In communism, Marx and Engels wrote in 1845â1846, everyone is able âto hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, [âŚ] without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or criticâ (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 47). Now, is this not how everyday life of todayâs academics looks like? Are they not also teaching in the morning, serving coffee in the afternoon, proofreading in the evening, and grading after dinner, without ever becoming teachers, waiters, proofreaders, or PhD supervisors? Indeed, the world of academic workers appears as what Marx and Engels described as communism. But then again, the wealth of nations also âappears as an âimmense collection of commoditiesââ, to quote a later Marx book (1976, p. 125), the one devoted, according to Fredric Jameson at least, to the question of unemployment (see Jameson 2011, pp. 2â3). And this is precisely the difference between the prefigured communism of the âearlyâ Marx and the criticised capitalism of the âmatureâ Marx, namely, the difference between the undoing of employment and, quite simply, unemployment. Academics today appear as communists insofar as they are in effect unemployed.
The central hypothesis of this edited volume is that the kinds of restructurings of academic work that are underway today not only have increased employment insecurity in academia but also may actually be producing unemployment both within and outside academia. The idea is that recent and current reorganisations of higher education and research work, and reorientations of academic life (as students, researchers, and teachers) generally, which are taking place around the world, achieve exactly the opposite of what they claim: though ostensibly undertaken to facilitate employment, these moves actually produce unemployment both for those within academia and for graduate job seekers in other sectors.
To flesh out the hypothesis further, the kinds of restructurings involved are (1) moving away from public funding of higher education towards self-funding and loans, which effectively blur the boundaries between public and private interests; (2) aligning policy for higher education pedagogy and research with the putative expectations of employers and âusersâ in different sectors, which entails pushing for ever-greater application-based (rather than critical and epistemological) study; (3) increasing emphasis on academic hierarchies (academic âleadershipâ and line management) and ad hoc or casual appointments (keeping a large stratum of academic workers underpaid and insecure) in the institutional structuring of research and pedagogy; (4) effectively delinking academic management from academic production and engagement, so that academic management often works like corporate management or management consultancies with âskillsâ that are indifferent to academic values; (5) reducing funding for research which is not ostentatiously applied, and making funding conditional to being âbusyâ (organising conferences, exhibitions, networks, events, etc.) at the expense of time for reading, writing, and productive discussion; (6) introducing measures of public standing (publicity) that are often at the expense of the integrity of research; and (7) systemically reducing, therefore, academic freedomâin the undertaking of teaching and researchâand the social and economic freedom of students, teachers, and researchers (down to the increasing dependency on managers and within families).
These kinds of moves are premised on two principal assumptions. First, that higher academic work is a privilege, and those engaged in it are apt to waste public resources and âskive offâ unless they are heavily controlled. And second, that employment is a matter of application and is simply âcreatedâ (almost altruistically) by non-academic âindustryâ, and such employment simply exists out there and is available only to graduates who are âfittedâ to the purpose. The hypothesis on which this book is based takes the opposite view. For the first, academic work is not a privilege but a public necessity, and cautions about âwasteâ are premised on the misguided attribution of âprivilegeâ. For the second, employment in every sector of productive industry is to a significant extent created by diverse and often unpredictable and apparently theoretical research (without an immediate investment in application) and pedagogic enterprise, and academic freedom and the social freedom of academics are crucial for this input not to become stultified. Moreover, academic freedom is at the basis of every area of social equity and progress.
Further, the hypothesis that this book opens to question could also lead to exploring the determinants of the seven prevailing moves outlined above. It is possible that the designing of academia now to effectively produce unemployment has a deliberate ideological agenda. This edited volume does not speculate on what that agenda may be, but it does not accept an easy assumption that the current moves are simply thoughtless or misguidedly well meant.
With this hypothesis in view, the manner in which academia is being restructured, and the lives of academic workers and students configured, is opened to exploration here under four broad headings (proceeding from the material conditions of academic work, through their impact on both institutional and personal practices of academic workers themselves, to the ways in which these workers might in turn collectively take charge of their material conditions): the political economy of higher education policy initiatives and institutional functioning now, in relation to teaching and research; management and leadership against academic freedom; generation gaps and economic dependency in academic life; and the scope of collective action in academia.
The making of this collection of essays was overdetermined by a basic performative contradiction: those who are willing to engage in a sustained critique of academia tend to be those who often cannot find the material conditions for such a critique within academia. Now, the cause and effect can be a matter of discussion: critics may be systematically marginalised in academia by their targets; or else those academics who find themselves on the margins of academia often develop a critical stance towards it. For both groups, however, the very situation that gives them motivation for critique is also what makes that critique difficult to execute. And indeed, not unlike the illusory yet necessary appearance of communism in the opening example of precarious academic workers, this volume may appear as a product of unalienated labour, due, for example, to the extraordinarily high proportion of collective authorship and open-access online resources. Yet this only appears as communism: if contributors wrote their chapters in pairs, this is not because they live in a post-capitalist commune but often because they were not able to find the time to write their chapters on their own; in those chapters they tended to quote open-access online sites (rather than, say, monographs published by university presses), but this is not because the struggle for the commons has been won globally but because critical and empirical material on academia is often limited to blogs (rather than being published, say, by American university presses).
So, the very fact that you are holding this book in your hands is the result of a practical overcoming of a contradiction that puts an epistemological obstacle on the way of any critique of the very material conditions of critical thinking. Indeed, a distinctive feature of this book is that it does not call only upon experts who are ensconced in their careers to pronounce on the issues raised. Contributors here are from different generations and societies (from Australia and the USA to Slovenia and Croatia, from the UK and Germany to India and Cyprus), and at different points in their academic careers (from full professors to doctoral candidates), yet they are all concerned about the changing contours of the profession, and they have all been engaged in recent student struggles. This book is premised on the notion that experiencing or having experienced employment insecurity and engaging with academic thinking and research need not be unrelated activities, and that life experience and empirical research and reasoning (in a generalising or universal direction) need not be alienated from each other. On the contrary, they may feed productively into each other, insofar as a reflection on the singular precarious conditions of oneâs own academic engagement offers the clearest view on the increasingly universal condition of the academic production of unemployment. In other words, the increasingly unproductive impact of employment insecurity on academic research is not the only way life experience and academic thinking can be interrelated. As academics, we can also do the opposite and use our research skills to analyse precisely the employment insecurity that we are experiencing. Moreover, such a reflection on the social conditions of our academic work is indispensable if we want to conduct this work as proper scholarly (as opposed to unreflexive, ideological) practice.
This is perhaps why the post-2007 Great Recession has brought not only a deepening of the crisis in academia but also a new wave of critical studies on this accelerated commodification of knowledge. For example, Andrew McGettiganâs The Great University Gamble (2013)âa book intended to do for the UK what Chris Newfieldâs 2008 book Unmaking the Public University did for the USA, and to explain in the process the authorâs encounter with precarisation amid the notorious dissolution of continental philosophy at Middlesex Universityâoffers a detailed political and economic analysis of the current UK governmentâs higher education policies, warning that British universities are now open to commercial pressures that effectively transform education from a public good into a private financial investment. Contributors to Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education follow McGettiganâs argument while widening his historical and geographical scope beyond UK government policies. By doing this, they also follow the argument, put forward by Jeffrey R. Di Leo in his 2014 book Corporate Humanities in Higher Education, that the neoliberal commodification of higher education requires humanists to be even better at what they do best, namely, valuing contributions for the ways they advance critical dialogue within academy. Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education can also be viewed as an attempt to update the argument Marc Bousquet developed in 2008 in How the University Works, namely that the very concept of the job market works to mask the ways in which the dominant labourers in the university classrooms are underpaid adjunct instructors. Last but not least, by following the Edu-Factory Collective in its rejection, in Toward a Global Autonomous University (2009), of any nostalgia for the privileged place of scholarship and national culture that used to be guaranteed by the university, this book sketches ways of broadening the perspective of critical pedagogy as assumed, for example, in Sheila Macrineâs edited volume Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times (2009).
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In this volume, the examination of the relationship between knowledge production and the production of unemployment begins with a series of insights into the political economy of recent higher education policy initiatives. Danijela Dolenec opens the collection by focusing on the Western Balkans. Within the broader process of European integration, the Bologna process and the Lisbon Strategy introduced a new and spectacular dynamic into the affairs of higher education in Europe, carrying the potential of transforming higher education as fundamentally as the nation-state changed the medieval universities. Bologna and Lisbon are taken to further the same four basic objectives: mobility, employability, attractiveness, and competitiveness. While Bologna aims to reorganise higher education systems through three-cycle structures, comparable degrees, and qualification frameworks, the revamped 2005 Lisbon Agenda focuses on making Europe a more attractive place to invest and work in, making knowledge and innovation the heart of growth, and creating more and better jobs. In the Western Balkans, these processes are perceived as more binding than they actually are, argues Dolenec in her chapter, as they importantly shape national strategic plans and legislative agendas. Importing the rhetoric of these initiatives, countries of the region vow to create âknowledge societiesâ and âknowledge trianglesâ that will supposedly advance their economies. Usually without appreciating the irony, these rhetorical figures are adopted as official policy goals in the poorest regions of the European Union, where gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is at 30â40 % of the EU27 average, where registered unemployment rates are as high as 30 %, and where the service economy stands for waiters, cooks, and care workers instead of IT and high-tech industries. Dolenec analyses this unhappy policy transfer by grounding it in the political economy of EU peripheral states, on the one hand, and in the context of austerity politics, on the other. As dependent market economies, peripheral states of the Western Balkans are highly reliant on foreign investment, which has meant that they suffered contraction since the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008. The imperative of balanced public budgets demands austerity measures, which has been reflected in cuts to public spending on higher education and research. Gross investments in research and development in the region have declined dramatically in the past two decades, and today the region invests below its level of development. The whole region invests approximately âŹ495 million in research and development per year, which is the equivalent to one US research university. On the basis of this evidence, Dolenec questions the appropriateness of the wholesale transfer of these European objectives to countries of the Western Balkans. While many researchers argue that Bologna and Lisbon processes helped advance an instrumental concept of higher education in these countries, Dolenec pursues a less researched problem, that of charting the problematic impacts of adopting the rhetoric of policy change designed for advanced knowledge economies of the core in dramatically different socio-economic contexts of the European periphery.
Building on his experience as a radical theorist and activist in Slovenia and other ex-Yugoslav parts of the Western Balkans, PrimoĹž KraĹĄovec refutes the theory of human capital from the standpoint of the critique of political economy. In the first part of his chapter, he sketches the intellectual history and sociopolitical context of the development of theories of human capital. He then moves on to criticise the neoliberal equalisation of labour with capital as well as the theory according to which investment in human capital brings profits to individual workers. In the final section, KraĹĄovec shows how current educational reforms impact the learning process and the working conditions at public universities in Slovenia and, by extension, comparable countries. Human-capital theory was conceived as early as the 1960s in the circle of American neoliberal economists, with its prehistory going back to the neoliberal epistemology as it was conceived in Vienna in the early 1930s. Yet it needed almost 20 years to gain recognition in both academic and policy-making circles. For it was only in the 1980s that human-capital theory was able to be broadened by new growth theory and its macroeconomic dimension. And as for the general social and economic conditions that allowed for the growing importance of human-capital theory, the key ones, for KraĹĄovec, were the rise of neoliberalism in general and neoliberal reforms of higher education in particular. Human-capital theory served as an ideological backbone of these reforms, which tightened the integration of the university with the economy, introduced (or increased) tuition fees, and standardised testing, constant evaluations, and audit procedures, increasing workload of both students and professors. In the 1990s, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched its ideological campaign for the âknowledge-based economyâ, and the EU started to prepare the Lisbon Strategy and the Bologna reform. During that time, human-capital theory underwent a silent mutation and began to creep into academic pedagogy. Another 20 years later, a review of Slovenian academic pedagogy literature shows that that there is hardly an article that does not list either âhuman capitalâ or âknowledge societyâ among its keywords. Yet, as KraĹĄovec concludes, in a stark contradistinction with the promises of increased general social welfare in the knowledge-based society, methods of its implementation hurt first and foremost those who are supposed to be its cutting edge, namely intellectual workers. The general notion of the knowledge-based society and the particular theory of human capital are as flawed as they are ubiquitous, according to KraĹĄovec.
P.K. Vijayan closes the section on the political economy of recent higher education policy initiatives by discussing new educational policies in India. The publication of the âReport on a Policy Framework for Reforms in Educationâ in 2000 saw the initiation of a major shift in policy formulation for higher education in India, according to Vijayan, a shift that has been sustained independently of the ideology or political programme of the government in power. The report was co-authored by Mukesh Ambani and Kumaramangalam Birla, respective heads of two of the most powerful business houses in India, with rapidly growing global presence and influence. That it was commissioned by the Prime Ministerâs Council on Trade and Industry is a telling indicator of the direction the state was already looking in regarding policy changes in higher education. The report set the agenda for the series of further reports, policy initiatives, and legislative measures that followed, some produced by the government but others, for example, by the multinational consultancy Ernst & Young Pvt. Ltd (in collaboration with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Planning Commission of the Government of India). As Vijayan demonstrates in his chapter, all of these documents and initiatives are focused on opening the educational sector to foster greater private initiatives and encourage more local and international investors; tailoring curricula and syllabi, as well as educational schedules, to meet the expectations and requirements of commerce and industry; synchronising the Indian higher education system with its global (i.e., European and American) counterparts to allow for easy movement of personnel and students between the systems; encouraging the use of information and communication technology in all educational spheres; introducing systems of calibration and evaluation of teaching based on various criteria of âproductivityâ; introducing systems of regulation and accountability of time spent âon the jobâ aimed essentially at actively depoliticising campus spaces, but ostensibly at enforcing discipline and encouraging research and publication; shifting increasingly towards contract-based employment, and away from permanent tenures; and, finally, introducing measures that will bypass or otherwise render redundant the various provisions of affirmative action for socially and economically weaker sections. Vijayan examines these documents and legislations with the aim of identifying and exposing the politics of the various provisions and prohibitions espoused in them; he outlines the possible ramifications and implications, for higher education, in their implementation; and he comments on their relations to larger economic, social, and policy changes that are underway in India currently. Vijayan also briefly discusses the (in)effectiveness of judicial review of such processes, by way of discussing courses of action through reference to a specific case to which he was party.
For those concerned with teaching and scholarly work in higher education now, talk of âacademic leadershipâ is everywhere, Richard Allen and Suman Gupta note in their chapter, which opens the section of the book devoted to management and leadership against academic freedom. Scanning academic jobs pages, looking at Research Councilsâ funding schemes, examining government policy documents on higher education, consulting university promotions and appraisals procedures, mulling academic workload calculations, and listening to deliberations in university committeesâall these suggest that the phrase academic leadership has, so to speak, gone viral. There are more scholarly sounding publications on the subject than specialists can keep up with; numerous well-endowed firms offer academic leadership training and guidance; think tanks constantly urge the need to nurture more academic leaders and corporations that can cultivate them; and newspapers inform of the privileges of top-level academic leaders with grudging admiration. In their chapter, Allen and Gupta attempt to contextualise the shifting connotations of academic leadership in order to understand the current circumstances of academic life. In the first part of the chapter, they do so in a broad manner, by considering the conceptual nuances of academic leadership amid phases in rationalising the conditions of academic w...