The Idea of the University – A review essay

The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts by Debaditya Bhattacharya (ed.)

ISBN: 9781138055384 (hbk.), London: Routledge, xix+287 pp., 2019.

Public Universities, Managerialism and the Value of Higher Education by Rob Watts

ISBN: 9781137535986 (hbk.), London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, xxi+358 pp., 2017.

Politics, Managerialism, and University Governance: Lessons from Hong Kong under China’s Rule since 1997 by Wing-Wah Law

ISBN: 9789811373022, Singapore: Springer, (hbk.), xxii+223pp., 2019.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer & Catherine Link

Three contemporary books examine the fundamental changes occurring in and around today’s universities. The first book argues that the origin of the modern university lies in Europe. Starting with such a European perspective, Debaditya Bhattacharya’s edited volume The Idea of the University highlights the essence of the modern university. This concept hinges on modernism’s idea of a university dedicated to enlightenment (Kant, 1784). Such a concept was strongly influenced by Wilhelm Humboldt (1767-1835; see Nybom, 2003). Humboldt’s Bildungsideal [education ideal] favours a unity of research and studies directed towards the two Enlightenment ideals: the rational individual and the world citizen (MacIntyre, 2009). Bhattacharya’s volume shows the damage that has been done to Humboldtian universities in the USA and India. The book also illustrates why and how Humboldt’s Enlightenment university has been defeated by the neoliberal university.

The second book – Rob Watts’ Public Universities, Managerialism and the Value of Higher Education – presents an insightful overview of many changes experienced by universities in three Anglo-Saxon countries, namely Australia, the UK and the USA. The book delivers one of the more comprehensive overviews of the current state of universities.

The last book positions Hong Kong’s universities since the hand-over from British rule to Chinese rule. Wing-Wah Law’s book focuses on the emergence of university managerialism since 1997 – an ideology that has infected many, if not most, universities (Aspromourgos, 2012).

This review starts with Bhattacharya’s The Idea of the University before taking a look at the Anglo-Saxon universities and finishing with the highly instructive case of Hong Kong.

The Idea of the University: Histories & Contexts

The Idea of the University

In the preface to The Idea of the University, Debaditya Bhattacharya writes that today’s universities exist at a time of a ‘resurgence of right-wing forces across continents [fostering] a climate of rabid anti-intellectualism’ (p. vx). Perhaps even more than its right-wing populist offsider, the ideology of neoliberalism has done very serious damage to ‘Humboldt’s idea of a university’ (p. 1). This damage comes through preventing universities from conducting research ‘uninterrupted and unforced’ by external powers (p. 3). Originally, many university systems ‘took inspiration from the Humboldtian model’ (p. 6). Against that sits today’s neoliberal university. It is a university defined by ‘the logic of production and consumption’ (p. 11) with a ‘fetishisation of performance’ (p. 15; cf. Avigur-Eshel & Berkovich, 2019) often mutating in what Fleck calls impact factor fetishism (Fleck, 2013). Performance and competition have been fostered by external agencies including the World Bank (Federici, 2009).

The World Bank’s The Challenge of Establishing World- Class Universities (Salmi, 2009) basically takes the twenty most elitist universities and tells the rest to be just like them. It is a bit like telling a slightly overweight middle-aged businessman who plays golf once a month, that you too can be Tiger Woods. Following such illusions, many local universities around the world have been made to believe they too can be world-class universities. This is not going to happen. On a more serious note, the 2008 ‘World Bank’s World-Class University report [had the] mission of poverty reduction’ (p. 13). At the same time, the World Bank is ‘promoting the development of private tertiary education’ (World Bank, 2009 p. 12). In a quasi-tautological move, the World Bank believes that poverty can be reduced by privatising universities so that university fees prevent the poor – and in some countries a growing (India) or dwindling (USA) middle-class – from accessing higher education.

Because of the World Bank’s privatisation policies, there were ‘1100 per cent fee hikes for certain courses’ (p. 24) at certain universities. Surely the fact that ‘universities impose costs on students’ (Chomsky, 2014, p. 2) is a welcoming development for the World Bank and neoliberalism. For those universities that refuse to be privatised, there is always managerialism’s ‘model of punitive audit for public universities’ (p. 28). Overall, the World Bank supported the transition from public funding to private investment. By and large, the World Bank’s neoliberal ideology is based on three principles (p. 48): 1. The principle of value – capital appreciation and the capacity to attract new investors. 2. Skyrocketing tuition fees…that stratify societies; and 3. The idea that privatisation breaks apart teaching and research, decreasing the value of scholarship.

‘The conversion of universities from public to private purpose, in both research and education, has been shaped by the demands that accompany private funding’ (p. 53). For students, the public-to-private conversion means that ‘privatisation limits access and funnels the historically excluded towards technical training rather than broad education in the science and letters’ (p. 56). The poor continue to labour while the rich attend expensive universities. This seems to be the neoliberal model of the World Bank. Meanwhile, one of neoliberalism’s key goals has been achieved, namely that ‘we are…losing universities as sites for the generation of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word’ (p. 58).

Apart from the pre-designed loss of democracy, poorer students are deterred from entering university so that the poor are trained to work. Like during the 19th century, they are simply confined to Learn to Labour (Wills, 1977). In short, ‘the only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus value for the capitalist’ (p. 63). Not even the ideological words of sophisticated human resources management talking of high performance work systems – HPWs can alter this fact. HPWs aren’t designed to alter that fact. They are designed to camouflage the profit-making imperative of companies, corporations and ultimately capitalism (Baig et al., 2018).

That the world centres around private profits can be experienced in private kindergartens, private schooling, and the private ‘surplus university’ (p. 63). These institutions condition (HR, 2010) young people just ‘as the neoliberal university trains them in the rhythms of flexibility and selfexploitation’ (p. 65). These surplus universities operate as ‘teaching factories’ (p. 67) where an ‘accelerated learning process’ (p. 69) creates ‘students [who are] self-financing entrepreneurs’ (p. 70). Meanwhile, ‘the figure of the teacher is merely that of an administrator’ (p. 74) delivering prefabricated, modular and testable knowledge to Excellent Sheep (Deresiewicz, 2014).

Today’s students – now reframed as customers – are trained (not necessarily educated) in ‘the neoliberal university obsessed with the factory format – as represented in its obsession with…academic performance, and rankings (Avigur-Eshel & Berkovich, 2019) based on technological upgrades such as e-learning’ (p. 83). With the e-learning of the ‘digital diploma mills’ (Federici, 2009, p, 454) or not, this signifies what social philosopher André Gorz calls ‘the despotism of the factory’ (Gorz, 1970, p. 2) – a ‘tyrannical system’ (Chomsky, 2014, p. 4). Factory-like e-learning is a classical euphemism. Learning hardly takes place inside an e – electronic. It takes place in classrooms (Robinson, 2010). Instead of learning, what takes place inside the neoliberal university is ‘the enclosure of knowledge’ (p. 93). This is embedded in ‘the dismantling of public education at all levels [which] has been the hallmark of neoliberal structural adjustment’ (p. 94; cf. MacIntyre, 2009). All this fits into ‘a neoliberal configuration driven by privatisation [and] state disinvestment’ (p. 104) marking ‘the triumphalist narrative of liberal capitalism’ (p. 106).

Inside the neoliberal university, one finds ‘corporate-style managerial regimes [with] bureaucratic mechanism [and] strict surveillance’ (p. 109; cf. Zuboff, 2019) often signifying ‘private educational factories’ (p. 112). On many occasions, one gets the impression these university factories are running on the premise that ‘people who think too much are dangerous’ (p. 125). To prevent dangerous thoughts, ‘teachers and students are [placed] at the mercy of petty bureaucratic… administrators’ (p. 133). University managerialists have assured that ‘the arts, humanities and social science have been diminished…while professional, business and vocational education have expanded’ (p. 135). University graduates should function – not think.

As universities have set up marketing departments spending millions on advertising, universities have become ‘profitmaking teaching shops’ (p. 137). One university has recently spent $20 million simply to rename the university to ‘enhance their branding’ (p. 151; cf. Kimbrey, 2015). At least the money spent on changing the university’s logo wasn’t wasted on research and teaching. Meanwhile, many universities ‘make money off degrees that are as lightweight as the paper on which they are printed’ (p. 137; cf. Klikauer, 2018a). To an overwhelming degree managerialists parrot the World Bank’s hallucination of being a ‘world-class teaching and research institution’ (p. 143).

Still, the ideology of the World Bank creates very serious problems. Apart from the fact that, ‘the possession of a PhD or a DPhil is too often the mark of a miseducated mind’ (MacIntyre, 2009, p. 348), a PhD candidate at an Australian university was recently told not only to complete her PhD thesis but also to have three A or A* publications. This follows the A*/ABC ranking of journals according to which five per cent of journals are ranked A*/A, 15 per cent B and 50 per cent are ranked as C (Dobson, 2014, p. 232). The focus is on the top five per cent. The PhD candidate’s university managerialists required her to do that even though there are plenty of academics who will never publish a single A or A* publication – let alone three of them (Klikauer, 2020). Managerialists believe that an unknown PhD from an unfamiliar local university in a distant city can push their university towards being a ‘world-class’ university (p. 143; cf. (Dobson, 2014, p. 239).

According to the Australian 2018 list used to ‘calibrate academic work’ (Dobson, 2014, p. 229) and to classifying academic journals into A* (best), A (good), B (okay) and C (bad), there are roughly 250 A and A* journals in the field of management (coded #1503: business and management). The 250 journals within the 1503 code include journals such as Applied Psychology, Acta Psychologica, Demographic Research, Health Services Research, Higher Education, International Migration, Journal of Communication, etc. Let’s do the maths: if each A and A* journal publishes four issues per year containing six peer refereed articles, there may well be about 6,000 A or A* articles published per year.

Globally, there are about 15,000 business schools. If one assumes that each business school has fifty academics (and many schools have more), that would make about 750,000 management academics globally (50 x 15,000 = 750,000). In other words, there are 125 academics per A/A* article per year (750,000 / 15,000 = 125). Beyond that, not all academics even submit an article each year. Only about 60 per cent of all academics submit an academic article to a peer-reviewed journal per annum. In our assumed case, this means 60 per cent of 125 = 75. Still, 75 academics per A/A* journal article. While junior academics are pressured to publish in A/A* journals, senior academics are often less likely to care about such a pressure. In a replication of the bankers’ dilemma (those who need a loan cannot get one and those who do not need a loan can get a loan), a publication dilemma is established: those who cannot publish are forced to publish while those who can publish do no longer want to publish in A/A* journals. In any case, many A/A* journals have about 75 submissions per acceptance. This is a just under two per cent acceptance rate or a 98 per cent rejection rate at top tier journals.

Many top tier journals pride themselves on their high rejection rate. In any case, an artefact of the volume of submissions is not a statement of quality. It is a statement of the success of managerialism (Klikauer 2019). Finally, there is also the well-known bias of disciplinary gate keeping journal editors favouring star authors. Much of this aids the madness of numbers, measurements and rankings. Unfortunately for Albert Einstein who published his Theory of Relativity [Relativitätsprinzip] in 1908 in a journal called Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität und Elektronik, this journal is not an A* journal. The 2018 list only includes the Jahrbuch fuer Wirtschaftswissenschaften (ranked: C). According to university managerialists, Einstein’s theory of relativity should not have been published – it is worthless (Einstein, 1908). Just as, by the same reasoning, is Einstein’s E=mc2 formula published in the Annalen der Physik (1905) – another non-A* journal.

All this explains two things: firstly, the numerical impossibility for many business school academics to publish in an A/A* journal (hence the high rejection rate of A/A* journals); and secondly, it shows managerialism’s madness telling unknown PhD candidates with no track record to publish in A/A* journals. Worse, university managerialists have told senior academics not to publish in B/C journals. Unknown to managerialists, there are many B/C journals that are of extremely high quality – just not in the eyes of managerialists (Dobson, 2014, p. 233).

For managerialism, ‘the very idea of excellence consists in its internal manipulability’ (p. 148). Inside the university, managerialists can easily manipulate PhD-students and academics while ‘mobilising structures of surveillance and control’ (p. 149). Just as one can control a lab rat in Skinner’s box by dangling a carrot in front of it, one can also control PhD students and aspiring academics by dangling a full-time job in front of them. The rat will jump, and the PhD candidate will try to publish in A/A* journals (Lemov, 2006). This support’s managerialism’s ‘fantasy…of people-as-human-capital’ (p. 157) – a mere cost factor for managerialists. The fact that ‘in a reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because they love it’ (Chomsky, 2014, p. 5) is an alien thought for managerialists.

In other cases, university managerialists are eager to establish ‘structural feudalism’ (p. 171). This is something that follows what real management calls strategic business units (SBUs; cf. Govindarajan, 1986). In Managerialism’s rational choice theory of endless games of chance (Abella, 2008), these SBUs can be pitted against each other. A mathematics department can be set against engineering or social science or against the arts. The possibilities are endless for the local warlords called department heads or deanlets (Ginsberg 2011). Uncontrolled, managerial deanlets can transmit the pressures installed by top-managerialists downward. The Harvard Business Review calls this ‘kiss upward and kick downward’ (Chamorro- Premuzic & Sanger, 2016). No wonder the neoliberal university increasingly becomes a prime site of bullying (Lewis, 2004). Even the corporate psychopath thrives under these conditions (Klikauer, 2018b). Beyond that, the product flowing from much of this is that ‘social justice is no longer the responsibility of…the university’ (p. 174).

In the managerial university, ‘the cultural Bildung model of Humboldt’ is no longer of value (p. 185). Bildung now takes place elsewhere. During Humboldt’s times and before Managerialism took hold, ‘for students, the campus was the universe’ (p. 188). In many cases, a campus has been replaced by a parking-lot-university that students drive to and then go home straight after class. Meanwhile, other managerialists call impersonal and dehumanising office blocks Vertical Campus. The linguistic madness – or perhaps the reality camouflaging ideological constructs of university managerialists – knows no boundaries (Orwell, 1948).

Inevitably, this leads to politics. The ‘mundane question of how academic research is controlled by grants cannot be divorced from politics’ (p. 201). This also links to the World Bank’s ideology that ‘higher education should be completely released to private capital’ (p. 213). It makes universities functional additives to capitalism. Deprived of a real campus, real teaching, real learning, and no civic engagement ‘higher education [no longer] provides the space for young people to become citizens’ (p. 245). Now universities provide vocational training between school and work (Klikauer, 2016) ‘promising their students a gateway to superior career possibilities’ (MacIntyre, 2009, p. 350).

The original ‘universitas magistrorum et scholarium – the community of teachers and scholars’ (p. 247; Habermas & Blazek, 1987, p. 11) has long been eliminated in favour of control and competition. University managerialists ‘leave no stone unturned to maintain surveillance’ (p. 269). They have created ‘a system of rewards and punishment based on a sense of good and bad, positive and negative’ (p. 270). Their surveillance system follows Greece’s ργος Πανόπτης – the allseeing Argus Panoptes. It is pan (all) and potikon (to see). In the panopticon, managerialists see all, measure all and control all (Kindsiko, 2018, p. 50). In short, university ‘Managerialism disrupts existing social relations between educational actors, only to reconstruct them in a new system of control’ (Avigur- Eshel & Berkovich, 2019, p. 3) – the all-seeing panopticon.

Meanwhile, external control has led to the fact that ‘in 2011, funding in the US for humanities research was less than half of 1 per cent of the amount that the science and engineering studies had access to [a fact that is somewhat] echoed in Britain…and Australia’ (p. 272). One of the dire consequences of engineering’s over-funding lacking a philosophical-ethical foundation is that science can genetically modify a human baby but to the question should we do that? we have no answer (Habermas & Blazek, 1987, p. 10). Equally daunting is the fact that Debaditya Bhattacharya’s book on The Idea of the University makes abundantly clear that the original concept of the university has been thoroughly demolished by neoliberalism and its evil twin brother of managerialism. All of this leads to the inevitable conclusion that public universities have been privatised while others are still-to-be-privatised. In both cases, managerialists behave as if universities were forprofit companies (Mandell, 2002). Whether private or public university, the destructive ideology of Managerialism has taken hold in many universities. Meanwhile, higher education has been reduced to vocational training. How neoliberalism and managerialism have achieved the same thing in the USA, Great Britain and Australia is illuminated in Rob Watts’ book.

Public Universities and Managerialism

Public Universities and Managerialism

In the preface to Public Universities, Managerialism and the Value of Higher Education, Rob Watts notes that ‘it is increasingly difficult to find universities where learning, as opposed to education and training, is the main goal’ (p. ix; cf. Habermas & Blazek, 1987). Perhaps this is because, ‘higher education is now a commodity’ (p. 10). Learning has been replaced by something that can be sold: an employmentrelated degree. Managerialism’s apparatchiks have convinced many that ‘selling higher education [is important and universities] work in a highly competitive market’ (p. 14; cf. Klikauer, 2015a).

The much-acclaimed educational market has ‘redefined the university in terms of purely economistic calculations [based largely on] consumer satisfaction’ (p. 29), i.e. a multiple-choice survey through which students evaluate courses. It is the application of management’s customer-is-king idea to private and public universities. Under managerialism the ‘distinction between private and public universities is fast becoming blurred’ (p. 31). Today, many, if not most, public universities operate as if they were private for-profit entities. Their focus has truly shifted from philosophy, science, research and teaching towards ‘budget responsibility, efficiency [and] accountability’ (p. 32).

Rafts of willing executors carry out managerialism’s imperatives every day. Staunchly, they stick to managerialism in a Columbus-like fashion. Watts writes ‘until his death, Columbus insisted that he had actually discovered a transatlantic path to India and threatened to hang any of his crew who dared disagree’ (p. 44). University managerialists seem to follow this. Challenge the managerialists and managerialism’s core beliefs and you are done. Gone are the days of ‘Kant’s unrestricted freedom to use his own rational capacity and to speak his own mind’ (p. 47). Kantian philosophy has vanished into thin air. Long gone are the days when ‘universities stood outside the system of market relations and cultivated both higher values and objective knowledge’ (p. 53). In the managerialist university, knowledge’s value lies in its saleability (Sandel, 1998).

Useless to managerialists are universities ‘constrained only by the requirement of truth’ (p. 54). Instead, university managers focus on things that can be measured, controlled and sold. Hence, numbers are relevant. These are numbers of publications – pure output – for example. Ask a colleague ‘how did she become a professor? And the answer is like to be “oh, she published a lot”’. These output publications are a valuable source for university marketing just like the number on some ranking (Amsler & Bolsmann, 2012). With the rise of the managerialist university, many ‘wannabe universities are offering merely professional or vocational courses’ (p. 80). This brings in money.

Under managerialism, much of this has become ‘social plumbing’ (p. 83), as universities are increasingly mere shells of what they once were. They are no longer dedicated to science, wisdom, philosophy, and truth. Now they are dedicated to vocationalism like any other vocational college or training school. Many activities previously organised by academics have been handed over to managerialists (Grubb & Lazerson, 2005). In the case of vocational training, these vocational training regimes are supported by external agencies, so-called accreditation agencies. Vocationalism also means a ‘trend toward occupational-professional programs combined with short-term cyclical movements’ (p. 86). These are courses in which students are forced to use ‘textbooks with all the right answers’ (p. 89; cf. Harding, 2003). It produces ‘clueless students’ (p. 92) ready for corporate consumption (Lyons, 2018). Such students no longer see ‘the value of knowledge in knowledge itself ’ nor do they see universities ‘as emblems of democracy’ (p. 96; cf. Klikauer, 2016).

Deprived of its original sense, ‘Plymouth University [for example] promotes its vision to be the enterprise university… having a world-leading…enterprise culture’ (p. 105) – a managerial hallucination. Much of this is based on the hegemonic belief that ‘the market is intrinsically more efficient than government; to gain greater efficiency, government should be redesigned according to market methods and incentives’ (p. 115). In many cases, such ideologies are straight out of Pinochet-loving Friedrich Hayek and his neoliberal catechism (Hayek, 1944; 1978). Inside universities, neoliberalism comes along as managerialism (Shepherd, 2018). Managerialism means high fees while academics are substituted through ‘the hiring for temps’ (Chomsky, 2014, p. 1). Managerialism’s unsavoury realities are camouflaged through announcements such as ‘students [are] at the heart of the system’ (p. 119).

The second impact of Hayek’s neoliberalism has been that ‘governments required that higher education double its enrolment…without any additional public funding’ (p. 123). This has been achieved largely through hiring more managers while casualising teaching – ‘some [academics] have to apply [for their own job] every year so that they can get appointed again’ (Chomsky, 2014, p. 3). This is accompanied by stagnating academic wages, the worsening of working conditions, work intensification, larger classes and moving research towards external, i.e. state or industry, funding. Both are seen by managerialists as the ‘most important output’ (Dobson, 2014, p. 231). Meanwhile, the growth of universities has been successful. Indeed, ‘student numbers in Britain almost doubled between 1990 and 1996 [while] real funding per student fell by nearly 30 per cent’ (p. 124).

Following neoliberalism’s ideological catechism, ‘in 1995- 2005 Australia was the only OECD member state to reduce total spending on tertiary education’ (p. 131). The loss of funding was compensated by a gigantic influx of oversees fullfee-paying students. In Australia, higher education became the third largest export industry after iron ore and coal (ABC, 2019). In other words, ‘higher education is an export industry’ (p. 147) and the prime location ‘for production of a commodity’ (p. 149) – just like iron ore and coal. Universities fulfil ‘the neoliberal project that is a political project’ (p. 153) even though neoliberalism is sold to us as an economic theory. Just add the prefix neo to the political idea of liberalism and you get neoliberalism – the master ideology of untamed competition.

Under neoliberalism and managerialism, research is based on ‘the competitive pursuit of excellence’ (p. 156). Now, researchers are often prevented from working collaboratively. Instead, they are pitted against each other. Teaching and research have become based on three core principles: a) promote competition; b) privatise higher education; and c) achieve economic autonomy (p. 161). The goal is to convert a ‘public good [into] a private good’ (p. 165) even though ‘knowledge is predominantly a public good, not a private good’ (p. 166). Just imagine if Albert Einstein would have kept E=mc 2 private and Alan Turing would have done the same – millions would have starved to death. Unsurprisingly, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz argued ‘knowledge is close to a pure public good and far away from being a commodity’ (p. 166; cf. Stieglitz, 1999). Undeterred, university managerialists march on (Klikauer, 2015b).

Despite managerialists’ enforcement of the neoliberal ideology of competition, top universities are ‘not driven by competition’ (p. 170). Next to neoliberalism’s market malfunctions, internally managerialism means ‘the rise of the manageriat’ (p. 181). As in all other cases where managerialism has taken hold (Klikauer, 2013), the number of managerialists will rise. Hence, ‘between 1975 and 2005 American colleges and universities increase[d] the number of administrators by 85 per cent and the number of non-teaching staff by 240 per cent...by 2014 there were two non-academic employees for every full-time (or tenure-track) academic staff member’ (p. 185: cf, Chomsky, 2014, p. 1). At the UK’s University of Bradford, 63 per cent of all employees are support staff. ‘The University of Wolverhampton had 62 per cent, and Durham and Aberystwyth University had 61 per cent... in Australian universities, there are 1.3 non-academic staff members to every academic staff member’ (p. 186), equivalent to 57% of all employees being support staff. In other words, universities are a place where managerialists manage themselves with a few remaining academics.

Meanwhile, university managerialists are busy with being busy (Rosenfeld et al., 1995) and, on top of this, they invent and manage things like ‘strategic plans, target setting, benchmarking, academic audits, quality assurance, annual performance review, performance indicators’, etc. (p. 192). The large overhead of university managerialists is financed by fee-paying students and ‘a continuous worsening of the staff/student ratio’ (p. 194). This means that more students are crammed into larger classrooms with a casual teacher in front of them, Alternatively, teaching has been moved online (Edmondson, 2012) – something even more cost-effective. Fee-paying students create what managerialists call ‘teaching surplus’ (p. 195). It means students pay more than they get in return (Hil, 2015). This also means that managerialists can use the income generated from students for other purposes such as, for example, themselves (Michels, 1915), the marketing of the PR university (Cronin, 2016), and the fostering of a ‘culture of audit’ (p. 196). Audit culture is another instrument used by the all-seeing Argus Panoptes. It is also used to camouflage ‘the arbitrary exercise of managerial power’ (p. 198). One such an area for managerial power is found in corporate mission statements (p. 201):

‘Mission statements for universities were almost unknown until the late 1980s but have become near universal in 2016. Perhaps nothing captures the pathos of modern universities as managers set[ting] about employing consultants and PR specialists to say what makes their university ‘unique’ or ‘special’, just as nothing expresses the loss of purpose that those charged with running the modern university now display as they attempt to express their claims to purpose and distinctiveness’.

Conceivably, mission statements are a clear sign that the neoliberal university has truly lost its sense and purpose. It becomes even more obscene when universities advertise themselves by telling students ‘begin, build, and believe’ (p. 204). Not surprisingly, university marketing comes along with the following: ‘there is a nearly complete inability on the part of the senior managers to say what learning is, or why truth matters combined, with an unwillingness to see or to say why higher education remains a fundamental public good’ (p. 209). Instead, ‘a school or program looks to be successful when all of the metrics which an audit culture generates are favourable’ (p. 231), like:

• high student entrance numbers,

• high completion rates,

• satisfied students who are attractive to employers, and

• excellent customer satisfaction numbers, apparently signifying good teaching quality.

Customer satisfaction is achieved when students fill in a student feedback questionnaire. Here, ‘the assumption is that students are best placed to evaluate teaching quality’ (p. 241). It follows Managerialism’s customer-is-king ideology. It is highly contestable that students are reliable judges of academic teaching ability.

Research on managerialism’s customer-is-king found ‘that 32 per cent of students each semester did not take any subjects with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week, and that half of the sample did not take a single subject requiring them to write more than 20 pages over the semester’ (p. 244). These are the valued customers-as-kings sitting in judgement over academic staff. To an ever-increasing level, academic staff no longer consists of full-time scholars. Instead, the managerialist university depicts this:

‘back in 1969, almost 80 per cent of college faculty members were tenured or on tenure track. By 2015 the numbers had essentially flipped, with two-thirds of faculty now non-tenured and half of those working only part-time, often with several different teaching jobs. This is something that modern universities refuse or fail to acknowledge: it doesn’t align well with the glossy brochure-speak in their corporate advertising. It is also something of a public-policy scandal. No one in their right mind would go to a hospital staffed predominantly by low-paid, third-year medical students’ (p. 246).

Much of this has a negative impact on students and academics. American academics, for example, ‘spend twice as many hours on teaching as they do research’ (p. 247). This is thanks to something managerialists call ‘workload formulas’ (p. 248). As a consequence, ‘universities are unhealthy place in which to work’ (p. 251). University managerialism comes not just with a heavy price for academics, it hits students as well. For example, ‘student debt in England will increase to around £100 billion in 2016–17, £500 billion in the mid-2030s, and £1000 billion (£1 trillion) by the late 2040s’ (p. 269). Such a ‘debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous’ (Chomsky, 2014 p. 2). Next to user-pays regimes and financial loan pressures, there is also a lot of pressure ‘to go to university [that is] strongly influenced by…[family] expectations’ (p. 279). Based on years of schooling (Bowles & Gintis 1976), parents and students have been convinced that ‘knowledge is a thing that can be delivered in on-line modules or memorised for subsequent regurgitating in a short-answer test’ (p. 291).

All this indicates that ‘academic capitalism’ (p. 302) is truly with us. Expectedly, ‘in the academic capitalist regime, higher education has two economic roles. Apart from generating revenue for academic organisations, its task is also to produce the kind of knowledge that facilitates the global economic competitiveness of corporations’ (p. 304). Given the imperatives of neoliberalism and managerialism ‘to satisfy certain interests, the modern managers of universities now have no interest in telling the truth…this means…no Vice-Chancellor (or university president), Dean or Head of School/Department has any interest in telling the truth about the impact of public policy on the quality of work done in their institution’ (p. 339). It is no surprise then that Noam Chomsky comments, ‘how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them’ (Chomsky 2014, p. 4).

It appears that the managerialist university moves further and further away from ‘the central point made in this book, that knowledge as a process is a deeply human and a public good’ (p. 349) [and] that ‘universities ought to be spaces for public scholarship, rational debate, and dissension, and they ought to play an indispensable role in nurturing a wider democratic and humane culture’ (p. 351). These virtues are slaughtered on the altar of neoliberal managerialism even in places like Hong Kong as the last book under review shows.

Politics, Managerialism, and University Governance

Politics, Managerialism, and the University

The foreword of Wing-Wah Law’s book on Politics, Managerialism, and University Governance starts with ‘education has frequently been seen as a prime vehicle for advancing democracy’ (p. v). Historically, the rise of universities has often been accompanied by the rise of democracy. Some have argued that an increase in educational levels will inevitably lead to a rise in a middle-class seen as citoyens – open-minded democratic citizens (Rosenow, 1992). Subsequent to that is ‘the belief that the free exchange of ideas furthered the advancement of society’ (p. vi). This takes place what German philosopher Habermas calls the open democratic sphere (Kellner, 2000).

As a consequence, even democratic states often have a tension-filled relationship with universities found in ‘the interplay between politics, managerialism, and higher education’ (p. 1). Still, with the rise of the managerialist university, democracy has been moved into the background. Meanwhile, managerialists foster – or perhaps enforce – ‘quality assurance and accountability’ (p. 2). This is not for CEOs, ‘antiquated hierarchies’ (Habermas & Blazek 1987, p. 6) and ‘the layer after layer of management’ (Chomsky 2014, p. 1). It is for academics working under such a regime. With the elimination of democracy from university administration came ‘the subordination of academic governance to corporate governance’ (p. 3). On this the historian of economics, Tony Aspromourgos notes in one of the finest pieces ever written on The Managerialist University (Aspromourgos 2012, p. 48), ‘the managerialist model cannot serve as a substitute for traditional approaches to quality assurance, which ultimately rest upon embodying in all individual and collective academic activity, professional norms and ethics of conduct, collegially regulated by the community of academics’.

The ultimate goal of managerialism is the complete destruction of the collective academic community. In many countries, this goal is supported by a ‘triangle of coordination spanning from ‘states, to markets and academic oligarchies’ (p. 4). The point is, however, that these oligarchies are managerial rather than academic oligarchies (Murray & Frijters, 2017). Quite often, they are furnished with professorial titles by the managerialists, which are generously handed out to those who support Managerialism (Thaw, 2013). In short, the horizontal collegial approach is annihilated in favour of ‘a top-down approach’ (p. 4). In his book, Law also says that ‘Managerialism lacks an agreed-upon definition’ (p. 5). Still, Wikipedia provides a sensible explanation:

Managerialism combines management knowledge and ideology to establish itself systemically in organisations and society while depriving owners, employees (organisational-economical) and civil society (social-political) of all decision-making powers. Managerialism justifies the application of managerial techniques to all areas of society on the grounds of superior ideology, expert training, and the exclusive possession of managerial knowledge necessary to efficiently run corporations and societies. (coincidentally citing Klikauer (2013) in Managerialism – Critique of an Ideology)

One might also argue that managerialism can be presented as a formula: MA=MEI (Micocci & Di Mario 2018, p. 54) where managerialism (MA) equals the product of management (M), expansion (E) and ideology (I). In short, there is no managerialism (MA) without management (M), just as there is no managerialism without expansion into, for example, universities in Hong Kong. Finally, it is virtually impossible to think of managerialism without mentioning ideology ever since Enteman’s seminal work Managerialism: the Emergence of a New Ideology (Enteman, 1993). Still, managerialism has replaced ‘the two dominant models of universities governance – bureaucratic and collegial’ (p. 7) that used to define university administration until the 1970s. The ‘collegial model considers universities as a collegium or academic community, one which allows the full participation of academics’ (p. 7). Managerialism ‘shifts [a] university as a republic of academics’ (p. 8) towards ‘implementing NPM [new public management] measures’ (p. 8), where NPM is the application of managerialism to public entities. Such attacks on universities and knowledge aren’t new.

After the unsavoury threat to torture Galileo Galilei by the Catholic Church significantly delayed the advent of vital scientific knowledge and progress (Chalmers, 2013), it became increasingly clear that ‘the most cherished feature of the university is that it derives its authority from human reason and wisdom, rather than from external authorities, such as the state and churches’ (p. 10). Managerialism threatens this. With managerialism, the state has actively planted its managerial henchmen into the very structure of the university. If Galileo Galilei and Albert Einstein fail to publish in A/A* journals and fail to attract external funding (Gove 2015), university managerialists will place those two no-goods on a PIP – a performance improvement plan, the first step towards dismissal (Klikauer 2018c).

For managerialism, another hindrance is ‘tenure [that used to be] an important mechanism to protect individual and collective academic freedom’ (p. 11). Academic freedom is a worthless concept for managerialism just as is the idea that universities should educate future citizens engaged in public discourse. Whether such citizens are ‘legal citizens, minimal citizens (someone who just votes), active citizens (someone who participates), or transformative citizens (e.g. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandel, etc.) is of next to no relevance to managerialism’ (p. 12). One of the best expressions of what such a citizenship means is Henry Giroux’s UWS Hamilton Graduation Guest Lecture (2017).

The Giroux lecture encourages ‘academics [in their] duty to defend higher education as a democratic public sphere’ (p. 13). In this defence, too many academics have fallen into the trap of attempting to deal with managerialism on the basis of what they are trained in and do every day. They argue their case and provide supporting evidence. Managerialism is not about arguing a case and it is neither about providing evidence. Managerialism is about ideology and power – organisational power and managerial power (Magretta, 2012). The ideological power of university managerialism is also found in ‘the concept of consumerism and academic entrepreneurship’ (p. 16). Students are seen as revenue-generating customers while academics are seen as entrepreneurs. They are made to fit into Hoyle and Wallace’s (2005) second versions of entrepreneurial managerialism (Magretta, 2012, pp. 70f.). For many universities, the neoliberal toolkit came with a hefty reduction in state support but not so in Hong Kong. Hong Kong universities did ‘not face severe budget cuts’ (p. 57). Furthermore, ‘Hong Kong academics enjoyed academic freedom’ (p. 59) – an increasingly rare commodity.

Still, slowly but surely even Hong Kong universities eventually fell under managerialism and ‘the introduction of competition between…institutions for research funding’ (p. 63). The mantra is let the market decide. All too often, one of the outcomes of the free market is that we will have even more medical drugs against obesity (a lucrative market) and but next to no drugs against malaria. Put crudely, poor children in our Planet of Slums have no market value (Davis, 2007). This is the inhumanity of neoliberalism. In any case, neoliberalism’s so-called market is based on ‘research outputs alone’ (p. 64). Just like a car factory, the more cars roll off the assembly line the better. Hence, managerialism ‘treats university staff as if they were workers in a factory’ (p. 66). The principles of management and the ideologies of managerialism work in factories and in universities just as much.

Another effect of markets is that they create a system that is geared towards ‘stabbing each other’s back to compete for scarce research resources’ (p. 188). Managerialists measure this through attracting grants (money) and A/A* journal publications. In Australia, research grants also follow neoliberalism’s competition-is-good ideology. This means that academics invest weeks, if not months writing grant applications to the Australian Research Council perhaps unaware that ‘75 per cent’ (Dobson, 2014, p. 230) or even up to ‘80 per cent of them don’t get funded’ (Lowe 2019, p. 49). This is a colossal waste of time. Another unknown side effect is a ‘preference for publications in English journals over [non- English] ones [has] demoralised [non-English] scholarship’ (p. 189). Managerialism’s ‘performance [and] funding-based research assessment’ (p. 190) strongly favours US journals that are often highly ranked.

To conclude, all three books support the ‘E’ in managerialism’s formula of MA=MEI. Managerialism remains highly expansive (E). Managerialism expands deeply into universities. The three books show this vividly in the case of the UK, USA, Australia, India, China, Hong Kong and in many other parts of the world. Managerialism has infected businesses, companies and the public service (hospitals and schools). At universities as well, managerialism’s ‘business model means what matters is the bottom line’ (Chomsky 2014, 1). Most crucially, university managerialism is taking universities back where they once were. These are the dark ages of external influences over research, knowledge and truth. These are also the days of Galileo Galilei. It was a time where an external agency – the Catholic Church – could define truth. A mere 350 years after Galileo Galilei, the Catholic Church actually apologised (Cowell, 1992) – admitting that the earth is not at the centre of our solar system and that the earth moves.

The similarity between Galileo Galilei’s time and today is that this time around, there is another external threat. It is no longer called the Catholic Church; rather it is neoliberalism. There is also a crucial difference. Today, universities face a more hideous form of control over truth, namely an internally operative managerialism. Unlike in the past, the attack no longer comes exclusively from outside. Neoliberalism has planted a corrosive agency inside universities. Worse, this time around we might not have 350 years to correct certain misbeliefs (Shulman 2006). What we are facing is the rapidly looming prospect of the Uninhabitable Earth (Wallace-Wells, 2017). Scientific truth is facing (Oreskes & Conway, 2010) an interesting symbiosis of corporate mass media (Smythe, 1977), conservative and populist politicians, and the $200 million spent annually by oil and gas corporations to defeat knowledge about global warming (McCarthy, 2019). Universities, science, knowledge and truth are under threat.

Thomas Klikauer teaches MBAs at the Sydney Graduate School of Management, Western Sydney University, NSW Australia. Contact: T.Klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au

Catherine Link is a lecturer at WSU specialising in hospitality and work integrated learning (WIL), in particular, simulations and student outward mobility.

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