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Seeking an Institution-Decentring Politics to Regain Purpose for Australian University Futures

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Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume II

Part of the book series: Palgrave Critical University Studies ((PCU))

Abstract

Institution-centric governance focusses on the university’s reputational capital as driven by quasi markets, tied to the career advancement of an increasingly powerful managerial caste. Entrenching across the Australian university sector, this approach to governance has whittled away multiple democratic functions of the Australian university, leaving central senior management and Council able to remove core capacities of the university in teaching, research and community service. We argue in contrast for a de-centred institution, through a community-oriented and community-participatory research agenda on problems that matter for the community as a way to regenerate the social justice mission of the university. Drawing on the pragmatist philosophical resources of the activist scholar, Isabelle Stengers, our proposed focus suggests a way out of the “enterprise university” and its institution-centric, authoritarian governance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lew Zipin, “Situating University Governance in the Ethico-emotive Ground Tone of Post/Late Times,” in Re-Positioning University Governance and Academic Work, eds Jill Blackmore, Marie Brennan & Lew Zipin (Rotterdam: Sense Publications, 2010), 147–162. Jill Blackmore, Marie Brennan and Lew Zipin “Repositioning University Governance and Academic Work: An Overview,” in Repositioning University Governance and Academic Work ed. Jill Blackmore et al. 2010, (Rotterdam: Sense Publications, 2010), 1–16.

  2. 2.

    Pierre Bourdieu, “The left hand and the right hand of the state,” 1992 Interview with R.P. Droit and T. Ferenczi in Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, by Pierre Bourdieu, transl. Richard Nice (New York: The New Press, 1998), 2.

  3. 3.

    Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999).

  4. 4.

    Stephen Ball, Global Education Inc. New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary (London: Routledge, 2012).

  5. 5.

    Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, Invitation to a Reflexive Sociology (Oxford: Polity Press 1992b).

  6. 6.

    Simon Marginson and Mark Considine, The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  7. 7.

    Simon Marginson “Towards a Politics of the Enterprise University”, in Scholars and Entrepreneurs: the Universities in Crisis, ed. Simon Cooper et al., Arena 17–18, (2002): 113.

  8. 8.

    Philip Brown & Anthony Hesketh, The Mismanagement of Talent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  9. 9.

    Simon Marginson, “Politics,” 134.

  10. 10.

    See Alison Lee and Catherine Manathunga, “Teaching as Performance,” in Re-Positioning University Governance and Academic Work, ed. Jill Blackmore, Marie Brennan & Lew Zipin (Rotterdam: Sense Publications, 2010), 101–114. See also Jill Blackmore, “Research Assessment: A Calculative Technology Governing Quality, Accountability and Equity,” in Re-Positioning University Governance and Academic Work, ed. Jill Blackmore, Marie Brennan & Lew Zipin (Rotterdam: Sense Publications, 2010), 67–83.

  11. 11.

    Marginson, “Politics,” 128.

  12. 12.

    Zipin, “Ethico-Emotive Ground Tone”.

  13. 13.

    Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. (London: Penguin), 1977; Michel Foucault, “Governmentality”, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graeme Burchell et al., (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).

  14. 14.

    Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006).

  15. 15.

    Bennett Harrison, “The dark side of flexibile productivity”, National Productivity Review, 13,4, (1994): 479–502 in Sennett, Culture of the New Capitalism, 40.

  16. 16.

    Julie Rowlands, Academic governance in the contemporary university: perspectives from Anglophone nations, (Singapore: Springer, 2010); Jill Blackmore, “‘Wasting Talent’? Gender and the Problematics of academic disenchantment and disengagement with Leadership,” Higher Education Research & Development 33, (2014).

  17. 17.

    Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan, “The suppression of ethical dispositions through managerial governmentality: A habitus crisis in Australian higher education,” International Journal of Leadership in Education, 6, 4, (2003): 351–370.

  18. 18.

    Sennett, Culture of the New Capitalism.

  19. 19.

    NTEU, Submission to the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee’s Inquiry into the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment, Submission 4, (2017); David Marin-Guzman, http://www.afr.com/news/policy/industrial-relations/murdoch-university-axes-historic-union-controls-in-landmark-ruling-20170829-gy6cok (2017).

  20. 20.

    Marginson and Considine, Enterprise University, 253.

  21. 21.

    Stephen Ball, “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity” Journal of Education Policy 18, 2, (2003).

  22. 22.

    Geoff Whitty, “Creating Quasi-Markets in Education: A Review of Recent Research on Parental Choice and School Autonomy in Three Countries,” Review of Research in Education, 22, 1 (1997).

  23. 23.

    Marginson “Politics”, 136.

  24. 24.

    Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, trans. Andrew Goffey. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  25. 25.

    Pignarre and Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery, 32.

  26. 26.

    Pignarre and Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery, 24.

  27. 27.

    Andrew Goffey, “Introduction,” Pignarre and Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery, xiv.

  28. 28.

    Marginson, “Politics”, 135.

  29. 29.

    Pignarre and Stengers, Capitalists Sorcery, 141.

  30. 30.

    Lew Zipin, “Pursuing a problematic-based curriculum approach for the sake of social justice,” Journal of Education, No. 69: 67–92.

  31. 31.

    Sarah Whatmore and Catharina Landström, “Flood apprentices: An exercise in making things public,” Economy and Society (40) 4 (2011), 606.

  32. 32.

    Isabelle Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, In Making things public, ed. Bruno Latour, B. and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) 161.

  33. 33.

    Pignarre and Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery, 112.

  34. 34.

    Pignarre and Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery, 85.

  35. 35.

    Zipin, “Problematics that Matter”, 77.

  36. 36.

    Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”.

  37. 37.

    Zipin, “Problematics that Matter”, 82.

  38. 38.

    Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes and Yannick Barthe, Acting in an Uncertain World: AN Essay on Technical Democracy, trans. Graham Burchell, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011): 584.

  39. 39.

    Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World, 9; (emphasis in original).

  40. 40.

    Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World, 26.

  41. 41.

    Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World, 27.

  42. 42.

    Pignarre and Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery, 76.

  43. 43.

    Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 153.

  44. 44.

    Whatmore and Landström, “Flood Apprentices”.

  45. 45.

    Whatmore and Landström, “Flood Apprentices”, 593.

  46. 46.

    Whatmore and Landström, “Flood Apprentices”, 606.

  47. 47.

    Lauren Berlant, “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, 3 (2016): 409.

  48. 48.

    Berlant (2016). “The commons”, 409.

  49. 49.

    Berlant, “The commons,” 393.

  50. 50.

    Brennan, Marie, “Struggles for Teacher Education in the Age of the Anthropocene,” Journal of Education 69 (2017): 43–65.

  51. 51.

    See Raewyn Connell, “What are good universities?” Australian Universities’ Review, 58, 2 (2016).

  52. 52.

    Berlant, “The commons”, 414.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa

    Marie Brennan & Lew Zipin

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  1. Marie Brennan
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  2. Lew Zipin
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Correspondence to Marie Brennan .

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  1. School of Education, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, QLD, Australia

    Catherine Manathunga

  2. School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Dorothy Bottrell

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Brennan, M., Zipin, L. (2019). Seeking an Institution-Decentring Politics to Regain Purpose for Australian University Futures. In: Manathunga, C., Bottrell, D. (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume II. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95834-7_13

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