Do not become an idiot: A comment on neoliberalism and labour relationships within higher education
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2457
As neoliberalism takes over academia, there is struggle going on. This is a struggle to keep the academic institutions as free as possible from “idiotic” (i.e. self-interested) forms of behaviour and especially from reproducing socially and politically such practices.
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Dimitris Dalakoglou
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Do not become an idiot: A comment on neoliberalism and labour relationships within higher education
Text.Serial.Journal
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Forum: Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
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2016-08-13
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Dimitris Dalakoglou
2016
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2457
67
Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands
2239-625X
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70
Do not become an idiot: A comment on neoliberalism and labour relationships within higher education
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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)                                                       67




Do not become an idiot: A comment on neoliberalism and labour
relationships within higher education
Dimitris DALAKOGLOU
Vrije University Amsterdam


ABSTRACT: As neoliberalism takes over academia, there is struggle going on. This is a struggle to
keep the academic institutions as free as possible from “idiotic” (i.e. self-interested) forms of beha-
viour and especially from reproducing socially and politically such practices.



    When Bologna Process was initiated by the European governments promoting the
neoliberal adjustment of academic sector in the continent, the focus of the protests that
took place back then was the creation of the so-called university/super-market 1. The
critique was that under the new paradigm the students will become consumers of the
educational product and the corporations or the State will be the consumers of the re-
search product. Moreover, these protests were also focusing on the wider social shift
that neoliberal higher education implies. Namely higher education was not considered
anymore a right of the society or a public good, but a luxury commodity requesting in -
dividual investment. People will buy education if they can afford it and this will be
translated into higher income or personal development, and listed learning outcomes,
which will be translated into analogous listed skills etc. However, an area which was
not stressed enough by the protests was the shift that neoliberalism will bring to the la-
bour relationships within academia.
    This happened for a number of reasons. One of these reasons has, arguably, to do
with the depoliticisation of academia. The majority of the workers in European aca-
demia did not participate that actively in those protests, on contrary to their students
who revolted properly in some cases against the proposed shifts over the last two dec-
ades. Certainly, one can argue that since the 1990s there was a more general depoliti-
cisation tendency in Europe. In our case, part of the problem was that academics at that
time considered themselves a different class than other workers, and unfortunately
some still do so. Many academics seem to think that they are immune to the material
conditions of everyday life. Of course the fact that a proportion of the academics had
decent salaries and decent working conditions in most of Europe contributed to that re-
lative lack of protest. This is not the case anymore as academia becomes an increas-
1. A version of this text was presented in the invited plenary session of IUAES in May 2016 on the Fu -
ture of Anthropology. I should thank Noel Salazar, Heather O’Leary and Rajko Mursic for putting to-
gether this session and the participants for their questions and comments. I also have to thank KULA the
Slovenian Anthropological Association for hosting me.

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


ingly repressive work environment, both in terms of salaries and also in terms of social
and political deregulation (see Bal, Grassiani, Kirk 2014; Mitchell, Dyck 2014; Afonso
2013; Dalakoglou 2012).
    Today any newcomer in academia knows very well how neoliberalism is implemen-
ted in terms of labour relationships. Constant restructuring has deregulated the sector
and put it in a permanent crisis, and thus a “state of exception”, which becomes the
new technology of academic governance. However, one should separate two major di-
mensions: an institutional structure (e.g. proliferation of temporary contracts, redund-
ancies, restructuring etc.) and the social one, consisting of people who are eager to im-
plement or simply remain silent about such shifts. These human resources seem to be a
key dimension of neoliberalism within academia and it is an issue that it is rarely ad-
dressed. It is a no-go zone since everyone working within the sector knows someone
who has been involved in such activities. For instance one hears stories all the time
about certain line managers who become the heavies of the neoliberal central manage-
ment, or management teams who interchange between good cop-bad cop roles, we also
hear cases about managers who blackmail psychologically or directly people who are
below them in the academic food chain or about libel campaigns that are damaging not
only within the particular institution but in smaller disciplines, they may make someone
unemployed for ever. Quite often such practices are applied by certain bosses in order
to make an example and intimidate the rest of the workers.
    Part of the problem is that a lot of academic environments that adopt the neoliberal
adjustments seem to borrow the worst elements from both worlds. So often, university
environments keep the archaic and useless hierarchical structures of academia that go
back to the Christian monastic punitive tradition, combined with informality and inter-
personal face to face relationships and the dog-eat-dog of the neoliberal legacy. Over-
all, the problem with neoliberal governance of labour, within academia, is that it allows
for abuse of power and bullying.
    Nevertheless, the important issue is always the individuals who are eager to apply
such practices in the everyday life of academic biotopes. The stories are repeated.
Everyone knows of colleagues who exchange a promotion for a managerial role, for ex-
ample, but they also happen to jump the fence overnight, finding themselves siting
comfortably on the side of neoliberal micro-management. Suddenly every senseless
moronity that an external consultant of the central management wrote in a report (and
the management now has to implement, since they paid the consultant 22 lecturers’
salaries for a month’s worth of work) is somehow justified by some of these former
colleagues. The big university bosses who implement the worst neoliberal agendas, are
portrayed by these former colleagues/now micro-line-managers as sympathetic parents
who really have good intentions, but their hands are tied. If someone dares to say any-
thing about e.g. the half million salaries of these big bosses and the junior faculty’s
salaries that are not enough even to pay their rent, they are automatically black-listed as
a troublemaker who must be isolated and ousted by all means available by the certain


2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                                   69


micro-bosses. After all, we are in a crisis and every exception can be justified in order
to “save the discipline” or “the department” or even “social sciences” per se2.
    So the point is that such regimes of everyday bullying within the academic work en-
vironments must be actually applied by some people, and not resisted by others, in or-
der for the neoliberal form of governance of labour to be materialised. These two kinds
of people are the necessary idiots. And idiot-ness is what distinct someone who will get
a position of power and will become a bully and someone who will not. As it is well
known, the word idiot is etymologically linked with the word for private. Idiot there-
fore refers, more or less, to persons who care about their private interests rather than
the wider good. It got its negative connotations thousands of years ago in Athens, when
not caring about what was defined as the collective interests of the time and the public
sphere was considered as one of the worst practices. Indeed, a problem with idiots who
are involved in education is that they have a role in the production of knowledge and
thus social reproduction. Unfortunately, gradually one can observe an increase in simil-
ar neoliberal idiotic ethics being reproduced in very junior levels. So for instance, we
see PhD students who receive their PhDs and jump the fence. Now they must take care
of their career and not protest too much, whilst stepping on the neck of someone else
for professional progress is justified for X or Y reasons. One also witnesses PhD stu-
dents who align themselves with certain powerful individuals who love power and are
higher on the academic food-chain like that aforementioned type of idiots etc.
    Thus we are running always the danger to reproduce entire cohorts of idiots, as stu-
dents learn not only from what their teachers say but also from the ways they behave.
This is a key dimension within the neoliberal academic world, as the system is being
adjusted structurally in order to produce idiots. So it is almost entirely up to the groups
of teachers how to navigate within the new paradigm so they do not become idiots
themselves and their students learn how not to be idiots.
    So it is of crucial importance to reproduce – from the most junior to the most senior
levels – as few idiots as possible. Otherwise, they will take over one of the very last
spheres of public life where there is some chance to reproduce socially and politically
critical forms of behaviour and thought.
    One can claim that self-interested practices were always present within academia
before the shift to neoliberalism. Hierarchy, authoritarianism and bravado up have
been, to a certain extent, historically embedded within academic world. However there
is a qualitative difference in the age of neoliberalism. The system never before favoured
so much the idiots (always per the original etymology referring to private self-interest
oriented behaviour). And idiot-ness becomes a distinctive factor between the people
who will be able to resist the repressive neoliberal adjustments in their daily practice
within the university – irrelevant of their position within the hierarchy – and the ones
who will turn into bullies as soon as they catch a position of power.

2. All cases used in this paper are random examples; any potential resemblance with real persons and
real situations is accidental.

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


REFERENCES

Afonso, Alexandre, 2013, How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang, blogs.lse.ac.- uk/impactof-
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      2016).
Bal, Ellen, Erella Grassiani, Kate Kirk, 2014, Neoliberal individualism in Dutch universities:
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      7, 3: 46-72.
Dalakoglou, Dimitris, 2012, Universities in a state of exception, Anthropology responds to the
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      Commonwealth, Republished in Allegra Laboratory, allegralaboratory.net/-dimitris-
      dalakoglou-universities-in-a-state-of-exception (accessed on 15 July 2016).
Mitchell, Jon P., Noel Dyck, 2014, Introduction: anthropology and the neoliberal agenda, Et-
      nográfica, 18, 2: 233-236.




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