Abstract
The book begins with a widely disseminated anecdote concerning an email asking members of a university department to bring an object of which they are proud to a forthcoming meeting. It could be a publication or a sporting trophy. This will allow colleagues to witness the year’s positive achievements, while also countering an increasingly reductive REF process. This introductory chapter reads the anecdote in a more critical fashion, and thus sets out the central thesis of the book: objects and openness are often taken to oppose managerial culture, yet they are also bound to its ongoing operation. Following the work of Bill Readings, it is claimed that the ‘University of Excellence’ requires a notion of unproblematic communication that notions of objecthood and transparency help to secure.
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Notes
- 1.
I take the general formulation for the opening of this introduction from Martin, Ben. 2016. What is happening to our universities? SWP Working Papers Series. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2745139. Accessed 1 July 2016. My focus is on UK provision, and on the humanities. Fundamentally, this is because UK humanities provision is what I know. For a discussion of the difficulties of such a choice, see, of course, Readings (1996). See also the introduction to Sayer, Derek. 2015. Rank hypocrisies: the insult of the REF. London: Sage Swifts. As I make clear later, however, UK provision is located in a wider discourse of internationalisation and of globalisation. The limitless university is one that exceeds national borders. This does not mean that local social and economic differences cease to signify, but rather that they are often consigned to shadows cast by the illuminated university.
- 2.
As Stefan Collini has it: ‘we should register the subliminal capacity of the phrase “concrete achievement” to summon up disconcertingly apt images: there is something both pleasing and telling about the fantasy of responding to official requests to “justify” the humanities by having a series of dumper trucks deposit a huge pile of excellent scholarly books on the steps of the relevant ministry’ Collini (2012), p. 85.
- 3.
My appeal here is, for example, to Simon Morgan Wortham’s suggestion that audit always requires a hearing. Wortham, Simon Morgan. 2006. Counter-institutions: Jacques Derrida and the question of the University. New York: Fordham, p. 101.
- 4.
In keeping with HEFCE’s policy for Open Access, ‘[m]embers of the public can access bibliographic details and many refereed full text versions free of charge, for personal research or study, in accordance with our End User Agreement’. University of Reading. http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/. Accessed 18 August 2016. I should add here that I am a supporter of Open Access.
- 5.
See, for example, the email policy of Aberystwyth University: ‘Monitoring [of email] means that all or part of an email is inspected either automatically or by nominated University officers without further seeking your permission.…University staff never routinely inspect the contents of any e-mail. However, in accordance with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, there are occasions where some or all of this information may be viewed…Where the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Student and Staff Services), or, in his/her absence, the Director of Information Services or the Director of Human Resources, believes there is a prima facie suspicion that the University’s Regulations or Policy on the use of e-mail have been contravened’. Furthermore: ‘You must not send e-mail messages that show the University in an unprofessional light or that could expose the University to legal liability. E-mails sent by a member of the University have the same standing as a letter on headed notepaper even if you describe the contents as “private”. If you wish to send e-mail and not be bound by this undertaking you should use an external e-mail provider’. University of Aberystwyth. Policies. http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/infocompliance/policies/e-mail/. Accessed 21 August 2016.
- 6.
All emails are understood to be the property of the university, see, for example, ‘all@port.ac.uk email addresses, associated accounts and work-related emails are the property of the University’. University of Portsmouth. http://policies.docstore.port.ac.uk/policy-070.pdf (2016). As many universities increasingly act against unauthorised transmission of material relating to its activities, especially, as we shall see, when it regards these as being against its interests, the move to publish emails in a book such as this would meet with institutional resistance.
- 7.
This contention can be read in texts from very different political standpoints. Clive Kessler makes the familiar case when claiming that the ‘neo-liberal ascendancy had to undermine the structures of intellectual authority that resided within the established disciplines. To prevail it had to disarm the capacity for effective intellectual critique they threatened to offer’. Kessler, Clive. 2010. Between a postmodernist and a hard place. The Australian. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/between-a-postmodernist-and-a-hard-case/story-e6frgcjx-1225877158821. Accessed 18 August 2016. See also Saunders, Malcom. 1996. The madness and malady of managerialism. Quadrant 50/3: 9–17. For recent examples see Sanbonmatsu, John. 2015. Postmodernism and the corruption of the critical intelligentsia. In Radical intellectuals and the subversion of progressive politics: The betrayal of politics, eds. Michael J. Thompson, and Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; Ecclestone and Hayes (2009), as discussed in Chapter 2 of this present book. See Collini (2012), for what I take to be a particularly clear critique of post-modernity within Higher Education discourse.
- 8.
See also Shore, Cris. 2008. Audit culture and illiberal governance: Universities and the culture of accountability. Anthropological Theory 8: 278–298.
- 9.
See also Docherty (2015), p. 123.
- 10.
See Štech, Stanislav. 2012. The Bologna process as a new public management tool in higher education. Journal of Pedagogy 2/2: 263–282; Ward, Steven. 2012. Neoliberalism and the global restructuring of knowledge and education. New York: Routledge; 2014. Araya, Daniel and Marber, Peter, eds. Higher Education in the global Age: Policy, practice and promise in emerging societies. Abingdon: Routledge; Lorenz (2012), pp. 599–629.
- 11.
Von Osten, Marion. 2011. Education reforms in a European context. In The assault on universities: A manifesto for resistance, eds. Michael Bailey and Des Freedman, 157–167. London: PlutoPress.
- 12.
For this, see Readings (1996), p. 134: ‘Judgement is better understood in relation to a continuing discussion rather than as a finality. To whom and to what the University remains accountable are questions we must continue to pose and worry over. Appeals to accounting – whether in the form of numerically scored teaching evaluations, efficiency ratings, or other bureaucratic statistics – will only serve to prop up the logic of consumerism that rules the University of Excellence. Value is a question of judgement, a question whose answers must be continually discussed.’
- 13.
For a critique of the supplement, see Readings (1996), p. 124: ‘we need no new identity for the University, not even the supplement will save us’. I am interested, rather, in Simon Morgan Wortham’s contention ‘that today’s “audit culture” tries its best to minimize testimony at the expense of evidence’ yet ‘“evidence” can never be pure of, can never simply take leave of, testimony’, Wortham (2006), pp. 101–103.
- 14.
Ecclestone and Hayes (2009), p. xiii.
- 15.
For more on this, see Chapter 3.
- 16.
Legge, James. 2012. Manchester Metropolitan: ‘Bullying’ university bans world-renowned professor who spoke out. The Independent, October 24; Morgan, John. 2014. Thomas Docherty ‘to be cleared of all charges’ by Warwick. Times Higher Education, October 21.
- 17.
Quoted in Grove, Jack. 2016. Reading lecturers rebel over ‘erosion of academic freedom’ in new contracts. Times Higher Education Supplement, August 6. The University stresses that the alterations are an exercise in ‘modernising and strengthening our charter’, this helping to maintain all academic freedoms. See University of Reading. https://www.reading.ac.uk/charter-reform/cr-home.aspx. Accessed 1 September 2016.
- 18.
Quoted in Grove (2016).
- 19.
Rolfe, Gary. 2013. The university in dissent: Scholarship in the corporate university. London: Palgrave, p. 54; Sayer (2015).
- 20.
This from a conversation between myself and an academic who publishes questioning, historically situated critiques of the neo-liberal university.
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Cocks, N. (2017). Introduction: Transparency and Objecthood. In: Higher Education Discourse and Deconstruction. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52983-7_1
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