Living the Neo‐liberal University

‘Each of my works is a part of my own biography. For one or other reason I had occasion to feel and live those things’ Truth, power, self: an interview (Foucault, 1988, p. 11) The practices of government and technologies of policy that make up and constantly re-make higher education (HE) nationally and globally have transformed the life of the university over the past 25 years. The funding and accountability of and access to HE have been changed in many material and affective ways. Concomitantly, what it means to learn, to teach and research in HE have also changed. The practices and technologies to which I refer include annual reviews, league tables and rankings, impact narratives, CVs, performance-related pay, the granting of degree-awarding powers to commercial providers, off-shore campuses, student fees, expanding overseas recruitment, and Public-Private Partnerships of all sorts. These are the effects and conduits of contemporary neo-liberalisation. They constitute the big-neo-liberalism, out there' in the economy, and the little-neo-liberalism, ‘in here’ — in our daily lives and in our heads. The former increasing renders ‘truth’ into a commodity — within what we now call the knowledge economy and informational capitalism. The latter is realised in a set of local practices which articulates the mundane rhythms of our email traffic, our form-filling, our peer reviewing, and re-modulates the ways in which we relate to one another as neo-liberal subjects, individual, responsible, striving, competitive, enterprising (Ball, 2003; 2005). In the university, we confront daily the mundane force, brute logic and stunning triviality of performative individualism as both ‘modest and omniscient’ (Rose, 1996, p. 54). Indicators, indexes and measures insinuate themselves both into our sense of what we are and into our practice and decision-making as writers and researchers and teachers (Burrows, 2012). Increasingly, we make decisions about the value and distribution of our time and effort in relation to the measures and symbolic and real rewards that are generated by us and about us. The pace and pattern of our work are constantly changing in relation to the oscillations of measurement and are further related to a pressured and speeded up need to tell about our research which is enabled by Websites, blogs, tweets, press releases, etc., but which generates, at that same time, a whole other set of measures which we can quote back to funders and paymasters as numbers of hits, re-tweets, followers, likes, downloads, etc. Once in the thrall of the index, we are easily reduced by it to a category or quotient — our worth, our humanity and complexity are abridged. We come to ‘know’ and value others by their outputs rather than by their individuality and humanity. Those who ‘under-perform’ are subject to moral approbation. It becomes increasingly difficult to think of life outside the constraints of the ‘contemporary problematics of information’ (p. 106) and the ‘infopolitical practices’ (Koopman, 2014) that make us up. These produce new and excruciating visibilities within which we, as academics, relate to one another, and in relation to which we must seek our place and our worth and fulfil our needs and desires. We are constantly expected to draw on the skills of presentation and of inflation to write ourselves and fabricate ourselves in ever lengthier and more sophisticated CVs, annual reviews and performance management audits, which give an account of our ‘contributions’ to research and teaching and administration and the community. This is part of what Kathleen Lynch et al. (2012) call ‘crafting the elastic self’ and the danger is that we become transparent but empty, unrecognisable to ourselves in a life enabled by and lived against measurement. More and more in education and other parts of the public sector, our days are numbered — literally. The techniques of enumeration do not simply report our practice; they inform, construct and drive it. The dry, soul-less grids and techniques of reporting elicit a range of often unhealthy emotions. Our emotions are linked to the economy through our anxieties and desires and our concomitant efforts of self-management and self-improvement. This is part of a larger process of ‘ethical retooling’ in the public sector, which is replacing client ‘need’ and professional judgement, the foundations of the welfare state, with commercial forms of accountability-driven and investment-based decision-making, the foundations of neo-liberalism. There is for many of us in education a growing sense of ontological insecurity; both a loss of a sense of meaning in what we do and of what is important in what we do. Are we doing things for the ‘right’ reasons — and how can we know? Constant change and constant visibility produce concomitant anxieties and insecurities — what Lazarrato calls the ‘micro-politics of little fears’ (Lazzarato, 2009) p. 120) — neoliberal affects. All this works to make ‘government possible and to make government better’ (Rose, 1996, p. 45) through the ‘technocratic embedding of routines of neoliberal governance’ (Peck & Tickell, 2002) in the everyday life of institutional practices. The enactment of judgement as practices of evaluation and comparison, as truths told about us articulate our ‘discursive currency’ (Prado, 2006, p. 80), i.e. ways of thinking and talking about ourselves, to ourselves and to others — ‘a regime of truth offers the terms that make self-recognition possible’ (Butler, 2005, p. 22). However, we are not simply victims here, we are complicit, indeed we are sometimes beneficiaries. At times, as Broadhead and Howard (1998) admit, we participate in all of this, not reluctantly, but ‘imaginatively, aggressively, and competitively’. We take responsibility for working harder, faster and better as part of our sense of personal worth and our estimation of the worth of others. In the neo-liberal university, we must calculate ourselves in another sense. Collective interests are replaced by competitive relations, and it becomes increasingly difficult to mobilise workers around issues of general significance, collective professional values are displaced by commercial values. We cease to be a community of scholars and rather we relate to one another in a complex, overlapping set of competitions, often expressed as rankings ‘whereby educational institutions and agents are viewed as isolated and distinct elements’ (Clarke, 2012, p. 301) or operationalised as tenders for research tasks required of us by our funders. The neo-liberal university is thus a particular configuration of the relationship between truth and power and the self (and thus ethics), a set of contact points ‘between reflexivity and government’ (Dean, 2007) p. 211). It is now a site of veridition only in the sense that knowledge has exchange value and research makes a measureable impact on social and academic life. Within all of this, as an academic subject, I am made unstable, ill at ease, out of place. My home in the ivory tower is being flattened by neo-liberal bulldozers to make way for a fast-fact HE franchise in which all knowledge has its price and which, as Ansgar Allen puts it, ‘is distinguished not by its greyness and economic subjugation, but by a gaudy proliferation of colour. It has become the rampant breeding ground of jobbing academics in search of the next “big” idea’ (http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ansgar-allen/in-praise-of-economically-illiterate-academic). This is a space nonetheless in which I continue and struggle.