Movement for a Free Academia—literature database

p. 5  

"what I am calling POD ['pathological organisational dysfunction'] has become a syndrome within which the toxic university has become enveloped in its unquestioning embrace of the tenets of neoliberalism—marketization, competition, audit culture, and metrification."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (29/04/2023, 09:33)

Keywords:   Academia, Management, Universities

p. 14  

"At a national level, the spectre of fear is constructed that our economy will ‘tank’ if we don’t outrank universities in other countries on international league tables, such as ‘the academic rankings of world universities (ARWUs, formerly known as the Shanghai Jiao Tong Index)—they will steal a competitive edge from us, and we will be the poorer for it; at the level of individual universities, the fear is perpetrated that failure to grab a large share of the best students or the most coveted competitive research grants, will somehow diminish the university; at the level of individual academics, the fear is promulgated that unless they participate fully in this game of greed, not only will their university be punished, but their careers, promotion prospects, and even their jobs will be in jeopardy—this is also used to hold a range of managerialist practices in place (see Zipin 2006); and at the level of students, the fear is conveyed that unless they make the right choice and get admitted into a high-ranking university, and then out-compete their fellow students in the grade–performance exchange game, then their prospects of getting a job will be doomed. Fear, fear, fear!!!"

Zipin, L. (2006). Governing Australia’s universities: The managerial strong-arming of academic agency. Social Alternatives, 25(2), 26–31.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (29/04/2023, 09:56)

Keywords:   Fear, Metrics, Neoliberalism, New Public Management, Research assessment, Students, Universities

p. 17  

"in Australia [...] in some universities, upwards of 60% of resources are now consumed by non-core activities (i.e. not directly connected to teaching or research)."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (29/04/2023, 13:38)

Keywords:   Management, Universities

p. 20  

"dignity becomes the lens through which worth is judged and affirmed. When something or someone is besmirched, demeaned, or otherwise denigrated, then dignity is impugned. That is precisely what is happening in contemporary universities with the performative apparatuses of neoliberalism—measuring, calibrating, ranking, rating, comparing, and auditing. These surveillance activities are gross forms of institutional humiliation and exclusion."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (29/04/2023, 13:54)

Keywords:   Academia, Management, Universities, Metrics, Research assessment, Teaching

pp. 55–56  

By 'toxic,' "I am referring to policies that are imposed upon, intrude into, are willingly embraced, or resisted to varying degrees, by universities—and that invariably comes with the outward appearances of being legitimate, and on the surface at least, have a modicum of common sense appeal to them—which is what makes them so insidious, and toxic. They infiltrate the cracks and the crevices of everyday work practices, and while they may attract the occasional grumble, they become insinuated into the work in ways that distort, deform, deflect, and damage the work and the culture within which it exists, often beyond recognition."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 10:34)

Keywords:   Management, Universities

p. 58  

Discussing the case of 'Professor White': "In other words, she refused to be cast by the university solely in terms of ‘a manager’ of the research of others—distanced from the research, bogged down in administrivia."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 10:42)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Administrivia

Comments:

Useful neologism: administrivia.   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 10:42)

p. 58  

Discussing reasons why 'Professor White' did not have her contract renewed: "Another major point of difference was that Professor White was not a scientist—in that respect, she had to continually struggle from her base in the social sciences to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the university, which was totally in the awe of endeavours in the sciences, especially of a medical kind, who it naively believed were on a pathway to finding a cure for cancer. The disdain for her ethnographic research, even though highly successful in publications and grant terms, was barely tolerated, even if only thinly disguised. After all, how could it be ‘real’ research if it was not measuring and calibrating things?"

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 10:44)

Keywords:   Management, Universities

Comments:

Sounds strangely familiar . . .   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 10:44)

p. 77  

"The hallmark of a university leader (with a few rare exceptions) is that they have shrugged off all vestiges, if they ever had any, of a commitment to scholarship or research, let alone pursuing critical thinking around ‘big ideas’."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 11:42)

Keywords:   Academia, Management, Universities

pp. 79–80  

"Radical innovations, and we have experienced many of these in university contexts in recent decades, are invariably a response to situations of deep structural change. Most notably from around the late 1970s, the crisis of capitalism has meant that many responsibilities hitherto that of governments, have had to be exported elsewhere. Universities are a classic case where the withdrawal of government funding has meant other sources have had to be found. The nebulous notion of the ‘market’, along with ‘global knowledge production’, became a very convenient policy relay. The discourse of the market was a convenient and simplistic way of responding in a seemingly common-sense way to a complex problem, but in a way in which reality is steeped in mystery that is not that far removed from cargo cultism and witchcraft."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 11:53)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Neoliberalism

Comments:

Cargo cult.   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 11:53)

p. 85  

Quoting Wood (2010): "‘As with the performance of a ritual, the completion of a template depends more on the enactment and form than actual substance’" (p. 234).

Wood, F. (2010). Occult innovations in higher education: Corporate magic and the mysteries of managerialism. Prometheus, 28(3), 227–244.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 12:16)

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

p. 85  

"Lost in the meaningless miasma of ‘citation indices’, ‘performance indicators’, ‘esteem measures’, ‘impact factors’, academic audits, journal rankings, and university league tables, all engineered through government imposed ‘quality assurance exercises’, is any sense that perhaps this nonsense and stupidification ought to be robustly resisted and extirpated from the academy."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (30/04/2023, 12:26)

Keywords:   Management, Universities, Metrics, Neoliberalism

p. 102  

"From the vantage point of universities, they see themselves as being positioned as key players as wealth-creating institutions in the knowledge economy. Maybe this is a somewhat exaggerated view of the situation, because what they are really doing is filling the funding gap left behind as a consequence of government withdrawal or diminution of research funding. Regardless of what is actually driving it the effect is still the same—university managers seek to further this wealth-generating objective by trying to pick ‘research winners’. Often this is in response to research grant schemes that have moved away from funding multifarious individuals, who present with curiosity-driven projects. This departure from funding individuals is often accompanied as well by a move in favour of funding applied research that addresses what governments call ‘real world problems’. In the marketized university, this is seen as being responsive to the ‘customer’. Increasingly university managers, policy makers, and politicians are forcing research concentrations into existence as a means of addressing these real-world problems while also justifying value for money in supporting research. Researchers are increasingly being required to form collectives or research themes, often cross-disciplinary, that are funded on a competitive basis, rather than individuals pursuing curiosity-driven topics. The outward logic is that teams are better able to address complex problems, but the invisible agenda is probably to reduce the exponential growth in numbers of academics that would occur, if the basis were to be the funding of individuals."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (01/05/2023, 16:14)

Keywords:   Management, Research funding, Universities

Comments:

Smyth claims this is an insidious means of censoring of research by managers as researchers squeeze themselves into topics that are more likely to get funded and for which more funding is available.   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (01/05/2023, 16:21)

p. 103  

"There are also more subtle ways of co-opting academics by ‘inviting’ them to participate in a process of identifying and selecting ‘research priority areas’ (RPAs), or ‘expressions of interest’, to which they might belong and which are vetted, signed off, and approved [or not] by various layers of management within the university hierarchy. What is not being disclosed in this seemingly consultative process is the way in which those who are destined to be placed at the research margins are being invited to conspire in their own demise. [...] research
is to be regarded as a privilege not a right, for those who conform and are prepared to align themselves with invisible or vaguely framed institutional research priorities."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (01/05/2023, 16:24)

Keywords:   Management, Research funding, Universities

Comments:

cf what recently happened at the institute.   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (01/05/2023, 16:26)

p. 117  

"the way to ‘incentivize’ university academics is to measure what they do by using a variety of ‘metrics’, and to present the results of such measurement as if they were self-evident indicators of ‘quality’, ‘excellence’, and ‘impact’—terms that are sufficiently vague as to be meaningless. In constructing individual hierarchies of reputational status, West (2016) argues that the ‘spreadsheet’ becomes the ‘essential tool of the new managerialism…whereby qualitative complexities, varieties of insight and originality and disciplinary differences can be reduced to a table of figures’ (p. 3). The attraction, West says, of ‘quantifiable data… [is that] judgements can be dispensed with altogether’, and managers ‘no longer feel the need to read and try to understand the work of those they assess’ (p. 3)."

Quoting West (West 2016).

West, D. (2016). The managerial university: A failed experiment? Demos Journal, 3.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (01/05/2023, 17:25)

Keywords:   Academia, Management, Metrics, Universities

p. 167  

Quoting Taylor (2003) on the distinction between management and managerialism: "The former refers to necessary organising activities required in any large, complex organisation. The latter refers to the petty self-perpetuating creation of needless bureaucracy and anti-professional controls that are rife within higher education. (p. 5)."

Taylor, P. (2003). Waiting for the barbarians and the naked emperor’s chickens. Higher Education Review, 35(2), 5–24.

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (03/05/2023, 06:08)

Keywords:   Bureaucracy, Management, Universities

p. 190  

From the titles of the monographs he has in his collection which deal with what is happening to universities, Smyth identifies "four dominant themes: (i) damage, despair, violence, and sense of loss; (ii) the rising tide of the marketized, corporate, managed, entrepreneurial, adaptive administrative, or neoliberal university; (iii) a scene of rampant confusion and loss of way; and (iv) attempts at reclamation, reinvention, reimagination, and recovery from this ill-conceived experiment."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (04/05/2023, 07:36)

Keywords:   Academia, Management, Universities

p. 213  

"Alvesson and Spicer (2016) point to the inherent paradox—‘stupidity management’ despite what we might think about it, does pay off—it does produce benefits, avoids paralysis, gets around time-consuming debates, and gets things done. Where the dilemma arises is in the ‘trade off’—does the university ‘want more stupidity and functionality, or do they want more smartness and less functionality?’ (p. 213). In the end, it can be put fairly bluntly, ‘decision making is easier if you reduce complexity’ (p. 213)."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (04/05/2023, 11:29)

Keywords:   Academia, Functional stupidity, Management, Universities

Comments:

If you reduce complexity, it means you reduce reflexion and thought. It is no longer necessary to have knowledge, to be an expert. Ignorance, above all else, is what characterizes managers and politicians today.   Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (11/05/2023, 14:48)