The universities of Manchester and Helsinki: Different paths
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2454
Comparing the experience of neoliberal reform at the Universities of Manchester and Helsinki shows that not all forms of neoliberalization are the same, despite the similarities in structural changes. In this case, the key difference has to do with the the social value attached to the content of scholarship, and to what universities do. In Manchester, the reforms were in the name of trying to achieve excellence, full stop; in Helsinki, the reforms were in the name of trying to achieve excellence for a reason: to better serve scholarship and the social good. This difference suggests that there is nothing inevitable about neoliberal reform: the outcome is contingent, and that generates hope.
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Sarah Green
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The universities of Manchester and Helsinki: Different paths
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Forum: Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
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Sarah Green
2016
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2454
55
University of Helsinki, Finland
2239-625X
1
en
58
The universities of Manchester and Helsinki: Different paths
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                                                       2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90




                                                                                                      FORUM




Student-led demonstration, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, February 4, 2015. Overpass Light Brigade, Joe Brusky
photographer. Source: overpasslightbrigade.org/love-light-for-uw-fight-the-cuts/.



Anthropologists in/of the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Cris SHORE & Susan WRIGHT, Vintilă MIHĂILESCU, Sarah GREEN, Gabriela VARGAS-CETINA
& Steffan Igor AYORA-DIAZ, Tracey HEATHERINGTON, Dimitris DALAKOGLOU, Noelle MOLÉ
LISTON, Susana NAROTZKY, Jaro STACUL, Meredith WELCH-DEVINE, Jon P. MITCHELL.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)
Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2437
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                                       55




The universities of Manchester and Helsinki: Different paths
Sarah GREEN
University of Helsinki


ABSTRACT: Comparing the experience of neoliberal reform at the Universities of Manchester and
Helsinki shows that not all forms of neoliberalization are the same, despite the similarities in struc-
tural changes. In this case, the key difference has to do with the the social value attached to the con-
tent of scholarship, and to what universities do. In Manchester, the reforms were in the name of try-
ing to achieve excellence, full stop; in Helsinki, the reforms were in the name of trying to achieve
excellence for a reason: to better serve scholarship and the social good. This difference suggests that
there is nothing inevitable about neoliberal reform: the outcome is contingent, and that generates
hope.



    Not all neoliberal reforms are the same: that is the key lesson I have learned by
working both in the Universities of Manchester and Helsinki in recently years.
    In 2015, I was asked by the Head of Social Research at the University of Helsinki to
give a talk for a Finnish audience about the UK’s concept of “Impact” in the Research
Excellence Framework 2014 (REF). I had moved to Helsinki in 2012. Keijo Rahkon-
en, the head of Social Research, said that he thought an audit of “research impact”
might be introduced in Finland, and it would be good to compare the British experi-
ence.
    At the time, there was a sense within the University of Helsinki that the university
structure had been becoming neoliberal since 2010. That was the year the Finnish Gov-
ernment passed the new University Law which, people told me, “privatised” the uni-
versities. Coming from the UK, it seemed to me like a very mild form of privatization:
all students still attended university for free (even overseas students); Finnish students
still received grants from the government on which to live; and the government still
paid almost all the costs of running universities. What had changed was that universit-
ies now managed their own budgets, were responsible for their own buildings, staff
were no longer civil servants, academic tenure no longer existed, and a part of people’s
salaries would be assessed by performance.
    I had arrived at Helsinki after 17 years of being employed by the University of
Manchester, which had been pursuing a strong and explicitly neoliberal path since
2004, when Alan Gilbert became its Vice Chancellor and (at his request) the uni-
versity’s President as well. Gilbert had come from Australia, and had attempted, but
failed, to create a fully privatised section of the University of Melbourne while he was
there1.

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Gilbert_(Australian_academic)

                                                  2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
56                                              ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY


   The University of Helsinki felt nothing like the kind of neoliberalism I had experi-
enced under Gilbert’s leadership at Manchester. The staff had been subjected to every
kind of audit – teaching audits, research audits, even admin audits; every part of our
work had been business-process re-engineered, so that everything we did was assessed
for levels of successful, efficient, and timely performance. Students had to provide so
much feedback about their lecturers’ performance, and so frequently, that they were
becoming tired of it. The amount of money spent on rebranding the university ap-
peared to be the equivalent of the costs of running a small department. Many of us
were put in newly built buildings that had open plan designs and little bookshelf space,
apparently intended to increase interaction and transparency. Many of the staff and stu-
dents believed it was actually to save money, and to increase surveillance.
   The University of Manchester – or at least the School of Social Sciences in which I
worked (nobody really knew what happened in other schools) - also introduced a vari-
ety of monetary targets, calculating annual “contributions” per discipline. “Contribu-
tion” was the word used to mean clear profit, after all the costs of employment, build-
ings, secretarial support, equipment, and so on, had been deducted. Even when discip-
lines were making a profit, if the average profit made by each member of staff was not
meeting the target, that counted as failure. For the first time in my academic career, I
began to become aware of the costs of teaching students, as the relationship between
the time spent with students against the money they earned for the university was made
explicit. Apparently, we should not give students more time than they are worth; but at
the same time, we were exhorted to always answer students’ emails and mark their
work thoroughly and on time, because the students need to say they are satisfied with
our service to them. There was also constant, endless, reorganization of administration
structures and systems, and constant renaming of disciplinary units and attempts to
merge them with others.
   Things moved so far away from what we had understood higher education to be that
many of us wondered how things had ever got to that stage with so few expressions of
alarm about the systematic breaking down of what many of us saw as the essential
basis for scholarship: the classic Humboldt model of the nurturing of a community of
peers whose commitment was based on the idea of scholarship as a vocation rather
than a job; whose work would be shared freely with other scholars so that it could be
tested, critiqued and built upon by others; and in which teaching was a means to en-
courage young people to learn how to think, not what to think. All of that began to feel
and sound faintly naïve, but the precise moment when it became so was unclear.
   Despite all this, Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester remained one
of the best anthropology units in the UK, and I thoroughly enjoyed working within that
research environment and I still miss my colleagues. Yet that was despite the uni-
versity’s reforms, not because of them. Of course, there were some positive changes:
nobody gave the same lectures for thirty years anymore; marking of exams became
much more rigorous, so there was a reduction of gender and ethnicity bias; and PhD


2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                          57


students were managing to finish their doctorates on time more often than not. Of
course the arrangements in the pre-reform era needed improvement, and many of those
improvements have now been made; but I am not convinced that turning the University
of Manchester into a neoliberal industrial site was the best way to make those improve-
ments. I am certain it was not the only way to make them.
    So when I arrived in Helsinki in 2012, the Finnish neoliberal experiment there felt
to me like it had either hardly begun or was something completely different from what
I had experienced in the UK. By 2015, when I was asked to present a paper on “the im-
pact of Impact” on university research environments, I had concluded it was indeed
something different. On the surface, the University of Helsinki might appear to be go-
ing down the same path: social sciences was moved to another building, much of which
is open plan; the new rector changed the university’s statutes so as to centralise power
to himself and would take increasing control over the appointment of deans and heads
of department; the need to meet targets has been increasingly emphasised; and the
complete reorganization of the administration and degree structures have been imple-
mented at such speed over the last year that people have hardly had time to catch their
breath.
    That last set of changes coincided with a newly elected national government that
radically cut the budgets of Finnish universities, and the University of Helsinki’s budget
in particular. The drop in income was so big, the university’s rector said, that he had no
choice but to downsize the university. This was despite the fact that the university made
a hefty profit in 2015. By the time the paper I presented in 2015 was published, less
than a year after I presented it (Green 2016), more than 500 staff had been laid off, in -
cluding the administrator of Social and Cultural Anthropology, who had worked for the
discipline for over twenty years. Most of these staff were administrative employees, but
there were also a few academic staff, including full professors, who lost their jobs.
Nothing that dramatic had ever occurred in one fell swoop at the University of
Manchester. The entire staff at the University of Helsinki was in a state of shock about
it by the time the summer recess arrived in 2016.
    Yet it would be a serious error to assume that there is anything either inevitable, or
inevitably the same, in the way such reforms have been implemented in Manchester
and Helsinki. Despite the structural similarities of the reforms, there is something dis-
tinctly different about the value and significance of universities being expressed at Hel-
sinki, from all sides of the debate, both those in favour of the reforms and those
against. Of course the official rhetoric speaks of excellence, of trying to climb up inter-
national league tables, of the need to win ever more research money. Yet there is still
an unwavering commitment to scholarship as an end in itself at Helsinki; more import-
antly, there appears to be a wider popular commitment to the idea that higher educa-
tion is the means by which more equal opportunities are achieved in Finland. And uni-
versities are still also widely seen as a major source of attempting to do good for soci-
ety (indeed, that is still written into the mission statement of the University of
Helsinki).

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58                                                ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY


   What has happened at Helsinki over the last year, both in terms of layoffs and in
terms of structural change, has shaken everyone to the core, and nobody knows, as yet,
what the outcome will be. And that uncertainty provides a space for intervention. What
appears fairly certain is that it will not be the same path as Manchester has taken. The
Finnish university system has the opportunity, and the values, to take its own route to
reform, and I am hoping to be there to help that happen.

REFERENCES

Green, Sarah, 2016, A New Twist in the Development of the Knowledge Economy: The Im-
      pact of ‘Impact’ in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework 2014, in What are univer-
      sities for? On the current state and the future of universities, Keijo Rahkonen, Hannu Nie-
      minen, eds, University of Helsinki: 33-50.




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