[-empyre-] Executives and corporatization

Wed Nov 28 08:18:13 EST 2012

Green grass seems harder to find, yes. Half the country is under water and the grass fails to grow. The wrong kind of rain...

The closure of a London university will probably happen. Will there be more to follow? The government has said as much, encouraging privateers to take over failing public HEI's and for others to merge. This process is already under way in Wales. In Scotland the FE sector is going through radical restructuring, with Edinburgh's four colleges merging into one and the same happening in Glasgow and elsewhere. HE is not immune to the dynamics impacting FE.

Edinburgh is a city of 450,000 people with four universities. Only one is of international standing. One is of national standing. Two others are, at best, regional institutions. There is clearly over provision. I imagine in 5 to 7 years there will be two universities in Edinburgh, one international and one regional. I expect similar rationalisation at the national level and even at the international. Things like Coursera point towards this eventuality, the coming together of international universities to create global brands.

I don't think this is a good thing but it does seem inevitable. The strategic conversations I hear indicate that those who are planning for the medium to long term have these developments firmly on their agenda. They are considering things on a global scale. The oldest and most prestigious institutions have always done this, in their way - so there's nothing new there. Why are we surprised?

best

Simon

Sent from a mobile device, thus the brevity.

Simon Biggs
simon at littlepig.org.uk
s.biggs at ed.ac.uk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk

On 27 Nov 2012, at 16:45, Nicky Donald <nicky.donald at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Simon

l agree the status and prospects of administrators have improved in the last 20 years. My historical generalisation is no longer true. However, the sh*t hit the fan a couple of years ago for administrative departments.

Restructuring, voluntary redundancy (in the Roman or Japanese tradition), reduced hours and casualisation have been underway for a long time. The grass ain't green anywhere.

We're just waiting for at least one of the major London Universities to close and for BIS to say that means competition is working... I suppose we can expect a welter of closures following the post-2014 government cuts.

Nicky

On Nov 27, 2012 2:50 PM, "Simon Biggs" <simon at littlepig.org.uk> wrote:
What Nicky says about admin staff in the UK being part time women workers who are only there to serve the great and the good is not at all accurate - at least in relation to any of the universities I've worked at (which range from mid-rank to Russell Group). My experience is quite the opposite. The administrators, at all levels, are often what holds a place together and present consistency and a friendly face to both students and staff, especially in a time when academic staff are often casualised. It is also the casual academics who are the first to be cut in hard times (along with senior academics approaching retirement whose grant income does not cover their salaries). These are the easiest people to let go and, in respect of the latter, the means of saving the most money. I've seen a good number of senior colleagues fall on their swords, as required. Harakiri has been in fashion recently...

The shit has not yet hit the fan in the UK. The current parliament, which will run till 2014 or thereabouts, has already shifted the cost of teaching at English institutions from the tax payer to the student (in Scotland higher education is still free) and although it is questionable what it will save for the public purse what has been assured is university incomes have been sustained during times of radical public spending cuts (at a cost to students). However, the bigger issue is what happens in the next parliament. The current executive have clearly indicated that the next parliament will make cuts of 50% more than at present. One area they are looking at cutting is research. That represents 50% of university income (80% or more in research intensive institutions) and there is no way they will be able to shift the cost elsewhere - it will just be a cut. That's when the pips will squeak and retrenchment begins.

best

Simon

On 27 Nov 2012, at 02:46, Erin Obodiac wrote:

> Dear Nicky Donald,
> 
> Thank you for your post.  I had a postdoc at Leeds a couple of years back and I caught a glimpse of what you're talking about.  Thank you, Nicky!
> 
> Erin Obodiac
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Nicky Donald [nicky.donald at gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, November 26, 2012 11:55 AM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Executives and corporatization
> 
> I'd like to put a couple of points from the other side of the fence (and the Pond). It's not targeted at any of the posts here, largely because the US is a different planet.
> 
> The UK academic establishment has always regarded and treated University administrators with contempt. They have historically  been part-time jobs for women who exist only to serve the great and good.
> 
> Time and time again administrators are bullied, shouted at and regarded as inferior. The attitude of many academic staff, especially, I have to say, the young ones on the make (professor by 35, HoD by 40, devil take the hindmost, probably the "stars" you mention) is shocking.
> 
> Now that universities are facing cuts across the board, the administrative staff have been the first to go. Rather than abandoning their silos and embracing cross-disciplinary projects or, God forbid, engaging with industry and wider society, the academic elite are entrenching themselves and blaming the "proliferation of administrators". The main reason there seem to be so many is that they've never noticed them before. As the cuts begin to bite, stuff just isn't getting done like it used to.
> 
> A University free from administration is absurd. Labelling highly-paid managers arriving from commercial companies and driving up senior salaries as "administrators" just betrays contempt for the little people who make sure we get paid, get our paperclips, get our proposals in on time etc. We need to distinguish between administrators and senior managers/executives, and to appreciate the excellent work that many of the latter do in these hard times.
> 
> Having said all that, I agree with most of the points, though not all attempts to democratise Higher Education are neo-liberal conspiracies (neo-liberal doesn't mean anything here, although the anti-intellectual movement is gaining ground in the UK too.) 25 years ago, most of my US High School friends had to join the military to get to University, since they were poor, or lower-middle-class. Freedom of speech is nothing without freedom of thought, and that shouldn't come at the price of a lifetime of debt.
> 
> Nicky
> 
> On Nov 26, 2012 5:58 AM, "David Golumbia" <dgolumbia at gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to thank Brian as always for his terrifically pointed, insightful, and accurate comments. 
> 
> I want briefly just to note that these issues connect to two others, themselves connected. They are somewhat to the side of this month's discussion, but I think they are too important to the general discussion to let pass.
> 
> 1) The neoliberal assault on higher education, endorsed and funded by many of the most prominent conservative and neoconservative institutions worldwide, exists primarily to limit the amount of critical thinking that goes on in the minds of citizens, because democratic thought, with its emphasis on critique, has become a major stumbling block to capital's pure accumulation and acceleration. More accurately: it is one of the only remaining stumbling blocks to capital's accumulation. The advent of the Tea Party and in particular its know-nothing rejection of science and of history, and its "coincident" alignment with the most heavily-capitalized of industrial interests, gave a public face to a form of ideological conditioning only remarkable for its success at this time, in this moment, with so much "information" available, at inspiring so many people to reject logic, fact, reason, emotion, communal solidarity, and even their own self-interest. The instrumentalization and corporatization of the University is one of the primary tactics this assault uses to realize its strategy, and thus analyses that attempt to meet the assault halfway by assessing liberal arts education on the basis of measurable outcomes, especially related to particular lines of employment, can only add fuel to the fire that is meant to burn down the University's most vital function: the maintenance of democracy through the continued study of the many discourses (I mean this as broadly as possible) that have gone into its development.    
> 
> 2) Given the above, it is vital for educators to realize that the advent of massive online education environments, including MOOCs, is not being done primarily to "democratize" access to education, but instead as the decisive tactic in the war to analyze forcibly each part of higher education on instrumental and economic terms. This is a war we will lose. We should not be negotiating with forces whose explicit intent is to destroy the institutions to which we have devoted our lives and careers, and we should not be mistaken in thinking their intent is somehow disconnected from the one mentioned in my first point. They are one and the same. The "neoliberal knowledge-based economy" Brian so rightly names is not the same thing as the understanding of democracy necessary for its survival.  
> 
> I've touched on this, especially the first point, in a preliminary way in a blog post, "Centralization and the 'Democratization' of Higher Education": http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=160; I plan to follow up on the first point when time permits. 
> 
> David
> 
> 
> On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/23/2012 07:28 PM, Susan E Ryan wrote:
> I have witnessed the
> escalation of university administration, both in the number of
> administrative positions and in the rather breathtaking salaries that I
> have heard
> quoted to me.  These are elite corporate executives. I assume this is
> part of the corporatization of the university, and that that is the real
> culprit.
> 
> Well, there has been a kind of star-system applied to professors, to the point where salary scales have been all but abandoned in many places. You can look up the salaries of professors in the UC system (public servants you know) and it's interesting to see who gets what. But of course, the star system only affects the stars, leaving everyone else with the usual wage stagnation, while the actual faculty majority, the adjuncts, get the worst deal of all. The question is indeed why, for what and for whom?
> 
> From all I can see, the neoliberal transformation of universities over the past thirty years is effectively driven by the administrators you are talking about, who typically give themselves three-figure salaries. They come in, you see, in the wake of economic crisis, in order to make the university *more efficient* -- ha ha, which is apparently why there is a tuition spike after every major recession, including a large one right now. The administrators go before Congress every couple years to raise the level of the loans that will be guaranteed by the government, and they use the proceeds, along with corporate partnerships and financialized endowments, to preside over vast expansions.
> 
> I think the research university should be identified as the central institution of the neoliberal knowledge-based economy. The sea-change was the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allowed for the patenting of publicly funded research. Corporations as well as government could then scale back their large laboratories and practice what's now called "open innovation," where relatively small amounts of seed money are enough to catalyze research processes whose results can be selectively acquired by buying out the relevant patents. In a society where, since Reagan, only business is recognized as a value, this transformation of scientific research was enough to justify running the entire university like a corporation. The star system, the corporate partnerships, the precarization of academic labor, the competition for the revenue stream of student loans, and more recently, the franchising of major university brands in Asia, are all among the results. For what? is the best question. In my view, very sadly, it's for reducing knowledge to nothing more than a function of capitalism.
> 
> The best book I've found on this is, fittingly, entitled Academic Capitalism, by Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades. It's serious, anything but simplistic, a very impressive and wide-ranging piece of scholarship, check it out:
> 
> http://books.google.com/books?id=Y-mISmAUa38C&printsec=frontcover
> 
> Another good one is Chris Newfield's Unmaking the Public University, particularly the chapter "Facing the Knowledge Managers":
> 
> http://humanities.wisc.edu/assets/misc/FacingKnowledge.pdf
> 
> Finally, my own attempt to sum these things up:
> 
> http://autonomousuniversity.org/content/silence-equals-debt
> 
> No one yet has the solution to these problems, but the good thing is, over the last five years people have finally started to ask the important questions and to begin mobilizing around those questions. Student loans and corporatization are issues in themselves: but they are also part and parcel of a larger problem, which is the neoliberal development model. It can't address the problems of inequality and ecological unsustainability, and as long as it rules over the universities, we will get nothing substantial from them. A great loss, I'd say.
> 
> in solidarity, Brian
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> 
> 
> -- 
> David Golumbia
> dgolumbia at gmail.com
> 
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Simon Biggs
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s.biggs at ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
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