When I left Britain in the 1970s to pursue a doctorate in the US, it was an item of faith that US universities were far more corporatized than their UK counterparts, in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. To be sure the British system was often stuffy and harboured a lot of dead wood, but few looked toward an American-style academia.
Today the situation is dramatically transposed. British social sciences are far more corporatized today than in the US, and expatriate British academics returning to the UK are regularly stunned at the wholesale intellectual destruction of UK universities. To a non-British academic, the language of academia is almost impenetrable, aping the corporate world on which it was modeled. Administrative memos, grant proposals, and bureaucratic correspondence - university-wide or departmentally specific - are peppered with verbiage so vague it is vacuous: excellence, accountability, performance measures, capacity building, benchmarking, pro-active, impact factors, grant harvesting, esteem indicators, innovation, technology generation and capture, skill sets, team cohesion, outputs, and so forth. Into such vacuous concepts, those with power can pour in whatever content is desirable.
Today the situation is dramatically transposed. British social sciences are far more corporatized today than in the US, and expatriate British academics returning to the UK are regularly stunned at the wholesale intellectual destruction of UK universities. To a non-British academic, the language of academia is almost impenetrable, aping the corporate world on which it was modeled. Administrative memos, grant proposals, and bureaucratic correspondence - university-wide or departmentally specific - are peppered with verbiage so vague it is vacuous: excellence, accountability, performance measures, capacity building, benchmarking, pro-active, impact factors, grant harvesting, esteem indicators, innovation, technology generation and capture, skill sets, team cohesion, outputs, and so forth. Into such vacuous concepts, those with power can pour in whatever content is desirable.
There are many reasons for this extreme corporatization, but the most important lie in the wholesale political restructuring of the institutional framework of academia. This restructuring began as an openly political intervention by the neo-liberalizing Thatcher government and was carried forward enthusiastically under Blair, and it has several salient dimensions. In the first place, it was deemed desirable to be able to compare on a level plane the performances of every university in the country, and this inevitably led to a ubiquitous quantification of every aspect of teaching, research and service, from the scale of the individual through that of the department and the School or College to the university as a whole. The vehicle for this state-mandated comparison was the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), initiated in 1986 with five subsequent such exercises.
As all British academics are painfully aware, this had several effects beyond the forced crunching of all intellectual activity into a number. To boost the numbers, it encouraged researchers to parse already small pieces of research into myriad fragments that could be scattered to multiple journals. Research became increasingly shoddy - atrocious grammar and little content - with terrifying speed. As a journal editor in the early 1990s I received a paper from one British scholar and a phone call two weeks later to inquire about and then urge acceptance of the piece "because our RAE submissions are due in two weeks." As it turned out a virtually identical paper had been submitted to another journal and that journal's editor happened to use one of the same referees I used. In various incarnations this scenario repeated itself during my tenure as editor, all involving UK academics. Not long ago, the faculty union, now the University and College Union (UCU), then the Association of University Teachers (AUT), warned that the RAE has had a disastrous effect on the UK's Higher Education. The reworking of the RAE into a "metrics-based" Research Excellence Framework is likely to exacerbate rather than resolve the disaster.
As all British academics are painfully aware, this had several effects beyond the forced crunching of all intellectual activity into a number. To boost the numbers, it encouraged researchers to parse already small pieces of research into myriad fragments that could be scattered to multiple journals. Research became increasingly shoddy - atrocious grammar and little content - with terrifying speed. As a journal editor in the early 1990s I received a paper from one British scholar and a phone call two weeks later to inquire about and then urge acceptance of the piece "because our RAE submissions are due in two weeks." As it turned out a virtually identical paper had been submitted to another journal and that journal's editor happened to use one of the same referees I used. In various incarnations this scenario repeated itself during my tenure as editor, all involving UK academics. Not long ago, the faculty union, now the University and College Union (UCU), then the Association of University Teachers (AUT), warned that the RAE has had a disastrous effect on the UK's Higher Education. The reworking of the RAE into a "metrics-based" Research Excellence Framework is likely to exacerbate rather than resolve the disaster.
The education bureaucrats in the UK are making "impact factors" a centerpiece of this revamped RAE. The underlying motivation for this move represents a clear continuation of the original rationale for the RAE: to produce practical knowledge, shovel-ready, for bureaucratic policy application. It straightens out and speeds up the four-lane highway from research to state or corporate utility. There are fewer and fewer off ramps from this highway, and the toll for accessing it is the guarantee of intellectual mediocrity. But "impact factor" is an empty shell that is available to be filled with any bureaucratic content.
Twinned with the RAE is the effect of the funding agencies (which for those of us in the social sciences means primarily the ESRC), but only those departments and universities with sufficiently high RAE scores and a good track record by other measures are eligible for such funding. Continued ESRC funding depended on timely completion of grants and mandated the completion of doctorates by graduate students within three years, four at the most, and failure to do so threatened further funding but also damaged RAE scores. This had several consequences. First, faculty were under extreme pressure to pass dissertations whether or not they were worthy. This not only dropped quality standards immediately but reproduced several generations of faculty who had been taught that sloppy, unfinished and sub-standard work was quite acceptable, further eroding the quality of work coming out in future PhD dissertations. By the same token, of course, a longer 'time-to-degree' (to use the operative bureaucratese) is no guarantee of superior quality work, and in the US for example unnecessarily long times to degree actually facilitate a casualization of academic work as graduate students are exploited as cheap instructional labour. But time-to-degree in Scandinavia, to take another case, can also be quite long with very different results, due largely to the quite different social and financial structuring of the degree compared with the US or UK. This is the crucial point.
Second, the strict time limits on PhDs adversely affected the kinds of topics and the geography of topics students chose. Several years ago I visited a geography department with 33 PhD students and on inquiry I discovered that 28 of these students were working in the UK. For a geography department to have only 15% of its postgraduates working outside the UK is a tragedy. When I asked the students how this could have happened they explained quite casually that if they had to scout out foreign field sites, possibly learn a language, do adequate archival research, learn methodologies, then do the field work (in addition to reading the requisite theory), and write the work up, there was a slim chance of them completing in three or four years. Much the same would apply to anthropology or history. Third, ESRC grants come with the requirement that a significant amount - as much as 30% - of the work be policy focused. Yet if a researcher's work leads to critical conclusions documenting, for example, the maladies of gentrification, would the ESRC be enthusiastic about policy conclusions that advocate the funding of anti-gentrification groups and movements? (Even the use of "gentrification" rather than the anodyne and dishonest policy euphemism "regeneration", while it may not condemn a proposal, will at least draw extra critical attention.) So basic research is tightly tethered to applications with the state as the exclusive target of policy proposals. Thus the highway between research and policy runs both ways, raising the specter that ESRC funding is increasingly designed, as I have heard it put, not to produce research-driven policy so much as to produce policy-driven research.
More broadly, universities are under extreme pressure to become their own capitalist entities. In pursuit of capital, British universities have, apart from anything else, become MA/MSc factories, often aimed at rich and foreign students who fork out the tuition fees in exchange for a commodity - the diploma.
The upshot of these and other transformations, at least for those of us looking in, is that UK academia is consumed by smaller and smaller issues, more and more frivolous topics, the victory of empirics over theory, and less and less significant research. On top of this, the quality of work has plummeted, and geography for one has become increasingly insular. The "impact factor" of this neo-liberalization of academia is immense. Among British colleagues I detect very little critique of this predicament beyond a few individuals, and little or no organized opposition; rather the modus operandi is defensive rationalization. There are exceptions, of course, and the militant strike and sit-in at London's Middlesex University, protesting the summary closing of the philosophy department, is heartening. That this department had a critical impact in radical, Marxist and continental philosophy as well as more widely, and that punitive retaliations were meted out against participating students and faculty, only strengthens the argument that whatever else drives it, the restructuring of British academia is politically motivated, and not for the better. Overall there has been an utter deflation and flattening of the British academic landscape. This is especially dispiriting because it is unclear, short of a major institutional restructuring of the scale pioneered by Thatcher and Blair, how this could be redressed, or where the will to do so would even come from.
Neil Smith teaches in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY.
Three years ago I moved to the UK after 13 years at a mid-sized US state university. It has indeed been a shocking experience to find myself and all of my hard-working colleagues routinely treated by administration as inveterate slackers who must constantly be forced to invest extra time in self-policing paperwork lest our presumed tendency to loaf around be allowed any free rein.
As in many workplaces, the leadership of my institute has generally opted to treat the RAE, REF and the whole neoliberal regime as not worth fighting against, instead hoping to stay ahead of the infinitely rising regulatory curve, developing procedures to cover our rear ends even before such procedures are mandated from above, in short, playing the game as well as they can. Within the terms set out by HEFCE (or in our case, HEFCW, the Welsh equivalent under which my university operates), we have been successful.
For me, the good faith and honest efforts of my colleagues, and their succes in playing the game, in no way render the whole experience more palatable. Quite the opposite: I know from having had the good fortune to work with similarly diligent, ethical and responsible academics in the US that the lion's share of the herculean efforts we make in the UK to document excellence, uphold accountability, etc. hardly affect the results that matter, the quality of our teaching and of our research, ... except further to restrict and more frequently to interrupt the precious time we still have in which to focus on them. As Stephen Shapiro notes, the whole system is quite straightforwardly an instance of disciplinary power, and also quite obviously pushes UK academics to ever more intense levels of self-exploitation.
There is much more to be said about what is wrong with the UK system, and Stephen Shapiro and Neil Smith have already pointed to some of the key issues. One phenomenon at least worth mentioning is the truly weird commitment the system encourages, not just to standardization of procedures (par for the course in any university), but to ABSOLUTE standardization, standard procedure applied in exactly the same way to everty student, regardless of how unusual or unlikely their situations. In the US, in my experience at least, most students are satisfied with a system that involves standard procedures for handling most problems, supplemented by some administrative discretion for those truly odd circumstances not covered by the rules. Each individual student's case might not get handled exactly the same way, but as long as there is a general attempt to be fair in each case, that's good enough. I think most UK students would probably feel the same way, had they not been enculturated into a system they know is striving for absolute, perfect standardization.
This commitment to standardization promotes utopian dreams of the truly comprehensive, exceptionless regulatory structure, one capable of foreseeing every possible situation. It leads predictably to a cancerous self-reinforcing growth in the sheer number of mandatory procedures, and is often accompanied by an even stranger 'deification' of the figure of 'the external examiner' as a sort of grim reaper who can do terrible things if he or she discovers irregularities.
At first I wondered why so much energy was being invested in ass- (or arse-)covering regulation in a society so much less litigious than the US. But now I understand that the toxic mix of an audit culture borrowed from the business world and a national educational bureaucracy with the authority to impose it upon every university in the country, is at the root of the problem. The problem is not simply corporatization, it is the top-down imposition of elements of corporate culture by a central state. A key result of this imposed corporatization is that far fewer meaningful decisions about how to do things can be taken at the local level, in departments, through real consultation. The excellent leadership in my own institute is basically constrained to an ongoing exercise in reactive adaptation, with a few initiatives thrown in here and there where they fit the imposed program.
It is indeed difficult to know what to do to change this system, since so many of its aspects (not least, the growing cohort of administrators whose careers are premised on buying into and reproducing it) are self-reinforcing. One tongue-in-cheek form of protest undertaken by myself and a small group of colleagues has been to form what we call a "Periphery of mediocrity" (as distinct from a 'center of excellence'). We have ideas for a mission statement, but are not organized enough to have had a meeting... we all teach and do research, after all.
More seriously, though, one line of thinking that might be worth pursuing starts from the banal recognition that much of this neoliberal stuff, as a form of power, comprises a system of disciplinary surveillance. There is a logic of refinement inherent in this structure of power that has no limits in principle, and this is perhaps the core reason it has become such a bane to academics who want to focus on teaching and research.
It might be possible to move away from this system by reconfiguring teaching and research more through the 'juridical' model of the contract. Teaching and learning contracts are not a new idea, of course. But they could be configured (with the aid of legal counsel) to specify a great deal about what should and shouldn't happen in higher education, responsibilities of staff as teachers, etc., while leaving it to students to report problems (and of course, making sure there is an adequate infrastructure for doing so, one that protects students and has real power to enforce proper conduct on all sides).
The huge, priceless advantage of such a reactive system would be that the majority of academics, who would in any case do their jobs conscientiously and work hard, could be spared the cancerous growth of preventive disciplinary procedures that only change the behavior of the few slackers undeniably surviving even today on campuses. Switching from a breathlessly preventive approach to a quieter, contract-based reactive approach might begin to exorcise the virulent 'welfare reform' mentality that has crept into ever more public and private institutions since the 1980s.
This is all part and parcel of moving away from the 'impact' discourse, which couldn't have flourished without the massive category mistake that places the running of universities in the same basket with the running of businesses. The kinds of procedural changes suggested here could begin to make space once again for the work that really makes higher education valuable, and might break the amnesia that has led so many to forget that the value of higher education often lies precisely in its DISTANCE from the immediate demands of business-and-government-as-usual. This critical distance remains the condition for our most important impacts.