Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education: Palgrave Critical University Studies

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’.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14707
Suman Gupta • Jernej Habjan • Hrvoje Tutek
Editors
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
Palgrave Critical University Studies

ISBN 978-1-137-49323-1 ISBN 978-1-137-49324-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49324-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936878
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
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
• the nature of academic work

• students’ experiences of learning
• leadership and institutional politics
• research and the process of knowledge production
• the social and public good.
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:
• Whose interests are being served?

• How is power being exercised and upon whom?
• What means are being promulgated to ensure subjugation?
• What might a more transformational approach look like?
• What are the impediments to this happening?
• What, then, needs be done about it?
The series intends to foster the following kind of contributions:
• Critical studies of university contexts, that while they might be local

in nature, are shown to be global in their reach;
• Insightful and authoritative accounts that are courageous and that
‘speak back’ to dominant reforms being inflicted on universities;
• Critical accounts of research relating to universities that use innova-
tive methodologies;
• Looking at what is happening to universities across disciplinary fields,
and internationally;
• Examining trends, patterns and themes, and presenting them in a
way that re-theorises and re-invigorates knowledge around the status
and purposes of universities; and
• Above all, advancing the publication of accounts that re-position the
study of universities in a way that makes clear what alternative robust
policy directions for universities might look like.
The series aims to encourage discussion of issues such as academic work,

academic freedom and marketisation in universities. One of the shortcomings
of many extant texts in the field of university studies is that they attempt too
much, and as a consequence, their focus becomes diluted. There is an urgent
need for studies in a number of aspects with quite a sharp focus, for example:
1. There is a conspicuous absence of studies that give existential

accounts of what life is like for students in the contemporary univer-
sity. We need to know more about the nature of the stresses and
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE vii
strains, and the consequences these market-driven distortions have

for the learning experiences of students, their lives and futures.
2. We know very little about the nature and form of how institutional
politics are engineered and played out, by whom, in what ways and
with what consequences in the neoliberal university. We need
‘insider’ studies that unmask the forces that sustain and maintain
and enable current reform trajectories in universities.
3. The actions of policy elites transnationally are crucial to what is hap-
pening in universities worldwide. But we have yet to become privy
to the thinking that is going on, and how it is legitimated and trans-
mitted, and the means by which it is made opaque. We need studies
that puncture this veil of silence.
4. None of what is happening that is converting universities into annexes
of the economy would be possible without a particular version of
leadership having been allowed to become dominant. We need to
know how this is occurring, what forms of resistance there have been
to it, how these have been suppressed and the forms of solidarity
necessary to unsettle and supplant this dominant paradigm.
5. Finally, and taking the lead from critical geographers, there is a press-
ing need for studies with a focus on universities as unique spaces and
places – possibly in concert with sociologists and anthropologists.
We look forward to this series advancing these important agenda and to

the reclamation and restitution of universities as crucial intellectual demo-
cratic institutions.
John Smyth
Professor of Education and Social Justice,
University of Huddersfield, and
Emeritus Professor, Federation University Australia
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Academia and the Production

of Unemployment 1
Suman Gupta, Jernej Habjan, and Hrvoje Tutek
Part I The Political Economy of Higher Education

Policy Initiatives Now 21
2 The Implausible Knowledge Triangle

of the Western Balkans 23
Danijela Dolenec
3 Human and Inhuman Capital, and Schooling:

The Case of Slovenia 41
Primož Krašovec
4 Privatising Minds: New Educational Policies in India 57

P. K. Vijayan
Part II Management and Leadership Against

Academic Freedom 79
ix
x CONTENTS
5 ‘Academic Leadership’ and the Conditions

of Academic Work 81
Richard Allen and Suman Gupta
6 Not Working: Shared Services and the

Production of Unemployment 103
Kim Emery
Part III Generation Gaps and Economic Dependency

in Academic Life 115
7 Graduate Unemployment in Post-Haircut Cyprus:

Where Have All the Students Gone? 117
Mike Hajimichael
8 ‘Dare to Dare’: Academic Pedagogy in Times

of Flattened Hierarchies 133
Ivana Perica
9 Cannibalising the Collegium: The Plight

of the Humanities and Social Sciences
in the Managerial University 151
George Morgan
10 Between Career Progression and Career Stagnation:

Casualisation, Tenure, and the Contract of
Indefinite Duration in Ireland 167
Mariya Ivancheva and Micheal O’Flynn
Part IV The Scope of Collective Action in Academia 185
11 Are University Struggles Worth Fighting? 187

Branko Bembič
CONTENTS xi
12 You’re Either a Flower in the Dustbin or the Spark

That Lights a Fire: On Precarity and Student Protests 201
Mark Bergfeld
13 Whither Critical Scholarship in the Modern University?

Critique, Radical Democracy, and Counter-Hegemony 215
Cerelia Athanassiou and Jamie Melrose
14 Academics as Workers: From Career Management

to Class Analysis and Collective Action 231
Hrvoje Tutek
Index 247
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Richard Allen is Professor Emeritus of English at The Open University. He was

a member of the Steering Group for the Quality Assurance Agency Institutional
Audit in 2004, and was an academic lead for the Audit in 2009. For a number of
years, he has been involved in collaborative work in Indian higher education. He
is co-author, with Subarno Chattarji, Supriya Chaudhuri, and Suman Gupta, of
Reconsidering English Studies in Indian Higher Education (2015).
Cerelia Athanassiou is an independent researcher, having completed a doctorate
at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of
Bristol. Her thesis is titled ‘De-Militarising Terrorism: (How) Does the Obama
Administration Disarticulate the Discourse of the Global War on Terror?’ Her
most recent article, ‘“Gutsy” Decisions and Passive Processes’, has been published
in the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Branko Bembič is a junior researcher and a doctoral candidate of Sociology at the
University of Ljubljana. He has MAs in Economy and Philosophy from the
University of Ljubljana. Bembič has published a book, in Slovenian, on the politi-
cal and economic history of the West since World War II, and several articles on
contemporary capitalism. He is a member of the Initiative for Democratic
Socialism, Ljubljana.
Mark Bergfeld is a doctoral candidate in the School of Business and Management
at Queen Mary, University of London. He was a leading participant in the UK
student movement in 2010. He was a member of the National Union of Students
Executive between 2010 and 2012, and the spokesperson for the Education
Activist Network. He has written on global student revolts for Adbusters, Al Jazeera
English, New Statesman, The Nation, The Occupied Times of London, and other
magazines. His writings are available at www.mdbergfeld.com.
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Danijela Dolenec is a research associate at the Faculty of Political Science,

University of Zagreb. She holds a PhD from ETH Zurich, and an MA from the
LSE. She authored Democratic Institutions and Authoritarian Rule in Southeast
Europe (2013) and has contributed to The Re-Institutionalization of Higher
Education in the Western Balkans (2014) and The Globalisation Challenge for
European Higher Education (2013). She is the coordinator of Group 22, a green
left think-tank in Zagreb.
Kim Emery is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. She is
the author of The Lesbian Index: Pragmatism and Lesbian Subjectivity in the
Twentieth-Century United States (2002) and is currently working on a book on
queer theory and the future of the university. Her articles have appeared in
Academe Online, Cultural Logic, Currents in Teaching and Learning, Profession,
South Atlantic Review, and Thought and Action.
Suman Gupta is Chair in Literature and Cultural History at The Open University.
His books include Corporate Capitalism and Political Philosophy (2001),
Re-Reading Harry Potter (2003, 2009), The Theory and Reality of Democracy
(2006), Social Constructionist Identity Politics and Literary Studies (2007),
Globalization and Literature (2009), Imagining Iraq (2011), Contemporary
Literature (2011), Consumable Texts in Contemporary India (2015), and Philology
and Global English Studies (2015).
Jernej Habjan is a research fellow at the literary institute of the Research Centre
of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was a postdoctoral researcher
in the research group ‘Globalization and Literature’ at the University of Munich
and a research fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in
Vienna. He has co-edited, with Jessica Whyte, (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental
Philosophy (2014) and, with Fabienne Imlinger, Globalizing Literary Genres
(2016).
Mike Hajimichael is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communications
at the University of Nicosia. He holds a PhD from The Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is the editor of Art and
Social Justice: The Media Connection (2015). He also produces two weekly radio
shows, Outernationa and In Session, that are broadcast globally on five stations.
Mariya Ivancheva is a postdoctoral research fellow at University College Dublin.
She works on an IRC-funded project on new inequalities in higher education in
Ireland. Ivancheva has done research and published on the legacy and present of
state socialism. She has done fieldwork at the Bolivarian University in Venezuela
and taught research design and the sociology of social movements and civil society,
as well as leading a number of summer school courses on social movements.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Primož Krašovec is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Arts,

University of Ljubljana. Previously, he was a research assistant at the Educational
Research Institute in Ljubljana. He has authored book chapters in The European
Public Sphere and the Media (2009), Poverty and Wealth (2013) and Soziale
Kämpfe in Ex-Jugoslawien (2013), and his articles have appeared in Journalism
Studies and Up and Underground. In 2011, he was actively involved in the occupa-
tion of the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana.
Jamie Melrose teaches at the University of Bristol in the School of Sociology,
Politics and International Studies, from where he obtained a PhD in Politics. His
research interests include the history of Marxism, historical epistemology, and
intellectual history after the linguistic turn. He is also the vice president of the
University of Bristol branch of the University and College Union.
George Morgan is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Culture and Society,
Western Sydney University. He has written or co-edited Unsettled Places: Aboriginal
People and Urbanisation in New South Wales (2006), Outrageous! Moral Panics in
Australia (2007), and Global Islamophobia (2012). His articles have appeared in
the Economic and Labour Relations Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of
Urban Affairs, Journal of Youth Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.
Micheal O’Flynn is a postdoctoral research fellow at University College Dublin
and Associate Lecturer in Social Science with The Open University. He is the
author of Profitable Ideas: The Ideology of the Individual in Capitalist Development
(2009) and co-editor, with Odette Clarke, Paul M. Hayes, and Martin J. Power,
of Marxist Perspectives on Irish Society (2011). His articles have appeared in Critical
Sociology, Critique, Sociological Research Online and Sociology.
Ivana Perica is employed at the Institute for Pedagogical Professionalisation at
the University of Graz. She finished her dissertation on the public and private as
spheres of the political at the University of Vienna, where she was a junior
researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies. She has edited a Croatian collection of
essays on the pedagogy and the political, and contributed to many German-
language edited volumes on German studies.
Hrvoje Tutek is a lecturer in the English Department of the Faculty of Humanities
and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb. He studied Croatian, English, and
Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb and Duke University. He is
currently finishing his dissertation on capitalist universality and the politics of nar-
rative form in the research group ‘Globalization and Literature’ at the University
of Munich. He was actively involved in the Croatian student movement against the
commercialisation of public universities.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
P. K. Vijayan is Assistant Professor of English at the Hindu College, University

of Delhi. He received a doctoral degree in Development Studies from the
International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. His scholarly interests
include critical theory, English literature, postcolonial theory and gender stud-
ies, orientalism, and higher education in India. He has contributed to Translating
Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India (2002), and his articles have
appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Economic and Political
Weekly.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Academia and the Production

of Unemployment
Suman Gupta, Jernej Habjan, and Hrvoje Tutek
In communism, Marx and Engels wrote in 1845–1846, everyone is able

‘to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the eve-
ning, criticise after dinner, […] without ever becoming hunter, fisher-
man, herdsman or critic’ (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 47). Now, is this
not how everyday life of today’s academics looks like? Are they not also
teaching in the morning, serving coffee in the afternoon, proofread-
ing in the evening, and grading after dinner, without ever becoming
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
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

S. Gupta et al. (eds.), Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global
Higher Education, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49324-8_1
2 S. GUPTA ET AL.
teachers, waiters, proofreaders, or PhD supervisors? Indeed, the world of

academic workers appears as what Marx and Engels described as commu-
nism. But then again, the wealth of nations also ‘appears as an “immense
collection of commodities”’, to quote a later Marx book (1976, p. 125),
the one devoted, according to Fredric Jameson at least, to the question
of unemployment (see Jameson 2011, pp. 2–3). And this is precisely
the difference between the prefigured communism of the ‘early’ Marx
and the criticised capitalism of the ‘mature’ Marx, namely, the differ-
ence between the undoing of employment and, quite simply, unemploy-
ment. Academics today appear as communists insofar as they are in effect
unemployed.
The central hypothesis of this edited volume is that the kinds of restruc-
turings of academic work that are underway today not only have increased
employment insecurity in academia but also may actually be producing
unemployment both within and outside academia. The idea is that recent
and current reorganisations of higher education and research work, and
reorientations of academic life (as students, researchers, and teachers)
generally, which are taking place around the world, achieve exactly the
opposite of what they claim: though ostensibly undertaken to facilitate
employment, these moves actually produce unemployment both for those
within academia and for graduate job seekers in other sectors.
To flesh out the hypothesis further, the kinds of restructurings involved
are (1) moving away from public funding of higher education towards self-
funding and loans, which effectively blur the boundaries between public
and private interests; (2) aligning policy for higher education pedagogy
and research with the putative expectations of employers and ‘users’ in
different sectors, which entails pushing for ever-greater application-based
(rather than critical and epistemological) study; (3) increasing emphasis
on academic hierarchies (academic ‘leadership’ and line management) and
ad hoc or casual appointments (keeping a large stratum of academic work-
ers underpaid and insecure) in the institutional structuring of research
and pedagogy; (4) effectively delinking academic management from aca-
demic production and engagement, so that academic management often
works like corporate management or management consultancies with
‘skills’ that are indifferent to academic values; (5) reducing funding for
research which is not ostentatiously applied, and making funding con-
ditional to being ‘busy’ (organising conferences, exhibitions, networks,
events, etc.) at the expense of time for reading, writing, and productive
discussion; (6) introducing measures of public standing (publicity) that
INTRODUCTION: ACADEMIA AND THE PRODUCTION OF UNEMPLOYMENT 3
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.
The making of this collection of essays was overdetermined by a basic

performative contradiction: those who are willing to engage in a sustained
critique of academia tend to be those who often cannot find the material
conditions for such a critique within academia. Now, the cause and effect
can be a matter of discussion: critics may be systematically marginalised
in academia by their targets; or else those academics who find themselves
on the margins of academia often develop a critical stance towards it. For
both groups, however, the very situation that gives them motivation for
critique is also what makes that critique difficult to execute. And indeed,
not unlike the illusory yet necessary appearance of communism in the
opening example of precarious academic workers, this volume may appear
as a product of unalienated labour, due, for example, to the extraordinarily
high proportion of collective authorship and open-access online resources.
Yet this only appears as communism: if contributors wrote their chapters
in pairs, this is not because they live in a post-capitalist commune but
often because they were not able to find the time to write their chapters
on their own; in those chapters they tended to quote open-access online
sites (rather than, say, monographs published by university presses), but
this is not because the struggle for the commons has been won globally
but because critical and empirical material on academia is often limited to
blogs (rather than being published, say, by American university presses).
So, the very fact that you are holding this book in your hands is the
result of a practical overcoming of a contradiction that puts an epistemo-
logical obstacle on the way of any critique of the very material conditions
of critical thinking. Indeed, a distinctive feature of this book is that it
does not call only upon experts who are ensconced in their careers to pro-
nounce on the issues raised. Contributors here are from different genera-
tions and societies (from Australia and the USA to Slovenia and Croatia,
from the UK and Germany to India and Cyprus), and at different points
in their academic careers (from full professors to doctoral candidates), yet
they are all concerned about the changing contours of the profession, and
they have all been engaged in recent student struggles. This book is pre-
mised on the notion that experiencing or having experienced employment
insecurity and engaging with academic thinking and research need not be
unrelated activities, and that life experience and empirical research and
reasoning (in a generalising or universal direction) need not be alienated
from each other. On the contrary, they may feed productively into each
other, insofar as a reflection on the singular precarious conditions of one’s
own academic engagement offers the clearest view on the increasingly
universal condition of the academic production of unemployment. In

other words, the increasingly unproductive impact of employment insecu-
rity on academic research is not the only way life experience and academic
thinking can be interrelated. As academics, we can also do the opposite
and use our research skills to analyse precisely the employment insecurity
that we are experiencing. Moreover, such a reflection on the social condi-
tions of our academic work is indispensable if we want to conduct this
work as proper scholarly (as opposed to unreflexive, ideological) practice.
This is perhaps why the post-2007 Great Recession has brought not
only a deepening of the crisis in academia but also a new wave of criti-
cal studies on this accelerated commodification of knowledge. For exam-
ple, Andrew McGettigan’s The Great University Gamble (2013)—a book
intended to do for the UK what Chris Newfield’s 2008 book Unmaking the
Public University did for the USA, and to explain in the process the author’s
encounter with precarisation amid the notorious dissolution of continental
philosophy at Middlesex University—offers a detailed political and economic
analysis of the current UK government’s higher education policies, warning
that British universities are now open to commercial pressures that effec-
tively transform education from a public good into a private financial invest-
ment. Contributors to Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher
Education follow McGettigan’s argument while widening his historical and
geographical scope beyond UK government policies. By doing this, they
also follow the argument, put forward by Jeffrey R. Di Leo in his 2014 book
Corporate Humanities in Higher Education, that the neoliberal commodi-
fication of higher education requires humanists to be even better at what
they do best, namely, valuing contributions for the ways they advance criti-
cal dialogue within academy. Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global
Higher Education can also be viewed as an attempt to update the argument
Marc Bousquet developed in 2008 in How the University Works, namely
that the very concept of the job market works to mask the ways in which
the dominant labourers in the university classrooms are underpaid adjunct
instructors. Last but not least, by following the Edu-Factory Collective in its
rejection, in Toward a Global Autonomous University (2009), of any nostal-
gia for the privileged place of scholarship and national culture that used to
be guaranteed by the university, this book sketches ways of broadening the
perspective of critical pedagogy as assumed, for example, in Sheila Macrine’s
edited volume Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times (2009).
***
6 S. GUPTA ET AL.
In this volume, the examination of the relationship between knowledge

production and the production of unemployment begins with a series of
insights into the political economy of recent higher education policy ini-
tiatives. Danijela Dolenec opens the collection by focusing on the Western
Balkans. Within the broader process of European integration, the Bologna
process and the Lisbon Strategy introduced a new and spectacular dynamic
into the affairs of higher education in Europe, carrying the potential
of transforming higher education as fundamentally as the nation-state
changed the medieval universities. Bologna and Lisbon are taken to fur-
ther the same four basic objectives: mobility, employability, attractiveness,
and competitiveness. While Bologna aims to reorganise higher education
systems through three-cycle structures, comparable degrees, and qualifica-
tion frameworks, the revamped 2005 Lisbon Agenda focuses on making
Europe a more attractive place to invest and work in, making knowledge
and innovation the heart of growth, and creating more and better jobs. In
the Western Balkans, these processes are perceived as more binding than
they actually are, argues Dolenec in her chapter, as they importantly shape
national strategic plans and legislative agendas. Importing the rhetoric of
these initiatives, countries of the region vow to create ‘knowledge societ-
ies’ and ‘knowledge triangles’ that will supposedly advance their econo-
mies. Usually without appreciating the irony, these rhetorical figures are
adopted as official policy goals in the poorest regions of the European
Union, where gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is at 30–40 %
of the EU27 average, where registered unemployment rates are as high
as 30 %, and where the service economy stands for waiters, cooks, and
care workers instead of IT and high-tech industries. Dolenec analyses this
unhappy policy transfer by grounding it in the political economy of EU
peripheral states, on the one hand, and in the context of austerity poli-
tics, on the other. As dependent market economies, peripheral states of
the Western Balkans are highly reliant on foreign investment, which has
meant that they suffered contraction since the onset of the global eco-
nomic crisis in 2008. The imperative of balanced public budgets demands
austerity measures, which has been reflected in cuts to public spending on
higher education and research. Gross investments in research and develop-
ment in the region have declined dramatically in the past two decades, and
today the region invests below its level of development. The whole region
invests approximately €495 million in research and development per year,
which is the equivalent to one US research university. On the basis of this
evidence, Dolenec questions the appropriateness of the wholesale transfer
of these European objectives to countries of the Western Balkans. While

many researchers argue that Bologna and Lisbon processes helped advance
an instrumental concept of higher education in these countries, Dolenec
pursues a less researched problem, that of charting the problematic impacts
of adopting the rhetoric of policy change designed for advanced knowl-
edge economies of the core in dramatically different socio-economic con-
texts of the European periphery.
Building on his experience as a radical theorist and activist in Slovenia
and other ex-Yugoslav parts of the Western Balkans, Primož Krašovec
refutes the theory of human capital from the standpoint of the critique
of political economy. In the first part of his chapter, he sketches the intel-
lectual history and sociopolitical context of the development of theories of
human capital. He then moves on to criticise the neoliberal equalisation
of labour with capital as well as the theory according to which investment
in human capital brings profits to individual workers. In the final sec-
tion, Krašovec shows how current educational reforms impact the learning
process and the working conditions at public universities in Slovenia and,
by extension, comparable countries. Human-capital theory was conceived
as early as the 1960s in the circle of American neoliberal economists, with
its prehistory going back to the neoliberal epistemology as it was con-
ceived in Vienna in the early 1930s. Yet it needed almost 20 years to gain
recognition in both academic and policy-making circles. For it was only
in the 1980s that human-capital theory was able to be broadened by new
growth theory and its macroeconomic dimension. And as for the gen-
eral social and economic conditions that allowed for the growing impor-
tance of human-capital theory, the key ones, for Krašovec, were the rise
of neoliberalism in general and neoliberal reforms of higher education
in particular. Human-capital theory served as an ideological backbone of
these reforms, which tightened the integration of the university with the
economy, introduced (or increased) tuition fees, and standardised testing,
constant evaluations, and audit procedures, increasing workload of both
students and professors. In the 1990s, the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched its ideological cam-
paign for the ‘knowledge-based economy’, and the EU started to prepare
the Lisbon Strategy and the Bologna reform. During that time, human-
capital theory underwent a silent mutation and began to creep into aca-
demic pedagogy. Another 20 years later, a review of Slovenian academic
pedagogy literature shows that that there is hardly an article that does not
list either ‘human capital’ or ‘knowledge society’ among its keywords. Yet,
8 S. GUPTA ET AL.
as Krašovec concludes, in a stark contradistinction with the promises of

increased general social welfare in the knowledge-based society, methods
of its implementation hurt first and foremost those who are supposed to
be its cutting edge, namely intellectual workers. The general notion of the
knowledge-based society and the particular theory of human capital are as
flawed as they are ubiquitous, according to Krašovec.
P.K. Vijayan closes the section on the political economy of recent higher
education policy initiatives by discussing new educational policies in India.
The publication of the ‘Report on a Policy Framework for Reforms in
Education’ in 2000 saw the initiation of a major shift in policy formulation
for higher education in India, according to Vijayan, a shift that has been
sustained independently of the ideology or political programme of the
government in power. The report was co-authored by Mukesh Ambani
and Kumaramangalam Birla, respective heads of two of the most powerful
business houses in India, with rapidly growing global presence and influ-
ence. That it was commissioned by the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade
and Industry is a telling indicator of the direction the state was already
looking in regarding policy changes in higher education. The report set
the agenda for the series of further reports, policy initiatives, and legisla-
tive measures that followed, some produced by the government but oth-
ers, for example, by the multinational consultancy Ernst & Young Pvt. Ltd
(in collaboration with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce
and Industry and the Planning Commission of the Government of India).
As Vijayan demonstrates in his chapter, all of these documents and ini-
tiatives are focused on opening the educational sector to foster greater
private initiatives and encourage more local and international investors;
tailoring curricula and syllabi, as well as educational schedules, to meet
the expectations and requirements of commerce and industry; synchro-
nising the Indian higher education system with its global (i.e., European
and American) counterparts to allow for easy movement of personnel and
students between the systems; encouraging the use of information and
communication technology in all educational spheres; introducing sys-
tems of calibration and evaluation of teaching based on various criteria
of ‘productivity’; introducing systems of regulation and accountability of
time spent ‘on the job’ aimed essentially at actively depoliticising campus
spaces, but ostensibly at enforcing discipline and encouraging research
and publication; shifting increasingly towards contract-based employ-
ment, and away from permanent tenures; and, finally, introducing mea-
sures that will bypass or otherwise render redundant the various provisions
of affirmative action for socially and economically weaker sections. Vijayan

examines these documents and legislations with the aim of identifying and
exposing the politics of the various provisions and prohibitions espoused
in them; he outlines the possible ramifications and implications, for higher
education, in their implementation; and he comments on their relations
to larger economic, social, and policy changes that are underway in India
currently. Vijayan also briefly discusses the (in)effectiveness of judicial
review of such processes, by way of discussing courses of action through
reference to a specific case to which he was party.
For those concerned with teaching and scholarly work in higher edu-
cation now, talk of ‘academic leadership’ is everywhere, Richard Allen
and Suman Gupta note in their chapter, which opens the section of the
book devoted to management and leadership against academic freedom.
Scanning academic jobs pages, looking at Research Councils’ funding
schemes, examining government policy documents on higher educa-
tion, consulting university promotions and appraisals procedures, mulling
academic workload calculations, and listening to deliberations in univer-
sity committees—all these suggest that the phrase academic leadership has,
so to speak, gone viral. 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 con-
stantly urge the need to nurture more academic leaders and corporations
that can cultivate them; and newspapers inform of the privileges of top-
level academic leaders with grudging admiration. In their chapter, Allen
and Gupta attempt to contextualise the shifting connotations of academic
leadership in order to understand the current circumstances of academic
life. In the first part of the chapter, they do so in a broad manner, by
considering the conceptual nuances of academic leadership amid phases
in rationalising the conditions of academic work. In the second part, they
offer a more contextually grounded view from the UK. According to Allen
and Gupta, a historical perspective on conceptualising academic leader-
ship reveals a shift, starting in the 1970s, from regarding academic leader-
ship as leadership by academics for academic work in the public interest
towards leadership by professional leaders (managers) over academics to
mould academic work for public and private, profit-generating, interests.
Allen and Gupta call for a historical examination of this shift towards man-
agerialism in academia. They contribute to it indirectly by outlining con-
secutive conceptual reorientations of the relationship between academic
leadership and the conditions of academic work—from the consideration
10 S. GUPTA ET AL.
of academic work as a public good whose material conditions should

largely be self-determined; through the exposure of this public good to
administrative measurements of its public benefits (first of its exterior-
ised products, and then, retroactively, also of its internal working process),
the introduction of professional managers and representatives of private
capital, respectively, responsible for producing and reviewing these mea-
surements, and the use of these descriptive measurements as proscriptive
guidelines; to the final fragmentation of the public university on behalf of
the interests of private ‘stakeholders’. In the second half of the chapter,
the UK academia in general and academic leadership and internship in
particular are examined from the perspective of this shift from ‘academic
leadership’ to ‘academic leadership’.
Moving on from the European to the global leader in academic mana-
gerialism, Kim Emery examines the USA, specifically the University of
Florida’s move to a shared-services model of staffing for the College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences. The basic goal of shared services is to remove
routine administrative tasks (accounting, human resources management,
payroll, purchasing, etc.) from the diverse departments, institutes, and
offices in which they traditionally reside, and to consolidate them in a
single centralised operation. The utility of shared services relies mostly
on the assumption that because the work done by support staff is not in
itself explicitly ‘academic’, the organisation of that work is irrelevant to
the properly intellectual purpose of the university. Like incentive-based
budgeting, responsibility-centre management, and other techniques of
the corporate university, shared services have emerged in the broader con-
text of planned deprivation and precarious employment. In Florida, such
context has been set up by neoliberal politics throughout the 2000s. By
2012, shared services were introduced at the University of Florida as a
cost-saving measure predicated on the assumption that members of the
office staff, having lost the protections of unionisation, would also lose
their jobs. The initial plan of 35 lay-offs due to the introduction of shared
services targeted mostly women, a multiracial group and mostly middle-
aged and older, most making less than $35,000 a year. In response, a
coalition of faculty, staff, students, and local residents emerged that cat-
egorically refused division among staff, faculty, and graduate employees.
As a result, the departments of the College were given the choice to opt
out of shared services, and lateral reassignment replaced lay-off as the first
option for affected staff. Nevertheless, another structural change has been
effected at the University of Florida: the shared-services centre has been
established. Over the course of a decade, a series of interrelated administra-

tive manoeuvres—shared services, departmental reorganisation, the shift
to a revenue-based budgeting system, and a dramatic, statewide union
decertification drive—has produced an increase in unemployment. On this
basis, Emery notes that the very notion of the production of unemploy-
ment invites two distinct readings: Emery asks not only what produces this
unemployment but also what this unemployment produces. Her answer
to the second question is a loss of departmental autonomy, increased anxi-
ety and precarity, and decreased academic freedom. So, the immediate
emergency of impending lay-offs may have worked, at the University of
Florida, as a decoy to distract the coalition from the structural acceptance
of the shared-services model. If so, one lesson learned, concludes Emery,
is that premising structural change on pernicious distinctions among
employees is at least not automatically a winning strategy. This is a criti-
cal accomplishment, in her view, as the divisions encouraged by shared
services appeal not only to faculty’s traditional vanity, but also to the par-
ticular vulnerability of our current circumstances.
Opening the section on generation gaps and economic dependency in
academic life, Mike Hajimichael examines the state of higher education in
Cyprus and especially the predicament of students after they finish their
studies in the context of the current economic crisis. Hajimichael out-
lines the evolution of higher education in Cyprus, with its postcolonial
belatedness and its strong emphasis on the dichotomy between the private
and the state sector. On this basis, he presents the results of ethnographic
interviews that he conducted with five communications graduates whom
he had taught at the University of Nicosia. Because of the economic crisis
in Cyprus, many of these graduates now face the prospects of unemploy-
ment, employment insecurity, and low-income, highly exploitative jobs.
Uncertain future, the stigmatisation of the unemployed, and the desperate
support of family and friends were themes common to all five interviews.
The biggest problem may be the way the society has changed in relation to
unemployment, according to Hajimichael. 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 %. This means that Cyprus is now faced with high
and long-term levels of unemployment, especially since official statistics
are constructed 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. This, of course, also means that people who
12 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
and professors were structured as pedagogical relations of ‘teachers’ and

‘students’ (or even ‘fathers’ and ‘sons’, as in the German Doktorvater and
wissenschaftlicher Nachwuchs), in the ‘new’ academia the ‘students’ have
not gained more autonomy but have—and this is her second point—been
repositioned into relations of dependency to their ‘managers’, ‘employ-
ers’, and ‘project leaders’. As precarious workers, all non-professors face
the pedagogy that is hidden in the paradoxical ‘horizontal hierarchies’ of
anonymous opinions of their peers, as well as in diverse (career) training
programmes offered by the universities themselves (courses on ‘academic
small talk and networking’, ‘lifelong learning’, etc.). The anonymity of the
evaluators and of those who determine the quality standards results in an
empirically observable reduction of the researcher’s scientific autonomy.
While the process of the pedagogical normalisation of the academic com-
munity is nothing new as such, its contemporary innovation lies in the
fact that its subjects are not expected to ever overcome their existence as
subjects of pedagogical subjectivation. On top of that, Perica concludes,
their future work, career prospects, and their sheer employability depend
on the willingness to become subjects of academia’s new pedagogy.
So, the rise of corporate management styles in higher education has
led to the growing exploitation of academic workers, particularly in the
humanities and social sciences, through insecure employment. In his
chapter, George Morgan argues that this process has diminished the politi-
cal influence of the very scholars who should be best placed and most
inclined to defend academic freedom, collegiality, and critical thinking
against the depredations of neoliberalism. As public funding diminishes,
universities are becoming less inclined to cross-subsidise vulnerable cur-
ricula in the humanities, social sciences, and pure sciences, especially in
specialised fields of low student demand and fields in which pedagogi-
cal requirements are most intensive. In order to make the funding dollar
go further, managers have resorted to employing members of the cogni-
tariat—sessional, casual, or short contract staff—to perform a growing
proportion of academic work. According to Morgan, this is part of a larger
economic programme that has imposed Taylorist bureaucratic regulation
of much academic work. In his chapter, Morgan charts the rise of the mass
university in Australia, in particular the growth in undergraduate student
numbers over the last 20 years. He argues that the management of this
growth—the rounds of organisational change and course rationalisation—
has demoralised academic communities and eroded scholarly bonds. For
Australia spends a smaller proportion of its GDP on universities than all
14 S. GUPTA ET AL.
but one of the OECD countries, universities respond to this squeeze by

undermining the conditions of teaching and learning, that is, by cutting
teaching time and staffing levels, and increasing class sizes. As a result,
between 1990 and 2008, casual academic staff numbers, on a full-time
equivalent basis, grew by 180 %, compared with a 41 % growth in non-
casual academic staff numbers during the same period. And between 2004
and 2010, the percentage of casual employees in Australian universities
rose from approximately 40 to 60. Most scholars, however, shrink from
the prospect of openly challenging the invidious effects of managerialism.
Members of the academic precariat, or cognitariat, are unable to make
plans, purchase property, or start a family. Their dependence on the con-
tinued patronage of tenured mentors in offering them work undermines
their ability to become politically active in challenging the system of creep-
ing casualisation that maintains them in poverty and powerlessness. As
for the tenured mentors, they either jump through the managerial hoops
or engage in passive resistance, but rarely offer an open challenge to the
discourses and processes that trammel them. However, in a post-Fordist
world in which Taylorist bureaucratic organisations are becoming increas-
ingly obsolete, the managerial university appears something of an anach-
ronism, and hence vulnerable to challenge, concludes Morgan.
In recent years, debates have emerged about rising corporate influence
and control over higher education. In their chapter, Mariya Ivancheva
and Micheal O’Flynn relate these issues to the role of tenure in academic
life. They explore the traditions of tenured employment, which many see
as a weapon or asset in the struggle against the relentless commercialisa-
tion and casualisation of higher education. Far from pleasing for a return
to an imagined golden age, Ivancheva and O’Flynn argue for the kind
of transformation that is required to make the best of the present as well
as to secure the future. They 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,
especially in a time when even tenured employment is becoming subject to
precarisation. With a focus on Ireland, they examine the so-called contract
of indefinite duration, a peculiar form of tenure that permits interpreta-
tions that downgrade those employed under its premise. With reference
to a number of cases, they examine the struggles that academics face in
obtaining these contracts of indefinite duration, as well as the ways in
which university administrations increasingly use the contract of indefi-
nite duration as a mechanism to divide and rule. Ivancheva and O’Flynn
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.
working class in this struggle and is therefore useless, if not dangerous,

from the point of view of capital. There is, however, another form of use-
lessness, one that is complementary to commodified knowledge. While in
a commodified universe, activities have no end in themselves but are car-
ried out for the sake of endless accumulation, the very uselessness of the
humanities from the standpoint of individual capitals excludes them from
the commodified universe and structurally places them in a position of lux-
ury. Two consequences follow from this, for Bembič. First, the two forms
of uselessness exclude each other. If the working class is strong enough to
successfully demand access to higher education in the field of one’s choice,
no part of university knowledge production can be regarded as luxury.
Second, those segments of the humanities that are useless from the view-
point of individual capitals become useful if viewed from the perspective
of the working class, insofar as they enter the workers’ consumption and
are capable of becoming weapons of the working class in class struggle.
However, from the vantage point of the bourgeoisie, they still pertain to
the vapid commodified universe. The humanities become luxury only if
capital completely subordinates the university knowledge production to
its needs, expelling the humanities as a useless endeavour. The neolib-
eral restructuring of higher education is thus in perfect harmony with the
dignified status of the humanities, concludes Bembič. To his view, the
struggle against this restructuring cannot be confined to the university
alone, as the university is an ideological state apparatus governed by a class
struggle that the contemporary working class can only win if it enters the
class struggle at the level of the entire society.
In the next chapter, in which Johnny Rotten’s message of ‘no future’ is
evoked for a second time, Mark Bergfeld asks what precarity, unemploy-
ment, and underemployment bring to young university graduates and to
contemporary activism. He starts by drawing out the different theorisa-
tions of precarity and the associated phenomena of precarisation and the
precariat. He discards the notion of the precariat as an emerging class, as it
was influentially proposed by Guy Standing. For Bergfeld, one’s class posi-
tion is defined not by one’s position in the structure of social income, as
Standing seems to think, but by one’s relation to one’s means of produc-
tion, as classically conceptualised by Karl Marx. Hence, Bergfeld advances
the idea that, as members of the precariat, university graduates form a
class fraction in the making: unlike previous generations of students, they
are from the outset part of a broader working class that facilitates new
forms of activism. Instead of Standing, he follows Mario Candeias and
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.
and unfolding in precedent and parallel with wider Occupy-style protest—

adopting and reflecting on so much of what can be described as counter-
hegemonic practices, Athanassiou and Melrose enquire about the lack of
comprehensive follow-up to this. To their view, the student movement
was notable because of its figurative medium as much as its anti-neoliberal
message, style, and content were fused. Horizontal and participatory in
spirit, it was well versed in non-hierarchical and institutional admonitions.
Yet, the fundamentally unhindered continuity of contemporary manage-
rialism, economism, and depoliticisation suggests that this student resis-
tance (supported by fellow producers of and participants in institutions
of higher education at the time) was a flash in the pan, a chapter in an
existing narrative, not the beginning of a new one. The wave of anti-cuts
and austerity protests did not transform into a more counter-hegemonic
presence. One reason for this, according to Athanassiou and Melrose, is
the crucial lack of meaningful political collaboration from what they see as
an institutionally entrenched, self-identifying anti-liberal grouping within
academia. Athanassiou and Melrose ask: Can this inactivity be seen as
characteristic of the critical scholarly constituency and its compliance with
the reproduction of the social status quo? Could it be a prelude to more
serious engagement with the terms of contemporary critical scholarship
and thus praxis? Through their collaborative account of their own institu-
tional experience over the course of the last 3 academic years, Athanassiou
and Melrose set out to contribute to the volume’s rethinking of critical
scholarship with the aim of reimagining what a radical and critical subjec-
tivity could look like and how it should be key to democratic participation
within the university and beyond.
The volume closes with Hrvoje Tutek’s attempt to explain how systems
of tertiary education, hailed prior to the global recession as fundamental
pillars of development and as driving motors of emerging ‘knowledge soci-
eties’, quickly became just another uncomfortable figure in state-budget
tables during austerity implemented after the last financial crash. With
the crisis, the ‘knowledge-society bubble’, characterised in the European
periphery by the implementation of the Bologna reform, investment in
the construction of academic facilities as well as the rampant commerciali-
sation of the public university system, burst and a halt was put to expansive
policies prevalent earlier (merely nominally expansive, that is, as the logic
of austerity has existed and been implemented since before the crash).
However, the ideology of knowledge society is still firmly in place, as is the
simplistic concept of the entrepreneurial university, where the production
of intellectual property equals the production of knowledge, and research

funding is considered to be in a proportional relationship to ‘results’. This
gives rise to the following contradiction: the practice of fiscal austerity
aimed at public universities adversely affects the production of ‘innova-
tion’ seen as the raison d’être of academic work (i.e., science) in the age
of the entrepreneurial university. This practice also directly contributes
to the intensification of the (semi)periphery-core emigration of academic
workers. In the peripheral European countries, where systems of tertiary
education are overwhelmingly public, this loss has often been observed
with spontaneous outrage: ‘our best and brightest are going to leave for
other countries’. However, as anyone familiar with the globally dismal
state of academic labour markets knows, the flight of academic workers
is not quite a flight to safety—the precarious conditions of labour and
neoliberal institutional discipline are dominant across the world system.
These problems, Tutek argues, cannot simply be solved by subtler local
policies targeted at universities and other research institutions. However,
many still consider the unenviable position of contemporary academic
workers in terms such as ‘staffing crises’, as Tutek’s example from the
University of Zagreb demonstrates, or conceive it as a problem of a dis-
mal academic ‘job market’, as can be witnessed from the recent rise of
‘post-ac’ or ‘alt-ac’ initiatives and support networks for jobless academics
in the USA. However, echoing most of the contributions to this edited
volume and certainly the main wager of the volume’s final section, Tutek
claims that these problems need to be addressed at the structural level and
that the struggle for better conditions of academic work and regulation of
knowledge production must necessarily be fought as part of an interna-
tionalised struggle of organised labour.
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nation. New York: New York University Press.
Di Leo, J. R. (2014). Corporate humanities in higher education: Moving beyond the
neoliberal academy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Edu-Factory Collective. (2009). Toward a global autonomous university: Cognitive
labor, the production of knowledge, and exodus from the education factory.
New York: Autonomedia.
Jameson, F. (2011). Representing Capital: A commentary on Volume one. London:
Verso.
20 S. GUPTA ET AL.
Macrine, S. (Ed.). (2009). Critical pedagogy in uncertain times: Hope and possibili-
ties. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital. (Vol. 1, Ben Fowkes, Trans.). Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1976). The German ideology. In K. Marx and F. Engels,
Collected works (Vol. 5, C. Dutt, W. Lough & C. P. Magill, Trans.). London:
Lawrence and Wishart; New York: International Publishers; and Moscow:
Progress.
McGettigan, A. (2013). The Great University gamble: Money, markets and the
future of higher education. London: Pluto Press.
Newfield, C. (2008). Unmaking the public university: The forty-year assault on the
middle class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
PART I
The Political Economy of Higher

Education Policy Initiatives Now
CHAPTER 2
The Implausible Knowledge Triangle

of the Western Balkans
Danijela Dolenec
THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY AS A NEOLIBERAL SCRIPT

Within the broader process of European integration, which is the pre-
eminent political project in the Western Balkans, the Bologna process and
the Lisbon Strategy ‘introduced a new and spectacular dynamic into the
affairs of higher education in Europe’ (Neave 2002, p. 186), carrying
the potential of transforming higher education ‘as fundamentally as the
nation state changed the medieval universities’ (Corbett 2005, p. 192). In
this analysis, Bologna and Lisbon are taken to further the same four basic
objectives—mobility, employability, attractiveness, and competitiveness
(see Neave 2002). While Bologna aims to reorganise higher education
systems through three-cycle structures, comparable degrees, and qualifi-
cation frameworks, Lisbon focuses on making Europe a more attractive
place to invest and work in, making knowledge and innovation the heart
of growth, and creating more and better jobs.
D. Dolenec
University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

24 D. DOLENEC
With the Lisbon Agenda, higher education is supposed to be trans-

formed into a strategic factor of European integration and a fundamental
ingredient of competitiveness as a key priority in discourse of the European
Union (see Capano and Piattoni 2011). As a result, with the launching
of the Lisbon Strategy the university became the core institution of the
‘Europe of Knowledge’ (Gornitzka 2010). The 2000 Lisbon Agenda and
its successor policies have proven to be highly consequential for changes
in higher education and research policy in Europe, for at least three rea-
sons: they reasserted the role of research and development for economic
competitiveness and growth; they underlined the role of education as a
core labour market factor as well as a factor of social cohesion; and they
shifted the focus of objectives and priorities from the national level to the
European one (ibid.). These reform demands were raised in an atmo-
sphere of perceived performance crisis (see Olsen and Maassen 2007), in
which something allegedly needed to be done immediately in order for
Europe to ‘stay in the game’ of global competition.
If we conceptualise the Lisbon Agenda as a script, that is, ‘a set of gen-
erally stated policy principles and ideas that policy actors employ in order
to give structure to their interaction and to channel their policy discourse’
(Capano and Piattoni 2011, p. 589), then its corresponding political buzz-
word is the ‘knowledge-based economy’, while its main components are
science-based innovation as the engine of economic development and edu-
cation as a necessary investment in human capital (see Gornitzka 2010).
In a knowledge-based economy, knowledge replaces capital, labour, and
natural resources as the central value- and wealth-creating factor. Reforms
use the language of modernisation, economic functions of the university,
and necessary adaptation to economic and technological change, while the
university is envisioned as dynamic and adaptive to consumers, giving pri-
ority to innovation, entrepreneurship, and market orientation (see Olsen
and Maassen 2007). Advancing such a functionalist conception, research
becomes a cornerstone of economic competitiveness, while education is
perceived through its impact on labour markets, social policy, and overall
economic policy. Along the same lines, the university is required to ‘step
up its interaction with industry, and as an institution of lifelong learning’
(Gornitzka 2010, p. 178).
In other words, the solution to Europe’s competitiveness problem is
sought in neoliberal public sector reforms, ‘celebrating private enterprise
and competitive markets’ (Olsen and Maassen 2007, p. 4), whereby the
university is reduced to one of the sites in a general rebalancing of power in
THE IMPLAUSIBLE KNOWLEDGE TRIANGLE OF THE WESTERN BALKANS 25
Europe’s political and economic order. Several interpretations understand

the Lisbon Strategy as embedded in neoliberal ideology (e.g., Radaelli
2003; Chalmers and Lodge 2003), whereby the panacea of the market
serves as a ‘“solution looking for problems” […], and usually finding
them, in all sectors of society’ (Olsen and Maassen 2007, p. 4). Other pos-
sible roles of the university, such as developing democratic citizens, social
cohesion, or addressing the EU’s democratic deficit, are not addressed
within the EU’s programme for higher education and research. Likewise,
within the spirit of New Public Management reforms, democratic internal
organisation of the university and individual academic freedom are under-
stood as obstacles to good performance.
This being so, researchers have exposed certain important weaknesses
in the EU’s grand project of ‘market building’ (Gornitzka et al. 2007).
As Johan P. Olsen and Peter Maassen (2007) show, the worry about
global competitiveness is centred on the European research-intensive
university, which is a minority among several thousands of universities in
Europe. If the Lisbon Agenda is a project inclusive of all universities, this
opens up the question of the reform arguments that apply to them—are
they also underperforming, in what ways, and for what reason? To this we
may add the dynamic of core and peripheral states of the EU, as well as
its neighbourhood, with respect to the same question. As a more careful
analysis shows, instead of being based on evidence and rigorous research,
the solutions currently being forwarded are to a large extent based on
‘belief systems’ (Olsen and Maassen 2007, p. 10) derived from the neo-
liberal script and embodied in the ideal of the US Ivy League University.
Proponents of the European university reform ‘usually refer to an imag-
ined US business model, as carried around the world by a multitude
of consulting firms and international organisations’ (Olsen and Maassen
2007, p. 13).
To this end, the European Commission promotes the development of
knowledge triangles: ‘close, effective links between education, research,
and innovation’ through ‘new types of cooperation between education
institutions, research organisations and business’ (European Commission
n.d.). In order to further this policy, the European Commission established
specialised institutions such as the European Institute for Innovation and
Technology or the University-Business Forum, and interlaced cooperation
between the higher education sector and the business community within
all its major funding programmes for higher education and research. In
this vision of ‘science based’ economic and social development, technology
26 D. DOLENEC
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.
EPISTEMIC COMMUNITIES AS KNOWLEDGE-ECONOMY

SCRIPTERS
Recently, scholars have come to analyse the Bologna process and the
Lisbon Strategy together, as the two main pillars of European integration
in higher education (see, e.g., Maassen and Musselin 2009). And indeed,
the two have become increasingly interconnected over time (see Gornitzka
2010; Vukasović 2014). However, the two initiatives differ in some impor-
tant aspects. Unlike the Bologna process, the Lisbon Strategy is largely a
supranational process, with a number of instruments developed to sup-
port its development (see Vukasović 2014). These include legally binding
directives in the areas of recognition of qualifications, joint recommenda-
tions as well as numerous funding schemes designed to support its objec-
tives (ibid.). Though the principle of subsidiarity in areas of education and
research are still in force, the open method of coordination (OMC), intro-
duced at the 2000 Lisbon Summit, was designed in order to enable setting
common objectives and translating them to national and regional policies
(see Gornitzka 2007). As Åse Gornitzka has argued, the OMC is ‘a mode
of governance that assumes that coordination can happen across levels of
governance without transferring legal competencies and budgetary means
to the European level’ (Gornitzka 2010, p. 155). Through the OMC,
experts from member states evaluate national performance according to
commonly agreed objectives and indicators (see Tamtik and Sá 2011).
The main instruments of the OMC are benchmarks, indicators, peer review
of policy, and iterated procedures (ibid.), which ties in with the broader neo-
liberal script of reform based on imitation of successful peers (see Olsen and
Maassen 2007). Wolfgang Kerber and Martina Eckardt (Kerber and Eckardt
2007) argue that the OMC is a tool for spreading new knowledge concern-
ing appropriate public policies. In addition, the OMC is an approach to
policy development that affords experts a central role (see Tamtik and Sá
2011). In 2007, the European Commission initiated 1237 actively oper-
ating expert groups composed of representatives from the member states
(see Gornitzka and Sverdrup 2011). As an overarching governance structure
that can create opportunities for networking and sharing of experience (see
Vukasović 2014), the OMC contributes to Europeanisation by endorsing
collective norms and ideas (see Tamtik and Sá 2011).
In this respect, EU and national policy experts who regularly inter-
act and co-develop policy through the OMC form so-called epistemic
communities (see Haas 1992), that is, communities that share specific
28 D. DOLENEC
understandings, values, and beliefs although members might come from

different disciplinary or professional settings. The sharing of experience
establishes connections with others who share the same values, and enables
the development of core belief systems that are then incorporated into
practical policy advice. The difference between any group sharing common
beliefs and an epistemic community is that the members of an epistemic
community have ‘the power of validating knowledge in the domain of their
expertise’ (Tamtik and Sá 2011).
Epistemic communities persuade others of their shared beliefs by virtue
of their professional knowledge; hence, their ‘policy goals must derive from
their expert knowledge, not some other motivation, otherwise they lose
authority with their target audience, usually elite governmental decision-
makers’ (Davis Cross 2013, p. 142). This also distinguishes them from
so-called advocacy coalitions: while advocacy coalitions involve politicians,
lobbyists, and journalists, epistemic communities are dominated by experts
motivated by technocratic considerations, whereby ‘basing the solution
on authoritative scientific content is more important than the solution’s
content’ (Zito 2001, p. 589). One of the implications of this, however, is
the ‘truth status’ of policy recipes emerging from epistemic communities,
which tend to travel to new policy contexts as authoritative knowledge.
Along these lines, the central organising concept for the dominant
policy paradigm in higher education and research—the ‘knowledge
economy’—has a respectable pedigree in the social sciences, all the way
from economics to sociology. Starting in the 1960s, on the one hand,
Peter Drucker (1969) developed the concept of knowledge worker with a
view to the service economy, emphasising the role of knowledge and for-
mal qualifications as key resources. On the other hand, in 1973, Daniel
Bell elaborated the idea of a post-industrial society, in which knowledge
and the availability of human resources were conceptualised as key for
economic progress, while the university became the central social insti-
tution. When, by the 1980s, this was combined with Paul Romer’s new
growth theory (see Romer 1986) and the concept of human capital, all
the main components of a new explanatory framework coincided, creat-
ing a powerful influence on social theory through the work of Anthony
Giddens, Ulrich Beck, or Manuel Castells as leading thinkers of global-
isation. By the late 1990s, when the European Commission began to
formulate socio-economic policy more actively, the idea that knowledge
forms the basis of global competitiveness was already considered com-
mon sense (see Dolenec 2008).
The importance of epistemic communities in explaining policy change

has grown with the recognised trend of transnational governance (see
Davis Cross 2013), of which the Lisbon Agenda is a telling example.
This is because knowledge creation is embedded in globally configured
professional knowledge communities (see Moodysson 2008). Communities
here designate an intermediate level between individuals and organisa-
tions, that is, groups of people who work on mutually recognised sets of
knowledge issues and share the same social norms (ibid.). By employing
the concept of epistemic communities, the analysis moves away from an
interest-based explanation to the terrain of ideas. In addition, this concept
has the added value of focusing the analysis on the ‘carriers’ of ideas, that
is, experts as actors with the professional and social stature to make author-
itative claims on a given topic (see Dunlop 2013). Though the concept is
not without its challenges when it comes to operationalisation, in the con-
text of higher education and research policy, the OMC provides an empiri-
cal setting in which it is possible to identify and establish the emergence
of new epistemic communities and their belief systems (ibid.). Already in
Peter Haas’s original analysis (1992), epistemic communities were con-
ceptualised as catalysts in international policy coordination. With respect
to their impact, they have been analysed at two levels. The micro-level
analysis is concerned with learning processes that occur between epistemic
communities and decision-makers, advocacy coalitions, interests groups,
and so on. And the macro-level analysis, which I will employ here, analyses
the policy outcomes at the national and the regional level that result from
policy prescriptions of epistemic communities.
The first study to apply the concept of an epistemic community to the
issue of EU integration was published by Amy Verdun (1999), who argued
that the Delors Committee, which elaborated the project of the European
Monetary Union, was an epistemic community. The Committee, which
consisted of the Commission President, 12 central bank presidents from
the European Community, 3 independent experts, and another European
Community Commissioner, easily reached unanimous agreement with
respect to drafting their conclusions, which, in a second step, were inte-
grated into the Treaty of the European Union virtually without amend-
ments (ibid.).
In the policy domain of higher education and research, several recent
studies analyse the importance of epistemic communities and norm diffusion
as explanations of national reform trajectories. Merli Tamtik and Creso
M. Sá ( 2011 ) analyse how the OMC, as a mechanism for generating
30 D. DOLENEC
epistemic communities, was first used for internationalising the science

and technology policy. Activities in this policy domain intensified after the
2005 review of Lisbon objectives, while after the launch of the Seventh
Framework Programme in January 2007, transnational cooperation came
to the forefront of European research policy (ibid.). Similarly, Alexander
Kleibrink (2011) studies how the notion of lifelong learning was devel-
oped within the purview of the Lisbon Agenda. He shows that the notion
of lifelong learning originated not from policy communities or academia,
but from the business world (ibid.). Lifelong learning envisaged the state
as strategic planner in developing human capital, with reforms driven by
demand from employers and the labour market. Following the revamped
Lisbon Strategy in 2005, the Portuguese Presidency launched the
European Qualification Framework in November 2007, followed by the
process of designing complementary National Qualification Frameworks
(NQFs) in EU member and candidate states. The European Commission
and its network of agencies were vital for the internalisation of the norm
by the members of the EU community as well as for spreading the norm
beyond the borders of the community. This process was guided by a
certain logic of appropriateness where international organisations are the
principal promoters of the lifelong learning norm. After almost all mem-
ber states had committed to follow the Lisbon version of lifelong learning
(notably after the Eastern enlargement), the European Commission dif-
fused the norm to other countries, primarily through capacity-building
measures that aimed at persuading governments to adopt the EU model
of lifelong learning.
In all these cases, expert groups developed an ‘episteme’, a shared world-
view that was derived from their mutual socialisation and shared knowledge
(Davis Cross 2013).
As Janine Goetschy notes (2005), the fact that the OMC is a mecha-
nism that is highly conducive to creating epistemic communities has sev-
eral important downsides. First of all, the multiplicity of actors involved
and the complexity of the process of coordination further exacerbate the
already existing problem of democratic control over EU governance.
Furthermore, they exacerbate the democratic deficit by further marginalis-
ing the European Parliament’s role in policymaking while strengthening
the role of the European Commission—with all that this entails for a mode
of governance that is already elitist and nontransparent. Finally, and most
pertinent for this analysis, the OMC’s reliance on expert networks contrib-
utes to the exclusion of important policy debates in the respective national
public arenas, further strengthening the technocratic nature of EU policy-

making by systematically depoliticising social and economic issues that are
crucial to the livelihood of European citizens.
LISBON’S BUMPY TRAVELS TO THE WESTERN BALKANS

In his analysis, Kleibrink wonders why EU neighbouring countries were ini-
tiating NQFs despite the absence of convincing empirical evidence of their
success. At the time when they began implementing NQFs, ‘governments
could not rely on clear empirical evidence that convincingly associated
their adoption with higher quality of educational standards, greater labour
mobility and higher labour participation rates’ (Kleibrink 2011, p. 70).
Instead, the explanation is sought in the domain of ‘logic of appropriate-
ness’, adopting a policy because it has become a norm of socially acceptable
behaviour. In the context of EU integration, aspiring candidates for EU
membership initiated NQFs to indicate their membership in the EU club
(ibid.). Kleibrink argues that the European Commission and its relevant
bodies in the field of education play a central role in designing a norm,
fixing its meaning, and then persuading states to internalise it. Hence, the
rationale for embracing the EU’s lifelong learning norm has more to do
with gaining legitimacy on the way to EU membership than with learning
about new policy development; this can explain why governments in these
countries burden themselves with overly ambitious reforms that overstrain
their administrations and budgets (see Kleibrink 2012, p. 124).
Building on the asymmetrical relationship between old and new mem-
ber states, Tanja Börzel (2003) distinguishes between two strategies with
respect to the development of European-level norms and associated policy
recommendations. The so-called uploading strategy refers to a bottom-up
dynamic in which countries advance policies at the European level that sat-
isfy domestic preferences. For example, and as Tamtik and Sá (2011) show,
the leading role in the development of the European Internationalization
Strategy in Science and Technology was taken by Germany, a member
state that had a lot to gain from this Strategy. Moreover, it was repeat-
edly the representatives of powerful Western countries—Germany, France,
Italy, Austria, and Norway—that shaped the agenda and direction of the
work of the group.
This builds on Börzel’s (2003) claim that the success of the upload-
ing strategy depends on the country’s position with regard to the rel-
evant structures. For example, countries that participate in the process
32 D. DOLENEC
as candidate or pre-accession countries have almost no opportunity to

shape EU-level policy in the area of higher education and research (see
Vukasović 2014). In addition, even when they gain the right of access,
other obstacles remain, such as administrative capacity and available
resources or financial means and staff power for lobbying within EU struc-
tures (ibid.). Along these lines, Tamtik and Sá (2011) demonstrate that
participants that recently joined the EU noted that the meetings were a
truly useful learning experience, but they expressed their regret for not
being able to fully embrace all ideas because of their limited resources.
Given that OMC and other EU coordinating mechanisms boil down to
voluntary recommendations, national experts on occasion agreed to con-
clusions that they knew ‘would not work well in their countries’ (Tamtik
and Sá 2011, p. 461).
With the help of epistemic communities and through the socialisation
of administrative and academic elites into EU’s discourse on the knowl-
edge economies, the policy paradigm was transferred to the countries of
the Western Balkans. Since the reform of higher education and research is
part of the broader process of European integration, which has the status
of a pre-eminent political project in the Western Balkans, Bologna, and
Lisbon, processes were perceived in the region as more binding than they
actually are (see Keeling 2006; Vukasović and Elken 2013), importantly
shaping national strategic plans and legislative agendas.
Transferring the policy paradigm wholesale, countries of the region
vowed to create ‘knowledge economies’ and ‘knowledge triangles’ that
would supposedly lead to economic and social development. Without
undertaking the necessary but labourious work of localising and reshaping
the policy recipe of the Lisbon Agenda in order for them to provide a bet-
ter fit with regional needs, they were adopted as official policy goals in the
poorest region of Europe, where GDP per capita is at 30–40 % of the EU
27 average, where registered unemployment rates reach as high as 46 %,
and where the service economy stands for waiters, cooks, and care workers
instead of IT and high-tech industries.
Furthermore, as Table 2.1 shows, governance capacity, which is sup-
posed to exist at a high level in order to implement the knowledge trian-
gle, remains a substantial challenge in the region of the Western Balkans.
The World Bank government effectiveness indicator attempts to capture,
among other things, the quality of policy formulation and implementa-
tion, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such poli-
cies. Higher percentiles indicate a more effective and responsible public
Table 2.1 Socio-economic data on countries of the Western Balkansa

Population GDP Unemployment World Bank
2010 per capita rate government
(in millions) 2010 2012 (%) effectiveness
(US$) index 2013
Albania 3.19 8580 12.9 43.5

Bosnia and 3.94 7636 45.9 39.2
Herzegovina
Kosovo 1.81 2650 35.1 40.7
Macedonia 2.05 11,528 31 53.1
Montenegro 0.62 12,877 19.7 59.8
Serbia 7.32 10,933 23 50.2
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
Table 2.2 Public invest-

% of GDP
ments in higher education
for selected Western Balkan Albania 0.7
countries compared to EU Macedonia 1.17
27 (2011–2013)a Montenegro 0.42
Serbia 1.26
EU 27 1.14
a
Source: Dolenec et al. (2014)
Table 2.3 Public invest-

% of GDP
ments in research and devel-
opment, as % of GDP Albania 0.15
(2011–2013)a Bosnia and Herzegovina 0.02
Kosovo 0.1
Macedonia 0.19
Montenegro 1.15
Serbia 0.76
EU 27 2
a
Source: Dolenec et al. (2014)
Western Balkan countries come close to the average EU level of public

investment in research. Montenegro is closest, at 60 % of the European
average. Serbia is around 35 % of the EU average, while Albania, Bosnia
and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia may be said to have public
research investments of negligible size.
Looking at these figures from a more distant perspective, it may be
surprising that overall investment in research and development in the
Western Balkans has declined dramatically since the breakdown of state
socialist regimes in the region (see World Bank 2013). The whole region
invests approximately €495 million in research and development per year,
which is the equivalent of one (second-largest) US research university
(ibid.). Current levels of investment cannot have a meaningful impact on
the current model of economic development (see Dolenec et al. 2014),
which is a further confirmation of the poor fit between the commitment
of Western Balkan countries to building knowledge economies and their
actual capacity to strengthen higher education and research sectors as the
key pillars of the system.
In other words, the policy paradigm of knowledge economies is travel-

ling from the advanced European core countries to the European peripheral
economies, which do not exhibit properties of knowledge-based econo-
mies. Even though the process of European integration is premised on the
idea that everyone will converge towards the liberal democratic model of
development, a growing body of literature has shown that we have instead
witnessed a clustering of European economies into distinctive varieties of
capitalism (see, e.g., King 2007; Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009; Bohle and
Greskovits 2013). The East–West division of Europe during the demo-
cratic transformations of the 1990s has taken second place to the core-
periphery divide. Post-communist countries have developed into liberal
dependent economies characterised by the unhappy marriage of declining
welfare standards and liberalised economies that depend on foreign invest-
ment (see King 2007; Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009).
The EU is the main trading partner of all Western Balkan countries,
accounting for 60–75 % of imports, with the largest proportion of direct
foreign investment in the region coming from the EU; for example,
75–95 % of banking assets in the Western Balkans is owned by EU banks
(see Uvalić 2014). The high level of exposure to investment flows from
the EU has meant that the Western Balkan countries have been nega-
tively impacted since the economic crisis in 2008, which brought reduced
exports, reduced inflow of credit, reduced foreign direct investment, as
well as migrant worker remittances (see Bartlett and Uvalić 2013). The
imperative of balanced public budgets demanded austerity measures,
which was reflected in cuts to public spending on higher education and
research which were not high to begin with. Gross investments in research
and development in the region have declined dramatically in the past two
decades, and today the region invests below its level of development (see
World Bank 2013).
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
Human and Inhuman Capital,

and Schooling: The Case of Slovenia
Primož Krašovec
In Slovenia, where I have done most of my theoretical interventions and

activist work, theories of human capital are becoming an increasingly com-
mon reference in pedagogical works1 as well as in political documents out-
lining the plans for reforms of science and education.2 As part of a broader
ideology of knowledge society, human-capital theories provide the ideo-
logical legitimisation of neoliberal trends in research and education poli-
cies. According to their main argument, which I will try to refute below,
increased investment in human capital at both the social and the individual
level increases the competitiveness of the economy as a whole as well as the
employability and welfare of individuals.
In the first part of this chapter, I will sketch the intellectual history and
sociopolitical context of the development of theories of human capital.
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

42 P. KRAŠOVEC
In the second part, I will propose a critique of the characteristically neo-

liberal equalisation of labour with capital; additionally, I will criticise the
theory according to which investment in human capital brings profits to
individual workers. In the third and final part, I will examine how current
educational reforms impact the learning process and the working con-
ditions at public universities in Slovenia and, by extension, comparable
countries.
THE HISTORY AND POLITICAL EFFECTS

OF HUMAN-CAPITAL THEORY
While theories of knowledge society publicly present themselves as the

cornerstone of current education policy proposals in Slovenia,3 human
capital appears as a somewhat reserved and mysterious but nevertheless
persistent companion to ‘lady knowledge society’. Although they possess
a rich intellectual and political history, theories of human capital are, at
least in recent political documents and statements regarding the devel-
opment of higher education in Slovenia, rarely explicated and appear as
a ‘goes-without-saying’ background of various blueprints and strategies
related to the coming of the innovation- and/or knowledge-based society.
Such documents somehow presuppose that everyone knows what human
capital or an increase in its stock or quality is and, furthermore, that it is
a good thing.
The basic argument of human-capital theory goes as follows: human
capital is a sum of knowledge and practical skills of individuals, and every
increase in their quantity and/or quality will make these individuals more
employable and prone to earn more money while employed, and the soci-
ety as a whole will become more innovative and thus more competitive on
the global market. By accumulating our human capital, we thus, without
side effects, gain at the individual as well as the social level. The key to
this gain is the education system, especially higher education. Its main
goals are said to be, first, to equip individuals with as large amount of
human capital as possible and, second, to teach them how to learn so as
to be able to enlarge this initial stock of human capital by themselves later,
when they have already left the formal schooling process. In their political
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
application, human-capital theories are thus mostly part of school or edu-

cation reform programmes.
Theories of human capital as such, regardless of their current local polit-
ical application, are, however, theoretically as well as politically much more
ambitious—and problematic. Their historical emergence can be traced to
the USA of the 1950s and early 1960s, which was a time of massive expan-
sion of access to university education, which until then had been relatively
limited to individuals with access to sufficient funds and/or social status.
This expansion and ‘massification’ of higher education were both related
and an attempt to influence wider socio-economic changes, such as high
economic growth rates, the expansion of mass consumption and social
welfare, as well as an increasing technological sophistication of economic
processes. With the exemption of two Central European authors, Fritz
Machlup (1984) and Peter Drucker (2009), human-capital theories are
part of a specifically American version of the neoliberal intellectual project,
whose goal was (and remains) to counter social-democratic and socialist
visions of society with a comprehensive social and moral philosophy of
individual liberty and political norms and institutions conducive to free
enterprise economy and consumer sovereignty.
Taken within this wider intellectual context, human-capital theory
falls in between the early neoliberal epistemology, which was conceived
in Vienna in the early 1930s, and new growth theory, which emerged in
the 1980s in the USA. Neoliberal epistemology, whose first and foremost
representative was Friedrich von Hayek, originates in the so-called socialist
calculation debate between early neoliberal and socialist economists. When
socialist economist Oscar Lange managed to prove that central planning is
more rational and efficient than free-market economy by using neoclassi-
cal concepts and methods, Hayek had to switch the terrain of the debate
from economic to epistemological theory. Hayek’s main counterargument
was that human knowledge is by definition subjective, fragmented and
dispersed, and therefore no governmental planning agency, however well
meaning, can possess all the knowledge necessary for the management of
complex contemporary economies. According to Hayek, only a spontane-
ous market interaction of free entrepreneurs and consumers can achieve a
level of sophisticated coordination necessary for the smooth functioning
of complex economic systems. In the subsequent development of neolib-
eral thought, the social production and distribution of knowledge became
central themes of a general neoliberal social and moral philosophy (see
Krašovec 2013a).
44 P. KRAŠOVEC
However, it is only through theories of human capital that the neolib-

eral theory of knowledge begins to approach a concrete analysis of late
capitalist societies and economies. In the 1980s, theories of human capital,
which are based on a microeconomic perspective and more or less limited
to studying the role of education, health and social skills in the increases
of the productivity of labour, are joined by new growth theory, which
adds a macroeconomic dimension and is able to account for the effects of
the development of science and technology not only on fixed capital but
also on growth rates and the competitiveness of national economies (see
Smith 2009).
If we bring all the above-mentioned theoretical strands together, we
get a complete neoliberal theory of knowledge with a Hayekian episte-
mology serving as the general philosophical background, human-capital
theory applying this general theory to the studies of education and its cor-
relation with qualifications and incomes within the working population,
and new growth theory providing studies on the ways changes in the edu-
cation system effect the inhuman part of capital as well as a given national
economy as a whole. All three strands—sometimes together, sometimes
separately—exert a large influence on contemporary education policies in
both the USA and the EU. As for reforms of the public universities in
Slovenia in recent years, human-capital theories may not be their most
visible ideological force, but are certainly their most powerful one. In the
1990s, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) launched its ideological campaign for the ‘knowledge-based
economy’, and the EU started to prepare the Lisbon Strategy and the
Bologna reform. During that time, human-capital theory underwent a
silent mutation and began to creep into academic pedagogy. Another 20
years later, it would only take a quick survey of Slovenian academic peda-
gogy literature to show that there is hardly an article that does not list
either human capital or knowledge society among its keywords.
By mid-twentieth century, the neoliberal project switched its institu-
tional and intellectual focus from Europe to the USA, and neoliberal the-
ory became limited to strictly economic issues, which hampered its ability
to provide a basis for a comprehensive worldview. It was precisely the
development of human-capital theory that granted neoliberalism access to
domains that previously had been the domain of other scientific disciplines
and thus out of reach of strictly economic analyses (see Foucault 2008,
p. 219). The empirical research that laid the foundations for what would
later become human-capital theory started from a social process that was,
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
any kind of collective (economic) social relation—there is no asymmetry

in social power between workers and entrepreneurs, just differences in
skills, knowledge, cunning and corresponding returns. Those who invest
smartly, earn a lot; those who do not, earn little or drop out of the game.
There is no class relation here, only individual entrepreneurs and their
capital.
Human-capital theory hence reinterprets not only work as a kind of
capital but also class relations as a kind of competition. If there is no real
difference between workers and entrepreneurs, one can present the capi-
talist economy as a mere interplay of enterprises (ranging from individual
workers to the largest multinational companies) that manage their cap-
ital in mutual competition. In human-capital theory, class relations are
not only mystified, they completely vanish (see Bowles and Gintis 1975,
p. 74).
CAPITAL, PROFIT, WAGE

From the ordinary, everyday perspective of both the entrepreneur and the
worker, wage appears as payment for work, not for the hire of labour force
as a commodity whose unique use value is that it can create new value.
If one disregards this specificity of labour force and fails to distinguish
between labour and labour force, wage appears as a just payment for the
work done (see Heinrich 2012, pp. 97–98). This appearance is the basis of
all other mystifications of the capitalist production process. If we see wage
as the compensation for labour’s contribution to production process, the
source of all new value can only be capital.
Human-capital theory takes this mystification, which is already present
in most economic theories, a step further. If one neglects the fact that
surplus value is made possible by the unique use value of labour power
as a commodity, hence seeing in capital the source of surplus value, then
any ‘thing’ that produces any sort of financial ‘gain’ can be seen as capital.
This is, in neoliberal theory, precisely the starting definition of capital,
which is then subsequently expanded to accommodate the newly discov-
ered human capital: capital is everything and anything that brings profits,
that is, returns that exceed the costs of original investments (see Becker
1993, p. 15). According to this definition, any positive return already con-
stitutes profit.
When early human-capital theorists discovered that higher education
is usually positively correlated with higher personal income, they were
48 P. KRAŠOVEC
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
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.
HUMAN CAPITAL AND EDUCATION

The main principle and motivation for capitalist production is maximisa-
tion of profit. Each individual capital reproduces itself by reinvesting a part
of their profits so as to expand its productive capacity, introduce new and
improved machines, hire new workers, and so on. There are, however, cer-
tain activities that are necessary for the (expanded) reproduction of indi-
vidual capitals and at the same time difficult or impossible to carry out in
a profitable way. Large infrastructural investments are the prime example:
roads, railways, airports, electrical, water, and telecommunications infra-
structure are rarely built by private companies, since they require enor-
mous initial investments and a lot of time before they can be run in a
profitable way. At the same time, infrastructure is an absolutely necessary
condition for the functioning of each individual capital. However, compe-
tition between individual capitals prevents any coordinated development
of common social infrastructure; also, such development is (at least at
first) not profitable and therefore not in the interest of individual capitals.
Hence, the responsibility of developing common social infrastructure is
usually taken on by the state.
Furthermore, individual capitals have the tendency to pay their work-
ers as little as possible as well as to expand the working day and increase
the intensity of work as much as possible. Such a tendency would, if left
unchecked, destroy or at least damage the workforce to the point that
it would be unable to continue working. So, again, in most developed
capitalist countries it is the state that steps in and limits the working day
to 8 h, prescribes minimum health and safety conditions for workers, and
organises their reproduction outside the workplace (via public health and
education). This means that the state works against the short-term imme-
diate interests of individual capitals (which is why these tend to dislike
both taxes and labour legislation), but only in order to be able to procure
the necessary conditions for the reproduction of the social capital as a
whole. Such ‘state management’ of the total social capital is of course
not without tensions, frictions and crises, and depends on the power of
trade unions and the relationships between various fractions of capital; yet
without such state management, capital would probably self-destruct (see

Hirsch 1978).
To come back to the topic of education: university as an institution stands
at the crossroads of social infrastructure (as it provides research) and the
reproduction of workforce (as it educates future workers). As such, it is to
a large extent a state affair in many countries, and certainly in Slovenia. The
development of science requires huge investments not only in the mate-
rial infrastructure but also in highly qualified researchers. Additionally, the
results of scientific research are unpredictable (we cannot exactly plan for a
discovery or a scientific breakthrough to happen), and even when they do
occur, they are not necessarily or at least not immediately economically via-
ble. The development of science is thus economically necessary (individual
enterprises need science in order to be able to improve their machines and
products, thus gaining a competitive edge) as well as expensive and unpre-
dictable. Also, the education of researchers is a long and expensive process,
which means that the existence of public universities and public research
institutes actually lowers the costs of individual capitals, which would oth-
erwise have to educate and train the researchers themselves (and the more
technologically advanced the company, the higher those costs).
When scientific discoveries do happen, and when they over time
become widely accepted, they also enter the school curriculum, and their
transfer to new generations becomes relatively cheap and massive (today’s
high-school students learn as a matter of fact things that a couple decades
ago were cutting-edge science). This means that the general development
of science in countries with a developed mass public-education system at
the same raises the qualification and lowers the value of the workforce as
a whole. When scientific discoveries of yesterday become part of school
curricula and can be easily transmitted to masses of students, the costs of
training highly qualified workforce drop dramatically.
So, some scientific discoveries can be immediately economically useful
or commercially applicable; and most of scientific findings can over time
be transmitted to generations of future workers who can understand (at
least the basics of) science as well as handle high-tech equipment and (at
least in part) contribute to its further development. There is nothing par-
ticularly ‘neoliberal’ about such a state of affairs, which is characteristic for
developed capitalist countries at least since the end of World War II. Such
a connection between the development of science, the massification of
education systems and the economy already existed and was prevalent in
times of Keynesian social compromise. What then makes recent education
52 P. KRAŠOVEC
reforms (or proposals of reforms), in Slovenia and elsewhere, specifically

neoliberal, and what does human-capital theory have to do with it?
Neoliberal education policy is a reaction to two socio-economic pro-
cesses that vary in their intensity from country to country, but have been, at
least in Europe, present for the last 30 years or so. The first one is the grow-
ing complexity and technological sophistication of capitalist production in
connection with increased competitive pressure of the global market. And
the second one is an effect of wider neoliberal macroeconomic policies,
namely the liberalisation of both national markets and international trade
in connection to financialisation as a process that allows for tighter control
over efficiency and productivity not only of individual firms but also of indi-
vidual component parts of the production process (see Bryan et al. 2009).
The Keynesian compromise presupposed, at least in Europe, autonomous
public universities, which were not (or at least not exclusively) oriented
towards economic goals, but nevertheless shared their discoveries with pri-
vate companies, which would then take and utilise whatever they would find
useful, but would also maintain their in-house research and development
teams and departments, thus translating general scientific discoveries into
commercial technological innovations. Nowadays, intensified competition
requires an ever-faster tempo of technological innovations, which them-
selves involve an ever-increasing level of sophistication. Hence, even the
translation of general scientific discoveries achieved at public universities
into commercial technological innovations is becoming too costly for indi-
vidual companies, especially in the technologically most advanced sectors of
the economy such as pharmaceuticals, telecommunications or computers.
Neoliberal education reforms, in Slovenia as well as in other European
countries, include attempts to ‘unburden’ the economy by transferring even
the work of the technological application of scientific discoveries to public
universities, whose work, moreover, is supposed to be aligned directly with
the interests of the private economy (with universities even being pressured
to include representatives of the economy in their management boards).4
This means that not only the general development of science but also the
process of its concrete technological application are becoming too costly
and demanding for individual capitals and are hence being transferred to
public institutions (universities and public research institutes) as part of the
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).
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.
REFERENCES
Becker, G. (1993). Human capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1975). The problem with human capital theory. The
American Economic Review, 65(2), 74–82.
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.
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics (G. Burchell, Trans.). Basingstoke:
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.
Hirsch, J. (1978). The state apparatus and social reproduction. In J. Holloway &
S. Picciotto (Eds.), State and capital. London: Edward Arnold.
Ivelja, R. (2010). Znanost in javna univerza v neusmiljenih lovkah komercializacije.
Dnevnik. May 19, 2010. www.dnevnik.si/1042360533/slovenija/1042360533.
Krašovec, P. (2013a). Neoliberalna epistemologija. In V. Pobežin (Ed.), Drugo
pedagoškega diskurza. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
Krašovec, P. (2013b). Družbena reprodukcija in človeški kapital. Borec, 694–7,
178–196.
Krašovec, P. (2014). Človeški in nečloveški kapital. Časopis za kritiko znanosti,
42(256), 65–83.
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koncepta. Ljubljana: MESS.
Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology. (2011). Drzna Slovenija.
Na poti v družbo znanja. Ljubljana: MHEST.
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June 5, 2012, viewpointmag.com/2012/06/05/what-can-quebec-teach-
us-a-preliminary-analysis-of-the-university-as-a-site-of-struggle/. Accessed
July 6, 2015.
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R. Bellofiore & R. Fineschi (Eds.), Re-reading Marx. Basingstoke: Palgrave
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Žagar, I. Ž., & Korsika, A. (Eds.). (2012). Predrzna Slovenija. Ljubljana: Pedagoški
inštitut. www.pei.si/Sifranti/StaticPage.aspx?id=117. Date accessed July 6, 2015.
CHAPTER 4
Privatising Minds: New Educational

Policies in India
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

58 P. K. VIJAYAN
was already looking in, regarding policy changes in higher education.

The report set the agenda for a series of further reports, policy initiatives,
and legislative measures that followed, including the government’s own
National Knowledge Commission’s Report to the Nation, 2006–2009
(see National Knowledge Commission 2009); the University Grants
Commission’s Higher Education in India: Strategies and Schemes dur-
ing Eleventh Plan Period [2007–2012] for Universities and Colleges (see
University Grants Commission 2011); the planning paper titled Higher
Education in India: Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012–2017) and Beyond
(see Ernst and Young-FICCI 2012), collaboratively produced by the
Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI),
Ernst & Young Pvt. Ltd (a multinational consultancy) and the Planning
Commission of the Government of India; the same combine’s reports
of 2011 and 2013 (see Ernst and Young-FICCI 2011; 2013); ASHE
2014: Annual Status of Higher Education of States and UTs in India
(see Deloitte and the Confederation of Indian Industries 2014), brought
out by the Confederation of Indian Industries, the Ministry of Human
Resource Development and Deloitte (an international consultancy
firm); and the Ministry’s own Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan—
National Higher Education Mission (see Ministry of Human Resource
Development 2013). Apart from that, six bills on higher education, col-
lectively referred to as the New Education Bills, are currently awaiting
passage in the Indian Parliament.
All of these documents and initiatives are focused, to varying degrees,
on opening the educational sector to foster greater private initiatives and
encourage more local and international investors; tailoring curricula and
syllabi, as well as educational schedules, to meet the expectations and
requirements of commerce and industry—that is, purportedly to improve
‘employability’; synchronising the Indian higher education system with
its global (read European and American) counterparts, to allow for easy
movement of personnel and students between the systems; encouraging
the use of (especially but not only) information and communication tech-
nology in all educational spheres; introducing systems of calibration and
evaluation of teaching based on various criteria of ‘productivity’; intro-
ducing systems of regulation and accountability of time spent ‘on the job’
aimed essentially at actively depoliticising campus spaces, but ostensibly
to enforce discipline and encourage research and publication; shifting
increasingly towards contract-based employment, and away from perma-
nent tenures; and introducing measures that will either roll back, bypass,
PRIVATISING MINDS: NEW EDUCATIONAL POLICIES IN INDIA 59
or otherwise render redundant the various provisions of affirmative action

for socially and economically weaker sections.
In this chapter, I hope to engage with some of these issues, as they
influence specifically the relation between employment and knowledge
production.2 I will examine some of the salient features of the reports
and documents noted above in order to give a general sense of the
directions in higher education policy that they espouse, as well as of the
motives and intents driving their arguments. I will then explore some
of the recent developments in the Indian context pertaining to higher
education, as well as to the relations between employment and higher
education, thereby offering an outline of the forces and dynamics at
work in the shaping of higher education in India today. I will attempt to
show that the need for higher education to cater to livelihood require-
ments gets harnessed to the neoliberal agenda of profit generation
through privatisation; the steady decreasing of the financial, political,
and administrative role of the state; and the steady exacerbation of class
contradictions.
STATE CONCEPTUALISATIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION

One would imagine that a useful starting point here would be the concep-
tualisation of ‘higher education’ itself. Given that the Indian state has been
and remains the primary and largest provider of education, higher or other-
wise, in India, it would be even more appropriate to first lay out the state’s
own conceptualisation of ‘higher education’. It is therefore of some signif-
icance that such a conceptualisation—in terms of an explicit definition—is
hard to come by, in any of the numerous government documents and policy
papers on the matter. The Report of the Education Commission, 1964–66,
popularly known as the Kothari Commission Report (see Ministry of
Education 1970), was one of the earliest and more influential of such
reports, and it remains frequently quoted by later documents—such as
the ‘National Policy on Education’ (see Ministry of Human Resource
Development 1992)—down to those of the last decade or so—such as the
National Knowledge Commission’s Report to the Nation, 2006–2009, or
any of the other documents noted above. None of these policy documents
makes any attempt to explicitly spell out how exactly they conceive of
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
higher education.3 From their various articulations of the phrase, though,

it is clear that ‘[t]he state universities and colleges make for the core of our
higher education system where almost all of our undergraduate students
and bulk of postgraduate students pursue education’ (University Grants
Commission 2011, p. iv). The focus is predominantly on issues of logistics
and administration, questions of state versus private funding, and issues
of autonomy, vocationalisation, and professionalisation—but there is no
evidence of any attempt to explicitly articulate the underlying conception
of education that guides these discussions.
However, Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan—National Higher
Education Mission—does make approving reference to an earlier articula-
tion on education, enunciated in the 1970 Kothari Commission Report
but mistakenly attributed by Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan to the
first of such documents in post-independence India, namely the 1950
Report of the University Education Commission, 1948–1949, also known
as the Radhakrishnan Commission Report (see Ministry of Education
1962). The passage Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan cites is:
The most important and urgent reform needed in education is to transform

it, to endeavor to relate it to the life, needs and aspirations of the people
and thereby make it the powerful instrument of social, economic and cul-
tural transformation necessary for the realization of the national goals. For
this purpose, education should be developed so as to increase productivity,
achieve social and national integration, accelerate the process of moderniza-
tion and cultivate social, moral and spiritual values. (Ministry of Human
Resource Development 2013, p. 3)
This passage appears in the Kothari Commission Report (see Ministry

of Education 1970, p. 33) and suggests, quite misleadingly, that the
Radhakrishnan Commission Report had a generally functionalist and
instrumentalist conception of higher education, with its emphasis on
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.
increasing productivity, promoting national integration, and so on. The

dominant tenor of the Radhakrishnan Commission Report, though, is
captured in the following passage:
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)
It goes on to note that higher education
should not be looked upon as the acquiring of certain conventional accom-

plishments which mark one as a member of the educated class. It should be
a well-proportioned preparation for effective living in varied circumstances
and relationships. The interests and opportunities and demands of life are
not limited to any few subjects one may elect to study. They cover the entire
range of nature and of society. That is the best liberal education which best
enables one to live a full life, usually including an experience of mastery in
Some [sic] specialized field. (Ministry of Education 1962, p. 103)
The Radhakrishnan Commission Report’s conception of education evi-

dently prioritises the untrammelled pursuit of knowledge, as well as a
‘well-proportioned preparation for effective living’. This may well be con-
sidered a somewhat general and idealistic understanding; nevertheless, it
is of some significance that it explicitly considers education to be ‘an obli-
gation of the State’, and that this obligation is unconditional, insofar as it
does not give the ‘State’ any quid pro quo rights of ‘control over academic
policies and practices’.
The Radhakrishnan Commission Report thus explicitly abjures a
functionalist or instrumentalist approach to education. The Kothari
Commission Report, however, evidently moves more in this direction,
emphasising education as a means to ‘increase productivity, achieve social
and national integration, accelerate the process of modernization’, and
so on. This could be read as evidence of the transition from the vaunted
‘socialism’ of the Nehruvian era to the increasingly populist and jingois-
tic sentiments of the Indira Gandhi era (e.g., education should relate to
‘the life, needs and aspirations of the people’, and aim to realise ‘national
goals’). Indeed, one may even track this as marking a steady but discern-
ible change from a generally universalist, even altruistic, conception of
62 P. K. VIJAYAN
education (see Ministry of Education 1962), through a more instrumen-

talist approach that nevertheless still sees education as serving a larger
cause, namely the development of the nation as a whole (see Ministry of
Education 1970), to the most recent documents that, under the guise of
enhancing employability, essentially conceive of education as preparation
to serve the needs of commerce and industry (see, e.g., the ‘National
Policy on Education’; the Report to the Nation, 2006–2009; Rashtriya
Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan—National Higher Education Mission; and
Higher Education in India: Strategies and Schemes during Eleventh Plan
Period [2007–2012] for Universities and Colleges).
HIGHER EDUCATION: FROM GOOD TO GOODS

I will return to this point: for now, what is pertinent to note is that
Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan invokes the passage from the Kothari
Commission Report quoted above and attributes it to the Radhakrishnan
Commission Report, in order to authorise and legitimise the conceptions
of education it sets out, which in fact mark a radical departure from the
Radhakrishnan Commission Report. It then goes on to note that the
‘National Policy on Education’ of 1986, as well as the amendments to it
in 1992, translated the articulations of the Radhakrishnan Commission
Report and the Kothari Commission Report into ‘an actionable policy’,
with five main goals: ‘Access’, or ‘enhancement of the education insti-
tutional capacity of the higher education sector’; ‘Equity’, or ‘fair access
of the poor and the socially disadvantaged groups to higher education’;
‘Quality and Excellence’, or the ‘provision of education […] of the highest
standard […] to enhance their human resource capabilities’; ‘Relevance’,
or the ‘promotion of education’ that keeps pace ‘with the changing eco-
nomic, social and cultural development of the country’; and ‘Value Based
Education’, or the inculcation of ‘basic moral values among the youth’.
These goals were to be implemented through ‘schemes/programs […]
designed to improve quality by strengthening academic and physical infra-
structure’ (Ministry of Human Resource Development 2013, p. 4). Barely
two pages later, however, this lofty vision begins to morph, and the docu-
ment begins to emphasise the need for a ‘strategic shift in thinking’, espe-
cially in the following aspects of higher education: more private funding;
more outcome-dependent funding; institutional autonomy and ‘account-
ability through competitiveness’; targeted social-equity schemes; more
vocational educational institutions; integration of teaching and research;
a more learner-centric pedagogy; more internationalisation; consolidation

of existing institutions rather than expansion; and alliances and networks
between universities and industry devoted to setting up a ‘self-governing
system’ (Ministry of Human Resource Development 2013, pp. 6–7). That
is, the five generalised sets of platitudes about the goals of higher educa-
tion, purportedly distilled from the Radhakrishnan Commission Report
and the Kothari Commission Report, undergo a ‘strategic shift’ in order
to morph into an ‘actionable policy’ shaped by ten priorities, all of which
are explicitly instrumentalist and functionalist in orientation. The empha-
sis is now on criteria such as competitiveness, cost-effectiveness, financial
and administrative autonomy from the state but increased subjection to
commercial and industrial pressures, and, significantly, on increased ‘inter-
nationalization’. This last has effectively meant not just the revamping
of academic aspects such as curricula, syllabi, and evaluation to ‘inter-
national’ standards, or bringing in more international students and fac-
ulty or even remodelling the financial and administrative structure to
match ‘international’ practices, but also the allowing of foreign direct and
institutional investments in the educational sector on an unprecedented
scale—all of which, though, simply refers us back to the primary impulse
underlying these changes, namely intensive and intensifying privatisation
and commercialisation.4
This change in fact, as the document notes, is in keeping with the stipu-
lations of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan of the Planning Commission of India
(2013). As the Twelfth Five-Year Plan notes,
[h]igher education is critical for developing a modern economy, a just soci-

ety and a vibrant polity. It equips young people with skills relevant for the
labour market and the opportunity for social mobility. It provides people
already in employment with skills to negotiate rapidly evolving career
requirements […]. Indeed, higher education is the principal site at which
our national goals, developmental priorities and civic values can be exam-
ined and refined. (Planning Commission of India 2013, p. 89)
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
The shift from the conception of higher education in the Radhakrishnan

Commission Report to that in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, Rashtriya
Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan, or the University Grants Commission’s Higher
Education in India is matched by the emergence of a corresponding
conception of higher education in various non-governmental and quasi-
governmental documents, such as the Report on a Policy Framework for
Reforms in Education (see Birla and Ambani 2000); the Ernst & Young-
FICCI reports (see Ernst and Young-FICCI 2011,5 2012, 2013); ASHE
2014 (see Deloitte and the Confederation of Indian Industries 2014); and
‘India—Higher Education Sector: Opportunities for Private Participation’
(see PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Limited, 2012). Like, for example,
Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan, Higher Education in India, or the
Twelfth Five-Year Plan, all of these non-governmental documents, too,
emphasise an overall instrumentalist and functionalist approach to higher
education, as much as specific ‘reforms’ such as internationalisation,
autonomisation, or increased private participation.
PRIVATISATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

AND THE CORPORATE CORPUS
Significantly, the main justification touted by the first set of documents

for this shift is also the reason for the spate of interest in higher education
from the private sector, as evinced in the second set. Noting the rather
low gross enrolment ratio (GER) in higher education institutions in India,
Gayatri Loomba summarises the argument of this justification as follows:
Improving the GER would mean providing higher education to a major

proportion of the population in an attempt to reap the fruits of India’s
favorable demographic dividend, expected to last for the next thirty to forty
years. The demographic dividend, which is expected to see more than 546
million people under the age of 25 at a time when the developed world
would be facing an ageing population of 37, implies that India would see
a higher proportion of workers in comparison to dependents, thereby pro-
viding an opportunity to increase the annual growth of per capita income.
Unless capitalised upon, this demographic dividend would turn into a
demographic liability and India would lose out on the chance to become a
globally dominating economy that is capable of exporting knowledge based
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.
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)
These sentiments are echoed by Amitabh Jhingan, in his ‘Foreword’ to the

Ernst & Young–FICCI report of 2012:
Today, a key concern for India is the creation of an employable workforce

to harness its demographic dividend to the maximum extent. To achieve
this, the country needs an education system that can deliver quality in terms
of a skilled and industry-ready workforce […]. The private sector can be
expected to play an instrumental role in achieving these outcomes through
the creation of knowledge networks, research and innovation centres,
corporate-backed institutions, and providing support for faculty develop-
ment. (Ernst and Young-FICCI 2012, p. 5)
Besides the striking term ‘demographic dividend’—which, incidentally,

is now widely used to also indicate a burgeoning market of potential
consumers7—two points of some significance are discernible in these
articulations.
First, the impulse towards privatisation is represented as being in the
national interest, and in at least three ways: in terms of supplementing
‘scarce’ government finances with private investments; in exploiting the
‘demographic dividend to the maximum extent’, towards establishing India
as a ‘globally dominating economy’ by crafting a ‘skilled and industry-
ready workforce’ that can export ‘knowledge based goods and services’;
and in maximising the ‘opportunity to increase the annual growth of per
capita income’. The guising of corporate interests as the interests of the
nation, however, slips up in referring to the need for ‘surplus graduates and
skilled workers’: the aim here is the creation not so much of employment
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:
Indian society puts a premium on knowledge and its acquisition – spending on

education has figured as the single largest outlay for a middle class household
after food and groceries. With its rapidly expanding middle class, India’s pri-
vate expenditure on education is set to increase manifold […]. [Because of

the] glaring mismatch between supply and demand […] 450,000 Indian stu-
dents spend over USD 13 billion each year in acquiring higher education
overseas. (PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Limited, 2012, p. 3)
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-
cally equipped enough to be granted admission into any segment of the

higher education sector). Besides these, there are other considerations—
such as the likely perpetuation of what Jeemol Unni refers to as the three
types of ‘skill-gaps’, namely ‘over-education’, ‘skill mismatch in technical
education’, and ‘quality skill gap’ (Unni 2013, p. 2)—that are stated as
the reasons for unemployability persisting despite acquiring higher educa-
tion. I cannot, however, explore these due to the paucity and fragility of
the data on this. It is true that one of the arguments for the privatisation
of higher education is in fact that it will address the problem of the ‘skill-
gap’. However, no convincing argument appears, in any of the documents
discussed, that privatisation can in fact address the problem of the ‘skill-
gap’, especially since the projected unemployment (or what is referred to
as ‘surplus labour’) remains extremely high even after the privatisation of
higher education and the attendant restructuring of pedagogy to provide
the necessary skills.
A crucial but hidden dimension of this problem is the fact that, although
the entire model of privatisation of higher education is geared towards
the needs of industry and commerce—that is, for skilled employment—a
major cause and source of unemployment is the attenuation of the agricul-
tural sector, leading to the increasing unemployment of unskilled labour
migrating out from agriculture, but with few prospects in the industrial
sector:
Although the service sector would continue to be India’s growth engine, it

would, given its relatively low labour-intensity of production, nevertheless
be unable to generate sufficient employment to reduce the disguised unem-
ployment in agriculture. India will need to create jobs in labour-intensive
industries to absorb the sizeable workforce from agriculture in industry. In
order to reduce the share of employment in agriculture from about 50 per
cent to 25 per cent by 2030, industry would have to double its labour
demand from 119 million in 2010 to 274 million in 2030. (CRISIL Centre
for Economic Research 2010, p. 12)
However, ‘the net incremental workforce required in the industry and

services sectors is ~145 million’ (Ernst and Young-FICCI 2013, p. 17),
which leaves a surplus (of unemployed) of more than 100 million. In
other words, at least one major reason for the persisting unemployment
is not the ‘unemployability’ of the workforce but the failure to promote
70 P. K. VIJAYAN
labour-intensive industrial and commercial policies9 more appropriate to

the Indian context and capable of absorbing this vast and growing force of
unskilled labour. It is true that the Ernst & Young-FICCI report of 2013
(see Ernst and Young-FICCI 2013, p. 20) as well as Rashtriya Uchchatar
Shiksha Abhiyan—National Higher Education Mission (see Ministry of
Human Resource Development 2013, pp. 6–7)—do argue for the restruc-
turing of higher education under privatisation, into a three-tier pyramidal
system consisting of ‘research-focused institutions’ at the top, ‘career-
focused institutions’ (‘with a focus on producing industry-ready gradu-
ates’) in the middle, and ‘foundation institutions’ (that provide ‘skills that
are relevant to the local industry/community’) at the bottom (Ernst and
Young-FICCI 2013, p. 20). This structure is intended, presumably, to
address the need for ‘skill-development’ on a mass scale, thereby render-
ing the unskilled part of the labour force—by far the largest chunk of it—
‘industry-ready’. But if there is no employment likely in the industry for
which they are being readied, even a highly successful skill-development
programme will prove pointless, and the entire argument of privatisation
of higher education as the panacea for the problem of unemployment will
fall flat.
Third, and arising out of the previous two points, it seems clear that
privatisation is going to benefit no one but the private investors. However,
if this were the case, there would be no need for the elaborate restruc-
turing of the entire system that all these documents argue for: it would
be sufficient to push privatisation as simply a fiscal requirement, supple-
menting governmental investments in return for profit. But privatisation
is being vigorously promoted as a necessary and inherent condition for
the overhauling of the entire higher education system, towards enhancing
employability—that is, for the benefit of the students. As noted above, a
central focus of this overhaul is on ‘internationalization’: besides ‘enhanc-
ing capacity and efficiency’, and ‘improving standards and quality’, ‘[i]
nternationalization can in fact allow India to realise its Demographic
Dividend and turn its educated (but frequently not skilled) workforce
into one that is highly skilled, efficient and integrated into the global
9
Arguably, the recent growth in the Indian economy has seen poor corresponding growth
in employment, primarily because the former has been driven mainly by the less labour-
intensive services sector rather than industry. Increasing automation in the latter, along with
a lack of encouragement for labour-intensive industries such as textiles, handicrafts and food
processing, has also contributed to poor employment growth rates in the industrial sector.
(See Mahambare and Saraf, 2014.)
marketplace’ (Ministry of Human Resource Development 2013, p. 131).

The Ernst & Young-FICCI report of 2013 optimistically notes that ‘India
could […] become a large supplier of skilled manpower to labor deficient
markets around the world’ (Ernst and Young-FICCI 2013, p. 17), where
the cumulative labour deficit is projected to be 56.5 million. However,
as observed above, barely 5 % of the ‘surplus’ is likely to benefit from the
‘skill development’ that will be unleashed through privatisation and there-
fore able to take advantage of the international labour shortfall—quite
apart from other crucial considerations, such as the fact that employment
opportunities and access to international travel are themselves restricted
to a minute percentage of even that 5 %.10 The professed benefits—such
as they may be—of facilitating the entry of foreign universities, in order to
raise (through measures such as the 2010 Foreign Educational Institutions
[Regulation of Entry and Operations] Bill)11 the quality of pedagogy and
research to international standards, not only remain confined to the tiny
social segment that may be able to afford that education but also have the
additional ramifications of importing academic labour from abroad, from
the home universities, rather than creating employment for local academic
labour; ‘capital flight’, through outward remittances to the home universi-
ties, of income generated through fees in India; and perpetuating a new
disconnect—between the Indian student consuming curricula designed
in and for a different social and economic milieu, and the demands of
the Indian social and economic context. That is, ‘internationalization’ will
benefit the universities that come in, perhaps more than the students they
cater to.
Another measure that is part of the process of privatisation and which
similarly belies its ostensible purpose of generating employment is the
‘learner-centric’ pedagogy. The intensive use of information technology,
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
and the reduction of the role of the professor to that of a facilitator,

effectively means an enforced reduction in pedagogic workload, and a
consequent reduction in teaching posts—that is, in academic employ-
ment. In the envisioned three-tier structure, the largest component of stu-
dents will be in the bottom two layers, being trained to meet the demands
of industry through curricula set by the industry and trained by person-
nel from the industry:12 in other words, the overhaul results in a dra-
matic attenuation of academic labour and employment, with the system
of higher education actually returning personnel into itself—or creating
employment within itself—only at the highest tier: the lower, and vastly
bigger, two tiers will be staffed by industry personnel already employed
within industry. A moot point here is whether the industry-set curricula
are in fact of any added value in terms of employability:
The possibilities of tailoring higher education systems to putative labor mar-

ket requirements are limited, except in specific sectors. Even if it were pos-
sible to match a higher education system with labor market outcomes, it
would still not be enough to get at the counter factual, namely what differ-
ence would a change in the education system make to economic outcomes?
Industry groups project labor requirement in certain sectors and then assess
whether the education system is producing the volume of human capital
for their needs. These standard ‘manpower planning’ exercises assume cer-
tain elasticity of demand of specific types of human capital with the overall
growth of the economy and of particular sector. There may be something
useful about this exercise, but it often raises more questions than it answers.
(Kapur and Mehta, 2007, p. 50)
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).
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
inexorably. One such crucial change is the increasing contractualisation

of academic employment: in the case of Delhi University, for example, a
white paper produced by the Delhi University Teachers’ Association (the
teachers’ trade union organisation) states that, as of August 2014, ‘more
than 4500 teaching positions (50 % or more of existing posts) continue to
be vacant and teachers appointed against these posts work on ad hoc or
guest lecturer basis’ (Delhi University Teachers’ Association, 2014, p. 19).
One very important fallout of this has been the increasing quiescence of
the teaching community, and the steady political weakening of the trade
union, since, inevitably, contractual employees grow more vulnerable14 to
pressure and therefore increasingly reluctant (for fear of repercussions on
their job prospects) to participate in any resistance (either to the sweeping
changes that they are themselves victims of, or to the rather cavalier man-
ner in which these changes are enforced).
But the resistance to these changes has the disadvantage of being per-
ceived as conservative, archaic, lazy, anti-progress, and so on,15 and, more
gravely, of not having a viable alternative discourse on higher education
that can move beyond critique to a full-fledged discourse in its own right.
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).
three aspects. It involve [sic] imparting of scientific knowledge to the

students on the subject so that we create knowledge society [sic] with
scientific approach and mind. Beside knowledge [sic] it also involve [sic]
imparting of skill and working knowledge, and thereby develop [sic]
human resource necessary for economic development. And finally rel-
evant education also involve [sic] providing value education so that edu-
cation serve [sic] as an instrument of creating citizens who cherish value
[sic] of democracy, secularism, fraternity, and equality.(University Grants
Commission 2011, p. 17)
This gem of profundity is particularly illuminating (despite—or perhaps

because of—its grammatical exceptionalism) in the importance it gives
to the third element, ‘value education’. It is not unique in this; even the
private-sector documents such as the Ernst & Young-FICCI report of
2013 emphasise this aspect: curiously though, its role in the three-tier sys-
tem is most in the bottom-most tier, where it will help ‘to produce well-
balanced individuals who are morally and socially conscious’, resulting in
an ‘improved social order to ensure favorable environment for industrial
growth’ (Ernst and Young-FICCI 2013, p. 25). This is part of a more
pervasive tendency in governance that tends to see higher education as
a subtle means of policing and maintaining law and order. In 2011, the
University Grants Commission had issued a directive to all science and
technology institutes (such as the Indian Institutes of Technology), to
give their students courses in the humanities and social sciences, in order
to ‘deradicalize’ them. This was apparently in response to a statement by
the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh:
[L]ack of productive employment opportunities for our young men and

women is one factor, which aids […] radicalization. Education and skill
development opportunities have a major role to play in addressing this prob-
lem. We have made efforts at providing more opportunities with greater
inclusion in higher education. (Singh, quoted in Danish 2013)
It is important to note the convergence of the tendencies towards pri-

vatisation, the marketing of illusory employment opportunities, and
‘deradicalization’, in the reconceptualisation of higher education that is
underway. It indicates the clear perception of higher education as the
site where such a convergence can in fact be perceived, analysed, under-
stood, and perhaps even challenged, thereby making the control of the
higher education sector all the more vital for the facilitation of profiteering
76 P. K. VIJAYAN
(both inside and outside higher education) to be carried out unchallenged.

It is this attempt to take control of the higher education system that has
to be publicised, challenged, and resisted—and it is an understanding of
higher education that makes such a resistance possible that needs to be
elaborated, promoted, and sustained. For what it is worth, this is a small
contribution in that direction.
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PART II
Management and Leadership Against

Academic Freedom
CHAPTER 5
‘Academic Leadership’ and the Conditions

of Academic Work
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

82 R. ALLEN AND S. GUPTA
In this chapter, we attempt to contextualise the shifting connotations

of academic leadership so as to understand the current circumstances of
academic life. In the first section, we do so sketchily and in a broad way,
by considering the conceptual nuances of such leadership amid phases in
rationalising the conditions of academic work. In the second section, we
offer a more contextually grounded view from UK academia.
THE BIG PICTURE

The first point to register is that academic leadership is now not what it
seems to mean or used to mean: the phrase has little to do with ‘academic
leadership’, or leadership informed by and therefore bearing upon engage-
ment with teaching and research; it is taken as ‘management of academic
workers and institutions from above’. The going wisdom is that such lead-
ers do not need to have (or even have had) any investment in academic
work themselves, much as management consultants need no involvement
in the work of business firms they give advice on. If some would-be leaders
happen to have such investments, the sooner they disinvest the better their
prospects. The second point to register speedily is that ‘academic lead-
ers’, thus understood, are now consensually regarded as being worth more
than academics of any sort. It seems thoroughly understandable that the
relative symbolic capital of ‘upper-level academic leaders’ and of academic
workers at the top of their pecking orders (‘senior academics’) in universi-
ties is signified by differentiations in material capital investments: crudely
put, the former get paid a lot more than the latter, often several times
more. It is clear where aspirations in academia are likely to be pinned.
That a shift has gradually taken place from ‘academic leadership’ to
‘managing academic workers and institutions from above’ in the use of
the phrase academic leadership is evident to all whose careers in academia
stretch back to the 1970s, or who have informed themselves of the matter.
Yet the stickiness of the phrase itself, so that it has constantly increased its
misleading traction, especially since the 1990s, is possibly encouraged to
disguise this shift—to confer on managers with thin academic credentials
a veil of academic respectability. The process and step-by-step implica-
tions of that shift are fairly difficult to pin down in historicist terms, partly
because many academics have been persuaded into it unthinkingly, and
partly because texts on the subject are overwhelmingly in the nature of
technical guidebooks and fact collocations to help academic leaders do
their jobs. Most such texts are produced by such leaders themselves, with
‘ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP’ AND THE CONDITIONS OF ACADEMIC WORK 83
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,
in the public service, in military organizations, in the church, and in other

large-scale, non-educational settings’ (Litchfield 1959, p. 490); or antici-
pations found in Daniel Bell’s sociological forecasting of the university’s
place in ‘post-industrial society’ as he took his neoconservative turn: when,
having been struck by the proliferating functions of American universities
(see 1966), he raised a set of questions about the future of the university
(see Bell 1973, pp. 263–265). Answering those questions, in many ways,
has been the stuff of the shift in question. Such anticipations offer a way
of retrospective clarification of what happened, a kind of meeting of future
gazing and looking back.
Such careful historicist research is what we call for. In this chapter,
however, which does not quite offer the space for it, we go in a differ-
ent direction, also historicist in temper: we try to articulate, in as bald
and straightforward a mode as possible, the unfolding of consecutive
steps in the conceptual rationalising of the relationship between academic
work and conditions for that work in the context of liberal economies.
These are given below as phases in rationalising academia in cost–ben-
efit accounting terms, and are informed to some extent by the details
offered in such researches as those cited above (a kind of crystallisation of
broad patterns discerned therein), and to some degree by the experience
of being academics exposed to such phases. The phases outlined below
have a conceptual or logical order, and, at the same time, they resonate
also, but loosely and fuzzily, with a chronological order of academic ini-
tiatives and experiences. Broader social factors undoubtedly explain the
rationalisations in and through these phases: it is arguable, for example,
that democratisation and expansion of the higher education sector, the
changing character of elite class interests embedded in academia, or the
changing features of post-World War II liberal economic systems (towards
globalisation) are determinative. The outlined phases below do not reflect
explicitly on such factors; we are content to leave it to readers to decide
how these have worked in a context-by-context fashion. Readers may also,
and accordingly, gauge what normative considerations attach to these
phases, whether they were desirable or not. The point here is to articulate
the rationale briefly and clearly, so that their broader social and ethical
implications can be contemplated.
It seems to us that such phases are being—and have been—unrolled in
some such order widely in different countries, increasingly globally. That
the citations above are predominantly with reference to academia in the
USA is not fortuitous: arguably, the conceptual direction charted below
emanated from the USA before being embraced in Western European

countries (especially wholeheartedly in the UK), Australia, Canada, and
further afield. Though some countries are perhaps further along the line
of such phases than others, almost all are converging on their direction.
Tracking the seven phases of consecutive conceptual reorientations of
the relationship between academic leadership and the conditions of aca-
demic work entails registering three general initial propositions about
what academic work and the accounting thereof in liberal contexts con-
sist in. First, a significant part of academic work is by nature introspec-
tive and relatively intractable in terms of time, resources, and outlay: such
as preparing for teaching, consulting research sources and conducting
experiments, reading and writing, engaging in conversations, and so on.
Second, easy tractability typically attaches to what is externalised after the
introspective process: lectures and tutorials, turning out qualified persons,
conference presentations and seminars, publications, data sets, experiment
results, patents, and so on. Third, setting the conditions of academic work
involves making some calculations of tractability, which in turn depend
on various ideological subscriptions within the liberal fold. Other kinds of
ideological subscriptions may have actuated different calculations (some-
times intrusions) in various contexts, especially in the past, but shifting
liberal subscriptions along the line of the phases below are now globally
discernible.
With these very general propositions, the following phases in engineer-
ing the relationship between academic work and conditions thereof can
be outlined.
Phase 1. Academic work as a whole—both introspective process and
externalised product—in all its dimensions is regarded as a public good,
as conducted in all academic institutions (however funded, but thereby
particularly justifying state or public funding). It is held that the precise
character of the public benefit cannot necessarily be accounted strictly in
terms of specific externalised products at any given time: it is impossible to
predict when and where the benefit of some product will become apparent
(if it exists, it may come to be useful in expected and unexpected ways).
But the evidence from a long view of the contribution of academic work
to social development shows a salutary, indeed inextricable, relationship.
Furthermore, it is considered that an intractable (i.e., free and open) intro-
spective process is necessary for the realisation of the externalised prod-
uct, and those engaging with academic work are therefore best placed to
understand and manage the conditions for such work—so a high degree of
academic self-determination in managing the conditions of academic work

(what is called ‘academic leadership’ above) is desirable. Typically, this
means that the intractable introspective process is allowed reasonable free
play and kept outside strict accounting; this accounting is confined mainly
to even-handed distribution of the more tractable externalised produc-
tion among workers (especially, teaching contact and administration). By
way of regulating productivity, systems for informing academic workers
of expectations, incentives to encourage effort and productivity (promo-
tions, increments, etc.), peer reviewing and external peer assessing at every
stage, and disincentives for poor work (appeals procedures, disciplinary
procedures, etc.) suffice.
Phase 2. It is soon argued—to begin with by those administering
government budgets—that academic work should not be considered a
public good without accountable evidence thereof: that is, every invest-
ment made by a putative public (whether through states or other enti-
ties, including private) in academic work should be tractably accounted in
terms of benefits to the public. Academic self-determination of the condi-
tions of academic work is not questioned; but academia is now required
to make itself ‘professional’ and tractable in ways that can be recorded by,
for example, auditors, bureaucrats, and ministers. In the first instance, this
means creating more disaggregated and stable measurements of the rela-
tively tractable exteriorised products, that is, measurements that comply
with existing, albeit so far loose and unsystematised, academic values and
norms. Thus, specific exteriorised products begin to be subjected regu-
larly to certain strict evaluative measurements—effectively withdrawing
the notion that their public benefits are impossible to affix firmly at any
given point of time. So, measurements of ‘quality’, that is, of scholarly
importance, influence, esteem, and impact for activities such as teaching
and research, are instituted—which can ostensibly be immediately gauged
through some regular bureaucratic procedure. The principle of academic
self-determination is maintained by keeping such disaggregated measuring
and accounting of exteriorised products at the behest of ‘peer reviewing’,
which is given the character of a bureaucratic accounting procedure.
Phase 3. Once the value of the exteriorised product is thus disaggregated
according to firm ‘quality’ measures, the introspective process preceding it
becomes open to tracking, too. The introspective process is then broken
down into parts, and each part is given a value in accordance with the
value attributed to the exteriorised products that putatively derive from it.
So, the cost of time for teaching preparation is considered as measurable
against the measured quality of the tractable teaching done (affixed by

consulting peers and students, recruitment figures, etc.); the cost of time
for reading, writing, experimenting, discussing is considered as measur-
able against the measured quality of publications produced (affixed by
consulting peers, checking ‘bibliometrics’, creating indexes of ‘prestige’,
etc.); and so on. Gradually, therefore, the conditions for academic work
are revised. Now, instead of allowing free play for introspection and even-
handed distribution of tractable exteriorised products, the apparently dis-
aggregated parts of the introspective process are themselves made subject
to accounting. This in turn allows for calculations and trade-offs in terms
of the ‘quality’ of the exteriorised product that is likely to follow from the
introspective process at any given time. That what’s ‘likely to follow’ is
itself an intractable variant is too obvious a weakness in this accounting
process: so measurements of the probability of performance according to
each worker’s record are generated and factored in to make this shaky vari-
ant appear measurable. It makes for a more atomised academic sector as
workers and institutions bargain with and calculate against each other to
obtain the most advantageous performance records and trade-offs as part
of their condition of work.
Phase 4. The disaggregation of both the exteriorised product and the
introspective process of academic work, and the generation of perfor-
mance records, are then brought to bear upon the further fashioning of
conditions for academic work through two crucial steps. Step one: it is
deemed that the accounting practices invented through Phases 2 and 3 are
an area of specialisation that demands too much time and effort, interferes
too deeply into the core of academic work (teaching and research), to be
left in the hands of academics as self-managers of their working condi-
tions. So, a professional management stratum is inserted into academia,
partly by co-optation from within and partly by recruitment from without.
It comes under the guise of ‘academic leadership’ as a specialised and dis-
crete role. The job of this management stratum is no longer justified by its
understanding of the relation between introspection and exteriorisation in
academic work. Instead, its role consists in taking charge of the account-
ing practices invented through Phases 2 and 3, and it is soon given (or
wrests) the power to engineer all aspects of academic work so that such
bookkeeping can be conducted to optimise the use of investments (costs
of time, resources, outlay, etc.). The measurements of performance put in
place for this stratum itself have no relation to academic work. These man-
agerial performance measures derive from comparisons (typically between
institutions and sectors) of success in optimising the use of investments,

and in ensuring the compliance of academic workers and the manipula-
tion of academic work for that purpose. The obvious way of ensuring this
compliance is by upping the pressure of atomisation and competitiveness
mentioned at the end of Phase 3; that is, by introducing targets for exte-
riorised production and accordingly rationalising the distribution of parts
of the introspective process in order to influence the record of predictable
performance (which easily translates into behaviour profiles for workers).
Phase 5. Step two, which follows on the heels of step one in Phase 4,
involves taking the measurements of ‘value’ put in place in Phases 2 and
3 largely out of the hands of academic self-assessment (peer assessment)
and passing it on to external representatives of the so-called ‘public’,
which is often now the same as agents of private interests (‘stakehold-
ers’ such as employers, industrialists, community leaders, political bosses,
and bureaucrats). This is aided, indeed motivated, by step one: the man-
agement stratum, isolated from academic workers and with license to act
upon them, often has aligned interests (in cost–benefit accounting terms)
with such non-academic stakeholders and finds them useful for pressur-
ing and extracting compliance from academic workers. The management
stratum is able to argue that the public benefits of academic work can only
be attested disinterestedly from outside academia by such ‘stakeholders’:
for example, employers can testify whether the teaching done is useful in
producing a workforce outside academia; community leaders can testify
whether teaching and research is producing social stability and develop-
ment; and corporations can bear witness to the contribution of teach-
ing and research to business development. Academic workers come to
be regarded as a part of the ‘human resources’ (a small part of the gross
resources) and as ‘service-providers’ of institutions, and students, along
with other ‘stakeholders’, become ‘clients’ or ‘consumers’.
Phase 6. The next move is inevitable: the disaggregated measurements
invented to render exteriorised product and introspective process tractable
in Phases 2 and 3, initially in keeping with academic values and norms,
are modified to align with these ‘stakeholder’ interests. So, incremental
adjustments in those measurements can now be used to not merely keep
track of the exteriorised product and the introspective process, but to
change and direct those. For example, now teaching has to be designed
to produce skilled workers for particular sectors of employment, research
has to be undertaken to produce innovation in industry or encourage
political harmony, and so on. Academic work is now considered not as
a public good in the broad sense, but as an instrument of dominant and

self-reproductive alignments that claim to represent and dictate the public
good (and, incidentally, that they are able to do so makes them dominant).
Typically, this phase involves a culling of academic workers who continue
to adhere to what they consider key to an academic identity (freedom
of introspection followed by exteriorisation), and increased recruitment
of workers who are able to accommodate their academic instrumentality
with those dominant and self-reproductive alignments. These moves are
managed under the guise of ‘strategic management’, ‘forward planning’,
‘restructuring’, ‘efficiency measures’, and so on. At the rawest, the intro-
spective process that is the starting point of academic work and the aca-
demic worker’s raison d’être is itself taken over and directed from without;
a kind of thought control seems to be exercised that annuls the impetus of
what was understood as academic work in Phase 1.
Phase 7. The identity of academia—academic workers’ understanding
of academic life—begins to fragment; so that ‘What is a university?’ and
‘What is an academic?’ appear increasingly rhetorical and old-fashioned
questions. Academic institutions and workers are gradually replaced by
large or small organisations peopled with service providers, under the con-
trol of various split management strata, sometimes as a federation under
a super-management stratum for a large so-called university. All these
organisations and service providers that constitute the so-called univer-
sity are now geared up for training personnel and utility-based knowledge
production to serve different dominant interest groups of society (not
really the ‘public’ in general any longer, but social alignments such as
corporations, state-policing-and-publicity units, community groups, and
consumer associations). Some elite parts of this so-called university (which
still appear to bear a resemblance to academic institutions of Phase 1) also
generate knowledge and instruction for scholarly hobbyists who can pay
for their intellectual pleasures. At this point, any pretence of academic
work being regarded as a public good can gradually be withdrawn, and
former commitments to public investment (especially direct state fund-
ing) reduced to a mote. Academic institutions are now fragmented bodies,
parts of which are outsourced, and parts of which remain as self-funding
and profit-making components of a range of establishment interest groups
and organisations (government, non-government, corporate, represented
by ‘stakeholders’ in academic boardrooms) that finance these fragmented
academic institutions according to their own needs. The ultimate aim of
such loose federations, each controlled by a complex management stratum
in synch with ‘stakeholders’, is to offer a flexible and obedient means for

generating economic growth and social stability for the perpetuation of
dominant interests.
In the UK, it seems to us, we are somewhere between Phases 6 and 7;
in a few so-called modernising contexts that we are aware of, academia is
still at Phases 2 or 3, or leaping ahead eagerly to Phase 4.
The rationale sketched above resonates with the broad outlines of
contemporary liberal cost–benefit accounting laid out, with unusual pre-
science, in Michel Foucault’s 1979 Collège de France course on The Birth
of Biopolitics (see Foucault 2008). Foucault’s lectures referred to a much
broader field, which he dubbed ‘biopolitics’, wherein such cost–benefit
accounting practices have become a naturalised and pervasive ground-
ing for liberal ‘governmentality’—within conjugal partnerships, conceiv-
ing and raising children, property and employment relations, the penal
system, and so on. Under the sway of liberal governmentality, Foucault
observed, individuals become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’, constantly
realising themselves and advancing their interests and confirming their
existence through cost–benefit accounting. As the above rationale of ‘aca-
demic leadership’ and the conditions of academic work unfold, the pres-
sure for academic workers to account themselves as ‘entrepreneurs of the
academic self’ increases. But this pressure is particularly fraught in this
instance. Such self-accounting is riven with anxiety because the academic
self that academic workers seek to realise, promote, sustain, and confirm
is slipping away—is ceasing to be recognised, seems to be falling unno-
ticed into a black hole. The core of the academic self—the freedom of
introspection and consequent exteriorisation—is slipping away; or rather,
introspection is gripped by extrinsic thought control and exteriorisation
squeezed by constraints of permissibility. Even on the superficial surface
of academic life, markers of value and integrity in thinking and practice,
communal rites of mutual recognition and acknowledgement, and gauges
of effort and aspiration have been redefined out of existence. All these
have been redefined into something with which the academic worker is
unable to identify.
So, while the worth and prevalence of what passes as ‘academic leader-
ship’ is ever on the rise, there is growing evidence of anxiety and stress
among academic workers. In the UK (and no doubt elsewhere, too),
this has spurred some public discussion. A March 2014 Guardian piece
on rising mental health problems among academics led to an energetic
and revealing debate (see Anonymous Academic 2014). The University
and College Union’s ‘Survey of Work-Related Stress 2014’ found: ‘The

proportion of Respondents [numbering 6439] from HE [higher educa-
tion] who agreed or strongly agreed that they find their job stressful has
increased from 72 % in the 2012 survey to 79 % in 2014’ (University and
College Union 2014). And there are also numerous scholarly papers on
the matter. Instead of dwelling on those, let us move on to a more con-
textually grounded view of ‘academic leadership’ and academic work in
the UK.
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.
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)
The threat of this kind of pressure—coupled with the difficulty young

people face in getting a job, and the availability of newer local universi-
ties and a range of newer vocational courses—must surely be a factor in
decision-making in this social group.
The issue of status runs like a thread through this history of expansion,
with each phase being driven by different kinds of specialist institutions
of higher education aspiring to the title of ‘university’. The monopoly
of Oxford and Cambridge in England was broken in the early nine-
teenth century by the founding of the University of London and Durham
University. Scotland had three old universities (St Andrews, Glasgow, and
Edinburgh), and other universities were founded in Scotland and Wales in
the later part of the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding the growth in
size and self-confidence of the major industrial cities, such as Birmingham
and Manchester, higher education therein saw the development of techni-
cal and commercial institutes, such as Mason College in Birmingham and
Owens College in Manchester. These received royal charters establishing
them as universities from the early twentieth century. Thus, a pattern is
apparent whereby new universities appearing from the mid-nineteenth
century onwards were almost never before the 1960s created from noth-
ing, but were built on the basis of specialist local colleges. After World
War II, the British government sought to modernise the British economy,
and this led to another phase of establishing higher education institutions.
New colleges of advanced technology were established alongside new
polytechnics in major cities across England as part of a thrust for innova-
tion in manufacturing, the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’
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
but also through publishing data, university by university, and subject by

subject, on whether graduates are in employment (or studying for a higher
degree) 6 months after graduating.
These instances of regulatory intervention are a small example of what
has been introduced since 1992. In principle, universities are autonomous,
that is, subject to the control of their boards of governors, and then, a
further step away, to government controls. In practice, governments exert
considerable influence through the Higher Education Funding Council,
even though, in regular steps since 1998, universities have grown increas-
ingly dependent on fees paid directly by students. The Council was estab-
lished in 1992 by the Act of Parliament; the Act also established the Quality
Assurance Agency. In essence, the effect of the Agency is to exert a strong
influence on the curriculum, methods of teaching and assessment, and the
academic and support environment (‘the student experience’) in which
students and teachers work. Add to this the system of inspection govern-
ing academic research organised by the Council (the Research Assessment
Exercises since 1986, replaced by the Research Excellence Framework in
2014), and it will be clear that the supposed autonomy of universities is
highly qualified now. Why is this? One vice chancellor evoked the responsi-
bility that came along with spending public money. Others evoke the need
to protect the international educational brand of the UK. It is tempting
to allow some credence to these claims, but also to suggest that the scale
of universities is a factor. When universities were smaller, more elite and
more tightly linked to the establishment, they could be allowed to act as a
source of innovation while also tolerating their critical ideological drifts and
inclinations—as licensed fools. The scale of operation renders those radical
and critical currents of academia threatening, particularly given the new
order into which universities have been thrust. In an echo of this national
situation, universities themselves have become less tolerant of ‘rogue’ ideas.
Tuning to the focus of this chapter within the UK, we look at two
aspects of academic employment: leadership and internship. The nature
of ‘academic leadership’ in UK universities has changed, along the lines
broadly outlined in the previous section, over the last 40 years or so. The
structural levels at which this change has occurred are worth registering.
At the beginning of that period, governance and management of universi-
ties were defined in terms that shadowed the political structure. That is to,
they were bicameral, with a leader based in the lower house (the Academic
Board and the vice chancellor) overseen by a kind of revising chamber
(a Council); support was provided by a structure akin to the Civil Service,
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
R. Moore (a retired partner at Ernst and Young) and Michael A. Diamond

(Vice President, University of Southern California). The text’s focus is on
US universities and colleges, and though leadership figures prominently in
the title, most of the work focuses on what the authors call ‘strategic plan-
ning’. The introduction, however, indicates how important a particular
leadership style is in their view. They write that ‘[l]eadership is purposeful’,
that it ‘empowers people to act’, and that it ‘is not high individual perfor-
mance’, before giving the following gloss:
Leadership, effectively exercised, will result in a team of people who enjoy

clear purpose, shared values, who are empowered by knowing that their ini-
tiatives are aligned with and supported by team members, and who believe
that there is mutual benefit deriving from their individual commitments in
turning their common vision into reality. Those who occupy positions of
leadership cannot get the whole job done by working alone. The alternative
to leadership and teamwork is that the people in leadership positions will
get to own, exclusively, all the problems and all the answers. (Moore and
Diamond 2000, p. 2)
The descriptions of ‘strategic planning’ that follow indicate that the

authors see these same characteristics as important aspects of the role of
staff lower in the managerial hierarchy, complying with the guardianship
of upper-level leaders.
Our second example is more diffuse: the work of the Leadership
Foundation for Higher Education established in 2004 by universities
(Universities UK and GuildHE). The work of the Leadership Foundation
focuses on providing courses for staff at a range of levels from gover-
nors to programme leaders who are identified by their role, or self-identify
themselves, as ‘leaders’. The brochure of their Transition to Leadership
programme says the following:
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)
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:
– Your role in supporting and delivering organisational change

– Capabilities as a team leader and builder, to optimise your team or
project group’s performance
– Emotional intelligence and influencing behaviours as a positive lead-
ership role model
– An understanding of leadership styles and skills, and apply this learn-
ing to your own context and sense of identity as a leader
– Self-awareness and reflective practice
– Personal skills in coaching including peer and team coaching to sup-
port achievement through others that you work with.
(Leadership Foundation for Higher Education 2015)
Leadership-led structures in these two examples, which are typical of

many, create an apparently benign culture in which individuals at all levels
of an organisation exercise formal and/or informal leadership engender-
ing teamwork and shared objectives. There are, however, two not entirely
silent elements here. First, if leaders ‘down’ through the organisation
are optimising their teams, they are creating or depending on what in
the leadership culture is called ‘followship’. Leaders must develop and/
or depend on willing followers. Second, there is an assumed or required
adherence to corporate objectives. This may take us back to the earlier dis-
cussion of the shift to commercial and industrial models in thinking of the
management of universities, implicit in the seven phases outlined in the
previous section. Universities regard their staff and activities less within a
government- and civil-service model and more as if the institution were a
company. In the UK, the erratic and almost mystificatory patterns of gov-
ernment funding and income flows generally lend an aura of inevitability
in the representation of university processes. The mystification stems, to
take an example, from the way the government channels its payment of
student fees through the Student Loan Company; students thus appear
to become the agents in demanding ‘value for money’ rather than the
Government. (The current system of higher education funding has been
critically analysed by Andrew McGettigan in his 2013 book The Great
University Gamble and on his Critical Education website.) Universities
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’:
Empowerment is essential to enable effective leadership throughout the

organization. Without alignment and commitment to a shared purpose,
however, empowerment only magnifies the lack of focus, and actually cre-
ates chaos and hostility to an organization’s success. Why would an institu-
tion empower people who espouse agendas and priorities that are in conflict
with the institution’s purpose? Yet, this dysfunctional form of empower-
ment is operational in more than a few academic and business organizations.
(Moore and Diamond 2000, p. 7)
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
seek more openly to remove dysfunctional empowerment at lower levels

of organisation and management. This goes with another change in uni-
versity structures and ethos over recent years. Many universities had what
was effectively a cellular structure with a considerable degree of auton-
omy within individual cells, corresponding to the overall autonomy of
universities and the autonomy held by tenured members of staff. Now
such structures (which, particularly in new media companies, are regarded
as thoroughly effective) are much less common than more conventional
pyramid structures in which the ‘strategic plan’ trickles down through
the levels. Executive Deans, Heads of Departments, and other ‘academic
leaders’ are required to devise plans and are given targets to meet that feed
upwards to sustain a single plan.
The preceding account risks seeming a caricature given the diversity
of universities and colleges, and yet—like any good caricature—it will be
recognisable to many as within their own experience and as highlighting
general trends across the sector. Universities and colleges renew them-
selves in various ways. Intellectual innovation is still considered significant,
but alongside—and, increasingly, subject to—corporate values. Change is
wrapped around with the notion of ‘change leadership’, and techniques
from the commercial and industrial sector such as ‘target setting’ and the
‘360 degree process’ are regularly embedded within what is likely now
to be referred to as ‘performance review’. The criteria that universities
and colleges use for promotions are often confidential within the institu-
tion, but those that are publicly available, and anecdotal evidence, indicate
that ‘leadership’ is increasingly a separately defined criterion. It is hardly
necessary to add that the criterion is likely to be written in terms that
involve allegiance to the corporate identity rather than the leadership dem-
onstrated by General Patton or by others with eccentric (in the literal sense
of the word) drives. Ideas of leadership here work alongside another idea
that has been imported into the discourse of universities and colleges in the
UK, namely ‘impact’. The most prominent use of the notion of impact is in
the domain of research and research funding. Ideas derived from industrial
product-focused research, and scientific research generally, have become
hegemonic—to serve the interests of a grand narrative whereby universities
have a beneficial impact on economic development. And individual proj-
ects are required to demonstrate the same kind of notional utilitarian value.
Universities and colleges also renew themselves by appointing new staff,
and this brings us to the role of something that we want to argue is very
akin to internship. Benevolently, internships offer a solution, particularly
at a time when candidates outnumber jobs available, to the paradox that

employers require candidates to have experience of work before they can
be considered for appointment to a first job (see the Graduate Advantage
website). Often, however, internship schemes have side effects. It can be
argued that when a small media company wants to expand, its most reli-
able method will be to recruit someone from the same background as
those already employed, risking effectively cloning new staff rather than
introducing challenge and some degree of unpredictability. Since demand
exceeds supply in this sector, and particularly in start-up situations, a com-
pany will perhaps also aim to appoint someone as an intern on low pay or
no pay. The common nature of this practice can be seen by the efforts to
counter it (see Creative and Cultural Skills 2011).
Before the expansion of higher education in the mid-twentieth century,
networks of patronage were a common feature of appointments in its key
areas. Subsequently, appointment processes were generally regulated and
codified, ensuring greater equality in access to opportunities. But these reg-
ulated processes have not always covered the earliest stages of an academic’s
career. For all the processes that institutions may start, here opportunities
usually arise within a small area and have a very instrumental purpose—
typically taking over the teaching of a more senior member of staff who has
been granted leave. It is as natural here as in the above example of the small
media company to look for someone who can fit in easily and whom the
department can trust. Typically, an academic will be paid for this work, but
will suffer the disadvantages of casualised or ‘supply’ work in any sector, in
that he or she will be paid for contact hours but not for training or prepara-
tion; and yet, he or she is likely to see this work as necessary for providing him
or her with the experience that can significantly boost his or her career pros-
pects. Demonstrating a commitment to the corporate identity of the institu-
tion is likely to play a significant part here. An academic career now in the UK
is likely to begin with a series of such quasi-internships succeeded perhaps
by a series of fixed-term contracts linked to teaching or research fellowships.
In its section on academic careers, Graduate Prospects Ltd, a website-
based careers advisory service owned by universities and colleges, states:
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)
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:
– [L]eadership and management;

– networking;
– presentation skills;
– resilience;
– time management.
(Graduate Prospects 2014)
Here and elsewhere, one must be wary of implying that deterministic

processes are at work, but it seems very likely that an academic will realise
the advantage of conforming to that corporate identity, whether he or she
is intent on early success in his or her career or becoming anxious after a
string of short-term contracts. He or she will do well to take in the ratio-
nales of ‘leadership and management’ even while seeking a foothold on
the first rungs of ‘followship’.
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CHAPTER 6
Not Working: Shared Services

and the Production of Unemployment
Kim Emery
You’re not going to cut the budget without somebody losing their job.
Paul D’Anieri, 2012 (quoted in Crabbe 2012a)
Currently, even management literature warns that transitioning to a

shared-services model is ‘not for the faint of heart’ (Schulman et al. 1999,
p. xv).1 Implementation ‘can be a challenge’, admits Georgia Regent
President Ricardo Azziz, ‘especially when the change may lead to redefin-
ing work responsibilities or the loss of a job’ (Azziz 2014). Nevertheless,
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

104 K. EMERY
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.
WHAT IS SHARED SERVICES? MANAGEMENT THEORY

AND ACADEMIC APPLICATIONS
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
as a friend who prefers to remain anonymous observes: the concerns of sup-

port staff, details of organisational structure and dispensation of which forms
get filled out how and where are not of obvious interest to many academics.
However, the utility of shared services relies on several assumptions that merit
closer scrutiny. The first and most obvious is one widely shared: that because
the work done by support staff is not in itself explicitly ‘academic’, the organ-
isation of that work is irrelevant to the properly intellectual purpose of the
university. In this view—one shared by management proponents of shared
services and many of their faculty critics—it is faculty and students who do
the work of the university, while so-called support staff (as is implicit in the
name) only work for the institution. This division has proved an easy sell,
perhaps because it is shot through with class stereotypes and cultural assump-
tions: faculty are members of a profession, engaged in serving the greater
good, even knowledge itself; support staff are wage slaves paid for their time
(not their unique contributions) by a particular employer; and so on.
In any case, this distinction is presumed by the shared-services model
and formalised in its structure. The shared-services centre is a ‘support
unit’ not directly engaged in whatever activities define the larger organ-
isation, but intended instead to ‘service’ other units that do directly ‘add
value’ to the larger enterprise. Indeed, the division is so absolute as to
exclude the activities consolidated in shared services from the organisa-
tion’s self-concept, an understanding reflected in the idea that ‘shared
services and outsourced services are flip sides of the same coin’—and
in the reality that the former frequently serves as first step towards the
latter (Schulman et al. 1999, p. 99). Adding value, moreover, is a some-
what amorphous idea, borrowed (of course) from management theory. It
refers generally to those activities that distinguish the enterprise (company,
university, etc.) from its competitors—as opposed to such lower-level
administrative activities as can be captured by shared services, which are
assumed to be fundamentally homogenous. The functions performed by
shared services may well be ‘valuable and important’, but ‘by themselves,
these activities provide no unique differentiation, no specific advantage or
distinction’ (Proenza and Church 2011). In the case of higher education,
adding value means performing the research, teaching and service that
universities are meant to do. In the case of for-profit business, from which
the concept is adapted, it mainly means ‘make money’. Although the fit,
obviously, is imperfect, management strategies currently popular in higher
education effect an illusion of alignment, mainly by subordinating intel-
lectual motivations to financial ones (see Emery 2010).
106 K. EMERY
Arguments in favour of shared services also assume that standardisation

and extreme specialisation improve efficiency and quality, that physical and
administrative segregation support specialisation, and that efficiency itself is
a prima facie good. By their logic, an employee assigned only travel vouch-
ers will get really good at processing travel vouchers, ensuring quality, and
improving speed. Standardisation ensures that the specialised employee never
encounters a novel or unpractised task that might disrupt the arrangement.
In all, this set of assumptions recalls an assembly-line Taylorism of centuries
past, a telling twist on this twenty-first century management fad. As ever,
the unexamined value of efficiency and the structures and practices that
serve it (specialisation, standardisation, and segregation) work to separate
and isolate employees from each other, from the larger project of the enter-
prise and its implications, and from their own creative agency. By impeding
employees’ vision of connections among the organisation’s many moving
parts, this strategy assures that only top administrators occupy a standpoint
appropriate to ‘decision-makers’. Only this managerial viewpoint allows for
the exercise of real agency within a system that simultaneously segregates
and circumscribes employees’ individual capacities for insight and action
(see Bousquet 2008, p. 73). It is not clear, moreover, that specialisation in
standardised tasks improves quality and speed of performance so much as
it bores and numbs those who are assigned these; without variety, novelty,
and challenge, even the most complex labour may be experienced as drudge
work. Why rush to complete a rote task when all that lies after it is more of
the same? Similarly, standardisation of support does not improve quality or
efficiency when offered in response to diverse specific needs. One assump-
tion of the theory of shared services is that the distinct disciplinary objec-
tives, modes and priorities of different departments matter only in their
officially intellectual endeavours, and not in the presumably fungible, ‘nec-
essary but redundant’ (see Proenza and Church 2011) activities of support
staff. A purchase order is a purchase order, this thinking holds, whether it
comes from the medical school or the philosophy department. Again, the
logic underlying the move to shared services relies on the pernicious dis-
tinction that work performed by faculty is special, significant, and specific,
whereas work done by staff is of a substantively different kind, performed
by a qualitatively different type of worker2—one appropriately subjected to
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.
the rudimentary schemas of scientific management, perhaps, as opposed to

those faculty who are encouraged to imagine themselves as not only profes-
sional but also thoroughly modern, and certainly advanced beyond age-old
distinctions between management and labour.
SHARED SERVICES IN CONTEXT

Like incentives-based budgeting, responsibility centre management
(RCM), and other techniques of the corporate university, shared services
have emerged in the broader context of planned deprivation and precari-
ous employment. The withdrawal of state support from putatively public
institutions has authorised the privatisation of core functions and activi-
ties along with casualisation and outsourcing within many categories of
employment, from food service and policing to teaching and research. At
UF, the introduction of shared services occurred at a very specific moment
along this trajectory, one not replicated precisely on other campuses
(because conditioned by local circumstances), but instructive nevertheless.
Between 2001 and 2003, Florida’s university system underwent signifi-
cant restructuring orchestrated by then-Governor Jeb Bush. Historically
governed by a single, statewide Board of Regents, the eleven universities
were reorganised under separate Boards of Trustees. Even though Florida
is a ‘Right-to-Work’ state with weak labour laws, many staff, faculty, and
campus police were protected by collective bargaining agreements and
strong union representation. The reorganisation provided political cover
and ostensible legal grounds for pulling the rug out from under all that.
The argument of the state of Florida was specious, but simple: laws ensur-
ing union recognition bound the Board of Regents, but that Board had
been abolished; hence, the law was no longer applied and the state bore no
responsibility to its formerly protected employees. Under the new arrange-
ment, workers were forced to fight back campus by campus and group by
group. Of course, the state’s position was untenable: even in Florida, man-
agement cannot escape its obligations simply by shuffling an organisational
chart. Nevertheless, the ensuing legal battles were long and costly. The
struggle ultimately strengthened some unions, including most chapters
of the United Faculty of Florida (UFF) and Graduate Assistants United,
whose constituents had been galvanised by the attack on basic rights; but
it weakened others, including Florida’s branch of the American Federation
of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSME), which represented
most staff. When the dust cleared, most physical plant employees had
108 K. EMERY
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).
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).
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
workforce more easily controlled, deteriorating working conditions for

those still employed, and a large ‘flexible’ labour pool comprising the
downsized and laid off. One question that haunts is whether the imme-
diate emergency of impending lay-offs worked as a decoy to distract us
from the structural acceptance of the shared-services model. Perhaps, it
was a ‘stress test’ of sorts, one designed to see just how much manage-
ment could get away with. Although they would probably have been
happy to encounter no resistance to the lay-offs, perhaps they win either
way, accomplishing the shift either slowly or quickly and learning much
about forces of resistance in the process. If so, I am encouraged that one
lesson learned is that premising structural change on pernicious distinc-
tions among employees is at least not automatically a winning strategy.
This is a critical accomplishment, in my view, as the divisions encour-
aged by the logic underlying shared services appeal not only to faculty’s
traditional vanity but also to the particular vulnerability of our current
circumstances. In the context of a nearly monolithic ‘neoliberal rational-
ity’ that threatens the mission and foundation of higher education, there
is comfort in an approach that seems to recognise that there is something
distinct about the academic enterprise, a different set of values that set it
apart from your average for-profit business (see Brown 2015, p. 181). By
associating this value only with the faculty, however, and by simultane-
ously subjecting their work as well to systems of management designed to
‘align’ academic objectives to financial directives, the corporate university
reveals its commitment to a conception of employees as human capital,
as opposed to simply human. Shared services comprises a ‘management
model’ that ‘strives to maximally leverage people’ (along with ‘knowl-
edge’ and ‘resources’), ‘regardless of which cost center they are assigned
to’ (Azziz 2014). Under this logic, faculty may be assigned to a differ-
ent category of employee than are office staff, and may indeed require
different techniques of management, but the goals and prerogatives of
neoliberal management remain unchanged. Proponents like to pretend
that shared services is simply a tool, non-ideological: ‘[s]hared services by
itself is not strategic’, but merely ‘tactical’ (Schulman et al. 1999, p. 35).
However, the move to shared services does not occur ‘by itself’ in a
vacuum. Instead, as events at UF illustrate, it is a tactic undertaken in the
context of a broader neoliberal ‘conversion in the purpose, organization,
and content of public higher education’ (Brown 2015, p. 184), which it
supplements and supports. In this context, clearly, the precarity of any
threatens the well-being of all.
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
Generation Gaps and Economic

Dependency in Academic Life
CHAPTER 7
Graduate Unemployment in Post-Haircut

Cyprus: Where Have All the Students Gone?
Mike Hajimichael
In this chapter, I would like to discuss the state of higher education in

Cyprus and especially the prospects of students after they finish their stud-
ies in the context of the current economic crisis.1 The chapter is partly a
collection of stories based on experiences of graduate students themselves.
It is also partly about the distinctive character of the evolution of higher
education in Cyprus, with its strong emphasis on the dichotomy between
the private and the state sector, and the manner in which education is
valued and stigmatised in Cypriot society. Research for this chapter was
conducted through ethnographic interviews with communications gradu-
ates (both bachelor’s and master’s) whom I had taught at the University
of Nicosia. Because of the economic crisis in the Republic of Cyprus,
many of these former students now face the prospects of unemployment,
employment insecurity, and low-income, highly exploitative jobs. These
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

118 M. HAJIMICHAEL
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.
THE EVOLUTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN CYPRUS

Some years ago, I heard a story that runs something like this. A PhD
graduate, fresh from a prestigious UK university, had landed in Cyprus
looking for his first teaching job back in the homeland. He was not very
optimistic. At the time, the tertiary education sector was dominated by a
variety of private colleges, and his specialisation in sociology could not be
accommodated that easily, so he settled for a few hours in a regional col-
lege (that shall remain nameless) to teach English. It was not quite what
he expected, but he tried to stay optimistic; it was a start. This story hap-
pened in the late 1990s. Anyway, he walked into his first class, a rowdy
bunch of people, one of whom was renowned for testing any new teach-
er’s patience during the first lesson. As the teacher started the lecture, it
was clear that the student was about to intimidate him. Instead of doing
the usual lily-livered thing, which many previous first-time teachers did,
the teacher decided to block the student’s hand, quite decisively, that had
been raised to his face. He also politely and sternly asked the student to
sit down, to which the student agreed. Apparently, nobody had ever chal-
lenged him like this before, and the class just hushed in a shocked sense of
unison. At the end of the week, the owner of the college, who also acted
as the principal, summoned the teacher to his office where he was given his
marching orders, a fine way to start an academic career. He was also told
to note that ‘the customer is always right’.
GRADUATE UNEMPLOYMENT IN POST-HAIRCUT CYPRUS 119
This opening anecdote introduces a trait in Cypriot society, namely cli-

entelism, something that has been explored thoroughly, for example, by
writers such as Caesar Mavratsas (2003) and Hubert Faustmann (2010).
While it is often referred to in politics with regard to corruption and
abusing regulations, clientelism is also prevalent in many aspects of every-
day life, such as the job market, education, and social activities. Being con-
nected to someone who ‘can’ (do something that needs to be done) is part
and parcel of what is commonly known as meson. This translates loosely as
‘connection’, a link to get things done in return for a favour. This could
be securing a job in return for voting for a particular party or, as is the case
with the above anecdote, a rowdy student getting a part-time lecturer fired.
At the same time, the development of tertiary education in Cyprus is
something much more recent, a postcolonial or post-independence phe-
nomenon (1960). The University of Cyprus, for example, the first state
university in Cyprus, was established in 1989, after much deliberation by a
number of successive governments (see Cyprus Ministry of Education and
Culture 2015). The idea of a university in Cyprus goes back to the 1930s,
when the British administration aimed to create ‘the most important and
effective channel through which the propagandist ideas could be dissemi-
nated in the local intellectual elite’ (Xypolia 2013). This did not materialise,
however, due to World War II, after which mounting tensions between
the colonial administration and local populations in Cyprus, as well as an
increasing sense of separatist violence and conflict in the years 1955–1960,
made this project even more unfeasible. However, the first teacher-training
colleges for Greek Cypriots were established in 1937 (for men) and 1946
(for women). By 1958, both of these merged to become the Pedagogical
Academy of Cyprus. After 1960, a Turkish Cypriot teacher-training college
was also established (see Koyzis 1997). Private colleges were also emerging
in the 1960s, starting with the Cyprus College (1961), Frederick Institute
of Technology (1975), Philips College (1978), and Intercollege (1980).
All of this led to the development of a large private ‘college’ sector that
existed long before the creation of a state university.
Figure 7.1 shows recent numbers of Cypriots studying abroad, Cypriots
studying locally, and international students studying in the Republic of
Cyprus. It is worth noting the rise in all three variables after 2004, when
the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union (EU). Also significant
is the constant rise in the number of students studying in Cyprus, which can
also be linked to the ‘universitisation’ of private colleges that was finalised
in 2007 (see Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture 2015). Currently,
120 M. HAJIMICHAEL
25.000
20.000
15.000
10.000
5.000 Cypriot students abroad

Cypriot students in Cyprus
Foreign students in Cyprus
0
01 01
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)
there are five private universities: the University of Nicosia, European

University Cyprus, Frederick University, Neapolis University (Paphos),
and the University of Central Lancashire—UCLAN Cyprus (Pyla). The
state sector has also expanded significantly through the creation of The
Open University (2002) and the Cyprus University of Technology (2003).
Of course, the development of colleges and universities in Cyprus, both
private and public ones, has not always been an easy route, particularly in
the private sector. Colleges in this sector, such as Intercollege and Cyprus
College, challenged government rulings against them in 1998, following
a decision by the state not to accredit degrees granted by these establish-
ments (see Times Higher Education 1998). I can recall the frustration of
a student at that time who had spent 5 years working part-time and study-
ing at one of these private institutions. This of course also has to be seen
against the background of preferential treatment for the newly founded
University of Cyprus, which officially opened its doors in 1992, and the
manner in which the accreditation of private college degrees was assessed in
the first place, largely by Greek- or Athens-based academics who abhorred
private higher education (see Times Higher Education 1998).
Parallel to this, the value of a university education needs to be consid-
ered in a wider historical and social context. As a society that developed
very rapidly after 1945 from a largely peasant-based rural society to a
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.
THE HAIRCUT AND ITS AFTERMATH

I will not go into the Cypriot bailout crisis of March 2013—the ‘hair-
cut’—in detail, as this has been documented widely in many academic
works, media outlets, political comments, and a vast array of economic
accounts (see Papaioannou and Hajimichael 2015). My main concern
here is how the haircut has affected tertiary education, and particularly
the institutions in this sector and students themselves.
One of the deepe0073t and most depressing elements of the post-
haircut climate in Cyprus is unemployment, and particularly how this has
impacted youth, and graduates in particular. Before expanding on this, I
would like to briefly discuss how notions such as those of unemployment,
poverty, and homelessness have been employed in the political discourse in
times when Cyprus was a more affluent and economically better-off society.
The epitome of this discourse was captivated perfectly by Ioannis
Kasoulides, currently Foreign Minister, who in 2008 stood for the Presidency
of the Republic of Cyprus. Kasoulides, a conservative, was beaten by com-
munist Demetris Christofias. One of the causes of Kasoulides’s defeat was
122 M. HAJIMICHAEL
an unfortunate statement he made on a live TV show on the state broad-

caster (CyBC TV) in which he advocated that there were no homeless
people in Europe, and therefore by implication in Cyprus. This kind of
carelessness also cuts across other issues such as unemployment, which for
a substantial amount of time in Cyprus was seen as something seasonal due
to the impact of tourism and the construction industries on the economy.
Following the effects of the ‘haircut’ in March 2013, many things changed.
Sure enough, unemployment had been rising steadily before this, from
3.8 % in 2003 to 8.7 % in 2012 and 11.9 % in 2013, before reaching 14.6 %
in 2014. Figures for long-term unemployment among people aged 17–74
had also been rising dramatically, namely from 1 % in 2003 to 3.6 % in
2012, and 6.1 % in 2013 rising up to 7.7 % in 2014. Youth unemployment
has also more than quadrupled, jumping from 8.8 % in 2003 to 36 % in
2014, with figures on graduates rising up to 40–50 % (see Kambas 2014).
It is this final group, young graduates, who face the most challenging situ-
ations and prospects, on which I will focus in the remainder of this chapter.
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
decided to study a master’s via the Erasmus programme in Spain. Before

analysing these interviews, however, I would like to draw the reader’s atten-
tion to Carmen Fishwick’s article ‘Europe’s Young Jobless’ (2013). This
piece was inspirational in the formation of my chapter, and I being by quot-
ing from it a long commentary given by Panayiotis Christodoulou, also a
former Communications graduate from the University of Nicosia.
PANAYIOTIS CHRISTODOULOU, 26, NICOSIA, CYPRUS

I’m worried that my degree will soon have no value. When the economy
recovers I’ll be 35 years old and unable to find work as a junior and without
the experience for a more senior position.
I knew things weren’t going to be ideal and getting a job was going to
be a hard task – I graduated from the University of Nicosia with a com-
munications degree. During my studies I worked as a DIY sales adviser but
had to leave after one-and-a-half years as my course demanded a practical
exam of a month’s work in a newspaper and I was unable to take the time
off work.
Since graduating I’ve sent on average about 25–30 applications a month,
and I’d welcome any position related to my degree, such as a journalist, pre-
senter, writer or PR adviser. During the past two to three years a lot of media
organisations have been shrinking with news websites finding it difficult to
attract adverts to survive.
Finding work has now become a matter of survival and I’m looking for
almost anything. But it’s been hard to convince employers that my dream
is to become a storekeeper, or a sales person for a spare parts car company,
after spending four years and 40,000 Euro on tuition fees. They tell me
they will spend time and money to train me and cannot risk losing me when
there are so many other candidates available. Despite months of going to
the department of labour for job advice and seeking assistance I, along with
many other people, have not been offered even a single job.
I’ve been receiving 600 Euro a month from the government for the past
six months – which is the maximum time – until a couple of weeks ago.
Now that I don’t have any income besides limited help from my family it is
very hard. I feel uncertainty. It has affected me psychologically and given me
feelings of depression. Lately I am not able to enjoy simple things, such as a
drink with friends, exercise, or concentrate on watching a movie or reading
a book. I’ve also put on a lot of weight. I was supposed to start building my
life and moving forward after graduation. I am at the age considered the
most productive yet I cannot even earn enough for the basics.
124 M. HAJIMICHAEL
I’d prefer to stay in Cyprus, but am thinking about moving abroad

despite the fact that a lot of countries in the EU and the world are in a simi-
lar situation. It will be easier to go to the UK given that the only language I
know besides Greek is English. Still, I’d prefer to stay here. (Christodoulou,
quoted in Fishwick 2013)
The key themes in Panayiotis’s story, echoed in most of the interviews I

conducted, are the value of a degree versus doing jobs that are irrelevant
to it; the difficulties of finding a satisfying and appropriate job; unemploy-
ment; and, finally, the future—living in or leaving Cyprus.
THE VALUE OF A DEGREE VERSUS DOING JOBS

THAT ARE IRRELEVANT TO IT
Of course, this question is one that many people ask when they decide to
study at the university. Most recipients answer positively in terms of the
usefulness of a degree in Communications; but for some of those who
have had to take on a lot of jobs outside of the domains of media and
public relations, having a degree was not so relevant. Perhaps the most rel-
evant point, however, concerns the question how the media has developed
through web portals, where the predominant practice of plagiarism is in
clear contradiction with what media students are generally taught. This is
what Andreas said in the interview:
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:
This scheme is about providing incentives for hiring unemployed individu-

als in the private sector. Financial aid of 60 per cent of the yearly wage cost
with maximum amount of €7.200 per person per semester is provided. The
subsidy is granted only for the first 6 months of employment. (Department
of Labour 2013)
THE DIFFICULTIES OF FINDING A SATISFYING

AND APPROPRIATE JOB
Job satisfaction is always a difficult subject to research because it can mean

radically different things to different people, things that are closely tied to
what we think and feel about the work we are engaged in (see Saari and
Judge 2004). Out of the five students interviewed, only one, Evie, was
completely satisfied with the job she had found on a radio station in Spain,
mainly because it was exactly the kind of work she had studied for and
wanted to work in. The interviewees’ feelings and thoughts on job satisfac-
tion ranged from dissatisfaction to discontent with low salaries and dismis-
sive treatment. Adonis’s experience is worth considering at length here:
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:
I felt unproductive, trapped; I can’t be part of my friends’ plans because they

talk about vacations, and the only vacation I can dream of is camping in my
backyard. If I manage to get 20 Euro, I break the 10 into petrol for the car
and 10 maybe for a social exit.
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’.
Another theme that came up in relation to reactions from other people

was the family and social networks as sources of support as well as frus-
tration. All five respondents said that family support played a vital role
in their life once the unemployment benefit ceased. Evie even went as
far as saying that families have become conditioned to accept unemploy-
ment as a given: ‘In this crisis, I think people are used to people being
unemployed, so my social circles and family so far have been under-
standing and very helpful.’ Yet family can also be a source of friction, as
Andonia stated:
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].
THE FUTURE: LIVING IN OR LEAVING CYPRUS

This final area is one to which all five graduates responded. Since the ‘hair-
cut’ of March 2013, more people have again been leaving the island of
Cyprus in search of better opportunities. It is difficult to quantify this
through official statistics, as these are not available at present, but gener-
ally Cyprus has recently shifted from being a source for mass immigration
to a society with significant levels of emigration due to the economic situ-
ation (see Hajimichael 2015). It comes as no surprise, then, that all five
respondents expressed a degree of anxiety and concern regarding their
future in Cyprus. Evie summed this up by saying the following:
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.
Andonia, however, was less optimistic about staying in Cyprus:
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.
And Andreas was more of a positive realist:
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.
This sense of pragmatism was also reflected by Christiana:
If there are opportunities to stay in Cyprus and making a respectable career

in the media, there’s no reason for me to seek a job abroad. If this is not
the case, I would consider moving abroad if I found a job that would be
beneficial to my career.
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:
As I stated in the beginning, I am a people’s person, and as such I want to

get to know the world. So no, I don’t see myself staying in Cyprus. I want
to use my skills and gain experience in different situations, not just here.
The future is what we make of today, so today, in Cyprus, these worthless
regulators are doing a lousy job, and we can only guess what the future will
bring. I am optimistic about my own future because I control my life and
the way things work out. My motto and advice for everyone is to keep it
simple, since simple means happy.
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
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.
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CHAPTER 8
‘Dare to Dare’: Academic Pedagogy

in Times of Flattened Hierarchies
Ivana Perica
In late capitalism, as it is often emphasised, knowledge, science and commu-

nication play a decisive role. Whereas the previous stages of capitalist devel-
opment were organised around ‘material’ production, late capitalism—be
it ‘cognitive’, ‘post-Fordist’ or ‘emotional’—subsumes the last remnants of
previously untouched social spheres. Due to the extensiveness of capital-
ism as we live it today, even ‘knowledge and communication, cooperation
and feelings, smiles of service agents are “tools” and thus they represent
an inextricable part of the workforce’ (Birkner and Foltin 2006, p. 93).
‘The commandership and the factory discipline’ (Birkner and Foltin 2006,
p. 33) take over even those residual spaces that have been preserved so far,
commodifying, for instance, previously untouched aesthetic practices, or
using philosophy as a discipline appropriate to practise ‘communication
skills’, although it was traditionally construed as ‘activity-without-finished-
work’ (Virno 2006, p. 207). Undoubtedly, one of the residual, unsub-
sumed, spheres of society has for a long time been academia. The acclaimed
Humboldtian university, with its two ideals (association of research and
teaching; freedom from any kind of educational pragmatism), achieved its
I. Perica
University of Graz, Graz, Austria

134 I. PERICA
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
‘neoliberal academia’ and its (admittedly often idealised) predecessor,

the ‘Humboldtian university’.
In Institution and Interpretation, an eminent study of the institutional
conditions of possibility and impossibility of theoretical systems and aca-
demic thought, Samuel Weber draws an implicit distinction between the
‘old’ and the ‘new’ academia. Whereas Jean-François Lyotard was still
able to see post-modernity from the standpoint of language games theory,
to assert that ‘to speak is to struggle, in the sense of playing’ and that
‘speech acts are part of a general agonistics’ (Weber 2001, p. 9), today we
find ourselves beyond language games: beyond the agon of speech acts and
amidst an antagonism that is effected by the institutional conditions of
possibility of academic work. It is in this place of ‘beyond’ that questions
on the future of the university are posed (see Kimmich and Thumfart 2003;
Derrida 2002). At the present time, the antagonism takes place between the
entrepreneurial vision of the university and the ‘outdated’ Humboldtian,
liberal or social-democratic education models. The traditional university
model, as analysed by Weber, is not assessed according to the standards
set by the Humboldtian ‘ideals’ but according to the independence the
‘old’ academia enjoys in relation to the ‘outside world’. Weber identifies
this systematic independence as a liberal one, thus referring to the original
meaning of the term ‘liberal’ (liberty, liberation). As opposed to the liberal
academia, where science is occupied by the struggle over meanings and
interpretations, in the neoliberal setting it is not the content and aim of
the research that occupy the academic worker but the institutional, finan-
cial and social conditions that effect the limitations—de-liberalisations—of
his or her work. Thus, when referring to the neoliberal academia, the
term ‘liberal’ can be employed only in the meaning of de-liberalisation as
‘deprivation’. With this in mind, the free university cannot at present be
taken for granted any longer. And Weber concludes that ‘[w]hen the most
important things can no longer be taken for granted, the process of grant-
ing imposes itself as a problem that becomes increasingly difficult to avoid’
(Weber 2001, p. 33). Living and working on those shattered foundations
and within new boundaries, academic workers are compelled to reflect on
the unstable conditions of possibility of their own intellectual praxis and,
furthermore, their own material existence. Even research and teaching,
which have been declared ‘independent of all political authority and eco-
nomic power’ (Observatory Magna Charta Universitatum 1988, p. 1), are
activities contributing to class struggle, meaning the struggle over both
the means of production (in this case financial and institutional capital
136 I. PERICA
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?
THE ANTINOMIES OF THE ‘SOCIAL’

Successive part-time employment and the certainty of imminent unem-
ployment make academic workers more dependent, more precarious and
more disposable. Due to the radical privatisation of social problems—
according to which ‘any extant and prospective social issue’ is interpreted
‘as private concern’ (Bauman 1993, p. 261)—the responsibility for their
future unemployment will be exclusively theirs. That is one of the rea-
sons why researchers, teachers and students are constrained to continu-
ously ‘justify’ their academic existence, with regard to both their existing
achievements and their future academic activities. They have to demon-
strate continuous forward movement, make promises of ‘great results to
come’ and thus prove unwavering commitment to the academic commu-
nity. Expectedly, as academia loses content over which language games
might struggle (e.g., humanistic concepts such as ‘reason’, ‘consensus’ or
‘art’ and ‘emancipation’), in the academic work of ‘being busy’ communi-
cation itself becomes pivotal: it is not the quality of the product (research
results) but the promises of ‘excellence’ (research plans) that provide new
professional opportunities. As the latter are not necessarily connected to
concrete workplaces (‘jobs’), this process of ‘making promises’ (develop-
ing project proposals, submitting applications, building networks) pushes
academic activity away from competition over privileged access to truth(s)
towards a competition for grants. This competition, demanding full-time
commitment, replaces research time with job-seeking time and actually

generates unemployment as much as it generates research. Academic
work indeed consists in the continuous search for awards for good plans
(see Kühl 2014).
Being an outspoken critic of communication-based economy, Paolo
Virno can lead us, at least partially, to a clarification of the quagmire the
European higher education and research have found themselves in. But
before I come to his critique of cognitive capitalism, I shall try to give
an outline of his predecessor Hannah Arendt’s critique of the ‘social’. In
her seminal Human Condition (1958), in On Revolution (1963) and in
the posthumous The Promise of Politics (2005), Hannah Arendt criticised
conformist and anti-political attitudes of the ‘social’. Her understanding
of the ‘social’ was unmistakably different from the post-modern belief
in ‘society’ as the realm and bearer of emancipation from the atrocious
modern ‘state’ (see Foucault 2003; Giddens 1992). The concept of the
‘social’, admittedly somewhat idiosyncratic in Arendt, refers to economic
constrictions leading to social pressure to adapt as it was typical of both
the totalitarian regimes and the bureaucratised post-World War II societ-
ies. According to Arendt, bureaucratic systems produce forms of social
anonymity that renders people not only apolitical (i.e., politically disin-
terested) individuals but even anti-political, self-interest-driven subjects.
Their anti-political behaviour is not a result of their ‘nature’ (what they
really are) but of the social pressure they are subjected to:
[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
Adapting Arendt’s criticism to today’s circumstances, Paolo Virno

points to a similar ‘dehumanisation’ of man. His critique of the bio-politics
of cognitive capitalism, which reduces the particular human ‘monde’
(social dimension) to the state of ‘ambiente’ (Virno 2003, p. 33), recalls
Arendt’s, in its time highly controversial, distinction between the ‘social’
and the ‘political’. Ambiente indicates space characteristic of animals: ani-
mals become specialised in certain activities (hunting, collecting, build-
ing of nests) and repeat them numerous times during their lifetime. (In
Arendt’s thought, these activities were ascribed to labour of the so-called
animal laborans.) In contrast, monde is a space typical of humans who—
as citizens—are never content, always searching for the newness in their
occupations. The human, as a citizen, is a learning and accommodating
animal that, in Rousseau’s words, is ‘always moving, sweating, toiling
and racking his brains to find still more laborious occupations’ (Rousseau
2005, p. 98). This need to learn and adapt to eternally new circumstances,
when carried to extremes, precipitates a quasi-ambiental state. Time for
repose and reflection disappears and the ‘existential experience of life as
exposure and intimidation’ (Neundlinger and Raunig 2005, p. 16) pre-
vails. Having Virno’s observations in mind, one cannot ignore the paradox
that the ‘liberating’ changes of post-Fordist professional cultures (flat-
tening of traditional hierarchies and the dissolution of strict factory dis-
cipline, flexibilisation of working time, dislocation of work from factory
and office to home, personalised approach to professional duties) actually
only made workers more dependent on work. In the neoliberal academia,
the once liberating demands such as ‘freedom’, ‘mobility’, ‘creativity’ and
‘initiative’, as soon as they were deployed as parts of productivity- and
competitiveness-enhancing measures (and not as intrinsic motivation of
gifted and committed researchers), became professional dictates that draw
on that residue of social life that is considered to be private. This results
in both psychical and physical disposability of workers, willingness to per-
form much more than one is paid for and to abandon familiar spaces and
people to satisfy demands arising from the circumstances of the workplace.
In German there is a wonderful word for it, Sachzwänge, meaning practi-
cal constraints: in Arendtian terms, social Sachzwänge condition a lack of
political responsibility, the result of which is an academia of intellectual
void, leaving no space for utopia, adversarial thinking or, ultimately, think-
ing as such. Although Arendt is sometimes regarded as an elitist espousing
a scornful view of the ‘social’, in this context I want to point out her specific
understanding of the ‘social’ as conformism. The ‘social’ thus primarily
refers to social dependencies shaped by the market. In this interpretation,

misunderstood by some of her critics (see, e.g., Pitkin 1998, 11, 17),
Arendt returns to the critique of ‘society’ as it existed before Fourier
and Saint-Simon’s concept of ‘association’ was introduced into German
philosophical discussions. Back then the ‘social’ meant the ‘zone of unim-
peded commerce’; only after the French ‘association’ was appropriated had
the ‘social’ taken on the emancipatory dimension of a ‘fermenting, stirring,
floating content’ (Marchart 2013, p. 24). Arendt’s much disputed critique
of the ‘social’ actually advocates rescuing the sociability that goes beyond
or is undisturbed by the social exigencies of the market.
Arendt’s critique of bureaucratic socialisation certainly offers some apt
observations. But when transferred to contemporary academia, it does not
seem to fit the logic of the aforementioned dictate to act as highly qualified,
solution-oriented, both individualistic and—in a bureaucratic sense—highly
responsible academic agents. Nevertheless, and having this discrepancy
between ‘cogs’ and a profound individualisation of work in mind, I would
like to show how the promotion of scientific uniqueness, audacity and
responsibility, paradoxically, goes hand in hand with the compulsion to con-
formist and economically driven, that is, ‘socialised’ behaviour.
‘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
but on the area-studies-premise, according to which scholars from dif-

ferent disciplines dealing with the same geographical or political area (in
this case homogenised and generalised area of Eastern and South-Eastern
Europe) intersect more in their work than scholars from geographically or
politically distant areas who cooperate intradisciplinary (e.g., in philology
or philosophy). As is often the case, after several years of the platform’s
activity the funding institution undertook a regular evaluation and
approval process. The results were positive and the platform was extended.
Nevertheless, the evaluation partly remodelled the platform: the first pub-
lic presentation of the newly approved platform showed its new economic
awareness, exemplified by the motto ‘University meets economy, economy
meets university’, and promoted the feasibility of cooperation between
university and market (‘society’). The presentation outlined a re-imagined
concept of research focused on its economic chances and duties and career
opportunities for researchers.
The main endeavour of the platform coordinator, a young doctoral can-
didate, was to empower the entrepreneurial spirit of the platform members.
They were told to ‘Dare to dare’ (‘Trauen Sie sich was’) and the advice was
rationalised by a profit logic, crystallised in the sentence ‘so that it gets
profitable and that you profit from it’ (‘Damit es sich lohnt und damit sich
das auch für Sie lohnt’). The maxim ‘Dare to dare’, in fact, implied that at
that point the researchers were obviously not equipped with the right kind
of interest. While their true scientific interests were not questioned, the
lack of ‘market consciousness’ certainly was. The market, it was suggested,
was what was important for their academic career and what offered them
opportunities for the future. After the sentence ‘Dare to dare’ more advice
followed; in order to prove scientific audacity and public competence,
young researchers were told to invite ‘experts’ from the following profes-
sionally pertinent (‘berufsrelevant’) fields: economics, politics and society.
More precisely, the participants (current or future PhDs in social sciences
and humanities) were encouraged to reach out to oil and gas companies
(OMV Group), international organisations (Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development [OECD], UN), construction companies
(STRABAG) or banks (Erste Bank) for cooperation possibilities.
Besides the economically minded ‘empowerment speech’, one of the
symptoms of the platform presentation was a discursive gap between the
young coordinator and the platform senior leader (i.e., one of the lead-
ers). Whereas the young, conscientious colleague was putting his effort into
empowering the participants, encouraging them to ‘act’ and ‘undertake
something’, assuring them that inviting experts from the abovementioned

fields should not be understood only as a job opportunity but as an intel-
lectual exchange, the older colleague was switching between enthusiasm,
perplexity and irony. In his speech one could notice a certain dissatisfaction
with the rules of the game. The platform should be seen as an opportunity
to connect the ‘outer world’ with the ‘faculty’. (Here he used the English
word for ‘Fakultät’ and paused, saying ‘I don’t know why all of a sudden
everything must be in English.’) Contrary to his older colleague, it is in this
kind of newspeak that the young colleague saw the future. This newspeak is
not simply a superficial linkage of English and German the conservative lin-
guists are dismayed by. It is lip service paid to the ‘new public management’,
which originated in the UK under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher and
was implemented in numerous countries worldwide. This new public man-
agement, which opens up academia towards the economic sector, replaces
the traditional hierarchies of ‘professors’ and ‘students’ by a two-level struc-
ture of ‘managers’ and ‘associates’. Thus, one cannot avoid the impres-
sion that the ‘old’ pedagogic hierarchies are in some way re-established in
the binary stratified field of academics on the one side and the officials on
the other. It could even be said that nothing new is happening. So, if we
agree with Antonio Gramsci, according to whom the pedagogical relation
is marked by an irreconcilable hierarchical difference between the ‘teacher’
and the ‘pupil’, we could conclude that ‘academic pedagogy’ sensu stricto
has been abolished with the onset of the neoliberal (fluid, mobile, flexible
and flattened) university. At the same time, in the expectations formulated
by management, grant providers and politics, we discern attempts to exert
hegemonic influence on research and teaching and design them after the
dynamics of the market. So, if ‘every relationship of “hegemony” is neces-
sarily an educational relationship’ (Gramsci 2007, p. 350), then one should
consider in what way can even the flattened hierarchies be observed in terms
of a new academic pedagogy. In the given example, a certain pedagogic effect
can be discerned in the earnest obedience the (especially young) researchers
show not as much towards their professors as towards the advice received
from managers and coordinators, as if they were given ‘from above’.
ACADEMIA’S NEW PEDAGOGY

Realistically speaking, the advice given by the platform coordinator was
a well-intentioned one. As young researchers do not have a chance to
follow the previously common professional trajectory and climb up the
142 I. PERICA
traditional academic ladder (from student to assistant, from assistant to

associate professor, from associate professor to full professor), they have
to rely on advice and tips given by university staff responsible for career
management and research funding. As is the case with political structures,
the important decisions in the academia are not made by ‘representatives
elected by the people’ (i.e., faculty) but by experts in management and
controlling, who govern the university as a corporate enterprise (Pernicka
2010, p. 20). As Lueger elaborates, no university with a degree of aware-
ness of the contemporary situation can afford to dispense with defining
its research focuses, establishing centres for quality management, syllabus
evaluation centres, or—last but not least—courses in higher education
didactics. ‘Those who want to be a part of the elite must subject oneself to
such requirements and document them on the university homepage. The
important stakeholders see thus how intensively committed the manage-
ment is about the quality development of the teaching process.’ (Lueger
2010, p. 46) On this basis it can be demonstrated that there are two
important layers of today’s academic pedagogy.
First, the ‘classical’ type of academic pedagogy, as we know it from
the traditional university seminar, is nowadays remodelled by the ‘qual-
ity standards’ defined by specialised centres or departments. The creative,
individually designed and often unforeseeable process of teaching is evalu-
ated according to universal measures that vary little from discipline to
discipline and from classroom to classroom. The overall evaluations of
classes are predominantly based on notes awarded by the students who
are taught to act as consumers and who receive study materials prepared
by their teachers. This form of student evaluations of their teachers’ work
represents a culmination of management and controlling mentality. We
find ourselves in the situation described a long time ago by Max Weber,
where the teacher ‘sells me his knowledge and his methods for my father’s
money, just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage’ (Weber 1991,
p. 149). Here, the important thing is not the results of evaluation, but the
students’ impression that they participate in the grading of their teacher,
as well as the increased attention that is now dedicated to the teacher, put-
ting him or her under additional pressure because his or her work is rated
and observed from every corner (see Lueger 2010, p. 46).
Second, officials such as coordinators, management and administrative
assistants, and project consultants serve academia as multipliers of new
academic ethos. They advise the former students, today’s young research-
ers, to think economically and not to hesitate to reach out for possibilities
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
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
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as well: the allegedly de-hierarchised, anti-authoritarian academia is non-

ideological only to the point that its hierarchies and its pedagogy are hid-
den (see Clarke 2012, p. 305). Thus, academia’s new pedagogy is not
to be found in classical hierarchies of ‘professors’ and ‘students’ because
this would imply the existence of decisive scientific criteria according to
which the stratification takes place (i.e., idea, interpretation, theory, ide-
ology). Contrary to that, the new, ‘post-ideological’ pedagogy functions
without any idea of university, research or even emancipation (tradition-
ally gained through the emancipation from some authority, some manceps
[see Lyotard 1990, p. 16]). In other words, it implements only the idea
of corporate enterprise and strong competition connected to it. In the
absence of any proclaimed pedagogy the academia adheres to an invisible
market pedagogy where there are no hierarchies and all are equal. What
makes everyone ‘equal’ is actually the never-ending struggle for survival.
But where the interests are survival oriented and not genuinely scientific,
not ‘intrinsic’ (Koschorke 2003, p. 155), one can easily conclude that it is
not intellectuals that the system ‘produces’, but only disposable academic
subjects, whose sociability rests ‘not on equality but on sameness’ (Arendt
1998, p. 213). ‘Sameness’ is here synonymous with substitutability. As the
workers are aware of their own low exchange value, they accept precarious
work conditions more easily.
Notwithstanding the differences that exist between them, both Arendt
and Virno share a passion for the transformative potential of human
action, the passion of producing something new (hence the centrality of
beginning—Neubeginn—in Arendt’s thought). But contrary to Arendt,
who despite her passion for revolutions has often proved to be a revolu-
tionary pessimist, Virno makes efforts in revolutionary optimism, discuss-
ing possibilities of a bio-political contra-productivity. As several chapters
in this volume show, the commodification of research has advanced to
such an extent that it probably would be misleading to expect, as Virno
does, that revolution could spontaneously emerge from neoliberal cogni-
tive production, where rampant activity renders Action impossible. When
we, faced with the impossibilities of ‘resistance’, take a retrospective look
at the much criticised position of some ‘authoritative teachers’ against
whom the anti-authoritarian youth at the end of the 1960s was rebelling
against—for example, Adorno and Horkheimer—with the benefit of hind-
sight, we might change our perspective. Faced with the utterly adminis-
tered world and confronted with the fact that there seems to be no possible
form of academic resistance left, Adorno and Horkheimer employed the
‘performative paradox’: according to Adorno, the ‘performative paradox’

means that ‘one is committed to refute the role of the intellectual and his
privileges’ and at the same time, working as an academic teacher and ‘for
the sake of freedom, [one] cannot but to make use of these privileges’
(Demirović 1999, p. 536). Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s immense institu-
tional ‘care for the offspring’ (see the eponymous chapter in Demirović
1999, pp. 194–263), finally, did offer a chance: it was their students who
precipitated the first major subversion of academic structures, which at
that time were still very authoritarian. Notwithstanding the fact that the
privileges of contemporary academic teachers are only conditionally to be
seen as such, their advantage surely is their pedagogic praxis. Pedagogy—
understood not as subjecting pedagogisation but as empowering action—
may be one of the last privileges the fragmented, dependent and allegedly
politically impotent academic workforce still has at its command. Politically
responsible teaching, oriented not towards obedience but towards action,
surely could encourage the students and scholars to demand alternatives.
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Press.
CHAPTER 9
Cannibalising the Collegium: The Plight

of the Humanities and Social Sciences
in the Managerial University
George Morgan
The rise of corporate management styles and values in higher education

has led to growing exploitation of academic workers, particularly in the
humanities and social sciences, through insecure employment. This has
diminished the political influence of the very scholars who should be best
placed and most inclined to defend the cherished values of academic free-
dom, collegiality and critical thinking from the depredations of neolib-
eralism. As public funding diminishes, so universities are becoming less
inclined to cross-subsidise vulnerable curricula in the humanities, social
sciences and pure sciences, especially in specialised fields of low student
demand or fields in which pedagogical requirements are most intensive.
In order to make the funding dollar go further, managers have resorted to
employing members of the ‘cognitariat’—sessional, casual or short contract
staff—to perform a growing proportion of academic work. This is part
of a larger economic programme that has imposed Taylorist bureaucratic
G. Morgan
Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia

152 G. MORGAN
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.
THE EXPANDING ACADEMY: AUSTRALIAN HIGHER

EDUCATION SINCE WORLD WAR II
Prior to World War II, the Australian university was the domain of a tiny
privileged elite, but this changed in the post-war era. Between 1946 and
1963, university enrolments of 17- to 22-year-olds increased from 2.3 %
to 7.1 %. A further expansion occurred after 1974, when the Whitlam
Labor government abolished fees and introduced tertiary assistance; but
this did not produce any significant increase in the numbers of those from
poor backgrounds undertaking tertiary study, and universities continued
to be the preserve of the upper and middle class (see Centre for the Study
of Higher Education 2008). The most rapid expansion occurred in the
1990s after the restructuring of the tertiary education by Labor Minister
for Education John Dawkins. While this saw the reintroduction of fees, in
the form of income-contingent Higher Education Contribution Scheme,
the Dawkins reforms also dramatically increased the number of university
places by granting university status to the former Colleges of Advanced
Education. From this point on, university enrolments grew at an unprec-
edented rate, particularly in the newer universities.
In recent times, the idea of the mass university has come to challenge
the elite feudal vision of higher education (see Marginson 2000), largely
because a rapid rise in youth unemployment has produced a situation
where most young people without a degree have dismal job prospects.
Youth unemployment rose from around 8 % in 2007 to 14.1 % in 2014,
and many of the available jobs are low-paid, precarious and dead-end
‘McJobs’ (Brotherhood of St Laurence 2014). So there has been a de
facto extension of the period of compulsory education—which in the
mid-twentieth century lasted only until the age of fourteen—into early
THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE MANAGERIAL UNIVERSITY 153
adulthood, especially for those from underprivileged backgrounds. The

ability of universities to play their part in absorbing this overspill—keeping
young people off the dole queues—was limited by the system of enrol-
ment caps that restricted the numbers of students that universities could
accept with full public funding. By the mid-2000s, the technocratic argu-
ment, according to which an expansion of university places is needed to
overcome the ‘skills deficit’ and compete in the so-called knowledge econ-
omy, was gaining public support.
Such an expansion became more likely with the election of Labor Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd in 2007, which unseated the conservative adminis-
tration of John Howard. The 2008 Bradley Review into higher education,
ordered by the Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard, recommended
a dramatic expansion of the university system. It set two key targets:
first, that by 2025, 40 % of 25- to 34-year-olds should hold a bachelor’s
degree, and second, that by 2020, 20 % of university enrolments should be
comprised of those from low socio-economic backgrounds. In 2009, the
federal government announced that after 2012 there would be a removal
of restrictions on the number of students that universities were permit-
ted to enrol, and that from 2012 public funding would follow student
demand. In the period between 2009 and 2012, when, under interim
arrangements, universities received part funding for those enrolled above
the caps, commencing student numbers increased by 21.3 % (see Edwards
and Radloff 2013). This trend continued after caps were lifted. In 2012,
the numbers of domestic undergraduates (excluding overseas students)
rose by 5.1 % from the previous year, and in 2013, the numbers increased
a further 5.5 % (see Department of Education and Training 2012; 2013).
But in this environment of increased competition, universities aggressively
sought to attract more students and increase enrolments. Between 2009
and 2014, there was a 10.3 % increase in the number of applications for
degree places, while the number of accepted offers increased by 20 %.
This produced pedagogical challenges especially as increasing numbers of
students who performed relatively poorly at school enrolled in university
degrees (see Edwards and Radloff 2013) just as per capita resources for
teaching and learning were diminishing.
Despite the lofty public rhetoric about the importance of universities
to national prosperity, and the prodigious growth in undergraduate enrol-
ments, state investment has declined in real terms. In the decade after
1995, public expenditure on higher education fell by 4 % as a proportion
of gross domestic product (GDP)—mostly the years of Howard’s Prime
154 G. MORGAN
Ministerial term—as student numbers increased by 45 % (see May et al.

2011). Over this period, Australia was the only Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) country in which real public
spending did not increase (see Tiffen 2015). By 2011, only 54 % of fund-
ing for universities came from private sources (see OECD 2014) in com-
parison with 87 % in 1986 (see May et al. 2011, p. 34). Private funding
included the Higher Education Contribution Scheme paid by domestic
students and full fees paid by the rapidly increasing numbers of overseas
students. Today, Australia spends less on universities as a proportion of
GDP than all but one of the OECD countries. As Tiffen wrote:
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)
Universities responded to this squeeze by undermining the conditions of

teaching and learning: by cutting teaching time and staffing levels, and by
increasing class sizes. The common management refrain in industrial nego-
tiations over academic salary increases was the demand for improved ‘pro-
ductivity’, which effectively meant embracing the challenge of teaching
larger numbers of students, especially through the use of digital technolo-
gies. In the early 1960s, the average student–staff ratio across Australian
universities was around 8:1 (see Bebbington 2012); by 2010, it was over
20:1, even taking casual staff into consideration (see Larkins 2012).
Universities have also used conservative staffing strategies to sandbag
against the effects of declining marginal funding. Since the early 1990s,
they have been systematically casualising academic work—employing ses-
sional or casual staff—in order to cover teaching and research assistance
at much lower cost than they would have to pay full-time staff. Between
1990 and 2008, casual academic staff numbers, on a full-time equivalent
basis, grew by 180 %, compared with a 41 % growth in non-casual aca-
demic staff numbers during the same period (see May et al. 2011, p. 191).
This effectively meant that the number of low-paid casual staff now prob-
ably exceeds the number of those on full time and fractional positions. In
2004, Anne Junor estimated that, by head count, 40 % of academic staff
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.
THE RISE OF THE REMOTE TECHNOCRATS

Historically, universities were comprised of guilds of scholars, self-governing
communities, both clannish and inscrutable, who fiercely resisted external
control. Even at their foundation, Australian universities varied consid-
erably from this model provided by the ancient European universities.
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.
In the colonies, the first universities were established in the mid-nineteenth

century and were bound to the modern mission of educating the colonial
mandarin class rather than simply reproducing the Oxbridge model of
cloistered dons pursuing the study of classics, law, philosophy, science and
religion. Nevertheless, the sense of scholarly independence and academic
freedom ran very deep, and academic communities resisted external politi-
cal and ecclesiastical interference.
Over the last 25 years, however, there has been an erosion of the tradi-
tional idea of the university as a loose federation of scholarly communities,
in favour of the corporate line-management model. University mana-
gerialism began to emerge in the 1980s and developed unevenly across
the sector. Peter Karmel, the vice chancellor of the Australian National
University from 1982 to 1987, a respected, though quite conservative
public administrator, wrote cautiously in 1990 about the complex rela-
tionship between managers and scholars:
[A]uthority within the university is intellectual authority. This is necessarily

dispersed among the senior academic staff. The Vice-Chancellor and senior
administrators may administer the resources and may, subject to the govern-
ing body, determine the broad policies, but intellectual authority does not
reside in them. Moreover, the quality of a university comes from the work
of many autonomous academics or groups of them. It follows from this that
a university cannot be run like a business enterprise with a chief executive
in command, seeking to maximise relatively simple variables. Consultative
processes are essential and, while leadership is of great importance, such
leadership must be consensual. Notwithstanding this, the modern university
is usually a large complex organisation. As such it needs to be ‘managed’.
Thus tension between collegial and managerial styles is bound to be chronic.
(Karmel 1990, p. 332)
As funding declined, however, the tensions identified by Karmel were

exacerbated. This was particularly the case in the newer universities. While
the prestige of the older institutions generated more student demand,
research grants and alumni endowments, the institutions formed under
the Dawkins reforms were generally more financially tenuous. In general
terms, they have increased student–staff ratios, class sizes and the level of
casualisation in their workforces more quickly than their more established
counterparts.
The newer universities were also the first places where scholarly com-
munities came most directly under threat, and where the traditional
158 G. MORGAN
disciplines were most vulnerable. If business studies attracted more stu-

dents and research funding than anthropology, then the anthropologists
were more quickly called on to justify their continued tenure. Those who
had traditionally served as collegial representatives, heads of department,
found themselves increasingly compromised. They were caught between
their colleagues, frustrated at the erosion of their working conditions,
and senior managers who demanded that they perceive themselves not as
scholarly representatives, the collegial voice issuing upwards, but as line
managers charged with implementing the policies devised by increasingly
remote oligarchs, operating like corporate CEOs. The established practice
of the scholarly groups and departments electing their heads from among
their number has been widely replaced by managerial selection of external
people for these roles. Managers have used the technique of institutional
restructuring, and increasing the scale of academic units, to break down
the power of disciplinary and scholarly ties, often using the progressive
pretext that they are seeking to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration,
rather than to create economies of scale. The resultant structural upheaval
allowed university managers to leave their institutional mark and enhance
their career prospects.
Over the last 20 years, there has been a noticeable narrowing of the dis-
ciplinary base from which senior university managers are drawn. While, for
example, in 1996 Australian vice chancellors included people with back-
grounds in human geography, history, English literature and linguistics,
by 2015 none of these disciplines was represented, nor was any other dis-
cipline in the humanities.4 Most university heads were drawn from science,
law, business or engineering. Those from the social sciences come from a
narrow range of backgrounds, ones that could be seen as peculiarly suited
careers in university management: economics, education, educational
psychology and public policy.5 While nearly a quarter of undergraduate
students are enrolled in courses defined as ‘society and culture’ (exclud-
ing education) and ‘creative arts’ (Department of Education and Training
2014b), these fields are conspicuously underrepresented among the vice
chancellors.
There are four reasons for this. First, due to the professionalisation
of university management, selection committees favour those whose
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.
backgrounds seem appropriate to the idea of a university as a business

rather than as a cultural institution. Second, the fading of the notion that
university leaders should perform the function of collegial representatives
works against the participation of those in the humanities and social sci-
ences among whom the idea of democratic university has strong support.
Third, labour markets in the humanities and social sciences are much
tighter than those in most professional or vocational training disciplines,
such as law and medicine, where there are viable career options outside of
academia; it is easier for accountants and engineers to find non-academic
work than for philosophers and sociologists. This is why those in the
humanities and social sciences can be enslaved to years of casual labour,
while those who can find work outside academia will be more inclined
to walk away if they are unable to obtain secure work. Additionally, hav-
ing obtained tenure, it is much more difficult to achieve promotion in
the humanities or social sciences, where higher standards of achieve-
ment are often expected; Australian historians get nowhere on research
achievements that would qualify them for a professorial position in a law
or accounting faculty. So it stands to reason that those in the humani-
ties and social sciences are usually much older by the time they reach the
level of seniority required to progress to management ranks and have less
time to ascend the hierarchy. Finally, and fourth, the more corporate val-
ues become embedded in university bureaucracy, the more repugnant the
managerial career path appears to those who have trained in disciplines
that encourage critical reflection on social institutions and ideologies. The
result of this narrowing of the managerial caste to people from outside the
humanities and social sciences means that there is less chance that some
kind of sociological imagination will be brought to bear on the running of
universities than was the case in the past. While familiarity with the ideas
of Michel Foucault and Max Weber might not equip you to read a balance
sheet or draw up a plausible flow chart, it will certainly give you a keen
understanding of the social and intellectual consequences of introducing a
new set of key performance indicators.
TAMING MANAGERIALISM: BEYOND THE TAYLORIST

UNIVERSITY
When a culture contents itself with Transparency and Information as insip-

idly neutral and impoverished surrogates for truth-seeking and knowledge-
making, then we start to lose sight of what the university is actually for,
160 G. MORGAN
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)
The suffocating consequences of the line-management system and the

corporate model of the university are well known to academics: the under-
mining of independent scholarship and critical thought; the growth of
official regulation and surveillance of various aspects of academic work;
the obsession with metrics and key performance indicators of dubious
value; the proliferation of administrative demands that diminish the time
available for real scholarship; the subordination of intellectual work to
financial imperatives; and the Orwellian paradox that the marketing rheto-
ric of ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ intensifies, just as the conditions of learn-
ing and teaching are undermined. Academics frequently experience these
processes as inexorable and difficult to resist. Many simply try to do good
work in the shadows—staffing what Thomas Docherty calls the ‘unseen
academy’. They either jump through the managerial hoops or engage in
passive resistance and non-compliance, but rarely offer an open challenge
to the discourses and processes that trammel them. The task of challeng-
ing managerialism is formidable and generally left to a shrinking pool of
activists.
Ironically, however, at the very moment that the cherished values of
intellectual freedom, liberal humanism and critical theory appear most
stifled by bureaucrats and technocrats, managerialism itself is suffering a
crisis of legitimacy. Not only is it ineffective in its own terms, it is also
anachronistic, out of step with contemporary management orthodoxy. In
order to understand this, it is important to situate the contemporary uni-
versity in relation to the development of capitalism over the last 100 years.
Taylorism emerged in the early-twentieth century as a scientific man-
agement creed in the service of Fordist mass production (see Braverman
1974). It sought to achieve greatest efficiency by breaking down the pro-
duction process to its smallest components, instituting a highly refined
division of labour where workers perform specialised but alienating and
repetitive tasks. But Taylorism was also a political project geared towards
undermining the skills and solidarity of blue-collar trades and locating
the scientific manager at the centre of the productive universe. In Fordist
enterprises, white-collar workers grew in number and power at the expense
of those on the production line. However, the enterprises of the Fordist

era were brittle and inflexible. They were good for producing standardised
outputs based on the uniformity of production, but not suitable for the
agile, fluid and creative processes of new capitalism.
With the decline of funding over the last 25 years, managers in higher
education have used Taylorist strategies to break down the intellectual
guilds and engage in more direct bureaucratic surveillance and regulation
of academic work, especially associated with undergraduate teaching. The
constant round of institutional restructuring has eroded collegial bonds,
while the quantification of performance (through, e.g., student satisfac-
tion surveys) and the proliferation of policies and paperwork intrude pro-
foundly on academic work. The cost-saving changes rolled out across the
university sector—increasing class sizes, casualisation, standardising course
structures and diminishing student choice—are symptoms of Taylorism
and the increasing power of the managerial class. Only three of Australia’s
thirty-six public universities—Monash, Sydney and Queensland—today
employ more academic than non-academic staff, and in several of the
newer universities the latter outnumber the former by nearly two to one
(see Department of Education and Training 2014a).
Yet in the Western world the time of the scientifically managed cor-
porate behemoth has passed. In the post-Fordist era, the line-managed,
bureaucratically rigid university is a profound anachronism. It contrasts
starkly with the ‘Montessori’ styles of management typical of new capi-
talism. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005) argued that capitalism
has great capacity for renewal in the face of critique. They saw the emer-
gence of what they called ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ in response to
the post-1968 creative dissent. This was typified by a popular rejection of
standardised consumption, moral conformity and, in particular, Taylorised
alienated labour. So innovation and creativity became the leitmotifs of new
capitalism, which sought to conscript ludic pursuits and intellectual free
play and generate the ‘new oil’ of intellectual property. Old management
techniques with their modernist social engineering ambitions simply crush
the spontaneity required for the creative juices to flow. Indeed, some new
technology corporations, such as Apple and Google, have constructed new
workplaces that they are calling campuses, in order to encourage a sort of
Ivy League student creativity (guided no doubt by the legend of Mark
Zuckerberg’s development of Facebook while at Harvard). Ironically, this
is occurring just as campus life in Australia is becoming increasingly bereft
of vitality, with students rushing off after lectures to work in shops or
162 G. MORGAN
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 prospects of advocating the virtues of a general education are per-

haps enhanced by the failure of the managerial university to secure suc-
cessful employment outcomes for graduates. Regarding the humanities
and their lack of vocational utility, Hunter claimed that the link between
the vocational training and national economic performance is by no means
clear. Recent reports on graduate outcomes found that nearly 30 % had
no job 4 months after graduating (see Dodd and Tadros 2014). As career
paths erode, even established professions—law, architecture, journalism—
have seen a rapid drop off in demand for graduates. While in 2012 83 %
of law graduates found employment within 4 months, the next year the
percentage fell to 78.5 (see Dodd and Tadros 2014). If these trends con-
tinue, they will belie the arguments of those who seek to justify higher
student fees on the basis that degrees confer private individual gain. They
also betoken the failure of university technocrats to deliver on their prom-
ises—in particular of shoehorning students into the vocational niches for
which the Taylorist ‘mass production’ university prepared them.
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
Between Career Progression and Career

Stagnation: Casualisation, Tenure,
and the Contract of Indefinite Duration
in Ireland
Mariya Ivancheva and Micheal O’Flynn
In recent years, debates about rising corporate influence and control

over higher education have emerged.1 Considerable attention has been
given to developments in the USA, where the process is, arguably, most
advanced (see Apple 2005; Hill 2005). In this chapter, we relate these
issues to the role of tenure in academic life. We explore the traditions of
tenured employment, which many see as a weapon or asset in the struggle
against the relentless commercialisation and casualisation of higher
education. We do not proceed with a view to returning to an imagined
golden age (see Clarke 2010), but with a view to transformation, as is
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.
M. Ivancheva () • M. O’Flynn

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

168 M. IVANCHEVA AND M. O’FLYNN
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.
CONTEXT: THE RISE AND FALL OF

THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY
The Irish university is best considered in the light of transformations

over the last half a century. Higher education became less exclusive in the
post-war period. In Western social democracies and Eastern state socialist
societies, working class people, mature students, women, and members
of ethnic and sexual minorities who came from social groups effectively
excluded from third-level education began to enter universities in signifi-
cant numbers. However, though student and faculty numbers have since
continued to increase, there has been a simultaneous erosion of the public
character of universities. Neoliberal reforms—introduced as a solution to
the global crisis in the 1980s—recast universities as competing enterprises
(see Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Clarke 2010). In Thatcher’s England, for
instance, the government abolished tenure and made universities com-
pete in a quasi-market for students, while the funding paid per student
decreased (see Clarke 2010, p. 95). Through the 1990s, public funding
for universities has continued to drop, increasing the reliance on private
funding. Towards the end of the decade, Philip G. Altbach was able to
observe that ‘[w]hile most academics are only dimly aware of it, the thrust
BETWEEN CAREER PROGRESSION AND CAREER STAGNATION 169
toward accountability has begun to affect their professional lives. This

trend will intensify not only due to fiscal constraints but because all public
institutions have come under greater scrutiny’ (Altbach, 1997, p. 14).
In order to turn education into a profitable commodity, senior man-
agement increasingly interferes with academic production. On top of this,
the continued erosion of the public good aspect of higher education is
evidenced in the tightening of budgets, the curtailing of salaries, and the
reduction of permanent faculty and administrative staff through retire-
ment and firing (see Leik 1998; Honan and Teferra 2001). The auster-
ity agenda imposed internationally following the global financial crisis
beginning in 2008 did not initiate this process, but it certainly intensified
it. The rationalisations that emerged (for cuts in public spending gener-
ally) were remarkably similar in different countries (see Glassner 2010;
Murphy 2010; Tyler 2013). The demonisation of public-sector work-
ers as being inefficient, privileged, and protected was easily applied to
higher education (see O’Flynn et al. 2014), with the perceived (and real)
luxuries that have characterised higher education historically (see Mountz
et al. 2015).
University bureaucracies have initiated a self-auditing of academic pro-
duction with an eye on its calculable outputs, applicability to industry, and
profitability (see Wright and Rabo 2010; Apple 2005; Gill 2009). While
research in many countries is predominantly state sponsored, the revenues
and patents in which public funds have been invested most often become
property of private enterprise (see Allen 2007; Lynch 2014). Government
policies on higher education dovetail with the commercialisation of the
sector. With the decline in public funding, academic institutions must
compete for investors, search for means of measuring their ‘product’ so
as to place themselves favourably among competitors, and increase their
productivity and ‘customer’ base (see The Autonomous Geographies
Collective 2010). ‘Academic capitalism’ has become the dominant model
of university development: the university has been organised as a busi-
ness enterprise dedicated to profit, growth, investment, and reinvestment
(see Slaughter and Leslie 1997). Universities around the globe worry
about their placing in ‘global’ university rankings, which rest on crite-
ria of ‘excellence’ established by elite Anglo-American research-intensive
universities (see Marginson 2008; Lynch 2014). In consequence, the
nominally free and independent academics face ever greater pressures to
respond to the needs of private funders, rather than to society. Exposed
to market conditions, the main privilege of academics—the time to think,
inquire, write, discuss, and engage—is increasingly regarded as unafford-

able (see Mountz et al. 2015). Similarly, humanities and social sciences
as well as ‘blue sky research’ become ineligible for funding unless they
can demonstrate marketable outputs (see Clarke 2010, p. 95; Lynch and
Ivancheva 2015).
Though the post-war era was a Golden Age of academia for many,
to mourn over the demise of a cherished ‘academic community’ is little
more than an expression of what John Clarke (2010) has called ‘profes-
sional nostalgia’. It is also clear that the zenith of the public university
was only short lived, and that the benefits were generally limited to the
developed world (see Clarke 2010). In concrete terms, the increasingly
casualised contractual arrangements bring about a reduced access to ben-
efits and resources, and a cruel system of competition among colleagues
and friends that breaks all collegiality and solidarity (see Ivancheva 2015).
Precariously employed academic staff with ever-increasing teaching and
publishing loads and vanishing benefits (see Courtois and O’Keefe 2015)
cannot afford to spend time on community projects, social justice cam-
paigns, or any relationship or activity that does not count in the final audit.
Choosing to do so might well become the dividing line between a per-
manent and non-permanent post, or, for those with a CID, the difference
between career progression and career stagnation.
THE DECLINE OF ACADEMIC TENURE

The destructive character of the ‘reforms’ is perhaps most obvious among
early-stage academics. A growing number of faculty members are con-
tracted on lower-scale fixed and short-term contracts of teaching and
research, with ever lowering salaries and contractual security (see Honan
and Teferra 2001; Courtois and O’Keefe 2015). Trapped in the logic of the
market, early-career academics must live up to contradictory expectations.
On the one hand, they need to prove the marketability of their teaching and
research. On the other hand, they are expected to remain excellent educa-
tors and scholars, working to preserve higher education as a public good
and facilitating the reproduction of an informed, active citizenry capable of
making and remaking stable communities, enhancing working, learning,
and caring lives into the future (see Lynch 2010). As if to undermine this
process of social rejuvenation, the competitive productivity of higher edu-
cation rewards those that are most ready to abandon all care responsibilities
and all commitment to the communities to which they belong.
Two competing career tracks have emerged, both facing precarity.

Under the growing ‘internationalisation’ of academic work, the traditional
space-tied academic must compete with transient academics that exist apart
from space-tied communities (as is necessary to develop international net-
works and to exploit opportunities wherever they arise). The mobile trans-
national academic is seen as relatively ‘careless’ and able to rise to the top
academic positions (see Lynch 2010). At the same time, to stay in the
academic game, such a hypermobile subject is usually required to put up
with flexibility and recurrent migration, curtailing previous social and pro-
fessional networks. Many such academics suffer loneliness and depression,
while others move their whole families or commute across regional or
national borders to make ends meet (see Zanou 2013; Ivancheva 2015).
The others, who—out of choice, or often out of necessity—opt out of the
game of transnational mobility, fall easily in the trap of zero-hour teaching
and precarious research arrangements in order to stay afloat (see Walters
2010). Hence, both groups remain dependent on local or international
clan-like loyalties and hierarchies (see Afonso 2013).
The normalisation of these conditions and the steep decline of tenure,
which is considered ‘one of the most coveted perks in higher education’
(Rotherham 2011), are both part of the same process. The word tenure itself
carries a different meaning in different countries. In France, for example,
it is associated with particular categories of civil servant employment and
the procedures of recruitment, promotion, and security that these involve;
in Germany, tenure indicates permanent appointment and status of civil
servant as a professor-chair (Lehrstuhl) only after a long competitive career
in an extraordinary (paid) or a private (unpaid) position; the American
tenure-track model involves a period of academic probation during which
the individual academic is expected to establish excellent research publica-
tions and a fundraising and teaching portfolio, as well as provide proof of
administrative or community service—and only after this time is over the
institution decides to grant tenure or terminate the contract.
According to data from the American Association of University
Professors, the number of tenured faculty with permanent contracts in
American universities had dropped from 75 % in 1970 to 30 % in 2007
(see Kaplan 2010). In North-Western Europe, trends are more divergent,
with most new research and teaching staff hired on well-paid fixed-term
contracts, with South-Eastern members of the European Union tend-
ing towards lower-paid open-ended contracts (see European Science
Foundation 2009). In Greece, prior to the global financial crisis of 2008,
there was a constitutional employment protection for permanent academic

staff. However, in 2010, this was curtailed with the severe public-sector
freeze (see Glassner 2010). In Austria, with the University Act from 2002,
university rectors were permitted to appoint academics on temporary con-
tracts of up to 6 years (see Lynch and Ivancheva 2015). In Lithuania,
academics now compete for employment in three 5-year employment
cycles, before they become eligible to hold permanent positions (see
Karran 2007). In the UK, where tenure was abolished in the 1980s, the
proportion of faculty on fixed-term contracts has reached 50 % in 2014
(see Higher Education Statistics Agency 2014). In Germany, where the
number of students and non-professorial staff has increased dramatically,
the number of permanent staff members has stayed the same (see Enders
2001, p. 5); temporary faculty numbers have increased over 45 % from
2000 to 2012, and 80 % of the research and 66 % of the teaching is now
covered by the non-permanent academic staff (see Wissenschaftsrat 2014).
On both sides of the Atlantic, the disjunction between good pay, job
security, and mobility has made the pursuit of a research career increasingly
difficult for a new generation of scholars (see European Science Foundation
2009; Kaplan 2010). Non-tenured faculty are paid less, have less job secu-
rity, feel isolated from the academic community, are highly dependent on
individualised connection with department chairs, and have little to no
chances for professional growth (see Center for the Education of Women
2010). This is particularly evident among women. In Europe, women are
increasingly dropping out of academic careers before they get permanent
positions: the requirement of geographic mobility and job flexibility make
it difficult for them to dedicate time to family building ‘in the rush hour of
life’ (European Science Foundation 2009). Gender differences among ten-
ured and non-tenured staff are also significant: in the USA, a countrywide
survey of 343 academics in all fields showed that 75 % non-tenured faculty
in the humanities, 60 % in the social sciences, and 46 % of those in the natu-
ral sciences were women (see Center for the Education of Women 2010).
Tenure has been criticised, and proposals have been made for its
abolition (see Schaefer Riley 2012; Wetherbe 2012). US politicians,
policy-makers, trustees, parents, and students have used terms such as
performance and efficiency to oppose ‘the socialistic monopoly’ of ten-
ure that allegedly costs millions of taxpayer dollars (see Wetherbe 2012;
Elkins 1998, pp. 763–764; Honan and Teferra 2001, p. 196). Critics of
tenure have said that it undermines competition, innovation and dissent,
and facilitates complacency, uniformity of scholarship and opinion, neglect
of teaching, and rigid academic hierarchies (see Kaplan 2010; Schaefer

Riley 2012). Economists have solicited the abolition of tenure as ‘det-
rimental to institutional flexibility’, a ‘dead-end street for junior faculty’
within an oversaturated labour market and a mechanism to keep academic
salaries and employment stagnant (Breneman 1997, pp. 3–4). Proponents
of tenure, on the other hand, have insisted that tenured faculty remain
competitive, as they are subjected to a highly competitive process of pro-
fessional peer review by highly specialised tenured colleagues (see Brown
and Kurland 1990; Nelson 2012). They have claimed that tenure secures
a level of stability that allows for long-term engagement with their institu-
tion and fosters institutional memory and community (see Karran 2007;
Kaplan 2010; Center for the Education of Women 2010; Nelson 2012).
They have considered tenure to be a prerequisite for academic autonomy,
allowing faculty to challenge students, powerful interest groups, and uni-
versity bureaucracies without fears of economic reprisal (see McPherson
and Schapiro 1999, p. 81; De George 2003, p. 18). It has also been
argued that tenure facilitates the progress of women in male-dominated
fields, shields representatives of ethnic minorities within the academy, pro-
vides necessary protection for risk-intensive research, and creates a viable
non-commercial path for engineers whose labour is better paid in private
companies (see Flores Niemann and Dovidio 1998; Varma 2001).
Thus, tenure has become a key battleground between the university as
an employer that tries to make all spending cost-efficient and academics
as employees who are compelled to struggle for a secure working experience.
Yet, while tenure has been discussed as a constant, a survey of 280 colleges and
universities carried out as early as 1996 has revealed numerous discrete modi-
fications of tenure practices throughout the USA: the development of post-
tenure review processes, the creation of multi-year non-tenure-track positions
and stop-the-tenure-clock options for tenured faculty, and also the increased
flexibility and length of the tenure-track employment, a tenure quota as well
as early-retirement and firing policies (see Honan and Teferra 2001, p. 195).
BETWEEN PROGRESSION AND STAGNATION:

THE CASE OF IRELAND
The decline of tenure is well underway in Ireland—accelerated by the
freeze on public-sector employment, which has ensured that the pro-
tection of a permanent contract is to be experienced by a dwindling
number of academics (see Courtois and O’Keefe 2015). Following the
global financial crisis, public-sector salaries in Ireland (encompassing

most third-level institutions) were cut by 14 % (see IMPACT 2014). To
reduce public spending, from 2011 onwards the government introduced
and implemented the Employment Control Framework, which involved
strict controls on recruitment, along with performance management and
merit-based promotion (see Hardiman and MacCarthaigh 2013). The
Employment Control Framework obliged public-sector staff to work
additional hours for a reduced salary. In order to impose a particular form
of efficiency in the higher education sector, the Employment Control
Framework introduced a division of academic staff into three categories:
core-funded posts (paid from undergraduate and other student fees);
non-core-funded posts (paid from means fundraised from exchequer and
external resources); and other research and/or specialist project-based
posts (paid from non-exchequer sources such as the EU and the private
sector) (see Higher Education Authority 2011).
The Employment Control Framework aimed to reduce the depen-
dency on public sources and enhance a new ethos of competition among
academic staff. To live up to the new standards, Irish universities have
cut and outsourced spending on permanent staff salaries (see Courtois
and O’Keefe 2015, p. 47). Given the increasing numbers of students
enrolling in higher education in Ireland year after year, there is actually
an increased demand for academic employees. However, the Employment
Control Framework is used as a justification by universities to hire staff on
a temporary basis or even via government (un)employment programmes,
such as JobBridge. Accurate figures are very difficult to obtain, as evi-
dence of precarious academic employment is often absent from official
reports, with no attention paid to the working or living conditions of the
employees (see Courtois and O’Keefe 2015, p. 48). These difficulties in
collecting reliable data are exacerbated by the vast array of contract types:
multiple-year fixed-term full-time, rolling yearly, monthly, or even weekly
contracts compete with different part-time arrangements, zero-hour con-
tracts, and hourly paid work with no standardised pay rate within and
across institutions (see Courtois and O’Keefe 2015, pp. 49–50). Still, a
survey with 227 respondents conducted by Third Level Workplace Watch
found that casualisation was an issue in every university in Ireland and
revealed growing divisions and inequalities between staff (see Courtois
and O’Keefe 2015).
Amid such rapid decline of tenure catalysed by the public-sector freeze,
CIDs are seen by many as a way of overcoming precarity and staying in
employment with benefits and protections. Under Irish labour law, an

employee that has worked fixed-term contracts for 3 years (carrying out
similar work without a break in service) is entitled to a CID. The Protection
of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003 states that an employer ‘shall
not penalise an employee […] by dismissing the employee from his or her
employment if the dismissal is wholly or partly for or connected with the
purpose of the avoidance of a fixed-term contract being deemed to be a
contract of indefinite duration under section 9(3)’. In order to be entitled
to CIDs, employees must be offered fixed-term contracts within these
legal limits. And even if the Employment Control Framework stipulated
that ‘[t]he Moratorium must not be used as a means of avoiding Contracts
of Indefinite Duration (CIDs)’ (Higher Education Authority 2011), the
reality was rather different. While CIDs have been considered permanent
contracts by Labour Court rulings and employment guidelines offered
by government bodies (see Burtenshaw 2012), the practice of granting
and interpreting CIDs has also changed since the Moratorium. In 2011,
the Croke Park Agreement, a non-legally binding deal between the Irish
government and public-sector unions, was signed, facilitating the imple-
mentation of austerity measures along with increased productivity and
flexibility as well as a reduction of the numbers of public-service employ-
ees. Since then, there have been a growing number of contestations of the
right to CID.
University administrations have increasingly employed the CID as a
mechanism to divide and rule. Over the last years, universities in Ireland
have been spending on average 2.7 million Euro per year on legal costs,
including on cases in which CIDs have been claimed and appealed against
(see Murray 2013). By signing the Croke Park Agreement, the unions
were also subjected to this logic. Though there were no plans in the agree-
ment for redundancies for public servants, or for further pay cuts, the
unions did sign an agreement that provided no replacements when staff
retired, or when contracts came to an end (see Burtenshaw 2012). The
individualising procedures around fixed-term contracts and CIDs have
become central to many of the disputes between employers, employees,
and trade unions. All this amounted to a freeze in public-sector employ-
ment, with emerging gaps to be filled with staff on precarious contracts. It
also put unions in an awkward position and shifted their work from organ-
ising collective bargaining and industrial action to a focus on legal pro-
ceedings. Since so few volunteers work for trade unions, when individual
cases arise, section representatives feel pressed to attempt to resolve each
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).
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
worked before getting a permanent job is 7.2. Those paid on an hourly

basis, earning less than 10,000 Euro per year, often work in more than one
college, with 62 % of the hourly paid work being performed by women
(see Courtois and O’Keefe 2015). This creates what Aline Courtois and
Theresa O’Keefe call ‘the “hamster wheel” of precarity’ (Courtois and
O’Keefe 2015): since hourly paid teachers are paid for face-to-face hours
only, they very often take on heavier teaching loads than permanent staff
members in order to make ends meet, which means little or no time to
gain any research experience. Administrative work, answering emails,
assessments, preparation work, answering emails talking to students—all
this usually remains unpaid. These academics also remain invisible to their
colleagues in permanent positions, not eligible for conference or research
funding. Due to the regular breaks in service and contractual shifts, these
academics are also precluded from claiming CIDs. In this, they are pit-
ted against the similarly precarious short-term full-time employed staff,
who are increasingly considered part of the more privileged academic work
force: they are at least eligible to engage in research and publication and to
compete on the job market. Also, after a number of consequent contracts
they can claim CIDs; or so it was until the case quoted above (see Labour
Court 2015), which might become a sad reference in future to come.
At the same time, there are a number of both practical and political
problems with CIDs. On the one hand, having a CID does not mean
equal with other permanent employees—it rather provides a catch-22 in
which you have a permanent contract but with no secure funding and very
little benefits attached. In cases when the CID claimant is not employed
within a payment scale and on an established position as a lecturer, it
also does not equate to permanent position in terms of the possibility to
garner research funding. This precarious arrangement also leaves to the
individual department the decision to what extent the person given a CID
can participate in the decision-making processes within the school and the
college. Thus, a CID means permanent employment but does not mean
permanent income when classes to teach or participation in research proj-
ects become subject to the market logic due to programmes’ disappear-
ance, department mergers, or the ending of project-based funding. On the
other hand, as obtaining a CID rarely happens automatically and requires
personal efforts and activation of trade-union membership and court pro-
cedures, claimants enter a vicious circle. Always having one eye on their
next contract, they are also practically much less likely to bring up issues or
insist on their rights. Furthermore, those who claim contracts may end up
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
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
individualised struggles. The public function of universities now hangs in

the balance. The individualised legal struggles depoliticise a very real attack
on the very idea of the university, the preservation of which, we suggest,
must involve organised struggle to maintain public funding and control
over higher education free and open to all, and concurrent demands for
adequate permanent placements for research, teaching, and support staff.
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PART IV
The Scope of Collective Action in

Academia
CHAPTER 11
Are University Struggles Worth Fighting?
Branko Bembič
There is a deep-seated anxiety about exposing the university to the imper-

atives of capitalist accumulation. Theory, it is said, is valuable for its own
sake and should remain independent from the business considerations
reigning in the capitalist economy. The concern that something priceless
will be lost with the corporatisation of the university applies especially in
the case of the humanities, as this segment of scholarly production is of
relatively little value for capitalist accumulation and thus risks being left
out of funding. What, then, is this invaluable something that might disap-
pear? And is it worth fighting for?
In this chapter, having in mind the neoliberal restructuring of the
university, I look at the status of the humanities and some other parts of
scholarly production from the standpoint of their uselessness for capital
accumulation. The chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section,
my aim is to develop a simple conceptual framework for examining the
uselessness of scholarly production from the standpoint of capital, from
which scholarly production is evaluated as useless in those segments that
can be resorted to neither as inputs to individual capitals nor as provid-
ers of expertise for supporting the general conditions of reproduction of
B. Bembič
University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

188 B. BEMBIČ
the total social capital (e.g., research in public administration). In the

second section, I try to provide some illustration of and support to
the conceptual framework by presenting a case study that I conducted
recently.
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
becomes a powerful tool in the process that ensures the reproduction of

capitalist mode of production (see Milios and Sotiropoulos 2009, p. 199).
Furthermore, as climbing the technological hierarchy keeps the promise
of improving the competitiveness of national economy without squeezing
the value of labour power, and insofar as jobs, wages, and welfare provi-
sion (in short, the material situation of workers) depend on competitive
success of national social capitals (i.e., national interest), scholarly produc-
tion becomes a tool in the process that is constantly eroding the unity of
the working class at the global level, fragmenting the working class along
the national borders.
A case in point are frequent claims that the competitiveness of the
national economy cannot be built on reductions of wages and precari-
ous employment arrangements and that the solution is to be sought in
changing the structure of export towards a larger share of hi-tech exports.
Such claims are put forward, for example, by trade unions in Slovenia
in their attempt to resist wage cuts and measures for enhancing flexibility
of the labour market. The problem with this position is that it presupposes
that someone else on the globe will be making cheap goods based on low
wages and exchanging them for hi-tech exports that command high prices
on the global market, which will in turn make possible for high wages of
the highly qualified workers who produce them.
Not all segments of scholarly production are, however, easily adjusted to
directly serve the needs of capital. It is quite obvious that large parts of the
humanities and many segments of social sciences cannot be. Nevertheless,
one can discern at least two different aspects of the uselessness of certain
parts of scholarly production according to their place in the process of
social reproduction. The first aspect of the uselessness of scholarly pro-
duction from the point of view of capital, which pertains to most parts of
the humanities, is complementary to the commodified scholarly produc-
tion useful to capital. For major parts of the humanities produce neither
technological innovations nor skills applicable to the capitalist process of
production. But precisely because of their futility from the point of view
of capital, these parts of the humanities appear as the last piece of scholarly
production that enjoys the privilege of being unburdened with having to
be useful.
Observed from this perspective, these parts of scholarly production
come close to Aristotle’s ideal of contemplation, an activity that has an
end in itself and is therefore ‘liked for its own sake’ (Aristotle 2004,
p. 195). This should, however, not blind us for their structural position in
190 B. BEMBIČ
the process of social reproduction or mislead us into attempts to defend

them as a last stand against overwhelming pressures for the commodifica-
tion of scholarly production. For this uselessness is in no way a sign of
theoretical autonomy, as the appearance of redemption from commodi-
fication is only an effect of the relations in the framework of the capital-
ist universe in which every activity is a means to an end outside of itself
and takes place only insofar as it furthers the process of accumulation of
capital, a process guided by an impersonal compulsion of self-expanding
value. In this setting, the very uselessness of large parts of the humani-
ties, on the one hand, puts them into a privileged field that is apparently
excluded from this endless and futile movement and, on the other hand,
turns them into a supplement that gives meaning to the senseless com-
modified universe—a place of contemplation as an end in itself in which
bourgeois humanists find enjoyment.
The situation in which those parts of scholarly production that are use-
less from capital’s viewpoint offer a privileged place reserved for the enjoy-
ment of bourgeoisie follows directly from their position in the process of
social reproduction, which is in turn implied by the very fact that they are
an end in itself. Thus, as an item that represents a blind alley, an appendix
in the process of social reproduction, these useless parts of scholarly pro-
duction cannot enter consumption of the workers, which means that they
must be a luxury, insofar as luxury consumption is ‘all production that is
not required by the reproduction of labour-power’ (Marx 1981, p. 201).
As I am writing this chapter, an attempt to ratify a differentiation of
university study programmes along these lines is being made at one of the
public universities in Slovenia. In January 2015, the chancellor’s office
at the University of Ljubljana tried to push through the university sen-
ate a document titled Navodila za uravnavanje programske strukture
Univerze v Ljubljani (Directives for the Regulation of the Structure of
Study Programmes at the University of Ljubljana). The Directives (see
University of Ljubljana 2015) determine the conditions for the introduc-
tion of new study programmes, renewal of accreditations for the existing
study programmes, and criteria for increasing and decreasing the num-
ber of enrolment places. An essential part of the conditions and criteria
advanced in the Directives is the employability of graduate students of
respective disciplinary fields measured in terms of their unemployment
rates and ascertained by surveys of graduate students. Hence, the pro-
grammes pertaining to the academic fields in which the unemployment
rate among graduate students is above average would be abolished but
could, nevertheless, be reintroduced if financial sources for carrying them

out were provided for by private means such as tuition fees and private
donations. A differentiation of this kind would cut off working-class stu-
dents from those segments of scholarly production that do not provide
input capital, and in two ways. First, regardless of how the provision of
education in these fields of knowledge is financed, students from working-
class households who feel the pressure of the dictate of labour mar-
ket already find it increasingly difficult to choose a subject of study that
does not increase their employability, that is to say, the usefulness of their
skills for their exploitation by capital. Second, if enacted, the Directives
would fortify barriers that would prevent potential working-class students
from accessing these subjects and elevating them to the status of luxury,
as only those from wealthier households would be able to afford such a
costly study.
The totality of scholarly production could therefore be divided into
two complementary parts: on the one hand, there is a large segment con-
sisting mainly of parts of natural and social sciences that are at least poten-
tially useful from the perspective of capital; on the other hand, there is a
segment of luxury scholarly production that appears as more or less waste-
ful from capital’s perspective but nevertheless serves as an indispensable
ideological supplement conferring meaning to the commodified universe.
Insofar as this division really exhausts the whole field of scholarly produc-
tion, there seems to be little in the humanities (or, for that matter, in any
other field of scholarly production) that is worth fighting for, nor would
such a fight be needed. But this division is truly exhaustive only from the
point of view of capital. For there is another segment of scholarly produc-
tion that is completely useless from the capital’s point of view. As this seg-
ment can offer neither utility to capital nor enjoyment to bourgeoisie, it
tends to be spontaneously crowded out in the process of subjecting major
parts of scholarly production to the needs of capital and depositing the
rest into the sphere of luxury production. It is because of this crowding
out that it does not appear in the division mentioned above.
One can approach this segment by making explicit the role of theory
in class struggle. As any theory produces its own problem field, it has to
theorise its own theoretical practice and to position itself in relation to
other social practices. Hence, insofar as capitalist society is fundamentally
split by class struggle, theory has to conceptualise its place relative to this
struggle (see Močnik 2009, pp. 404–405, 434–437). But if a theory is to
conceptualise its place in class struggle, if it is to take a stand with regard
192 B. BEMBIČ
to class struggle, it is a potential weapon in the hands of the working class.

In What Is To Be Done?, the famous text written at the very beginning
of the twentieth century, Lenin argued that workers could never acquire
the socialist consciousness by themselves and that this consciousness has
to be brought to them by educated bourgeois intellectuals; that is, the
socialist consciousness has to be instilled from without (see Lenin 1961).
Winning access to higher education for all members of society was there-
fore a great accomplishment, for it provided the working class with institu-
tional capacities to form its own ‘organic intellectuals’, as Gramsci would
call them (1971, pp. 6–20). Subordinating scholarly production to the
requirements of the accumulation of capital, on the other hand, is part of
capital’s spontaneous drive to deprive the working class of capabilities to
form intellectuals who could invent powerful conceptual tools usable in
class struggle, organise workers, and help them integrate into a social force
capable of fighting capitalist oppression.
A case of intellectuals working in the midst of the masses that immedi-
ately springs to mind is, of course, the Italian workerist movement. One
of its basic concepts, the concept of the composition of the working class,
dealt precisely with the problem of historically specific ways in which capi-
tal (e.g., by means of technology, which, for workerists, is always moulded
by capital) divides the working class in order to fracture it and control it
politically (as the technical composition of the working class), with the
working class struggling, in an autonomous movement, against this frag-
mentation to recompose itself and achieve political unity that, given the
technical composition imposed by capital, is also historically specific (for
a succinct explanation of class composition, see Bologna 1991, p. 23;
Močnik 2009, pp. 394–399; Mohandesi 2013, pp. 84–88). In a similar
vein, the method of conricerca (co-research) developed and practised by
workerism never aimed at science conceived as an end in itself, but was
always concerned with constructing and providing workers with concep-
tual tools designed to be used in class struggle (see Bologna 2014). To be
sure, conricerca was not only about transmitting the tools of knowledge
to workers, but instead involved them throughout in the process of their
development:
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 …)
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)
It is difficult to ascertain the extent of the impact of workerism on the

struggles of Italian workers in the 1960s and 1970s, struggles that shifted
the balance of forces between capital and labour in favour of the latter for
more than a decade (see Franzosi 1995, pp. 338–339). It is of little doubt,
however, that workerists themselves took part in these struggles and that,
moreover, the so-called extra-parliamentary leftist groups that grew out of
the student movement and which had a substantial influence on the course
of workers’ struggles drew extensively on theoretical foundations built
by the workerist movement (see Bobbio 1988, pp. 16–17). Last but not
least, it seems that the bourgeois state was quite aware of the danger posed
by militant workerist intellectuals, as many of them were either imprisoned
or at least expelled from the university (see Bologna 2014).
CASE STUDY: A SPILLOVER OF UNIVERSITY STRUGGLE

In the rest of this chapter, I want to provide a brief analysis of the role of
a group of organic intellectuals in Slovenia consolidated in the struggle at
one of the Slovenian universities; subsequently, these organic intellectuals
were actively engaged in a workers’ struggle raging in a major Slovenian
company and its outsourced suppliers of workforce. The analysis is part of
a larger case study of the class culture of workers in a Slovenian company
based on eight in-depth interviews that I conducted in the course of 2014
and in the first months of 2015. The aim of my study was to analyse the
process of precarisation and fragmentation of the workforce in a particular
firm as well as workers’ attempts to overcome the fragmentation imposed
by capital and merge into a collective on a class basis that extends beyond
the borders of a particular company. I defined the central concept of my
study—the class culture of workers—as follows: insofar as a class is a con-
crete historical relation, the class culture of workers (i.e., a set of material
practices and institutions formed by workers within this concrete histori-
cal relation) is situated in a position that traditional Marxist approaches
reserve for class consciousness.
At the outset I based my study on the two groups of workers involved in
a strike. However, as soon as I began assessing the material concerning the
strike other than newspaper articles and the interviews I have conducted,
194 B. BEMBIČ
I stumbled upon activities performed by organic intellectuals as they were

documented in web pages containing reports on the development of the
strike, letters addressed to public authorities on behalf of the workers
involved, interviews conducted with workers on the spot, and so on. Most
of these militant intellectuals were young; many of them were students,
some of them associated with study groups working on Marxist theory
outside the established research institutions, while others were academics
involved in various social struggles including those within the academy.
Hence, I decided to do some additional interviews in order to find out
more about one of these groups, a group that was very close to one of the
unions involved in an industrial dispute and which was also involved in the
university struggle a year before that dispute.
In what follows, I want to provide a brief account of the formative
experience of the struggle at the university and a constitutive role of the
group of militant intellectuals in the process of construction of the class
culture of workers that was elaborated during the subsequent strike, as
reconstructed through interviews and materials available in blogs and
newspaper articles.
A few years ago, the Faculty of Humanities at one of public universities
in Slovenia announced a layoff or, as the management put it, a non-renewal
of employment contracts with some 40 academics holding precarious jobs.
The great majority of those laid off either accepted the argumentation
provided by the management, which claimed that a reduction of the work-
force is necessary due to the reorganisation as the old study programmes
were replaced by new, so-called Bologna study programmes and, more-
over, that rationalisation is imperative due to the diminishing amount of
public financing, which was in turn dependent on the number of enrolled
students. A small group of some half dozen, however, decided to put up a
fight, claiming that the criteria for layoff selection were not clear and that
layoffs were a purge of those most critical of the management as well as an
act of disciplination rather than rationalisation of faculty’s business activity.
Indeed, in the year prior to the layoffs, many of those who had to leave
had supported the students’ struggle against the ‘neoliberalisation of the
university’ and backed up a professor who was fired, which set them on a
collision course with the faculty management.
It is, however, quite irrelevant whether the management targeted the
layoffs in such a way as to get rid of the critics among the academic staff
or the rationalisation was carried out strictly on ‘economic’ grounds. The
important point that should not escape one’s attention (as it did not escape
one of my interviewees) is that a spontaneous effect of such ‘production
of unemployment’ is to discipline members of the faculty regardless of its

‘true’ motives. Nor should we lose from sight the fact that never-ending
rationalisations demanded by cuts in public financing erode the potential
for solidarity among members of the academic collective as they try to
keep afloat their own courses or departments whatever it takes. This might
just be the reason why a group of permanent staff and some precarious
academic workers at the Faculty who managed to preserve their jobs wrote
an open letter in which they expressed loyal support to the management
and the Faculty (which the authors of the letter, perfectly in line with the
framework presented above, referred to as the ‘jewel of the humanities’),
while denunciating the fired naggers.
As mentioned above, a small collective determined to counter the
decision of the management stepped forward. They publicly accused
the management of conducting a purge. They engaged their employer
in direct talks, requesting clarification of the layoff criteria. Also, a court
injunction was sought to reinstate them back on their previously held
positions. Finally, students rallied in their support, demonstrating in front
of the faculty building, sending emails to the management with requests
to reconsider its decision, and so on.
From the point of view of their ‘economic’ results, one must certainly
acknowledge the insignificance of the rebellion of the ‘rationalised’ aca-
demics and their supporters. However, their ‘moral and political conse-
quences’, to paraphrase Marx (1979, p. 169), were more far-reaching.
First, although a small group of militants (with strong ties to a local
anarchist group) was already formed before the layoffs by collaborating in
extra-curricular activities, sharing similar theoretical and ideological posi-
tions, and reflecting on the relation between theory and practice, their
active engagement considerably strengthened the bonds within the collec-
tive. In the words of one of my interviewees:
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.
Second, as the faculty-level union aligned with the management (although

the national confederation supported the fired members of the staff and
196 B. BEMBIČ
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
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
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.
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tici.org/operaismo/alquati2/index_1.htm. Accessed July 6, 2015.
Aristotle. (2004). Nicomachean ethics (R. Crisp, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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Bobbio, L. (1988). Storia di lotta continua. Milano: Feltrinelli.

Bologna, S. (1991). The theory and history of the mass worker in Italy. Common
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Bologna, S. (2014, December 15). Workerism beyond Fordism: On the lineage of
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15/workerism-beyond-fordism-on-the-lineage-of-italian-workerism. Accessed
July 6, 2015.
Franzosi, R. (1995). The puzzle of strikes: Class and state strategies in postwar Italy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith,
Trans. and Eds.). New York: International.
Harvey, D. (2010). The enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism. Oxford:
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J. Fineberg & G. Hanna, Trans., V. Jerome, Ed.). Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House.
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Milios, J., & Sotiropoulos, D. P. (2009). Rethinking imperialism: A study of capi-
talist rule. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Mohandesi, S. (2013). Class consciousness or class composition? Science and
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University of Ljubljana. (2015, January 17). Navodila za uravnavanje programske
strukture Univerze v Ljubljani. Ljubljana: University of Ljubljana. http://
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uravnavanje-programske-strukture.pdf. Accessed July 6, 2015.
CHAPTER 12
You’re Either a Flower in the Dustbin

or the Spark That Lights a Fire:
On Precarity and Student Protests
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

202 M. BERGFELD
To be fair, the common ground connecting Johnny Rotten and Bruce

Springsteen is probably not the most pressing question in the life of
(unemployed) graduates. With their university degree in their pockets
they drive cabs, serve pints, sell vegetables, and sit at a phone 12 h a day,
6 days a week. The rent doesn’t pay itself, the food on the table is not free,
and their university degrees probably cost as much as The Boss’s car, but are
worth as much as Johnny Rotten’s piss in a beer bottle.
Johnny Rotten’s despair and hopelessness of being young and on the
dole, and Bruce Springsteen’s reason to rebel, are two sides of the same
coin. And it is years after its release that Johnny’s one-liner ‘God Save
the Queen’ still expresses a new lost generation’s anger with unemploy-
ment, and a system with booms and slumps: ‘We’re the flowers in the
dustbin.’ It is in the same vein that Bruce’s Dancing in the Dark hints
at the role recently played by graduates and young people in despair and
on the dole: ‘You can’t start a fire, you can’t start a fire without a spark.’
In this chapter, I will try to demonstrate what precarity, unemployment,
and underemployment bring to young university graduates and to con-
temporary activism.
In the first section, I draw out the different theorisations of precarity
and the associated phenomena of precarisation and the precariat. While
I dismiss the notion of the precariat as an emerging class, I advance the
view that university graduates form a growing class fraction in the making.
Unlike previous generations of students, they are from the outset part of a
broader working class that facilitates new forms of activism.
In the second section, I look at the student movements in London in
2010 and the Quebec student strike to show how contemporary student
movements place themselves squarely into the struggle of labour against
capital, and thus reconfigure precarity as a form of activism. The UK
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.
The theoretical debates featured in this chapter informed the UK
student movement in 2010 not only at the ideological level but also in
terms of political strategies. The works of Guy Standing and Paul Mason,
for example, were continuous reference points in analysing the struggle.
Despite the passing of this moment, it is worth revisiting these debates,
to my view, if we want to conceptualise 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
ON PRECARITY AND STUDENT PROTESTS 203
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.
A NEW CLASS IN THE MAKING?

Precarity is a concept widely associated with the generation that has gradu-
ated from university since the outbreak of the economic and financial crisis
in 2007–2008. However, the terms precarity, precariousness, and precari-
sation have come to mean an array of things across different countries and
industries, often depending on one’s social and class position (see Raunig
2007; Mattoni 2012). Thus, they represent a contested discursive field in
the social sciences and beyond.
With its origins in the Italian autonomist-Marxist and post-autonomist
movements, this set of terms has been given widely diverse meanings, in
today’s media, political parties, and various communities of academics and
activists, depending on whether it supports or contradicts their ideological
predispositions or theoretical frameworks.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Great British Class Survey
(see Savage and Devine 2013) highlights the relevance of these concepts,
as it not only makes use of precarity but even features the precariat to
designate one of the classes. Similarly, Guy Standing argues that we are
dealing with a new ‘class in the making’ (Standing 2011, p. vii). According
to Standing, the precariat is to be distinguished from the well-positioned
salariat, professional, and technical workers—so-called proficians—and
the ever-shrinking traditional working class made up of manual workers
(Standing 2011, p. 7, 8). In fact, the precariat finds itself below all of these
social classes, yet is neither what Marxists have labelled lumpenproletariat
nor a type of underclass.
Yet this ‘emergent class’-thesis has serious theoretical flaws. It is
doubtful that the vast numbers of university graduates who cannot find
jobs, let alone jobs corresponding to their qualifications, constitute an
emerging social class, an alternative to the receding working class. In
order to reject Standing, one only needs to be reminded of Marx’s find-
ing that class is a social relation between those who own the means of
production—the bourgeoisie—and those who do not—the proletariat
(see Seymour 2014, p. 36). One’s class position then, according to Marx,
is ultimately determined by one’s relation to the means of production.
Standing, on the other hand, argues that one’s class position is defined
204 M. BERGFELD
by one’s position in the post-1945 welfare regime and by one’s access

to social, welfare, and civil rights—the social income structure. With the
commodification of higher education and the replacement of grants with
debt, students hence constitute a new class with a particular interest,
according to Standing.
As a matter of fact, this raises the question whether Standing does not
conflate class with citizenship rights. It is undeniable that citizenship rights
mediate one’s class position in society and have to be accounted for in any
investigation into social structures and the mediations of class. However,
one’s inclusion or exclusion does not alter one’s relation to the means of
production.
Moreover, when analysing social classes, Marx makes the distinction
between the class for itself and the class in itself. Objectively, workers
constitute a class due to their relation to the means of production and
to the fact that they have no control over how the surplus is managed in
capitalist societies. Thus, the working class, or any other subaltern class,
also needs to constitute itself as a political and cultural agent in order to
become a class in itself. In making the distinction, Marx acknowledges
that a unified working or subaltern class is not the norm but the excep-
tion, as it requires an act of collective consciousness. Hence, divisions,
fragmentation, and stratification persist and create sectionalism within
the workers’ movement, making it difficult for workers to become a
class in itself.
Simply put, Standing and the BBC survey re-label a growing section of
the working class as ‘the precariat’. Standing’s empirical work shows that
in the advanced capitalist nations of the Global North the manual work-
ing class is shrinking due to lean production techniques, new workplace
organisation, and production methods, while the section of workers who
are no longer employed on full-time contracts, enjoy less employment
security, and have no trade union representation is steadily rising since the
1990s. While this acknowledges the fact that the working class—just as
capitalism itself—continuously transforms itself, it does not mean that we
are dealing with a new emerging class.
Mario Candeias and Eva Völpel provide a more modest starting point,
one that possibly offers a more productive way to interpret the current
transformations in the economic, political, and social sphere. For them,
the young people in question constitute a class fraction in the making,
one that constitutes the remaking of the working class both politically and
culturally (see Candeias and Völpel 2014).
GRADUATES WITH NO FUTURE

The rapid rise of zero-hour contracts under the Conservative–Liberal
Coalition, the unprecedented growth of low-paid or unpaid internships
among university graduates, and the highest rates of youth unemployment
since the Thatcher years exemplify how precarity affects Great Britain’s
students and young people.
The widespread use of unpaid and low-paid internship across differ-
ent industries is a means of replacing full-time employees. According to
Ross Perlin, internships transform the nature of education and work.
On the one hand, education is shaped to the needs of the divisions of
labour in society and of the dominant regime of accumulation (see Perlin
2011, p. xi). On the other hand, for ever greater numbers of univer-
sity graduates saddled with debt (or, ‘indebted men’, to evoke Maurizio
Lazzarato’s category (2012)), internships constitute the ‘main entry
point into white-collar work’ (see Perlin 2011, p. xvi). This is paralleled
by the increased casualisation of the higher education sector itself (see
University and College Union 2015; Haiven 2014, p. 15; Giroux 2014),
which makes postgraduate students and university researchers one of
the most precarious sections of the working class in Britain. This recon-
figures education and work into an individualising experience where
the triad of education, internships, and work is seen as an investment
into oneself, thus undermining the possibilities for collective action and
organisation of these groups of workers.
Paul Mason’s concept of the graduate without a future mirrors some
of these arguments, yet is far more optimistic. Mason’s argument is
informed by the view that the traditional working class no longer takes
the same form as it did under Thatcher, and that orthodox Marxist theo-
ries of class do not suffice to explain what is happening. Unlike previous
generations of students, ‘[t]he graduates without a future’ who partici-
pated in the student protests of 2010 ‘were thoroughly embedded both
in workforce and in low-income communities’, Mason observes (2011,
p. 70). This is echoed in Giulio Calella’s argument that students are
already precarious workers insofar as capitalism has ‘managed to lower
the expectations of graduates regarding the use of their acquired com-
petences in the labour market, their career paths and their income’.
Moreover, ‘they are exploited as zero-cost labour in compulsory intern-
ships and in precarious jobs with no rights that they are forced to accept
as a result of cuts in higher education funding. But above all they are a
206 M. BERGFELD
commodity in the making’ (Calella 2011, p. 95). Alex Callinicos writes

in a similar vein:
[S]tudents merge into the much larger population of precarious workers

doing part-time, low-paid, casual jobs. […] One thing university expansion
on a neoliberal basis has done, however, is to force increasingly large num-
bers of students to become casual wage labourers while they are studying.
The precarity they experience then is a good preparation for the neoliberal
world of work that awaits them when they graduate. (Callinicos 2006, p. 33)
The enormous expansion of education in the UK over the last quarter of

the twentieth century meant that in 1971 there were 1.7 million students
in further education and 621,000 in higher education. In 2009 this had
grown to 3.5 million and 2.5 million, respectively. The massive expansion
has undone higher education as a preserve of the elite in society. This
transformation reflected the system’s need for an increasingly educated
workforce.
Undeniably it is still difficult for working-class children to go to univer-
sity, but hundreds of thousands of working-class children do it. Over 30 %
of students in higher education come from the lowest socio-economic
classes, and nearly 90 % were educated at state schools. While in 1971
there were twice as many men in university as women, in 2006 there were
more women than men in both further and higher education.
However, qualifications no longer meet what is out there. In 2011,
one in five students left university without a job, and 200,000 success-
ful school leavers did not get a university place. With the current eco-
nomic crisis, the introduction of tuition fees of no less than £9000 and the
government’s austerity agenda, the treadmill of low-paid administration
or call centre work has and will become the future of millions of young
people. In Britain alone students entering university in 2012 could leave
university with up to £53,000 of debt. Just over a quarter of workers in
Scottish call centres have degree-level or higher qualifications. Working
in largely low-paid, inflexible, and stressful jobs, the system turns these
graduates and young adults into flowers in the dustbin, as Jonny Rotten
so aptly describes in his song.
As a consequence, today’s university students are part of yet unlike the
traditional working class, as they are marked by a new set of contradictions.
First, they are more skilled than previous generations. Yet due to their
over-abundance, capitalism renders them superfluous in the labour market.
In other words, they find themselves in a structurally weak position in the
labour market despite their high skills. This is a particularly pessimistic

insight if one believes that this form of ‘immaterial labour is hegemonic
in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in nineteenth century capital-
ism, large industrial production was hegemonic’ (Žižek 2012). Hence, this
‘creative class’ (Florida 2002), ‘the cognitariat’ (Berardi 2003), or ‘cyber-
tariat’ (Huws and Leys 2003) renders itself obsolete through its very own
labour, its difficulty to organise, and the lack of representation by tradi-
tional labour parties and trade unions.
Second, these graduates grew up knowing the political and social ben-
efits and promises of the post-World War II regimes, yet find themselves
excluded from these perks which their parents’ generation still enjoys, cre-
ating one of Max Haiven’s ‘crises of imagination’ (Haiven 2014). Here,
one should bear in mind that the relatively stable situation of the working
classes in the advanced capitalist nations post-World War II has been the
exception in the history of the working class and capitalism, rather than
the norm.
Third, the ever greater degree of empowerment and autonomy achieved
through the use of new information and communication technologies
conflicts with their constant state of alienation and insecurity in work, edu-
cation, and life itself (see Standing 2011, p. 16; Mason 2011, pp. 65–87).
Unlike David Harvey, who would like us to believe that neoliberalism has
eroded most social and place-based bonds and ties (see Harvey 2005),
Mason points out that ‘the graduates without a future’ reconfigure old
bonds and come to form new ones through the use of new information
and communications technologies. For Mason, this ‘networked sociality’
is something to laud (2011, p. 81). It challenges trade unions, political
parties, and other institutions that rely on older forms of sociality. To an
extent, this offers a possible explanation as to why these ‘graduates with-
out a future’ favour alternative forms of political engagement or worker
representation, and why their relation to trade unions appears to be con-
flictual at times.
At another level, Perlin’s and Mason’s accounts disclose the extent
to which young people’s transitory phase is no longer confined to their
time at the university. With internships, underemployment, bogus self-
employment, contractual work, and multiple jobs becoming the norm,
young people’s phase of transition stretches beyond the confines of the
university as they continue to be dependent on their parents’ financial
assistance or state subsidies to be able to reproduce their labour power.
Drawing on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Henry A. Giroux argues that
208 M. BERGFELD
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).
NEW FORMS OF PRECARIOUS PROTEST

Today’s students and young people are already workers or will be tomor-
row’s workers. This is a different situation from the student revolt in Paris
in May 1968, which detonated and inspired the Communist-led General
Confederation of Labour to call its 10 million members into a general
strike, bringing France to the brink of revolution (see Birchall 1987; Cohn-
Bendit and Cohn-Bendit 2000; Harman 1998). In the nearly 50 years since
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)
As the 2012 student strike in Quebec illuminates, when proletarian tactics

such as a strike are adopted by a majority of students, they can be a pow-
erful weapon. Students and their supporters ousted Liberal Premier Jean
Charest, forced the withdrawal of Bill 78 and, most importantly, froze
tuition fees. This victory came after 6 months of student strike involving
more than 190,000 students. During the 6-month-long strike, many of
210 M. BERGFELD
the demonstrations held on the 22 of each month reached up to 500,000

protesters. However, it was the roughly 180 local student unions organ-
ised in the student organisation CLASSE that carried the fight from day to
day, shutting down the Port of Montreal, ministerial meetings, and nearly
all classes in post-secondary education across the province. The high point
of the ‘Quebec Spring’ has been the 350,000-strong demonstration in
Montreal on 22 May. Following the biggest student demonstration ever,
students called for a week of economic disruptions, bringing inner cities’
traffic to a standstill while also mobilising 30,000 parents in support of the
students’ demands. The two largest public sector unions also called their
membership on to the streets for the mobilisation. The looming summer
break did not succeed in breaking the strike either. Instead, students con-
tinued to carry their message into the streets and to the election rallies.
With full privatisation looming, students didn’t want to see a repeat
of their 2005 strike, which saw them go back to class empty-handed.
Students have learnt some important lessons. They are organising on a
departmental or faculty basis, which has strengthened the overall organisa-
tion of the strike.
When word spread, in 2011, that the Liberal government would raise
university tuition fees by 75 % over the next 5 years, a coalition of roughly
44,000 students was already in place. After several days of action, meet-
ings, and a host of other events, CLASSE decided to ballot its 44,000
members—roughly 2 % of all Quebec students—for an indefinite student
strike. Soon, a required majority was won and students started to picket
their departments, faculties, and universities.
In 2015, CLASSE had approximately 180,000 members; it has grown
to be the largest Student Union in the federal state of Canada. This par-
ticular model of collective organising through a trade union-like body has
meant that the strike has been enforced successfully and won a majority of
students. Student demonstrations attended by 250,000–300,000 people,
with an estimated student population of 450,000, have rocked Quebec on
22 March, 22 April, and 22 May.
In the face of state repression, the use of tear gas, shock grenades, the
arrest of thousands of protesters, and riot police in college corridors, stu-
dents didn’t buckle. Instead, they called upon workers and the neighbour-
hoods to join in nightly pots and pans protests, the casseroles. Charest’s
unpopular Bill 78 acted as a catalyst for the student movement to turn into
a popular movement. But student protesters weren’t campaigning only
against tuition fees. Time and again, they argued that Finance Minister
Raymond Bachand’s provincial budget of 2011–2012 would cut public

and accessible healthcare, hydroelectricity, and education. In doing so,
they placed themselves squarely inside of the labour movement and on the
side of the oppressed. This only strengthened the determination of student
strikers, leading them to forge new alliances. Students organised solidar-
ity with locked-out Rio Tinto Alcan workers and with hundreds of Aveos
employees who had lost their jobs. Protests also saw environmentalists and
students come out together. They stormed the top floor of a conference
centre in which Charest was to unveil further details of his ‘Plan Nord’, a
mining plan that will see a 1.2-million-square kilometre stretch of indig-
enous land be sold off to big business. At the same time, other students
stormed a meeting of the Federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, best
known for his anti-gay and anti-immigration stances. While messages of
solidarity from trade unions were common, the most significant action was
taken by a group of lecturers at the University of Quebec in Montreal when
an injunction against the student strike was served and lecturers formed a
picket line in front of the student picket line.
FIRST STEPS IN COALITION-BUILDING:

THE UK STUDENT MOVEMENT
The UK student movement took off after an initial demonstration on 10
November 2010, called jointly by the National Union of Students (NUS)
and the University and College Union (UCU), ended up with the occu-
pation of the Conservative Party headquarters. While the movement only
lasted for a month or so, until the vote on tuition fees on 9 December
2010, it bears some interesting lessons regarding the relationship between
such new movements and traditional unions.
Following the occupation of the Conservative Party headquarters,
the lecturers’ union, the UCU, withdrew their support for the students.
However, a number of branches and rank and file activists continued to
support the students, even though these were accused of endorsing vio-
lence (see Solomon 2011, p. 13). The relationship reached its lowest point
when the official body of the student movement, the NUS, refrained from
calling a demonstration on the day of the vote and invited all unions to
participate in a ‘glowstick vigil’, which they did, and left the students who
marched on parliament without any significant resources or union back-
ing. Arguably, this left the students vulnerable to the police crackdown,
which ensued that day.
212 M. BERGFELD
Nevertheless, the students who did demonstrate managed to get the

London engineering branch of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and
Transport Workers, the London branch of the UCU—dominated by the
UCU Left—as well as the Billy Hayes from the Communication Workers’
Union to speak at their rally. In doing so, the students struck a chord
with the left-wing sections of the union movement. In the months to fol-
low, Len McLuskey, the leader of Unite, Britain’s largest union, addressed
the police in his speech at the Trades Union Congress demonstration on
26 March by saying: ‘Get your dirty hands off our kids!’ Most support
remained at the rhetorical level. However, it is interesting to see that the
unions preferred to cooperate with the official bodies rather than informal
student organisations and activist groups. As Upchurch, Croucher, and
Flynn argue at a much broader level:
However, unions’ traditional commitment to social democratic institution-

alization will constrain their ability to be disruptive in both conventional and
innovative forms. Leaders tied to traditional social democratic repertoires
may be reluctant to adopt more radical tactics, and unions as organizations
may lack capacity to alter ways of working. (Upchurch et al. 2012, p. 862)
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
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.
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CHAPTER 13
Whither Critical Scholarship in the Modern

University? Critique, Radical Democracy,
and Counter-Hegemony
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
C. Athanassiou () • J. Melrose

University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

216 C. ATHANASSIOU AND J. MELROSE
higher education. Neoliberal ascendency and the katabasis of the universi-

ty’s mild social–democratic features are hardly disputable (see Evans 2004),
yet where is the coordinated response on the part of university work-
ers? Effective resistance has not been forthcoming (see Bhambra 2013).
Despite counterblasts (see Collini 2011; Bailey and Freedman 2011)
prompted by the latest round of neoliberal entrenchment (see Browne
2010; Willetts 2011), and despite a vibrant student-led attempt to resist
this restructuring, ‘academics have not, on the whole, mounted strong
collective resistance to what most of them see as detrimental changes […].
The sad truth is that despite pockets of resistance and some concerted
union action, British academics have acquiesced to harm’ (Gopal 2014).
Granted, dissensus in the modern university, as the case of Thomas
Docherty (see Morgan 2014) and Marina Warner’s J’accuse (see Parr 2014)
demonstrate, is not easy, nor is it fostered by conditions on the ground.
Voices questioning the current direction of travel are marginalised. There
is, though, an obvious but remarkable aporia here. Academics live at the
apogee of critical thought: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Pierre
Bourdieu are some of the most utilised authors in the human sciences
(see Times Higher Education 2009). Humanities-oriented staffrooms
conform to a certain right-wing echo chamber’s picture of trendy leftie
posties (see Heath 2015). Aware of his or her continental philosophy,
sympathetic to the resurgence in feminism and to the depravities of US
imperialism, the critical scholar is alive and well in academia. But this gen-
eral bias is not reflected in any credible counter-hegemonic movement to
reclaim the modern university along the lines of, for example, the student
movement in Quebec (see Hallward 2012) or the 2010 student occupa-
tions (see Ismail 2011, p. 123). Critical scholarship is depoliticised. The
subject of the critical scholar is in crisis.
Taking this impasse as our starting point, we specify what we mean by
critique, before moving on to the example of the complex of criticality in
the university. We then outline our understanding of counter-hegemony,
a notion that offers a neopragmatic articulation of how critical scholarship
can authentically build coalitions and foster subject positions. Drawing
on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, we hope to counter
possible charges of, first, hyper-subjectivism (‘I established a theoretical
model of thought. How could I have suspected that people would want
to implement it with Molotov cocktails?’ [Adorno 1969, p. 10]), sec-
ond, materialist justification (why would academics in positions of rela-
tive privilege resist the status quo?), and, third, fatalistic anti-volunteerism
CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY 217
(what can we do given the odds?). We then explicate the counter-hege-

monic project. We focus on the university as a front, reimaginable as a
heterogeneous civil society.
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
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
or lack thereof, misconstrual of purpose, professional responsibilities, and

so on—the absence of frank critique makes it hard to see how demand-
orientated struggle is to be engendered unless the organisational aspect
of political struggle is stressed more coherently by those who bemoan
neoliberalism and all its works.
Present here on our part is a certain expectation. Of course, expectation
can be a self-defeating state of mind. To have a theoretical disposition;
to have an affirmative relationship with a body of propositions; to have
bookshelves groaning under the weight of Marx, Deleuze, Chomsky, and
Butler; to write an opinion piece in an establishment organ—none of these
guarantees that a certain set of action-directed praxis ensues. One can
recollect the famous case of Adorno in 1968, or the more prosaic example
of Labour politician and academic Tristram Hunt crossing a picket line to
lecture on Marx (see BBC 2014). There is no necessary self-contradiction
at play here. There is a very tenuous link between philosophical concep-
tions and concrete political attitudes (see Foucault 1984, p. 374). The
issue, then, is one of reflexivity. Are critical scholars aware of what they are
doing, not in the sense that they are fully conscious of their actions, but
rather, are they aware that what they are doing is reproducing the status
quo? Questioning is important, we contend, for critical literacy; compla-
cency, to be avoided.
CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP: STATE OF PLAY

The neoliberal reform of British universities has been on the government
agenda for a while, specifically since the mid- to late 1990s (see Callinicos
2006). In the face of such developments within the university, critical
scholarship has been steadily developing an agenda of reclaiming space
for critique. Stefan Collini’s counterblasts concerning higher education
policy (see 2010, 2011, 2013) are indicative of a consensus in critical
academic circles on the shortcomings in higher education. Equally, how-
ever, Collini’s case is ultimately disingenuous in its inability to harness
and use the necessary tools for counter-organising. It fails to go beyond
general calls for outrage at what is being imposed by a seemingly distant
and all-powerful government. Despite demonstrating a clear awareness
of the shortcomings (and their complexity), the sense is that, neverthe-
less, they originate in successive governments’ attempts to commercialise
universities, and that is where critique is levelled. There is no sense in this
critical narrative that the commercialisation of British universities does not
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
‘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
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
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
given experience. The demands of each are articulated equivalently with

those of the others, so that, in the words of The Communist Manifesto,
‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all’ (Marx and Engels 2012, p. 62). Our equivalence is relational: built on
the recognition that demands are not inalienable rights but ones that have
to be fought for, bringing with them not only many possibilities but also
responsibilities. Work is required to construct the substance of counter-
hegemony; this is not a quality that exists, but one that has to be made. It
is not found. Complacency in counter-hegemonic discourse, as in the case
of critique, is not to be countenanced.
HOW DOES THIS WORK IN THE ACADEMY?

Crucially, reflexivity with regard to the critical scholar’s implication in the
system of neoliberal higher education is lacking. Where critique of the
status quo in British higher education is currently externalised, critical
scholars could instead focus their attention on how the neoliberal com-
plex maps locally. This requires willingness to act. Contrary to suggestions
that newer thinking is required—that universities should don more radi-
cal identities (see Castree 2010, p. 240), or that academics should resist
neoliberalism’s imposition of new modes of labour (see R. Gill 2014) with
their own versions of democratic utopianism (see Castree 2010; Giroux
2002; Collini 2013)—the tools to be used in the rethinking of the uni-
versity can be found, reformed, and re-used in the infrastructures already
existing, such as universities’ committee governance and trade union-
centred collective bargaining. We are bound to start from somewhere,
from within Butler’s matrix of power, that which we find ourselves in, and
work from there. The question is not what project of reformation we apply
going forward, but rather whether we decide to go forward, articulating
the path as we traverse it.
This requires a step away from current tendencies to disallow the subject
of the critical scholar any power, tendencies that render this figure a pas-
sive recipient of decisions. This is not to dispute the dire conditions defin-
ing the working life of increasing numbers of academics, nor the necessity
of bringing these working conditions to light (see R. Gill 2014); it is to
challenge a victimisation that denies the possibility of change. Where the
subjectivity of the victim prevails, problems are individualised, both in
their impact and in the ‘how’ of their solutions. No matter that when
analysed, in the re-tweeting or sharing of a generalised rant about the
modern academia, through anecdotes mentioned in passing to colleagues

on the way to a school meeting, there lies the grounds for a clear common
understanding that there are serious structural issues to be overcome if
one’s, and others’, situation is to be improved.
The realisation, then, of the critical scholar as a political figure is required,
where critique is mobilised for the formation of a counter-hegemony that
aims to be general, and finds alliances that reach beyond the immediate
interests of the academy, admitting wider concerns and struggles. As in
the case of the student occupations, both past and present, that have been
fought not only on student issues but also in solidarity with teaching staff
(see University of Bristol Students’ Union, 2014) and wider struggles in
neoliberal society (see University of Bristol Students’ Union 2010), there
would be recognition that the university is not defined by a specific con-
stituency; rather, it is composed of multiple subjects, voices, and interests;
a civil society that exists as a collectivity of individual moments (see Laclau
and Mouffe 2001, p. 105) that can be seized upon in aid of counter-
hegemonic re-articulation.
Political accountability is central to the formation of the kind of counter-
hegemonic civil society we want to outline here. As must be clear by now,
our complaint is not necessarily with the content of critical scholars’ ques-
tioning of contemporary higher education, but with the lack of follow-
through on this at all levels—collegial, departmental, university-wide. As
Andrew McGettigan observes, ‘over the last few years, attention has been
on fees and loans, and understandably so, but there is a pressing need
to assert democratic governance at individual institutions’ (McGettigan
2014). The general problematic of the neoliberalised academy can mani-
fest and be opposed to in local struggles to re-assert democratic control.
Political awareness of the potential offered by critical scholarship—to
relate the particular struggles of the workplace to the material conditions
of higher education, and beyond—should be a key starting point for over-
coming the critical impasse we have identified here.
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
that the neoliberal university is a heartless business, that it builds itself on

exploiting the most vulnerable, and that it undermines pedagogy as well
as research. We have shown how such a constellation of radical knowledge
and complete lack of action can hold strong, even in the face of aggressive
efforts of the neoliberalisation of education in the UK.
If critical scholarship and its dedication to progressive change can only
be articulated in research grants or to progress one’s career; if it cannot be
brought back to one’s immediate reality so as to challenge the very same
relations of power and their more parochial effects; if it fails to expose its
own internal contradictions so as to move beyond them—then it cannot
have any value at all. The complicity of critical scholarship in the higher-
education establishment has to be recognised. This would be done not
just through apologetic awareness of the existence of contradictions (see
Research and Destroy, 2009), but through the willingness to hold one-
self accountable in forums of equal participants who can begin together
to redefine and re-make the conditions on which the university is built.
The crisis of critical scholarship is one of depoliticisation. Instant change
cannot be expected, nor is it easy to confront one’s own implication in a
system to which one is also totally opposed. But if critique of the neolib-
eral university is to mean anything, this is the work that has to be done.
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2015.
CHAPTER 14
Academics as Workers: From Career

Management to Class Analysis
and Collective Action
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

232 H. TUTEK
shift in public education towards ‘market-based self-sustainability’ (Žitko

2012, p. 19) and the internationalisation of tertiary education systems, the
pre-crisis ‘knowledge society bubble’ burst, and a halt was put to (at least
nominally) expansive policies prevalent earlier2 in this sector.
This major halt has, however, not been a symptom of wider systemic
failure and has not provoked a consistent re-evaluation of the dynamics
and consequences of the dominant regime of capitalist accumulation glob-
ally. As we well know, the system established during the last several decades
remains tenaciously in place despite its crises and the socio-economic model
of the ‘knowledge society’ is still current, both as an ideological compul-
sion (as the political elites still invoke the well-worn clichés of ‘innovation’,
‘entrepreneurial spirit’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘excellence’ when referring to
the university’s role in helping to bridge the economic crisis) and as an
institutional framework (as the entrepreneurial university proceeds with its
organisational procedures-cum-disciplinary regimes of flexibility, mobil-
ity, and quantification of excellence—on top of maintaining its dedication
to the production of intellectual property in place of what used to be
conceived as ‘knowledge’). In her contribution to this volume, Danijela
Dolenec concisely describes the transformation.
It is, however, unclear how the university should fulfil its role, even func-
tionally reduced, under drastic measures that characterise the age of aus-
terity: slashing of funds, dropping or stagnating faculty salaries,3 moratoria
on further employment in public higher education, underfunded research
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
projects, and unavailability of secure employment create adverse structural

conditions for any type of work, including the dynamic production of ‘inno-
vation’ seen as the entrepreneurial university’s raison d’être. In an attempt
to resolve this contradiction and keep extracting value from public univer-
sities in accordance with the neoliberal ideological demands, the austerity
governments are left only with the option to intensify the single-minded
politics of ‘new public management’ put in place globally throughout the
last couple of decades. Structurally short of alternatives, they resort to cor-
porate strategies of ‘streamlining’, ‘raising efficiency’, and maintaining pres-
sure to commodify services offered by the university and transfer costs to
students and their families.
Having this continuum in mind, we should remember not to conceive
the age of austerity as an anomaly or a short-term adjustment. It is simply
a contingent recent development—an intensification, as it happens—of an
ongoing process. Symptomatically, the 2009 United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report prepared for the
World Conference on Higher Education examining global trends in higher
education since 1998 does acknowledge the still fresh financial crisis, but
the austerity it mentions after examining pre-crisis ‘trends in the financing
of higher education’ is older: ‘The immediate effect of these trends on the
financing of higher education (again, varying by country) is a state of austerity
in universities, postsecondary education institutions, and national higher edu-
cation systems’ (Altbach et al. 2009, p. 70). There is also nothing geographi-
cally or geopolitically specific to austerity, as the UNESCO report states that
these higher education conditions are ‘nearly universal’ and occur through-
out the world-system (despite the fact that they occur at their most crippling
in sub-Saharan Africa, developing countries, and countries ‘in transition’)
(Altbach et al. 2009, pp. 69–70). Among their consequences, which is key
to our topic here, the report mentions the problem of ‘restive and otherwise
unhappy faculty’, as well as ‘faculty “brain drain” as the most talented faculty
move to countries with fewer financial troubles’ (Altbach et al. 2009, p. 70).
It is on these two problems and the way they are conceptualised when
they appear as problems of academic labour that I would like to focus
here. UNESCO’s vaguely conceived ‘restiveness’ is a result of a combina-
tion of well-known factors: the flexibilisation of academic employment,4
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
undercompensation, as well as a new regime of institutional discipline

within the academic field that brings about a framework of practical limi-
tations on research and teaching that appears as costs are cut and insti-
tutional procedures and technologies ‘streamlined’ under the watchful
eye of expanding university administration (see Callinicos 2006; Martin
1998; Nelson 2011). The ‘restiveness’ under intensified austerity can then
easily, if other conditions are met, turn into increased ‘brain drain’ (see
Theodoropoulos et al. 2014), that old problem of structural asymmetry
between the periphery and the core of the world-system. Comprehensive
statistics on the movements of academic workers in the post-crisis period
are hard to find, but if some of the most radical austerity projects in the
EU periphery are anything to go by, it can be empirically confirmed that
austerity politics significantly contributes to the intensification of emigra-
tion of academic workers from the periphery. In Greece, for example, the
already high rates of émigré scientists rose catastrophically during the cri-
sis, by 70 % according to some estimates (see Tzanos 2013), and the Baltic
countries record similarly unprecedented emigration spikes and brain drain
migration patterns: ‘At the peak of the crisis (2009–2010), emigration
reduced the size of Latvia’s population by 3.6 per cent and Lithuania’s
population by 3.3 per cent.’ (Juska and Woolfson 2015, p. 236) This, of
course, further compounds the situation in which, according to a 2010
Ohio State University study by Bruce Weinberg referred to in Nature
magazine’s report on global mobility of scientists, one in eight of the
world’s most highly cited scientists from 1981 to 2003 ‘were born in
developing countries, but 80 % of those had since moved to developed
countries (mostly the United States)’ (Van Noorden 2012, p. 327).
But, of course, if we insist on the common underpinnings and the uni-
versal spread of recent transformations in tertiary education systems around
the globe, it must be said that the flight of academic workers from the
periphery to the core is far from a flight to safety. Along with the already
mentioned changes in the institutional conditions of academic work, there
is not only the problem of casualisation of labour but also structural unem-
ployment: according to an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) study, OECD countries have seen a 40 % increase
in the number of doctorate holders in 2006 compared to 1998 (see Auriol
2010). At the same time, the number of available positions in higher edu-
cation and research either declined or stagnated. According to the same
study, the general unemployment rates of 1990–2006 doctoral graduates
are low and ‘do not exceed 2 % or 3 %’, but ‘a non-negligible share of
doctorate holders also seem to be employed in non-related or lower quali-

fied occupations’ (Auriol 2010, pp. 11, 14). For some fields, especially the
humanities, the unemployment rates are much higher, and many doctorate
holders find themselves without permanent jobs well after they obtain their
degrees: ‘In 2006, five years after the receipt of their doctoral degree, more
than 60 % in the Slovak Republic and more than 45 % in Belgium, the
Czech Republic, Germany, and Spain were still on temporary contracts.
Yet permanent engagements accounted for over 80 % of all jobs in almost
all countries’ (Auriol 2010, p. 13). Having this in mind, it is not unreason-
able to suggest that the influx of young researchers from the periphery, as
states brutally cut their budgets in compliance with the demands of the age
of austerity, might exacerbate these already existing issues in the countries
of the centre. ‘Knowledge economies’, it would seem, structurally limit
production of knowledge.
These issues are, however, rarely discussed in their systemic dimension.
The movement of academic labour is most often conceived as a conse-
quence of the logic of meritocracy and professional ambition,5 which it
often is, but identifying academic labour mobility solely with advancement
of individual careers can be used cynically to justify structural asymmetries
in the world-system, workforce flexibilisation in the systems of tertiary edu-
cation, as well as to hide the precarious and often highly undesirable side
of contemporary academic worker’s potentially forced mobility. Because,
as it is well known, a respectable academic career strives towards excel-
lence, and excellence is from a peripheral perspective predominately found
abroad. So it follows that mobility is nothing but a measure of quality.
This manoeuvre not only sidesteps the discussion of adverse effects of
brain drain, but also represents flexibilisation in the new academia as a
form of liberation, an enticement to pursue seemingly delocalised excel-
lence more vigorously.
Similarly to the discourse of mobility, when viewed in their structural
dimension, the supplementary discourses of career management and excel-
lence that are often used in the new academia can be observed as mechanisms
of translation of social (structural) problems into the language of (work)
ethics and personal responsibility. If Barbara and John Ehrenreich are right
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
in their thesis that significant portions of the twentieth century professional-

managerial class—which academic workers belong to—are undergoing
disintegration under pressure of the new regime of accumulation, techno-
logical changes, and shifted balance of power between labour and capital (see
Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 2013), learning and utilising these languages by
members of the transforming professional-managerial class can help with an
effective socialisation into the new paradigm of capitalism, though at the
price of lost (relative) autonomy which was once their class reward.
If, however, a more critical position is to be assumed, real subsumption
of the ‘temple of the spirit’ (Krašovec 2011) and ‘life of the mind’ under
capital has brought about conditions of precarity where affected academic
workers face labour problems without available strategies or clearly visible
organisational means to address those problems in their systemic dimen-
sion. Certainly, the professional-managerial class ‘needs to start from an
awareness that what has happened to the professional middle class has
long since happened to the blue collar working class’ (Ehrenreich and
Ehrenreich 2013, p. 11), as the academic professions have been affected by
gradual proletarianisation. But if this is so, it is also important to develop
means of addressing the residual ideological conception whereby the aca-
demic profession is conceived as a ‘gentlemanly calling’ (Halsey 1992),
romanticised as ‘vocation’, and naively accepted as a self-regulating meri-
tocracy. Academic workers have no other options if they are to resist the
adverse conditions they face in the workplace but to start acting as work-
ers: to develop consciousness of the structural position they occupy within
the mode of production, and to act collectively in order to gain control
over the workplaces, professions, and social spheres that belong to them.
What I would like to concentrate on next, however, are examples that
go in the opposite direction. The institutional protocols of the labour
market and the ideology of neoliberal capitalism, as mentioned, demand
learning the language of career management and mobility. Under the
regime of often quite extreme precarity, modes of adaptation develop that
steer academic workers towards an effective transition into a new contin-
gent class form, and away from workplace organisation and development
of antisystemic political potential.6
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).
A recent example from the EU periphery can be useful to demonstrate

and exemplify one local institutional process by which a structural problem
is ideologically translated into a problem of management, and a properly
political effort necessary to address it is supplanted by a technical policy
recommendation: in 2013/2014, the Croatian government Agency for
Science and Higher Education initiated a reaccreditation procedure for
some of the public institutions in the country and consequently tasked
an expert panel of mostly international academics with reviewing them.
One of the evaluated institutions was the Faculty of Arts and Humanities,
the largest faculty at the University of Zagreb, both by the number of
students and employed academic workers. As a part of the evaluation pro-
cedure, the expert panel held a large meeting with the institution’s junior
staff, the majority of them early- to mid-career academics on fixed-term
contracts responsible for both teaching and research. Many of them had
been first employed in the expansionary pre-recession ‘knowledge society’
boom, signed 6-plus-4-year contracts which are now close to completion,
and spent a considerable amount of time working and building careers
in an academic job with reasonable security, at least in comparison to
the trends which have become the norm elsewhere. However, in 2014 a
freeze on hiring was imposed by the government in an attempt to reduce
budget deficits. Thus for the junior academic workers whose contracts
were near completion—hundreds of them—the prospect of unemploy-
ment suddenly turned very real, and this in a peripheral EU country plod-
ding through its sixth year of recession, with registered unemployment
rate of around 17 %. In the review meeting, the young academic work-
ers explained the situation to the international expert panel in an openly
emotional and quite typical discussion where a number of distressed com-
ments mostly blamed the state or successive governments for negligence
towards their public institutions and blindness to the key role that higher
education plays in society. The expert panel members, in turn, tried to
assess the adaptability of the public university staff to the new situation.
The questions they posed—‘have you considered alternative career paths’,
‘how do you feel about academic opportunities abroad’, and ‘are you
familiar with external funding sources that would make your position sus-
tainable’—impose the strategy of adaptation as primary. No one asked,
‘Do you have a strong union?’
The later official report by the expert panel does indeed show an aware-
ness of repercussions this problem might have for the functioning of the
public institution. But it is framed, among the seven disadvantages of the
238 H. TUTEK
institution, not as a universal labour problem, but as that particular insti-

tution’s management and ‘staffing crisis’:
1. The current institutional framework makes the Faculty unable to make

staffing decisions or plan staffing going forward. The Faculty faces a defi-
nite staffing crisis in the next few years which will inevitably impact upon
the quality of both teaching and research.
2. There is no research office to support the capture and administration of
grants.
3. There is no careers office to support students (including doctoral stu-
dents) in their future careers and to enable them to maximise their employ-
ability. (Agencija za znanost i visoko obrazovanje 2014, p. 11)
Thus, an ideological proposition is again implicitly made—employment

and career prospects are a function of individual effort and the institu-
tion’s readiness to foster and hone the individual ‘employability profile’
of the worker so that he or she can later be compatibly allocated into a
‘future career’ by the job market. But interestingly, the first ‘disadvan-
tage’ identified by the expert panel vaguely draws attention to the role the
institutional, systemic arrangement plays for the ‘staffing crisis’, whereby
that term is inadvertently revealed as misleading: the phrase ‘current insti-
tutional framework’ points to the state as the ultimate address for and the
unavoidable locus of resolution of public university problems. Of course,
the ‘current institutional framework’ is a specific historical alignment of
wider political and socio-economic forces crystallised in state institutions
which remains hidden so long as it is treated as a technical abstraction.
Observed in the historical dynamics that was outlined above, there can
hardly be a better example of a systemic consequence of policies imple-
mented in the name of ‘knowledge economy’ than the precarious posi-
tion of the academic workers at this university. Consequently, this is not
simply a problem of ‘staffing’ but of boom and bust cycles of capital,
the structural integration of a peripheral post-socialist economy into the
world-system, labour legislature favouring capital, and the neoliberal gov-
ernance mechanisms making it difficult to solve this problem locally and
democratically prior to passing it onto the job market for judgement.
So, the beginning of an answer to labour problems at a public univer-
sity in such a situation should be to consider the logic and structure of
this historical alignment, and to develop a relation between labour and
state in which privately antagonistic relations to the state apparatus can be
replaced by an institutionally effective formalisation and collectivisation.
As almost everywhere, however, the general weakness of existing tra-

ditional organs of labour organisation, such as unions turned into ‘social
partners’, cosily sitting on a ‘three-seater sofa’ (Kostanić 2013) with capi-
tal and the state, as well as the peculiar social position and ideologies of
the professional-managerial class in capitalist society make this a difficult
project among academic workers. The default answers to this and similar
systemic crises, regrettably, remain wedded to strategies of navigating the
‘job market’, through which individuals move accomplishing more or less
clever or more or less successful balancing acts between their own intrinsic
motivations and the ‘needs of the market’. The disciplining paradigm of
‘compulsory individuality’ (Cronin 2000) is an essential component of
such conceptions of academic work.
However, even sensible career management, prudent choices, and a
willingness to conform to the demands of the moment are no guarantee
of escaping unemployment and casualisation in the new academia. Recent
research shows that precarious employment might for many academic work-
ers truly be ‘a hamster wheel’ (Courtois and O’Keefe 2015, p. 56). In other
words, it is long-term, not a temporary stepping stone to a more secure
position and a tenured professional life and very often no hard-earned secu-
rity awaits after the initial trials and tribulations of early career. Academic
workers, especially younger ones, in both the core countries and the periph-
ery would be well-advised to realise that precarity is the only game in town.
In a 2002 article, at a time when this subject had still not been broached
quite as extensively as it is today, Marc Bousquet advocated a shift from
thinking about systems of higher education in terms of job markets and
supply-side control of supposed overproduction of doctoral degrees. He
suggested that the system7 is, in fact, doing exactly what it is supposed to,
extracting surplus labour and externalising costs, at the (apparently negli-
gible) price of creating ‘waste product’ in the form of the doctoral degree:
Thinking about casualization means abandoning the vividly counterfactual

job market premise, that doctoral education functions primarily to create a
‘supply’ of teachers with the Ph.D., and asking instead: What does it mean
that the primary function of the vast web of doctoral education is to pro-
vide the university with teachers who don’t hold the doctorate? Any real
examination of graduate education and casualization leads inescapably to
the conclusion that the real ‘labor market’ in the academy is a market in
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)
Bousquet goes on to explain that the system produces actual degree

holders only ‘out of a tiny fraction of the employees it takes in’. In the
US humanities programmes of the time, doctoral programmes ‘typically
award the PhD to between 20 and 40 Per cent of their entrants. And
the system employs only perhaps a third of the degree holders it makes’
(Bousquet 2002, p. 90). The rest, the technological waste produced by
the new system, is of course difficult to bury underground, flush into
seas and rivers, or launch into space. So some sort of a recycling mecha-
nism needs to be established, preferably at little or no cost to institutions,
universities, who produce it. Thus we can observe, most notably in the
USA, recent organisational attempts by academic workers themselves to
help patch up the messy reality that is created systemically. Most often
described by the two semi-related terms ‘alt-ac’ and ‘post-ac’, the purpose
of such organisational attempts is both to help the unemployed academic
workers transition to fields outside academia and to find jobs within the
academic system that are not considered academic jobs proper, as well
as to establish support and cooperation networks similar to occupational
networks of ‘knowledge workers’ in other occupations, such as ‘freelance
unions’. Post-ac and alt-ac do not refer to specific organisations or groups,
but are conceptions of ‘alternative career tracks’ for doctoral degree hold-
ers who are structurally unable to find academic jobs. What distinguishes
these academic initiatives from regular networks of freelance workers in
the ‘knowledge economy’ is the somewhat idiosyncratic position of the
precarious academic workers within the professional-managerial class. As
in the peripheral example described above, so in the core country such as
the USA, exiting the university, a relatively hermetic system with some-
what autonomous mechanisms of organisation and production, becomes a
necessity for many only after they have already invested years of work and
gone through the effort of highly specialised training, socialisation, and
career development under protocols specific to the academic field. In prac-
tice, this means that a more radical adaptation and a rougher ‘transition’
is required than simply switching jobs, or even industries, as would be the

case elsewhere throughout the knowledge economy.8 But despite even the
willingness to remain casually employed over a long period of time, take
on debt, and withstand the ‘hidden injuries’ of precarious employment in
the neoliberal academia (see Gill 2009), for many academic workers the
‘transition’ to other sectors in search of employment becomes a necessity.
Thus the role of the mentioned networks also becomes a pedagogic or
even a therapeutic one: not simply to exchange and distribute business
contacts within a single profession, but to help unemployed academics
cope with the ‘outside world’ and help their integration and orientation
in a market where the skills they gained and identities they invested in are
often seen as undesirable, ‘theoretical’, or outright useless. Miriam Posner,
an outspoken alt-ac academic worker confirms this in an article for Inside
Higher Ed where she writes that ‘many Ph.D.s have seized on the alt-ac
movement as a beacon of hope in an otherwise fairly depressing situa-
tion’ (Posner 2013). And a 2015 report by the US non-profit Council on
Library and Information Resources suggests the growing importance of
such developments, even when advocating a conception of academic work
beyond such ‘tracks’: ‘[O]ver the last five years, the chatter about alterna-
tive career paths for PhDs has grown into a full-scale conversation’ (Beck
Sayre et al. 2015, p. 103).
As far as I am aware, there are currently no similarly formalised equiva-
lents either in the periphery or in the European core countries in many of
which the problem of ‘academic waste’ is relatively invisible or relegated to
career management and grant application offices at particular universities.
The difference might be the result of the size and further evolution of a
similar structural dynamics in the US context, as well as the fact that the
shape of the problem is different for those working in academic fields where
European-style welfare state public universities are absent or do not rep-
resent a dominant model. The Croatian example elaborated above shows,
among other things, the convolutions of peripheral public institutions that
have still not completely given up on some form of public institutional
role in organising even potentially superfluous academic labour—thus the
state financing policy recommendations by external experts in order to
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
manage or rectify institutional problems created by series of its own prior

political decisions and ‘structural adjustments’ suggested by equivalent
types of earlier experts. Alt-ac and post-ac ‘movements’, as opposed to
that, are autonomous (in relation to the state) attempts of parts of the
professional-managerial class to self-regulate by adapting to the needs of
the regime they are superfluous to, savvily avoiding to add to the costs
of their maintenance: ‘For us, alt-ac is ultimately proof that there is a
third way—that one can remain within the academy outside of a tenure-
track position; teaching, publishing, and living the “life of the mind”, are
all possible if one is willing to consider the myriad number of staff and
administrative positions available in the academy’ (Posner 2013). Such
language of possibility suggests a positive ideological charge of the term is
necessary: alt-ac is beyond simple career advice, it is meant as an empow-
erment resource, and the conversation about alternative career paths for
academic workers unsuccessful in finding tenure-track jobs is also meant
to fight the entrenched and outdated occupational ideologies, to ‘combat
the notion that anything short of a tenure-track job means failure’ (Beck
Sayre et al. 2015, p. 106).
As opposed to such insistence on institutional (self-)preservation and
the readiness to adapt to the new institutional limitations that arose in the
socio-economic context characterised by casualisation and redefinition of
the role of the university, post-ac perspectives seem to be characterised by a
more confrontational, sometimes rhetorically militant, position. The mili-
tancy, however, is a resentful one, limited to criticism of new academia’s
effects on its precarious labour, but avoiding an organisational or ana-
lytical engagement from within the system. The manifesto entitled ‘What
Does It Mean to Be Postacademic? A #Post-Ac Manifesto’ published on
the website entitled ‘How to Leave Academia: Peer to Peer Postacademic
Support’ and offering resources, experiences, and advice on transitioning
from an academic career to the broader ‘free market’ states:
[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
by completely divorcing oneself and one’s identity as an adult away from

academia, as a thinker/writer/worker, away from the academy. […] Post-ac
is interested in survival […] has no shame about corporate employment,
welfare, ‘selling out,’ or the need to talk about dollars and cents when it
comes to jobs and debt. […] Post-ac is a critique of the academy, its mythol-
ogy, and its structure. Post-ac discourages people from pursuing graduate
work. (Bell and Whitehead 2013)
This is certainly an outline of a strong politics of disillusionment. But

disillusionment implies that there had to be a prior emotional investment
in an illusion. Conceiving academic work in the manner of the twentieth
century professional-managerial class, as a vocation and calling, is certainly
a large part of that illusion. But it is, however, not enough to observe that
the illusion is not real, a productive politics can only be built on an under-
standing why the illusion was put up in the first place. Abandoning one’s
occupational ‘identity’ and finding other markets to sell your labour to
might be a temporary solution for many, but in class terms, post-ac as it is
conceived here simply means a lateral transition to a currently more stable
position within the same system whose injuries one is trying to escape.
One does not get to choose to ‘sell out’, as it is suggested here, by going
corporate and leaving behind the ivory tower and dirtying one’s beautiful
soul. It is a choice that is made for all of us long before we are even aware
of it. In a system that depends on wage labour and extraction of surplus
value for its reproduction, everybody cannot but sell out.
Distributing occupational advice and setting up support networks and
hubs where people can read about the experiences of others, as well as
exchange ideas, contacts, and often emotional support, should certainly
be done everywhere where there is need. But without the baseline inten-
tion to organise a collective means of resisting the system that produces
such effects in this and other sectors of society, it can only be observed
as a purely pragmatic career advice and a localised attempt of parts of a
‘disenfranchised’ class to reconstitute lost privilege and autonomy. The
focus on individualised navigation through the system, adaptability, con-
formity to disciplinary regimes of the new institution, as well as dreams
of ‘professional fulfilment’ and ‘making it out there’, though sometimes
empowering, also represent an excellent adaptation to a neoliberal dynam-
ics and division of labour.
Despite their differences, the above perspectives share a reluctance to
consider options academic workers might have that go beyond conformist
244 H. TUTEK
adaptation, that is, properly transformational options that require observing

labour problems in their systemic dynamics and imagine autonomous, antisys-
temic answers and collective resistance. That can only happen if we realise that
unemployment or precarity are neither mistakes or anomalies, nor betrayals
of past entitlement, nor are they simply results of poor policies. They are also
neither limited to particular countries nor badly managed national academic
fields. Nor to particular people and badly managed individual careers. They
are structural consequences with systemic functions of their own and can
properly be fought only if they are addressed as such and faced collectively.
Recent activity on the part of academic workers’ unions such as Graduate
Student Organizing Committee/United Auto Wvorkers (GSOC-UAW)
in the USA, Academic Solidarity in Croatia, or wide participation of aca-
demic workers in anti-austerity protests in France, Greece, Chile, Spain,
and elsewhere shows that this is becoming more and more current as
the awareness dawns that the ‘debt-ridden unemployed and underem-
ployed college graduates, the revenue-starved teachers, the overworked
and underpaid service professionals, even the occasional whistle-blowing
scientist or engineer—all face the same kind of situation that confronted
skilled craft-workers in the early 20th century and all industrial workers in
the late 20th century’ (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 2013, p. 11).
To finish even more directly: the struggle of academic workers for con-
trol over their workplaces and autonomous regulation of their job, the
production of knowledge, must be fought as an internationalised struggle
of organised labour.
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INDEX
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

Higher Education, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49324-8
248 INDEX
Breneman, David W., 173 Dawkins, John, 152

Brown, Ralph S., 173, 179 De George, Richard T., 173
Brown, Wendy, 112 Deem, Rosemary, 83
Browne, Lord of Madingley, 216 Defteras, Nikolas, 130
Bryan, Dick, 52 Deleuze, Gilles, 143, 219
Burtenshaw, Rónán, 175, 176 Demirović, Alex, 147
Butler, Judith, 216, 218, 219, 224 Derrida, Jacques, 135, 218
Devine, Fiona, 203
Di Leo, Jeffrey R., 5
C Diamond, Michael A., 96, 98
Calella, Giulio, 205–6 Dick, Kirby, 218
Callinicos, Alex, 206, 219, 232, 234 Docherty, Thomas, 160, 216
Cameron, Ailsa, 202 Dodd, Tim, 163
Candeias, Mario, 16, 204 Dolenec, Danijela, 6–7, 23, 28, 33, 34,
Capano, Gilberto, 24 232
Castree, Noel, 224 Dovidio, John F., 173
Chakroun, Borhene, 33 Drucker, Peter F., 28, 43
Chalmers, Damian, 25 Dunlop, Claire A., 29
Charest, Jean, 209–11
Charlwood, Andy, 208
Chiapello, Eve, 161
E
Chirac, Jacques, 209
Eckardt, Martina, 27
Chomsky, Noam, 219
Edwards, Daniel, 153
Christie, Ryerson, 220
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 235–6, 244
Christodoulou, Panayiotis, 123–4
Ehrenreich, John, 235–6, 244
Christofias, Demetris, 121
Elken, Mari, 32
Church, Roy A., 104–6
Elkins, Charles L., 172
Clarke, John, 167, 168, 170
Emery, Kim, 10–11, 103, 105, 108
Clarke, Matthew, 145–6
Enders, Jürgen, 172
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 208
Engels, Frederick, 1–2, 224
Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel, 208
Etzkowitz, Henry, 26
Collini, Stefan, 216, 219, 224
Evans, Brad, 220
Coppola, Francis Ford, 95
Evans, Mary, 216
Corbett, Anne, 23
Courtois, Aline, 170, 173–4, 177–9,
233, 239
Crabbe, Nathan, 108, 110, 111 F
Cronin, A.M., 239 Faustmann, Hubert, 119
Finn, Chester E., 83
Fishwick, Carmen, 123, 124
D Flores Niemann, Yolanda, 173
D’Anieri, Paul, 103, 108 Florida, Richard, 207
Davis Cross, Mai’a K., 28–30 Foltin, Robert, 133
INDEX 249
Foucault, Michel, 44, 45, 90, 137, Heinrich, Michael, 47

159, 216, 217, 219 Herring, Eric, 220
Fourier, Charles, 139 Higate, Paul, 220
Franzosi, Roberto, 193 Hill, Dave, 167
Freedman, Des, 216 Hirsch, Joachim, 51, 53
Frideman, Milton, 46, 48 Honan, James P., 169, 170, 172, 173
Horkheimer, Max, 146–7, 217
Howard, John, 153
G Hugo, Graeme, 155
Giddens, Anthony, 28, 137 Hunter, Ian, 162–3
Gill, John, 218 Huws, Ursula, 207
Gill, Rosalind, 169, 176, 180, 224,
241
Gillard, Julia, 153 I
Gintis, Herbert, 47 Inderesan, P. V., 74
Giroux, Henry A., 205, 207–8, 217, Ismail, Feyzi, 216
224 Ivancheva, Mariya, 14–15, 167, 170–2
Glassner, Vera, 169, 172 Ivelja, Ranka, 54
Goetschy, Janine, 30 Ivory, Chris, 95
Gopal, Priyamvada, 216
Gornitzka, Åse, 24, 25, 27
Gramsci, Antonio, 141, 143, 192 J
Greskovits, Béla, 35 Jameson, Fredric, 2
Guattari, Félix, 143 Jessop, Bob, 26
Gupta, Suman, 1, 9, 59, 81 Johnny Rotten (See also Lydon, John)
12, 16, 131, 201–2
Judge, Timothy A., 125
H Junor, Anne, 154–5
Haas, Peter M., 27, 29 Juska, Arunas, 234
Habjan, Jernej, 1
Haiven, Max, 205, 207
Hajimichael, Mike, 11–12, 117, 121, K
128 Kambas, Marie, 122
Hallward, Peter, 216, 218, 223 Kaplan, Karen, 171–3
Halsey, Albert Henry, 236 Kapur, Devesh, 72
Hardiman, Niamh, 174 Karmel, Peter, 157
Harding, Sandra, 158 Karran, Terence, 172, 173
Harjani, Ansuya, 65 Kasoulides, Ioannis, 121
Harman, Chris, 208 Kaufmann, Daniel, 33
Harvey, David, 188, 207 Kausar, Heena, 74
Hayek, Friedrich A., 43 Keeling, Ruth, 32
Hayes, Billy, 212 Kenney, Jason, 211
Heery, Edmund, 208 Kenway, Jane, 26
250 INDEX
Kerber, Wolfgang, 27 Machlup, Fritz, 43

Kimber, Megan, 155 Macrine, Sheila, 5
Kimmich, Dorothee, 135 Madden, Ed, 176
King, Lawrence P., 35 Mahambare, Vidya, 70
Kleibrink, Alexander, 30, 31, 33 Major, John, 118
Knapp, John C., 83 Marchart, Oliver, 139
Kofman, Amy Ziering, 218 Marcuse, Herbert, 217
Korsika, Anej, 41 Marginson, Simon, 152, 169
Koschorke, Albrecht, 145, 146 Marini, Adelina, 33
Kostanić, Marko, 239 Martin, Randy, 234
Kouvelakis, Stathis, 209 Martinez-Aléman, Ana M., 83
Koyzis, Anthony A., 119 Marx, Karl, 1–2, 16, 188, 190, 195,
Krašovec, Primož, 7–8, 41, 43, 49, 203–4, 207, 219, 224
236 Mason, Paul, 17, 202, 205, 207
Kühl, Stefan, 137 Mattoni, Alice, 203
Kurland, Jordan E., 173 Mavratsas, Kaisar V., 119
May, Larry, 137
May, Robyn, 154–5
L McGettigan, Andrew, 5, 97, 225
Laclau, Ernesto, 215, 216, 221–3, 225 McLennan, Gregor, 220
Lange, Oscar, 43 McLuskey, Len, 212
Larkins, Frank, 154 McPherson, Michael, 173
Lazzarato, Maurizio, 205 Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, 72
Lebowitz, Michael, 49 Melrose, Jamie, 17–18, 215
Leik, Robert K., 169 Milios, John, 189
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 192 Močnik, Rastko, 191, 192
Leslie, Larry L., 168, 169 Mohandesi, Salar, 192
Leys, Colin, 207 Monbiot, George, 218
Litchfield, Edward H., 83–4 Moody, Kim, 208
Lodge, Martin, 25 Moodysson, Jerker, 29
Loomba, Gayatri, 64–5 Moore, Michael R., 95–6, 98
Loxley, Andrew, 177 Morgan, George, 13–14, 151, 155
Lueger, Manfred, 142 Morgan, John, 216
Lupton, Ruth, 91 Mouffe, Chantal, 216, 221–3, 225
Lydon, John (See also Johnny Rotten) Münch, Richard, 143, 145
12, 16, 131, 201–2 Murphy, Gerard, 169
Lynch, Kathleen, 83, 168–72 Murray, Niall, 175
Lyotard, Jean-François, 135, 145–6 Musselin, Christine, 27
M N
Maassen, Peter, 24–7 Neave, Guy, 23
MacCarthaigh, Muiris, 174 Nelson, Cary, 173, 234
INDEX 251
Neundlinger, Klaus, 138 Rogers, Katina, 241

Newfield, Christopher, 5 Romer, Paul M., 28
Newman, Melanie, 98 Rotherham, Andrew J., 171
Nisbet, Robert A., 83 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 138
Nölke, Andreas, 35 Rowley, Christina, 220
North, Edmund H., 95 Rudd, Kevin, 153
Noutcheva, Gergana, 33
Nuthall, Keith, 121
S
Sá, Creso M., 27–9, 31–2
O Saari, Lise M., 125
O’Flynn, Micheal, 14–15, 167, 169 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 139
O’Keefe, Theresa, 170, 173–4, 177–9, Salmon, John, 208
233, 239 Saraf, Neha, 70
Olsen, Johan P., 24–5, 27, 30 Savage, Mike, 203
Otten, C. Michael, 83 Schad, John, 215
Schaefer Riley, Naomi, 172–3
Schaffner, Franklin J., 95
P Schapiro, Morton Owen, 173
Papaioannou, Tao, 121 Schulman, Donniel S., 103, 105, 112
Parr, Chris, 216 Scott, Peter, 221
Patton, George S., 95, 99 Sennett, Richard, 208
Perica, Ivana, 12–13, 133 Seymour, Richard, 203
Perlin, Ross, 205, 207 Siegel, David J., 83
Pernicka, Susanne, 134, 142, 144, 145 Slaughter, Sheila, 168, 169
Piattoni, Simona, 24 Smith, Tony, 44
Pitkin, Hanna, 139 Solomon, Clare, 211
Pollert, Anna, 208 Sotiropoulos, Dimitris P., 189
Pollock, Grace, 220 Springsteen, Bruce, 201–2
Posner, Miriam, 241, 242 Standing, Guy, 16–17, 202–4, 207
Proenza, Luis M., 104–6 Stensaker, Bjørn, 26
Province, Charles M., 95 Sverdrup, Ulf, 27
Pyne, Christopher, 156
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
Thumfart, Alexander, 135 Weber, Max, 142, 159

Tiffen, Rodney, 154 Weber, Samuel, 135–6, 139, 144
Tutek, Hrvoje, 1, 18–19, 231 Weldes, Jutta, 220
Tyler, Imogen, 169 Westby, David L., 83
Tzanos, Constantinos, 234 Wetherbe, James C., 172
Whitehead, Lauren, 243
Whitlam, Gough, 152
U Willetts, David, 216
Unni, Jeemol, 69 Wilson, Harold, 93
Upchurch, Martin, 212 Wolfreys, Jim, 208
Uvalić, Milica, 35 Woolfson, Charles, 234
Wright, Susan, 169
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

Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education: Palgrave Critical University Studies

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palgrave critical university studies

More information about this series at

Palgrave Critical University Studies

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936878

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

• the nature of academic work

• Whose interests are being served?

The series intends to foster the following kind of contributions:

• Critical studies of university contexts, that while they might be local

The series aims to encourage discussion of issues such as academic work,

1. There is a conspicuous absence of studies that give existential

strains, and the consequences these market-driven distortions have

We look forward to this series advancing these important agenda and to

1 Introduction: Academia and the Production

Part I The Political Economy of Higher Education

2 The Implausible Knowledge Triangle

3 Human and Inhuman Capital, and Schooling:

4 Privatising Minds: New Educational Policies in India 57

Part II Management and Leadership Against

5 ‘Academic Leadership’ and the Conditions

6 Not Working: Shared Services and the

Part III Generation Gaps and Economic Dependency

7 Graduate Unemployment in Post-Haircut Cyprus:

8 ‘Dare to Dare’: Academic Pedagogy in Times

9 Cannibalising the Collegium: The Plight

10 Between Career Progression and Career Stagnation:

Part IV The Scope of Collective Action in Academia 185

11 Are University Struggles Worth Fighting? 187

12 You’re Either a Flower in the Dustbin or the Spark

13 Whither Critical Scholarship in the Modern University?

14 Academics as Workers: From Career Management

Richard Allen is Professor Emeritus of English at The Open University. He was

Danijela Dolenec is a research associate at the Faculty of Political Science,

Primož Krašovec is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Arts,

P. K. Vijayan is Assistant Professor of English at the Hindu College, University

Introduction: Academia and the Production

Suman Gupta, Jernej Habjan, and Hrvoje Tutek

In communism, Marx and Engels wrote in 1845–1846, everyone is able

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

teachers, waiters, proofreaders, or PhD supervisors? Indeed, the world of

The making of this collection of essays was overdetermined by a basic

universal condition of the academic production of unemployment. In

In this volume, the examination of the relationship between knowledge

of these European objectives to countries of the Western Balkans. While

as Krašovec concludes, in a stark contradistinction with the promises of

of affirmative action for socially and economically weaker sections. Vijayan

of academic work as a public good whose material conditions should

established. Over the course of a decade, a series of interrelated administra-

and professors were structured as pedagogical relations of ‘teachers’ and

but one of the OECD countries, universities respond to this squeeze by

working class in this struggle and is therefore useless, if not dangerous,

and unfolding in precedent and parallel with wider Occupy-style protest—

of intellectual property equals the production of knowledge, and research

The Political Economy of Higher

The Implausible Knowledge Triangle

THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY AS A NEOLIBERAL SCRIPT

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 23

With the Lisbon Agenda, higher education is supposed to be trans-

Europe’s political and economic order. Several interpretations understand

EPISTEMIC COMMUNITIES AS KNOWLEDGE-ECONOMY

understandings, values, and beliefs although members might come from