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Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume II pp 1–22Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Prising Open the Cracks in Neoliberal Universities

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

Abstract

Working in universities in the twenty-first century is a challenging endeavour. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed by the extent to which neoliberalism is crushing the lifeblood of inspiration out of academe. Vivid testimonies abound of the toxicity, barbarism and horrific psychological cost of neoliberal universities. This volume seeks to trace how we might prise open the cracks in neoliberal logic and find ways to follow Readings call to “dwell in the ruins”. We draw on recent examples of managerial ruthlessness to expose the cracks or flawed logic that permit conditions of possibility for collegiality, creativity and activism and new counter-ontologies of critical resistance and radical hope. These chapters highlight the importance of relational and collective processes in formation of counter-ontologies and praxis, drawing attention to feminist, intersectional and decolonising criticalities that are necessary to mobilise in our struggle.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    John Smyth, The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

  2. 2.

    Michael O’Sullivan, Academic Barbarism, Universities and Inequality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

  3. 3.

    Andrew C. Sparkes, “Autoethnography and Narratives of Self: Reflections on Criteria in Action,” Sociology of Sport Journal 17, no. 1 (2000): 21–43; Simon Warren, “Struggling for Visibility in Higher Education: Caught Between Neoliberalism ‘Out There’ and ‘In Here’ – An Autoethnographic Account,” 32, no. 2 (2017): 127–40.

  4. 4.

    Dorothy Bottrell and Catherine Manathunga, Resisting Neoliberal Universities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

  5. 5.

    Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 162.

  6. 6.

    Mary Zournazi, Hope: New Philosophies for Change (Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press, 2002).

  7. 7.

    Ruth Barcan, Academic Life and Labour in the New University (Surry: Ashgate, 2013).

  8. 8.

    Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–8.

  9. 9.

    Antonia Darder, “Neoliberalism in the Academic Borderlands: An On-going Struggle for Equality and Human Rights,” Educational Studies 48, no. 5 (2012): 412–26.

  10. 10.

    Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 20, issue 6 (2014): 813.

  11. 11.

    Malcolm Saunders, “The Madness and Malady of Managerialism,” Quadrant 50 (2006): 9–17.

  12. 12.

    Lew Zipin, “Governing Australia’s Universities: The Managerial Strong-Arming of Academic Agency,” Social Alternatives 25, no. 2 (2006): 26–31.

  13. 13.

    Laurie Field, “Appraising Academic Appraisal in the New Public Management University,” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 37 (2015): 172–89.

  14. 14.

    John Smyth, The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

  15. 15.

    Sue Saltmarsh, “Storylines of Accountability,” Teaching and Learning 26 (2012): 75–88.

  16. 16.

    Richard Watermeyer, “From Engagement to Impact? Articulating the Public Value of Academic Research,” Tertiary Education and Management 18, issue 2 (2012): 115–30.

  17. 17.

    Richard Hil, Whackademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2012).

  18. 18.

    Bronwyn Davies and Eva Bendix Petersen, “Neo-Liberal Discourse in the Academy: The Forestalling of (Collective) Resistance,” Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences 2, issue 2 (2005): 77–98.

  19. 19.

    Lew Zipin, “Situating University Governance in the Ethico-Emotive Ground Tone of Post/Late Times,” in Re-positioning University Governance and Academic Work, ed. Jill Blackmore, Marie Brennan, and Lew Zipin. (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010), 159

  20. 20.

    Zipin, “Situating University Governance,” 157.

  21. 21.

    Italics in original. Zipin, “Situating University Governance,” 157.

  22. 22.

    Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 243.

  23. 23.

    Mark Furlong, “Alight on the Dark Triad,” Arena 149 (2017): 41.

  24. 24.

    Andrew Whelan, “Agnosis in the university workplace,” Australian Universities Review 58, no. 2 (2016): 54.

  25. 25.

    Cris Shore, “Beyond the Multiversity: Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Schizophrenic University,” Social Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2010): 15–29.

  26. 26.

    Whelan, “Agnosis in the university workplace.”

  27. 27.

    Smyth, Toxic University.

  28. 28.

    Victoria University, “Vision, Mission and Strategy.”

  29. 29.

    Slaughter and Leslie, Academic Capitalism, 22.

  30. 30.

    Gail Kinman, “Doing More with Less? Work and Wellbeing in Academics,” Somatechnics 4 (2014): 219–35.

  31. 31.

    Hil, Whackademia.

  32. 32.

    Sue Saltmarsh, “Storylines of Accountability.” Teaching and Learning 26 (2012): 82.

  33. 33.

    Saltmarsh, “Storylines of Accountability,” 82.

  34. 34.

    Paula Baron, “Working the Clock: The Academic Body on Neoliberal Time,” Somatechnics 4 (2014): 253–71.

  35. 35.

    Kinman, “Doing More with Less?”

  36. 36.

    Kinman, “Doing More with Less?”

  37. 37.

    Italics in original. Kinman, “Doing More with Less?” 224.

  38. 38.

    Mark Amsler and Cris Shore, “Responsibilisation and Leadership in the Neoliberal University: A New Zealand Perspective,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 38, no. 1 (2017): 123–37.

  39. 39.

    Stephen J. Ball, “Living the Neoliberal University,” European Journal of Education: Research, Development and Policy 50, issue 3 (2015): 258–61.

  40. 40.

    Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014).

  41. 41.

    Yvette Taylor, “Queer Encounters of Sexuality and Class: Navigating Emotional Landscapes of Academia,” Emotion, Space & Society 8, no. 1 (2013): 51–8.

  42. 42.

    Barcan, Academic Life, 143.

  43. 43.

    Barcan, Academic Life.

  44. 44.

    Barcan, Academic Life, 143.

  45. 45.

    Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continnum, 1994), 10.

  46. 46.

    Michael Schudson, “You’ve Got Mail: A Few Observations on Hope,” Social Research 66, no. 2 (1999): 628.

  47. 47.

    Barcan, Academic Life.

  48. 48.

    Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

  49. 49.

    Barcan, Academic Life, 148, 169.

  50. 50.

    Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, edited by Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989), 118.

  51. 51.

    Jane Kenway, Rebecca Boden and Johannah Clare Fahey, “Seeking the Necessary ‘Resources of Hope’ in the Neoliberal University,” in Through a Glass Darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University, ed. Margaret Thornton (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), 259.

  52. 52.

    Henry Giroux, “When Hope is Subversive,” TIKKUN 19, no. 6 (2012): 38.

  53. 53.

    Kenway, Boden and Fahey, “Seeking ‘Resources of Hope’”, 261.

  54. 54.

    Kenway, Boden and Fahey, “Seeking ‘Resources of Hope’”, 261.

  55. 55.

    Kenway, Boden and Fahey, “Seeking ‘Resources of Hope’”, 277.

  56. 56.

    Gina Anderson, “Mapping Academic Resistance in the Managerial University,” Organization 15, no. 2 (2008): 251–70.

  57. 57.

    Stewart Clegg, “Power Relations and the Constitution of the Resistant Subject,” in Resistance and Power in Organisations, ed. John M. Jermier, David Knights, and Walter R. Nord (London: Routledge, 1994), 274–325.

  58. 58.

    Bottrell and Keating – Seeing Through the Cracks, Vol. 1, pp. 157–178

  59. 59.

    Manathunga et al., “Professional doctorates as spaces of collegiality and resistance: a cross-sectoral exploration of the cracks in neoliberal institutions”, Prising Open the Cracks 2018

  60. 60.

    Stephen J. Ball, Foucault, Power and Education (London: Routledge, 2013), 145.

  61. 61.

    Anderson, “Mapping Academic Resistance.”

  62. 62.

    James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

  63. 63.

    Anderson, “Mapping Academic Resistance,” 254.

  64. 64.

    Italics added. Robyn Thomas and Annette Davies, “Theorising the Micro-Politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services,” Organization Studies 26, no. 5 (2008): 683–706.

  65. 65.

    Raewyn Connell et al., “Negotiating with the North: How Southern-Tier Intellectual Workers Deal with the Global Economy of Knowledge,” The Sociological Review 66, issue 1 (2018).

  66. 66.

    Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), quoted in Connell et al., “Negotiating with the North.”

  67. 67.

    Connell et al., “Negotiating with the North,” 5.

  68. 68.

    Connell et al., “Negotiating with the North.”

  69. 69.

    Connell et al., “Negotiating with the North,” 15, 16.

  70. 70.

    Raewyn Connell, “Southern Theory and World Universities,” Higher Education Research & Development 36, no. 1 (2017): 4–15.

  71. 71.

    Connell, “Southern Theory.”

  72. 72.

    Connell, “Southern Theory.”

  73. 73.

    Raewyn Connell, “The Shores of the Southern Ocean: Steps Toward a World Sociology of Modernity, with Australian Examples,” in Worlds of Difference, ed. Saïd Arjomand and Elisa Reis (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), 58–72.

  74. 74.

    Antonia Darder, Freire and Education (London: Routledge, 2014).

  75. 75.

    Thomas and Davies, “Micro-Politics of Resistance.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  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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  1. Catherine Manathunga
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Correspondence to Catherine Manathunga .

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Editors and Affiliations

  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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Manathunga, C., Bottrell, D. (2019). Prising Open the Cracks in Neoliberal Universities. 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_1

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