because of the legal procedures that it triggers, claiming a con-
tract of indefinite duration deepens the individualisation and the isolation
to which universities subject their casual staff, curtailing the possibilities of
collective solutions to a shared predicament. Ironically, then, contracts of
indefinite duration are a precarious mechanism, but increasingly the only
one that precarious academics have in order to obtain permanent position
while employed by Irish universities.
The collection closes with a section on the possibilities, and the urgency,
of collective action in academia. Reflecting on his empirical study of a uni-
versity struggle in Slovenia that managed to align itself with an industrial
strike, Branko Bembič examines, in the section’s first chapter, the useful-
ness of university knowledge production from the perspectives of capital
and the working class. From the viewpoint of capital, the university is
useful primarily as a locus of permanent primitive accumulation in the
scientific sphere, which the state institutionalises in order to enhance the
competitiveness of the capitals that are operating within its borders. As
university knowledge production becomes production for the capitalist
market, scholarly production becomes commodified. Certain segments of
the university knowledge production are, however, useless from the view-
point of individual capitals, since they are of little interest to capitalist pro-
duction. These segments are found mainly in the fields of the humanities.
Bembič distinguishes between two forms of uselessness of the humanities.
The first relates to the production of theory. Insofar as the principal con-
tradiction of societies with the capitalist mode of production is the one
between labour and capital, no social theory can assume a neutral position
with regard to class struggle. Thus, theory can become a weapon of the
16 S. GUPTA ET AL.
Eva Völpel as they argue that the young people in question constitute
a class fraction that constitutes the remaking of the working class both
politically and culturally. From this perspective, Bergfeld looks back at the
London student movement of 2010 and the Quebec student strike of
2012. Characterised by student strikes, economic blockades, mass gen-
eral assemblies, permanent organisations that resemble trade unions, and
a high degree of mobilisation by high school students and urban youth,
these and other student movements have placed themselves squarely into
the struggle of labour against capital, thus reconfiguring precarity as a
form of activism. In the UK, the movement did so insofar as it placed itself
at the helm of the anti-austerity movement as a whole, while students in
Quebec used proletarianised forms of action as they picketed university
buildings and led student strikes. In general, the proletarianisation of stu-
dents has meant that students have not only proclaimed solidarity with
labour struggles, as in the case of the UK, but also adopted proletarianised
forms of struggle, as in Quebec. As Bergfeld highlights, the theoretical
debates featured in his chapter informed the UK student movement in
2010 not only at the ideological level but also in terms of political strate-
gies. The works of Guy Standing and Paul Mason were continuous refer-
ence points in analysing the struggle. Despite the passing of this moment,
it is worth revisiting these debates, Bergfeld argues, if we want to concep-
tualise the situation that the political and economic elites have not been
able to resolve, and address some questions that need to be addressed in
political praxis in a new round of university struggles. And such struggles
are never too far off: as Bergfeld was writing his chapter, he was able to
see students at the University of Amsterdam and students of the London
School of Economics occupy university buildings.
In the face of the aggressive neoliberal restructuring of the institutions
of higher education—manifest, in the UK, in the raising of student tuition
fees, budget cuts, commercialisation of career paths and research ‘prod-
ucts’, and so on—there has been little notable resistance, especially among
critical scholars and theorists. Critical scholarship has proven itself to be
collectively apathetic or actively disinterested in pragmatically deploying
the resource of critical theory against the identified neoliberalisation of
higher education. Why is this the case? In their chapter, Cerelia Athanassiou
and Jamie Melrose discuss the reasons for this inactivity, as well as the criti-
cal tools at our disposal that they see as unused or misused. With the so-
called student rebellions of 2010—to date, the most significant display of
discontent and resistance to the neoliberalisation of UK higher education,
18 S. GUPTA ET AL.
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PART I
Danijela Dolenec
D. Dolenec
University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
transfer offices, science parks, incubators, and spin-offs emerge as the new
institutional infrastructure enabling universities to commercialise and capi-
talise knowledge (see Etzkowitz 2008).
Though, on the one hand, the introduction of the ‘knowledge trian-
gle’ should not pose a threat to the university, as the latter has always
had education, research, and innovation as its basic functions, the cur-
rent rhetoric makes two assumptions that reflect negatively on universities.
First, an essentially functionalist reduction of the mission of university to
furthering economic growth is recast as the university’s civic role in social
and economic development (see, e.g., Etzkowitz 2008). Second, the
‘knowledge triangle’ frame plays ‘panic football’, claiming that the uni-
versity must be drastically reformed in order to stay in the game (Maassen
and Stensaker 2011). The knowledge triangle and its framework discourse
of the knowledge-based economy have become a ‘powerful imaginary’
(Jessop 2008), influencing strategies and policy recipes as well as shaping
the policy paradigm that guides institutional design and reform objec-
tives in higher education and research. Furthermore, this script reconcep-
tualises the academic as a technoscientist, presuming ‘a much narrower
subjectivity that combines scientific rationality with instrumental and
opportunistic sensibility’ (Kenway et al. 2007, p. 125). The privileging
of the technoscientist encourages academics across disciplines to restyle
themselves according to this image in order not to be perceived as redun-
dant in the new order of things (ibid.).
Assuming that we agree that this functionalist liberal script for uni-
versity reform is currently the dominant discourse, two important ques-
tions arise. First, how does this set of ideas get transferred into policy
proposals and reform agendas implemented by national bureaucracies,
university management, and academic staff? And second, what happens
when this script travels further than its initial logic intends? In order to
answer the first question, I will employ the concept of epistemic com-
munities and analyse how it helps us understand the wholesale transfer of
the Lisbon Agenda objectives to peripheral European economies of the
Western Balkans. In an attempt to reveal the severity of the mismatch
between the Lisbon Agenda objectives and the political economies of
the Western Balkans, I will analyse, in the second part of the chapter,
comparative data on investment in higher education and research as well
as state capacity. I will conclude by sketching an argument that attempts
to relate this unhappy policy transfer to the elite-driven character of
European integration.
THE IMPLAUSIBLE KNOWLEDGE TRIANGLE OF THE WESTERN BALKANS 27
a
Source for the first two columns: United Nations Statistics Division (2015), third column: Marini (2014),
and fourth column: Kaufmann et al. (2014)
sector and a higher quality of policy implementation. Such high levels are
to be found in the Nordic region (with Denmark, Finland, Norway, and
Sweden as core countries), where governments score 90–100 percentiles.
Among the Western Balkan countries the range is 40–60 percentiles, which
may be read to suggest that governments in the region have substantially
lower capacity for strategic planning and policy implementation than is
implied in implementing Bologna and Lisbon objectives. According to
Dolenec et al. (2014), weak governance capacity helps explain the discrep-
ancy between the level of formal adoption of Bologna objectives, which
has been high, and the much lower success regarding implementation.
This has inspired other researchers to view elements of the Bologna pro-
cess as ‘Potemkin’ institutions aimed at signalling commitment to EU
institutions but failing to fulfil their purpose (see, e.g., Noutcheva 2009).
Discussing the implementation of NQFs in particular, Borhene Chakroun
(2010) and Kleibrink (2012) doubt its success in the Western Balkans,
given how different their socio-economic context and labour markets are
from those of the EU.
A further empirical illustration of the problems of transferring policy
paradigms designed in the core EU countries to the EU periphery can be
drawn from the comparison between levels of public investment in higher
education (Table 2.2) and research and development (Table 2.3) in EU
27 vs. Western Balkan countries.
Among Western Balkan countries, only Serbia has a level of investment
in higher education that is comparable to EU 27, while none of the other
34 D. DOLENEC
a
Source: Dolenec et al. (2014)
a
Source: Dolenec et al. (2014)
CONCLUSION
Putting together the two strands of this analysis together, it could
be argued that the neoliberal script of knowledge economies and its
embodiment in the Lisbon Agenda provide an excellent illustration of
the elite-driven, technocratic, and nondemocratic character of European
integration. Through the process of European integration, academic
and administrative elites from Western Balkan countries are integrated
into coordination mechanisms such as the OMC and other Brussels-
36 D. DOLENEC
based policy fora, whereby they are exposed to, and become members
of, epistemic communities that shape the official EU discourse and
policy on economic and social development. Having acquired a shared
worldview on the role of knowledge in furthering European competi-
tiveness, they serve as transmission belts for embedding these ideas into
their home societies.
The problem arises, however, due to the circumstance that the European
periphery is characterised by economies that could hardly be qualified as
post-industrial, and which hence do not have either the infrastructure nor
the capacity to implement such reforms (setting aside for the moment the
equally important question of whether that would be a good idea at all). In
their attempt to become ‘licensed’ in the halls of Brussels, the liberal elites
of Western Balkan countries therefore commit at least two consequential
mistakes. First, they fail to engage with their domestic constituencies in
deliberating, localising, and transforming official EU policy into workable
and viable development programmes that would take account of country
specificities and developmental trajectories. Instead, they are content in
styling themselves as the enlightened elite bringing progress to a back-
ward nation, setting aside the deeply undemocratic character of the pro-
cess. As a result, the wholesale policy transfer results in all kinds of failure
in implementation, ranging all the way from bureaucratic incompetence
across window dressing to deliberate sabotage. Second, enthralled by join-
ing the ‘most prestigious world club’, as the EU is sometimes referred to,
they toe the official line of the European Commission, failing to engage
critically with its ideas and to acknowledge that inside the EU there is
a constant plurality of voices when it comes to designing development
policies—let alone to consider that the institutional and cultural practices
engendered in their own societies may ever provide templates worth dis-
tilling into policy proposals for Europe.
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CHAPTER 3
Primož Krašovec
1
For a detailed critical overview of recent Slovenian pedagogical literature on human capi-
tal and knowledge society, see Krašovec (2014, pp. 80–2).
2
See Žagar and Korsika (2012) for a detailed critique of the current plan for reforms of
education and science policy in Slovenia.
P. Krašovec
University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
3
In 2011, a comprehensive national plan for reforms of science and education policy in
Slovenia was subtitled Na poti v družbo znanja (The Road to Knowledge Society): see
Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology 2011.
HUMAN AND INHUMAN CAPITAL, AND SCHOOLING: THE CASE OF SLOVENIA 43
at least in the 1960s USA, quite evident, namely the fact that higher edu-
cation leads to higher personal income (see Becker 1993, p. 12). This
social fact focused the attention of neoliberal researchers on three basic
elements that could potentially explain this positive correlation: the pro-
cess of education and the mode of organisation of educational institutions
in relation to increases in productivity and qualifications of the workforce;
qualitative modifications of workers’ abilities originating from increased
qualifications; and the relation between increases in qualifications and pro-
ductivity, on the one hand, and in personal income, on the other.
Although the interrelations of these three elements seem quite obvious
today, their investigation triggered a mini-revolution within economics.
Work was no longer seen as a purely quantitative factor of production
(measured in hours), but rather as a qualitative variable dependent on
the qualification of the workforce. These empirically ascertained qualita-
tive variations of work, with corresponding variations in personal income,
allowed neoliberal economists to begin to perceive work as a specific kind
of capital with variable returns. Wage itself was no longer seen as payment
for work but as a return on capital—a special kind of capital, henceforth
called human capital. If one takes into account that it is non-economic
factors that determine the qualification of the workforce (primarily edu-
cation, but also personal work ethics and diligence, health, social skills,
etc.), one has to expand economic analysis to previously inaccessible fields.
Economics thus became increasingly interested in pedagogy, psychology,
sociology, and other social sciences. Human-capital theory allowed neo-
liberalism to shed the limitations of a strictly economic theory and start
becoming a much wider social theory and political ideology.
Since work is no longer seen as an aggregate, quantitative production
factor, the theoretical perspective changes from the social to the indi-
vidual. Human-capital theory is no longer concerned with economical
processes, focusing rather on individual strategic rationality (see Foucault
2008, p. 223): that is, on the individual choice regarding which univer-
sity to study at, what to study there and how long, which occupation to
choose, and so on. The central theoretical perspective becomes that of the
individual worker seeking best ways to gain human capital (i.e., choices
in education) and to invest this capital with highest possible returns (i.e.,
choices in employment).
Such change in perspective is not only theoretical but also political.
The future worker is presented as an individual consumer in the market-
place of education services. The dimension of education as a production,
46 P. KRAŠOVEC
involving its own manner of (pedagogical) work, work relations and rela-
tive autonomy, drops completely out of sight. In human-capital theory,
education is reduced to a supply of services that are supposed to give
individual future workers access to human capital. The logic of the mar-
ketplace is thus smuggled into education through the back door, that is,
not as explicit declarations that education should bend its knee to the dic-
tate of the economy, but through a quite subtle switch in perspective that
introduces the viewpoint of the freedom of consumer’s choice in being
provided a starting stock of human capital. Interests of (autonomous or
semi-autonomous) public universities are thus no longer counterposed to
capital- or profit-seeking corporations, but to the free choice of common
people (consumers) who, due to caprices of allegedly backward thinking
and inert public university management, are being denied the opportunity
to increase their human capital and become more employable.
Milton Friedman’s take on education policy is a case in point (see
Friedman 1982, pp. 85–107). In Friedman’s view, the main principle of
education policy should be strategic calculation of individual consumers
of education services. There is no mention of the autonomous logic of
the development of education and educational institutions, non-economic
dimensions of education or, say, interests of teachers. Friedman is inter-
ested exclusively in organising educational institutions in a way that would
allow efficient and unobstructed consumer choice. Teachers’ trade unions,
rigid public employee collective wage contracts, traditional professional
autonomy, guaranteed public financing of educational institutions and
autonomous rules and regulations governing the functioning of the edu-
cation field—all of this is little more than so many obstacles in the way of
market-like relations and hence a completely free consumer choice.
Another political dimension of human-capital theory is the presenta-
tion of the worker as an entrepreneur. If the future worker is seen as an
individual consumer of education services, the practicing worker is no lon-
ger a wage-worker in a classical sense but an entrepreneur making strategic
choices between different possibilities of investment of his or her individual
human capital. Such an economic analysis no longer distinguishes between
individual workers and heads of individual enterprises—they both manage
certain quantities of capital and try to invest them in the best (i.e., most
profitable) way possible. The only remaining difference is that of the kind
of capital invested. Ordinary entrepreneurs invest money and control the
means of production, while worker-entrepreneurs invest their knowledge
and skills. What quite remarkably drops out of sight in this perspective is
HUMAN AND INHUMAN CAPITAL, AND SCHOOLING: THE CASE OF SLOVENIA 47
just one step away from including work qualifications in such a broad
definition of capital—and if above-average wages are the return (profit),
what remains to be done is to locate the original investment. This origi-
nal investment was discovered in the (monetary) investment in education:
first, we pay for the tuition fees, and then, once we graduate, our qualifi-
cations and productivity are above average, and so are our wages. When
this surplus pays off the original investment (the cost of tuition fees), what
remains are profits, returns on our human capital. If we do not pay tuition
fees (e.g., in countries where all university education is public and free of
charge), we, according to human-capital theory, get something for noth-
ing, profits without investment, which is an unnatural and unfair state of
affairs. Most neoliberal arguments for the introduction of tuition fees start
from this argument.
This theoretical procedure also equates human and fixed capital (see
Friedman 1982, pp. 100–101): both are seen as ‘things’ able to ‘pro-
duce’ positive returns (profits). But what is capital? Is it really ‘thingly’
means of production (‘fixed capital’) as such? Indeed, a special kind of
use of machines can bring profits, but the key is this special use, not the
machines themselves. Machines by themselves, when they are turned off
or used outside of capitalist economic relations (like, say, domestic kitchen
appliances), do not bring profits. Therefore, capital is not a thing but a
social relation, a special way of organising production. Positive returns
are a characteristic of capital relations, but not its defining characteristic.
For example, if I walk down the street and find €5, this is indeed a posi-
tive return, my costs being a negligible wear of shoe soles and my gain a
whole €5, but one nevertheless cannot define flâneuring as capital. What
makes capital is the fact that in capital relation, returns take the form of
profits, a form that depends on the production of surplus value. Profit is
a systematic and (more or less) guaranteed form of positive return that
depends not on coincidence, like walking down the street, but on the way
the production process is organised, on generalised market exchange and
the state of the market, and so on. Only a company organised in a capital-
ist way—that is, taking care of the efficiency of its production process and
competitiveness of its products, frequently scanning the market and taking
note of consumer demand, and so on—can systematically realise profits.
Not every return is a profit, and profits are possible only for (successful)
capitalist enterprises.
Hence, profit cannot be defined simply as a positive return, a return
exceeding the original investment. That also means that capital is not
HUMAN AND INHUMAN CAPITAL, AND SCHOOLING: THE CASE OF SLOVENIA 49
every ‘thing’ that can bring about a financial yield, but a social relation
that allows for profits (see Krašovec 2013b). Allows is the key word here:
capital does not produce profit, but appears as its source due to the above-
mentioned mystification of the wage form. What then does produce
profits? If one, to simplify matters, disregards the distinction between sur-
plus value and profit, the answer is—surplus labour contributed by work-
ers, the time workers work above what is needed to cover their wage, that
is, to produce the value equivalent of their wage, which is itself, on aver-
age, equivalent to the value of their labour power.
In capitalism, workers of course do not work so as to produce sur-
plus value. Their value contribution is not only hidden, or mystified, but
also irrelevant for their daily-life considerations. Workers work primarily
in order to pay the bills, buy food and clothes, and put their children
through school. The cost of all the commodities necessary for such a
reproduction of the worker represents the value of the worker’s labour
power—and the wage covers that, not the worker’s value contribution
to the production process. The value of the labour power and therefore
the socially average expected wage is thus reliant on (the activity of the
individual worker’s) consumption, not on (his or her individual role in)
production. And the success (measured in profits) of capitalist enterprises
relies precisely on their ability to keep the difference between the value
of their workers’ labour power and the value of their final products posi-
tive. The basic social condition for this is that a certain group of people,
namely managers, is able to freely seek ways to implement such a differ-
ence (and to maximise profits), and that, on the other hand, those who
work have no say in the organisation of the production. In other words,
for capitalism to be possible, there has to be a class relation (see Lebowitz
2009, p. 13).
Therefore, capitalism can only work if workers are precisely not capital-
ists and if their wages, although certainly representing a certain gain (an
employed worker certainly has more money than an unemployed one),
exhaust themselves in simple consumption and therefore do not have the
characteristics of capital (which tends to expand itself through productive
consumption). Thus, if we want to have capital and profits, workers must
precisely remain workers; they should not become capitalists. Also, a wage
remains a wage even if it is above average. Human-capital theory can thus
be disproven on account of its weak definitions of capital and profit, and
its disregard of collective, systemic features of the capitalist economy. But
even if human-capital theory is false by strict theoretical standards, it still
50 P. KRAŠOVEC
has important political and ideological effects and still remains both an
expression and ideological legitimisation of important reforms of higher
education in Slovenia (and worldwide). It is to the politics and the ideol-
ogy of human capital that I will turn now.
4
To quote a proposal for a new law, regulating higher education in Slovenia: ‘There is a
need to ensure lasting cooperation with potential users of the [university’s] knowledge, espe-
cially with the economy’ (Ministry of Education, Science and Sport 2015, p. 20).
HUMAN AND INHUMAN CAPITAL, AND SCHOOLING: THE CASE OF SLOVENIA 53
general public infrastructure (see Hirsch 1978, p. 80). For these institu-
tions, such a process brings about the beginning of an end of their tradi-
tionally conceived autonomy, which was partly based of premodern status
distinctions and hierarchies but partly also on the independent develop-
ment of modern science beyond immediate economic concerns. In this
context, human-capital theory appears in its ‘macro’ version: as a critique
of ‘pure science’, which does nothing to enrich the nation’s human capital,
and as an argument for applied science and the development of human
capital at the level of the national workforce as a whole.5
While the reforms and reform proposals described above deal mainly
with research, a second characteristic strand of neoliberal reforms involves
the reforms of the pedagogical component of academic work. By analogy
with lean production or the lean state, the form of these reforms could
be called the lean university. Concretely, this means calls to increase the
effectiveness of university education and to shorten the amount of time
students spend at the university—both being essentially cost-cutting mea-
sures. Parallel to cost-cutting, this also involves attempts to increase the
control over and the discipline of both teachers and students (see Roberts
2012). The most visible effect of the increasing pressure on the university
to perform more effectively is the uncontrolled growth of administrative
rules and regulations, mostly involving constant evaluations and self-
evaluations, and quantitative measurements of productivity of students
(ECTS points) and teachers (academic point-scoring).
The content of the neoliberal reforms of the public university’s peda-
gogical component is condensed in the notion of employability. This is
where the individualist part of theories of human capital comes into effect,
together with a characteristically neoliberal consumer perspective—univer-
sity education has to align itself with the needs and demands of the labour
market and make sure that future workers (human capitalists) are as pro-
ductive and efficient as possible.6 However, since those who will ‘invest’ in
correct knowledge and skills, thus accumulating their human capital during
5
‘Without excellence in science there can be no successful applicative [scholarly] work and
no transfer [of knowledge] into the economy. The production of purely academic knowl-
edge, without either potential or actual economic implementation, is not enough’ (Ministry
of Higher Education, Science and Technology 2011, p. 16).
6
A proposal for a new higher education law in Slovenia calls for a two-pronged alignment
of university education with the labour market: people from the economy should take part
both in the planning of university courses and in teaching these courses (see Ministry for
Education, Science and Sport 2015).
54 P. KRAŠOVEC
their time at the university, will later be rewarded with higher earnings, there
is no reason for the costs of investment in individual human capital to be
socialised: it would only be fair, according to human-capital theory, for these
costs to be paid by the very individual who will benefit. So, from the point
of view of human-capital theory, education is no longer seen as a universal
social right, but as a combination of consumer choice and individual invest-
ment in human capital. Something like human-capital theory is then indis-
pensable for any ideological campaign for the introduction of tuition fees.
It needs to be noted that, in this regard, human-capital theory is much
stricter when it deals with students than when it deals with private compa-
nies. As students might earn above-average wages due to their education,
it is supposedly right that they cover the costs of their studies themselves;
this would also help universities lower the cost of their pedagogical com-
ponent, which means that funds would be freed to increase the financ-
ing of their economically useful activities, that is, applied research. On
the other hand, the fact that successful high-tech companies already gain
surplus-profits due to their technological competitive edge does not pre-
vent this same ideology from demanding further socialisation of the costs
of economically useful research.
A joint effect of neoliberal reforms of the university is the devaluation
of highly qualified workforce. On paper, increased control over and disci-
pline of students and teachers lowers the costs of university education and
increases its effectiveness; in reality, however, this lowers the professional
autonomy of teachers and the quality of the learning process (which takes,
among other things, time). In a stark contradistinction with the promises
of increased general social welfare in the knowledge-based society, meth-
ods of its implementation hurt first and foremost those who are supposed
to be its cutting edge, namely intellectual workers. As Ranka Ivelja (2010)
shows for the Slovenian case, the working conditions of intellectual work-
ers are rapidly deteriorating and becoming more and more precarious,
incomes of intellectual workers are decreasing rather than increasing, and
unemployment among teachers and researchers is rising due to the ‘lean-
ing’ of universities and research institutes.
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Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1975). The problem with human capital theory. The
American Economic Review, 65(2), 74–82.
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Bryan, D., Martin, R., & Rafferty, M. (2009). Financialization and Marx: Giving
labor and capital a financial makeover. Review of Radical Political Economics,
41(4), 458–472.
Drucker, P. (2009). Landmarks of tomorrow. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
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Palgrave Macmillan.
Frideman, M. (1982). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heinrich, M. (2012). An introduction to the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital
(A. Locascio, Trans.). New York: Monthly Review Press.
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S. Picciotto (Eds.), State and capital. London: Edward Arnold.
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Date accessed July 6, 2015.
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pedagoškega diskurza. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
Krašovec, P. (2013b). Družbena reprodukcija in človeški kapital. Borec, 694–7,
178–196.
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42(256), 65–83.
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Ministry of Education, Science and Sport. (2015). Zakon o visokem šolstvu. Predlog
koncepta. Ljubljana: MESS.
Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology. (2011). Drzna Slovenija.
Na poti v družbo znanja. Ljubljana: MHEST.
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July 6, 2015.
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inštitut. www.pei.si/Sifranti/StaticPage.aspx?id=117. Date accessed July 6, 2015.
CHAPTER 4
P. K. Vijayan
INTRODUCTION
The publication of the Report on a Policy Framework for Reforms in
Education in 2000 saw the initiation of a major shift in policy formula-
tion for higher education in India, a shift that has sustained, albeit with
varying pace, independent of the ideology or political programme of
the government in power. The report, also known as the Birla–Ambani
report, was co-authored by Mukesh Ambani and Kumaramangalam
Birla, each the respective head of two of the most powerful business
houses in India, with rapidly growing global presence and influence.1
Significantly, it was commissioned not by the Department of Education
of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, or the University
Grants Commission—which would have been the expected bodies to
undertake such an enquiry—but by the Prime Minister’s Council on
Trade and Industry. This is a telling indicator of the direction the state
1
For example, the Ambanis own most of the major production houses in Hollywood today.
P. K. Vijayan
University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
2
The chapter is much the better for some crucial feedback from Suman Gupta; its inevi-
table flaws, though, are mine alone.
60 P. K. VIJAYAN
3
The lone exception is perhaps the 2009 Report of ‘The Committee to Advise on Renovation
and Rejuvenation of Higher Education’, also known as the Yash Pal Committee Report. The
report’s first chapter, titled ‘The Idea of a University’, emphasises the importance of research,
knowledge production as much as dissemination, and the need for universities to be autono-
mous, to pursue the production and dissemination of knowledge freely (The Committee to
Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education 2009, p. 9). It also refers to
the need for universities to cater to the demands of the job market (pp. 9–10) and for inter-
disciplinarity (p. 10). But all of these are couched in such clouds of platitudes as to render
them inane, if not meaningless, as conceptions of higher education.
PRIVATISING MINDS: NEW EDUCATIONAL POLICIES IN INDIA 61
Higher education is, undoubtedly, an obligation of the State but State aid is
not to be confused with State control over academic policies and practices.
Intellectual progress demands the maintenance of the spirit of free inquiry.
The pursuit and practice of truth regardless of consequences has been the
ambition of universities. (Ministry of Education 1962, p. 47)
4
This is not to suggest that all institutional attention to and connection with academic
work in other countries (including Europe and the USA) is necessarily coterminous with
privatisation and commercialisation; it is the simpler point that the entry of foreign educa-
tional institutions—even those that are funded by foreign governments—is automatically
treated as private, precisely because they are foreign, and therefore not funded or adminis-
tered by the Indian state or its educational policies. As such, their entry on a large scale can
only happen when the policy environment becomes more favourable to privatisation.
64 P. K. VIJAYAN
5
This is the first report brought out by the Ernst & Young–FICCI combine and did not
have the blessings of the Ministry of Human Resource Development; governmental support
and endorsement came with the reports of the following years.
PRIVATISING MINDS: NEW EDUCATIONAL POLICIES IN INDIA 65
goods and services with surplus graduates and skilled workers […]. The
private sector is thus looked upon to make investments over and above the
estimated 50,000 crores6 per year in order to ensure the desired expansion
of the sector. (Loomba 2014, pp. 233–4)
6
In Indian Rupees; 1 crore = 10,000,000. This estimate is confirmed by the Ernst &
Young-FICCI report of 2011, which states that by 2020, ‘[a]ssuming that the private sector
would continue to account for 52 % of total enrollment (as in 2006), investment required by
private players works out to INR 0.52 million crore i.e. an average of INR 50,000 crore per
year’ (Ernst and Young-FICCI 2011, p. 22).
7
For example, Sunil Devmurari, country manager for India at Euromonitor, is reported to
have said the following: ‘Two hundred and fifty million people are set to join India’s work-
force by 2030. As a big chunk of the population shifts into the working age group, the off-
shoot of that is an increase in disposable incomes and conspicuous consumption. This is the
most exciting aspect of India’s demographic dividend’ (Devmurari, quoted in Harjani 2012).
66 P. K. VIJAYAN
and the professed interest in the ‘growth of per capita income’, but of a
readily available workforce at the service of commerce and industry, on
a scale that ensures the uninterrupted supply of labour. Such a situation
inevitably favours employers over employees, serving to make and main-
tain the workforce as docile, internally divided by competitiveness over
employment, and willing to be subjected to whatever passes for ‘educa-
tion’ and ‘skill-training’ in the name of enhancing employability. As such,
it is not national interest but that of the corporates that is aimed to be
served here.
The second point of significance in these articulations is that there are
three kinds of corporate interests evident at work here. First, the invest-
ments that the private sector is expected to make, as well as the ‘instru-
mental role’ it is expected to play, both confirm my argument that higher
education is understood here not as a public good but as a commodity
produced and marketed for profit, as a commercial enterprise. The gov-
ernment’s own Twelfth Five-Year Plan document states that ‘the “not-
for-profit” status in higher education should, perhaps, be re-examined for
pragmatic considerations so as to allow the entry of for-profit institutions
in select areas where acute shortages persist’ (Planning Commission of
India 2013, p. 100)—a perception shared by the private sector, which has
increasingly been exploring and availing of the ‘opportunities for private
participation’ in higher education, to quote the subtitle of ‘India—Higher
Education Sector’: the report of PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Limited.
For example, the Ernst & Young-FICCI report of 2012 notes that the
‘unaided private sector accounted for around 60 % of total enrollment
in 2012’ and that ‘[e]nrollment in private institutions has increased at
a CAGR of 11 % over the last five years, as compared to 7 % in gov-
ernment institutions’ (Ernst and Young-FICCI 2012, p. 14). Assuming
that the estimate given in the Ernst & Young-FICCI report of 2011 is
accurate—that private investment to the tune of INR 50,000 crores per
year is required—the argument (significantly, not explicitly stated in any
of the reports) is implicitly that there is a quantum of profit to be made
that justifies investments of this magnitude. The PricewaterhouseCoopers
Private Limited report (and several others like it from the private sector)
indicates where these profits are to be made from:
Read along with the excitement over the ‘demographic dividend’, the real
interest in higher education in the private sector is clearly not to meet the
goals of ‘Access’, ‘Equity’, and perhaps not even ‘Relevance’, but to capi-
talise on the paying power of the upper strata of this ‘demographic divi-
dend’, which can afford to pay out ‘USD 13 billion each year in acquiring
higher education overseas’. One estimate of the kind of returns expected
by the private sector from investment in higher education in India is stated
as follows: ‘the overall market for higher education is projected to be worth
USD 115 billion in the next ten years’8—or, in Indian terms, at current
conversion rates, approximately INR 708,906 crores, or approximately
70,000 crores per year—which is, roughly, an annual profit of about INR
20,000 crores. Even if this estimate is scaled down to one-hundredth of
this figure, the anticipated stakes for the private sector in higher education
are enormous.
A crucial point that is carefully papered over here is the fact that although
there may well be a large youth population emerging over the next decade
or so, nationwide, the overwhelming majority of it will in fact continue
to be from outside the paying middle classes—they will not have access
to this bounty that the private sector proposes to offer in higher educa-
tion. The total population of India is likely to be 1400 million by 2026,
as per the Census of India projection of 2006. The projected population
for 2026 of the age group 15–24—which is approximately the cohort for
higher education—is about 224 million, or 16 % of the population (see
Technical Group on Population Projections 2006, p. 264). Even if the
government’s target of 30 % GER (i.e., 30 % of this cohort, or 67 mil-
lion) is met, it still means that higher education remains confined to just
below 5 % of the total populace. Further, the optimistic (from a business
point of view) projected size of the middle class—which will be the class
that will be purchasing higher education—for 2030 is 475 million (see
8
See ‘Education Sector in India’ (India Brand Equity Foundation, 2012, p. 16).
Significantly, this was the only document I could find that explicitly stated an estimate of the
expected returns on investment in higher education—suggesting an unwillingness that is
perhaps a tacit awareness of the possible political fallout of reconceptualising higher educa-
tion as a marketable product rather than as a public good.
68 P. K. VIJAYAN
Rediff 2013). That is, since private investment in higher education will
cater almost solely to this purchasing class, we may safely argue that the
5 % that will gain higher education by 2026 will in fact be almost entirely
from this middle class. In other words, the ‘demographic dividend’ arising
out of India having a young population will not go to the nation at large,
but will go to benefit just 5 % of the population, in terms of acquiring
higher education, and probably the entirety of the private sector inves-
tors in higher education—on an enormous scale—in terms of financial
returns. Additionally, there is a strong argument that private investors will
also have to be ‘incentivized’ through grants from the state, especially for
research at the higher education levels (see Deloitte and the Confederation
of Indian Industries 2014, pp. 37–8). The real interest in investment in
higher education, then, is to market it as a consumable commodity, and
garner the disposable income of the putative ‘growing middle class’ in
doing so, under the guise of supplementing the government’s initiatives
and investments and thereby ostensibly serving the nation’s interests.
Second, a persistent theme in all these documents, whether govern-
mental or non-governmental, is that higher education needs to be tailored
to meet the requirements of industry and commerce because the exist-
ing higher education system is producing ‘unemployable’ graduates (see,
e.g., Planning Commission of India 2013, p.78; PricewaterhouseCoopers
Private Limited, 2012, p.12; Ernst and Young-FICCI 2011, p. 33; Ernst
and Young-FICCI 2012, p. 50). At the same time, almost all the docu-
ments indicate the need to deal with what two of them refer to as an
emerging ‘labor surplus’ (see Ernst and Young-FICCI 2013, p. 17;
Planning Commission of India 2013, pp. 89, 139): this surplus, in 2020,
is variously estimated to be 56 million (see Planning Commission of India
2013, p. 139) and 47 million (see Ernst and Young-FICCI 2013, p. 17).
Considering that this is just short of the government’s targeted GER
for 2020, one may safely argue that, in gross terms, either a quantum of
graduates roughly equal to the targeted GER number will continue to
remain unemployable despite achieving the targeted GER (opening the
higher education sector to private investment and tailoring higher educa-
tion to meet the demands of industry and commerce), and/or this sur-
plus will consist largely of those social sections that will not be able to
acquire higher education as part of the targeted GER (whether because
it will become unaffordable, or because the process of higher education
expansion simply will not reach them, or because they will not be academi-
PRIVATISING MINDS: NEW EDUCATIONAL POLICIES IN INDIA 69
10
A rough estimate can be made from the fact that, as per government data, as of June
2012, there were about 10 million non-resident Indians scattered globally—approximately
0.8 % of the then population (see the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs 2012). There is
scarce data on the quantum of skilled labour migrating out of India, but the Ministry of
Overseas Indian Affairs’ Annual Report, 2010–11 states that ‘there are about five million
overseas Indian workers all over the world’ (Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs 2011,
p. 28)—which is about half of the total. Even assuming a dramatic growth in the population
of skilled labour migrating out by 2030, clearly this will remain a minute percentage of the
projected beneficiaries of privatisation.
11
Because of the controversial nature of the issue, this and five other bills on higher educa-
tion are still pending in Parliament.
72 P. K. VIJAYAN
The point is that the entire gargantuan exercise of overhauling the system
of higher education with a view to catering to the touted requirements of
industry and commerce is being undertaken with no clear evidence that
this will in fact enhance the students’ employability (in terms either of job
availability or of the students’ own capabilities) but on that very pretext.
12
For example, the Ernst & Young-FICCI report of 2013 proposes that the middle tier
will have 80 % faculty with average industry experience of 7–10 years, as well as a ‘higher
proportion of visiting/contractual faculty’ that will mentor the students ‘on their careers in
the industry’ (Ernst and Young-FICCI 2013, p. 24). The bottom tier is almost of incidental
interest but will have ‘partnerships with leading Indian institutions for distance learning
programs and content […] with industry for industry visits, conferences, and guest lectures
[…] [and] with ITIs [Industrial Training Institutes], polytechnics and other vocational train-
ing providers for skills training’ (p. 26).
PRIVATISING MINDS: NEW EDUCATIONAL POLICIES IN INDIA 73
From the above arguments, it seems clear that the entire exercise is aimed
rather at justifying the conversion of higher education from a public good
to a marketable commodity; at opening opportunities for the industry and
commerce to invest in this commodity and make profits on an unimagi-
nable scale; at permitting the influx of foreign universities, and thereby
gaining a veneer of ‘international standards and quality’; and at expand-
ing the employment opportunities, into academic employment, of those
already employed in the industry.
It is worth noting here that some of the results sought to be achieved
by these policies are already taking shape, even before the policies them-
selves have been formally legislated on and implemented. The several vol-
umes of governmental, quasi-governmental, and private-sector reports
have—perhaps through the sheer dint of repetition—come to constitute
an authoritative canon of thinking on higher education, invoking and
alluding to older such reports (if necessary, erroneously, as we saw) so as
to legitimise change as, in fact, continuity. This in turn becomes the basis
for policy formulation and implementation that, however, can run into
legal hurdles, because the existing legislation has not yet caught up to
the new thinking on higher education. The six bills on higher education
pending in the Parliament for the last several years is testimony to both,
the pressure to change and the resistance to it. For example, as part of
the drive towards internationalisation, in 2013, Delhi University, follow-
ing on the recommendations of the National Knowledge Commission,
Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan and the University Grants
Commission’s Higher Education in India, restructured the undergradu-
ate programme from a 3-year, honours-based annual system to a 4-year,
choice-based credit system in semester mode, despite enormous resistance
and controversy. But because higher education law in India specifies that
non-technical undergraduate degrees should be of 3 years, the change
eventually had to be reversed. However, even that reversal took place,
not in a court of law (where in fact the matter was dismissed),13 but as a
result of sustained political pressure on the new government at the cen-
tre, in 2014. An insidious, creeping methodology of these policies, as
they slouch towards New Delhi to be born in the form of the six bills,
is that changes that can be made without legal hurdles are being made
13
I was one of the petitioners challenging this change. Currently, the credit-based choice
system is being brought back, with effect from the next academic year, but without changing
to a 4-year format.
74 P. K. VIJAYAN
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION
So, what then should higher education in India look like? In the face
of the many extensive and intensive reports and documents that have
engaged with that question, it would be nothing short of insouciant to
even attempt an answer to that question in a paragraph or two at the tail
end of a chapter not focusing exclusively on that question. Nevertheless,
it would not be out of place to remind ourselves that higher education, as
it is being conceptualised now, is not just about the imbibing of specialisa-
tions and technical sophistications in various fields—regardless of whether
that imbibing is towards further research, or towards gaining employment
in industry or commerce. As the University Grants Commission report
notes, it has
14
A typical news report on this, among others, was by Heena Kausar (see Kausar 2014).
15
Here is a sample of a widely held prejudice: ‘Fifty years ago, India opted for the socialist
pattern of development and decisively rejected market economics. As a result, advocates of
socialism gained ideological control in academia. The more their ideology proved to be
wanting, the more they resisted change. Thus, resistance to change has become a contagion
at Indian universities’ (Inderesan 2007, pp. 99–100).
PRIVATISING MINDS: NEW EDUCATIONAL POLICIES IN INDIA 75
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challenge. CRISIL, November 2010. www.crisil.com/pdf/corporate/skilling-
india_nov10.pdf. Date accessed July 6, 2015.
Danish. (2013). UGC wants science students ‘Deradicalized’, experts term move
idiotic. Firstpost, March 1, 2013. www.firstpost.com/india/ugc-wants-science-
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Delhi University Teachers’ Association. (2014). Grave illegalities, academic ero-
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Inderesan, P. V. (2007). Prospects for world-class research universities in India. In
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Kapur, D., & Mehta, P. B. (2007). Indian higher education reform: From half-
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Kausar, H. (2014). Nearly 5,000 DU ad hoc teachers live with uncertainty. India
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78 P. K. VIJAYAN
Richard Allen and Suman Gupta
For those concerned with teaching and scholarly work in higher education
now, talk of ‘academic leadership’ is everywhere.1 In the UK, at any rate,
it seems so: scanning academic jobs pages, looking at Research Councils’
funding schemes, examining government policy documents on higher
education, consulting university promotions and appraisals procedures,
mulling academic workload calculations, and listening to deliberations in
university committees—all these suggest that the phrase academic lead-
ership has, so to speak, gone viral in a contained way. There are more
scholarly sounding publications on the subject than specialists can keep
up with; numerous well-endowed firms offer academic-leadership training
and guidance; think tanks constantly urge the need to nurture more aca-
demic leaders and corporations that can cultivate them; newspapers inform
of the privileges of top-level academic leaders with grudging admiration.
1
Some of the research for this chapter was undertaken in the context of the collaborative proj-
ect ‘Framing Financial Crisis and Protest: North-West and South-East Europe’, which is admin-
istered by the Faculty of Arts at The Open University, and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
R. Allen () • S. Gupta
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
the spin that suits them (it is considered that no one can be an ‘expert’ in
academic leadership without having been a leader).
Nevertheless, a historicist approach to this shift in understanding what
‘academic leadership’ consists in is much to be desired, because it clarifies
a broader shift—an incremental and comprehensive reorientation of the
condition of academic work itself, of the very understanding of what
scholarship and pedagogy consists in and why these should be undertaken
in higher education. The shift in conceiving ‘academic leadership’ is a
locus around which this broader change can be apprehended, and it is of
especial interest because it has rather sneaked up on us. Of course, the shift
does have something to do with the ever-growing grip of managerialism—
aligning state bureaucratic and corporate business functioning—which,
since World War II, has been periodically rediscovered with some surprise
as operating through and as academia to the detriment of academic work.
In the early 1970s, for example, growing managerialism in academia was
regarded with dismay as both an impetus to radicalising 1960s univer-
sity students (see, e.g., Chap. 7 in Otten 1970 and Chap. 3 in Westby
1976) and as emerging dominant after the student movement (even by
those very far from friendly to the ideological thrust of that movement,
such as Robert A. Nisbet [1971]). In the more temperate and globally
coherent higher education environment after four decades, the prevalence
of ‘new managerialism’ is found at large in global academia with similar
misgivings—in the USA (see Martinez-Aléman 2012), in the UK (see
Deem et al. 2007), in Ireland (see Lynch et al. 2012), and so on. A syn-
thesis of such investigations from the 1970s to the 2010s, tracking the pas-
sage of managerialism in higher education, which is the same as tracking
the shifting relationship between academic leadership and the conditions
of academic work, would undoubtedly illuminate the shift mentioned
above. Or, perhaps, a historicist approach could trace a path of changing
regimes of funding higher education and accountability practices therein
(e.g., from Chester E. Finn’s 1978 book to John C. Knapp and David
J. Siegel’s monumental three volumes from 2009), tracking the relation-
ship of leadership and academic work accordingly. Or yet again, possibly a
historicist approach could begin with early anticipations of that shift, and
determine how those anticipations became realities or came to be modi-
fied in reality. What we have in mind here are anticipations such as Edward
H. Litchfield’s (from 1959, when he was chancellor of the University
of Pittsburgh) in envisaging university ‘administration’ (it was not quite
‘management’ then) as drawn from principles ‘in the business corporation,
84 R. ALLEN AND S. GUPTA
OBSERVATIONS FROM THE UK
The history and development of higher education in the UK over the
last hundred years or so can be seen as working within a series of dis-
courses: social equality and political policy and expediency, social and
intellectual status, commercial technology and intellectual enquiry, supply
and demand, and autonomy and government regulation. Taking these
in turn, the most striking aspect of UK higher education since 1800 has
been the growth in size. This is evident in the number of both students
and institutions. Over more or less a half century since 1950, participa-
tion has increased from rather less than 15 to more than 40 %. In terms
of institutions, over the 800 years to 1960 thirty-eight universities were
created, and then between 1960 and 1970 alone another twenty-four. In
2015, the boundaries to higher education are less clearly defined, but a
reliable count shows that there are 166 institutions called universities or
with an equivalent special title (judging from the membership of the two
bodies that formally represent higher education in the UK, Universities
UK and GuildHE). This suggests a major achievement in the struggle for
equality, and that achievement should indeed not be denied. However, the
achievement needs to be qualified in a number of ways. First, the higher
participation figure conceals continuing differences depending on social
class, age, and status of the university. Thus, the Office For Fair Access
found that ‘one in 50 of the most disadvantaged young people would
enter a higher tariff institution compared to just less than one in five of
the most advantaged young people’ (Office for Fair Access 2014; see also
Lupton and Stephanie Thomson 2015). Second, as this finding reveals,
the expansion of institutions has not meant an increase in what was the
typical university of the 1950s. Rather, many students study subjects that
would not have been taught then, and many more live at home rather than
leaving to attend a residential university.
92 R. ALLEN AND S. GUPTA
Over the period following the 2007–8 financial crisis, moreover, the
pressure on young people to be in education or employment has strongly
increased. Government policy and political expediency encourage keeping
people in education. A new category has been invented: NEET, ‘not in
education, employment or training’. The UK welfare system treats NEETs
harshly. Proposals discussed in 2015, for example, include:
18 to 21-year-olds who have been ‘Neet’ […] for half a year before claiming
welfare will have to start doing community work before getting benefits.
The scheme will involve around 30 hours a week of community work
from day one of their claim, which can involve making meals for older
people or working for local charities alongside 10 hours of job hunting.
(Channel 4 2015)
that the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson had advocated in 1963.
Again, however, formal gradations between institutions in the higher
education sector were removed, and the Further and Higher Education
Act of 1992 allowed all higher education institutions to come together
under one umbrella, almost all now with the title of ‘university’. Other
higher education institutions have either independently or through merg-
ers applied successfully to be recognised as universities since. Embedded in
these developments are changes in the nature of professions. The expan-
sion of the university sector has been driven by, for example, the decisions
taken at different times that schoolteacher training and nursing should
become graduate professions.
A desire for status presses institutions to seek to be part of the unitary
‘university’ sector, but it is evident that there are divisions within the system
predicated often on research or teaching reputation and resources. Thus,
alongside membership of the formal representative bodies, vice chancellors
and their universities may belong to the Russell Group, the Million+ Group,
the University Alliance, and the GuildHE. Somewhat more directly, the
Office for Fair Access uses three categories based on entry grades required:
High Entry Tariff, Medium Entry Tariff, and Low Entry Tariff. Membership
of one or the other of these bodies and the categories of the Office for Fair
Access are as self-defining as the social classes of British society.
As new institutions have joined the university sector, existing universi-
ties have grown in size. Whereas around 1970, a university of perhaps
3000 students would have been considered average and viable, now uni-
versities of more than 20,000 students are quite common. The result is
a very substantial increase in the supply of graduates. Arguably, as the
manufacturing sector in the UK has shrunk and the white-collar sector
expanded, there is greater demand for graduates; but it is evident, espe-
cially with the 2007–2008 recession, that supply outstrips demand from
the sectors typically employing graduates. Jobs are defined as ‘graduate’
now not so much by the skills they require as by the more simple fact that
graduates apply for them. Non-graduates are in turn squeezed from sec-
tors of the employment market, prompting an increase in application to
university and a further step change in employment patterns. Typically,
graduates from higher-status universities do best, continuing to dominate
in well-paid governments and private industry, though choice of subject
also has a bearing on prospects. Various UK governments have accepted
the logic of casting higher education into this discourse of supply and
demand not only through an emphasis on vocational aspects of education
94 R. ALLEN AND S. GUPTA
to the extent that titles (secretary, deputy secretary, etc.) were widely used.
By the end of the period, this was more or less entirely swept away, and
governance and management were defined almost entirely in terms of
business. Thus, the senior chamber was now defined in terms of the board
of a company, with a chairman who exercised considerable influence and
a group of non-executive directors; the vice chancellor was seen more in
terms of a CEO; and the academic board (lower house) consigned to a
specialist or advisory function that at best may resemble a German-style
Works Council or Economic Committee. A plausible quasi-neutral nar-
rative can be built around this change, hinging on the expansion of uni-
versities. When a university typically had a stable population of between
2000 and 6000 students with more or less stable income, it might be said,
the scale of operations required only limited professional support. It is
almost normal for a university today to have more than 20,000 students
with income and expenditure flows to match and to feel that it is operat-
ing in a world where market forces may cause an ebb and flow in student
numbers from year to year. Another narrative might be built on the coin-
cidence of this change in university governance and management, on the
one hand, and the rise of professionalised management generally, on the
other. University structures changed, that is, over a period when business
schools teaching the MBA programme became more regularly a feature
of universities. One account finds that ‘there were no business schools in
British universities before 1965, but by the beginning of the twenty-first
century there were approximately 120’ (Ivory et al. 2006, p. 6).
Here, however, we are less interested in explaining why there was
this shift in governance and management than in discussing the implica-
tions of the increased focus on ‘academic leadership’. It is commonplace
in considering leadership to think in terms of two sets of characteristics,
which can be crystallised in the supposed contrast of the US World War
II Generals Patton and Bradley, especially as depicted in the film Patton
(1970, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, screenplay written by Francis
Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North). A website devoted to Patton
quotes General Eisenhower as saying ‘George, you are a great leader, but
a poor planner’, by inference unlike Bradley (see Province 2015). Staff
in universities and colleges may identify their vice chancellor with the
freewheeling and impulsive mode of leadership of Patton, but the ideol-
ogy created by professionals in the sector is much more in the Bradley.
Two examples illustrate this. In 2000, The Ernst and Young Foundation
published Academic Leadership: Turning Vision into Reality by Michael
96 R. ALLEN AND S. GUPTA
You have identified yourself as a leader with a role in shaping change within
your organisation, whether this is small change or big change. Transition to
Leadership will enhance your leadership skills and enable you to become an
authentic leader. […]
Transition to Leadership will explore your personal leadership, your team
leadership and your change leadership style. By understanding your own
resilience and how you can influence and inspire others you will learn new
approaches to manage difficult situations and enable institutional change to
happen. (Leadership Foundation for Higher Education 2015)
‘ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP’ AND THE CONDITIONS OF ACADEMIC WORK 97
In understanding the ethos here, one might focus on the use of ‘authen-
tic’, ‘personal’, ‘team’, and ‘change’. These elements are echoed in the
more detailed listing of the outcomes of the course:
Transition to Leadership will allow you to develop:
and colleges then ‘sell’ courses, pitching those perceived as ‘high value’
at high fees and those aimed at ‘widening participation’ at lower fees.
Academics more or less inevitably become caught up in these processes,
pitching their courses within the market and aiming for an appropriate
price that will fit the university’s ‘strategic plan’ and the perceptions of
prospective students.
Corporate identity can then easily become compelled identity. This can
be experienced in a relatively benign way, especially at the highest levels.
Being a university or college governor in the UK is an unpaid role, perceived
as perhaps a social duty. Yet a scan of governing boards shows that gover-
nors typically have held senior posts in industry, commerce and governmen-
tal organisations and NGOs, and are now often paid members of boards of
companies or unpaid trustees of boards of charities, and so on. For all their
variety, governors bring shared understandings and shared ways of approach-
ing issues to the questions they encounter in universities or colleges. Vice
chancellors must at least to a significant degree sign up to these ways of
thinking. They may also be said to be bound by the institutions’ ‘strategic
plan’, though they are likely to have more agency here than most. Agency
comes more now, however, from the need to react, particularly to changing
income streams or other sudden occurrences. In their discussion of leader-
ship and strategic planning, Moore and Diamond refer to ‘empowerment’:
One might think that the most senior leadership in a university or college
would be so identified with the defining of ‘shared purpose’ as to escape
the charge of dysfunctionality. Yet, behind all the structures referred to so
far in the UK system, there are the Higher Education Funding Council’s
regulatory systems, which monitor and judge the annual financial perfor-
mance of individual universities. ‘Dysfunctional empowerment’ has indeed
been at the root of more than one vice chancellor leaving his post in recent
years (see, e.g., Newman 2009). Universities and colleges are likely to
‘ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP’ AND THE CONDITIONS OF ACADEMIC WORK 99
Research assistant roles are not famed for job security and it is a competitive
environment. Short-term contracts are usually offered, which can be any-
thing from three months to three years in length. It is not uncommon for a
research assistant or fellow to spend years working on temporary contracts
before being offered a permanent role. (Graduate Prospects 2014)
‘ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP’ AND THE CONDITIONS OF ACADEMIC WORK 101
The website also cites five key skills that the University of Manchester, the
largest UK university, believes academics need to possess in addition to
their subject expertise, namely:
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Bell, D. (1966). The reforming of general education. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post-industrial society. New York: Basic Books.
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new managerialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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accessed July 6, 2015.
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Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
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2015.
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Commercialization, carelessness and gender. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Martinez-Aléman, A. M. (2012). Accountability, pragmatic aims, and the
American university. New York: Routledge.
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States in the 1960s. Cranbury: Associated University Presses.
CHAPTER 6
Kim Emery
You’re not going to cut the budget without somebody losing their job.
1
For insights important to the development of this essay, I am indebted to the staff, stu-
dents, and faculty who united in the spring of 2012 to ‘Stop the Layoffs!’ proposed for the
University of Florida’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, especially John Biro, Erin Cass,
Candi Churchill, Susan Hegeman, Aida Hozic, John P. Leavey, Patrick McHenry, Diana
Moreno, Paul Ortiz, Joe Richards, Leah Rosenberg, Rob Short, and Jose ‘Beto’ Soto.
K. Emery
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
university administrators across the USA are rushing to implement this lat-
est idea in a spate of largely bad ideas adapted for use in higher education
from the dubious example of private, for-profit corporations. Versions of
the efficiency-oriented organisational structure have recently been intro-
duced at the University of California–Berkeley, Yale University, University
of Kansas, University of Texas, University of Michigan, and, in 2012, my
own workplace—the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) at the
University of Florida (UF).
Advocates promise improved performance, better working conditions,
and enhanced attention to higher education’s true mission, core activities,
and defining objectives (see Azziz 2014; Proenza and Church, 2011). On
many campuses, however, the move has been met with significant scep-
ticism—and at others, with organised resistance. Here at UF, it was the
announcement that thirty-five staffers would be issued lay-off notices that
galvanised the opposition to shared services. The immediate objective of
saving people’s jobs informed our efforts and—at least arguably—precluded
full consideration of the broader implications of the proposed structural
change. Three years out, this essay affords me the opportunity to revisit
the issue with the luxury of time for reflection. In it, I examine our local
experience both in relation to the theory of shared services and the broader
management perspective of which it is a part, and also in connection to the
specific historical and material contexts in which the model was introduced
on this campus. The example offers evidence that, both conceptually and
materially, the shared-services model is inexorably entangled with the threat,
idea, and actuality of unemployment. By parsing out some particulars of
the model’s emergence in this time and place, however, it also documents
the tactical flexibility of shared services and its several elements, suggesting
a potential for shifting strategic significance and indicating the necessity of
mobile and attentive engagement with its various manifestations.
The basic idea of shared services seems quite straightforward: remove rou-
tine administrative tasks (accounting, human resources management, pay-
roll, purchasing, etc.) from the diverse departments, institutes, and offices in
which they traditionally reside, and consolidate them in a single centralised
operation. Admittedly, to many faculty the whole topic ‘sounds zzzzzzzzz’,
NOT WORKING: SHARED SERVICES AND THE PRODUCTION OF UNEMPLOYMENT 105
2
The vaunted value of efficiency, interestingly, increasingly shapes the work environment
of both faculty and support staff, as budget models and management strategies increasingly
incentivise faculty productivity as a ratio of output to invested resources.
NOT WORKING: SHARED SERVICES AND THE PRODUCTION OF UNEMPLOYMENT 107
regained their collective bargaining rights, but most of the office staff were
shut out.
In 2006, 3 years after the reorganisation had been accomplished, UF’s
CLAS experienced severe retrenchment; programs were cut and consoli-
dated, operating budgets were slashed, and faculty (term-appointed, tenure
track, and ultimately tenured) were served notice of lay-off. However, the
faculty union (UFF) had survived Bush’s union busting and summarily
filed grievances on behalf of fired faculty members who requested rep-
resentation. The union prevailed, and the laid-off faculty who brought
grievances kept their jobs. In July 2008, then-UF President J. Bernard
Machen convened a committee to explore the adoption of a revenue
(later responsibility)-based budgeting system: RCM. Implemented in the
autumn of 2011, the model formalises the principles underlying shared
services, distinguishing dedicated ‘support units’ from ‘responsibility cen-
ters’, and requiring that the latter both pay their own way and fund ‘non-
value-added units’ with a portion of the proceeds. RCM explicitly claims
the objective of encouraging an ‘entrepreneurial’ mindset among academic
units, pitting them in direct competition over resources and subordinating
academic decisions to financial considerations at every level (see Emery
2010). CLAS shared services is a natural outgrowth of this setup, fur-
ther rationalised by the College’s dire financial straits. As then-Dean Paul
D’Anieri made clear, ‘You’re not going to cut the budget without some-
body losing their job’ (quoted in Crabbe 2012a): at UF, shared services
were introduced as a cost-saving measure predicated on the assumption
that members of the office staff—having lost the protections of unionisa-
tion—would also lose their jobs.3
3
Interestingly, even the vaunted savings relentlessly associated with shared services appear
exaggerated, as early adopters routinely report savings realised even without taking into
account new expenses incurred in making the move. Interviewed by the Gainesville Sun in
2012, UF Chief Financial Officer Matt Fajack reportedly ‘pointed to tens of millions of dol-
lars in saving at other universities, such as Michigan, that have established such centers’ and
suggested that Florida might see similar savings (Crabbe 2012a). However, Inside Higher
Ed, among other sources, reports the ‘backlash’ that ensued when Michigan tried to imple-
ment shared services—in 2013 (see Rivard 2013). Reporter Nathan Crabbe recalls, in a
personal email from 26 March 2015, that Fajack ‘had an article […] that he cited’, but
acknowledges that ‘perhaps it was about the projected savings rather than actual savings’ at
Michigan. By 2013, even estimates of those projected savings had been adjusted downwards,
with Inside Higher Ed reporting that ‘the plan is no longer expected to save nearly as much
as once hoped’ and that even those revised projections do not factor in millions of dollars in
new costs (see Rivard 2013).
NOT WORKING: SHARED SERVICES AND THE PRODUCTION OF UNEMPLOYMENT 109
The initial plan called for thirty-five lay-offs. Under the cruelly con-
strained but ostensibly ‘decentralised’ mandates of RCM, the news arrived
in the English Department accompanied by an order to fire three (of six)4
front-office staffers. As was the case across the College, the targeted staff
members were overwhelmingly women, a multiracial group and mostly
middle-aged and older, most making less than $35,000 a year. Many had
decades of service, and some were only a year or two from retirement.
Although the department proposed several plans to make up the money
elsewhere, the new ‘flexible’ system was not that flexible: the English
Department had the authority to determine which staffers to let go, but
not to decide whether to lay off employees. This sort of sharply constricted
‘autonomy’ is a familiar feature of the ostensibly ‘decentralised’ decision-
making characteristic of the RCM-organised corporate university, often
branded as ‘empowerment’ for the local units and lower-level administra-
tors left scrambling to cover costs under systems that grant them little real
control. A web of incentives, restrictions, and potentially punitive alloca-
tion schemas force departments into ‘alignment’ with institutional objec-
tives over which they have no say. Because the system itself creates the
context in which cost-cutting, shared services, and lay-offs appear desir-
able or even necessary, solutions refusing one or more of these elements
are unlikely to be found within the system. Hence, while Department
Chair Kenneth Kidd stalled and kept trying to bargain,5 faculty and oth-
ers organised outside official administrative channels. UFF immediately
emailed the bargaining unit, upper administration, and the press, ‘cat-
egorically and emphatically’ opposing the lay-offs. ‘We find this attempt to
exact some small savings by targeting some of UF’s longest-serving, most
vulnerable, and least well-compensated employees to be both unethical
4
Exactly which jobs and how many were in peril emerged as a point of discussion as the
Department dragged out deliberations. At one stage, staff positions not in the front office
but associated with journals housed in the Department were added to the list of potential
lay-offs, but these positions were ultimately maintained, as well.
5
As I have learned through union negotiations, stalling and bargaining are complementary
tactics: stalling is a technique of bargaining, and bargaining can be used as a means of stalling.
Although Kidd modestly avers that he is still not entirely sure how it happened that the
English Department escaped this crisis largely unscathed, he deftly dragged the process out
as the context changed, avoiding action until conditions had improved. Despite the initial
mandate that savings had to be realised through lay-offs, he eventually convinced the Dean
to accept the Department’s sacrifice of a graduate research assistantship in exchange for the
preservation of one of the staff lines. He then managed to direct support from a different
funding stream to continue offering the assistantship, as well.
110 K. EMERY
and unwise’, the email read. ‘Such action would have a deleterious effect
on the local economy and a disastrous effect on many individual lives’.
Sounding a note that would inform the continuing campaign, the letter
concluded with a call to solidarity: ‘These staff members are our friends,
relatives, neighbours, and co-workers. We support them absolutely and
encourage you to do the same.’6
From this rushed call to arms, there emerged a larger coalition of fac-
ulty, staff, students, and local residents, first under the banner of ‘Stop the
Lay-Offs’ and later rebranded as ‘Save UF! Spend the Reserves’, which
linked opposition to the lay-offs in CLAS with resistance to other damag-
ing cuts and restructuring proposed outside the College and refused the
arbitrary assignment of debt to CLAS by the university’s recently adopted
budget model.7 Tellingly, the upper administration answered UFF’s oppo-
sition with the threat that if staff were not laid off, faculty would be. This
response solidified the place of solidarity as the opposition’s central theme.
A petition on Change.org quickly garnered almost 500 signatures, calling
on ‘supporters, fans, friends, faculty, students, alumni, and concerned fel-
low citizens […] [to] recognize that the heart and soul of this University’
is ‘the people’—and appealing to the central administration as follows:
‘Please, as we work through this difficult economic time, try to pull us
together instead of tearing us apart. Preserve the integrity and character
of the University of Florida by taking actions that are responsible, not
destructive and divisive’ (Save UF Coalition 2012).
Flatly rejecting the administration’s each-against-all perspective, the
coalition categorically refused division among staff, faculty (term contract
and tenure stream) and graduate employees. ‘No layoffs, no non-renewals,
no GA cuts’, the petition demanded. ‘Keep all the people that make UF
great.’ To underscore our point that the university is its people, as opposed
to its Board or brand, the campaign claimed the university brand, calling
more than once on ‘the Gator Nation’ and signing off ‘Go, Gators!’ In
keeping with these initial interventions, the coalition hewed close to the
theme of solidarity throughout ensuing rallies, protests, on-campus peti-
tions, letter-writing campaigns, media interviews, and a ‘General Assembly
6
I drafted this email on behalf of UFF at the UF, and co-signed it with Paul Ortiz.
7
For documentation and discussion of these activities and more, please see the ‘Save UF!
Spend the Reserves’ Facebook page, administered by Erin Cass, Susan Hegeman, Mathew
Loving, Paul Ortiz, Joe Richard, Leah Rosenberg and myself. Gainesville Sun reporter
Nathan Crabbe confirms that the distribution of cuts was ‘determined through UF’s
responsibility-centered management budgeting system’ (Crabbe 2012c).
NOT WORKING: SHARED SERVICES AND THE PRODUCTION OF UNEMPLOYMENT 111
to Save UF’. In the end, the worst cuts were rescinded, and the Dean was
forced to adopt ‘a less ambitious, more streamlined and more voluntary
plan’ for shared services (quoted in Crabbe 2012b). Ultimately, a shared-
service centre was established in CLAS, but departments were given the
choice to opt out, lateral reassignment replaced lay-off as the first option
for affected staff, and the English Department lost only one staff line
(when the youngest employee and most recent hire left the next year for a
better job, and was not replaced), avoiding lay-offs entirely.
LESSONS AND REFLECTIONS
For a long time, I felt like we had won, more or less. Almost daily, I see
staffers slated for lay-off still safely at work. In our office alone, there
is a woman who is shy of retirement and suffers from chronic illness;
she has health insurance and an income, and will soon collect her well-
earned pension. There is a middle-aged woman with 20 years of experi-
ence, with a new mortgage and a kid approaching college age. There is
a woman caring alone for her dying mother and barely scraping by.8 The
preservation of these jobs and continued presence of these colleagues
in our department are indisputable goods. Nevertheless, another struc-
tural change has been effected at UF: the shared-services centre has
been established. Over the course of a decade, a series of interrelated
administrative manoeuvres—shared services, departmental reorganisa-
tion, the shift to an RCM budgeting system, and a dramatic, statewide
union decertification drive—has produced an increase in unemployment,
either directly through lay-offs or slowly and indirectly through weak-
ened worker rights, imposed austerity and attrition. Clearly, corporate
management is playing the long game, and this makes me question any
easy interpretation of tactics, including facile assumptions about cause
and effect. Even the phrase ‘the production of unemployment’, as pro-
posed by this collective volume, invites two distinct readings, and our
experience in Florida suggests that both are critical: what produces unem-
ployment? And also, what does unemployment produce? The answer from
here, so far, is a loss of departmental autonomy, increased anxiety and
precarity, and decreased academic freedom. These human and institu-
tional costs are clear. The administrative upside, however, includes a
8
In an effort to protect privacy, these actual circumstances are assigned here to composites
instead of the real people experiencing them.
112 K. EMERY
REFERENCES
Azziz, R. (2014, September). Implementing shared services in higher education:
How universities can benefit from a concept frequently and successfully imple-
mented in the corporate world. University Business.www.universitybusiness.
com/article/shared-services. Date accessed May 2, 2015.
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the university works: Higher education and the low-wage
nation. New York: New York University Press.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. New York:
Zone Books.
Crabbe, N. (2012a). ‘Proposed shared service center at UF runs into opposition’.
(2015, March 15). Gainesville Sun. www.gainesville.com/article/20120315/
articles/120319725. Date accessed May 2, 2015.
Crabbe, N. (2012b, May 30). UF liberal arts cuts to include lay-offs, reduced admis-
sions. Gainesville Sun. www.gainesville.com/article/20120430/ARTICLES/
120439957. Date accessed May 2, 2015.
Crabbe, N. (2012c, April 10). ‘Everything on the table’ as UF ponders where to
cut. Gainesville Sun. www.gainesville.com/article/20120410/ARTICLES/
120419966. Date accessed May 2, 2015.
Emery, K. (2010). ‘Crisis management’ in higher education: RCM and the politics
of crisis at the University of Florida, 13. Cultural Logic. clogic.eserver.
org/2010/Emery.pdf. Date accessed May 2, 2015.
Proenza, L. M., & Church, R. A. (2011, July 21). Shared services and partner-
ships: The keys to the future of higher education. EDUCAUSE Review. www.
educause.edu/ero/article/shared-services-and-partnerships-keys-future-
higher-education. Date accessed May 2, 2015.
Rivard, Ry. (2013, November 21). Shared services backlash. Inside Higher Ed.
w w w. i n s i d e h i g h e r e d . c o m / n e w s / 2 0 1 3 / 1 1 / 2 1 / u - m i c h i g a n - t r i e s -
save-money-staff-costs-meets-faculty-opposition. Date accessed May 2, 2015.
SAVE UF Coalition. (2012). Save UF! Spend the reserves. Change.org petition.
www.change.org/p/save-uf-spend-the-reserves. Date accessed May 2, 2015.
Schulman, D. S., Harmer, M. J., Dunleavy, J. R., & Lusk, J. S. (1999). Shared
services: Adding value to business units. New York: Wiley.
PART III
Mike Hajimichael
1
Some of the research for this chapter was undertaken in the context of the collaborative proj-
ect ‘Framing Financial Crisis and Protest: North-West and South-East Europe’, which is admin-
istered by the Faculty of Arts at The Open University, and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
M. Hajimichael
University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus
interviews, which are a collection of insights and stories, will lead to some
inferences and generalisations from my qualitative sample.
I must confess that my own interest in this subject is multifaceted. As a
student myself, who once studied for a BA in Government and Sociology
(University of Essex, 1979–82), I faced upon graduation the prospect of
either seeking employment or continuing with my studies under the first
term of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. For infrequent periods of time
I was unemployed, between studying and taking on a variety of seasonal
and part-time jobs, a member of what the band UB40 called ‘the one in
ten’. When I repatriated to Cyprus around 1994, the political climate I
had left, namely Britain under John Major, was completely different from
the environment in Cyprus under the presidency of George Vassiliou. For
one thing, there was far less unemployment, and the unemployment that
was there was more or less seasonal due to the dependency of the economy
on tourism and the building trades.
25.000
20.000
15.000
10.000
9
02 02
8
8
7
7
0
6
99 99
10 10
3
2
05 05
04 04
11 11
20 200
20 200
19 199
00
19 199
00
19 199
00
20 200
01
20 –20
20 –20
19 19
20 –20
20 –20
0
20 20
–2
–2
–2
–2
–2
–
–
–
–
–
–
00
08
06
07
95
96
97
98
03
09
20
19
20
20
20
Fig. 7.1 Cypriot and international students in Cyprus and Cypriot students
studying abroad (Source: Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture 2012)
more urban one (see Attalides 1981), education, even in rural areas, was
always highly valued. Many people with largely rural backgrounds did not
have access to good education, so they tended to see education as a tool
for social mobility and economic betterment. These ideas spread across
generations as well as in the diaspora. I can recall how my late father,
who left school at the age of fourteen to become a tailor’s assistant in
the village of Marathovouno, shared with all three of his children a very
simple saying, ‘Mathe grammata, na spoudasis, na men minis arkatis san
emena’, which loosely translates as: ‘Study, educate yourself so you won’t
be a worker like me’ (Hajimichael 2014). This is one reason why I value
university education, which I have been privileged to have. This thirst for
higher education has also contributed to the fact that Cyprus has one of
the highest levels of tertiary education graduates in the EU. According
to Eurostat, in 2012, 49.9 % of residents in the Republic of Cyprus
aged 30–34 had completed tertiary education; this was second only to
Ireland and its 51.1 % (see Nuthall 2013). Having outlined the evolu-
tion of higher education in Cyprus, I would now like to turn to the time
when everything started to go dramatically wrong, and examine the way
in which Cypriot society has changed following the tumultuous ‘haircut’
or ‘bail-out-bail-in’ of March 2013.
GRADUATE STORIES
Most of the information in this section was obtained from five interviews
with mostly former BA students whom I had taught in the Department
of Communications at the University of Nicosia. Three of these students
also went on to complete or are in the process of completing a master’s
in digital communications. One of the students did not do a first degree
at the University of Nicosia. For reasons agreed with the students, partial
anonymity was used in that they are referred to through first names only
in the interview process. This made people more comfortable to express
themselves. So, the five people interviewed are Adonis, Andonia, Andreas,
Christiana, and Evie. Also, names of companies and employers have been
anonymised. Knowing the students personally made it easier for me to con-
duct the interviews online. This is perhaps the first time such research is
being conducted with graduates, and although the research does have a
limited sample, I would like to extend it in the future into a wider research
project with a bigger sample. It is important to understand from the outset
that although the students tell different stories, there are a number of com-
monalities in terms of facing unemployment, finding a suitable job for their
degree qualifications, and living with the uncertainty of the future. One of
the students, Evie, has a different experience in that after her first degree she
GRADUATE UNEMPLOYMENT IN POST-HAIRCUT CYPRUS 123
Many of these jobs in web portals have a common characteristic: people are
constantly forced to copy-paste, and that’s something anyone can do even
without having a degree. Essentially, a degree is like a passport to get work.
It’s up to you if you want to stay a simple ‘copy-paster’ earning 500–750.
The other former students indicated the importance of studying ‘no mat-
ter what the job is’, as Adonis said in his interview, and having a degree in
Communications enabled at least two of them to enter into a government-
sponsored scheme for unemployed graduates. This is how the Department
of Labour outlines the scheme:
I was very dissatisfied with all the jobs that I had done because in each case
it felt wrong. For example, in ‘Z’ [a bakery chain] I felt I was exploited for
my swiftness and my relations with the customers, and so they didn’t pro-
mote my application for a managerial position that required my academic
background, and for that I quit. At my next job we were used like telephone
operators and were forced to lie that we were calling from a courier com-
pany in order to obtain personal information of the subject that we had
targeted in order to bombard people with invitations for business summits.
I only lasted 4 months lying on the phone. I couldn’t do it anymore. At ‘N’,
all was good until they showed their true face. For their job to be done, they
wanted unpaid ‘workers’, and they used the intimidation tactic that if you
don’t like it the door is open. So I left and took the door with me. It was
the saddest experience I have had in the field, as I was so eager to work and
we were treated very badly.
Three students had mixed feelings on job satisfaction. Andonia, for exam-
ple, said the following:
I was satisfied because I had the opportunity to learn something new in the
field of public relations, but also dissatisfied because my supervisor treated
me as a trainee and didn’t encourage me to learn new things. Also, the sal-
ary was very low for someone who has some experience – just 500 Euro a
month.
It is important to note that the minimum wage was 870 Euro for a new
employee, and 924 for someone who has worked for the same employer
for more than 6 months (see Department of Labour Relations 2012).
126 M. HAJIMICHAEL
This means that Andonia’s salary was around 40 % less than the minimum
wage. Stressing the issue of plagiarism (copy–pasting) for a second time,
Andreas was more pleased with his last job, since it ‘made me learn more
about video editing’. And Christiana’s job satisfaction was closely linked
to the kind of work she wanted to do in the future; as she said, ‘the sec-
ond job I had, although under the umbrella of media, was not satisfying
because I do not want to pursue a career in sales and advertising’.
So, generally, job satisfaction is a tricky subject to conclude on. One
thing is clear from most of the interviews: the workers were mostly paid
low wages, and in Adonis’s case not paid at all. This made many of them
feel a sense of disappointment in terms of studying for a degree and then
having to do jobs that are paid so badly.
UNEMPLOYMENT
The issue of unemployment affected all five participants in the research
sample. It is a multifaceted issue that relates to how long and how often
people were unemployed, what kind of stigmas they encountered in their
everyday life, and what happened when the unemployment benefit ran
out; in other words, how they survived. It is important to note that two
participants did not qualify for the unemployment benefit, as they had not
been employed before and hence had not paid social insurance contribu-
tions for the minimal period of twenty-six consecutive weeks. However,
it is clear that all five graduates had experiences of being out of work for
different periods of time, from a couple of months (on two or three occa-
sions for one person) to periods longer than a year (three people), while
one person was unemployed for 6 months but did not declare herself as
such because she was not eligible. In at least four cases, unemployment
and employment went hand in hand: a person would, say, work for a cou-
ple of months before being out of work for a few more and then getting
another job. Evidence on unemployment given by the interviewees can
be grouped into two main areas: feelings about being unemployed and
reports on what happened when the unemployment benefit ceased.
Adonis described the situation as one of exclusions:
This position of an outsider was expressed by all the graduates via feel-
ings of disappointment, depression, and worthlessness: ‘I was feeling very
disappointed sometimes. I was outside of the system and I had to look
for other jobs in order to store some money for my future’, Andonia said.
Three of the five participants elaborated on this in the following ways: ‘I
felt very disappointed. I also went through a long period of depression.
Nevertheless, I told myself that if I am unemployed again I would not be
disappointed, I would be more optimistic and more active as a citizen’
(Andreas). ‘Psychologically, being unemployed felt like I was fading as a
person, and my creativity and urge to work and use my skills were unim-
portant’ (Christiana). ‘Being unemployed made me feel useless, like I had
nothing to offer to society, to the world’ (Evie).
The feeling of worthlessness, of becoming wasted, operates as a stigma,
and being unemployed denies people a sense of dignity in a number of
ways. Adonis described this in reverse by turning the tables slightly:
There is a stigma from those who got the jobs – yeah … they say everyone
has to lower their standards and do whatever job – you asshole I’ve been
searching for whatever job for a long time. So yeah, there is this, and also
I get the feeling that when they ask me and I tell them I am unemployed
they have the look of ‘he’s too lazy to do a job’.
My family supported me, but I was not happy with that. Some of my social
circles tried to encourage me and give me some hope. My family was sup-
porting me financially but not psychologically. They were not accepting me
regardless of the kind of job I had, and they thought I wasn’t trying hard
enough to get a job.
Adonis’s family offered their unemployed son ‘chores’ to do for cash. And
in two cases, families offered positive moral support as well (something
128 M. HAJIMICHAEL
that Adonis missed): Andreas said, ‘They were positive and urged me not
to get frustrated and not to stop looking for work, but also to enrich my
knowledge’; and Christiana reported that her parents believed in her—
‘They always said that when the time was right the right job would be out
there for me.’
Survival on the unemployment benefit or family support requires a dif-
ferent mindset, even a different perspective on subsistence. Adonis probably
described this best when he talked about his own personal austerity plan,
indicating how the politics of austerity translates into everyday life:
I made an extremely hard savings plan, harder than that of Greece. I cut car
rides and replaced them with the bicycle (but now the wheel needs fixing,
and it’s 6 Euro that I need to pay). If I go for a coffee, I get the smallest and
cheapest coffee as long as it does the job. I don’t ask for support, but, on
the other hand, I do chores for members of my family like typing things they
need, painting their houses, fixing items; or I go for one-day jobs in order to
get a Merokamato [a day’s pay].
In the times we live in, the words for good mean absolutely nothing. With
the economic crisis, I have seen families relocating to other countries just
to survive. So, since I can’t say for good, I can say that for now, yes, I could
see myself living in Cyprus. If, of course, I find a good job and can support
myself financially. Cyprus is where my family is, my friends, it’s my home;
I would like to start building a life here. The future … is unknown. I am
prepared for anything, because anything can happen. If I have to relocate
again, in order to be happy and support myself financially, I will do it. If I
have to take on different jobs that have no relevance to my degree, I will do
it. I will just try to find the positive side of things.
GRADUATE UNEMPLOYMENT IN POST-HAIRCUT CYPRUS 129
There is not any future in Cyprus in the field of artistic journalism, or in any
other kind of jobs I’d enjoy. I don’t like how the system works. I believe
that there are much more opportunities outside Cyprus. My future will be
outside Cyprus, exploring new horizons, doing a master’s degree, or simply
working abroad; and starting to study music.
It is certainly more difficult ever since the crisis has affected us all as a kind
of economic depression. I will stay here, though, because I have my family
here and I have my own place to stay. As long as I have my job, it’s difficult
to think of emigrating. I don’t know yet if this is my final choice. You never
know what life brings.
Finally, Adonis was uncertain about the future; for him, the way the post-
haircut society was being regulated and controlled, leaving Cyprus could
become inevitable:
What is most disturbing about this last theme is that no person actually
said that they would definitely stay in Cyprus. Even if people tried to stay
upbeat about staying in Cyprus, they at the same time did not rule out
the option of leaving to work abroad. This does provide a kind of answer
to a key question of my chapter: yes, the students are (thinking of) going
abroad to live and work.
130 M. HAJIMICHAEL
CONCLUSION
Uncertain future, the stigmatisation of the unemployed, and the support
of family and friends were themes common to all five interviews. A sample
of five can never be viewed as representative. At the same time, the qualita-
tive data and insights shared by these interviews do offer a glimpse into the
kinds of problems that students face in contemporary post-haircut Cyprus.
The biggest problem may be the way the society has changed in relation
to unemployment. In 2003, when Cyprus joined the EU, the island had
the lowest unemployment rate among the ten new member states, namely
4.1 %, which is in stark contrast to the more recent figure of 16.1 % (see
Eurostat 2015). This means that Cyprus is now faced with high and long-
term levels of unemployment, especially since official statistics are con-
structed in a way that hides the real numbers because they only account
for people on the unemployment benefit, which, however, only lasts for 6
months in Cyprus. Which, of course, also means that people who are out of
work for more than 6 months are left to fend for themselves, as is the case
with those interviewees who increasingly rely on their family as a source of
alternative income and support. A similar phenomenon is also noticeable
in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, all economies that are undergo-
ing different forms of austerity. As shown through some of the accounts
shared in this chapter, people often depend for their survival on supportive
families and social networks as well as on their determination as they try to
remain positive in the most difficult of times. Andreas summed it up best
perhaps when he says the following: ‘The future is difficult but we must
not stop fighting for the development of body, mind and soul, every day.
For me that is my goal, whether I have work or I’m unemployed.’
Finally, what conclusions can we draw as academics, and what role can
we play in this current recession climate? I had a discussion a couple of
years ago with a colleague of mine, Nikolas Defteras, about how we could
try to be more sensitive to what was going on in our post-haircut society,
and how this affected our students, the media, and employment oppor-
tunities. While it was tricky to incorporate all this into teaching practice,
as time went by, I started to observe that things were happening, and
autonomously. I was intrigued, for example, by what certain artists were
saying about the crisis through their music; by the way media and indi-
vidual politicians framed the crisis; or by the manner in which the media
itself have been impacted in terms of revenue, through decreased adver-
tising income, which resulted in reductions in their workforce. There is a
GRADUATE UNEMPLOYMENT IN POST-HAIRCUT CYPRUS 131
need today for a more critical awareness in education, one that addresses
precariousness, exploitation, and social inequality. The ‘common sense’ of
current austerity measures has struck graduates just as much as Thatcherite
laissez-faire monetarist policies in Britain had hit many of us as graduates
back in the 1980s. There is a need for counterhegemonic movements to
challenge this ‘common sense’. Youth unemployment in Cyprus is one of
the highest in Europe. It peaked at around 40 % just after the haircut of
March 2013, and has by now fallen to 31.7 % (see YCharts 2015). This
could be seen as an improvement, but it remains unacceptable that one in
three young people in Cyprus still has ‘no future’, as Johnny Rotten used
to sing on the eve of those Thatcherite 1980s.
REFERENCES
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Nicosia. Nicosia: Social Research Centre.
Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture. (2012). International students. Cyprus
Higher Education. http://www.highereducation.ac.cy/en/international-
students.html. Date accessed July 6, 2015.
Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture. (2015). Private universities. Cyprus
Higher Education. www.highereducation.ac.cy/en/private-universities.html.
Date accessed July 6, 2015.
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Welfare and Social Insurancewww.mlsi.gov.cy/mlsi/dl/dl.nsf/dmlschemes_en/
dmlschemes_en?OpenDocument. Date accessed July 6, 2015.
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valid from 1st of April 2012. Ministry of Labour, Welfare and Social Insurance.
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Eurostat. (2015, June). Table 2 unemployment rate, 2003–2014 (%). European
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Faustmann, H. (2010). Rusfeti and political patronage in the Republic of Cyprus.
The Cyprus Review, 22(2), 269–289.
Fishwick, C. (2013, July 3). Europe’s young jobless: ‘Finding work has become a
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Hajimichael, M. (2014). Conversations with my father Philippos. (unpublished).
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media connection. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
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CHAPTER 8
Ivana Perica
I. Perica
University of Graz, Graz, Austria
fullness only after World War II, as university teachers for the first time
gained the right to full academic employment. However, the trend of
universities being dominated by the logic of management that started in
the 1980s announced the bitter end of academia’s privilege and its right
to freely ponder without outside interference. The glorious and, from a
broader historical perspective, rather short period of academic freedom has
found its end in the Europe-wide (or even worldwide) legislative changes
that exhibit only small divergences from country to country. After the
public sector was exposed to commercialisation, merged into the ‘service
sector’, as a ‘branch of production’, and delivered in the 1990s and 2000s
to the invisible hand of the market, the European universities have also
been declared ‘service providers’. National academic fields have, through
the Lisbon Strategy, been integrated into the European Research Area with
the stated aims of enhancing competitiveness and workforce mobility in
order to foster research quality and innovations. Since much of the critical
work on contemporary academia focuses precisely on the structural, legis-
lative changes, I shall focus on the substantial impact these changes have
had on the intellectual and social identity of the members of the academic
community.
Let me start off by saying that the hierarchies typical of traditional
academia (and typical of more ‘authoritarian’ organisational struc-
tures) have been replaced by somewhat flattened hierarchies between
researchers, teachers and students. Notwithstanding this flattening of
hierarchies, there is something pedagogic about the expectations faced
by all community members, when they are supposed to engage in a
series of courses in skills improvement, management prowess or learn-
ing-to-learn seminars. And there is also something pedagogic about
the expectations to prove researchers’ professional innovativeness and
uniqueness, while conforming to the unifying quality standards and
numerous technocratic criteria the scientific ‘excellence’ is rigorously
judged by. Within the scope of this new pedagogy all agents in the
academic field are expected to be ‘highly qualified, solution oriented,
individualistic and exposed to a permanent competition over promis-
ing ideas and concepts developed by them and their “peers”’ (Pernicka
2010, p. 20). This orientation towards swift problem-solving and the
dependence on peers (i.e., not exclusively on the hierarchically supe-
rior deans and supervisors), who are—often anonymously—entitled to
judge the extent of one’s excellence and thus decide one’s academic
future, may be one of the main differences between what is called
‘DARE TO DARE’: ACADEMIC PEDAGOGY IN TIMES OF FLATTENED HIERARCHIES 135
needed for research and publishing) and the means of reproduction (insti-
tutional continuity, teaching activities, transfer of knowledge). So Weber
speaks of a university that finds itself in a ‘process of dislodging’ (Weber
2001, p. 37). Free, ‘disinterested’ (in the sense of ‘not market-driven’,
‘not short-term-interest-driven’) research is marginalised and pushed out
to the peripheries of academic work. Discussing the economic limitations
that afflict research and teaching and thus ‘take over the overturning role’,
Weber points to ‘liberalism’ as that classic ‘form of exclusion which, wher-
ever possible, denies its own exclusivity’. In the past, liberalism has often
been opposed by Marxism, which was ‘bound to emerge as one of the
most significant alternative models’ (Weber 2001, p. 45). Considering the
contemporary de-liberalisation (i.e., neoliberalisation) of academia, where
not language games but institutional conditions of academic existence are
at stake, what kind of alternative action could precipitate the intended
independence of political authority and economic power?
[T]he realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of development,
reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given
community equally and with equal strength. But society equalizes under
all circumstances, and the victory of equality in the modern world is only
the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the
public realm, and that distinction and difference have become private mat-
ters of the individual. (Arendt 1998, p. 41)
In Arendt’s view, most people do have a ‘need to think’ but this need
can be erased by ‘more urgent needs of living’ (May 1996, p. 85). When
discussing the institutional networks often analysed as frameworks within
which the bureaucratised, anonymous individual is produced, Larry May
similarly points out that ‘institutional socialization in bureaucracies trans-
forms individuals into cogs; that is, individuals come to think of them-
selves as anonymous’ (May 1996, p. 85).
138 I. PERICA
‘DARE TO DARE’
In what follows I shall try to depict the ideological impact of the urge to
adapt to economic standards prescribed from without academia, or from
the position of its ‘enabling limits’ (Weber 2001, p. x). What I am inter-
ested in specifically is the rhetoric coaching academic workers in corporate
stylisation of their own career and of the institution they work in. Special
attention will be given to social sciences and humanities, which currently
experience a twofold development: whereas traditional research is still
dominated by the structure of national departments, the possibilities of
innovative research undertaken in newly established interdisciplinary plat-
forms and research centres are heavily connected to the dictates that come
from without academia, that is, from ‘political authorities’ and ‘economic
powers’ (contrary to standards set by the Magna Charta Universitatum).
To illustrate this intrusion, I would like to give an example of one par-
ticular interdisciplinary platform brought to life thanks to ‘successful’ and
‘competitive’ university management and third-party funds. The platform
is aimed at connecting young and experienced researchers from diverse
disciplines. Interestingly, the focus does not lie on particular disciplines
140 I. PERICA
beyond the university (in the economic sector, or ‘society’). From the very
first entry into the academic field they are trained (even pedagogised) to
become acclimated to the new rules and to the fact that these rules will
always be changing. The only thing the new academic pedagogy is encour-
aging is their enduring adaptability. As both the new institutional initia-
tives (such as research centres, platforms and excellence initiatives) and the
tradition-laden ‘core’ of the university (professors and ‘their’ assistants)
are evaluated according to corporate standards of ‘excellence’, ‘competi-
tiveness’ and ‘productivity’, the secret of success lies in the capability to
present the existing and future work as congruous with these highly com-
petitive quality standards.
My argumentation here adjoins not only Gramsci’s critique of pedagogic
hegemonies but also Althusser’s general assumption that it is not possible
to observe social dynamics ‘except from the point of view of reproduction’
(Althusser 2014, p. 238). One has to keep in mind that universities are
not only institutions of research and allegedly disinterested transmission
of objective knowledge. Universities are also undoubtedly institutions of
social (re)production, where knowledge transfer is just one means of this
reproduction. Here, several important studies have already been under-
taken: Pierre Bourdieu’s extensive study on ‘homo academicus’ immedi-
ately comes to mind (see Bourdieu 1988), as well as Jacques Rancière’s
critique of the ‘teacher Althusser’ (see Rancière 2011). Both Bourdieu
and Rancière discuss traditional academic structures made of professors
and (doctoral) students, which can sometimes be categorised as authorita-
tive, or even authoritarian. Among important traits of these structures are,
at their best, the process of formation of philosophical schools (see Münch
2009, p. 2), and, at their worst, the (re-)production of clique-like behav-
iour (see Adorno 1973; Bourdieu 1988; Rancière 2011). As opposed to
that, ‘the long march through the institutions’, structural ‘deterritorialisa-
tions’ (to allusively refer to Deleuze and Guattari) and softening of old
academic hierarchies, as advocated by the 1968 generation, have in the
meantime been caught up by and integrated into the advancing force of
capitalism. As it was argued here, the reforms introduced by the market-
oriented university management have actually helped in dissolving the
‘old’ hierarchies only to erect new ones. If the social reproduction in the
field of research and teaching was earlier conducted in a hierarchically
stratified field, today it has only changed its modus operandi. While the
relations among professors, their assistants and students, and among peers
and collaborators have become de-hierarchised, it is now the management
144 I. PERICA
that has seized indisputable authority. So, after more than two decades
of neoliberal ‘reterritorialisation’, one cannot help but get the impres-
sion that the expectations that the ‘new’ academia could triumph over the
‘form of exclusion’ (Weber 2001, p. 45) of the ‘old’ one were mislead-
ing, if not politically thoroughly naïve. Although the old hierarchies, as
criticised by Bourdieu and Rancière, have thus been widely flattened (in
the German and Austrian academia, e.g., it became common to address
each other informally with ‘du’ instead of ‘Sie’), one should take another
close look at today’s academic stratification before concluding that repro-
duction of hierarchies and their respective scientific pedagogies have been
overcome.
In this respect, the reform of Austrian universities, although somewhat
belated in comparison with the German or British academic sector, pres-
ents no exception from overall European and global trends. The struc-
tural changes that were introduced by the ‘University Organisation Act’
in 1993, ‘University Act 2002’ and the latter’s amendment in 2009 are
multiple and serious. The ‘University Act 2002’ especially has become
famous for its ‘chain-contract regulation’ (‘Kettenvertragsregelung’
[Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur 2002, § 109]),
an article that makes long-term employment at the same university practi-
cally impossible (According to Austrian laws, a contract with an institution
running longer than 6 years requires a tenure. Except in the cases when
the contract with the university is followed by a contract on a research
project, the academic workers are expected to change their university
affiliation every two or three years. Other possibilities are, of course, part-
time project employment or, more often, proverbially underpaid teaching
assignments. [See Betriebsrat der Universität Wien 2009]). Together with
this process, the structure of the ‘old’, multi-layered and gradually organ-
ised academic hierarchies (as typical for the nineteenth century Bildung as
it was for the welfare state university after World War II) has been trans-
lated into a structure that is based on the ossified poles of tenured profes-
sorial staff and precarious mid-level academic positions (‘Mittelbau’). The
inequality between these poles manifests itself not only as a wage difference
but also as a difference in participation rights and employment duration
(Pernicka 2010, p. 21). While professors have long-term appointments
(but are due to their management duties constantly short of time for
research), mid-level academic staff must deal with short-term contracts,
numerous employment applications, an exposure to greater peer pressure
and expectations of conformist behaviour in order to avoid conflicts which
‘DARE TO DARE’: ACADEMIC PEDAGOGY IN TIMES OF FLATTENED HIERARCHIES 145
might jeopardise their vulnerable position in the future. The result is, as
Koschorke claims in his confessional paper, an ‘aggregate state of bustling
conformity’ (Koschorke 2003, p. 151).
The reterritorialisation of the European university obviously establishes
academic structures that do move beyond previously exclusive and self-
contained ‘philosophical schools’, but these structures, boosting competi-
tion in order to foster productivity, impair the quality of the research itself:
as the old departmental structures have been weakened due to the reor-
ganisation of funding models, professors nowadays have to act as manag-
ers, seeking third-party funds necessary to sustain regular activities of their
institutional unit. In the given context, professors have less and less time
to devote to students and academic junior staff, their potential successors,
who, in any case, due to short-term appointments and high probability
of career continuation at distant universities, are only conditionally to be
considered for ‘succession’. So, whereas in the ‘old’ academia the rela-
tions between professors and their assistants were structured as pedagogic
relations of ‘teachers’ and ‘pupils’ (or even ‘fathers’ and ‘sons’, as sug-
gested by the connotations of the German word for ‘thesis supervisor’—
‘Doktorvater’—and the one for ‘junior scientific staff’—‘wissenschaftlicher
Nachwuchs’), in the ‘new’ academia the relations of dependence have
been re-established in the competition among colleagues who are all uni-
formly reduced to precarious workforce dependent on managers, project
leaders (who could help them, if even for a short period of time, to replace
their precarious state of outsiders for the one of insiders) or anonymous
peers (who evaluate their projects and performance). And as the analyses
show, the number of academic outsiders who are trying to enter academia
(again) in order to become insiders by far exceeds that of existing jobs
(Münch 2009, p. 5; Pernicka 2010, p. 23). The illusion of highly qualified
and individualistic researchers disappears as soon as one is aware of their
precarious dependence on fellow researchers. As nobody can sustain the
illusion of independence from his or her social and scientific environment,
this dependence on academic networks that could provide new working
opportunities eradicates alternatives. Those who still search for autonomy
or see academia as a place for civil disobedience are considered to be ‘irra-
tional’ (Lyotard 1991, p. 71).
The hidden pedagogy that governs the network is consistent with the
‘apoliticism’ of neoliberal education policies in general. In a paper that
deals with the hidden politics of neoliberal education, Matthew Clarke
points out two important traits that can easily be applied to academia
146 I. PERICA
REFERENCES
Adorno, T. W. (1973). The jargon of authenticity (K. Tarnowski & F. Will, Trans.).
Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Althusser, L. (2014). Appendix 2: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In
L. Althusser, On the reproduction of capitalism (G. M. Goshgarian, Trans.).
London: Verso.
Arendt, H. (1998). The human condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Bauman, Z. (1993). Modernity and ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Betriebsrat der Universität Wien. (2009, February). Regelungen bei befristeten
Verträgen. Betriebsrat für das Wissenschaftliche Universitätspersonal. brwup.
univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/betriebsrat/Kettenvertragsregelung.pdf.
Date accessed July 6, 2015.
Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur. (2002). Bundesgesetz
über die Organisation der Universitäten und ihre Studien. Bundeskanzleramt
Österreich. .www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&
Gesetzesnummer=20002128. Date accessed July 6, 2015.
Birkner, M., & Foltin, R. (2006). (Post-)Operaismus. Von der Arbeiterautonomie
zur Multitude. Stuttgart: Schmetterling.
Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo academicus (P. Collier, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Clarke, M. (2012). The (Absent) politics of neo-liberal education policy. Critical
Studies in Education, 53(3), 297–310.
148 I. PERICA
George Morgan
G. Morgan
Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia
regulation of much academic work. In this chapter, I will chart the rise of
the mass university in Australia, in particular the growth in undergraduate
student numbers over the last 20 years. I will argue that the management
of this growth—the rounds of organisational change and course ratio-
nalisation—has demoralised academic communities and eroded scholarly
bonds. Most scholars, however, shrink from the prospect of openly chal-
lenging managerialism’s invidious effects. However, in a world in which
centralised bureaucratic organisations are becoming increasingly obso-
lete, the managerial university appears something of an anachronism, and
hence vulnerable to challenge.
In 2011, the last year for which full international data is available, Australia’s
public funding of universities ranked thirty-third out of the thirty-four
OECD member countries. Governments across the OECD spent an average
of 1.1 per cent of GDP on universities; Australia devoted just 0.7 per cent.
Six countries – including Canada, at 1.6 per cent – spent at least double
Australia’s proportion of national income. Finland, at 1.9 per cent, tops the
list. (Tiffen 2015)
were casual employees (see Junor 2004, p. 276). However, by 2010, this
figure had reached 60 % with 67,000 academic staff employed on a casual
basis in the Australian university system (see May et al. 2011, p. 194).1
The ostensible rationale for casualisation is to give universities the ability
to maximise workforce flexibility. University bureaucrats—notably human
resources managers and financial officers—frequently recite the narrative
of market risk, of increased competition for students and volatile enrol-
ments, in seeking to justify employing more and more workers on pre-
carious contracts. This has profoundly undermined academic job security
and has brought to academia the levels of precariousness characteristic of
careers in, for example, the creative industries (see Morgan et al. 2013),
where the number of core workers is shrinking with a rapid growth in the
peripheral labour force (see Kimber 2003). Indeed, over the last decade
only 20 % of all jobs created in Australian universities have been continu-
ing, relatively secure positions (see Department of Education and Training
2014a). Discussing the rapidly ageing profile of the academic workforce,
Graeme Hugo wrote of the ‘lost generation’ of academics (Hugo 2005).
When tenured staff resign or retire, universities will invariably replace
them with casual or short-contract appointees.
Casual staff experience is the condition of the enervated precarity that
has become a structural feature of contemporary universities, and which
mirrors the wider social and economic relations of late modernity, when
new capitalism is restless, competitive and turbulent, undermining job
security and the possibility that durable skills can be slowly accrued in
fixed communities of practice. Members of the academic precariat, or
cognitariat, are unable to make plans, purchase property or start a fam-
ily. Their dependence on the continued patronage of tenured mentors in
offering them work undermines their ability to become politically active
in challenging the system of creeping casualisation that maintains them in
poverty and powerlessness.
Despite clear evidence of the declining investment in universities, Tony
Abbott’s conservative Liberal National Coalition government, elected in
2013, announced that it would be fiscally unsustainable to maintain the
growth of the university sector under the existing arrangement. In its first
budget, in May 2014, it announced a plan to let universities set their own
1
These are informed estimates only. Researchers have struggled to obtain adequate data on
casual staffing in universities.
156 G. MORGAN
fees, despite having made no mention of such a plan in the lead-up to the
election. The government introduced the deregulation legislation in 2014,
but was not able to pass it.2 This precipitated a public debate, not only on
the weight of student debt that the changes would generate, but also on
the social, economic and cultural roles that universities should properly
perform and on the very principles that should inform their operation.
The debate illustrated the extent to which Australian higher education had
become an issue of mass public concern, probably for the first time. It also
brought to light the corporate character of universities, many of which
have annual turnovers of more than one billion dollars, and often appear
to be fixated on revenues and competition more than on their traditional
role as centres of independent learning and research.
The fee-setting debate also laid bare the political rifts within the uni-
versities: the growing divide between, on the one hand, the vice chancel-
lors and their governing bodies (made up largely of business and political
appointees) and, on the other hand, the wider university communities.
The Education minister who introduced the fee deregulation legislation,
Christopher Pyne, claimed that his government’s proposed reforms had
the support of the universities. This was based on the fact that Universities
Australia, peak body of Australian vice chancellors, expressed conditional
approval for deregulation of fees.3 Pyne thus constructed the vice chancel-
lors as the sole legitimate channel through which university opinion could
be represented. This was based on a narrowly corporatist view of the uni-
versity. In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore the contradictions
inherent in the neoliberal university, and the tensions between scholarly
communities and university managers.
2
As at July 2015. The government did not control the Senate, where a group of cross-
bench and Greens Senators held the balance of power. The government was not able to
persuade enough of them to support the legislation.
3
But not, it should be pointed out, for the 20 % cut in government funding that came
along with the proposed power to set fees.
THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE MANAGERIAL UNIVERSITY 157
4
Warren Bebbington of the University of Adelaide, however, is from a music education
background.
5
Sandra Harding of James Cook University in Queensland is an economic sociologist by
training.
THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE MANAGERIAL UNIVERSITY 159
and to lose sight of its proper commitments. The Official University – the
transparent one, replete with information – has not only eviscerated but
also threatened with extinction the institution where serious work goes on.
That institution, if it is to survive, has had to become clandestine. (Docherty
2011)
restaurants to cover living expenses and student debt, and casual staff, who
do much of the teaching, leaving when their classes finish.
So there is a need for a creative renewal of the university. The justifi-
cation for it, however, is not (I hasten to add) in the production of the
next generation of tech entrepreneurs, but rather in the recognition of the
need to rescue intellectual life from bureaucratic and technocratic suffoca-
tion. This project involves challenging the idea that education is simply a
credentialing process, and striving to renew liberal humanist values. This
is a formidable task. As youth unemployment increases throughout the
Western world, and the labour market advantages that a university educa-
tion can confer become less and less apparent, so popular anxieties about
the vocational prospects of young people intensify. Disciplines and degrees
that appear to provide little vocational leverage are often the first to have
their value questioned. This is of course not new. In Australia, the humani-
ties and liberal arts were called to account around the Dawkins restructur-
ing of higher education in the late 1980s. Around that time, Ian Hunter
wrote that the transcendental justification for the humanities—that they
promote individual cultural growth—is insufficient. He argued that they
play a ‘quite calculable and interested role’ in forming the ethical citizens
and that it is necessary to engage in public debates to advocate that role:
‘Drawn irresistibly towards transcendental conceptions of culture and rea-
son, the humanities academy has itself failed to develop a public ratio-
nale outlining the pragmatic ethical and social function that it supports’
(Hunter 1989, p. 447).
The humanities and social sciences should play a central role in this
project, but for this to happen the practitioners in these fields ought to
overcome the embattled, cloistered and introspective disposition within
the university and to deny university managers the prerogative of repre-
senting the views of university communities. It is important to recall the
scholarly radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, when the campuses were
centres of political ferment and when many academics were powerful pub-
lic intellectuals. In recent times, there has been an attenuation of political
engagement in general. Precariousness has also limited scholarly horizons
and ambitions: a gentle nudge to public policy here, an incremental con-
tribution to some scholarly sub-specialism there. But this quietism, and in
particular the evasion of thorny questions of the politics of the university,
can make critical thinkers vulnerable to the predations of neoliberalism by
failing to engage in the debates about the social and cultural roles played
by universities.
THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE MANAGERIAL UNIVERSITY 163
CONCLUSION
The creation of the mass university in Australia was accompanied by the
rise of the technocratic oligarchs, imbued with the ideas of new public
management, who profoundly changed the character of universities. They
have imposed systems of line management and regular rounds of structural
change on disciplinary communities, the effect of which was to undermine
the collegial voice in university decision-making. This has narrowed the
disciplinary base from which university managers are drawn. Many from
the humanities and social sciences who in an earlier era might have been
prepared to perform the role of collegial representatives are reluctant to be
line managers in the contemporary neoliberal university. In dealing with
the rapid growth in undergraduate enrolments and the relative decline in
the funding base, university managers sought to adopt Taylorist solutions,
tightly managing the conditions under which pedagogy and research were
practised, and effecting economies of scale that have diminished many of
the freedoms and qualities of academic life. Unlike many of their mid-
twentieth century predecessors, staff in fields that are best placed to extol
the values of critical and liberal scholarship have in recent times been
reluctant to critically engage with the contemporary neoliberal university.
Crusading researchers and public intellectuals, who fight for social justice
and good causes outside academia, will often remain mute on university
164 G. MORGAN
politics and the capricious exercise of managerial power. They are guilty of
petrified silence, glum defeatism or the blind acceptance of the ‘there is no
alternative’ injunctions of neoliberal dogma. Either way, they evacuate the
terrain of the politics of higher education at a time when the foundations
of critical thinking and scholarship are most under threat. Contemporary
economic conditions have undermined the idea that the university is a
conveyor belt to a vocation, and thus rendered problematic the Taylorist
and technocratic vision of higher education. At such a moment it is impor-
tant to hear the expression of a broader vision of universities, voices capa-
ble of describing the value of education in terms other than individual and
instrumental ones.
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CHAPTER 10
Mariya Ivancheva and Micheal O’Flynn
1
Some of the research for this chapter was undertaken in the context of the collaborative
project ‘Framing Financial Crisis and Protest: North-West and South-East Europe’, which is
administered by the Faculty of Arts at The Open University, and funded by the Leverhulme
Trust.
required to make the best of the present and to secure the future. With
a focus on Ireland, we examine the contract of indefinite duration (CID)
as a peculiar form of tenure that permits interpretations that downgrade
those employed under its premise. With reference to a number of cases, we
examine the struggles that academics face in obtaining these permanent
contracts. We consider how the absence of security and stability impacts
on people’s lives and their capacity to develop as researchers and teach-
ers. We address deteriorating working conditions and consider how they
prevent a growing number of academics from engaging productively with
their colleagues, caring for their students, or even caring adequately for
themselves (see Lynch 2010). We suggest that by outsourcing work previ-
ously carried out under permanent contracts of employment, universities
demonstrate a stubborn refusal to contribute to the formation of secure
occupational identities among those hoping to live and work as academics.
We argue that though CIDs do offer the closest thing to job security amid
increasingly destructive commercial forces, such half-hearted solutions can
also be used as a tool for antagonising further the ever more stratified
academic community.
issue at the appropriate level and, where necessary, contact a union official
to bring the case to the labour court. This focus on legal entitlements
has produced a dependence on individual professional representation.
This contrasts with workers’ struggles of the past, which compensated
for individual weaknesses through the power of numbers. Where trade
unions limit themselves to representing, rather than organising, members,
the potential of collective action remains underdeveloped. The issue of
increasing collective insecurity vanishes amid the individualised struggles
(see Gill 2009, p. 259), as does the necessary task of restructuring the
university in the public interest.
Since 2011, a growing number of cases of college employees (among
other public-sector workers) claiming CIDs have become known to
the public, with universities appealing against the granting of such
contracts or withdrawing them post-factum (see Burtenshaw 2012;
Madden 2012). In 2012, Trinity College Dublin’s branch of IFUT—the
Irish Federation of University Teachers, which signed the Croke Park
Agreement—contested the redundancy of three faculty members who
already had CIDs. In Labour Relations Commission proceedings, the
IFUT insisted that the college had to secure an alternative job placement
to the staff members as they were paid by ‘non-core funding’. According
to the report on the case (see Burtenshaw 2012), the college ran the risk
of setting a precedent that would draw a distinction between permanent
contracts inside the university: between those more recently given CIDs
but without ‘core’ funding and most permanent ‘core’ faculty whose
contracts stipulated a guaranteed income and employment until a speci-
fied retirement date. Thus, ‘non-core funding’ termination makes staff
hired with this funding un-fundable and thus undesired despite contrac-
tual arrangements.
Colleges have also interpreted the durations, types, and wording of
contracts in order to contest the right to a CID. A faculty member from
University College Dublin was denied permanent contract despite having
replaced permanent faculty members on three contracts during 4 years.
As two of her contracts were of different nature (maternity leave and sab-
batical cover), University College Dublin treated this as different contracts
altogether. On appeal, the Labour Court ruled in favour of the employee:
the nature of the work she did—designing and teaching full modules—
was ‘core work’, rather than replacement work, which means that she had
been deprived of a CID ‘on financial grounds, rather than on any objec-
tively justifiable grounds’ (Madden 2012).
BETWEEN CAREER PROGRESSION AND CAREER STAGNATION 177
Yet not all decisions of the labour court have been so positive. In a
more recent case, University College Dublin appealed a decision for
granting a CID to a scientist who had been employed by the university
as a postdoctoral fellow in three consequent fixed-term contracts for over
4 years with insignificant gaps between them and as part of the same
research group (see Labour Court 2015). When the third contract expired,
it was not renewed, and the claimant was paid a redundancy payment.
The claimant was part of the so-called Research Career Framework, which
allows individual researchers to be hired by the university twice as postdoc-
toral researchers (Level 1 and then Level 2) within a period between 4 and
6 years in total (see University College Dublin 2015). Yet, the corporate
solicitors hired by University College Dublin claimed that within the
Research Career Framework postdoctoral fellows were ‘trainees’ and as
such cannot be considered as fully employed by the university and thus
eligible for CIDs. They insisted that after completing their postgraduate and
postdoctoral training, academics became ‘highly marketable’ for ‘enduring
roles both in the career of academia, and in the commercial arena’ (Labour
Court 2015). If CIDs were given to ‘post-doctoral students’, the rubric
under which the solicitors subsumed the advanced researcher, the univer-
sity ‘would not be able to process successive cohorts through the available
research roles’ (Labour Court 2015). The IFUT challenged the premise
that work experience after PhD can be considered ‘training’ and claimed
that it was not ‘a legitimate objective of the employer to provide world
class research by means of temporary, insecure employment’. The court
found the claim ‘not well founded’ and the researcher did not receive a
CID (Labour Court 2015).
These cases show that while CIDs are increasingly contested by uni-
versities, they are overwhelmingly seen as a kind of privilege. The overt
default position for the last several years has been to offer fixed-term or
low-hours contracts, and to prevent employees from entitlement to a
CID. As Andrew Loxley has shown, in 2011 only 20 % of all the 5202
researchers in Irish third-level institutions were on permanent contracts
(see Loxley 2014, p. 128). This data is even more difficult to trace for tem-
porary teaching staff who are usually grouped and reported as ‘full time
equivalents’, and hourly paid work stays invisible (Courtois and O’Keefe
2015). At the same time, the contracts offered in Irish colleges and univer-
sities are ever more precarious. The number of years that an academic must
exist on precarious contracts has steadily increased. In the arts, humanities,
and social sciences, upon completion of a PhD the average number of years
178 M. IVANCHEVA AND M. O’FLYNN
pitted against their colleagues and direct line manager within their depart-
ment, considered a troublemaker, alienated, and stigmatised, regardless
of any positive human resources or Labour Court decisions. As the Third
Level Workplace Watch stated, ‘one respondent reported that her employ-
ment was terminated after she sought a contract of indefinite duration
(CID) in the institution where she had been employed for a number of
years, which illustrates the legal vulnerability of casual workers, unmiti-
gated by their experience, performance and commitment’ (Courtois and
O’Keefe 2015, p. 59). Thus, claiming a CID deepens the individualisation
and the isolation to which universities subject their casual staff, curtailing
the possibilities of collective solutions to a shared predicament. Ironically,
then, CIDs are a precarious mechanism, but increasingly the only one that
precarious academics have in order to obtain permanent position while
employed by Irish universities.
CODA
The neoliberal attack on tenure has been destructive to the internal life of
universities around the world. Tenure is a prerequisite to the formation
of secure occupational identities among those hoping to live and work as
academics. What we are witnessing, in Ireland as well as elsewhere, is an
isolation of the official ‘academic community’ from a growing precarious
faculty, a growing asymmetry of power between the protected and the
unprotected, and a recasting of academic autonomy as a minority privi-
lege (see Brown and Kurlad 1990, p. 349). Taken together, these trans-
formations inhibit the development of an environment of free and open
dialogue upon which the public character of higher education has always
rested. The erosion of tenure amounts to the erosion of possibilities for
academic knowledge and freedom to be used to the benefit of society.
The activist-academic is likewise caught up in an all-consuming competi-
tive system, which presents itself as a logical excuse for neglecting activist
work or, worse still, for building careers by researching the oppressed but
not joining them in their struggles (see The Autonomous Geographies
Collective 2010).
At the same time, though many academics are critical of neoliberalism,
we should not regard ourselves as passive recipients of these regressive
changes. The commercial and bureaucratic interferences outlined above
all require support and mediation by academic staff. Whether we are ten-
ured or precariously employed staff, we are all complicit in supplying the
180 M. IVANCHEVA AND M. O’FLYNN
meat and fat to the academic ‘sausage factory’, especially when we fail to
use our freedoms, ignore our public role, or stop questioning how the
world ‘out there’ is shaped by what goes on ‘in here’. Just as academics
play a key role in the production of ruling ideas at each stage of mod-
ern history, in the reproduction and/or restructuring of capitalism and
class society, they likewise play a key role in the neoliberal transformation
of university life (see The Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010).
Despite the apparent academic interest in reflexivity (see Gill 2009), aca-
demics rarely focus on the world ‘in here’, on class exploitation in their
own institutions, on their own academic working lives, or on particular
roles, individual or collective, in the neoliberalisation of higher educa-
tion. Universities are still very often viewed as ‘better’ than other kinds
of employer, given the freedoms, supports, and various privileges enjoyed
by tenured academics—though these are enjoyed by a shrinking percent-
age of academic workers (see The Autonomous Geographies Collective
2010). However, the conditions of early-stage academic reveal the univer-
sity that will emerge if it is permitted.
Those taking part in the 2015 wave of protests that took place in uni-
versities across the world are only too aware of the issues outlined above.
The early months of the year saw strikes in universities across Canada, an
occupation in the University of Amsterdam, an occupation in the London
School of Economics, a student occupation in the Dublin College of Art
and Design, and a nationwide walkout of precariously employed lecturers
across the USA. These developments are positive insofar as they repre-
sent a necessary rejection of the false distinction between academia and
wider society, when it comes to conceiving valid sites for struggle (see The
Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010). Undeniably, the decreasing
work opportunities, the increasing indebtedness, job insecurity, exploita-
tion, and geographical hypermobility of many workers in third-level edu-
cation are turning many of them into working poor.
Though there may never have been a golden age of academia, the post-
war period was a time of exceptional potential to at least to hold power
to account. Yet, it is less useful to consider university life against a real or
imagined past, as it is to examine the struggles emerging in the present, and
what will be required of the university as an institution by the society in the
future. We suggest that the capacity of universities to act for (and on behalf
of) civil society cannot be maintained without a corresponding collective
demand for occupational integrity and security. With respect to Ireland,
the ‘academic community’ cannot adequately defend itself on the basis of
BETWEEN CAREER PROGRESSION AND CAREER STAGNATION 181
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BETWEEN CAREER PROGRESSION AND CAREER STAGNATION 183
Branko Bembič
B. Bembič
University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
From the point of view of capital, every segment of scholarly production
that takes place in the academy is useful in the same way, that is, to the
extent that it is useful for the purpose of extraction and appropriation of
surplus value either in the form of supply of labour power equipped with
the skills required by capital (the so-called employability) or in the form of
technological and organisational innovations. There are, however, at least
two ways in which a part of scholarly production can be useless as an input
required by capital.
Let me first address the role of knowledge in the contemporary, neolib-
eral form of capitalism. As David Harvey (2010, p. vi) suggested, capital
is the lifeblood of capitalist societies, that is, a flow that provides us with
goods and services we consume. Furthermore, our jobs depend on this
continuous flow of capital, be it in the private or the public sector, as
capital enables the states that tax it to perform their functions, includ-
ing the construction of infrastructure and provision of services necessary
for the well-being of their citizens. Now, in the decades following World
War II, the main policy tools on which national governments relied for
sustaining this flow of capital were Keynesian macroeconomic policies.
However, faced by the crisis of the post-war regime and a neoliberal res-
toration that entails an intensification of competition between capitals on
the global plane, the states are trying to sustain the flow of capital by
securing competitive advantages for capitals based in their respective ter-
ritories. Hence, from the standpoint of both individual and social capitals,
scholarly production is of paramount importance as it enables individual
capitals to capture the technological rents that in turn allow national social
capitals to move upwards in the technological hierarchy. University and
other research organisations thus become crucial institutions for the bour-
geois competitiveness policy.
This does not hold from the viewpoint of the working class. As
‘[c]ompetition is the mode generally in which capital secures the victory of its
mode of production’ (Marx 1973, p. 730), scholarly production, as a weapon
in the competitive struggle between capitals (be they individual or social),
ARE UNIVERSITY STRUGGLES WORTH FIGHTING? 189
This relation and exchange were also reciprocally formative. They made
explicit political hypotheses about the struggle and tied them to a theory that
was in this way put to the test in a manner that this mobilising knowledge
also transformed the worker in a particular militant (not only ideological …)
ARE UNIVERSITY STRUGGLES WORTH FIGHTING? 193
and made the militant and sometimes the struggle reach new heights, until
the militant him- or herself started to work as co-researcher, dragging others
along as we, after all, were dragging along young apprentices. (Alquati 2000)
We should not forget […] that the consolidation [of the collective] was
based on the fact that we knew each other, that we collaborated in organ-
isational work, and that our direct engagement revealed to us who is who.
Many people also fell out of the group, in a way, and for different rea-
sons. Because, say, they did not have the courage to combine and engage,
[although] we were very close in terms of theory, but when it came to prac-
tice they backed off. […] A dividing line formed there, very spontaneously,
in a way, and some got scared and backed off.
demanded a resignation of the dean of the Faculty), a trade union that orga-
nises a core workforce in a major Slovenian company located in the same
town as the university strongly supported the rebels. Although the union
and the local anarchist group had already established connections before the
struggle at the university took place, this support immensely strengthened
the ties between academics and students, on the one hand, and workers, on
the other. Since then, they always supported each other’s actions by being
present on the spot. What is more significant is that theory itself began
to function as a bond between workers and intellectuals. Elaborating their
political position, workers often turned to intellectuals with requests for
advice and materials such as academic books and articles, which they usually
debated and interpreted together. Granted, it was workers who made the
first step when they demanded theoretical explanations of the struggles in
which they were involved, but it is of no less importance that the intellectu-
als were there for them, providing them with conceptual tools that could
be productively applied in their struggle and, even more importantly, which
interpreted the conflicts in terms of class struggle.
It is, of course, impossible to determine precisely to what degree the
intellectuals radicalised the workers, but the fact is that both groups soon
became protagonists in a major class confrontation. This time it was up
to intellectuals to back workers in their struggle. What made that clash
even more important from the class point of view was, nevertheless, the
involvement of another group, composed mostly of highly precarious low-
paid immigrant workers working on visas (which means that they were
bound to their particular employers) and employed with ‘peripheral’ firms
that formally provided services to the ‘core’ firms while in fact lending
them the workforce. Or, more precisely, what elevated this particular case
of industrial strike to the status of a political conflict with far-reaching
implications was the very unity of the two groups of workers, the core
company workers and the workers working on visas.
The industrial strike was about improving the disastrous working con-
ditions of the precarious workers, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
prerogative of the management of the core firm to bring workforce from
the so-called services providers to take up the strategic working places on
particular machines that were previously reserved for high-skilled workers
of the core company. Needless to say, competition from low-paid pre-
carious workers would be detrimental for the bargaining positions of the
core company workers. Hence, from the perspective of simple cost–benefit
analysis it would probably make sense for the core company workers to try
ARE UNIVERSITY STRUGGLES WORTH FIGHTING? 197
to exclude precarious workers from their working places. This is, however,
not what happened. As can be seen from their demands, the workers of
the core company requested the exclusion of the firms supplying work-
force to the core company from their workplaces, while at the same time
pressing for a step-up in hiring from the pool of precarious workforce
employed with peripheral firms. In addition, the core workforce supported
both organisationally and financially the establishment of a trade union of
workers employed with peripheral firms. As for the precarious workers
who demanded a collective agreement backed by the core company as an
agent with economic power, they contributed the numbers and a fighting
spirit—they persisted on the company’s courtyard under the hot August
sun during the whole strike in defiance of the core company’s manage-
ment and their own bosses. Moreover, without their presence the dis-
pute would be one of strongly organised and relatively well-paid workers
demanding specific concessions from a state-owned company, a demand
that would find little public support in a time of crisis.
Perhaps the most interesting role was the one played by organic intel-
lectuals. Of course, the academics and students involved in the above-
mentioned struggle at the university were not the only group involved
in strike activities. Nevertheless, most of the collectives present on the
spot were formed in activities linked in one way or another to theoreti-
cal production. The most important function of these intellectuals was
to provide a liaison with the local community. First and foremost, the
cause for mobilisation had to be presented to the public; also, the media
spin directed from the central company management and the bosses of
the peripheral firms had to be countered. Thus, a special magazine was
printed and disseminated to the local community, alerting it to the super-
exploitation of the precarious workers and to their demands; flyers were
distributed to households in certain districts of the city; and a website
containing information related to the strike as well as short interviews
with the strikers was created. In addition, intellectuals helped workers in
formulating their public statements and demands. Finally, traffic blockades
were organised to get the additional attention from the public. This task
had begun some time before the strike itself and was carried out with
formidable success, as one of the involved organic intellectuals testified:
Organic intellectual: When it came to it, community was there for us. You
had restaurants, you know, people bringing pots full of food to the workers.
And no one asked them to do that, they came by themselves. People came
198 B. BEMBIČ
by to bring them water or just to join them in the traffic blockade. […]
They came by car to bring water or something to eat … They just came by,
simply to support us.
Interviewer: Would you say that the local community in general supported you?
Organic intellectual: Yes, very much.
Another task was to constantly press the authorities. Thus, workers and
intellectuals wrote letters to the president of the Republic of Slovenia
and the Labour Inspectorate, among others, forcing them to take a stand
on the dispute. This task was also successfully accomplished, as some
addressees of these letters publicly supported the cause of the workers.
Finally, during public assemblies, which took place in the courtyard of
the core company or in the nearby office of the union organising the core
workforce, the intellectuals debated with workers about the developments
of the strike and provided support and consultation if and when needed.
As regards its economic results, it cannot be claimed that the strike
was a success for the precarious workers from peripheral firms. It is not
my aim here to inquire into the reasons for such an outcome. Suffice it
to say that efforts of the workers were fiercely opposed by capital, which
launched a counteroffensive in which it employed all the means available,
from threats and cajolery to laying off the striking workers and import-
ing strike-breakers to the company. Nonetheless, the management of the
core company was able to break the unity of the two groups of workers
only after it stepped back and met the demands of its own employees
while stubbornly refusing any direct negotiations with the employees of
the peripheral firms. Still, some minor economic gains were realised on the
part of precarious workers, such as stricter control of the legal constraints
on the working hours as well as a step-up in hiring by the core firm from
the pool of precarious workers.
One should, nevertheless, not overlook the fact that in the process of
their struggle, precarious workers become visible; that they spoke out and
fought back after years of being anonymously exploited; that they have
shown us how even a workforce in position of extreme dependency in
relation to their employers can break free from the oppression by joining
forces, if only for a brief moment; and that they proved that a working col-
lective fragmented along the national and confessional divides, employed
with several dozens of different companies, which are in turn dependent
on the whims of the core firm, can organise and bring the accumulation
of capital in the core firm itself to a halt. These were the real achievements
ARE UNIVERSITY STRUGGLES WORTH FIGHTING? 199
of the clash that took place in those hot summer days. And it is of little
doubt that the participation of the militant intellectuals who had been
formed in the social struggles and theoretical confrontations either within
or outside the walls of the university was an essential part of these achieve-
ments. It is, furthermore, up to such organic intellectuals to reflect upon
and provide interpretation of the failures and accomplishments of this as
well as other struggles against capitalist oppression and exploitation.
What is being put in jeopardy by subordinating the university to the
requirements of capital are the very material conditions for the kind of
theoretical production that is capable of reflecting on and positioning itself
in class struggle, as well as the potential for the formation of working class
organic intellectuals (be they students, teachers, or researchers) who can
make these theoretical insights work in social struggles. To be sure, univer-
sity is not necessarily the only and may even not be the most appropriate
place for such theoretical and political undertakings. What university is and
what use can be made of it will nevertheless be determined in the struggle.
To conclude, if there is indeed anything invaluable that may be lost to
the corporatisation of the university, it is invaluable only from the perspec-
tive of the working class. For those parts of scholarly production that,
from the point of view of capital, are either useful for accumulation or use-
less and assume the role of luxury production do not risk anything at all.
Struggles against the neoliberal corporatisation of university are thus basi-
cally working-class struggles. Hence, one final observation has to be added
to the above analysis. What makes militant intellectuals in my case study
so remarkable is not only their pluckiness in resisting the ‘production of
unemployment’ at the university that happened to be their own workplace
or, for that matter, their own place of study, but also their ability to inter-
vene in other social struggles as well. Conversely, if graduates can find jobs
only insofar as they are able to directly serve the requirements of capital
accumulation, it is impossible to counter the effects of the neoliberalisation
of the university only by participating in university struggles. University
struggles simply have to be part and parcel of class struggle as a whole if
they are to be successful. And as such they are indeed worth fighting.
REFERENCES
Alquati, R. (2000). Sul secondo operaismo politico. Futuro anteriore. www.autis-
tici.org/operaismo/alquati2/index_1.htm. Accessed July 6, 2015.
Aristotle. (2004). Nicomachean ethics (R. Crisp, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
200 B. BEMBIČ
Mark Bergfeld
But who has ever seen a riot whose front ranks were made up of the elderly?
Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History (2012, p. 22)
INTRODUCTION
If you were to ask a call centre worker in Glasgow, a cab driver in Berlin,
and a bar worker in London what Johnny Rotten and Bruce Springsteen
have in common, they would probably give some half-hearted, half-
guessed answer containing the words punk and no future. Then all of them
would rant about how shit The Boss is, and how they do not understand
what Springsteen finds so great about New Jersey.
If you were to ask the same question to a vegetable vendor in Tunis
and a computer programming student in Alexandria, they would prob-
ably light a cigarette, shrug their shoulders, and continue to make ends
meet.
M. Bergfeld
Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
struggles—which are never too far off: as I write these lines, students at the
University of Amsterdam and students of the London School of Economics
are occupying university buildings.
today’s youth have become ‘outcasts and outlaws of a novel kind, cast in
a condition of a liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transi-
tory or permanent’ (Giroux 2014, p. 158).
By placing this in the context of a changing work regime, one starts
to understand why this generation of university graduates has no future.
Precarity is becoming synonymous to neoliberal employment relations
with ‘casual contracts’ (University and College Union, 2015), insecure
work (see Heery and Salmon 2000), vulnerability at work (see Pollert and
Charlwood 2009), precarious employment (see Wolfreys 2012), and the
individualisation of the professional condition (see Sennett 1998). The
change in employment relations has gone hand in hand with the reor-
ganisation of work: lean production, outsourcing, just-in-time scheduling,
and extended supply chains (see Moody 1997).
Precarity manifests itself through the growth of part-time work, zero-
hour contracts, underemployment, and agency work. In the UK, more
than 700,000 workers in the labour force are employed on zero-hour con-
tracts (see Office for National Statistics 2015), while approximately 4.82
million—or one in five—workers are paid less than the living wage (see
Markit 2012). Women, youths, migrants, and ethnic minorities are dis-
proportionately affected by the precarisation of work (see Trades Union
Congress, 2014b). A gendered and racialised division of labour and labour
market with temporary, part-time, or zero-hour contracts and agency
work concentrated in the retail, hospitality, and the care sector contribute
to the vulnerable and precarious social status of women (see Trades Union
Congress, 2014a). Youth unemployment stands above 22 %, while for
Black British males it is 50 % (see Trades Union Congress 2012). The rea-
son that unemployment is not higher can be explained with the extortion-
ate growth of self-employment. In fact, self-employment is higher than at
any point in the last 40 years, with income from self-employment having
fallen by 22 % since 2008–2009 (see Office for National Statistics 2014).
the events of May 1968, such a scenario has remained the exception rather
than the norm. Instead, we have witnessed how student movements place
themselves squarely in the struggle of labour versus capital, both symboli-
cally and in their forms of action.
Moreover, the proletarianisation of students has meant that students
have not only proclaimed solidarity with labour struggles, as in the case
of the UK, Italy, and California, but also adopted proletarianised forms of
struggle, as in Quebec. Characterised by student strikes, economic block-
ades, mass general assemblies, permanent organisations that resemble
trade unions, and a high degree of mobilisation by high school students
and urban youth, these movements have placed themselves squarely inside
of labour struggles.
The anti-First Employment Contract protests are a key to understand-
ing this. During the successful movement in France in 2006, which forced
the conservative Chirac government to retreat over the flexibilisation of
young employees’ contracts, urban youths from the banlieues as well as the
lycée students (A Level students) played a massive role inside of the pro-
tests. Instead of occupying buildings like university students, they forced
their schools to shut down by blocking them with furniture, large objects,
traffic cones, and picket lines.
Stathis Kouvelakis writes:
This time the school and university youth has acted as part of the world of
labour. This […] has, of course (in comparison with 1968) not only made
easier the link with workers but, above all, has given this an ‘organic’ charac-
ter, the character of the building of a common struggle, and not of an alliance
or solidarity between separate movements.
It also explains the main form taken by the student movement itself,
which brings it closer […] to working class struggle: the ‘blockade’ (and
not ‘occupation’, an interesting semantic distinction despite aspects that are
often comparable) of lycées and universities that are seen as being a place and
tool of labour (and being intended for it) whose production flow (lectures,
examinations) is to be interrupted. (Kouvelakis 2006)
Slavoj Žižek, however, argues that the majority of protests are made up of
the ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ who are protesting against their own ‘proletari-
anisation’. He develops this further by arguing that unionised workers on
full-time contracts receive a so-called surplus wage:
These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being
reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent
job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile
industry etc, but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teach-
ers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of
student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher educa-
tion will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life. (Žižek 2012)
CONCLUSION
The total anarchy of the market means that millions of young flexible
graduates with transferable skills are produced in universities in order to
fill the no longer existing roles in the public sector. Expanding the knowl-
edge base and investing in skills have become catchphrases in order to
ON PRECARITY AND STUDENT PROTESTS 213
adapt education to the needs of private business and the state. No longer
are universities about cultivating flowers that will bloom in the so-called
free world. It is about preparing us for reproduction; reproducing the
labour power required by advanced capitalism.
REFERENCES
Badiou, A. (2012). The rebirth of history: Times of riots and uprisings (G. Elliott,
Trans.). London: Verso.
Berardi, F. B. (2003, October 3). Market-ideology, semiocapitalism and the digital
cognitariat. Future Non Stop. http://future-nonstop.org/c/54443acf95f3b40
aef441961d7f16feb. Date accessed July 6, 2015.
Birchall, I. (1987). France 1968: ‘All power to the imagination!’. In C. Barker
(Ed.), Revolutionary rehearsals. London: Bookmarks.
Calella, G. (2011). The factory of precarious workers. In C. Solomon & T. Palmieri
(Eds.), Springtime: The new student rebellions. London: Verso.
Callinicos, A. (2006). Universities in a neoliberal world. London: Bookmarks.
Candeias, M., & Völpel, E. (2014). Plätze sichern! ReOrganisierung der Linken in
der Krise. Hamburg: VSA Verlag.
Cohn-Bendit, D., & Cohn-Bendit, G. (2000). Obsolete communism: The left-wing
alternative (A. Pomerans, Trans.). Edinburgh: AK Press.
Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class. New York: Basic Books.
Giroux, H. A. (2014). Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Chicago: Haymarket
Books.
Haiven, M. (2014). Crises of imagination, crises of power: Capitalism, creativity
and the commons. Halifax: Fernwood; London: Zed Books.
Harman, C. (1998). The fire last time:1968 and after. London: Bookmarks.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heery, E., & Salmon, J. (Eds.). (2000). The insecure workforce. London: Routledge.
Huws, U., & Leys, C. (2003). The making of a cybertariat: Virtual work in a real
world. London: The Merlin Press.
Kouvelakis, S. (2006, May 12). France: From revolt to alternative (I. H. Birchall,
Trans.). Europe solidaire sans frontières. www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?
article2670. Date accessed July 6, 2015.
Lazzarato, M. (2012). The making of the indebted man (J. D. Jordan, Trans.). Los
Angeles: Semiotext[e].
Markit. (2012). Living wage research for KPMG: Current trends in household
finances and structural analysis of hourly wages. Henley on Thames: Markit.
Mason, P. (2011). Why it’s kicking off everywhere: The new global revolutions. London:
Verso.
Mattoni, A. (2012). Media practices and protest politics: How precarious workers
mobilise. Farnham: Ashgate.
214 M. BERGFELD
Cerelia Athanassiou and Jamie Melrose
INTRODUCTION
Things are dire in the ivory tower. ‘What I would say about the university
today’, Terry Eagleton gloomily observes, ‘is that we’re living through
an absolutely historic moment—namely the effective end of universities
as centres of humane critique, an almost complete capitulation to the
philistine and sometimes barbaric values of neo-capitalism’ (Schad 2015,
p. 43). Sir Keith Thomas notes several ways in which higher education is
‘under attack’. These include ‘the withdrawal of direct public funding for
the humanities and social science’, ‘a highly-paid executive class’ running
our universities, and ‘the rejection of the idea that higher education might
have a non-monetary value’ (Thomas 2011).
A worrying corollary is also the case. Opposition within academia is at
a profound impasse. There is no Laclauian ‘people’ possessing a demand
(Laclau 2007, p. 74), opposed to the institutional status quo in British
CRITIQUE
We suggest deploying critique as an opening crutch to our discussion
because it contains two important manoeuvres. Critique is finding fault
with regard to a target plus. Not merely thumbs-up or thumbs-down,
it reveals why its target—film, psyche, university, and so on—is so mal-
formed. ‘A critique’, Foucault contends, ‘is not a matter of saying that
things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds
of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes
of thought the practices that we accept rest’ (Foucault 1988, p. 154). In
revealing the constructed specificity of its target, pointing out as opposed
to simply offering up a negative judgement, critique has a transformative
potential. It has a form of activity, ‘a matter of flushing out’ (Foucault
1988, p. 154). Such radical criticism aims ‘not simply to eliminate one or
other abuse’ (Horkheimer 2002, p. 207), but also to inform an audience
how something far less ridden with abuses is capable of being engendered.
In this vein, Henry A. Giroux describes a ‘critical literacy’ entailing both a
‘rigor’, an ability to spot abuses, and an intervention-based reading of the
critical target, an ethico-political commitment (2013).
Moreover, as Theodor Adorno posits, critique can be conceived tran-
scendentally, immanently, or dialectically. The transcendent critique
‘assumes as it were an Archimedean position’. It ‘speaks the language of
false escape’, conjuring up an exo-reality, which negating the target of cri-
tique can bring about. On the other hand, immanent critique ‘cannot take
comfort in its own idea’; it immerses itself in the object of its criticism,
exposing that object’s intrinsic flaws: ‘the logic of its aporias’ (Adorno
1982, pp. 31–33). When faced with the object of their critique, imma-
nent critics do not baulk from criticising it on and from the grounds on
which both it and they are situated. Situation is not to be risen above, as
is the case with the idealist imperative of transcendental critique (Marcuse
2001, p. 57).
Immanent critique, though, in its commitment to start from some-
where, can, for Adorno, give too much credit to the object of criticism,
critique as a response to the object. More dialectically conceived, imma-
nent critique maintains creatio ex materia while introducing an antipathy
218 C. ATHANASSIOU AND J. MELROSE
to its error-ridden object, thus ensuring that critique is both part of that
which it moves away from and that which it moves to. ‘The dialectical
critic of culture’, writes Adorno, ‘must participate in culture and not
participate. Only then does he do justice to his object and to himself’
(Adorno 1982, p. 33).
Today, this commitment is echoed, for example, by Peter Hallward’s
notion of dialectical voluntarism (see Hallward 2009, p. 17). This non-
reifying notion of critique can also be found in Jacques Derrida’s defini-
tion of deconstruction and in Judith Butler’s critique of sexuality. Derrida
casts deconstruction as subjecting its target to a sustained bout of defla-
tion: ‘One of the gestures of deconstruction is not to naturalize what isn’t
natural, to not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions or
society is natural’ (Dick and Kofman 2002). Suggesting an immanent–
dialectical approach, Derrida’s strategic suspension of the certainty of the
object of criticism, the removal of its taken-for-grantedness, is not the
same thing as the emancipatory displacement of the object by an ex nihilo
other. ‘[T]he very condition of a deconstruction’, Derrida observes, ‘may
be at work in the work […]. One might then be inclined to reach this
conclusion: deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards,
from the outside, one fine day’ (Derrida 1989, p. 73). The internalist
and the externalist fold in on one another. Butler notes how criticism
‘presumes […] that to operate within the matrix of power is not the same
as to replicate uncritically relations of domination’ (Butler 1990, p. 42).
This tradition of critique we have sketched and associate ourselves
with haunts critical theory in the academy. Opposed to neoliberal stric-
tures, critical scholars, in their institutional form as academic actors, are
presumably aware of their embeddedness. They must proceed from the
given to effect the ‘new’, be that given the crony capitalist confines of the
academic publishing industry (see Monbiot 2011) or philistine funding
mechanisms (see J. Gill 2014). Or are they aware? Are they cognizant of
the commodification of their work into objects of exchange? Are critical
academics engaged in the recognition of their situation that takes its terms
immanently dialectically into account? In the case of organisations in the
UK opposed to current policy in higher education—the Campaign for the
Public University and Council for the Defence of British Universities, for
example—these groups are external sources of dissent, not designed to
alter academic behaviour, to mobilise and effect radically different rela-
tions of university production. While representatives from such organisa-
tions may point to salient reasons for their current status—membership
CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY 219
proceed in one fell linear swoop from a defined ‘root cause’ situated in
the upper echelons of higher education governance, but rather operates
and is implemented at a multiplicity of levels, middle management within
universities being a key such level: one could draw attention to decid-
ing and implementing budgets that dictate redundancies, casual contracts,
and privileging the chasing of research grants over more ‘mundane’ teach-
ing. Where is the sense that this managerial aspect of the critical scholar’s
institutional existence has to be reconciled with critical consensus on the
status quo in higher education?
Our very own School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies
(SPAIS) milieu of the University of Bristol can point to a tradition of
critical inquiry, with the development of specialised courses that emphasise
critical approaches to mainstream teaching, as well as carving out a space
for research projects that do not conform to mainstream strictures. This
space focuses on the value of ‘activist […] scholarship’ (Herring 2006),
the pedagogical need for universities that provide alternative modes of
thought (see McLennan 2008), as well as the crucial role for ‘public intel-
lectuals [to] resist […] global violence’ (Pollock and Evans 2013). This
is not intended as a grand project, but rather as a necessary attitude as
regards change.
At the time of the student occupations at Bristol, there was significant
worry among critical scholars about the policies being rushed through
(see McLennan 2010; Vostal et al. 2011) and university management’s
disregard for dissent. In the spirit of opposition at the time, there were the
possible outlines of a common front on campus, forming hitherto under-
developed alliances between staff and students; in a nutshell, a common
counter-hegemonic cause against the ‘repugnant philosophy underlying
the Browne Report’ (Thomas 2011, p. 10) and its recommendations of
fees and cuts. And yet, 5 years after this moment, there has been no cred-
ible staff effort to build a front. We have experienced in our own insti-
tution a prevailing disregard for local politics and ‘stirring up trouble’
on one’s doorstep. The awareness of and commitment to concepts such
as reflexivity in relation to research fieldwork (see Higate and Cameron
2006), the questioning of the wider orientation of international stud-
ies (see Rowley and Weldes 2013), or the preoccupation with ‘counter-
hegemony’ (Christie 2010, p. 171) stand in contrast to any critique of
neoliberalism’s effects on the university doorstep.
In 2012, in SPAIS, this took the form of a redundancy of a long-serving
staff member, a ‘freeing up’ of space to hire more teaching staff on a more
CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY 221
‘flexible’ basis, required to manage funding streams that vary from year to
year. Effectively, there was a lack of ‘critical’ solidarity: a defensive cam-
paign was the order of the day (see The ‘Keep Maggie’ Campaign Group
2012). SPAIS are not alone in confronting such challenges, but such chal-
lenges illustrate how local action is not just about localised outcomes, and
thus particular and distinct from a more general critical position concern-
ing higher education, but also about resisting the wider forces at work in
the specific misfortune. This is a connection that critical scholars fail to
recognise when they disassociate themselves and their politics from spe-
cific cases that are preferably seen as personal or one-offs.
COUNTER-HEGEMONY
We have identified a key challenge: mediating critical thinking with radi-
cal political activism and vice versa. In this respect, counter-hegemony is a
useful concept, as it grasps ‘practices which […] disarticulate the existing
order so as to install another form of hegemony’ (Mouffe 2005, p. 18).
We argue that counter-hegemonic intent links in well with the current
conjuncture in universities, in which there is plenty of opposition but no
sedimented opposition (see Scott 2014), no profound course of action
in front of any ‘us’. Theoretically, it clarifies the non-essentialist, open
notion of identity integral to the critical tradition. To be clear, campus
hegemony belongs to what Laclau and Mouffe describe as ‘basically met-
onymical’ (2001, p. 141). One can think of how a vice chancellor in a
university becomes, rather than simply represents, the university in dis-
course. Undoing the ties that bind managers as universities, students as
consumers, academics as producers of commodities, and so on, and thus
prefiguring a dissociative alternative to these associations is a first step in
any form of campus resistance: it is possible to redraw the naturalised link-
age, for example, of management with the university. In terms of the lack
of critical action that we have identified, in counter-hegemonic efforts, the
centrality of the construction of a subject gives lie to passivism. Counter-
hegemony is predicated on bringing to bear intensional political activism.
Counter-hegemony disregards a type of ‘sociologico-teleological
hypothesis’ (Laclau 2000, p. 45). This hypothesis claims that we are either
to be doomed or to be saved, to be limited to or liberated from our current
conjuncture, on the fatalistic basis of external factors outside our ken (i.e.,
the enlightened despotism of rational university managers or a Labour
government). Moreover, it holds no truck with a Jacobin decisionism that
222 C. ATHANASSIOU AND J. MELROSE
our oppositional approach may imply; that is, ignoring conditions on the
ground in order to advance righteous ethical principles, believing that if
enough agents behave as they only would if granted the opportunity to,
good will follow. Instead, ‘power and political mediation are inherent to
any universal emancipatory identity’ (Laclau 2000, p. 46). In Laclau and
Mouffe’s phraseology (2001, pp. 178–179), there is ‘no common core’
at which ‘a priori agents of change’, such as the university worker unvar-
nished or the untainted undergraduate, along with ‘privileged points and
moments of rupture’, such as the demotion of leaders or thwarted strikes,
coalesce.
As expounded by Laclau and Mouffe, counter-hegemony assumes con-
flict, difference, and the desire to deal with plurality by promoting a par-
ticularity: for example, in the context of higher education, supporting the
student-led campaign to abolish tuition fees, or furthering staff-backed
initiatives for more resources in terms of pay and pensions, while being
aware that in these initiatives success can only be achieved at the cost
of another marked interest, the university managerial class or the gov-
ernment. This pro-particularity, backing a certain horse, is, however, not
tantamount to being besotted with the individuality in question, with the
potential universal status of the particularity. For example, one cannot, in
the case of staff and management within a university, suggest that these
identities are truly self-serving, or that one group has a monopoly on
truth. Rather, the counter-hegemonic conception of the political has the
Machiavellian insight (see Mouffe 2005, p. 7) that if a we wants to for-
mulate a we, a professed multiplicity of agents in a plural war of interests,
we can effect stability in this flux. We can impose our will upon other wills
in a territory or time, thus engendering ‘a series of universalising effects’
(Laclau 2000, p. 49). ‘Investment is the cornerstone’, Laclau notes, ‘of
the operation called hegemony’ (2000, p. 85).
In developing a neo-Gramscian understanding of specific groups’ polit-
ical articulation of differing demands and outlooks to achieve dominance,
Laclau and Mouffe ‘see hegemony as a theory of the decision taken in
an undecideable terrain’ (2001, p. xi). Contrary to common-sense man-
tras, alternatives always exist; any totality is nothing more than an ever-
changing constitution. Thus, hegemonic constructs such as the current
mode found in higher education have to be seen as partial if in fact domi-
nant. Their contestability is not straightforward and external, as implied
in the sociologico-teleological normative framing, but it is within the
medium of the hegemonic interplay that we find the tools to challenge the
CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY 223
hegemonic order and to build our alternative. One does not leave or fall
back from the university front because it is lost or unintelligible—‘even in
order to differ, to subvert meanings, there has to be a meaning’ (Laclau
and Mouffe 2001, p. 112)—if one is adhering to a different interpreta-
tion, one stays there and works with what one has got.
In recent times, there have been attempts to build counter-hegemonic
projects, to construct a subject. In Laclau and Mouffe’s vocabulary, this
would be akin to a chain of equivalence, something to which Hallward
refers with regard to the successful CLASSE student mobilisation in
Quebec (see Hallward 2012). Forming a ‘collective will’, drawing together
groups opposed to the ‘they’ (Mouffe 2005, pp. 52–53) of our aloof neo-
liberal managerial adversaries, is the task at hand. At first, this may appear
trite. If you are opposed to how the university is being run, you agitate
for all individuals and groups—unions, societies, departments, and activ-
ist groups—to form a common front: ‘[t]he presence of the [counter-
hegemonic, radical] imaginary as a set of symbolic meanings which totalize
as negativity a certain social order […] essential for the constitution of all
left-wing thought’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. 190).
Yet there is a radical democratic understanding of a robust civil society
that qualifies such constructions of them and us. When Mouffe describes
legitimising enemies (see Mouffe 2005, p. 52), that is, the agonistic mode
of conceiving political contestation, she admits of a conflict that is only
partially halted by the type of hegemonic commitment that we have dis-
cussed. Political conflict is also predicated on heightened debate being
taken as the norm of things, an understanding that competing groups and
individuals are in it together as much as they are legitimately opposed.
One is not violating any code if one wants to draw attention to and orga-
nise around difference; acknowledging difference is not antithetical to
constructive dialogue, nor is it a personal statement on an individual’s
quintessential being (as vice chancellor or professor). In acknowledging
difference, our universities are political spaces where victories are not the
vanquishing of a deadly foe, but the establishment of a loser for the time
being: ‘we have to accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result
of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always
entails some form of exclusion’ (Mouffe 2000, p. 104).
In establishing our counter-hegemonic collectivity, the formation of a
democratic equivalence, which relies on the construction of a new ‘com-
mon sense’, we would expect to see a shift in the identity of the different
individuals involved. The coming together of our staff–student group is no
224 C. ATHANASSIOU AND J. MELROSE
CONCLUSION
As things stand, there has not been any real effort to deploy counter-
hegemony, where critique would be used to highlight key aspects of nega-
tivity so as to enable new orders to be built. We—as a collectivity of critical
scholars, a collectivity that we are adamant has to be articulated rather
than assumed—have remained static in relation to the common sense
226 C. ATHANASSIOU AND J. MELROSE
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CHAPTER 14
Hrvoje Tutek
It is a well-known story: even before the sovereign debt crisis hit the
European periphery and austerity was established as the dominant model
of handling it, the conservative (fiscal) policies systematically applied
across peripheral and core states had already begun treating large por-
tions of state budgets as afflictions—they were there to be cut. With the
financial crisis and its global spread, even the systems of tertiary educa-
tion, despite being hailed earlier as fundamental pillars of development
and driving motors of emerging ‘knowledge economies’, quickly became
just another uncomfortable figure in state budget tables.1 Encompassing a
1
The European University Association report from January 2011 provides an overview of
the severe budget cuts to public higher education across Europe, with peripheral countries
hit the hardest: in Latvia, the higher education budget was first cut by 48 % in 2009, and then
later in 2010 by another 18 % following recommendations by the IMF. In Greece, the gov-
ernment set cuts of 30 % as a target. Substantial budget cuts around or more than 10 %
occurred in Romania, Estonia, and Lithuania, cuts of between 5 % and 10 % in Ireland, and
H. Tutek
University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
up to 5 % in the Central and South Eastern Europe—Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia, and
Macedonia. Additionally, in countries like Hungary governments have discarded previous
commitments to increase funding (see EUA 2011).
2
OECD reports indicate that public spending on tertiary education increased in most
OECD countries between 1995 and 2008 (see, e.g., OECD 2011). Simultaneously, how-
ever, the increase in the number of students in tertiary education systems has been dramatic
and the costs of tertiary education also rose steadily (see Altbach et al. 2009).
3
This has been a long-term trend. The UNESCO report states: ‘It is no longer possible to
lure the best minds to academe. A significant part of the problem is financial. Even before the
current world financial crisis, academic salaries did not keep up with remuneration for highly
trained professionals everywhere. Now, with tremendous financial pressures on higher edu-
cation generally, the situation will no doubt deteriorate further’ (Altbach et al. 2009, p. 92).
In the UK, for example, ‘academic pay has fallen in relative terms. In 1981–2001 non-
manual average earnings rose by 57.6 % after inflation. In the same period the salary of aca-
demics at the top of the Lecturer B scale in the old universities rose by 6.1 % above inflation,
and that of academics on point 6 of the senior lecturer scale in the new universities by 7.6 %
after inflation’ (Callinicos 2006, p. 16). In the USA, ‘a recent study by the American Association
of University Professors shows that even full professors are underpaid in comparison to non-
academic positions in similar fields’ (CFHE 2015).
FROM CAREER MANAGEMENT TO CLASS ANALYSIS AND COLLECTIVE ACTION 233
4
It is often said that such developments affect young academic workers the hardest, but
there are many casually employed academic workers who perform low-paid fixed-term con-
tract or even free work well into their thirties, forties, and later, which also suggests that this
is not a new development (see Courtois and O’Keefe 2015; Auriol 2010).
234 H. TUTEK
5
The above-mentioned Nature report features a graph showing that foreign postdocs
outnumber foreign professors in almost all countries included in the GlobSci survey ‘Restless
Youth’, thus completely disregarding the changing structural conditions of academic work
between generations and naturalising a historical trend (see Van Noorden 2012).
236 H. TUTEK
6
I am using ‘antisystemic’ here in Immanuel Wallerstein’s sense of ‘antisystemic move-
ments’: ‘These movements were all antisystemic in one simple sense: They were struggling
against the established power structures in an effort to bring into existence a more demo-
cratic, more egalitarian historical system than the existing one’ (Wallerstein 2014, p. 160).
FROM CAREER MANAGEMENT TO CLASS ANALYSIS AND COLLECTIVE ACTION 237
7
Bousquet writes about the USA, but the same structural logic can be observed across the
world-system.
240 H. TUTEK
the labor of persons without the terminal degree. And if this is true, the
creation of persons holding the doctorate may be more properly named
a ‘by-product’ of the graduate employee system: persons who don’t hold
the degree are inherently more ‘marketable’ than persons who do. That is,
this is a system that creates holders of the Ph.D. but doesn’t have much use
for them. Indeed, the buildup of degree holders in the system represents a
potentially toxic blockage. (Bousquet 2002, p. 89)
8
Available research shows that 74 % of young academic workers in the US humanities
expect to remain working in the academic field, while ‘43 % of humanities PhD recipients
have no commitment for either employment or postdoctoral study at the time of degree
completion’ (Rogers 2015, p. 2).
242 H. TUTEK
[P]ost-ac is more than just being outside of academia or past one’s academic
career: it’s a set of values about, and way of relating to, academia. […] If
alt-ac is the good daughter of academe, post-ac is the family’s black sheep—
ready to air the dirty laundry in the hopes of shaking up the (damaging and
corrupt) status quo. […] Post-ac is at heart a state of disillusionment. […]
an identity or way of identifying in relation to the institution of academia,
and a belief that the current system is flawed, cruel, unsustainable, and there-
fore impossible to directly engage with […] It is an identity characterized
FROM CAREER MANAGEMENT TO CLASS ANALYSIS AND COLLECTIVE ACTION 243
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246 H. TUTEK
A Bartlett, Will, 35
Abbott, Tony, 155 Bauman, Zygmunt, 136, 207
Adorno, Theodor W., 143, 146–7, Bebbington, Warren, 154, 158
216–9 Beck Sayre, Meredith, 241, 242
Afonso, Alexandre, 171 Becker, Gary, 45, 47
Allen, Kieran, 169 Bell, Currer, 243
Allen, Richard, 9, 81 Bell, Daniel, 28, 84
Alquati, Romano, 193 Bembič, Branko, 15–16, 187
Altbach, Philip G., 168–9, 232, 233 Berardi, Franco, 207
Althusser, Louis, 143 Bergfeld, Mark, 16–17, 201
Ambani, Mukesh, 8, 57, 64 Bhambra, Gurminder K., 216
Apple, Michael W., 167, 169 Birchall, Ian, 208
Arendt, Hannah, 137–9, 146 Birkner, Martin, 133
Aristotle, 189 Birla, Kumarmangalam, 8, 57, 64
Athanassiou, Cerelia, 17–18, 215 Bobbio, Luigi, 193
Attalides, Michael. A., 121 Bohle, Dorothee, 35
Auriol, Laudeline, 233–5 Bologna, Sergio, 192, 193
Azziz, Ricardo, 103, 104, 112 Boltanski, Luc, 161
Börzel, Tanja, 31
Bourdieu, Pierre, 143–4, 216
B Bousquet, Marc, 5, 106, 239–40
Bachand, Raymond, 211 Bowles, Samuel, 47
Badiou, Alain, 201 Bradley, Omar N., 95
Bailey, Michael, 216 Braverman, Harry, 160
M N
Maassen, Peter, 24–7 Neave, Guy, 23
MacCarthaigh, Muiris, 174 Nelson, Cary, 173, 234
INDEX 251
T
R Tadros, Edmund, 163
Rabo, Annika, 169 Tamtik, Merli, 27–9, 31–2
Radaelli, Claudio M., 25 Teferra, Damtew, 169, 170, 172, 173
Radloff, Ali, 153 Thatcher, Margaret, 118, 141, 168,
Rancière, Jacques, 143–4 205
Raunig, Gerald, 138, 203 Theodoropoulos, Dimitris, 234
Rivard, Ry, 108 Thomas, Keith, 215, 220
Roberts, William Clare, 53 Thomson, Stephanie, 91
252 INDEX
V
Van Noorden, Richard, 234, 235 X
Varma, Roli, 173 Xypolia, Ilia, 119
Vassiliou, George, 118
Verdun, Amy, 29
Vijayan, P. K., 8–9, 57 Z
Virno, Paolo, 133, 137, 138, 146 Žagar, Igor Ž., 41
Vliegenthart, Arjan, 35 Zanou, Konstantina, 171
Völpel, Eva, 17, 204 Žitko, Mislav, 232
Vostal, Filip, 220 Zito, Anthony R., 28
Vukasović, Martina, 27, 32 Žižek, Slavoj, 212
Zuckerberg, Mark, 161
W
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 236
Walters, Joanna, 171