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The tower of pong Bullshit Towers – Neoliberalism and Managerialism in Universities by Margaret Sims ISBN: 978-1-78997-812-4, Peter Lang Publisher, Oxford, x+196 pp., 2020. Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer and Norman Simms
Ever since neoliberalism and managerialism arrived at universities, the ivied halls have deliberately been changed from places where people wanted to go to places that people endure. As a new caste of managerialist, corporate apparatchiks, and CEOs – albeit the latter with a range of titles – took over (Murray & Frijters, 2017), students eager to learn became customers eager to get the stamp of approval for a job (Hil, 2015). Inside The Toxic University (Smyth, 2017), the most willing executors of managerialism (always to be found in administration) were promoted into management. Others, less manageable, were downgraded, side-lined, dismissed, retrenched, and casualised. Simultaneously, academics, who originally constituted ‘the university,’ became a necessary evil, a cost, but one to be reduced. Based on her decades of experience in academe, Margaret Sims’ book outlines how this process was inexorably and relentlessly carried through. Today, many academics go to work, to a place that ‘makes [their] stomach churn and [their] blood pressure sky-rocket’ (p. 3). Sims says, she got the idea of using the word bullshit from reading management emails, something she has done for the better part of the last twenty-five years. While the term bullshit has become ever more prevalent ever since the US philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a book On Bullshit (2005), the word has entered the scholarly arena, the champion of the dispossessed, ready to take on the lions (liars and their prevarications) of managerialism. Recently, bullshit became truly popular in other gladiatorial combats through Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018) and Spicer’s Business Bullshit (2018). There are many very justifiable reasons to call universities bullshit towers, places run by those with bullshit jobs engaged in the business of bullshit. What corporate apparatchiks in universities do may appear as bullshit, it is nevertheless dangerous bullshit (in the sense of meaningless and obscurantist discourse). Much of the bullshit we see – many see it not just from afar as a theoretical ‘cloud of unknowing’ but experience it first-hand as a traumatic shock to the system – is created by a corps of corporate apparatchiks. These corporate apparatchiks do not really work in a proper corporation (one that produces or distributes things) but have taken on the ideology of a corporation (a consolidation vol. 63, no. 1, 2021
of managers who merely self-aggrandise and self-perpetuate). They transfer the ideology of neoliberalism into the idea of a university to the point that it becomes not just another ideology to compete for mental and bureaucratic space, but the very ideology of managerialism (Klikauer, 2013), the one that replaces knowledge, tradition and intellectual ambition. Sims is correct when saying, ‘Neoliberalism…is an ideology’ (p. 5). Reading through the godfather of neoliberalism F. von Hayek’s catechism The Road to Serfdom (1944), indeed one gets the distinct impression that his short(ish) booklet isn’t on academic economics at all but an insidious ideological pamphlet. At the end of his long life, Hayek himself admitted that his main success had been the influence he had on journalists, working economists, and politicians. One of Hayek’s outstanding successes was ‘the removal of state responsibility’ (p. 7), which is now to be read as ‘the state or status of responsibility.’ In neoliberalism, this new condition of statelessness means privatisation. In managerialism this means shifting responsibilities (liabilities, consequences and burdens of guilt) to workers, ideologically camouflaged as empowerment (another meaningless buzz word, like agency). For university managers, it means taking credit for what academics have achieved (as scholars and teachers) while blaming them when things (the financial and structural integrity of the institution) go wrong. This remains one of the most important rules management has ever invented. Of course, in the old days of a more equal (collegial) life at university, to be an academic was to enter into venerable learned profession, a career in creating and evaluating knowledge and passing on the improved ideas and the refined skills to the next generation; therefore, it could not continue once managerialism moved in lock, stock and barrel. From then on, it proclaimed to the animals in the farm: ‘No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal’ (p. 8). Any university boss or corporate henchman will tell you that empowerment and collegiality are important. And, of course, at the same time, they say that ‘any viable sense of agency [is] undermined’ (p. 8). Simultaneously, ‘dissent is perceived as traitorous, and as such, a legitimate target for punitive action’ (p. 8). That’s just because some animals are more equal than the others.
The tower of pong Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer and Norman Simms
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