The ideology of managerialism in the public university

The education market

Two distinct understandings of the corporation have become entwined with one another in the contemporary public university, which has caused confusion and uncertainty as to its character and purpose. The not for-profit corporation was established in the Middle Ages ‘for some good purpose’ of a public nature, whereas the for-profit corporation became the primary structure through which profit-making activities are conducted. The public university is not listed on the stock exchange and it has no shareholders; academics and students are described as ‘stakeholders’, an uncertain status that is not synonymous with shareholders. In 2005, Prof Di Yerbury referred to the sector as comprising ‘nominally public universities’ [my italics], which captures a sense of its ambiguous status.

The role of government has been central in the transformation of the university, encouraged by international bodies such as the OECD and the World Bank, committed to ensuring the profitability of public goods in a neoliberal context. The spur was Lyotard’s insight that it is knowledge not land that is the contemporary source of struggle between nation states (1984). This constellation of factors gave rise to the Dawkins reforms of 1988, resulting in the ‘massification’ and commodification of higher education.

Since then, the education market has ballooned. In 2014, it added $140 billion to the economy, and education has become the third largest export, behind iron ore and coal. The Data Snapshot provided by Universities Australia in 2018 indicated that Australia engaged in educating more than 1.5 million students (domestic and international) and directly employed 120,000 full-time equivalent staff.

To manage the multidisciplinary behemoths that Australia’s universities have become, a new managerial class has emerged, which Rob Watts wittily dubs the ‘manageriat’ (2017). So powerful and influential has this class become that it has replaced the professoriate as the university elite. Not only has the manageriat expanded exponentially, it has done so at the expense of traditional functions, such as teaching, which now must be done ‘on the cheap’, as illustrated by the marked rise of casualisation.

The managerial embrace

While management entails the enhancement of administrative systems that transform resources into productive outputs, managerialism is an ideology that distorts the primary function of management. It comprises a set of beliefs that promotes the view that management is the most desirable element of good administration or governance (Joseph 2015). It sloughs off debate in the belief that it is unnecessary for solving problems, which can be replaced by rational assessment. The government has played a key role in withdrawing trust from the academic community in the belief that the manageriat will manage the university more efficiently.

Managerialism has little regard for critical scholarship unless it has use value in the market. The intervention by government in the Australian Research Council (ARC) process is a notorious example with, first, Brendan Nelson in the 2005 and 2006 rounds and then Simon Birmingham in 2017 declining to ratify projects that had been subjected to rigorous peer review (The Australian 2018, 31). All suspect proposals emanated from HASS (Humanities and Social Science) in contradistinction to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in the belief that the latter are uncritical and apolitical, as well as being more likely to generate profits through innovation. The fallout from the brouhaha is that future grant applicants must now satisfy a National Interest Test (NIT) by establishing the potential of projects to have ‘economic, commercial, environmental, social or cultural benefits to the Australian community’. This is a direct attempt by government to encourage the functional and the instrumental at the expense of the critical.

Managerial ideology presupposes that the university be run as a business, in the same way as a bank or factory. Hence, the appropriate comparator for a Vice Chancellor is deemed to be the CEO of a large for-profit corporation; it is not other academics, for he or she (still overwhelmingly ‘he’) is no longer regarded primarily as an academic leader. The average salary paid to Australian Vice-Chancellors is $890,000, which is considerably more than the Prime Minister receives, as well as more than the heads of Oxford and Harvard. In fact, twelve VCs belong to the ‘million dollar club’.

Governance

Managerialism is central to the governance of the university, in respect of which accountability, efficiency and effectiveness are crucial elements, but competition, a central element of a for-profit corporation, has also crept into the mix. Hence, the aim is to secure the best students, the best staff, the biggest grants and the highest rankings in order to surpass one’s competitors. Public good criteria, such as equity and diversity, are more contentious as they do not appear in any rankings, although lip service might be paid to them.

Under a university’s Act of Incorporation, the university council is legally responsible for governance and performance, with the Academic Board charged with responsibility for academic affairs. Protocols for university councils have been established under the Higher Education Support Act 2003, supplanted by a voluntary code of best practice agreed to by the University Chancellors Council (UCC).

The contraction of collegiality has seen a shift away from internal to external membership of university councils, particularly those with senior business and financial expertise. It is notable that this reflects the worldwide trend away from collegial governance to managerialism, which underpins the contemporary idea of higher education as a source of wealth generation.

Managerialism has also seen a change in the style of governance from legal-rational authority to efficiency in the market (Roberts 2015). Thus, governance has been reshaped to accommodate what is often a perfunctory governing board supplemented by a plethora of ‘shadow university structures’ such as Vice Chancellor advisory committees and for-profit arms.

The demise of collegiality

The assumption that professional managers will be more efficient if not burdened by the need for debate has diminished the role of stakeholders in university governance. While shareholders have a right to question the activities of for-profit corporations, the comparable right of university stakeholders is less clear. They often have difficulty in obtaining answers to their questions, even if members of Council. It is common to claim that academic members of council suffer from a conflict of interest – unlike the representatives of business.

For example, Professor Margaret Sims was subjected to attempts to remove her from New England University Council when she was president of the local branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) (Sims 2019). The university denied Sims access to council papers and meetings where, in the opinion of the chancellor, a conflict arose. Sims was not permitted to know the nature of the material from which she was excluded as even the subject headings in the agenda and minutes were redacted.

Commercial-in-confidence may be used by councils to prevent scrutiny of a university’s commercial entities in the same way as for-profits invoke the concept against competitors. Managerialism has also given rise to codes of conduct in many universities that are used to inhibit dissent. The university community is not supposed to be critical of university decisions, such as the award of an honorary doctorate to a philanthropic donor when the source of that person’s wealth appears to be questionable. As the university becomes more focused on profits, its ‘brand name’ takes precedence over academic freedom.

More recently, an audit conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs asserted that academic freedom was being subtly rolled back in universities (Lesh, 2018; see also Peel 2019). At the same time, both the University of Sydney and the Australian National University (ANU) reaffirmed their commitment to academic freedom (Hoepner 2019, 32), again pointing to the tension between competing understandings of what the contemporary university is for.

Dependency on corporate sponsorship may insidiously weaken researchers’ ability to act as independent critics (eg Batt & Fugh-Berman 2018). There have been many examples, particularly in the US and Canada, where criticism of research practices involving the pharmaceutical industry and public health have had adverse repercussions for researchers. ARC Linkage Grants and contract research that are designed to encourage functional partnerships with corporate funders can be fraught. However, the competition for research dollars means that the demand for corporate partnerships will continue to grow (Basken 2018).

As Polanyi points out, without freedom only subordinated knowledge is possible (1951, 43-45). As instrumental or applied knowledge is the form of subordinated knowledge favoured by managerialism, academic freedom is viewed as dispensable. At the same time, rankings and research assessment audits, such as the ERA (Excellence for Research in Australia), reward original scholarship, whether applied or not, which highlights the fact that managerialism can never be an entirely closed system.

Governmentality

While university governance is ostensibly top-down, as in the case of for-profit corporations, managerialism produces a classic manifestation of Foucauldian governmentality that includes governance of the self, which is effected through multiple forms of audit and metricisation (Lynch 2015). Numbers and metrics comport with the superficially apolitical stance favoured by managerialism but are in fact profoundly political as they facilitate modes of control, surveillance and accountability. Academics have internalised the idea that they should work harder, publish in better journals and generally be more productive, not only to promote the self, but to enhance the brand name of the university. By holding a mirror up to the self and constantly focusing on self-improvement and performativity, their attention is deflected from what is taking place around them, which is quickly normalised. Metricisation in conjunction with management of the self is a key technology of power. Failure to satisfy the numbers can be disastrous and HASS is particularly vulnerable within a corporatised context. In 2008, for example, the entire Faculty of Arts was closed down at the Carseldine Campus of the Queensland University of Technology in favour of a Faculty of Creative Industries because it was believed that the latter would be more lucrative (Thornton 2009).

Conclusion

It is not easy to come up with strategies for change in light of the stranglehold that the ideology of managerialism has secured in the contemporary university, especially as the academic environment is volatile and uncertain. The predilections of a particular vice-chancellor and/or chancellor can exercise a profound effect on a university’s direction. This is apparent in the 2019 case of Melbourne University Publishing where a decision was made to resile from an emphasis on commercialism to concentrate on scholarly publishing despite its comparatively low returns. To reject a profitable in favour of a non-profitable venture suggests that it may be possible to turn things around more fundamentally.

In Privatising the Public University (Thornton 2012), I argued that the tuition fees lay at the heart of the corporatisation of the university. The imposition of HECS initially provoked strong opposition, which became progressively weaker with each increase until the debate over deregulation in 2014 temporarily revived the opposition. It is nevertheless notable that virtually free higher education is offered by many countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Czech Republic, Cuba, Greece, Hungary, France, Turkey and the Nordic countries. Germany is particularly striking as it abolished fees for undergraduate students in 2016. However, New Zealand offered the first year free from 2018 and British Labour has promised to abolish fees if elected, even though this would inevitably mean higher taxes.

The turnaround suggests that there is nothing inevitable about managerialism. The electorate and the university community have acceded to it, but they could change the way things are if they chose to do so. Even though academics grumble in the corridors, they are hesitant to take a critical stance. The boiled frog metaphor aptly encapsulates the extent of acquiescence despite the academic antipathy to managerialism. While of dubious scientific validity, the belief is that if a frog is placed in boiling water it will jump out but if placed in cold water, it will stay there even when the water is heated up, despite its inevitable fate. In view of the rapid ratcheting up of managerialism, I exhort university stakeholders with amphibian tendencies to react before it is too late.