Movement for a Free Academia—literature database

p. 9  

"the universities of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia are fast becoming a fraud perpetrated on the citizens of these countries. The so-called marketisation of public universities is degrading the many public goods universities can and should be providing. With some important exceptions, too many students are being short-changed by grossly inadequate teaching. This is a consequence of government-imposed and management-inspired choices that are compromising the point and purpose of public universities. The good news is that none of this was inevitable, nor is it yet beyond our capacity to do better."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (14/04/2023, 17:33)

Keywords:   Management, Universities

pp. 29–30  

"the idea of ‘public’ is conventionally applied to government-funded statutory agencies set up by Parliaments. For example both the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Britain and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) are considered ‘public’ broadcasters because they are regulated by statute and receive the bulk of their funding from ‘public sources’— i.e., government taxation—and are regulated accordingly."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (15/04/2023, 09:32)

Keywords:   Management, Universities

Comments:

Re the BBC, this is just plain wrong. The BBC is funded by licence payers. It may well have been set up by the British Parilament but it is absolutely not goverment funded—see https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/timelines/1920s/. This is the reason why the BBC is now complaining about the tag ('government funded media') applied to its Twitter feed.

Additionally, a 'statutory agency' is a national or local governent body (see https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810105929995;jsessionid=601104742D21A2B862BD870CA139CFCB). The BBC is not a statutory agency (nor is the ABC I believe). To be 'regulated by statute' does not a statutory agency make.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (21/04/2023, 08:27)

p. 32  

"If there is one clear and simple idea about why universities matter, it is that they matter because knowledge is a basic human good. [...] The widespread discussion of that idea alone points to the serious possibility that universities have become sites of ignorance, a truly frightening possibility."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (15/04/2023, 09:48)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Knowledge

p. 37  

Paraphrasing Finnis: "[I]f one were to pursue the line that knowledge is not a basic good one would in fact be operationally self-refuting. That is, by engaging in the endeavour of establishing whether or not knowledge is a basic good, one has demonstrated, by the very pursuit of the issue, that one wishes to know. Thus one self-refutes when one denies that knowledge is a basic good."

Finnis, J. (1980). Natural law and natural rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (15/04/2023, 10:07)

Keywords:   Knowledge, Management, Universities

p. 70  

Some academics resisted "the discourse of ‘marketising’. What this suggests is the dominance of an academic model based on the implied premise that the task of university teaching was to reproduce an academic culture. This premise was deeply antagonistic to the project of increasing access to higher education, since it presumed from the start that a university education was not for everyone, a stance turned into a self-fulfilling dictum by the refusal of many academics to engage in the kinds of teaching practices that might have informed a democratic model of higher education. This thought in turn opens up some questions about how the idea of academic freedom was put into practice in the decades before the great disruption of the 1980s. Arguably too few academics opted to make full and responsible use of the autonomy they claimed as their due."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (16/04/2023, 08:43)

Keywords:   Democratisation, Management, Universities

pp. 70–71  

"the democratising impulse designed to encourage universities to take in larger numbers and more diverse kinds of students set [sic] gave rise to some important tensions or ambiguities about the value and kind of knowledge which ought properly to be found in, or produced by, a public university. By this I mean only to point to an unresolved tension between rival conceptions of knowledge—one which values knowledge for its utilitarian capacity to assist the people of a democracy in solving various economic, social, and technical problems; and the other, which values the autonomy of the university so as to enable it to preserve and protect the value of objective knowledge."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (16/04/2023, 08:47)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Democratisation

pp. 75–76  

"In terms that anticipate later contradictions we see also see some fundamental contradictions in the Robbins Report. On the one hand, universities were fundamental to ‘the transmission of a common culture and common standards of citizenship’. To meet this objective the report insisted that universities must promote the ‘general powers of the mind’, to produce ‘not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women’. The Robbins Committee also accepted that while the balance between teaching and research might vary, teaching should not be separated from the advancement of learning and the search for truth, since ‘the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes of the nature of discovery’.

Yet the Robbins Report also saw in the expansion of universities a basis for economic growth. Sir Geoffrey Crowther, former editor of The Economist, had given a lecture where he judged Britain’s higher education policy to be a ‘formula for national decline’. During the 1950s Gary Becker at the University of Chicago, had been developing his theory of human capital, which identifi ed education as a major factor in a nation’s economic performance. Becker claimed to show that there were good returns to higher education as an investment. University-educated people were about to be redefined as an ‘input’ to the ‘productive process’."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (17/04/2023, 07:58)

Keywords:   Management, Universities

Comments:

The Robbins report was commissioned by the Macmillan government in the UK to make recommendations for higher education.

Robbins, L. (1963). Higher education: Report of the Committee appointed by the Prime Minister under the chairmanship of Lord Robbins, 1961–63 (Cmd 2154). London: HMSO.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (17/04/2023, 08:42)

p. 77  

Provides a description of academics taken from the 1957 Australian Murray Report: "They are simply knowledge intoxicated men who will devote their lives to it if they possibly can. Though this pursuit of truth seems to many rather inhuman, and to some a rather super human kind of life, there are fortunately far more of them than most people would have thought possible (Murray 1957 : 9–10)."

Murray, A. H. (1957). Report of the committee on Australian universities. Melbourne: Committee on Australian Universities.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (17/04/2023, 08:04)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Academia

p. 91  

As part of a critical discussion of the view of academics of academia and of the consequences of the clash of the democratization of universities with a rosy view of academia and unrealistic expectations of the student: "It was discovered soon enough that the average student did not write all that well and displayed too few of the expected aptitudes for analysis, critical thought, or capacity to put together a reasoned argument within the terms defi ned by a teacher and prescribed as appropriate. These discoveries were rapidly enhanced by the discovery that students were not even properly engaged as a university student should be. It was within this frame then that the routine use of statistical techniques designed to ‘bell-curve’ or standardise the range of grades was sanctioned. This development was based on the proposition that only a small and statistically predictable number of students were actually demonstrating the kind of competence the academic model presumed to be the desired norm."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (17/04/2023, 08:41)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Academia, Knowledge

Comments:

I believe this happened in Denmark.   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (17/04/2023, 08:41)

pp. 165–166  

Discussing the commodification of knowledge where knowledge becomes a commoditiy to be bought and sold in a free or open marker: "Immediately it ought to be evident that it is not clear what precisely is being bought and sold. Is the student purchasing a certain amount of time in a classroom? Is the student buying a credential without the obligation to do anything more than hand the money over? In both cases it is not clear why anyone would bother doing either. The mystery remains: what else is being bought? [...] You cannot buy an education, but you can buy the status or reputation attached to attending a certain university. The basic category mistake at stake here begins when people start treating knowledge/education as a commodity. It is not. Here one distinction that matters is between ‘public goods’ like education, which you cannot buy, and a ‘status good’, which you can buy."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (21/04/2023, 08:26)

Keywords:   Management, Students, Universities

Comments:

See also Shearing on student complaints in the UK (Shearing 2023).

Shearing, H. (2023). University student complaints hit record high in England and Wales for fourth successive year. Retrieved April 20, 2023, from https://www.bbc.com/news/education-65324664   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (21/04/2023, 08:30)

p. 167  

Discussing Stiglitz's notion of public goods and knowledge as a public good: "the natural price of knowledge is zero. [...] a large component of knowledge consists of global public goods. A mathematical theorem is useful because it is true in Australia, Tibet, or Russia. Its price everywhere is also zero."

Stiglitz, J. (1999). Knowledge as a global public good. In I. Kaul, I. Grunberg, & M. Stern (Eds.), Global public goods (pp. 308–325). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (21/04/2023, 08:40)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Knowledge

Comments:

Public goods are never depleted (they are not resources that can be extracted—see resourcification) and they are not exclusive to any one group (Hultman et al. 2021).

Hultman, J., Corvellec, H., Jerneck, A., Arvidsson, S., Ekroos, J., & Gustafsson, C., et al. (2021). A resourcification manifesto: Understanding the social process of resources becoming resources. Research Policy, 50(9), 1–7.   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (21/04/2023, 08:49)

p. 168  

"the value of the education they are engaging in is as much dependent on what [the students] are doing as learners as it is on what their teachers doing. [...] any value that might be attributed [to knowledge] depends on the intrinsic worth of what they are doing as opposed to consuming and that frequently the value of the learning [the students are] doing may not become apparent until some time later."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (21/04/2023, 08:48)

Keywords:   Management, Students, Universities, Knowledge

p. 170  

"Once elite institutions become elite, they find it relatively easy to maintain this role, and to block other potential producers. Elite university status reproduces itself."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (21/04/2023, 08:54)

Keywords:   Universities

p. 172  

Quoting Quiggin: "‘the rankings of universities can be predicted, with a high degree of accuracy, by the date and conditions under which they were founded’ (Quiggin 2014: 9)."

Quiggin, J. (2014). Post-school education in Australia: The case against deregulation. Submission to Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee inquiry into the Higher Education and Research Reform Act Amendment Bill.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (21/04/2023, 08:59)

Keywords:   Universities

p. 184  

Quoting Graeber's Iron Law of Liberalism: "Any market reform, any government initiative to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs. (Graeber 2015: 9)"

Graeber, D. (2015). The Utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Brooklyn: Melville House.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (23/04/2023, 08:31)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Bureaucracy

p. 185  

"In the UK universities’ 2013–14 returns to the Higher Education Statistics Agency on staff numbers reveal that support staff were the majority at 111 out of 157 institutions. They made up 60 percent or more of all staff at 27 institutions."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (23/04/2023, 08:38)

Keywords:   Bureaucracy, Management, Universities

p. 186  

"Today 50–60 percent of university income is distributed to central administrations. Each year the figure grows incrementally. Universities repeatedly claim that centralising administration is more efficient, but it is not."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (23/04/2023, 08:42)

Keywords:   Bureaucracy, Management, Universities

Comments:

As far as I can make out from the context, this appears to refer to the Australian system.

'Today' is presumably c. 2017 when the book was published.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (23/04/2023, 08:43)

p. 197  

"The fatal paradox at play here is that, fi rstly, the very preoccupation with metrics and accountability regimes increased the tendency to relocate the locus of authority away from academics and toward managers. This has a lot to do with the way the ‘theory of market-driven quality improvement’ provides the legitimation for increasing layers of managerial oversight of educational practice and increasingly intrusive risk-management interventions. [...] Secondly and no less fatally, the shift to the idea that ‘student satisfaction’ survey–generated metrics can become a proxy ‘measure’ of high-quality teaching and learning has had some very odd effects which further erode the authority that used to be assumed by academics. Those effects arise from a need to ‘manage for risk’."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (24/04/2023, 13:46)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Metrics

p. 201  

"Mission statements for universities were almost unknown until the late 1980s, but have become near universal in 2016. Perhaps nothing captures the pathos of modern universities as managers set about employing consultants and PR specialists to say what makes their university ‘unique’ or ‘special’, just as nothing expresses the loss of purpose that those charged with running the modern university now display as they attempt to express their claims to purpose and distinctiveness."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (24/04/2023, 13:56)

Keywords:   Management, Universities

p. 216  

"universities are expected to be both ‘efficient’ and to ‘deliver’ high-quality teaching. ‘Efficiency’ means employing more and more cheap, short-term, or part-time teachers. The pursuit of ‘quality’ means using metrics of customer satisfaction to demonstrate that ‘excellence’ is being achieved."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (25/04/2023, 07:44)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Metrics, Teaching

p. 217  

"universities compete to climb up the ladder that claim [sic] to ‘measure’ the quality of universities. These rankings rely little, if at all, on whatever teaching quality is supposed to mean, and much more on ‘research quality’ using proxies like research income or the number and ‘peer assessed status’ of the journals in which academics publish their research. This kind of competition over research rather than teaching quality has encouraged a form of ‘asset stripping’ as universities divert funding away from teaching and into research."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (25/04/2023, 07:46)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Metrics, Research assessment

p. 235  

"The new public management story is that, once ‘marketised’, universities face competition; and this competition will improve ‘efficiency’ and ‘quality’. Since no market or competition actually exists in higher education, the government supplies the incentive to efficiency simply by persistently cutting public funding. Inside the universities the efficiencies are found as we have seen by the simplest of devices: managers start to reduce the reliance on full-time and expensive academics and replace them with cheap, non-permanent teaching staff. As for ‘quality’, the government imposes new and ever-more-intrusive auditing and accountability systems designed to ‘measure quality’. Inside the universities even more extreme redefi nition of teaching practices is introduced, including the introduction of ‘student-centred learning’ and the reliance on students to evaluate the quality of the teaching and learning process. It is perhaps predictable that government policy-makers and regulators and university managers have become preoccupied with ‘quality’ and ‘metrics’."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (25/04/2023, 11:51)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Metrics

p. 249  

"the use of workload formulae becomes doubly obscurantist: it not only ignores the substantial amount of work academics actually need to do to (to support the functioning of the university), but it enables managers to claim that staffing levels are appropriate."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (25/04/2023, 12:46)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Workload

pp. 290–291  

"Quite often the actual exercise of grading involves nothing more sophisticated than a process like the kind involved when one person asks another about the film they have just seen or a restaurant meal they have just eaten, ‘What would you give that out of ten?’ Teachers need to know something about the real changes that have taken place in a person’s capacity for thinking, reading, writing, remembering, comprehending, problem-solving, and so on and be able to describe these changes. We should be able to say at the end of a semester or a whole degree course that this student can do the things we want them to do really well, or not very well, or even not at all. For this we would need to have a mixture of very sharply defined formative assessments that evaluate these things through the course of the degree program and then some kind of summative assessment which provides an overall view of these abilities. The latter is by and large not happening. We cannot simply assume that the formative assessment is all that accurate a reflection of the things we want students to be able to think and do. The absence of any summative assessment at the conclusion of a degree confirms our inability to say anything clear about what a student can do or think."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (27/04/2023, 07:43)

Keywords:   Grading, Students, Universities

p. 291  

"The mountains of data we do have largely reflect a perverse preoccupation with ‘customer satisfaction’. That preoccupation in turn reflects the erosion of academic authority and the presumption that managers can now tell us about the quality of learning and teaching in the university by asking students what they think is happening."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (27/04/2023, 07:46)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Students, Grading

pp. 292–293  

"The inverting of the traditional relations of authority in which the learning done by students was assessed by their teachers to a situation where students are now charged with the responsibility for assessing the quality of the teaching done by their teachers is good for no one and for nothing. Designing and delivering a curriculum where the chief objective is to avoid upsetting students—because if the work is too difficult it might compromise the teacher’s Good Teaching Scores—is a horrible moment to have arrived at."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (27/04/2023, 07:50)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Students, Teaching

p. 295  

Footnote 12 states: "the notion that one can ‘buy skills’, like the idea you can ‘buy knowledge’, is something no normal person would advance, but then most economists aren’t normal."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (27/04/2023, 07:56)

Keywords:   Universities, Knowledge

Comments:

But then, many students today have spent long hours playing computer games where skills and knowledge are commodities to be bought and sold in order to enhance the player's status or position in the game. It might, then, be seen as perfectly normal for such students to assume skills and knowledge in the real world can similarly be sold and bought.   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (27/04/2023, 07:56)

p. 318  

"as ever, the manageriat have overcome the obstacle represented by the ‘public good’ status of knowledge. They have invented an elaborate culture of audit that purports to ‘measure research quality’ while promoting a very satisfying competitive regime signified by the various global rankings of universities. Again, this is another consequence of market-crazed governance."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (28/04/2023, 13:37)

Keywords:   Knowledge, Management, Research assessment, Universities, Metrics

p. 318  

Regarding the introduction of national research assessments: "These exercises have been introduced in order to maintain the ‘as-if’ fiction that university research has been ‘marketised’. What is really driving the pursuit of metrics of quality are demands by policy-makers for some kind of data that documents research quality as well as the need of university managers to promote their capacity to engage in competition within and between institutions for prestige, students, staff, and resources."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (28/04/2023, 13:41)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Metrics, Research assessment

p. 321  

"In Britain, the Research Excellence Framework 2014 exercise involved more than 1,100 British academics spending about one year reading and assessing 191,232 research outputs submitted for review. As one academic panelist there complained, it would require ‘two years’ full-time work, while doing nothing else’ to read the 1,200 journal articles he had been allocated (Sayer 2014). It is estimated that the cost of the exercise in Britain was around £47m spent in universities and a further £12m in central administrative costs."

Sayer, V. (2014). Five reasons why the REF is not fit for purpose. The Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2014/dec/15/
research-excellenceframeworkfi vereasons-not-fi t-for-purpose

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (28/04/2023, 13:54)

Keywords:   Management, Research assessment, Universities

Comments:

NB. The link in the PDF to the Guardian article does not work. Here's a working link (Sayer 2014).

Note also, that the original reference is to 'Sayer, V.'.' It should be 'Sayer, D.'.'

Sayer, D. 2014, December 15. Five reasons why the REF is not fit for purpose. The Guardian.   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (28/04/2023, 13:55)

p. 328  

"In spite of a neo-liberal rhetoric about freedom, decentralisation, and the end of government control, governments have actually implemented a more regulated, highly interventionist system to monitor the research outputs of academics and to change the behaviour of academics."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (28/04/2023, 14:14)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Neoliberalism