Undermining the dominance of neoliberalism before it undermines us

Victoria Fielding, University of South Australia & Kent Getsinger, University of Adelaide

As part of Friday Sessions, the NTEU’s online national training program, we recently ran a seminar entitled ‘Neoliberalism: how it infiltrates universities, how it affects us, and how can we resist it?’ We hope to open and maintain a conversation about how the neoliberalism of the university sector affects us as workers and unionists. We want to reframe the narrative and bring about the university sector we deserve.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis. That real crisis adds to the manufactured crisis of decades of neoliberal ideology and managerialism that has decimated the university sector. To quote one t whom we largely owe this widespread decimation to: ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change’ and that the actions taken ‘depend on the ideas that are lying around’. 1 Thanks to Milton Friedman and also the Mont Pelerin Society, the fringe idea lying around of neoliberalism took root immediately following the 1970s crises of stagflation and oil embargo. 2

Whether ‘real’ or ‘perceived’, neoliberal ideology blamed these crises on the failure of the socially-democratic Keynesian state, framing state intervention as ‘unnatural’ and claiming it causes societal breakdown. This near-mythic ethos enforces extreme individual responsibility where collectivism and social welfare are an affront to the ‘natural’ order. 1,2,3

Neoliberalism-proper entered in the 1980s with the Reagan and Thatcher Governments. We have them to thank for some of the cruellest austerity ever enacted, second only to the ‘shock treatment’ imposed on the Global South. In particular, Chile first suffered neoliberalism’s dictatorship implementation for what would be revealed to be anything but freeing individuals from the ‘tyranny’ of the state. 2

Contrary to claims of enabling the ‘free market’, neoliberalism was (is) in fact a radical state reconfiguration of accumulation of wealth and power to the very top. What resulted is many institutions enforcing cruel ‘trade liberalisation, deregulation, wage rollbacks, union attacks, privatisation and fiscal retrenchment’. 2

This reconfiguration that erodes our collectivism and conditions is also happening in the university sector. Since the Dawkins reforms of the late 1980s, universities have seen fee deregulation, mass precarious work, withering of academic collegiately, erosion of the public institution and a shift in power to managers. The neoliberal ideological rhetoric of the ‘free market’ is then used to justify high manager salaries, aggressive and cruel restructures, job insecurity and abhorrent workplace practices. 4

When we speak to our colleagues about the insidious neoliberalism of the university sector, they see this culture as the cause of anxiety, shame and resentment in their working lives. They want change, but they don’t know what change looks like. We argue that to reframe our work in a neoliberal age, we need to show our colleagues how neoliberalism positions both our university work and our union activity as illegitimate. Only then can we collectively see that this is just one story, and that there are other stories which fight back against the shame of living in a neoliberal frame.

Through a neoliberal frame, university work is perceived to be the same as the public sector: as a cost taxpayers have to bear, rather than an investment in the health of the economy and society. Universities are a microcosm of our larger society that has resulted in power and wealth concentration to the top. This contradictory neoliberal ideology has taken root in the research outcomes, language, paradigm and milieu of the and as a result, current university system. It fills the halls, our institutions classrooms and the space between our social relations. As university workers, in our academic and administrative labour, we live work its effects.

Neoliberalism treats higher education teaching as valuable only when a profit can be placed on its delivery. Research is viewed through this lens as pie in the sky and useless, unless research invents something the private sector can immediately profit from. University workers are constantly pressured to reduce funding, encouraged to downsize, and to compete against private providers; to let the market decide.

Union activity is also framed as illegitimate because neoliberals view collective action as a harmful intervention in the natural authority of university management. Through this lens, workers have no place in institutional decision-making, should not seek to improve their working conditions, and should never assume they have a place at the negotiating table or the right to consult over how they do their work. Management’s prerogative rules, and anything that undermines this prerogative is framed as adverse for the organisation.

Neoliberalism automatically places management on a pedestal, in the hero frame. Management are taken for granted as naturally acting in the best interest of their institutions. Funding cuts are good, downsizing is desirable, efficiency dividends apparently make us all better off. Unionists, on the other hand, are automatically in the neoliberal villain frame because we challenge the unilateral powerof our employers to dictate every aspect of our working lives. We also challenge the wisdom of the managerial prerogative, often defending student educational outcomes as much as we fight for our own benefit.

As university workers and as unionists, we do our best to counter neoliberal framing which tells us we are illegitimate. We tell a different story demonstrating the value of the work we do. We believe in a democratic, cooperative, collectivist and supportive public university sector. We know that we each contribute to quality teaching and research, and that without dedicated academic and professional staff, universities would be nothing more than buildings. We act in solidarity with each other, recognising that only as a collective can we ensure problems are solved in our workplaces that make us, our students, our research outcomes, and as a result, our institutions better off. We believe in our work and value each other’s contribution.

Telling these counter stories is not easy. Resisting the dominance of neoliberalism is, by definition, difficult work. Neoliberalism frames our language, delegitimises our union narrative and constrains all our relations. Neoliberalism turns much academic work into casual – disposable – work. Neoliberalism creates an environment of toxic shame, competition, inferiority, precariousness, stigma and debilitating anxiety in academia. 5,6 We can be confined to ‘neoliberal horizons’, where ‘disimagination’ perpetuates to a pervasive insecure narcissism and reduces us to continual lifeless measurement. 7 We can lose personal connection, to others and self, and narrowly view social attachment solely for marketable worth.

When we recognise that neoliberalism is in the air that we breathe, in the structures of our workplaces, in the attitudes towards unions, in the culture and ideology of the country we live in, it is obvious whyresisting these ideas is emotionally and intellectually difficult. By having knowledge of this difficulty, and by confronting it, we can defeat the force of these ideas. Naming them is powerful. Listening to people’s experiences of them is powerful. Telling our own stories that undermine neoliberalism is powerful action which makes a real difference to our collective power.

Neoliberal ideology need not dominate our lives and universities. With awareness of the theoretical basis to connect the dots and see more clearly, we can realise that our troubles are not the fault of our shortcomings, but those of cruel shortsightedness. With that awareness, we can reframe the narrative and legitimately demand what we believe in for our sector.

References

1. Bregman, R. (2020). ‘The Neoliberal Era is ending, what comes next?’ The Correspondent.

2. Mitchell, M. & Fazi, T. (2017). Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post- Neoliberal World, Pluto Press, London.

3. Sitaraman, G. (2019). ‘The Collapse of Neoliberalism’, The New Republic.

4. Connell, R. (2019). The Good University: What universities actually do and why it’s time for radical change, Monash University Printing, Clayton, Australia.

5. Gill, R. (2009). ‘Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of the neoliberal university’ in Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, Routledge, New York.

6. Sims, M. (2019). ‘Neoliberalism and new public management in an Australian university: The invisibility of our take-over’, Australian Universities’ Review 61 01.

7. Wilson, J. (2017). ‘The Moods of Enterprise: Neoliberal affect and the care of self’ in Neoliberalism, Taylor & Francis Group, London.