Universities are nearly irretrievably broken. It's a reluctant conclusion that I have come to accept after many years as an international researcher and teacher in law. Not that this statement should be a surprise. Indeed, the internet is full of articles, blogs, and reports chronicling and lamenting the demise of the university throughout many countries, which has survived in more-or-less the same form over the last few centuries. In too many places, universities are beset by public funding crises that starve them of needed, but costly resources, while being subjected to increasing political interference. No longer seen primarily as institutions of critical reflection or incubators of good citizens, universities are now viewed by politicians as engines for economic growth, production-lines of job-ready employees for fickle employers and a precarious, tech-centered, and STEM-obsessed economy. For this purpose, humanities and social sciences have especially little worth, as too many elected philistines tell us.
Compounding the assault of these external forces on the university is an even more sinister one: internal administrative collaboration. Deans and rectors were once chosen by and responsible to the professoriate from which they came, ensuring a collegial, if sometimes amateurish, administration strongly linked to academic culture. This is no longer the norm. Rather, changing practices or institutional reforms have led to the professionalization of university administrative officials, now chosen in a more business-like manner to govern in a more business-like way. Collegial governance has been replaced by hierarchy and academic traditions attacked by corporate governance practices. Tenure and academic freedom have come under assault - or already been fatally undermined - at many universities, further eroding the power of the professoriate to criticize and impact administrative decision-making. For the Dean-as-CEO - too often committed to pursuing a further administrative career, rather than returning to the academic ranks from which he or she came - efficiency and cost-savings are key, research must attract external funding and show a social pay-off, and teaching must produce skilled laborers. Public or private stakeholders - whatever and whoever they are - must see a return on their financial investments not unlike the corporate shareholder.
None of this is new, as I mentioned, and will not come as a surprise to readers once or still in academia. Nor will readers find here a solution for or a plan to reverse these trends. This is because I now fear they have gone too far to be stopped. That is not to say that some universities with conscientious administrators have not managed to resist or ameliorate such pressures. There also remains intrinsic value in individual administrators and academics refusing to collaborate with corporatization schemes, in so far as it is possible. A good example of resistance to political interference is the recent pledge of the London School of Economics to refuse to cooperate with the UK government, which ordered all non-British research staff off of Brexit-related consultations. Such isolated acts of resistance have ethical weight, but no such noble gesture is likely to be of help in halting the greater trends identified above. Likely, only a concerted, full-scale movement of resistance by academic staff (and perhaps students, with their own justified gripes) to both external and internal forces for change can have any impact. However, the days of national strikes are long-gone, researchers find themselves terrified of unemployment with no private-sector prospects, and the general public is unlikely to be sympathetic while in its anti-elitist, anti-intellectual, and populist mood. Too many people would revel in the Schadenfreude of the egghead's plight.
So what is to be done? Don't be silent. That is the only idea I have, although without the open support of colleagues, confrontation of any sort can be a risky proposition. I know this from personal experience. Where academics were once free to be prickly, surly, or uncooperative as means of resisting or maintaining control, this is no longer the case where tenure has been eroded, "adjunctification" has led to exploitation, and the job-market is saturated by hungry (metaphorically or literally) bright young things already groomed for the new realities of Education, Inc. Yet, speaking-out remains the first indispensable step in resisting the university's wholesale capitulation to neo-liberal market forces and its unpleasant bedmate, administrative corporatization.
This post also appears on my new personal blog “Cicero : a personal journal of law - politics - culture” at https://cicerodicit.wordpress.com/.