Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The Disintegration of University Teaching and Research

176 Pages·2017·1.29 MB·English

by  Ingrid M. Hoofd (auth.)

INGRID M. HOOFD
Higher Education
& Technological
Acceleration
THE DISINTEGRATION OF UNIVERSITY
TEACHING AND RESEARCH
Higher Education and Technological Acceleration
Ingrid   M.   H oofd
Higher Education
and Technological
Acceleration
The Disintegration of University Teaching and
Research
Ingrid   M.   Hoofd
Utrecht University
Utrecht, The Netherlands
ISBN 978-1-137-51751-7 ISBN 978-1-137-51409-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51409-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 201695056
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P
REFACE
A huge number of academic books have been written over the last few
decades on the transformations of higher education, both positive and
negative, the world over. A quick search on the Internet on this topic
reveals more than a million titles, many of which have been written in
the last 20 years—indeed, publication numbers have risen exponentially,
productively addressing, yet hence paradoxically also validating criticisms
of current academic over-production. Why then add yet another book
to this already excellent and well-researched body of work on this topic?
The reasons for writing this particular book are in fact simple: they have
to do with what this book fl ags as a lack of self-refl exive depth concern-
ing the entanglements of the laudable ideals of the university and the
pernicious neo-liberal economy in many of such books, not in the least
concerning, for instance, that paradox of over-production. Indeed, many
of the more critical books in this genre propose that the university in
recent years has fallen victim to an immoral onslaught of neo-liberal poli-
cies and techniques that are imposed from the outside, leading to a host
of hitherto unseen internal and external issues and problems. While this
book does not necessarily disagree with this pervasive neo-liberalisation
thesis in the literature—in fact, it will regularly refer to the recent trans-
formation of higher education with that rather convenient shorthand—it
argues nonetheless that this common thesis fails to unearth the ways in
which the university actually projects a fundamental problem concerning
its o wn workings and ideals on a demonised ‘outside.’ So instead, this
book suggests that the apparently corrupting neo-liberalisation by ‘evil’
policy-makers and administrators is only a symptom of the economic and
v
vi PREFACE
technological acceleration of the fundamental and fi nally unresolvable ten-
sions and perversions that lie and have always lain at the heart of its actu-
ally very upright ideals of total knowledge and emancipation. This means
that the reasons for this contemporary corruption, as this book hopes to
show through a multitude of seemingly unrelated theoretical and practi-
cal examples, can be found in the myriad ways, at the level of teaching as
well as research, through which both staff and students presently seek and
in the past have sought to be loyal to these founding ideals. If such an
argument may to some perhaps initially appear as shockingly scandalous
or conversely as mere mischievous navel-gazing, this book suggests that
this argument indeed seeks to be somewhat scandalous and self-absorbed
as much as this book itself is precisely also a mirror image of the outra-
geous ambitions around the quest for scientifi c and social transparency
that constitute the workings of academia at all its levels. Far from being a
mere matter of theoretical playfulness though, this book wants to stress
that such idealistic yet pernicious workings are fundamentally entangled
with the misery inside and outside its walls, whether this concerns staff
burn-out and excessive adjunctifi cation, the submission of student work
and life to an increasingly oppressive machinery of competition, or the
ways in which the university is tied up with the reproduction of social elites
locally and globally.
This book thus wants to make a case for the urgent need to grasp the
current perversions of the modern university, and especially how such per-
versions have been exacerbated in the recent decades at all its levels, exactly
through casting a fresh eye on those ideas and ideals of transparency,
equality, knowledge-gathering, and democracy. What is more, it wants to
unearth how also ideals about communicative or media transparency are
entangled in the production of theory and other academic practices, so
that we may understand the connections between modern techniques and
the role of higher education beyond the mere argument for empowerment
through media tools. To put it more explicitly, this book suggests that
this historical junction at which the tools and techniques of transparency
and emancipation have started to become near pervasive in global society
precisely also allows for the opportunity to shine some much-needed light
on the problems and dark sides inherent to this foundational enlighten-
ment quest. And because of the often intricate and at times extremely
subtle ways in which staff and student experiences and institutional work-
ings reveal themselves, a lot of materials in this book are anecdotal and are
gathered from the universities in Asia and Europe where I have studied
PREFACE vii
and worked as an academic and administrative staff member. While this
obviously has its limitations, it also allows, this book hopes, for a careful
elaboration of the often liminal connections between these institutions,
the people that work and study in them, and the larger national and global
context in which this takes place. It is my hope that this book enacts a
careful analysis in this way also as a sign of care for all the people that are in
one way or another problematically affected by its workings, so that we all
may fi nally reassess not merely that perverse neo-liberal economy, but also,
and especially, the perversion behind the founding ideas and ideals that
have informed such an economy in a major fashion, since that economy’s
functionality in fact conspicuously often can be traced back to academic
research innovations and ‘improvements’ in teaching. Finally also, since
the main aim of this book is to shine a critical light on the institution that
led to its own conceptualisation, writing, and dissemination, it will refrain
from condemning any administrative layer as well as from providing a too-
easy resolution of all the contemporary tensions and problems around
higher education, as the obsession with easy resolutions is itself just as
much borne out of the aggravation of such tensions. Instead, it will by way
of a conclusion seek to raise the stakes by letting the question regarding
the acceleration of knowledge and emancipation fatally become a question
that seems e ver more unresolvable. Only then, certain truly unforeseen
consequences may follow out of this book’s argument, as it itself just as
much partakes in the accelerated quest for transparency in which all of
academia will fi nally dissolve.
Utrecht, The Netherlands Ingrid   M.   Hoofd
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is the culmination of various lines of thought around the recent
transformation of higher education which I explored earlier by way of
a couple of journal publications. For instance, sections of Chap. 2 have
been published previously in a slightly different form as “Singapore:
Bridgehead of the west or counterforce? The s[t]imulation of creative and
critical thought in Singapore’s higher education policies,” in G lobalisation,
Societies and Education , special issue “The New Research Agenda in Critical
Higher Education Studies,” Vol. 8, No. 2, 293–303 (2010), guest- and
co-edited by Eva Hartmann and Susan Robertson. Chapter 3 meanwhile
contains modifi ed parts of “Questioning (as) violence: Teaching ethics
in a global knowledge enterprise,” from Ethics and Education , Vol. 6,
No. 1, 53–67 (2011). And Chap. 4 lastly combines insights from “The
accelerated university: Activist-academic alliances and the simulation of
thought,” published in e phemera: theory & politics in organization , spe-
cial issue on “The excellent institution,” Vol. 10, No. 1, 7–24 (2010),
as well as those from “The Financialization of the Communicative Ideal
in the Activist Social Sciences,” from G lobal Media Journal, special issue
“Financialization, Communication, and New Imperialism: Meaning
in Circuits of Flow,” guest-edited by Mohan J. Dutta and Mahuya Pal
(2015). I wish to thank all the editors for agreeing to the reuse and partial
rewrite of these articles for this particular book.
Other people to whom I am very grateful because they have gener-
ously offered their thoughts and ideas for the theoretical conceptualisa-
tion of this book are Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, Jeremy Fernando, and
Sorelle Henricus, as well as all those of my new colleagues at Utrecht
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
University who fruitfully remain critical of the recent transformations
of the Dutch university and the stifl ing internal surveillance culture that
ensued. I also want to thank the administrative staff at the Department of
Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore
and at the Department of Media and Culture of Utrecht University in
the Netherlands, as without their continuous labour behind the ‘scenes
of theory’ this book would not have been possible. And fi nally, I wish to
thank my partner, Sandra Khor Manickam, for her insightful and critical
notes on higher education in Europe and Asia, and also for her uncondi-
tional support for my work and ideas even at those appalling yet instructive
moments in my academic journey where I was sure the sly operations of
the supposedly noble institution of higher education had fi nally defeated
me. These accidents eventually turned out to be fortuitous—as accidents
also often tend to be—since they allowed me to gain a better understand-
ing between the ideal of total transparency and the stealth workings of the
modern university. It also allowed me to continue my work at Utrecht
University in a humanities faculty which contains many superb research-
ers and teachers who are in many ways even more seriously plagued by
the tensions and contradictions inherent in this ideal than those in my
former university. My heart therefore goes out to all the passionate and
disillusioned staff and students, in Asia and in Europe, currently labour-
ing under the negative fallout of the tyranny of transparency. I hope this
book will also provide some distance and solace away from all the peda-
gogical, administrative, and publication disappointments and pressures for
all of them, and help some of them understand that their emotional and
physical discontent is not their fault, but mirrors the university’s currently
exacerbated auto-immune illness.
C
ONTENTS
1 Speed and Academic Blindness 1
2 Coercive Invitations of Universality 3 5
3 Idealistic Self-Delusions and the Limits of Nostalgia 6 5
4 The Double-Bind of/in Activist–Academic Research 9 9
5 A Fatally Wounded University? 1 39
Bibliography 1 53
Index 161
xi