University Management, the Academic Profession, and Neoliberalism

John S. Levin, Marie C. Martin, Ariadna I. López Damián

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438479101, 9781438479095
• eBook ISBN: 9781438479118
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

A unique examination of how faculty and university administrators understand their work and professional identities under neoliberalism.

This book examines tensions and challenges in the professional lives and identities of contemporary academics. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted over seven years with academics in the United States and the United Kingdom, the authors analyze the experiences of four types of academics as they respond and adjust to the demands of neoliberalism: part-time faculty, full-time faculty, department heads and chairs, and deans. While critical of this phenomenon, University Management, the Academic Profession, and Neoliberalism also recognizes that neoliberalism cannot be driven out of academia easily or without serious consequences, such as a perilous loss of revenue and public support. Instead, it works to shed light on the complex-sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary-relationship between market values and academic values in the roles and behaviors of faculty and administrators. In providing an unprecedented in-depth, data-based look at the management of the academic profession, the book will be of interest not only to educational researchers but also to professionals throughout higher education.

Chapter 1

Full-time Tenure Track Faculty

Academic Professional Identity and Managerialism

In the Introduction, we argued that universities in the United States have blended academic logic and neoliberal logic, and, as a result, managerialism guides practices within universities. Academic logic pulls universities toward traditional values such as academic freedom, professional autonomy, and the pursuit of knowledge. Neoliberal logic pushes them toward competitiveness, individualism, financial gain, and quantitative productivity. Thus, management and managerialism in the university take a different form than in for-profit organizations and in nonacademic organizations. We advance the argument here with a focus on tenure track faculty: with contradictory logics blended or coexisting, academics have adopted managerial practices; they both manage one another and manage themselves. They are willing to resist an amorphous managerial class in universities, but they fail to identify their own role in managerialism and the perpetuation of neoliberal logic.

The academy has characteristics of a professional institution: it serves a social function (to develop knowledge and transmit knowledge in the form of teaching), and individuals in the profession have special traits (e.g., expert knowledge, legal legitimacy, and traditional authority). Moreover, autonomy and academic freedom are idealized as central features of the academic profession. However, university attention to performance, or what Ball (2012a, 2012b) calls “performativity” and thus connects the academic profession to neoliberalism, results in insecurity and constraints upon both autonomy and academic freedom of university faculty (Archer, 2008; Enders & Musselin, 2008; Garcia & Hardy, 2007). With the growing use and abuse of new managerial strategies and the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideology to challenge faculty members’ professional identity, this academic professional identity is both problematical and questionable. Are faculty part of an integrated community of scholars (Goodman, 1962)? Or are they members of a fragmented professional culture (Clark, 1987)? Do they embrace nonacademic values of the marketplace or do they reject and oppose them (Alvesson & Spicer, 2016)? Are they independent actors or are they neoliberal subjects (Davies, 2005)? Or, are there variations and gradations in academic professional identity for university academics? Does neoliberal ideology in the form of new managerialism disturb or distort academic professional identity? Here, we discuss the evidence that responds to these questions.

In the United States, the critical concern about the condition of the profession is the degradation of the traditional professoriate. The threat to full-time tenure track faculty identity is the neoliberal takeover of, or infiltration into, higher education in the United States. This takeover not only emanates from the state but also from the university itself, overtly in the form of a managerial class, as well as covertly from full-time faculty themselves. Full-time faculty are central to the university but both as objects of neoliberal policies and managerial control and as neoliberal subjects. They are neoliberal subjects (Ball, 2012a) because full-time faculty continue to carry out the central functions of a neoliberal university: They generate resources (e.g., grants) and engender organizational prestige (e.g., rankings); they develop, monitor, and revise the curriculum, and teach the majority of the curriculum at the graduate level, where they reinforce (e.g., socialization) and perpetuate (e.g., future faculty and researchers) the production and revenue-generating function of the university; and, they sell their products (i.e., entrepreneurship) and thus aid in a nation or state or region’s economic development (Cantwell & Kauppinen, 2014; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Ward, 2012), as productive citizens tied to the neoliberal state.

With the rise in the exercise of managerial authority in U.S. universities, faculty independence has become attenuated. The role of tenure track faculty in the governance of their universities is viewed, at present, and even in comparison to 2006, as diminished (Finkelstein et al., 2016). As well, their professional selves are highly subject to their social context, or social structures that are shaped by neoliberal ideology (Morales Vázquez, 2019). Their academic professional identity in large part has depended upon their social structures, and one of the structures that has gained considerable attention since the 1990s is the managerial one of their universities (Gonzales, Martinez, & Ordu, 2014; Rosinger, Taylor, Coco, & Slaughter, 2016; Ward, 2012).

In this chapter, we address academic professional identity, first from a theoretical standpoint; second, as constructed by faculty; and, then, we move on to the management of full-time faculty. Overall, we rely upon both scholarly literature and empirical data from more than 130 interviews collected between 2010 and 2017 in public research and comprehensive universities in the United States to sustain our argument (for more information about the participants in these interviews see Appendix). These in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with both male and female faculty (including deans who were former faculty) from various ranks and disciplines in eight universities in the United States illustrate the discrete and nuanced ways in which academics are managed and manage.

Professional Identity as a Theoretical Tool

We employ the label academic professional identity throughout our book; thus, we explain the term here. First, we move from identity to professional identity. Identity has several theoretical roots in the literature, but there is no single definition of identity or professional identity that is sufficient for our examinations and explanations. Consequentially, we draw upon an amalgamation of theories of identity to aid us in a useful definition of academic professional identity, a definition that accounts for both the cognitive and behavioral outcomes of our academic faculty and academic managers within the context of two dominant institutional logics—academic logic and neoliberal logic.

Identity can be derived from various components, including life spheres such as cultural, economical, familial, financial, political, and religious contexts; it may be influenced by life roles, such as “parent” or “breadwinner”; and, it may stem from work facets, such as the workplace environment or social groups in that workplace (Bothma, Lloyd, & Khapova, 2015). Identity is formed through a process whereby the individual adopts “certain meanings, norms, expectations, beliefs, and core values” (Bothma et al., 2015, p. 27) in accordance with a social group (such as the academy). Institutional logics, discussed in the Introduction, are manifest in the meanings, norms, values, beliefs, and expectations that shape an individual’s identity within an institution. Thus, the logics of the institution (i.e., academic logic and neoliberal logic) play a role in the construction of an academic professional identity.

Explanations of how identity formation processes occur vary across different identity theories. The outcome of an identity formation process is referred to as either a prototype (Hogg, 2001) or an identity standard (Burke & Stets, 2009), which is a guide for behavior (Bothma et al., 2015). Social identity theory posits that identity is rooted in membership in a specific group where the group members hold compatible views and perspectives (Bothma et al., 2015). Self-categorization theory, an extension of social identity theory, places the determination for membership in a group on the individual. Individuals’ self-categorization in a group suggests that individuals behave, think, and perceive phenomena in accordance with the group (Bothma et al., 2015). These group members reject adherence to behaviors and values associated with perceived “out groups” and adhere instead to behaviors and values associated with the “in group” of their self-categorization (Bothma et al., 2015).

Role identity theories differ from social identity theories in that role identity theory places the basis of identity in role-related behaviors; that is, individuals act in accordance with role expectations (Hogg & Ridgeway, 2003; Stets & Burke, 2003). The term salience is used in identity theories to explain the activation of an identity as well as the probability that an identity will be activated in a situation (Bothma et al., 2015; Burke & Stets, 2009). A given identity (e.g., academic) will be more salient in one place (e.g., a university) than in another (e.g., a prison). Individuals endeavor to verify their identity through feedback loops, or reinforcement from others, and adjust behavior to maintain an identity prototype or standard within a specific social situation (Bothma et al., 2015; Burke, 1991). When an individual fails to activate and verify the acceptable behaviors and identity, this can result in negative feelings such as personal stress and either a change in behaviors or reduced salience, including abandonment of that identity (Burke, 1991).

Professional identity alludes to the part of a person’s identity that is derived through identification with a profession. Professional identity is an “enduring” (Ibarra, 1999, p. 764) “collective identity of a profession and an individual’s own sense of the professional role” (Feen-Calligan, 2005, p. 122). We understand professional identity as a self-categorization that involves role expectations and individual and group construction.

Our data reveal that academic professional identity extends beyond the formal role of the professor, the individual faculty member, or the academic manager. Academic professional identity is derived from the personal attributes and history of an individual, their self-categorization as an academic, their adherence to both role expectations as well as socially accepted behaviors, and their membership in a social “in-group” that verifies their identity through both formal (e.g., tenure, merit, and promotion) and informal mechanisms (e.g., norms and expectations).

The academic professional identity of full-time tenure track faculty, those who are in the most stable position in the academic profession, is both complex and ambiguous (Enders & Musselin, 2008). Yet, the scholarly discourse reflects an idealized past for the faculty, when there was less complexity and ambiguity (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006), and a more homogeneous way to characterize academic professional identity (Becher, 1989; Clark, 1987), with variation limited to institutional type and discipline. U.S. scholars Finkelstein, Martin Conley, and Schuster (2016) assert that the faculty profession in the United States is transformed, compared to the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, this alteration has for these scholars no clear source: They are vague about those at the helm of the transformation; they have little to say about those who manage the profession. Furthermore, Finkelstein et al. (2016) fail to suggest, as do earlier critics (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), that contemporary faculty identity is ambiguous, not one condition or another, but a combination of several conditions, such as the managed laborer and autonomous actor, and that those who manage the profession are themselves, in the main, academic professionals.

Academic Professional Identity

As early as the 1950s, faculty in the United States self-identified as independent professionals, with responsibilities dictated primarily by themselves and accountable to themselves and their colleagues rather than to their employers (Jencks & Riesman, 1968). Aside from unionization, as a condition where faculty are categorized as a collective, faculty at a university constitute a legitimate collective body only in governance matters (often through a senate), and even here the role is informal, legally as recommenders. However, faculty in disciplines or departments can be construed as a collective within a university. They function as a guild (Clark, 1987) or tribe (Becher, 1989), in some contrast to enterprise or administrative authority (Clark, 1987), even though the discipline or department has more traditional authority than legal authority over academic matters. Indeed, discipline or program affiliation and the socialization process within that unit have a shaping effect upon not just the cohesiveness of a unit but as well upon the academic professional identity of tenure track faculty at a university (Becher, 1989; Clark, 1987). Research and the associated research culture and epistemology of a discipline are major socializers going back to graduate education of university faculty (Austin, 2002; Becher, 1989).

If you go to graduate school in a graduate department that has [a] self-concept of itself as a grant-driven research shop that is a research one and is training people to do that sort of work, the rules of the game are very quickly learned and very easy and apparent. Because it is the entire culture. This is very clear. (professor, sociology, research university)

The research function has differentiated and stratified tenure track faculty in “hard/soft and pure/applied” fields or disciplines (Becher, 1989, p. 153), and more recently through productivity measures that include the acquisition of money (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004) and prestige, as well as funds from sources legitimate to managers (Roisinger et al., 2016). “In the sciences, the culture of evaluation of faculty is really based on how much money is arriving” (professor, sociology, research university). Research as well is a primary activity of university faculty, especially at research-oriented, or research intensive, universities, and is reinforced through faculty activity with external resource providers (Becher, 1989; Rosinger et al., 2016; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). Moreover, the research role of full-time tenure track university faculty has, traditionally, at least from the 1960s to the 1990s, provided them with an independent role within their universities, and served as a central characteristic of the profession (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). Such autonomy is a key marker of a professional (Freidson, 2001).

Traditionally, self-ascribed identity, research orientation, and discipline affiliation are major components in the academic professional identity of tenure track faculty. In identity theory, when an individual categorizes themself as an occupant of a role, they incorporate “the meanings and expectations associated with that role and its performance” (Stets & Burke, 2000, p. 225). That is, “identities are internalizations of role expectations” (Stryker & Burke, 2000, p. 286), which include the meanings attributed not only by the self but also by others. These meanings of roles and the expectations for action shape individual behaviors, which themselves convey meanings and thus reinforce or repudiate identities and what they signify (Stryker & Burke, 2000). If others confirm one’s identity through interactions (behaviors), then that identity is verified and reinforced. In contrast, if one’s identity is repudiated, then the saliency of an identity erodes (Stryker & Burke, 2000). In the case of full-time tenure track faculty, social and professional contexts are thus salient for academic professional identity. Faculty in departments that they view as “collegial” or “supportive” project positive views of their work and their academic professional identity (Hoyt, 2012). In this way, faculty can and do align academic professional identity with group identity, sometimes a discipline or department, and sometimes a research collaborative group that is either internal or external to the university, or a combination.

Group identity suggests individual commitment to common values, beliefs, and understandings of experience. “[W]hen several persons interacting in a common situation mutually verify the identities held by each, their commitment to one another increases” (Stryker & Burke, 2000, p. 290). These affinity identities (Gee, 2000–01) can be undermined when “persons interacting in a common situation have difficulties in verifying their identities” (Stryker & Burke, 2000, p. 290). When this is the case, “ties are broken and structures dissolve” (Stryker & Burke, 2000, p. 290). Fractious departments can undermine faculty professional identities just as “collegial” departments can validate identities. Faculty in departments classified as “collegial” by their members suggest that their colleagues are supportive and thus their behaviors verify or validate their academic professional identities. A professor of biology at a comprehensive university characterizes her department as “collegial,” that is, faculty are engaged in departmental matters and they interact without animosity. Her experiences in this department are without negative experiences that undermine her academic professional identity.

One of the things that’s attractive about this department is we’re pretty collegial. I’ve been in some departments that are slightly dysfunctional, but this particular department is good, and that’s part of the attraction of my job is that the faculty in this particular department pretty much all get along, and they all pull their weight, and they—I don’t say that they’re all easy going—but enough so that we get along. The downside is our faculty meetings sometimes last three hours because they won’t go home. … Every other week we get together, so things get hashed out. … The dynamics [are] fairly loose, and that may be the key to the success of this department. It’s more of a democracy. … We’re not so big that we can’t have an effective meeting, and we’re not so small that individual personalities might cause a problem. (professor, biology, comprehensive university)

Faculty in departments where there is limited trust and where there is fear of retaliation for behaviors that are not in accord with group preferences find themselves unable to express their views; indeed, they are unable to enact their professional judgment. An associate professor of sociology at a research university, who is newly tenured, reflected upon his departmental colleagues’ behaviors during his tenure process. His academic professional identity was threatened both because the tenure process placed him in a position of vulnerability and because the judgments of his departmental colleagues negated and did not verify his role.

[W]hen you have to worry about retaliation, when it comes to voting, promotions, files, and so on, then it’s hard for me to really feel comfortable as though I can really express what it is that I want to say when I’m worried about retaliation. … I actually had experiences when it came to certain times in which my file went up where people voted and said things about my file and my record that were inaccurate. And so, when that happens, then you have validation that this is a group that is not to be trusted; that you’re being excluded; that they don’t see you as an insider or somebody worthy and so on. And so, I felt like, “Yeah, I didn’t trust that I could say anything without there being possible retaliation, and these folks have some power because, if ultimately my tenure is at least partially decided upon by my faculty’s vote, and I feel as though I have to watch myself, then I can’t feel like I’m a full citizen.” And then when that gets validated by things that happen in terms of voting, then you really feel as though, “Yeah, I was right not to trust my faculty.” So those kinds of things make me feel that way. (associate professor, sociology, research university)

The strengthening or weakening, or indeed dissolving, of group identity affects individual commitment and the salience of an identity. Such is also the case in disciplinary research.

[Y]ou get both communities of cooperation, people who are personally supportive, engaged in the same kind of activity … supportive of one another. And you also get an awful lot of individual competitiveness. In many ways, the humanities and letters are more viciously personally competitive than the world of science, although there’s certainly an awful lot of that in sciences as well. In science, the science side … the individual contributions are also very important, but the products are very often collaborative team projects. (professor, sociology, research university)

The implication, then, is that identities, including academic professional identity, are fragile, subject to social disconfirmation or rejection (Knights & Clarke, 2014). In particular, within the context of a university, there are idealized expectations for academics, where there are both processes of ongoing identity formation (e.g., tenure and promotion) and multiple demands (e.g., teaching, research, and service) that lead to self-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Management of the Academic Profession
• Chapter 1 Full-time Tenure Track Faculty: Academic Professional Identity and Managerialism
• Chapter 2 Non-Tenure Track Faculty: Professionals with Commitment and Self-Worth in an Exploitative Environment
• Chapter 3 Department Chairs: Dual Roles, Dual Identities
• Chapter 4 Academic Deans: Double Agents of Two Institutional Logics and Two Institutional Domains
• Chapter 5 Higher Education Management in the U.S. University
• Appendix
• References
• Index
• Back Cover