Table Of ContentPALGRAVE CRITICAL UNIVERSITY STUDIES
RESISTING NEOLIBERALISM
IN HIGHER EDUCATION
VOLUME II
Prising Open the Cracks
Edited by Catherine Manathunga
and Dorothy Bottrell
Palgrave Critical University Studies
Series Editor
John Smyth
University of Huddersfield
Huddersfield, UK
Aims of the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series
Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and
most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed
by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and with
little understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or
destroyed. The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage,
and publish scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direc-
tion of these reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a
much-needed forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the
consequences of ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and
will do this with particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups
whose views have hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The
series explores these changes across a number of domains including: the
deleterious effects on academic work, the impact on student learning, the
distortion of academic leadership, and the perversion of institutional
politics. Above all, the series encourages critically informed debate, where
this is being expunged or closed down in universities.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14707
Catherine Manathunga • Dorothy Bottrell
Editors
Resisting
Neoliberalism in
Higher Education
Volume II
Prising Open the Cracks
Editors
Catherine Manathunga Dorothy Bottrell
School of Education School of Education and Social Work
University of the Sunshine Coast University of Sydney
Maroochydore, QLD, Australia Sydney, NSW, Australia
Palgrave Critical University Studies
ISBN 978-3-319-95833-0 ISBN 978-3-319-95834-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95834-7
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Preface
Something strange and ominous has been happening in universities. On
the face of it, they are flourishing as never before: more millions of stu-
dents worldwide, flashy new buildings, endless research breakthroughs.
Presidents, Vice-Chancellors and Rectors announce record growth, grand
restructures, and even newer, even flashier buildings. Universities are get-
ting richer, taller, faster…
Down the back of the campus, things feel different. Decoding the lat-
est restructure imposed by management, puzzling over the inscrutable
on-line report required by last Tuesday, or trying to grab a hot-desk in the
new privacy-free open-plan workspace, many of the university’s staff feel
no ownership. Some, on the contrary, feel as if their campus has been
invaded by an alien force, a commando of grey-suited corporate execu-
tives who know little, and care less, about how universities really work,
but who have seized power and trample all resistance in pursuit of met-
rics, income and competitive success.
Though it is unusual for real aliens to appear from their spaceships –
most managers actually come from inside the higher education sector – it
often feels like an invasion, as there has been such a sharp rise in the
power, intrusiveness and brutality of management in universities. The
new cadre of controllers have energetically adopted the language and the
control techniques of corporate capitalism. They tell us this is modern,
efficient, smart, necessary.
v
vi Preface
They are backed by business elites, who are delighted to find university
leaders who admire and soothe the rich; and by business-friendly politi-
cians, who have squeezed public funding for universities, legislated for
fees, and welcomed the managerial takeover. Some managers have come
a cropper – in Australia we remember the great fiasco of “Melbourne
University Private” – but collectively the new regime is well established,
and has already changed a great deal in university life.
That is the situation addressed in this book. Most of its chapters, in a
variety of ways, document the impacts of corporatisation, commercialisa-
tion and managerial power. One of the most distressing effects is the
disillusionment of young scholars, who have worked long and hard to
prepare themselves for academic careers, only to find the career path van-
ishing in front of their feet as managers casualise the teaching workforce.
Around 70% of undergraduate classes in Australian universities are now
taught by staff in insecure employment – casual, fixed-term, most often
part-time. Universities fudge or simply conceal the statistics on this mat-
ter, and there is no declared intention on the part of managers to improve
the situation. A considerable part of the universities’ professional and
support staff has also been casualised, usually by outsourcing; there is
even less information about this.
Even for staff who still have full-time continuing jobs, there are large
effects. There is background insecurity, as they can legally be made redun-
dant in a top-down restructure. There is much more intrusive control
over their teaching and their research. They notionally have “academic
freedom” but a lot of practical autonomy has gone, or has to be re-
established by childish evasions and subterfuges. New reporting require-
ments – in the name of transparency and accountability, but to
whom? – eat more and more academic time and there is absolutely no
limit to their growth. The audit regime now entrenched in universities
embeds, even flaunts, managers’ distrust of the workforce. Not surpris-
ingly the distrust is reciprocated. The emotional impacts of neoliberal
corporatisation, well documented in this book, are among the most
important consequences for the future of universities as well as their pres-
ent state.
There is also a concern in the book about something neoliberal man-
agement has not done: addressing the university system’s involvement in
Preface vii
global inequalities and the knowledge consequences of colonialism.
Eurocentric curricula, research networks centred on the global North,
marginalisation of the world’s diversity of knowledge formations – these
are issues needing action, and we are not getting it. The rhetoric of “glo-
balisation”, and the fixation on league tables that presume a homoge-
neous world, actually make things worse.
For people who care about university teaching and learning, and
university- based research and cultural work, it is easy to fall into rage or
despair at what has been going on. But this book takes us further, in fact
two steps further. The first reveals the good intellectual work still going
on in the university environment, that is relevant to understanding the
institution itself. The book provides accounts of the archiving of
Aboriginal resistance history, the creation of reading groups and other
interactive forums, the documentation of personal experiences of the
universities’ transformation. It shows imaginative projects of research and
reflection using cameras, drawings and dramatic scripts.
The second step, sometimes directly following from the first, gives rea-
sons to believe that there will be life after neoliberalism. There is a lot of
dispersed resistance in universities, using the weapons of the weak – I
notice that management consultants advising university bosses on restruc-
tures openly speak of “academic resistance” as a problem to be overcome.
There is sometimes direct confrontation in industrial disputes, and unions
also play an important role in holding back bullying and victimisation in
universities. Chapters in this book speak of other resources – in religion,
in everyday life, in community connections – that will be important in
the long run. They speak of radical hope, the fundamental confidence
that alternatives can be built.
There is much to learn here! Now read on….
Sydney, NSW, Australia Raewyn Connell
Contents
1 Prising Open the Cracks in Neoliberal Universities 1
Catherine Manathunga and Dorothy Bottrell
Part I Seeing in the Cracks 23
2 The New Culture Wars in Australian University
Workplaces 25
Paul Adams
3 Weighing Up Futures: Experiences of Giving Up an
Academic Career 43
Ruth Barcan
4 Resisting the Norming of the Neoliberal Academic
Subject: Building Resistance Across Faculty Ranks 65
Joseph M. Schwartz
ix
x Contents
5 Creating a Positive Casual Academic Identity Through
Change and Loss 89
Joanne Yoo
Part II Decolonising the Academy 109
6 On (Not) Losing My Religion: Interrogating Gendered
Forms of White Virtue in Pre-possessed Countries 111
Fiona Nicoll
7 Academic Collaboration in Pursuit of Decolonisation:
The Story of the Aboriginal History Archive 133
Edwina Howell
Part III Prising Open the Cracks 153
8 Assessment Policy and “Pockets of Freedom” in a
Neoliberal University: A Foucauldian Perspective 155
Rille Raaper
9 Professional Doctorates as Spaces of Collegiality and
Resistance: A Cross- Sectoral Exploration of the Cracks in
Neoliberal Institutions 177
Catherine Manathunga, Peter Shay, Rosemarie Garner, Preetha
Kolakkot Jayaram, Paul Barber, Bhatti Thi Kim Oanh, Sunny
Gavran, Loretta Konjarski, and Ingrid D’Souza
10 Interrogating the “Idea of the University” Through the
Pleasures of Reading Together 199
Tai Peseta, Jeanette Fyffe, and Fiona Salisbury
