Survive and Thrive in Academia

The New Academic’s Pocket Mentor

Kate Woodthorpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138048652
• eBook ISBN: 9781351690751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A pocket mentor for the early career academic learning to strategically navigate the demands of an academic role, this book is a friendly and constructive companion providing hands-on advice about how to balance teaching responsibilities alongside other duties. More than just a 'how to', the text is a timely commentary on changes in higher education. Discussing contemporary developments and offering guidance on how to negotiate this evolving climate, the book uniquely captures the political, social, economic and cultural forces at play, taking into account the issues which influence and shape an academic's career trajectory.

Organised around the three main tasks within a conventional academic post – teaching, research and administration – the book includes tips, pauses for thought, author reflections and sources for further reading, and provides insight to help the reader reflect on what they are doing, why, and where to go next in their career. Crucially, it shows that in order to survive and flourish, the early career academic needs to take a strategic view as to their function, purpose and contribution both inside and beyond the intellectual establishment.

From establishing a research niche to getting stuck into administration Survive and Thrive empowers the early career academic, helping them to build their academic reputation both internally and externally and maintain a sense of personal fulfilment and accomplishment within an increasingly commercialised environment.

1 The university workplace

So, how did you get to this point? What is the appeal of working in academia? And how do you fit into the sector? In this introductory chapter, my objective is to provide important context on the social, economic and political changes that shape and shift the purpose, organisation, and function of the contemporary university institution. The chapter aims to provide perspective, and an opportunity to (re)set the scene for you, the early career academic, enabling you to identify and position yourself within the enormous juggernaut that is the global higher education (HE) sector.

In order to do so, the chapter provides an overview of the shifts that have occurred in HE in the last few decades. Following on from this it identifies some of the very real implications of these shifts for the everyday work of the early career academic, thereby setting the tone for what follows. As part of its scene setting function, the chapter introduces the rest of the book at its end.

Current trends

As you will observe in other parts of this book, I do not wish to repeat or rehash the already very well written texts on key areas of academic life, such as how to lecture. In the same vein, I do not intend in this opening chapter to document the origins of the modern university, nor focus on the neoliberal rationalisation of HE. These have been articulately accounted for elsewhere and I have provided references to useful texts at the end of this chapter if you wish to engage with this material. No, for this chapter and the rest of the book, I want to provide a contemporary focus on what life in academia is like now for an early career academic and how you can survive and thrive in this environment. However, in order to do so I need to explain briefly in this chapter some of the changes that have occurred since the start of the twenty-first century.

Various terms are used to describe change that has taken place and continues apace in academia and universities, for example: massification, corporatisation, vocationalisation, commercialisation, privatisation, quantification, metricisation, monetisation and so on. Much of these phrases have been, and continue to be used, to summarise the expansion of HE both in the UK and around the world.

Included in this expansion of HE is a diversification of degree subjects, a growth in the number of undergraduate students, and changes the way in which knowledge production within HE institutions is framed, valued and assessed internally and externally. In what follows in this chapter, the intention is not to expand, intellectualise or particularly critique these terms, as this has been done eloquently elsewhere. Rather, the aim is to set the scene for the context(s) in which you can find yourself working as an early career academic, and some of the very real consequences for your role(s) and responsibilities. In other words, its purpose is to establish the social, cultural, economic and political background in which you are employed, and upon which the remainder of the book is based.

Marketisation

One of the most popular ways of examining HE today, marketisation refers to the infusion of market forces into universities. Underpinned by neoliberalism, these market forces have been shaped by changes in funding structures and sources, positioning universities and their staff in competition with one another for resources, and students as consumers of their educational ‘product’. Brown (2011a: 1–2) neatly summarises two opposing views of marketisation in HE as follows:

Table 1.1

Proponents	Opponents
- Increased resources	- Increased stratification of institutions and the groups they serve
- Institutions more responsive to meeting student needs	- Loss of institutional diversity
- Greater flexibility, innovation and receptivity to change	- Ever more divided academic community
- Incentives to raise standards	- Detrimental to quality
- Incentives to attend to costs and make best use of resources	- Less autonomy
- Offers best value for society	- Reinforces the marketisation of society

In order to better understand how market forces can shape the organisation of HE, drawing on Jongbloed’s (2003) model of freedoms to identify an HE market, Brown (2011b) outlines the eight conditions required for a market to operate, separated into providers and consumers as follows:

Table 1.2

Providers	Consumers
1. Freedom of entry for new providers	5. Freedom to choose provider
2. Freedom of suppliers to specify the product	6. Freedom to choose degree
3. Freedom to choose and deploy resources	7. Freedom of information to make above choices
4. Freedom to set prices	8. Cost-covering prices paid directly (tuition fees and living costs)

If this model of an HE market were to operate, Brown posits, there would be little – if any – role for the state or academics in establishing the quality and quantity of HE provision. With little market regulation, in this vision students would exercise consumer choice and institutions would thrive or wither on their ability to attract and retain those students.

Yet in HE, Brown notes that as “no major developed system currently fulfils these criteria [it] takes us into ‘market failure’” (2011b: 9). The factors that indicate some form of market failure in HE, he suggests, are monopolies of power, information asymmetry, and imbalance in the benefits and costs of some products – that is, those products that are regarded as ‘public goods’ (good that are a net benefit to society) but may be unattractive to the provider because of their prohibitive cost. An example of this within HE is costly degrees and research that requires expensive facilities (for example, science and engineering subjects that require extensive and often pricey laboratory and test centre space), but which may be of great technological and economic benefit in terms of what the student(s) and researcher(s) studying them may potentially contribute to society.

Problems with markets can lead to state intervention, which in turn can create a ‘non-market’ whereby prices and numbers are closely regulated; there are high barriers to entry; there is limited information about quality; and where quality is determined via self-regulation by the state and the academy. Brown (2011b) warns however, that non-markets too can fail, owing to “the absence of mechanisms for reconciling calculations by decision makers of their private and organizational costs and benefits with the costs and benefits to society as a whole” (p. 13). In terms of where this leaves HE, it is neither fully at the whim of market forces, nor does it operate as a non-market. In the UK this means it is in flux in terms of an institution’s autonomy, its ability to respond to market forces, and the conditions imposed on it by the state.

Pause for thought

What are the current state interventions or political debates that are shaping HE at the time of reading? Regulation? Managing competition? The scrapping, capping or introduction of tuition fees? The funnelling of funds to specific areas of research?

Such flux, at worst, can translate into lack of clarity of vision and mission at an institutional level. It can also lead to a permeation of corporate values and discourse within HE, which you will find orbiting around you as you commence your career. These are, as Brown (2011c, p. 50) argues, potentially the biggest challenge to HE and those working in it.

The biggest threat to liberal higher education appears to come from the increasing interpretation of the values and practices of business and commerce. These are already blurring the boundaries of the academy and pose a potentially serious threat to its long standing and generally beneficial (for both sides) relationship with society.

Commercial values and practice are having a profound effect on the functioning, funding and organisation of universities, and are increasingly politicised as questions are raised about the role of the state in overseeing university priorities, budgets, student fees and research agendas. Demands are made that universities provide ‘value for money’ and that academics contribute something of ‘value’ to the economy and society more broadly. But what constitutes ‘value’ is habitually poorly defined and open to debate. For example, value in HE could be regarded according to:

• The teaching and contact hours a student receives on their degree;
• The balance between teaching quality and research outputs;
• The utility or blue-skies potential of research;
• The economic need of a particular degree programme;
• The societal worth of a particular degree programme (which may not have much economic need!);
• The fostering of independence and resilience in the next generation;
• The engagement with different publics to influence and affect change.

With the creep of commercial values and practice into universities, perceptions of ‘value’ in HE are increasingly conceptualised according to economic and corporate imperatives (O’Leary, 2017). As a result universities are expected to demonstrate their economic contribution to society, measured in, for example, the number of graduate students in employment six months after graduating and their starting salaries. This position overlooks or downright neglects important founding principles such as the role of HE in fostering resilience and fortitude, independence, and the development of transferable and soft skills, such as written and spoken communication (see chapter 9).

Corporatisation

Corporatisation is a regularly used phrase to describe the corporate imperatives that have permeated HE and university expansion within the last couple of decades. These imperatives have shifted emphasis onto discernible results that can be used to explain and account for monetary investment and productivity pound per pound – whether that investment comes from students, the taxpayer or commercial interests. Through this process of corporatisation the funding and regulation of HE has become a policy concern in order to ensure best ‘value’ for money (Hazelkorn, 2016) that is assessed according to visible and often commercial criteria for success.

Increasingly, the public is calling for ‘relevance’ and ‘accountability’, and the modernist scholar is being asked to provide compelling material justifications for his or her scholarship, especially in times of severe economic downturn. And as funding is tied to programs that produce tangible and immediate results, the traditional idea of the university is giving way to the results-orientated mandate which sees the modern university being run by CEOs or those trained in their methods, and which hears the language of business in discussions of departmental budgets while witnessing the replacement of non-instrumental decision-making practices with rational business models.

(Côté and Allahar, 2011: 17)

Although this instrumentalism is not confined solely to the management of universities, and will be considered again in chapter 2 in relation to new millennial students, it is important to reflect on what these tangible and immediate results might look like, and the pressures they can create. In terms of a university’s ‘outputs’, quantifiable and measurable indicators of success can include:

• The number of applicants per student place;
• The retention of students in year one;
• The proportion of top-rated degree classifications;
• The student evaluation of teaching quality and facilities;
• The number and ranking of academic peer reviewed publications;
• The monetary value of research income.

All of these indicators can be, and are, used to determine the ‘quality’ of an institution, made manifest in and perpetuated by national and international league tables. As Côté and Allahar go on to note, with this idea of quality,

the factory or customer service industry comes to mind and suggests such things as quality control, client satisfaction, and product inspectors. University campuses, on the other hand, do not lend themselves quite so easily to quality considerations and their measurements, for scholarship and learning do not always have clear quantifiable ends in mind.

(Côté and Allahar, 2011, p. 18)

Herein lies one of the key tensions at the heart of contemporary HE: a misalignment between indicators of quality based on corporate models of productivity and measurement, and the purpose and principle of the individual and societal value of learning, which cannot always be anticipated in advance nor quantified.

Pause for thought

How does your current/prospective employer/institution identify measures of success? Are there ‘ke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The university workplace
• SECTION 1 TEACHING
• SECTION 2 RESEARCH
• SECTION 3 ADMINISTRATION, MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP
• Index