Painting Outside the Lines: Transgressing the Managerial University, Avoiding Forced Creativity

Abstract

This chapter aims to put creative methods into the context of wider trends in university institutions. As managerialism—here understood as the application of corporate values and practices into all sectors of society—continues to play a large role in the production and creation of knowledge, we argue that creative methods have the potential to either subvert or reinforce these trends. We see the entrenchment of managerialism as contradictory to the stated aims of the application of creative methods in knowledge production. In an attempt to avoid this, we provide a picture and discuss the institutional framework in which creative methods are deployed to understand and critique the values and practices of managerialism in academia. We point towards the constraints it places on those who wish to take a creative approach. First, we provide an historical accounting of how managerial values have contributed to de-politicization in the wider public sphere, with a particular focus on academia. Second, we outline the fundamental properties of the managerial university, summarized as: (i) accountability, (ii) competition, and (iii) obedience. Third, we sketch out a definition of forced creativity and illustrate two applied cases of how it might look in practice: “artwashing” and “funding tricks”. This section is meant to contribute to defining “truly” creative methods by spelling out what they are not. Finally, we summarize our main points and provide future directions of discussion.

Regeneration at a distance from the state: From radical imaginaries to alternative practices in Dutch farming

“…Yet, this scholarly work remains limited in its scope and too detached from the practice of experimenting with various alternative strategies. At the individual level, most (early stage) researchers remain economically precarious and too tied to the standardised outputs expected from their funding institutions (again, under the tyranny of metrics) to be able to carry out such extended, in‐depth and action‐oriented projects in practice (Anderson, 2020; Leitheiser et al., 2022b). Scaling this task up from the work of individual researchers to the level of public university research programs and insulating both from distorting influences of the market is crucial in this regard.…”

“…A starting point is for academics to search out radical imaginaries in practice; begin building networks of community solidarity, collaboration and mutual support; and join in battles against commodification and managerialism in universities (Leitheiser et al., 2022b). Such interventions could, in turn, serve as an overarching framework for creating new knowledge paradigms, which could in turn make space for more particular strategies in regard to issues like land access and collective organisation for proto‐regenerative farmers.…”

Joining the ideational and the material: transforming food systems toward radical food democracy

“…RFD requires a back and forth between the ideational and the practical, the abstract and the concrete, the actionable and the analytical. Our methodology follows a critical scientific approach to society (Sayer, 2009) and a renewed attention to the social role of academics (Leitheiser et al, 2022b) as public intellectuals endowed not only with the task of furthering dialogue over concepts, but also trying to make concepts "performative politically by linking the concept to contemporary practices and struggles over socio-environmental change" (Kaika, 2018(Kaika, , p. 1719. Accordingly, we draw inspiration also from other scholar-activists working in a dialectical fashion with food sovereignty movements (e.g., Duncan et al, 2021).…”