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

Abstract

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.

From democracy to managerialism: foundation universities as the embodiment of Finnish university policies

“…The rising discontent of academic communities has been accepted as collateral damage -or, on a more pessimistic note, as an expected result of the de-democratising exercise that was deliberately aimed at restraining self-government. In this sense our findings suggest disempowering administrative models might contribute not only to rising levels of fragility among academics (Anderson 2008;Knights and Clarke 2014;McCann et al 2020), but also more severely to the authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies that have gained strength in our societies. If universities in a stable and developed country like Finland, with their highly-educated staffs, are not perceived as being capable of exercising democracy, we can only wonder how the rest of the society and its democratic capabilities are perceived in the same regard.…”

The Critical Business School and the University: A Case Study of Resistance and Co-optation

“…There were regular and breathless announcements about the ambition to become a 'top 20' business school by a Head of School who was styling himself as 'Dean'; at the same time, that there was a tangible sense of loss and anger amongst academic staff. In a way that was very similar to other university change processes (see McCann et al, 2020;Parker, 2014), the messaging from the school, college and university had taken on an increasingly bright and corporate tone, with announcements about various initiatives that seemed largely disconnected from the experience of most employees. A school re-branding exercise was undertaken in 2012 which suggested that the 'sub-brand' image should be based around the four pillars of 'reputation ', 'collaborative', 'open' and 'real'.…”

Organisational institutionalisation of responsible innovation

“…This increasingly vies with a 'utilitarian' logic associated with strategic research and such concepts as the entrepreneurial (and occasionally civic) university, a logic which is particularly engrained in research intensive universities (Shields and Watermeyer, 2018). Finally, a 'managerial' logic, aligned with new public management practices (Docherty, 2016), reflects universities as increasingly bureaucratic, centralised and competitive organisations (Martin, 2016;McCann et al, 2020). Such logics heavily influence and configure behaviours and practices, which over time become embedded, routinised and repetitive, in turn maintaining institutions 1 associated with them (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006).…”