“A strange modernity”: On the contradictions of the neoliberal university
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2980
While many commentators see neoliberalism as a monolithic force changing universities into businesses, in reality its shared veneer of rhetorical vocabulary obscures profound and irresolvable practical contradictions – contradictions that make university life impossible, even in “business” terms.
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Martin A. Mills
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“A strange modernity”: On the contradictions of the neoliberal university
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Martin A. Mills
2017/07/18
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2980
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University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom
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“A strange modernity”: On the contradictions of the neoliberal university
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                                                  2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 47-52




                                                                                              FORUM




Student demonstration against fees and cuts, Aberdeen. Credits: http://anticuts.com/wp-content/uploads /
2015/07/ Aberdeen-student-left-banner.jpg


Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Virginia R. DOMINGUEZ, Sam BECK, Carl A. MAIDA, Martin A. MILLS, Berardino
PALUMBO, Alan SMART, Ger DUIJZINGS, Alexis M. JORDAN & Shaheen M. CHRISTIE,
Boone W. SHEAR, Alex KOENSLER & Cristina PAPA, THE RECLAIMING OUR UNIVERSITY
MOVEMENT.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © MARTIN A. MILLS
“A strange modernity”: On the contradictions of the neoliberal university
2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 47-52.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2980
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            47




“A strange modernity”
On the contradictions of the neoliberal university

Martin A. MILLS
University of Aberdeen


ABSTRACT: While many commentators see neoliberalism as a monolithic force changing uni-
versities into businesses, in reality its shared veneer of rhetorical vocabulary obscures pro-
found and irresolvable practical contradictions – contradictions that make university life im-
possible, even in “business” terms.


   In his short revisionist essay, “The Fourth World War has begun”, subco-
mandante Marcos, the anonymous but charismatic spokesman of the Zap-
atista liberation movement in Chiapas, contemplated the wars that have
raged on earth over the last century: not between empires or nation-states or
religions, which were mere ciphers, but between the impersonal engines of
global finance and the very populations they were originally meant to serve.
The First, Second and Third (Cold) World Wars were merely means to pull re-
calcitrant populations out of their traditionally autonomous domains, and
into the shadow of global administrative finance. Globalisation, he argued,
«is merely the totalitarian extension of the logic of the finance markets to all
aspects of life. Where they were once in command of their economies, the
nation states (and their governments) are commanded - or rather telecom-
manded - by the same basic logic of financial power, commercial free trade.
And in addition, this logic has profited from a new permeability created by
the development of telecommunications to appropriate all aspects of social
activity» (Marcos 2001). Marcos’ observations on “war” are most unsettling
because of the conceptual range he deploys to understand the term. Because
war is violence, we often mistake it for the merely physical transformation of
bodies, but in truth violence – as we understand it both legally, politically
and socially – is in essence the forced transformation, not just of bodies, but
of persons.
   What we see in universities today is exactly that: a new battleground for
the nature of who we truly are as scholars, academics and students, as the


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48                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


logic of scholarship is transformed, apparently, into the remorseless logic of
business. As we stand in our seminar rooms and lecture halls, the world
seems to shift around us. When once academics and students were united, at
least in principle, in the shared pursuit of scholarship and understanding, we
are now divided from one another in the very quality of our personhood
within a larger economic game. What were once students intent on learning
and truth have become customers folded around the ambitions of hoop-
jumping and career-building; while we ourselves have shifted subtly within
our academic skins to become cost centres and service providers, similarly
engaged in burgeoning games of administrative hoop jumping just to put
food on the family table. Inasmuch as we go along with it (and thankfully,
not all of us do), this game changes us in ourselves, and changes our rela-
tionship with what we hold most dear, and to which we once committed our
lives. We try to resist, but in this new global war, it often seems that the odds
are stacked against us.
   However, as with physical conflict, the fog of war looms over the battle-
field, and it is often far from clear what is actually happening, and who is on
what side. Much of the academic literature that critiques “the neoliberal
academy” assumes that what is at hand is a straightforward battle of wills
between two distinct world-views: on the one side an ancient ideal of the
university as a «space where speculative thought can be freely pursued with-
out regard to its financial value» (Thomas 2011); while on the other is the
neoliberal vision that universities «should provide education and research on
the model of corporations delivering “goods” in a market» (Rustin 2016:
159). The test of who has “won” here is the degree to which universities have
been turned into “businesses”. But is this really true, and if it is, why is it that
those universities that have gone down this path seem so unsuccessful in
business terms, so increasingly burdened with costs that they end up losing
the very engine of their own productivity – their academics?
   In my own experience, the economic dynamics at work in these changes
are far more unclear, and the rhetoric of neoliberalism and ‘business’ hides
considerable confusion, suggesting that it is something of a red herring. Of
course, as many have commented, the capitalist logic of customer, service
provider and product is something of a chimera. As I (and many others) have
argued before (Mills 2007: 15), there is some disagreement over who is who
in this increasingly destructive drama, as new capitalism is squeezed into the
old world of academia.
   In the UK, whilst the idea of the student as customer has increasingly
dominated public discussion of tertiary education, my own experience of or-


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 47-52
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            49


ganisations such as the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency was that policymak-
ers regarded the taxpayer, business and indeed government itself as the pri-
mary customers when considering the distribution of national financial re-
sources. This view rendered students not as customers, but as products for
consumption by the external economic marketplace. To a large extent this is
explicit within the logic of the 1997 Dearing Report on higher education, de-
spite its headline message of students as customers (Dearing 1997).
   The problem here is that these two visions do not cohere; indeed, in many
respects they are contradictory. The student qua customer is looking, in re-
turn for their fees, for the requisite qualifications that will procure them a lu-
crative job on graduation, and may be prepared to go to considerable lengths
(including complaints, litigation, and even plagiarism) to achieve that goal.
At the same time, universities – lacking the legal or financial resources to
hold off litigious students or police a growing pattern of plagiarism – are in-
creasingly forced to compromise their academic standards in the face of such
pressure. By contrast, the requirement – exemplified in the recent thinking,
speeches and policies of both New Labour and Conservative governments –
produce a workforce for the future knowledge economy that is characterised
by excellence, critical thinking, innovation, transferable skills, research-led
expertise (and so on), imply a year-on-year increase in standards at UK uni-
versities.
   The tension between these countervailing flows of expectation is experi-
enced most practically on the floor of university senate chambers or behind
the closed door of the exam board. The resolution of the dialectic is duplici-
tous, but disturbingly simple: to treat students as customers when they ap-
ply, but as products when they leave. Thus, in the UK many universities place
pressure on staff to recruit as many PhD students as possible (even when
they are interested in projects outside a supervisor’s academic expertise) in
order to boost fees income, while at the other end of the spectrum trying to
get those self-same students to submit their doctoral theses within the over-
all deadlines set by national funding bodies, with any over-run to do so being
seen as a failure of supervision. Academics, in other words, are set up to fail,
one way or another.
   Such blatant contradictions bedevil modern university life at all levels,
while attended by a rhetoric that presents such changes as “obvious”, “prac-
tical” and “realistic” in the face of obscurantist academic resistance and spe-
cial pleading. Some years ago, I participated in a research investigators work-
shop, the opening morning of which was designed to introduce us to the
“new economic context” of our research work. In the first speech, a noted

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50                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


vice-principal of an ancient university explained about the straitened times
we now live in, and how vital it was that we provided “value for money” in
our research, by which he meant that we engage competitively in getting
large research grants, preferably of the kind that included substantial over-
heads for our host institutions. We got the message. He was then followed by
the head of a national funding body, who explained again what straitened
times we now live in, and how vital it was that researchers provide “value for
money” for their national economies, by which he meant that research
projects should produce their results for as little as possible, because there
wasn’t much research money to go around. In other words, while presented
under the veil of identical rhetoric, the practical messages they were supply-
ing contradicted one another completely, but both nodded enthusiastically
as the other spoke. At the end of the morning, several of my colleagues ex-
pressed the view that the two speeches, which were clearly intended to moti-
vate us, had actually caused them to seriously contemplate a different career.
    But how do those academics amongst us, those that continue to believe in
the fundamental value of what we do and wish to continue in our commit-
ment to it, survive in such an increasingly erratic and no-win environment?
When I wrote on this question back in 2000 (Mills 2000), I rather facetiously
quoted Scott Adams (author of the Dilbert cartoons), when he noted that,
when faced with such a dilemma, «the rational employee will divert all avail-
able resources away from accomplishing things and towards the more highly
compensated process of lying about accomplishments» (Adams 1996: 269).
To be honest, Adams remains bang on target. Caroline Humphrey observed
similar tendencies when studying reindeer herding collectives in Siberia dur-
ing the Soviet period: when asked to do two contradictory things at the same
time, reality forces one to develop more and more elaborate narratives to
cover up the inevitable and growing discrepancies (Humphrey 1983). In bu-
reaucratic terms, this is called “reporting”, and involves the lengthy and time
consuming process of manufacturing metrics, targets, financial statements
and attendant narratives that fit with the appropriate rhetoric. When dealing
with large collectives like universities, it involves a growing number of ad-
ministrative personnel, and growing obfuscation of actual reality. As David
Graeber has observed in his recent Utopia of Rules: «History reveals that po-
litical policies that favor “the market” have always meant even more people
in offices to administer things» (Graeber 2015: 32).
    The requirement to respond bureaucratically to governmental require-
ments to “promote quality” within universities clashes hard against the pos-


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ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            51


sibility of expanding those institutions financially. Precisely because such
quality requirements are so expensive in terms of time and energy, they gen-
erate a burgeoning administrative segment, and internal reporting structures
that use up increasing quantities of academics’ time, often precisely at the
mid-point of their careers, when they would otherwise be most productive in
research terms and effective in teaching terms. University populations thus
end up being dragged in two different directions, vastly increasingly their in-
ternal workloads and costs. At the same time, the comparative size of univer-
sity administrations is growing apace, precisely given over to plug the gap
between growing expectations and reducing resources with a powerful flurry
of carefully crafted words, numbers and flagship “initiatives” designed to
mollify senior management teams, university courts, national REF panels,
national student survey and international quality league tables, government
ministers and ombudsmen and indeed potential ‘banks of mum and dad’,
while simultaneously telling university staff how terrible things are.
   Precisely in the name of accountability and transparency, in other words,
looming walls of increasingly meaningless words are being built between de-
pleting resources and “world-beating” rhetorics. It has become the new real,
not only toppling universities over with the weight of their administrative
workloads, but also generating divisive “rhetoric gaps” between those that
must persuade and those that need to be persuaded. The result, therefore, is
a veneer of rhetorical production that has become the central task of univer-
sity existence, which serves to solve everything and nothing at the same
time.

REFERENCES
Adams, Scott, 1996, The Dilbert principle, New York, Boxtree Publications.
Dearing, Ronald, 1997, Higher education in the learning society, Report of the Na-
      tional Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education, London, Her Majesty’s
      Stationery Office.
Graeber, David, 2015, The Utopia of Rules, London, Melville House.
Humphrey, Caroline,1983. The Karl Marx Collective, Cambridge, Cambridge Univer-
      sity Press.
Marcos, Subcomandante, 2001, The Fourth World War Has Begun, Nepantla: Views
      from South, 2, 3: 559-572.
Mills, Martin, 2000, Comment: Audit culture and anthropology, Journal of the Royal
      Anthropological Institute, September: 521-526.
Mills, Martin, 2007, Universities torn between two masters, Times Higher Education,
      September 14.


                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 47-52
52                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


Rustin, Michael, 2016, The neoliberal university and its alternatives, Soundings, 63:
     147-176.
Thomas, Keith, 2011, Universities under Attack, London Review of Books, December
     15: 9-10.




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