For the University

Docherty, Thomas

doi:10.5040/9781849666336

Cited by 62 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…As part of this vision of a knowledge economy governed by technical administrators, Kerr (2001 [1963]) wrote widely about university reform, most notably in The Uses of the University , while enacting major changes at the University of California. He was a significant figure in the post-war US technocratic elite (Bernstein, 2016) during a time when management and administration were heralded as advanced technologies for governing every aspect of complex modern societies amid the ‘end of ideology’ (Docherty, 2011: 10–12; Klikauer, 2013; Schrum, 2016; Waring, 1991).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Upon the gears and upon the wheels’: Terror convergence and total administration in the neoliberal university

McCann

Granter²,

Hyde

et al. 2020

Management Learning

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University governance is becoming increasingly autocratic as marketization intensifies. Far from the classical ideal of a professional collegium run according to academic norms, today’s universities feature corporate cultures and senior leadership teams disconnected from both staff and students, and intolerant of dissenting views. This is not a completely new phenomenon. In 1960s America, senior leaders developed a technocratic and managerialist model of the university, in keeping with theories around the ‘convergence’ of socio-economic systems towards a pluralist ‘industrial society’. This administrative-managerial vision was opposed by radical students, triggering punitive responses that reflected how universities’ control measures were at the time mostly aimed at students. Today, their primary target is academics. Informed by Critical Theory and based on an autoethnographic account of a university restructuring programme, we argue that the direction of convergence in universities has not been towards liberal, pluralist, democracy but towards neo-Stalinist organizing principles. Performance measurements – ‘targets and terror’ – are powerful mechanisms for the expansion of managerial power or, in Marcuse’s words, ‘total administration’. Total administration in the contemporary university damages teaching, learning, workplace democracy and freedom of speech on campus, suggesting that the critique of university autocracy by 1960s students and scholars remains highly relevant.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Upon the gears and upon the wheels’: Terror convergence and total administration in the neoliberal university

McCann

Granter²,

Hyde

et al. 2020

Management Learning

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“…Thomas Docherty has similarly argued in more directly political terms that 'playful waste' 40 -wasteful because it refuses demands for predictably productive use of time -is essential to the formation of a meaningfully different future and therefore meets hostility from the authorities. Similarly, for Phillips, the child's frivolities affect the adult world, but in persistently unpredictable ways, this unpredictability rooted in the privacy of the child's experiences.…”

Section: Theory and Frivolitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…allows for the possibility of historical change'. 46 Leclaire defines the 'work of psychoanalysis' as 'a way to locate unconscious representatives without claiming that any translation [. .…”

Section: Theory and Frivolitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Spirits of enterprise: The disappearing child in Thatcherism and Theory

Dean

2017

Literature & History

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Thatcherism offered a promise of future prosperity based on unleashing the young male's ambition; simultaneously, its 'Victorian values' sought to retrieve a moral past. Literary depictions of Thatcherism make the child central to a resulting contradiction between imagined moral past and materialistic future. The disappearance of the child recurs in Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), Ian McEwan's The Child in Time (1987), and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004). These novels satirise how Thatcherism managed the contradictions in its vision of the future by attempting to regulate the child's ambitions. They even use the abducted, killed, or simply disappeared child to audaciously parody both the results of Thatcherite policy and contemporaneous practices of literary and psychoanalytic Theory, as each struggles to represent the child's interests in the future. Here Thatcherite materialism leads, unintentionally and ironically, to unacceptable material ambitions in the child.

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“…What we might call the functional model of the university -or utilitarian (Robins & Webster, 2002) or pragmatic (Doherty, 2011) -is not, of course, new and has existed alongside the liberal model in which knowledge is viewed 'as an end in itself' in a productive (if ambiguous) tension which has perhaps been the hallmark of the 2GU. This alliance, Robins and Webster argue, 'made sense in terms of an agenda determined by the economic and cultural objectives of nation-states within a national project and agenda for higher education ' (2002, p. 9).…”

Section: Towards the 3gumentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Today, How Can We Not Speak of the University?’: Towards the Next Generation …

Watson

2012

Power and Education

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Universities are currently in a period of transition as the Humboldtian institution reaches its limits and we move towards the next generation. These limiting factors include the massive expansion of higher education and increase in student numbers; globalisation; and demands that universities contribute to the development of the ‘knowledge economy’. Change is inevitable – but does this leave the university in crisis? Is the university still a functional institution? In this article the author's aim is to uncover just how far we have gone in this transition towards the next-generation institution; to celebrate those institutions that have embraced these opportunities; and to consider the implications of all this guided by (and providing a partial answer to) the question once posed by Jacques Derrida: ‘Today, how can we not speak of the university?’ The article concludes by considering whether there is room for a dysfunctional university, a university that in a sense opposes the call for functionality. In other words, is there (still) a role for a university as a critical and radical institution?

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For the University

Cited by 62 publications

References 0 publications

‘Upon the gears and upon the wheels’: Terror convergence and total administration in the neoliberal university

‘Upon the gears and upon the wheels’: Terror convergence and total administration in the neoliberal university

Spirits of enterprise: The disappearing child in Thatcherism and Theory

‘Today, How Can We Not Speak of the University?’: Towards the Next Generation …

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