Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2836
Questo Forum prosegue il dibattito aperto da un precedente Forum di Anuac (vol. 5, n. 1, giugno 2016) sulle trasformazioni dell’accademia al tempo del neoliberismo e le relative conseguenze sul futuro dell’antropologia. Auspichiamo che queste ulteriori testimonianze e commenti inducano chi lavora e studia all’università a formare una coalizione transnazionale capace di immaginare nuove visioni di università. Il Forum presenta contributi di Virginia R. Dominguez, Sam Beck, Carl A. Maida, Martin A. Mills, Berardino Palumbo, Alan Smart, Ger Duijzings, Alexis M. Jordan &amp; Shaheen M. Christie, Boone W. Shear, Alexander Koensler &amp; Cristina Papa, e del Reclaiming Our University Movement.
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Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
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Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
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                                                  2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 23-98




                                                                                              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 © TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)
Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 23-98.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2836
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY              23




Introduction
Tracey HEATHERINGTON
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Filippo M. ZERILLI
University of Cagliari


   In the summer of 2016, Anuac hosted a forum dedicated to Anthropolo-
gists in/of the neoliberal academy (Heatherington, Zerilli 2016), featuring
short papers by colleagues across Europe, North America, and beyond. Con-
tributions witnessed unfolding transformations in their universities related
to changing education policy frameworks, declines in funding, the introduc-
tion of audit cultures, and new forms of public-private partnership. As San-
dra Grey has recently described the case of New Zealand universities sub-
jected to rigorous managerial systems, «the picture is one of institutions and
their academics being robbed of the space to be engaged in projects which
are not countable, auditable, measurable or commercializable» (2017: 275).
This suggests profound impacts on the mission of higher education and pos-
sibilities for critical research. Shore and Wright have explained, with particu-
lar reference to studies of institutions in Europe and New Zealand, «under
pressure to produce “excellence”, quality research and innovative teaching,
improve world rankings, forge business links and attract elite, fee-paying
students, many universities struggle to maintain their traditional mandate to
be “inclusive”, foster social cohesion, improve social mobility and challenge
received wisdom – let alone improve the poor records of gender, diversity
and equality» (2017: 1-2). These same pressures have been recognized by the
American Association of University Professors, which recently marked seri-
ous threats to systems of shared governance, organized labour, principles of
social diversity, and the fundamental role of colleges and universities in the
U.S. (Barlow 2017).
   Anthropologists continue to witness – as students, researchers, practi-
tioners, teachers, community advocates and administrators – how the struc-
tural changes impacting higher education and research are affecting the fu-
ture of our discipline, our institutions and our society writ large. Our second
forum proceeds with this important work of participant observation in the


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 23-27
24                                         TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


evolution of the neoliberal academy, from the perspective of diverse subject
positions and national contexts. We are interested not only in the outcome
of research and scholarship in the anthropology of higher education, but also
in documenting the changing conditions of our everyday work in the acad-
emy, as well as the movements taking shape to resist and channel neoliberal
initiatives that affect us. Snapshots of current academic contexts across the
U.S. are provided by contributions from Virginia R. Dominguez, Sam Beck,
Carl Maida, Alexis M. Jordan & Shaheen M. Christie, and Boone W. Shear. In
addition, Martin A. Mills offers a perspective from Scotland, Berardino
Palumbo discusses developments in Italy, Alan Smart provides insight from
Canada, and Ger Duijzings reflects on an institution in Britain, while Alexan-
der Koensler & Cristina Papa discuss comparative examples from Northern
Ireland and Italy. Taken together, these grounded commentaries represent
more than the sum of the parts. Like the essays contained in our 2016 forum,
they are also evidence of the collective spirit of our discipline, which is fun-
damentally self-reflective and engaged. We are also pleased to reprint the
2016 Manifesto from the University of Aberdeen, Reclaiming Our University,
which seeks out a new model for the public university in the twenty-first
century.
   Documenting the erosion of the tenure system in the U.S., Dominguez ex-
plores the pivotal principle of academic freedom. Although protected by Eu-
ropean constitutional law (COE 2006), and written into the statutes of some
state systems, the right to freedom of academic research and teaching is in-
creasingly jeopardized by emerging procedures of administrative control and
sanctions, as well as obligations and limitations associated with privately
sponsored projects. Koensler & Papa (this forum) argue that the unspoken
purpose of transformations in academic administration is the making of a
new, docile subject: the “flexible academic person”. This recalls Jon Mit-
chell’s crucial point that «the transformation of subjectivity is not a “soft”
project, but the hard edge of neoliberalism» (2016: 90). Yet academics are
anything but docile, and diverse scholarly projects address challenges to the
core values of the university. In the Auckland Declaration on the Purpose of
the University in the 21st Century, for example, an international collabora-
tion of students and academics from China, Canada, New Zealand, Australia,
Malaysia, Singapore, USA and European countries affirm the principle of
higher education as a public good, and the necessity for institutions, re-
searchers and educators to remain autonomous actors in order to fulfil man-
dates as «critic and conscience of society» (Newfield et al. 2016). Identifying
a «new social contract for higher education», they insist,


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ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                      25

      Universities’ responsibilities to societies must always take precedence over
      their accountability to their funders. Constraints and conditions on funding
      must not be used to compromise their educational autonomy, academic free-
      dom, or social responsibility (ivi).

   Drawing on experiences with educational theories and practices in U.S.
public universities, both Beck and Maida stress the fundamental value of
learning as an engaging engaged, transformative social practice in their con-
tributions to this forum.
   However, “learning away from neoliberalism”, as Boone poetically sug-
gests in his essay, is a route cobbled with paradoxes and contradictions. Ne-
oliberal restructuring cannot be easily refused or reversed; neither should it
be conceived as a monolithic, teleological process. In fact, Palumbo argues
that despite evidence of the limits and damages produced by the recently es-
tablished university audit system in Italy, it is better than relying on the
“backward”, “tribal” evaluation and recruitment practices that have previ-
ously held sway in Italian social anthropology. On the other hand, neoliberal
processes do not necessarily transform all universities into institutions that
operate according to the logic of profit seeking: as Smart contends in his
commentary, the Canadian academy works rather as an economy of prestige
that nonetheless serves the production of private profit, like the State itself.
The contradictions and opacity of the university business model and dis-
course is also at the core of Mills’ contribution, according to which: «the eco-
nomic dynamics at work in these changes are far more unclear, and the
rhetoric of neoliberalism and “business” hides considerable confusion, sug-
gesting that it is something of a red herring» (Mills, this forum). And if the
business model is far from being as efficient and worthwhile as it pretends to
be, on the other hand «the movement for engagement is both part of this in-
tegration [into the market economy] and a movement of resistance against
the neoliberal political economy» (Beck, this forum). Duijzings adopts a dif-
ferent kind of voice in his “ethnographic dispatches” that offer a perspective
on the transformation process at a well-known institution in UK. His vivid
account suggests that university teachers and professors, students, adminis-
trative staff and blue collar service personnel are all atomized categories of
persons in the university who are rigidly classified, hierarchically organized,
and most importantly kept separate one from the other, as though they were
living in different, often conflicting professional worlds. It is this implicit so-
cial division that undermines their capacity to resist structural violence,
whereas a coordinated coalition might assert an alternative to the prevailing
university model.

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26                                               TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


   This year’s forum is concerned to explore how anthropologists are in fact
actively re-envisioning and reshaping the institutions within which we work.
As Shore and Wright (2017: 18-21) discuss, the corporate university is not
the only model available to us; some academics are now participating in
trust universities, cooperative universities and free universities. These au-
thors conclude that such alternative projects of higher education may not be
viable substitutes for the public university, «however they do illustrate the
advantages of an educational system freed from commercial imperatives…
[and they highlight] a commitment to, and confidence in, higher education as
a vehicle for promoting a better future for all» (ibidem: 21). Such creative de-
termination and collaboration is required to find new paths forward for pub-
lic education. In this forum, we have sought out contributions that look to-
ward a vision for reshaping the neoliberal academy in positive ways. While
all of the essays here contribute understandings that support our scope for
agency, a provocative contribution from Shear on the role of the “solidarity
economy” movement on and off campus in Massachusetts is particularly
apropos in this respect. Similarly, Jordan and Christie document the efforts
of students, academic staff and faculty working together to advocate for aca-
demic freedom in Wisconsin. Each of these pieces supports the argument
that only a genuine collaborative effort of students and teachers can help us
move towards a new academic community envisioning the university «as a
location of possibility from which to locate and advance lines of connection
to egalitarian worlds» (Shear, this forum). This is perhaps best exemplified by
the Reclaiming Our University movement originating at the University of Ab-
erdeen, with its Manifesto providing an anchor to our forum:
     We, scholars, students, staff and alumni of the University of Aberdeen, call for
     fundamental reform of the principles, ethos and organisation of our university,
     in order (1) that it should be restored to the community to which it belongs and
     (2) that it can fulfil its civic purpose in a manner appropriate to our times, in
     the defence of democracy, peaceful coexistence and human flourishing.

   We invite our colleagues around the world to respond and contribute to
this continuing exchange of ideas about the future of the academy. As Aaron
Barlow avers, «We have work to do… We cannot allow decisions about our in-
stitutions to be made without our participation» (2017: 2).
   Like the rest of this Anuac issue, our forum is dedicated to the memory of
anthropologist Ugo Fabietti, whose progressive vision for the future of the
discipline continues to provoke novel intellectual explorations.



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REFERENCES
Barlow, Aaron, 2017, From the Editor: Activism 2017, Academe, 103, 1: 2.
COE 2006, Academic freedom and university autonomy, Parliamentary Assembly Rec-
      ommendation 1762 (2006), Council of Europe, http://assembly.coe.int
Grey, Sandra, 2017, Resistance in the Neoliberal University, in Death of the Public
      University? Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy,
      Susan Wright, Cris Shore, eds, Oxford, UK, Berghahn: 275-295.
Heatherington, Tracey, Filippo M. Zerilli, eds, 2016, Anthropologists in/of the neolib-
      eral academy, Forum, Anuac, 5, 1: 41-90.
Mitchell, Jon P., 2016, Let Our Profs Be Profs, Anuac, 5, 1: 87-90.
Newfield, Chris, et al., 2016, Auckland Declaration on the Purpose of the University in
      the 21st Century, draft statement, Universities in the Knowledge Economy
      project website, http://unike.au.dk/the-auckland-declaration.
Shore, Cris, Susan Wright, 2017, Introduction. Privatizing the Public University: Key
      Trends, Countertrends and Alternatives, in Death of the Public University? Un-
      certain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy, Susan Wright,
      Cris Shore, eds, Oxford, UK, Berghahn: 1-27.




2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 23-27
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The erosion of academic tenure in the U.S.
And its ties to public neoliberal anti-intellectualism

Virginia R. DOMINGUEZ
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign




ABSTRACT: This essay examines the erosion of tenure in the U.S. academy and its connections
to the spread of neoliberal capitalist ideology in U.S. colleges and universities. It also
explores how this affects anthropology departments since only a small part of anthropology
is ever considered part of the STEM fields.




   I write as someone with experience at several U.S. universities but also as
past president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). And I
write as someone who has held visiting positions of different kinds at
universities in Israel, Hungary, England, France, Italy, South Africa, and
Japan. My concerns here are primarily, but not exclusively, about what is
happening to higher education in the U.S.
   Change is not necessarily bad, of course. There were only four tenured
women on the Yale faculty when I began there as an undergraduate, and
there are many more now (though still not parity with men). And witness
that Yale was for years a bastion of elite families who sent their children to
exclusive private schools before they went on to Yale. It was only in the mid-
sixties that starting Yale Freshmen classes consisted of more students from
public high schools than private high schools. Change can be good. It can be
fast or slow, but it can still be good.
   The question, of course, is what kind of change we want, what kind of
change we are seeing, and what kind of impact that change is having. For
years I was probably too focused on my own career to notice, even when I got
involved in university administration and politics, as I quickly did at Duke. I
worried then about whether I would ever get tenure and whether my whole
academic generation would. I envied earlier U.S. generations that had
seemingly gotten professorial jobs and promotions with less scholarly

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30                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


accomplishments than were apparently required of my academic generation.
I thought and said that tenure should be abolished, even though I knew why
it had been instituted in the first place (to avoid political appointments and
firings on political, rather than intellectual, grounds). But, as years have
passed and I have experienced tenured faculty positions at Duke, the
University of California-Santa Cruz, the University of Iowa, and the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and had deep exposure to a wide
variety of institutions in the U.S. through my AAA presidency, I have
reevaluated tenure, worried about its erosion, noticed the rise of STEM fields
in the academy (science, technology, engineering, and math) and its
connections to increasing privatization, and experienced what I can only
describe as growing anti-intellectualism in the public at large. In sum, I now
worry deeply about higher education and perhaps especially about the
research university.

Tenure and its erosion
   The importance of tenure at U.S. universities is that it was designed to
protect scholars from interventions – and frankly witch hunts – that had
nothing to do with developments in their disciplines. Tenure still depends on
other members of one’s profession considering someone’s teaching and
research work valuable and substantial, and it can also depend on academics
outside one’s field passing judgment, as is the case with Promotion and
Tenure Committees, Associate Provosts and Provosts, Chancellors and
Presidents of U.S. universities. So people still make decisions and those
decisions are not always by people knowledgeable enough to make those
decisions, but for a number of decades institutions insisted on keeping
politics out of university appointments and promotions. At times people
have forgotten the value of tenure and the usefulness of tenure, and at times
(such as during the McCarthy Era in the U.S. in the 1950s) people have
valued it and cherished it.
   But we are now undoubtedly witnessing the erosion of the tenure system
at U.S. institutions of higher education. There was a time when faculty
retirements and departures meant that a department would keep the line
and search for a replacement. That has been less and less the case since my
years at Duke in the 1980s. Increasingly, though not suddenly, faculty lines
revert to central administration (sometimes to deans and sometimes to
committees at that level or higher). And again increasingly, though not
suddenly, allocation of those lines depends on enrollment in a department’s


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courses, some formula that takes into account how much external money a
department brings to the campus, or some mix of reputational or statistical
rankings of a whole department, its faculty members, and even its
(post)graduate students. And when a department shrinks in size, like my
current department, administration responds by “allowing” the department
to hire people to teach but not in tenurable positions.
   I first saw this at Duke, but thought it was particular to the performing
arts or the clinical medical sciences. People in those fields were given non-
tenurable positions, in effect, making them “less valued” faculty members. At
some point in the 1980s Duke instituted and regularized faculty lines for
those faculty members, something I saw developed further in the early 1990s
at the University of California-Santa Cruz. The UCSC system specified the
number of courses those colleagues were required to teach (always more
than the rest of us) and the duties (such as research and student advising)
they were not allowed to do or, if they did them, the system would not allow
them to be counted in any evaluation or possible promotion.
   These were the days before the expansion of post-doctoral positions,
something I have seen increasingly in Europe and the U.S. over the past two
decades. Now we have more and more “postdocs” and more of them require
some teaching. As I look at my own department here at UIUC, I see more
people offering courses in different kinds of contingent faculty positions and
the balance of those faculty members and those of us in tenured or tenure-
line positions shifting. There are indeed so many non-tenurable people on
our campus that central administration has had to operationalize the various
existing titles, define their duties, and spread this information to
departments when they have such people teaching regular courses. At the
moment, for example, my own department has 6 such colleagues teaching –
all women – 6 others listed in various capacities (but not really teaching),
and 25 tenured or tenureable faculty. When I first came 10 years ago, the
department had 30 or 31 FTEs (tenured or tenurable faculty lines) and only 1
or 2 were in non-tenurable positions.

Money, privatization, and its rhetoric
  There is, not surprisingly, much talk about cuts and how to handle them.
For years all universities I have known well, especially the large U.S. research
universities belonging to the “Big Ten,” have been delighted when colleagues
have gotten grants from outside their university. Indeed there has been
pressure to get those grants, and not every central administrator has fully
understood how that privileges people in STEM disciplines. David Skorton,

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32                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


now Secretary of the Smithsonian but 15-20 years ago first Vice President for
Research and then President of the University of Iowa, did understand this
despite being a Professor of Medicine before becoming a high-level
administrator there. He used money from patents and big-time grants in the
natural, biological, and physical sciences to help underwrite Iowa programs
in the Humanities and softer Social Sciences and Area Studies programs. But
I have seen little of that here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign at least in the past 10 years.
   The pressure to bring in outside money is great, the rhetoric shows up in
hiring promotion, tenure, and marketing practices of this university, and the
parts of the university (or even of anthropology departments) that do get
those external funds are the parts that are being allowed to grow. This is
especially the case now that the governor of this State (Governor Rauner) has
de facto downsized state support for public Illinois universities, including
UIUC, its long-standing flagship institution. We are now very close to the end
of a second year without any regular state funding because the governor and
his opposition in the state legislature remain locked in a seemingly endless
battle over the state’s allocation to higher education and service organiza-
tions. As a result, there is more talk than ever before of a financial crisis and
of needed cuts, even more than when we had to take unpaid furlough days
during one of my two years as AAA President. Our salaries are being paid out
of university reserves, so it is no surprise that the university is constantly
looking for new money to bring in. The problem is that it simultaneously
then favors fields seen by the federal government, private corporations, and
big-time donors as useful and valuable enough to serve the country’s
economy and labor needs, and it makes it harder to say no to them when
they come calling – demanding things from research on topics they care
about, admission of particular students to programs and schools, and a say in
who the university hires and fires.
   So, it is simply not true that there is no money. There appears to be less
money outside the STEM fields, but huge amounts of money are sought and
spent on large and potentially income-generating new hires and their
specialties and projects. There is clearly a prioritization of people and
projects that can bring to a U.S. college or university outside money,
especially money from large sources, including (and at times especially
targeting) large corporations in science, technology, medicine, and
engineering.



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Repercussions
   Several things are making this possible, and one of them is public anti-
intellectualism. Perhaps this is not totally new in the U.S. but I remember
how shocked I was when in the mid-late 1990s – and while at the University
of Iowa – I had to fill out a form one week about time I spent working, and all
because one vocal critic of state universities in Iowa kept complaining that U
of Iowa faculty members only worked 6 hours a week (because in each course
students and faculty members are in the classroom for 3 hours a week and
the unit norm for faculty in the humanities and social sciences was two
courses each semester). To counter this bad image, Iowa’s central
administrators wanted to collect hard data about the time Iowa faculty
worked in their triple roles as teachers, researchers, and administrators. As I
recall, the university presented the press with data showing that the average
number of hours Iowa faculty worked each week was ca. 57. And I wondered
who actually worked as little as that, since I knew what I worked and saw my
colleagues doing about the same.
   But I think I was wrong to be shocked. Increasingly our students and their
parents worry about them getting jobs, and many of our undergraduates
double-major in order to have one major they and their parents consider
practical. Periodically some public figure mocks anthropology as useless.
This happened earlier in this decade when Governor Scott of the State of
Florida publicly named anthropology as a useless college major, despite U.S.
federal government agencies identifying anthropology as one of the
professions for which there will be many jobs in the near future. I mentioned
this in my 2011 AAA Presidential Address (published in 2012) and Bonnie
Urciuoli has been writing about the hidden, creeping manifestation of
neoliberal economics in the rhetoric of U.S. colleges and universities for
some years (e.g. 2014). At first I thought she was reading something into it
that I didn’t see, but I was wrong. She is right to identify (and rail against) all
the talk about skills in courses, college marketing, and curricula. I see it more
and more. Students are supposed to acquire skills in college so they can
adapt them, use them, and have them after college when they go to work in
government or the private sector. Being curious, developing sharpness as
critics and readers, and becoming well-rounded citizens is apparently no
longer enough. Simply knowing things is clearly not valued enough.




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34                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)




REFERENCES

Dominguez, Virginia R., 2012, Comfort Zones and Their Dangers: Who Are We? Qui
     Sommes-Nous?, The 2011 AAA Presidential Address, American Anthropologist,
     114, 3: 394-405.
Urciuoli, Bonnie, 2014, The Semiotic Production of the Good Student: A Peircian
     Look at the Commodification of Liberal Arts Education, Signs and Society, 2, 1:
     56-83.




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Engaged learning
Sam BECK
Cornell University




ABSTRACT: Engaged learning commits itself to community development and an active peda-
gogy as the state continues to withdraw funding from communities. Community engage-
ment is a teaching, research and change mechanism for students who use ethnographic
methods and experiential learning to practice citizenship and rehearse their roles in profes-
sional settings. Engaged learning provides the opportunity to explore “alternative moral
frames for academic work”, for pedagogical innovation and for resistance against neoliberal-
ism.




    Cornell University is one of the land-grant universities created in the
1860s that marked the beginnings of university-community engagement. It
was a response to the modernization of industry and agriculture with each
state in the U. S. developing its own campus. Cornell University is one of a
small number of campuses (MIT is another) that incorporates both public
professional and private liberal arts colleges. While Cornell’s public colleges
encouraged off-campus engagement, Cornell’s private liberal arts college un-
til recently resisted this sort of engagement.
    The Campus Compact, a national coalition of colleges committed to the
civic mission of higher education, was formed in 1985 to respond to the criti-
cism higher education received from business and government sectors for
being unresponsive to society needs (Beck and Maida 2013: 1-2). The non-
academic Cornell Ithaca Volunteers in Training and Service was established
in 1988, made up of a small number of activist professors and administrators.
Following the establishment of G.H.W. Bush’s National Community Service
Act of 1990, Cornell established its Public Service Center in 1991 «to cham-
pion the conviction that the Cornell University experience confirms service
as essential to active citizenship» (http://vivo.cornell- .edu/display/individ-
ual26488) using a service-learning methodology. In 2001 Cornell helped
found the New York Campus Compact.


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36                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


   University engagement is a double-edged sword, a teaching tool for civic
engagement and labor market oriented professional development and the
further articulation of higher education with neoliberalism. University en-
gagement incorporates professionals in community non-profit and the pri-
vate sectors as unofficial non-university instructors and simultaneously pro-
vides free labor (Perlin 2012) in exchange. For corporations, internships are
an inexpensive recruitment strategy. For the non-profit sector, engagement
adds university labor, problem solving and research capacity that replaces
government support.
   The concept of community engagement is also implemented to reduce in-
equalities and disparities in our society. According to the Committee on Edu-
cating Health Professionals to Address the Social Determinants of Health,
      Community-Engaged learning is an educational process by which people are
      enabled to become actively and genuinely involved in defining the issues of
      concern to them; in making decisions about factors that affect their lives; in
      formulating and implementing policies; in planning, developing and delivering
      services; and in taking action to active change” (A Framework for Educating
      Health Professionals 2016: xiii).

   Community engagement emphasizes change and agency (Freire 1970),
people improving their own lives, while concurrently improving teaching,
learning, scholarship, professional practice and the self.
   I have directed the Cornell University experiential learning Urban Semes-
ter Program in New York City for the last 25 years and shaped it into its en -
gaged form as students involve themselves in internships, community action
projects, text analysis and active learning seminars. Engagement here re-
shapes the students’ experiences in knowledge production from siloed out-
of-context and abstract learning to lived practice and the multidisciplinary
problems of the real world. Coursework that encompasses an interdiscipli-
nary approach is shaped into an integrated curriculum with permeable inter-
disciplinary boundaries. By providing this kind of knowledge and holistic ex-
periences students in internships rehearse the adjustments they must make
to adapt to professional work environments and the civic contributions for
which they are being prepared.
   Social welfare programs and funding grew between 1965–1981, spanning
the presidencies of LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter, this growth ended with re-
ductions introduced in the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years. Funding for so-
cial welfare was withdrawn, impacting working class urban America as dein-
dustrialization, deregulation, the decline of trade unions, racial discrimina-
tion by banks, real estate agents and landlords was occurring. Urban white


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ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            37


flight occurred simultaneously with the repopulation of cities by immigrants
and low income people of color.
    Government and business sectors reproached institutions of higher learn-
ing for not adequately preparing undergraduates for the national and more
generally the global labor force as citizens of this nation and the world, po-
tential future leaders, and for being campuses disengaged from real world
dilemmas. Universities were criticized for maintaining their Ivy Tower exis-
tence, isolating themselves from the real world at a time when the real world
was facing problems for which they should take responsibility of resolving.
    Community engagement should not be confused with volunteerism or
other forms of charity work. The United States has a well-developed history
and mythology built around volunteerism and the notion of “charity,” a prac-
tice of benevolence. It is an ethical and moral stance. Engagement is inher-
ently based on the notions of empowerment, autonomy and self-determina-
tion, the principle of autonomy and protecting those who lack autonomy,
beneficence by doing no harm, and maximizing benefits while limiting harm
and the just distribution of burdens and benefits.
     Universities, of course, were not constructed to engage communities or
the world in this manner, but rather to intellectually prepare the young to do
so once they left institutions of higher learning. The community engagement
movement followed the silencing and punishing McCarthy Era resulting in
academic isolationism. Engagement was a response invigorated by the in-
volvement of campus-based anti-Viet Nam war and Civil Rights social move-
ments.
    The changes in immigration laws of the 1960s and the 1970s brought
about a visible demographic shift as more immigrants of color settled into
life in the United States. The social and cultural transformations that took
place as a result of the Civil Rights and Human Rights movements reverber-
ated in the education system from pre-school to universities. By the 1970s,
institutions of higher learning were challenged by the increasing number of
students of color in their classrooms and the race and ethnicity based soci-
etal tensions that this demographic shift created. Multiculturalism, the cul-
ture wars, and affirmative action all resulted from these population shifts.
    Richard Nixon (1969-1974) started the withdrawal of social service fund-
ing, the shrinking of entitlements, and dismantling Lyndon Johnson’s War on
Poverty. This helped create the context in which students were harnessed to
carry out community service in community based organizations reinforced
by JFK’s and LBJ’s ideology of service (Peace Corp and VISTA).


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38                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


   Community service programs targeted relatively affluent and racially
identified “white” students who not only wished to learn about the under-
privileged but were also looking to “help” them. Educators sought to bring
about critical consciousness (Freire 1970) in their students opening them up
to experience the barriers of change, the lives of the working poor and people
of color and how these barriers limit life chances.
   The other issues in which universities were engaged were related to the
withdrawal of government support for underserved and vulnerable commu-
nities. Faculty created community service-learning projects and courses to
support or help these communities resolve local problems through research
in which students generated the data, analyzed these, proposed remedies
and provided the labor to implement projects. This is where experiential
learning and service-learning courses emerged as an important academic
transition, previously perceived as not academically viable or a scholarly en-
deavor (Stanton, et al. 1999, Butin 2010).
   Funding incentives, political pressure, and academic associations advo-
cated for greater scholarship relevance that brought universities and disci-
plines to embrace “community engagement” (Burawoy 2004, Beck and Maida
2015). Efforts to involving students in off-campus activities coincide with a
focus on more effective teaching methods rooted in John Dewey’s hands-on,
experiential and problem-based learning educational philosophy
(1938/1997); Lev Vygotsky’s view that reasoning grows out of practical activ-
ities in social environments (1978); Kurt Lewin’s founding action research
(1946); and Paolo Freire’s concerns with liberatory education that uses daily
life as a means for transforming themselves and their world (1970). David
Kolb’s widely used theory represented by a four stage learning cycle of con-
crete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and ac-
tive experimentation remains influential (2009). Donald Schoen (1983) and
Chris Argyris (1974) explored the notion of reflective practice central to or-
ganizational learning, the nature of in-context, in-process learning and the-
orizing-in-practice.
   In the past, college student outreach and service programs and activities
were administered by untenured and part-time staff and were classified ei-
ther as forms of volunteerism or co-curricular endeavors. They were not wor-
thy of academic credit. In the 21st century these activities have taken on a
greater importance in pre-professional education, increasingly recognized as
academic where contingent staff still predominate, but where tenured and
tenure line faculty participate due to the increasing administrative encour-
agement for “active learning.” Yet, it is also a time when universities are op-


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ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            39


erated as businesses and part-time and an untenured contingent labor domi-
nates higher education teaching, of which supervisors in private sector in-
ternships and non-profit organizations serve as mentors.
   The Urban Semester Program’s experiential learning and ethnographic
approach pushes against the predominant use of pedagogies that emphasize
aggregate statistical hegemony, didactic and pacifying (“banking”) forms of
teaching, out of context learning, MOOCs and what Shore annd Wright
(2016: 47) identify as the emerging
      institutional framework that promotes competition, entrepreneurship, com-
      mercialization, profit making and “private good” research and the prevalence of
      a metanarrative about the importance of markets for promoting the virtues of
      freedom, choice and prosperity.

   While university engagement is not an accepted standard in higher educa-
tion, it is receiving increasing legitimacy. Oddly, as universities are increas-
ingly being integrated into the market economy, restructured to serve the la-
bor market, becoming yet another business form, the movement for engage-
ment is both part of this integration and a movement of resistance against
the neoliberal political economy.

REFERENCES
A Framework for Educating Health Professionals, 2016, Washington, DC, The Na-
      tional Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine. Available at www.-
      nap.edu/read/21923/chapter/1 (accessed on 10/12/2017).
Argyris, Chris, Donald Schoen, 1974, Theory and Practice: Increasing Professional Ef-
      fectiveness, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
Beck, Sam, Carl Maida, 2013, Introduction: Toward Engaged Anthropology, in To-
      ward Engaged Anthropology, Sam Beck, Carl Maida, eds, New York, Berghahn
      Books: 1-14.
Beck, Sam, Carl Maida, eds, 2015, Public Anthropology in a Borderless World, New
      York, Berghahn Books.
Burawoy, Michael, 2004, American sociological association presidential address: For
      public sociology, British Journal of Sociology, 56, 2: 259-294.
Butin, Dan W., 2010, Service Learning in Theory and Practice, New York: Palgrave
      MacMillen.
Dewey, John, 1997 [1938], Education and Experience, New York, Touchstone.
Freire, Paulo, 2016 [1970], Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, Continuum.
Kolb, David, 2009, Experiential Learning Theory: Holistic approach to management
      learning, education and development, London, Sage Publications.



                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 35-40
40                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


Lewin, Kurt, 1946, Action research and minority problems, in Resolving Social Con-
      flict, G. W. Lewin, ed, New York, Harper & Row.
Perlin, Ross, 2012, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave
      New Economy, New York, Verso.
Schoen, Donald, 1983, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action,
      Aldershot, Ashgate.
Shore, Chris, Susan Wright, 2016, Neoliberalisation and the “Death of the Public
      University”, in Anthropologists in/of the neoliberal academy, Tracey Heathering-
      ton, Filippo M. Zerilli, eds, Anuac, 5, 1: 46-50.
Stanton, Tim, Dwight T. Giles, Nadine J. Cruz, 1999, Service-learning: A movement’s
      pioneers reflect on its origins, practice, and future, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
Vygotsky, Lev, 1978, Mind in Society: The development of higher psychological pro-
      cesses, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.




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Challenged academy
Engagement after neoliberalism

Carl A. MAIDA
University of California, Los Angeles




ABSTRACT: Market-driven educational policies and advances in information technology may
assure greater accountability in public universities; however, the trend toward increased
standardization strengthens the “machine’s” ability to appropriate the task of teaching. The
challenge for college faculty is to sustain student-centered teaching and learning methods
in the face of neoliberal reforms.


   Neoliberal reforms took hold in North American public universities during
the 1980s, through market-driven educational policies and the public-private
partnerships; although evidence of this framework appeared at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, the “quintessential Cold War megaversity”, ac-
cording to historian Eric Foner (1998: 290), at the time of the Free Speech
Movement (FSM), there, in 1964-1965. The FSM agenda included civil rights,
anti-war and academic freedom concerns, and its leader, Mario Savio, was
clearly ahead of his times (Cohen 2009). Savio’s vision of participatory
democracy was forged through experiences in Catholic social action projects
in Mexican slums, in labor protests in San Francisco where he was jailed, and
during the Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Savio was able to integrate
Catholic social justice, civil rights and union-based political rhetoric in his
speeches. During this time, more working class youth were admitted to pub-
lic research universities. Many were raised in union households politicized
during the Great Depression and by post-war union movement cultures that
endorsed working people’s rights, union organizing, and labor actions. These
students, often the first in their families to gain access to higher education,
voiced a style of political rhetoric heard on public university campuses at
this time. Their parents understood that college was their children’s way out
of the factory, and of serving time in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. FSM
student protesters viewed their university as a “bureaucratic machine,” and

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42                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


characterized their education as a form of mass production, within an imper-
sonal and alienating “knowledge factory,” seeing the IBM punch cards
adopted by university administrators as part of mass higher education’s con-
trol revolution as symbolic of the new information technology (IT) that
would, over time, regulate higher education. There is much to reflect upon
this half-century trajectory of bureaucratization and commodification of
public higher education, and its discontents.
   Henry A. Giroux’s (2007) characterization of the contemporary “university
in chains” goes beyond Max Weber's “iron cage,” indicating the increased ra-
tionalization of social life in Western capitalist societies, specifically large
scale public and private enterprises that are at once hierarchical, impersonal,
specialized and efficient. Military and corporate appropriation of higher edu-
cation through open and clandestine research, and the production of quasi-
private data for government and corporate sponsors, has led to a diminish-
ment of transparency. These trends support graduate and post-doctoral sci-
ence programs, and move the undergraduate curriculum away from broad,
critical thinking and reflection – the hallmark of the liberal arts – toward
skill-based approaches that students believe help them to enter competitive
graduate and professional degree programs, or gain entry level positions in
the corporate world. The military is clearly on a recruitment mission, as the
Reserve Officers’ Training Program (ROTC) reappears on elite campuses;
low-income youth are also recruited during their last years in high school,
with promises of college scholarships, and more. Many academics nearing re-
tirement came into their tenure track jobs after military service in the late
sixties and early seventies and found ways to reproduce the military’s hierar-
chical arrangements in their work lives. At that time, administrators sought
to restore the stability experienced before 1964, when student-led move-
ments created chaos at state-funded public campuses like Berkeley, Wiscon-
sin, and Michigan. The infusion of well-behaved men of “the silent genera-
tion” on to the tenure track and into administrative positions assured that
the campuses would be “quiet” and under increasing surveillance. Colin
Powell's peacetime army during those years provided a safety valve for poor
Southern and Southwestern men and women of all ethnic persuasions, but
predominately African Americans, white Southern Mountaineers and their
kin in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas, and recruits from the Plains states.
   An agricultural metaphor may have come to supplant the industrial
metaphor coined a half-century ago. The public university continues toward
becoming a “knowledge plantation” economy – resembling California Cen-


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tral Valley agricultural enterprises with their part-time seasonal farmworkers
– as long as it hires large numbers of contingent employees and scores of lab
techs to keep the “farm” running. Faculty and students become the new class
of “technopeasants,” or “hyperserfs” (Wiscomb 2017) as universities reinvent
themselves as corporate-funded knowledge Latifundia. In these worlds,
“techies” rock! The farmworkers, themselves, may not necessarily be ex-
ploited by IT, which routinely operates in agribusiness enterprises; however,
those in the fields work with the byproducts of biotechnology, including the
toxic chemicals that are sickening them and their children (Nash 2004). Con-
tingent faculty work relations are analogous to those of farmworkers. Patron-
client ties operate across social classes and occupations, from farms and fac-
tories to corporate offices, as do scientific management practices. Neo-Tay-
lorism of human service occupations took place in the post-Fordist decades
(Braverman 1974; Crowley et al. 2010); by comparison, Taylorism was prac-
ticed in California's farming areas since the 1930s (Stoll 1998: 167). There are
analogies between the conditions experienced by farmworkers and the
pathogens they encounter in the fields, with the pathologies that many expe-
rience within university departments. One frequently hears that increasing
exploitation and bullying are making academic workers ill, and many die
early as a result of stress; others suffer from sick building syndrome (Redlich
et al. 1997), resulting from exposure to toxics and pollutants present in older
academic buildings.
   The challenge, then, is to sustain the student-centered teaching and
learning methods of John Dewey (2016) and Paulo Freire (1970) in the face of
IT domination, which is clearly administratively controlled and sanctioned.
Many have seen their classes and seminars double in recent years, and still
find ways to engage students and let their voices be heard in the classroom.
Beyond PowerPoint slides and “clickers” (classroom response system devices)
that promise to hold the attention of the millennials, deeper learning meth-
ods such as collaborative work, self-directed and project-based learning help
develop critical learning and reflective processes, even in larger classrooms.
However, textbook publishers have found ways to seduce the novice, and
even the experienced teacher, with a box of “instructor resources,” including
slides, manuals, test item files, software, even course design materials so that
a syllabus follows closely to the text. Pressure comes from above as well to
uphold the primacy of both the text and the corporate-influenced profes-
sional voice. There are even multiple levels of review to assure that “student
learning objectives” in the university catalog are not only stated on the syl-
labus but also embedded within it.

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44                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


   Moving forward, the IT “revolution” may assure greater accountability;
however, the trend toward standardization also increases the “machine’s”
ability to appropriate the task of teaching, as standardized texts and syllabi
can be readily put online, with TA support, and minimal professorial over-
sight. IT is a disruptive innovation in every occupation, and college teaching
is no exception. Administrators, whose work lives are governed by computer-
generated models, manage new model university routines, through comput-
erized learning platforms in retooled college classrooms, especially on blue-
collar campuses. It's “pay to play” for students at elite campuses; otherwise
one learns via “machine.” As Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are
pushed forward, the response to skeptical academic laborers is “deal with it.”
The question remains how to push back, when large numbers of contingent
faculty, and those on the tenure track, tow the administrative line by accom-
modating to the ongoing Taylorism of their occupational lives on behalf of
keeping their jobs.
   As Giroux indicates, neoliberalism in higher education devalues the teach-
ers as workers and the students as objects of “schooling.” College life is
thereby transformed, with students and contingent labor passing through,
and regarded as objects to which any unfortunate turn, sent down from above
by administrators, from reduced salary and benefits to the acceptance of rank
bullying is to be borne without so much as a word. So, while the institution is
valued, upward, as a capitalist profit center, the life worlds of those within
are devalued, with students viewed as the source of tuition-based funding or
residence hall fees, and with teachers as labor that provides increased value.
All of this is controlled from above, serving to diminish the value of students
and faculty as persons involved in learning encounters, relative to the in-
creased value of the institution and its administrators, whose salaries are
skyrocketing. Universities are conduits for: hundreds of millions in federal
student loans; textbook publishers and computer software manufacturers;
food and linen service suppliers; residence hall beds at capacity throughout
the calendar year. The worth of these neoliberal universities is staggering;
consider the billion-dollar capital funding campaigns these systems initiate
to remain competitive.
   Amid this largesse, many students struggle not only to pay increasing tu-
ition and living costs, but, after graduation, to land jobs that will help pay off
student loan debt while providing a living wage. Faculty members witnessed
this sea change for more than a generation, and some have attempted to re-
sist through struggles for unionization and on behalf of benefits for teaching


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assistants and contingent faculty (Entin 2005). To the broader question
about solutions, the progressive professorate appears not to have found a
satisfactory answer. Nonetheless, accessible mass higher education remains
one of best ways to cultivate the critical consciousness necessary for an in-
formed citizenry to sustain a reasonable quality of life—one that includes an
inner life relatively free of economic and political anxieties.


REFERENCES

Braverman, Harry, 1974, Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the
       twentieth century, New York, Monthly Review Press.
Cohen, Robert, 2009, Freedom’s orator: Mario Savio and the radical legacy of the
       1960s, New York, Oxford University Press.
Crowley, Martha, Daniel Tope, Lindsey Joyce Chamberlain, Randy Hodson, 2010,
       Neo-Taylorism at work: Occupational change in the post-Fordist era, Social
       Problems, 57, 3: 421-447.
Dewey, John, 1916, Democracy and education, New York, Macmillan.
Entin, Joseph, 2005, Contingent teaching, corporate universities, and the academic
       labor movement, The Radical Teacher, 73: 26-32.
Foner, Eric, 1999, The story of American freedom, New York, WW Norton & Company.
Freire, Paulo, 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, Seabury Press.
Giroux, Henry A., 2007, The university in chains: Confronting the military-industrial-
       academic complex, London and New York, Paradigm Publishers.
Nash, Linda, 2004, The fruits of ill-health: Pesticides and workers’ bodies in post-
       world war II California, Osiris, 19: 203-219.
Redlich, Carrie A., Judy Sparer, Mark R. Cullen., 1997, Sick-building syndrome, The
       Lancet, 349, 9057: 1013-1016.
Stoll, Steven, 1998, The fruits of natural advantage: Making the industrial countryside
       in California, Berkeley, University of California Press.
Wiscomb, Avery J., 2017, Hyperserfs: How Silicon Valley exploits students and their
       universities, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 63, 28: B5-7.




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“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-


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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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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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Confessioni di un EV (esperto valutatore)
Berardino PALUMBO
Università di Messina




ABSTRACT: If audit is a socio-political system, any analysis or evaluation of its effects should
consider also the specific contexts and the peculiar historical contingencies in which
practices associated with it apply. In this comment I try to grasp some consequences these
practices can have on the specific academic field of the Italian anthropological sciences.


   Leggendo il nome di chi firma e scrive questo testo (il mio) il popolo degli
attenti lettori di ROARS (www.roars.it) e di altri importanti spazi di discus-
sione pubblica intorno all’accademia italiana e ai suoi enormi problemi si
starà probabilmente chiedendo cosa ci faccia (io) qui. Che siano o meno pra-
ticanti della mia area disciplinare (antropologia sociale), alcuni ricorderanno
infatti che ho svolto il ruolo di E(sperto) V(alutatore) – solo rappresentante
del mio settore – nel GEV ANVUR per la VQR 2006-20101. Ho quindi fatto
parte della prima Commissione per l’Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (d’ora
in avanti ASN) e continuo a svolgere un ruolo, all’interno dell’ANVUR, nel
gruppo di lavoro sulle riviste. Un “collaborazionista”, dunque, in quell’ottica
di polarizzazioni ideologiche che – a mio parere – troppo spesso in Italia ha
caratterizzato, se non connotato, i dibattiti intorno al rapporto tra accade-
mia, audit culture e neoliberismo. Tranquilli, però, non sono un “pentito”, e
non dovete aspettarvi né ammissioni di colpevolezza, né, d’altro canto, non
richieste difese d’ufficio. Nello stesso tempo, infatti, i lettori più familiari con
la ricerca antropologica immagino potranno riconoscere in chi scrive lo stu-
dioso critico dei processi di espansione del neoliberismo, in particolare nel
campo della patrimonializzazione, oltre che nell’analisi del campo politico e,
addirittura, di quello accademico. Nelle pagine che seguono vorrei chiedervi


1. L’acronimo GEV indica il Gruppo di esperti della Valutazione dell’ANVUR (l’Agenzia Na-
zionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca istituita nel 2006). L’acroni-
mo VQR si riferisce invece all’esercizio periodico di Valutazione della Qualità della Ricerca
prodotta dalle università e dagli enti di ricerca italiani (ndr).

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allora di accompagnarmi in un personale tentativo di risoluzione di questo
(che spero di dimostrare essere un) mio apparente bipolarismo.
    La scissione, nella sua forma più acuta, si è manifestata nei primi giorni
del 2014. Terminato il mio ruolo di Commissario sorteggiato nell’ASN 2012-
2013 e messe da parte le tensioni prodotte dalla resa pubblica degli esiti del-
la VQR 2006-2010, sulla scia della relazione che dovetti redigere per
quest’ultima esperienza, ho pubblicato un saggio nel quale provavo a rendere
esplicite le divisioni e i fazionalismi che, dal mio punto di vista, hanno con-
notato il campo accademico dell’antropologia (socio/culturale) italiana e che,
nello stesso tempo, sono fluite in maniera semi-clandestina intorno alle di-
verse fasi e alle differenti modalità del processo di valutazione (Palumbo
2013). In un simile campo si è costruita, del resto, la mia soggettività accade-
mica e di studioso e su di esso si sono prodotti gli effetti delle diverse forme
della valutazione che in qualche modo mi è toccato praticare. In uno dei mo-
menti di forse massima esplosione delle contestazioni contro l’attacco neoli-
berista all’università perpetrato anche attraverso gli strumenti dell’audit –
pensavo nell’impostare quello scritto – un’attenzione paraetnografica e auto
etnografica ai concreti modi di funzionare dell’accademia (o meglio di quella
porzione molto ridotta della quale potevo parlare con qualche cognizione), ai
modi in cui i rapporti di potere si squadernavano nel campo, precipitandosi
sui corpimente di chi in esso occupa posizioni di dipendenza, venendo appun-
to incorporati e a volte, sempre più spesso, escorporati e resi oggetto di resi-
stenza/contestazione, potesse costituire uno stimolo ad una discussione an-
che politicamente critica. Il saggio, messo su Academia e in qualche altro
blog prima di essere pubblicato, a giudicare dalle visualizzazioni, ha circola-
to, ma relegato in spazi nicodemici, producendo nei colleghi più anziani o in
quelli miei coetanei allusioni, battutine da corridoio, o velenose dislocazioni
riflesse (Timbergen 1969) e un silenzio assordante in quelli più giovani.
    L’assenza di reazioni e di prese di posizioni pubbliche, soprattutto di quel-
la parte del campo accademico cui principalmente, con una consapevolmente
ingenua speranza di offrire una sponda di espressione, se non ancora di li-
bertà – devo confessarlo – non mi sorprese affatto, era in qualche modo pre-
ventivata. Mi ha fatto però riflettere non tanto sull’efficacia molecolare del
potere accademico (appunto ciò che consentiva la previsione) quanto piutto-
sto, anche qui, su una sorta di scissione, forse rifrazione della mia, che mi è
parso di poter cogliere nella platea dei miei immaginari lettori: insomma co-
loro che ad uno sguardo sociologico certo superficiale mi sembravano rap-
presentare una parte non irrilevante del roaruggente mondo italiano anti au-


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dit - donne e uomini, studiose spesso sottoposte a non più accettabili condi-
zioni di precariato e sfruttamento che con argomentazioni spesso condivisi-
bili si schieravano contro quelle agenzie e quelle procedure che ritenevano in
prima battuta espressione di interessi di cricche e lobby fortemente inter-
connesse con il potere accademico e in ultima istanza segnali operanti di un
controllo neoliberista sul “libero” mondo della ricerca – posti di fronte ad
una sia pur minima e certo irrilevante possibilità di apertura di un concreto
varco di discussione intorno a quelle cricche, a quei rapporti e alcuni di quei
modi di controllo, si tiravano indietro, preferendo evidentemente posizionar-
si al di qua della linea d’ombra che separa una presa di posizione ideologica
da una personale e riconoscibile esposizione.
   Insomma, alla mia (spero apparente) bipolarità di etnografo critico del
neoliberismo, da un lato, e accademico coinvolto nei processi di valutazione,
dall’altro, mi è parso di poter sovrapporre una speculare (e certo apparente)
forma di bipolarità in una ristretta porzione dell’ideale e immaginario pub-
blico di oppositori alla via italiana all’audit accademica. Proverò a “risolvere”
un simile doppia configurazione bipolare, con i suoi quadrupli vincoli, propo-
nendo di portare l’analisi su un piano molto concreto e attento ad alcune
specificità del campo accademico italiano2. Specificità che, appunto, da un
lato, potrebbero render conto della possibilità di praticare un minimo gra-
diente di audit e di poterlo immaginare, se non proprio, adoperare come uno
strumento di lotta ai potentati accademici; e dall’altro consentirci di com-
prendere come possano tenersi insieme una critica ideale delle logiche del
controllo neoliberista sulla pratica della ricerca e dell’insegnamento scienti-
fici e una qualche difficoltà a prendere concretamente e in specifici contesti
le distanze da quelle configurazioni di potere che si immaginano parte del
progetto di mercificazione tardo capitalista della forza lavoro cognitiva (Ver-
cellone 2006). Volendo esprimere in maniera schematica, quasi brutale, una
simile specificità – pensando soprattutto all’area delle scienze umane e so-
ciali – si potrebbe dire che il campo accademico-intellettuale nel nostro pae-
se si caratterizza nella lunga durata per una peculiare configurazione fazio-
nale – fatta di contrapposizioni tra piccoli gruppi, “scuole”, capi-scuola (“big
men”, li chiamavo nel mio scritto, con una consapevole marcatura di genere),
con i loro apparati di riproduzione del sapere e di controllo delle carriere, in
cui l’efficacia effettiva di criteri minimi comuni e condivisi di valutazione e di
giudizio è quasi nulla, e comunque fortemente legata alle diverse contingen-
ze. Ad una simile configurazione sembrerebbe poi corrispondere, quando se
2. Di un doppio vincolo legato all’audit culture nel contesto accademico rumeno parla Mi-
hăilescu (2016).

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ne vogliano prendere le distanze e in qualche modo oggettivarla, soprattutto
in relazione ad audiences esterne al campo stesso, una precisa tendenza a va-
lutare il proprio, come molti altri, sistemi sociali in termini giuridico-norma-
tivi, formali e ideali, che scarsi rapporti finiscono per avere con le concrete
pratiche e che anzi a volte svolgono di fatto un ruolo di protezione delle va-
lenze interne, intime, di pratiche e abitudini sedimentate (Herzfeld 1997).
Ulteriore conseguenza di un tale scenario è la tendenza a passare, senza ec-
cessive mediazioni contestuali o analitiche, da singoli (non di raro personali)
casi a valutazioni appunto normative, ideali e astratte.
    Se dunque ci posizioniamo in quello spazio teoretico intermedio insieme
critico, empirico e militante che secondo Herzfeld (2001) connota uno sguar-
do antropologico, non si può non segnalare come gli scenari politico-cultura-
li sui quali si esercitano le sempre più dure politiche di controllo neoliberista
della vita accademica e della ricerca scientifica e, insieme, le sempre più net-
te critiche dei colleghi che lavorano in aree anglofone siano molto diversi da
quelli italiani. Questo non tanto perché le tecniche di controllo e di governa-
namentalità messe in atto da almeno un decennio anche da noi non possano
rivelarsi, sulla media o lunga durata, in linea con quelle tendenze – sviluppo
di ideologie manageriali e di forme di competizione per l’acquisizione di ri-
sorse economiche, taglio delle risorse pubbliche destinate all’università pub-
blica, implementazione di conseguenti pratiche di sorveglianza e forme di
privatizzazione – che i critici anglofoni, giustamente, individuano all’opera
nei propri contesti (Heatherington, Zerilli 2016). Piuttosto credo sia impor-
tante non perdere di vista che queste tecnologie di controllo e questi tentati-
vi di rimodulazione delle soggettività accademiche (Shore, Wright 2016) van-
no ad applicarsi su contesti accademici che continuano a rispondere a forme
di organizzazione del campo, della ricerca, a rapporti di forza e a processi di
soggettivazione molto diversi da quelli stabilizzatisi nel corso del secolo
scorso negli spazi universitari, pubblici e privati, anglofoni e, in generale,
nord europei. Senza voler ingenuamente immaginare che quelli siano campi
idealmente (weberianamente) razionali ed etici, nei quali non operino anche
contrapposizioni tra gruppi di potere o prospettive teoriche, insieme a forme
di cooptazione basate su elementi eminentemente contestuali (reti, prove-
nienza da alcune università, adesione a modelli o temi analitici di moda), mi
pare si possa affermare che meccanismi considerati ovvi come, ad esempio,
quello della peer review, o la conseguente presenza di riviste e collane edito-
riali consolidate e più o meno prestigiose, abbiano da tempo stabilizzato spa-
zi condivisi di regole e procedure di valutazione della ricerca all’interno dei


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quali il peso di arbitrii e personalismi, sempre possibili, appare però quanto-
meno sotto controllo. Questo non significa certo la scomparsa di scarti strut-
turali di potere all’interno di ogni specifico settore di un certo campo accade-
mico (scarti di lingua, in primo luogo, o legati alla maggiore o minore vici-
nanza ai luoghi centrali della ricerca, scarti di risorse), e non vuol dire nem-
meno accettare come un dato (e non piuttosto come un costrutto socio-poli-
tico) la gerarchia oramai globale dei luoghi di pubblicazione. Voglio sempli-
cemente sottolineare come, diversamente da quanto mi pare accada ancora
oggi in numerosi ambiti disciplinari, specie quelli a me più familiari di area
umana e sociale, nei contesti esteri che oggi sentono più la pressione di for-
me di controllo di carattere neoliberista, tali azioni operano su scenari am-
piamente sottoposti a un processo che non riesco a definire in altri termini
che quello di modernizzazione. L’azione della pressione neoliberista
sull’accademia si rivolge ad un’accademia che nel corso del secolo scorso si
era data delle regole formali, autonome e condivise di controllo e valutazione
della produzione scientifica. Nel caso italiano, invece, mi pare che l’adozione
di sistemi di audit abbia finito per provare ad applicarsi su un contesto acca-
demico invischiato in dinamiche di carattere particolaristico, fazionale e so-
stanzialmente clientelare. È possibile che – come segnalato per altri contesti
comparabili a quello italiano (Mihăilescu 2016) – ambiti ristretti ed elitari di
un simile campo fazionale si siano appropriati dei meccanismi dell’audit,
adoperandoli a vantaggio di interessi particolari. Vorrei però concludere que-
sto mio intervento provando a chiedere ai colleghi (più e meno giovani) che,
anche legittimamente, hanno voluto inscrivere le proprie critiche ai mecca-
nismi e alle istituzioni dell’audit italian style nella più generale tendenza cri-
tica che attraversa il mondo dell’accademia globale – specie nelle scienze so-
ciali e umane meno istituzionali e ortodosse – se preferiscono veramente
uno scenario nel quale non solo l’accesso a riviste e collane, ma anche la più
intima strutturazione dei rapporti tra studiosi di diverse generazioni, la pro-
gressione delle carriere e la valutazione della qualità della ricerca siano sta-
biliti in relazione a campi di forze fondati sul potere di questa o quella “big
woman” (o “big man”), o se invece – conservando certamente la capacità
prospettica di una critica generale dell’espansione dei sistemi neoliberisti –
non ritengano utile provare ad utilizzare strumenti formali minimi di aset-
tizzazione di abituali, sedimentati e spesso incorporati campi di potere per
provare a garantire non certamente un ideale e asettico sistema di valutazio-
ne, ma quantomeno elementari livelli di decenza.




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RIFERIMENTI BIBLIOGRAFICI

Heatherington, Tracey, Filippo M. Zerilli, eds, 2016, Anthropologists in/of the neolib-
     eral academy, Forum, Anuac, 5-1: 41-90.
Herzfeld, Michael, 1997, Cultural Intimacy. Social Poetics in the Nation-State, New
     York & London, Routledge.
Herzfeld, Michael, 2001, Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society,
     Malden (MA), Blackwell.
Mihăilescu, Vinitilă, 2016, The double bind of audit culture in Romania, Anuac, 5, 1:
     51-54.
Palumbo, Beradino, 2013, Messages in a bottle. Etnografia e autoetnografia del cam-
     po accademico antropologico in Italia, La Ricerca Folklorica, 67/68: 169-194.
Shore, Cris, Susan Wright, 2016, Neoliberalisation and the “Death of the Public
     University”, Anuac, 5, 1: 46-50.
Tinbergen, Niko, 1969, Il comportamento sociale degli animali, Einaudi, Torino.
Vercellone, Carlo, 2006, Capitalismo cognitivo. Conoscenza e finanza nell’epoca post-
     fordista, Roma, Manifestolibri.




2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 29-33
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                             59




Profit, prestige and the liberal arts in the “neoliberal” academy
Observations from Canada

Alan SMART
University of Calgary



ABSTRACT: I argue that the Canadian academy, at least, is not neoliberal in the sense of acting
as a profit-seeking corporation. Rather it serves the agenda of the corporate sector while op -
erating under what is better seen as a symbolic economy of prestige and status.


   In the first set of essays on the neoliberal academy, Cris Shore and Sue
Wright stressed that in current academic conditions, «what “counts” are
those things that can be “counted”, quantified and translated as financial re-
turns to the institution» (2016: 48), while also noting that reforms are con-
tradictory, producing chaos and corruption rather than efficiency. In my
comments, I will suggest, at least in Canada where my professional experi-
ence has been concentrated, that these divergent observations can be partly
reconciled by recognition that post-secondary institutions are being pres-
sured to provide service to profit-making corporations but have not been op-
erating as one would expect profit-oriented capitalist enterprises to. In par-
ticular, I want to stress that in the absence of generous research overhead
payments, the STEM fields (Science,Technology, Engineering and Mathemat-
ics) are rarely profitable for Canadian universities, while many liberal art dis-
ciplines are profit centres but are systematically starved of resources. This is
the result of senior administrators operating in an economy of prestige and
fast policy (Peck 2002) rather than one that rewards profits.
   In 2008, I wrote an entry, perhaps more of a rant than a scholarly essay, for
the GlobalHigherEd blog (Smart 2008). Little appears to have changed since
that time, so I will draw in part on my arguments there. The administration
at the University of Calgary where I have taught for 28 years has adopted a
strategic vision based on moving up the ranks of research intensive universi-
ties. The main benefits have gone to the STEM disciplines, particularly
Medicine and Engineering. This could be seen as a sign of the corporatiza-


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60                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


tion of the university. I would agree, but only in the sense that the university
concentrates on things that the dominant business community would like to
see done, not in the sense that the university is acting like a profit-seeking
enterprise. James Turk (2016) provides a detailed account of a scandal
around a Centre funded by the pipeline company Enbridge, which led to a
Board of Governors inquiry into conflict of interest by University of Calgary
President Elizabeth Cannon, who had been a Director at Enbridge.
   At a university that acted like a corporation, rather than for a corporate
agenda, we might expect to see investment in profit centres at the expense of
other units, but it tends to operate the other way around. In 2008, the Fac-
ulty of Social Sciences, with the most students, had a budget basically equal
to the tuitions paid by its students, even though Alberta policy is that tu-
itions should not be higher than 25% of the operating budget. Social Sci-
ences (and the other core arts and sciences to a somewhat lesser extent) are a
cash cow for Faculties that cannot cover their own costs. The situation has
changed in 2017 only to the extent that Social Sciences has been merged
with Humanities and Fine Arts in a much larger Faculty of Arts.
   One could point to the substantial research funds brought in by Medicine
in particular, but this has little positive effect on the university’s financial
situation since grant overhead payments are very low in Canada, unlike the
United States. In any case, the usual pattern when a medical researcher has a
breakthrough or receives a major grant is that they get offers from other in-
stitutions and turn to the administration to say that they couldn’t justify
staying without a new lab, additional colleagues, postdocs, graduate stu-
dents, etc. This doesn’t produce any real advantage to the administration’s
budget, unlike the large number of bums on seats in the arts and sciences
faculties. Especially when those bums on seats are being taught by session-
als. A sessional being paid $5,250 for a one-semester course with 400 stu-
dents paying $500 each for that course generates a profit of $194,750, or a re-
turn on investment of 37 times. What profit-oriented business would turn
down returns like that? Yet, because tuition goes to the central administra-
tion without any direct return to the department or faculty offering the
course, such courses provide no benefit to the unit offering the course, de-
spite intense student demand. The current response to budget problems in
2017 has focused on cutting sessional teaching (for cost saving reasons, not
social justice ones, I must stress).
   If this is a corporate model, it would seem a very dysfunctional example of
one. But I think it is corporate only in the sense that it provides research and


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training subsidies which are captured by private firms, and that it follows
corporate administrative styles, but not corporate goals of achieving profits.
Within the University of Calgary, and apparently in other Canadian universi-
ties at least, the pattern of distributing resources follows a different logic,
one that I believe is based on status and prestige, not maximizing financial
returns to the institution based on what can be counted. Presidents like to
brag about their neurosciences or cancer treatment or energy research cen-
tres. Transferring resources into sexy high profile fields makes it easier for
them to swagger when they get together with other Presidents or potential
donors, and hopefully step up to a better job before their house of cards,
looking impressive and lofty but without stable foundations that will allow
them to withstand even a light adverse breeze, collapses around them. Or to
use another analogy, their fiscal operations are like a bicycle, stable only
while it continues to move forward.
   The desire by University Presidents to invest in shiny research toys and
programs is prompted in part by the utility of having such projects to show-
case to potential corporate, governmental and private funders. But there also
seems to be a growing frequency of national and international events at
which university administrators get together to discuss new trends and pri-
orities. This results in less “cutting edge” administrators returning with
“new” ideas about “best practices” to try out on their institutions. Similar
dynamics have been identified in urban and national governance institu-
tions, leading to increasingly “fast” policy transfer (Clarke et al. 2015; Peck
2002; Peck, Theodore 2015)
   I believe that it would be an insightful endeavour to examine the competi-
tion for prestigious programs, indicators, and research centres in terms of
the ideas of economic anthropologists about status economies and conspicu-
ous consumption. Ideas from scholars like Thorstein Veblen, Franz Boas,
Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Karl Polanyi, Pierre Bourdieu, and
Georges Bataille might shed a rather different light on the contemporary
governance of universities than do the neo-marxist and neoclassical eco-
nomic perspectives that are usually deployed. Bracketing our usual assump-
tions about the formally rational character of capitalist institutions might al-
low anthropology to bring to light very different accounts of what is going on
in the governance potlatches of our administrative leaders.
   To my mind, the remarkable thing is that really being corporate and pur-
suing profits, rather than serving as a handmaiden to corporations or gov-
ernment agencies, would encourage the things that universities (at least
those without massive endowments) should be doing, providing a well-

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62                                                TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


rounded education in the liberal arts and sciences, with a smaller set of ap-
pendages in the professions doing the far more expensive but “sexier” things.
Instead of being seen as essential, the core of the University of Calgary is be-
ing gutted to support a host of showcase programs and projects much larger
than the modest financial reality can support. How widely this destructive
prestige economy and its white elephants and misallocated resources is
found in other parts of the world, I cannot say, but it seems likely to me to be
far too common.

REFERENCES
Clarke, John, et al. 2015, Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and
       Assemblage, University of Bristol, Policy Press.
Peck, Jamie, 2002, Political economies of scale: Fast policy, interscalar relations, and
       neoliberal workfare, Economic geography, 78, 3: 331-360.
Peck, Jamie, Nik Theodore, 2015, Fast policy, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
       Press.
Shore, Cris, Susan Wright, 2016, Neoliberalisation and the “Death of the Public Uni-
       versity”, Anuac, 5, 1: 46-50.
Smart, Alan, 2008, The ripple effects of the global fossil fuel boom: a view from inside the
       University of Calgary, GlobalHigherEd blog, January 29, 2008, available at: https://-
       globalhighered.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/the-ripple-effects-of-the-global-fossil-
       fuel-boom-a-view-from-inside-the-university-of-calgary/ (accessed on 31/12/ 2016).
Turk, James, 2016, University debased, Alberta Views, August 2016, available at https://alber-
       taviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/university-debased/ (accessed on 31/12/2016).




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Ethnographic dispatches from the neoliberal academy
Ger DUIJZINGS
Universität Regensburg



ABSTRACT: This text consist of four brief ethnographic vignettes, offering personal observa-
tions and poignant recollections of the consequences of «neoliberalisation» at University
College London, where I was employed for eighteen years until I took up a new position at a
German university in September 2014.


   I have written four brief observational pieces, responding in the represen-
tational mode that is core to our discipline: ethnography. For me this is the
most precise and appropriate response to Anuac’s call to present neoliberal
academia «in concrete, empirical, ideally ethnographic terms», and on the
basis of «personal observations». Hence what I am presenting here is a few
personal observations and poignant recollections of the consequences of
«neoliberalisation» (Shore, Wright 2016) in a London-based university where
I was employed for eighteen years, until I took up a new position at a German
university in 2014. These short vignettes describe real situations of which I
was part, all (but one) anonymized to protect the anonymity of the individu-
als figuring in the text. I developed this ethnographic reporting format as
part of the Nightlaboratory, a fieldwork blog which I created together with my
student Iulius-Cezar Macarie in 2012, where we have posted ethnographic
pieces no longer than two-hundred words depicting the nocturnal city (par-
ticularly London) and migrants working nightshifts (https://nightlaborato-
ry.wordpress.com/). The purpose of this blog is to offer composed yet evoca-
tive portraits of night workers and descriptions of situations we encounter
during our nocturnal fieldwork. For this Anuac Forum, I have written longer
pieces of three to four hundred words. The last one, “Zombies” is based on
fieldwork carried out as part of the Nightlaboratory, when I interviewed and
shadowed a night security guard at University College London in my last
months at UCL, before I moved to Germany. The four vignettes are dry and
matter-of-fact, and I purposefully refrain from suggesting how the situations
that I describe can be reshaped and transformed, as I believe that they speak


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64                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


for themselves. One can glean from them what alternative futures can and
ought to be envisaged, which is what ethnography and ethnographic critique
can offer.

Fish tank (2009)
   Since the move into a prizewinning and state-of-the-art new building, the
school’s language teachers are accommodated into open plan offices, with
glass panes, not walls, separating them from the rest of the building. They
are exposed to the frequent gazes of others, such as the management on the
top floor, which looks down on the “fish tank” as its residents soon call it. Al-
though these offices are meant to be “transparent”, teachers protect their
privacy by patching language and country-related posters on the glass, as
well as putting up “quiet zone” warning notes addressed to staff and students
passing through the corridor talking loudly. In no other part of UCL – Lon-
don’s self-proclaimed “Global University” that boasts Jeremy Bentham as its
spiritual father— is the spatial setup more panoptical and self-censuring
than here. Teachers feel watched and try to avoid eye-contact with those
looking at them from a distance. «If I want to use a deodorant, I feel people
observe me, so I go to the toilet. When we congregate, I tend to think that
they [the management] think we may be plotting». The offices have no sound
isolation as the glass panels are not sealed to the floor, allowing air to pass
through a gap at the bottom into the office and from there into the air and
light well around which the offices and library are built. To control the flow
of air, the windows open automatically, so the climate is cold and drafty es-
pecially during winter. Most teachers now tend to avoid the place. They do
not socialize as they used to do before, and only use their office to hang their
coats when teaching. Neither do the academics assemble, hidden away in
small individual offices across the corridor. The language teachers’ situation
has become more precarious over the years, as the number of students taking
languages is continuously dropping. They are paid hourly rates with just a
few guaranteed hours on their temporary nine-month contracts. One floor
up, another open plan office accommodates the postdocs and visiting fel-
lows: «the unwashed» as a manager once told me quizzically. That was, of
course, a joke, but, as I come to think of it, not a very apt one for fish tank
residents.

Security alert (2010)
  Students occupy the Jeremy Bentham Room in response to cuts to higher
education and the rise in tuition fees, also demanding the full living wage for


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cleaning, catering and security staff. In front of the school’s premises stu-
dents gather, many of them unable to enter the building as they are stopped
by security guards who ask for IDs (which the students do not tend to have
with them). Staff is treated more leniently and allowed in. Doing their best to
look intimidating the guards seem rather confused and helpless, not ready to
challenge any staff unwilling to show an ID. An administrator sends around
an all-staff email: «Because of a college security alert, at the time of writing
(11am) the door is locking when closed, allowing access only to staff via the
ID card reader. Some students may not be able to enter the building, so this
may be the reason for some absences this morning». After entering the build-
ing (without showing my ID) I respond to that email: «Thanks for sending
this message around, it seems we are living in interesting times, barring stu-
dents from the university premises. Can I ask what this is all about? Do we
have a right to know what the security threats are? Is it the students?» One
academic backs up my query by asking why students, who don't normally
show IDs, are now being asked to do so, and yet another one writes in an
email: «we have not been informed of a genuine threat to security and can
only suspect that this is intimidation directed toward our students. This cre-
ates a hostile environment for work. I am headed home and will not return
until the “security” presence is withdrawn». Some colleagues knock on my
office door to say «well done», but without expressing their support publicly,
while the majority keeps silent. Later that day the school’s front doors are re-
opened without any further explanation. One colleague informs us at the end
of the working day: «I think you should all know, if you don’t already, that
the UCL authorities have threatened the student occupiers with legal action
if they do not vacate the Jeremy Bentham room».

Rocking the boat (2012)
   In a court room not far from Heathrow Airport, Australian citizen Trenton
Oldfield, and a dozen or so sympathizers listen to the sentence read out in
front of him by a judge. Trenton is convicted to six months’ prison for dis-
rupting the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race in protest
against government cuts and a culture of elitism in the UK. On 7 April 2012,
perceiving the boat race as a symbol of upper-class privilege that deprives
the less well-to-do of educational opportunities, he jumped into the Thames,
disrupting the race for 25 minutes. Police pulled him out of the water, no-
body got hurt, he only put his own life at risk. After he served his sentence,
his application for a spousal visa is rejected, his presence in the UK being de-
clared «not conducive to the public good». After twelve years of residence,


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66                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


married to a British citizen with a small daughter, Trenton receives a ruling
by the Home Secretary (and Oxford alumni) Theresa May that he is to be de-
ported back to Australia. He appeals against this decision, and several aca-
demics, artists and activists rally to his support. In a character reference for
the court I wrote: «Trenton’s protest gave voice to his concerns through di-
rect action, meant to energize the public debate around these issues. He did
this out of a sense of moral duty, without causing physical harm to anybody,
which elsewhere in Europe would not lead to such a draconian punishment
followed by the threat of eviction. He may have crossed a boundary, but he
has served his sentence, and he should be allowed to continue asking these
critical questions through which he makes a larger contribution to British
public life than most of us».

Zombies (2014)
   A private security guard sits at the entrance of the School’s library six
nights a week, after the university introduced 24-hour opening times during
exam term, serving its rapidly growing cohort of Chinese students many of
whom work through the night. There are no librarians present whatsoever,
security guards take care of students’ safety and well-being. Most of the
guards are on zero-hour contracts and when doing nightshifts they often
work from 4pm until 9am. «We are the left-over of society», says one security
guard whom I accompany during his nocturnal round through UCL premises,
passing through tunnels and corridors and listening to the noises of ma-
chines that operate during the night. He tells me that it is important to lis-
ten, because anything can go wrong, such as explosions, breaking in, and wa-
ter dripping. Noises are the warning signals as you can’t see much because of
the dark. The older buildings make sounds by themselves: they have «charac-
ter», as he explains. But that’s creepy when you get tired: then your mind
starts playing tricks. Many guards drop the “graveyard shift” as it is some-
times called, as «it is too spooky» at night, they hear strange noises and see
all sorts of things. They tell that there are ghosts around, as the UCL Main
Quad was built on an old cemetery. The Rockefeller Building, an old structure
across Gower Street, makes squeaky sounds and has a morgue so it scares the
shit out of them. The Cruciform Building’s name makes them think that
there must be something wrong with that building too. It also doesn’t help
that Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-Icon, a wooden cabinet with his embalmed body
and wax head, is located in one of the corridors near the Provost’s office, and
that quite a few zombie films such as The Mummy Returns (2001) were shot at


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UCL, bringing in extra revenue for the university. Because of that there is a
high turnover of night-shift security personnel. The guard with whom I talk
also tells me that he only gets a few hours of sleep as he commutes large dis-
tances and needs to be back at work on time for another 16-hour shift. He
takes pills as it is hard to get a proper rest.


REFERENCES

Shore, Cris, Susan Wright, 2016, Neoliberalisation and “The Death of Public Univer-
     sity”, in Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy, Tracey Heatherington,
     Filippo M. Zerilli, eds, Anuac, 5, 1: 46-50.




                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 63-67
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The graduate student experience in the neoliberal academy
Alexis M. JORDAN
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Shaheen M. CHRISTIE
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee



ABSTRACT: This commentary discusses graduate student perspectives on the disjuncture be-
tween the neoliberal framing of value as pursuit of economic profit and the academic com -
munity’s pursuit of knowledge. Declining opportunities and the devaluing of different
frames of knowledge and practice in the academy suppress graduate students’ ability to con-
tribute to their chosen fields of study and to create value in novel ways. Our participation as
graduate students in the academic community, including organizations such as American
Association of University Professors, has been instrumental in articulating the interconnect-
edness of the systemic consequences that the neoliberal constitution of value has on the
campus and community.



Introduction
   The 2015-2017 state budget instituted drastic cuts to higher education in
Wisconsin. While the threats to tenure, academic freedom, and shared gover-
nance have been well documented (Buff 2015b; Hertzog 2016b; Savidge
2016; Strauss 2015), the circumstances of graduate students are often over-
looked in broader discussions of the challenges faced by the University of
Wisconsin (UW) System1. As current anthropology PhD students at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), in this commentary we highlight
impacts of declining state investment in higher education on our ability to
carry out research and outline how our involvement in the American Associ-
ation of University Professors (AAUP) links graduate student experiences
with university- and community-wide efforts to promote the values associ-

1. First and foremost, we would like to thank Lara Ghisleni for her support and outstanding
editorial skills. We would also like to thank the Anuac editors, Tracey Heatherington and
Filippo Zerilli for their assistance and patience, with special thanks to Tracey Heatherington
for inviting us to contribute our thoughts to this important ongoing discussion in higher
education.

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70                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


ated with Wisconsin higher education. In the context of coalition building,
we advance the broader aim of protecting the university community as a
space for intellectual innovation and freedom.
   A consequence of the budget cuts is the decline in funding opportunities
for graduate students, such as teaching assistantships, departmental scholar-
ships, and work study positions in the College of Letters and Sciences. The
increasing scarcity and contingency of such resources make it difficult to use
the funds that are available for their intended purpose—a sustained focus on
coursework, research, or dissertation writing. For example, while university
fellowships are designed to reduce teaching loads in order to facilitate
progress through the degree program, the uncertain fiscal climate prompts
students to conserve stipends for future academic years rather than reduce
their work hours in currently held positions. Fellowship guidelines require
students to limit the number of work hours per week for on or off campus
positions, which may result in a loss of earnings or position if the student ac-
cepts the fellowship. It may not be possible to risk losing employment that
might disappear after the fellowship period is over, which may lead the stu-
dent to decline a fellowship offer. This issue is especially acute for students
from impoverished backgrounds, who have economic dependents, or whose
research requires additional funding to carry out fieldwork and/or laboratory
tests. Minority students in particular may be disproportionately affected by
financial instability in higher education, which may result in fewer com-
pleted degrees in many academic fields (Aud 2010; Jaschik 2014; Nealy 2009;
Sowell et al. 2016). For anthropology, this loss is particularly galling as our
discipline is meant to explore the variety of humanity and include diverse
perspectives.
   Furthermore, funding opportunities are more than sources of income.
Cuts to work study programs or research assistantships, for example, nega-
tively impact the ability for graduate students to work with university faculty
to hone the kinds of skills needed to pursue careers in or outside of the acad-
emy. Moreover, in some instances within the UW System, faculty have cho-
sen to relocate to universities outside of Wisconsin in pursuit of stable eco-
nomic environments and opportunities for their graduate students (Beckman
2016; Magnus 2016; Rocha 2016; Schneider 2016). These compounded issues
result in less original research conducted as well as the loss of potential advi-
sors, committee members, and mentors. As such, graduate students may find
themselves unable to effectively assemble a committee to support their
projects, or worry that they will have to face this outcome were they to enroll
in a university system in crisis.


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   Of further concern to graduate students is the potential loss of UWM’s
Carnegie Classification as an R1 (top tier) research institution, a conse-
quence that would be directly linked to the diminished ability for innovative
original research to be conducted and completed, including work by graduate
students. The administration has proudly touted the R1 mantle (Herzog
2016a; Swanson 2016; Walz-Chojnacki 2016), and completed research disser-
tations were an integral component to UWM being awarded this prestigious
status. However, the reduction in funding and available research and teach-
ing assistantships in the College of Letters and Science hinders the effective-
ness of departments, the working conditions for graduate students conduct-
ing research, and the ability for students and faculty to engage across the
university and surrounding communities in Milwaukee. The prioritization of
perceived economic worth and efficiency over UWM mission of research and
access (UW-Milwaukee 2017), devalues higher education experiences for
graduate students in the UW System. It also undermines the goals of the
Wisconsin Idea, a cornerstone of education in our state (Heatherington
2016), which holds that the university is for the benefit of all Wisconsin citi-
zens (McCarthy 1912) and aims «to extend the boundaries of the university
to the boundaries of the state» (Fleisher 2015).
   Our growing awareness of the negative impacts the neoliberal model is
having on our graduate student experiences led us to seek out a means by
which to gain better insight into the inner workings of this approach at UWM
and identify methods by which these impacts can be combatted. This aim ul-
timately led us to become members of UWM’s recently reconstituted chapter
(2015) of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Com-
prised of academic staff, faculty, and graduate students, the AAUP is a pro-
fessional academic organization standing for «academic freedom, shared
governance, institutional independence, and economic security for all those
employed in teaching, research, and academic support» (UWM AAUP 2017a).
The UWM AAUP promotes and defends «higher education as a fundamental
human right to which freedom of inquiry and expression are integral», and in
particular, the defense of the «mission of UWM to provide democratic access
to a first-class, Research 1 university to all of Wisconsin» (Buff 2016a).
   In striving towards these values and engaging with the UWM and broader
UW System administrations as well as the state legislature, UWM AAUP has
become adept at recognizing the interconnected manner in which attacks on
public education appear across various arenas of the UWM as well as across
the university system. This awareness has aided the UWM AAUP chapter in
identifying, documenting, and disseminating knowledge of the specific qual-

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72                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


itative ways this damage has unfolded and how fiscal austerity continues to
exacerbate these effects (Buff 2015b). Our participation in AAUP has allowed
us to bring graduate student concerns to the forefront of conversations
within the organization and better gauge the long-term impacts of further
endeavors the university administrations and the state legislature seek to
implement. Over the past two years the UWM AAUP has also identified other
organizations and populations, both within the university and the larger Mil-
waukee community, that share in the commitment to protecting public edu-
cation and the problem of doing so in a state that continues to devalue it. Ac-
cordingly, the UWM AAUP has worked to build solidarity amongst these bod-
ies on a number of issues, most frequently in the development of strategies
that aim to protect and promote public education from «K-PhD» (kinder-
garten through the doctoral degree) (UWM AAUP 2017b; Buff 2016b). UWM
AAUP stands against the recurring propositions of tuitions hikes for stu-
dents, which would make higher education impossible for more and more
students in Wisconsin, particularly some of the urban population of Milwau-
kee with school districts containing high rates of poverty (Anderson 2016;
Buff 2015a). The organization collaborated with Milwaukee Teachers Educa-
tion Association (MTEA) to protest the state legislature’s law (Opportunity
Schools Partnership Program) which privatized Milwaukee Public Schools,
making underperforming institutions answerable to private corporations
contracted to manage them rather than local Milwaukee residents (Buff
2015b). As UWM AAUP moves into its third year since its reformulation, the
organization’s efforts continue to expand and build new coalitions that cre-
ate inter-group awareness and support. This ongoing mission to engage with
more potential allies allows us to amplify our voices and raise public aware-
ness of the state of education in Wisconsin (UWM AAUP 2017b). We, as indi-
vidual graduate students and as UWM AAUP members, hope that our collec-
tive efforts will result in long-term strategies that promote the survival and
flourishing of our university and the communities with which we share a
bond and purpose.
   Ultimately, our experiences as graduate students, anthropologists, and
AAUP members at UWM have made it clear to us that the continuing erosion
of public education in Wisconsin has the potential to demolish the essential
funding, skills, and academic support necessary for successful graduate edu-
cation programs. Accordingly, this increases the odds that Wisconsin will
lose current and potential future graduate students unable or unwilling to
attempt or complete degrees in an increasingly unstable environment. Such


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an outcome is especially likely for disciplines like anthropology, whose goals
do not easily fit models of economic profit, and consequently are more likely
to be targeted by state cuts. Consequently, we have come to view our contin-
ued cognizance of and active engagement with the political and social forces
seeking to shape public education as vital components of what it means to be
professional scholars and anthropologists. Only through the normalization
of these undertakings within academia can we hope to ensure the survival of
higher education as a force for intellectual inquiry and public good.

REFERENCES
AAUP//UWM, 2017a, American Association of University Professors UW-Milwaukee
      Chapter Blog, https://uwmaaup.org/, June 8, 2017.
AAUP//UWM, 2017b, Solidarity, https://uwmaaup.org/solidarity/, June 14, 2017.
Anderson, Madeline, 2016, “Closing gaps”: Milwaukee Public Schools no longer re-
      quired to take part in OSPP, Fox 6 Now, October 12, 2016. http://fox6now.-
      com/2016/10/12/ performing-better-milwaukee-public-schools-no-longer-re-
      quired-to-take-part-in-ospp/.
Aud, Susan, 2010, Status and trends in the education of racial and ethnic minorities,
      National      Center    for   Educational     Statistics,   July     1,    2010.
      https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015.pdf.
Beckman, Kevin, 2016, Slashed budgets push University of Wisconsin faculty to
      Minnesota, Minnesota Daily, September 9, 2016. http://www.mndaily.com/arti-
      cle/2016/09/uw-professors-leave-for-minnesota.
Buff, Rachel, 2015a, “No tuition hike!”, American Association of University Professors
      UW-Milwaukee Chapter Blog, September 29, 2015. https://uwmaaup.org/-
      2015/09/29/no-tuition-hike/.
Buff, Rachel, 2015b, We now know, or, another semester older, deeper in debt: take-
      aways from the UW struggle, 2015, American Association of University Profes-
      sors UW-Milwaukee Chapter Blog, December 29, 2015. https://uwmaaup.org/ 2
      015/12/29/we-now-know-or-another         semester-older-deeper-in-debt-take-
      aways-from-the-uw-struggle-2015/.
Buff, Rachel, 2016a, Statement of principles: March 2016, American Association of
      University Professors UW-Milwaukee Chapter Blog, March 21, 2016. https://uw-
      maaup.org/2016/ 03/21/statement-of-principles-march-2016/.
Buff, Rachel, 2016b, Board of regents activities this week!, American Association of
      University Professors UW-Milwaukee Chapter Blog, June 7, 2016. https://uwm
      aaup.org/2016/06/07/board-of-regents-activities-this-week/.
Fleisher, Nicholas, 2015, UWM AAUP calls on the Board of Regents to support and
      sustain UWM’s Research and Access Missions, American Association of Univer-
      sity Professors UW-Milwaukee Chapter Blog, February 10, 2015. https://uwm
      aaup.org/2016/02/10/uwm-aaup-calls-on-the-board-of-regents-to-support-
      and-sustain-uwms-research-and-access-missions/.

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74                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


Heatherington, Tracey, 2016, Reclaiming the public university in Wisconsin, in An-
      thropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy, Tracey Heatherington, Filippo M.
      Zerilli, eds, Anuac 5, 1: 63-66.
Herzog, Karen, 2016a, UW-Milwaukee elevated to elite status as research university,
      Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 8, 2016. http://archive.jsonline.com/-
      news/education/uw-milwaukee-elevated-to-elite-status-as-research-univer-
      sity-b99666322z1-368083861.html/.
Herzog, Karen, 2016b, Amid rough seas for UW System, wave of distinct challenges
      hits UWM, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 5, 2016. http://archive.jsonline.-
      com/news/education/amid-rough-seas-for-uw-system-wave-of-distinct-chal-
      lenges-hits-uwmb99678457z1371174451.html.
Jaschik, Scott, 2014, Missing Minority Ph.D.’s. Inside Higher Ed. November 3, 2014.
      https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/11/03/study-finds-serious-attri-
      tion-issues-black-and-latino-doctoral-students.
Kertscher, Tom, 2015, Despite deliberate actions, Scott Walker calls change to uni-
      versity mission a “drafting error”, Politifact Wisconsin, February 6, 2015.
      www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2015/feb/06/scott-walker/despite-
      deliberate-actions-scott-walkercalls-chan/#.
Magnus, Amanda, 2016, UW Professor explains why she is leaving Wisconsin. Wis-
      consin Public Radio, May 18, 2016. https://www.wpr.org/uw-professor-ex-
      plains-why-sh%E2%80%99s-leaving-wisconsin.
McCarthy, Charles, 1912, The Wisconsin Idea, New York, NY, MacMillan. Archived at
      archive.org/stream/cu31924032449252/cu31924032449252_djvu.txt.
Nealy, Michelle, 2009, Study finds minorities underrepresented in Graduate School,
      Diverse Issues in Higher Education, April 24, 2009. http://diverseeduca- tion.-
      com/article/12510/.
Rocha, Polo, 2016, Amid tenure debate, UW System campuses say faculty departures
      rise, Wisconsin Business.com, March 9, 2016. http://wisbusi- ness.com/in-
      dex.iml?Article=366623.
Savidge, Nico, 2016, Changes to tenure, budget and Regents show extent of Scott
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      madison.com/wsj/ news/local/education/university/changes-to-tenure-bud-
      get-and-regents-show-extent-ofscott/article_90954155-df31-5fdb-bb93-dd9-
      3a0f81225.html.
Schneider, Pat, 2016, Leaving UW: reduced funding, politics force fond faculty to say
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      local/education/university/leaving-uw-red- uced-funding-politics-force-fond-
      faculty-to-say/article_2110b510-c271-570- d-9f23-0ffbcba2c469.html.
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Strauss, Valerie, 2015, Gov. Scott Walker savages Wisconsin public education in new
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Learning away from neoliberalism
Lines of connection towards other worlds

Boone W. SHEAR
University of Massachusetts, Amherst


ABSTRACT: In this essay, I envision the university, not simply as a discreet institution with for-
mal boundaries to attend to and defend from neoliberal and conservative assaults, but as a
location of possibility from which to locate and advance projects that connect students and
ourselves to the possibility of other economic worlds.




  At a Town Hall meeting this past February, a 20-year-old college student
asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi if the Democratic Party might
consider moving a bit more to the left on “economic issues”. Pelosi’s re-
sponse was, in some respects, unsurprising.
      «I have to say, we’re capitalist, and that’s just the way it is».

   Pelosi’s assertion of capitalism as our natural condition was then followed
by a confession, «we do think that capitalism is not necessarily meeting the
needs with the income inequality that we have». Pelosi then lamented the
imagined loss of a more moral, “stakeholder” economy that has been re-
placed by a less equitable “shareholder” economy.
   On the one hand, Pelosi’s response resonates with what Badiou, Mouffe,
Swyngedouw and others have described as “post-political”, a condition rising
concomitant with neoliberalism in which social action is delimited by a pre-
existing set of possibilities. Politics can then be reduced to discussing, or
merely managing and administering, what is already possible. In this case,
capitalism is claimed as a natural, invariant, encompassing condition. We
can admit that capitalism is not perfect. It might need some adjusting or even re-
sisting. But, capitalism is simply the reality that we all live in.
   It’s useful to understand Pelosi’s response as a post-political strategy that
polices discursive boundaries. But it would be a mistake to presume that it is
indicative of a continued, broader post-political condition in the United


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States that forecloses on a politics aimed at increasing the “possibility of
other possibilities” (Badiou 2010). What might have been read a decade or
two ago as a re-inscription of capitalist hegemony, today feels more like des-
peration; the very need to make public proclamations that we live in a capi-
talist world is symptomatic of the ruptures in the common-sense, natural-
ness of capitalism. Indeed, in the process of posing his question, the student
at the town hall cited a 2016 poll showing that the majority of young people
aged 19-29 now reject capitalism.

Neoliberalism and possibility at the university
   The student’s comment squares with my changing experience teaching
undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As part
of the U.S. higher education terrain, UMass has profoundly restructured in
relation to and through public disinvestment, privatization, and market log-
ics – what some characterize as “neoliberalism”. Labor conditions, university
governance, campus space, teaching and learning, and institutional objec-
tives all bear the marks of these restructurings while new affects, beliefs, and
desires that steer the university towards the interests of capital circulate
among administrators, faculty, and students (Hyatt, Shear, Wright 2017;
Shear, Zontine 2017).
   However, even as the university is more intricately woven into market im-
peratives – and as white supremacy and patriarchy structure inequalities and
violence across and through identities – new threads of possibility for social
and ecological well-being are laid bare. A decade ago, undergraduate stu-
dents in my gen-ed classes displayed considerable emotional and affective
resistance to critical investigations of capitalism and interrelated forms of
oppression. Invested in the imagined rewards of hard work and individual
achievement, their beliefs, hopes, and desires were woven tightly into the
fabric of neoliberal fantasies. Today, many of my students have no such faith
in the American Dream. They are well aware of their precarious economic
and ecological futures. Like most of us, they are anxious and insecure, dissat-
isfied with the world we live in and wary of what is to come.
   Of course, experiencing overwhelming precarity does not necessarily lead
to a true desire for other ways of being. As Lyon-Callo (2017) discusses, it’s
not enough for students to know and feel that capitalism is “bad”. Without
other possibilities at the ready, a reasonable solution appears to be to rein-
vest in ourselves as individuals or, at best, to resist the impacts of exploita-
tion and oppression. What then might be the role of anthropologists and
other academics in creating and supporting projects for students that reveal

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the “possibility of other possibilities” and that show and connect them to
other ways of being in the world?
   In the rest of this essay I envision the university, not simply as a discreet
institution with formal boundaries to attend to and defend from neoliberal
and conservative assaults, but as a location of possibility from which to lo-
cate and advance lines of connection to egalitarian worlds. I briefly describe
the emergence of a solidarity economy (SE) framing of social justice in Mass-
achusetts. I argue that the enabling conditions of SE are opening new possi-
bilities for communities, activists, and students. I suggest some modest and
practical ways that anthropologists and other academics might participate in
further connecting students and ourselves to the enabling conditions of
other worlds.

Solidarity economy
   Emerging as responses to capital accumulation and neoliberal ideology, SE
is a movement and a framing of economy that has its roots in Latin America
and Europe. Formulated and discussed in different ways – SE can be under-
stood as an effort to organize economic relationships, practices, and institu-
tions that reveal and encourage, rather than conceal and discourage, our so-
ciality and interdependence. For example, community land trusts transform
land from a commodity to a landscape in which the needs of individuals,
neighborhoods, and ecology can be fully considered. Instead of alienation
and exploitation structured in capitalist enterprises, worker cooperatives en-
tail collective control and deliberation over world-making surplus. Following
Tsing, if precarity is the human «condition of being vulnerable to others»
(2015: 20), SE helps us to see, embrace, and organize around our humanity.
   In Massachusetts, efforts have exploded around SE activity over the past
10 years, with explicit formulations in our three most populous cities of
Worcester, Boston, and Springfield (Loh, Shear 2015; Loh, Jimenez 2017). Of
particular interest, these efforts foreground a social justice frame that seeks
to address exploitation and oppression by transforming the conditions that,
in part, create inequalities and violence in the first place.
      A solidarity economy movement is emerging from lower-income communities of
      color in Massachusetts. This movement aspires to transform capitalism – as we
      know it – into a world rooted in values of democracy, justice, and sustainability.
      These dreams arise from those making Black Lives Matter, from immigrant
      workers making poverty wages, from ex-prisoners locked out of the mainstream
      economy, from tenants barely able to make rent, and from communities being
      displaced to make way for the 1% (Loh, Jimenez 2017: 3).



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   Loh and Jimenez describe eight different SE networks in Massachusetts
that are organizing through consciousness shifting, building power, and alter-
native economies in order to «transform and go beyond capitalism» (ibidem 7).
SE makes claim to worlds that embrace our shared vulnerability, «at the base
of these big dreams is collective care for each other – solidarity» (ibidem 4).
SE enables people who are dissatisfied with or actively rejecting the set of
existing possibilities delimited to capitalist ideology, to truly imagine, orga-
nize around, and enact other economic worlds. To illustrate further, I turn to
a remarkable student activist group, Divest UMass.

Enabling conditions and the edges of other worlds
   In 2016 Divest made national news. After years of organizing, culminating
in the occupation of the UMass administration building, Divest forced a pub-
lic commitment from the Board of Trustees to divest the university’s endow-
ment from the fossil fuel industry. Shortly after this fantastic win, thoughts
turned to a project of reinvestment. Rooted in an intersectional, climate jus-
tice analysis, Divest wanted to ensure that the divested funds were rein-
vested in a socially-just way. As ideas were formulated and discussed, Divest
members encountered a solidarity economy frame, which has begun to re-
shape their imaginings and politics.
   In the summer of 2016, some Divest leaders attended a meeting with the
Boston centered Ujima Project. The Ujima Project aims to help cultivate soli-
darity economy through a community-controlled capital account; commu-
nity members envision and then democratically decide how to invest in local
SE enterprises and initiatives. It was during one of these visioning meetings
that the Divest members began to reframe what was politically possible. One
Divest leader describes how the stance towards possibility presented new af-
fects to embrace.
      It was the first time, that, well, it felt like a purely hopeful space. It was like, we
      have everything we need in this community… we need to connect the dots and
      use our own creativity and solutions. That was really, really, really cool.

   For another prominent Divest leader SE is a way to help move beyond a
politics of opposition and redistribution within our dominant economic on-
tology.
      [Divest] was always [intended to be] about taking down the bad, and building
      the new. I was getting not very energized because I couldn’t see a direction to
      go in after taking down the bad. Even when we talked about reinvestment it
      didn’t make sense. I knew that capitalism was bad but, I didn’t know how to get



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      out of that…then we went to Boston to talk to [SE activists]…we talked about
      the solidarity economy network that they were envisioning and thinking about
      that combined the theory and the values and practical things that were already
      happening. We don’t have to wait for this thing that would come it was already
      happening.

   Divest leaders have subsequently spread these new imaginings, affects,
and desires – activated through the enabling conditions of SE – to member-
ship and the broader public. This past winter, Divest held a well-attended
teach-in at UMass featuring a panel of SE activists from across the state. The
teach-in was intended as both general education and as the beginning stages
of a potential campaign to reinvest in the SE movement. In addition to the
potential campaign, members of Divest are now working with SE activists in
a variety of ways through existing university structures. One has developed a
collaborative research project involving video documentation that is a part
of their senior thesis. Another has taken an internship with the Data Com-
mons Project that is mapping and connecting SE. Still another has joined the
communications committee of a growing worker cooperative organization in
Springfield whose staff director is also the director of the U.S. Solidarity
Economy Network.

Lines towards other worlds
   SE invites a politics from which to envision and organize around “new”
and suppressed ways of being. It’s but one example of a project that shows us
the possibility of, and begins to connect us to, other worlds. Worlds in which
our precarity – our vulnerability to others – can be collectively embraced and
social and ecological well-being can be more fully realized. I suggest that an-
thropologists concerned about the multi-faceted dimensions of what some
describe as neoliberal restructuring of the university can pay careful atten-
tion to the opening of multiple political fronts as capitalist ideology loses its
coherence. As we struggle against the impacts of capitalism and related sys-
tems of oppression in, through and beyond the university, we can mobilize
our existing resources and practices – our teaching, writing, and research,
and even “neoliberal” practices like internships and volunteer opportunities
– to help create and support lines of connection towards other worlds.




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REFERENCES

Badiou, Alain, 2010, The Idea of Communism, in The Idea of Communism, Slavoj
     Žižek, Costas Douzinas, eds, London and New York, Verso: 1-14.
Hyatt, Susan Brin, Boone W. Shear, Susan Wright, eds, 2015, Learning Under Neolib-
     eralism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education, New York, Berghahn.
Loh Penn, Sarah Jimenez, 2017, Solidarity Rising in Massachusetts: How Solidarity
     Economy Movement is Emerging in Lower Income Communities of Color, Solidar-
     ity Economy Initiative Report.
Loh, Penn, Boone W. Shear, 2015, Solidarity Economy and Community Develop-
     ment: Emerging Cases in Three Massachusetts Cities, Community Develop-
     ment, 46, 3: 244-260.
Lyon-Call, Vincent, 2015, To Market, to Market, to Buy…a Middle Class Life?, in
     Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education,
     Susan Brin Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, Susan Wright, eds, New York, Berghahn:
     79-102.
Shear, Boone W., Angelina Zontine, 2015, Reading Neoliberalism at the University,
     in Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Educa-
     tion, Susan Brin Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, Susan Wright, eds, New York,
     Berghahn: 103-128.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 2015, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possi-
     bility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press.




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L’uomo accademico flessibile
Due casi a confronto
Alexander KOENSLER
Queen’s University, Belfast
Cristina PAPA
Università di Perugia



ABSTRACT: With the acceleration of the neoliberal management of academic institutions, the
rules of evaluation change continuously in unpredicatable ways. In this contribution, we an-
alyze the changes in evaluation criteria in two cases, one Italian and one in the UK. Despite
the diversity of contexts, both are characterized by technologies of self designed to create a
new human type: the “flexible academic person”.


    «Una costante insicurezza sul lavoro, un costante ridimensionamento, una
costante ristrutturazione, un costante bisogno di aggiornamento per avere
un insieme di competenze adattabili ed essere flessibili. In un certo senso la
sicurezza sul lavoro e la stabilità sono state liquidate» (Ho in Kiviat 2009).
Con queste parole l’antropologa Karen Ho spiega il senso del titolo del suo
libro Liquidated sulla finanza di Wall Street (Ho 2009). Questo modo di vivere
il lavoro che fino ad alcuni anni fa pareva applicarsi soltanto alla finanza e al
settore produttivo privato, sembra oggi estendersi sempre di più ad altre sfe-
re professionali, inclusa quella accademica.
    Nel dibattito sull’audit culture in particolare in Italia ci si sofferma preva-
lentemente sulla valutazione dei prodotti della ricerca effettuata da pari nei
processi della ASN (Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale) e VQR (Valutazione
Qualitativa della Ricerca), che potrebbero certamente essere migliorati ma
che nella sostanza rinviano a pratiche scientifiche qualitative per molti
aspetti efficaci. Un aspetto poco considerato invece è quello relativo agli ef-
fetti dei continui aggiornamenti, cambiamenti e rielaborazioni, a cui sono
sottoposti gli standard di valutazione delle persone e della didattica in coe-
renza con l’accelerazione della gestione neoliberale delle istituzioni pubbli-
che. La flessibilità sembra diventare l’unica costante, con conseguenze sulle
forme dell’esperienza individuale e collettiva del lavoro accademico (Sennett
2000; Armitage, Graham 2001; Bauman 2002). È lecito chiedersi quindi se la

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richiesta al personale universitario di flessibilità e di disponibilità a cambiare
pratiche e atteggiamenti derivi soltanto dalla necessità di ridurre sprechi e
rendite di posizione introducendo criteri di razionalizzazione, oppure se non
vi siano anche sottostanti convinzioni culturali ed etiche, habitus corporei, e
se non si intendano esercitare specifiche forme di governamentalità definibi-
li come tecnologie del sé (Foucault 1978). In questo contributo ci soffermia-
mo su due tipologie diverse di schede, il «modulo di accreditamento delle
sedi e dei corsi del dottorato» del MIUR (Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Uni-
versità e della Ricerca) e la «scheda di valutazione del personale» dell’Uni-
versità di Belfast che, nonostante la diversità dei contesti, si caratterizzano
per una struttura “sorprendentemente” simile.
Trasparenza e “visioni”
   A settembre del 2014 il “senior management” dell’università di Belfast, in-
sieme al neoeletto rettore, si ritirava nel castello della città per riemergerne
con la «visione 2020», un ambizioso progetto di trasformazione dell’universi-
tà. La “visione” viene sintetizzata in un’unica frase ad effetto:
      Un’università internazionale di livello mondiale che supporta studenti e per-
      sonale accademico eccezionali che lavorano in infrastrutture di livello mon-
      diale, conducono formazione e ricerca all’avanguardia, focalizzate sui bisogni
      della società (grassetto in originale).

   In successive comunicazioni pubbliche, la “nuova visione” venne illustrata
anche attraverso un Powerpoint che si soffermava sull’importanza di alcuni
fattori per raggiungere quegli scopi: per esempio, quello di coltivare una
«cultura di leadership al fine di elevare le ambizioni». L’enfasi sulla “leader-
ship” tende a legittimare l’elaborazione e il monitoraggio di piani «strategi-
ci» da parte della direzione dell’Ateneo. In particolare, la “visione 2020” mo-
tiva il lancio di un nuovo piano che mira al raddoppio delle entrate finanzia-
re attraverso l’aumento del numero e dell’entità dei progetti di ricerca finan-
ziati dall’esterno («entrate di ricerca»).
   Uno degli strumenti di monitoraggio è il cosiddetto «modulo di valutazio-
ne del personale» che ogni membro dell’università deve compilare semestral-
mente. Il modulo di circa venti pagine comprende una definizione degli
«obiettivi» per l’anno a venire e degli «standard accademico professionali»
differenziati per livello gerarchico e ambito disciplinare, una verifica degli
«obiettivi raggiunti» nell’anno precedente e la rendicontazione dei «succes-
si» ottenuti. Vari spazi richiedono commenti. Una volta compilato e inviato il
modulo all’amministrazione, il dipendente è obbligato a discutere i «risultati
raggiunti» con un valutatore di livello gerarchico superiore che deve espri-
mere un giudizio in fondo al modulo.

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   L’attuazione della «visione 2020» ha cambiato non soltanto molti assetti
nell’università, potenziando ad esempio le facoltà che qualche anno prima
erano state ridotte a una mera presenza simbolica. Il cambiamento, che ha
creato inizialmente un maggiore scompiglio nell’università ha riguardato
l’«allineamento» degli standard accademici alla “visione”, attraverso l’obbli-
go da parte del dipendente di dichiarare nel modulo di valutazione semestra-
le in che modo intenda contribuire, procurando fondi esterni, alle entrate
dell’Ateneo secondo il proprio ruolo nella gerarchia accademica e l’apparte-
nenza disciplinare. Ad esempio un Lecturer in Antropologia deve acquisire
almeno una somma di £77,276 in tre anni. Anche chi è stato assunto per un
periodo di prova, all’improvviso si è visto cambiare le regole del gioco in cor-
sa, ed è stato costretto a cofinanziare il proprio stipendio. Inoltre, l’80% delle
valutazioni ricevute dal docente da parte degli studenti devono essere positi-
ve. Dopo un iniziale periodo caratterizzato da toni diplomatici da parte sin-
dacale, nell’Università di Belfast si è formato un nuovo gruppo sindacale in-
tenzionato a resistere a quello che veniva considerato un cambiamento ille-
gittimo e non negoziato dei contratti in corso. Una «visione alternativa» ela-
borata in opposizione alla visione ufficiale, ha trovato un sostegno inaspet-
tato tra i giovani ricercatori precari, inasprendo il conflitto con il manage-
ment, che si è arrestato solo con la improvvisa e recente morte del rettore.
Questi sviluppi indicano i limiti della malleabilità dei soggetti di fronte ai
tentativi manageriali di promuovere “tecnologie del sé” che creano al con-
tempo nuovi spazi di condivisione e solidarietà.
   Un altro cambiamento, più micro-politico, riguarda l’introduzione nel
«modulo di valutazione del personale» di una sezione colorata e incorniciata
con il motto dell’università «Noi siamo eccezionali». Corredate da piccoli di-
segni, sono elencate «11 regole che l’Ateneo si aspetta siano seguite da tutto
il personale». Una regola recita: «Sii ricettivo alle nuove idee e vedi il cam-
biamento come necessità per mantenere e migliorare l’efficacia». Un’altra ri-
chiede di «avere una costante spinta interiore per fare meglio le cose, soddi-
sfare e superare le aspettative nonostante gli ostacoli». In queste regole si
svela apertamente il paradosso prodotto dagli intenti di modellare le attitu-
dini. Agli autori dell’elenco, ispirati da una visione comportamentista e tec-
nocratica, sembra sfuggire che le disposizioni interiori non si possono pro-
durre in modo automatico, neanche attraverso quelle “tecnologie del sé” fou-
caultiane che comprendono non solo l’acquisizione di specifiche capacità ma
anche «lo sviluppo di determinati atteggiamenti […] di tecniche adottate
dall’individuo per agire su se stesso» (Foucault 1992: 14).


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Le nuove linee di accreditamento dei dottorati: messa alla prova delle tecnologie del sé
   Riflessioni analoghe si possono sviluppare a partire da un caso italiano. Le
recenti linee guida 2017 per l’attivazione dei corsi di dottorato in Italia han-
no sollecitato alcune critiche formalizzate nel campo accademico: dai rilievi
del CUN (Consiglio Universitario Nazionale) a un documento dei dottorati di
area umanistica dell’università di Roma La Sapienza, a più diffuse inquietu-
dini, preoccupazioni, malumori soprattutto relativi ai nuovi standard
dell’“indicatore quantitativo di attività scientifica”. Il legame esclusivo isti-
tuito in questo indicatore tra attività scientifica e numero di pubblicazioni in
fascia A mettendo in dubbio la qualità scientifica di chi non lo raggiungeva
poneva in discussione anche l’utilità di un controllo che ne riduceva la com-
plessità. Tutto ciò ha prodotto solo alcuni effetti circoscritti come lo sposta-
mento di una settimana della scadenza delle proposte degli atenei e una tar-
diva attenuazione dei criteri per il raggiungimento del suddetto indicatore.
Questa sostanziale acquiescenza potrebbe lasciare immaginare che ci si trovi
di fronte a un provvedimento di normale amministrazione, ma in realtà il
cambiamento introdotto con le linee guida del 2017, che andavano a sostitui-
re quelle emanate nel 2014, ha messo duramente alla prova l’efficacia delle
tecniche di adattamento individuali e istituzionali. Il 14 aprile sul sito del
MIUR appaiono le nuove linee e una settimana più tardi (il 21 aprile) con una
nota inviata ai rettori, il MIUR fa conoscere le scadenze per la presentazione
di «documentate proposte di accreditamento» entro e non oltre il 31 maggio.
Ma la banca dati del MIUR non sarà disponibile prima dell’8 maggio e di fatto
sarà accessibile solo il giorno seguente. Un tempo molto breve considerato
che la proposta prima di essere inviata al MIUR deve essere approvata local-
mente dai seguenti organi di ateneo: consiglio di dipartimento, presidio di
qualità, nucleo di valutazione, senato accademico, consiglio di amministra-
zione; di fatto meno di una settimana per preparare una nuova proposta di
dottorato o per verificare la permanenza dei requisiti di accreditamento, nel
caso di un dottorato già attivato. Un tempo brevissimo era così concesso per
verificare se il collegio dei docenti e il coordinatore rispondessero ai nuovi
requisiti e, nel caso in cui questo non fosse accaduto, per adeguare la compo-
sizione del collegio ed eventualmente sostituire il coordinatore o per solleci-
tare i suoi membri ad aggiornare le pubblicazioni sul sito del MIUR, e infine
soprattutto per confrontarsi con angosce, senso di rabbia, di frustrazione e
inadeguatezza, minacce di abbandono del collegio. La sostanziale acquie-
scenza a cui si accennava si sarebbe già potuta prevedere in anticipo.



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   Almeno dall’inizio dell’anno le linee guida erano state attese per settima-
ne invano. Tuttavia, in questa attesa vi era anche un elemento di sfida con se
stessi, nella consapevolezza che si sarebbero dovuti fare i salti mortali per
stare nei tempi e rientrare comunque nei criteri, che veniva espresso nelle
battute tra colleghi anche di diverse sedi universitarie. Più il tempo passava e
più era chiaro che la sfida sarebbe stata ardua: solo l’abilità degli uffici, degli
organi dell’ateneo, dei coordinatori e il senso di responsabilità dei membri
del collegio alla fine avrebbero avuto la meglio e avrebbero permesso di vin-
cere la sfida. Con quali strumenti? Con il disciplinamento dei corpi forgiati
per lavorare docilmente e con compiacimento nell’incertezza dei tempi e
delle regole, con la capacità di adottare misure opportunistiche e strategie
(individuali e collettive) per rientrare nei criteri e con la disponibilità ad ac-
cettare acriticamente standard di qualità incomprensibili.
   Era noto che le regole dell’accreditamento sarebbero state cambiate e al-
trettanto inevitabile pareva che i soggetti coinvolti dovessero dimostrare
flessibilità e prontezza nell’adeguamento di fronte al cambiamento. Tuttavia,
non conoscendo le regole, era impossibile prevedere in anticipo quali strate-
gie adottare per adeguarsi, inoltre la necessità di un adattamento flessibile
era aumentata dal fatto che uno dei parametri, quello dei risultati della VQR
non può per legge essere richiesto ai membri del collegio, così come solo
un’attenta attività investigativa può condurre a conoscere il valore dell’indi-
catore I, calcolato sul numero medio di soglie raggiunto dal collegio.
L’ANVUR era quindi disponibile a produrre simulazioni degli indicatori R e
X1 che riguardano la VQR per l’insieme del collegio, ma non per ogni suo
membro, così come dell’indicatore I complessivo. Tuttavia venne spiegato
che la simulazione di quest’ultimo valore era possibile ma inattendibile per-
ché l’ANVUR non sarebbe stata in possesso dei dati necessari al calcolo se
non in data successiva a quella di presentazione delle proposte agli organi
accademici. Ma il massimo di incertezza si è raggiunto con l’“indicatore
quantitativo di attività scientifica”, relativo al numero di pubblicazioni su ri-
viste di fascia A per i settori non bibliometrici che solo dopo la chiusura delle
proposte venne esplicitato potevano riguardare tutti i settori e non uno solo
come supposto alla lettura delle linee guida.
   In conclusione, entrambi gli esempi dimostrano che una medesima logica
è al lavoro sia pure in modo più esplicito nell’Università di Belfast, che ha
una più antica cultura dell’audit e in forme più indirette e contraddittorie nel
caso italiano. In entrambi i casi si esercita una specifica forma di governa-
mentalità che mira a produrre nel corpo accademico comportamenti e atteg-
giamenti coerenti con un imperativo tecnocratico ed efficientistico, di “cul-

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88                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


tura della leadership” attraverso istituzioni, procedure, moniti, premi e casti-
ghi. Calcoli opportunistici e tattiche di sopravvivenza rappresentano forme
di resistenza, ma è anche utile riflettere su nuove forme di condivisione che
potrebbero sfociare nell’elaborazione di un’alternativa.

RIFERIMENTI BIBLIOGRAFICI
Armitage, John, Paul Graham, 2001, Dromoeconomics. Towards a Political Economy
      of Speed, Parallax, vol. 7, 1: 111-123.
Bauman, Zygmunt, 2002, Modernità liquida, Roma, Laterza.
Foucault, Michel, 1978, La governamentalità, Aut Aut, 167, 8: 12-29.
Foucault, Michel, 1992, Tecnologie del sé, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri.
Ho, Karen, 2009, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, Durham, Duke University
      Press.
Kiviat, Barbara, 2009, An anthropologist on what’s wrong with Wall Street, inter-
      vista a Karen Ho, Time, 22 July (online), content.time.com/time/business/arti-
      cle/0,8599,1912085,0- 0.html (consultato il 22/05/2017).
Sennett, Richard, 2000, L’uomo flessibile. Le conseguenze del nuovo capitalismo sulla
      vita personale, Milano, Feltrinelli.




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Reclaiming Our University
The University of Aberdeen Manifesto


ABSTRACT: Originating at the University of Aberdeen, Reclaiming Our University is a
movement that is running a campaign to reclaim the academic world and reshape it in a
more communal sense. The Reclaiming Our University Manifesto sets out the key prin-
ciples of freedom, trust, education and community on which the University is founded.
Further details about the movement and its campaign are available at https://reclaimin-
gouruniversity.wordpress.com/.



   §1 We, scholars, students, staff and alumni of the University of Aberdeen,
call for fundamental reform of the principles, ethos and organisation of our
university, in order (1) that it should be restored to the community to which
it belongs and (2) that it can fulfil its civic purpose in a manner appropriate
to our times, in the defence of democracy, peaceful coexistence and human
flourishing.
   §2 We stand at a pivotal moment in the long history of our university, a
fork in the path that offers two ways forward. One is to follow the business
model of higher education to its logical conclusion, in a competition for stu-
dents, research funding and ratings that values constant change as an end in
itself. The other is to rediscover the civic purpose of the university as a nec-
essary component of the constitution of a democratic society, with the re-
sponsibility for educating its citizens and furnishing them with the wisdom
and understanding that will enable them to fashion a world fit for future
generations to live in.
   §3 Under its current regime, this university has committed itself to the
business route. Not only does this contravene the university’s duty, as a
charitable institution, to disseminate knowledge for the public benefit; it
also overlooks its primary responsibility for education and scholarship. To
take the civic route will require a complete alteration of course. It will mean
rebuilding the university from its very foundations. Whether we participate
in the community as students, as researchers and teachers, or as administra-
tive or support staff, we are here to promote truth, justice, virtue and liberty.

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The kind of university we want is one in which these principles are both
thought and taught.
  §4 In our university we will:
   • Create an environment for free, open-minded and unprejudiced de-
      bate, which stands out as a beacon of wisdom, tolerance and human-
      ity.
   • Defend our freedom to undertake research and teaching in the pursuit
      of truth, against the constraints, both internal and external to the in-
      stitution, which threaten to curtail it.
   • Restore the trust that underpins both professionalism and collegiality,
      by removing the conditions of line and performance management, and
      of surveillance, which lead to its erosion.
   • Bring together research and teaching as complementary aspects of an
      education that carries a responsibility of care.
   • Abstain from the egregious language of business that would divide the
      university between ‘employers’, ‘employees’ and ‘customers’.
   • Restore the governance of the university, and control over its affairs,
      to the community of scholars, students, staff and alumni to which it
      rightfully belongs.

The university and its purpose
   §5 The primary civic purpose of the university, in a democratic society, is
to educate future generations of citizens and to forge the knowledge needed
to sustain a just and prosperous world. The university is a place where people
of integrity, from all nations, gather in order to learn to think, and think
deeply, about the nature of things, about the ways we live, about truth and
justice, peace and conflict, freedom and responsibility, the distribution of
wealth, health and sustainability, beauty and virtue. They learn to weigh
these thoughts against the evidence of experience, and to translate them
into policy and practice, systems of law and governance, as well as great
works of science, literature and art. These things are the foundations of
civilised life. Our university will be a place in which they can be incubated
and nurtured.
   §6 The university is a centre of academic life. The days when the academy
was an ivory tower, wherein intellectual pursuits could be enjoyed in isola-
tion from the practical conduct of life, have long gone. In today’s world, not
only are people and ideas moving and meeting on an unprecedented scale,
but the colonial hierarchies of knowledge that propped up the academy in


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former times have largely imploded. The rise, in their place, of competing
economic, political and religious fundamentalisms poses a grave threat to
democracy and coexistence. In this increasingly dangerous situation, the
academy has a new and pivotal role to play. It is to create and sustain a safe,
ecumenical environment of freedom of expression, in which ideas matter,
and in which there is room for experiment and dissent, and for open-minded,
unprejudiced debate. In our university we will create such an environment.
   §7 Our university is not a business. Its goals are academic, not commer-
cial. It is here to foster inquiry, not to extract profit. We are motivated in our
scholarship not by incentives of financial gain but by the pride we take in our
educational and scholarly work. We are driven by a quest for truth and a pas -
sion for learning. Our ambition for the university is not that it should be
ranked above others in terms of quantitative indices of performance or pro-
ductivity, but that it should stand out as a beacon of wisdom, tolerance and
humanity.
   These are our core values. They are moral and ethical, not instrumental,
and cannot be measured on any scale. They rest on four pillars. These are
freedom, trust, education and community. Below, we spell out what they
mean.

Freedom
   §8 Though we speak of academic freedom, this is not a freedom reserved
exclusively for academics. It is not the privilege of a scholarly elite, absolving
them of any burden of care. It is neither a form of immunity, nor a refuge. It
offers no protection, nor can we hide behind it. On the contrary, academic
freedom is a form of exposure. It rests upon a willingness to relinquish the
comfort of established positions, to take the risk of pushing out into the un-
known, where outcomes are uncertain and destinations yet to be mapped.
   §9 Academic freedom is exemplary. In everything they do, academics in
our university seek to live to the fullest extent a freedom that, in a demo-
cratic society, is available to every citizen. Thus academic freedom is not dis-
tinct from the freedom of the citizen; it is an intensification of that freedom.
No more than the freedom of the citizen, is academic freedom handed to us
on a plate. It is a task that falls to us, not an unqualified right to which we
are entitled, and we have continually to work at it, whether in our teaching,
in our research or in our scholarship. We perform freedom, and thereby ex-
emplify it, in our relations with students, with colleagues and with society at
large. It is always work in progress; we can never give up on it and assume
that it has been achieved. Academic freedom can never be taken for granted.


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   §10 The freedom we seek in our university, and wish to defend, is one that
confers upon the imagination the right to roam, without fear or favour, un-
hindered by predetermined aims and objectives. But this right also carries
personal, moral and professional responsibilities. We are responsible to our
students and to the university community as a whole, and we are responsible
for the wider societal and environmental consequences of what we do. We
have to trust that members of our academic community, whatever their rank
or status, will exercise their freedom wisely. There can be no freedom with-
out trust. Loss of trust is the greatest enemy of academic freedom since it
leads to the replacement of autonomy and self-determination with surveil-
lance and control.
   §11 Academic freedom is the life-blood of our university. It has to be sus-
tained against multiple threats. Unaccountable regimes of management,
monitoring and assessment are currently placing severe constraints on what
can be researched or taught, on how work should be presented or published,
and on intellectual priorities. These constraints are particularly acute for
younger scholars, for whom employment and promotion prospects depend
upon compliance. Some constraints come from outside the institution, from
government or funding councils over which we have little or no control. In
using these external parameters as levers of internal management, the insti-
tution is not only exacerbating their effects, but actively undermining the ef-
forts of the scholarly community to defend the freedom on which the proper
conduct of academic life depends. In our university, we will restore the free-
dom of the academic community to govern itself, above all through the re-
empowerment of the University Senate.

Trust
   §12 Academics are professionals. They have joined the university on the
strength of their professional accreditation and competence. This profes-
sionalism carries with it an expectation of trust. In our university we will
trust academic staff to perform their duties responsibly, with personal and
ethical integrity, and in a spirit of service to the community and to the public
good. But trust also implies collegiality. Not only do we depend on colleagues
to play their part, we also grant them the autonomy to do so. Trust rests on
this combination of autonomy and dependency. It is fundamental to scholar-
ship.
   §13 As a university we aspire to the highest professional and scholarly
standards. We will promote and encourage in one another the attainment of
these standards, under the authority of the University Senate. We acknowl-


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edge the risk that individuals will not always live up to the standards ex-
pected of them. In our university we will put transparent protocols in place
to deal with mistakes and failures if they occur. We will not however assume
that errors are bound to occur unless such protocols are applied, or that their
application is a necessary condition for success. We trust that for the most
part, they will not be needed. We are confident that in flourishing communi-
ties of scholarship, colleagues will look after one another, and that by main-
taining collegial commitment, high professional standards will be upheld
without the need to have them continually inspected and monitored.
   §14 Trust does not arise of its own accord. It has to be nurtured. It is nur-
tured by openness and honesty, by matching stated intentions with actions,
by striving for fairness and consistency, and by learning from mistakes. Trust
calls for personal investment, and sometimes entails setting aside immediate
advantage for the sake of the community. The individual costs of doing so
are more than offset by collective benefits that trust brings to the day-to-day
conduct of academic life. Nevertheless, trust that has taken time to build up
can quickly be broken down. It is broken down, above all, by the impositions
of what is increasingly known as ‘management’.
   §15 Many kinds of management have the potential to erode trust, includ-
ing ‘line management’ and ‘performance management’. Line management
undermines both professionalism and collegiality when it redirects the re-
sponsibility and loyalty of every member of staff from the community of col-
leagues who share a love of their subject and work together in teaching it, to
an organisational superior who neither knows the subject nor is accountable
to the community. Performance management undermines professionalism in
assuming that scholars are not motivated by a desire to advance knowledge
in their fields but are responsive only to threats and incentives issued by
managers. It undermines collegiality in attaching these threats and incen-
tives to targets that bear no relation to the contribution that individuals
make to the communities of scholarship to which they belong. Behind both
line management and performance management lies the premise that staff
cannot be trusted to perform of their own accord, to the best of their ability.
Both are instruments not of support but of control.
   §16 The principle of trust applies not only to academic staff. It also ap-
plies to students. Students come to the university because they are eager to
join with us in our scholarly endeavours and because we hope they will carry
the torch of learning to future generations. We trust that they will do their
best, according to their abilities. We are convinced that the legitimate aspira-
tions of students are optimally served by demonstrating, in principle and


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practice, that learning and scholarship are rewarding in themselves, rather
than by defining their education as a regime of testing, geared only to the
achievement of measurable results, and implemented through procedures of
assessment and verification based on the pretext that students are less than
conscientious.

Education
   §17 The university is, by definition, an institute of higher education. By
education we mean an open-ended process of intellectual growth and dis-
covery. In our university, education covers the activities of both research and
teaching. These are inseparable; there cannot be one without the other.
   §18 Research is the pursuit of truth. Though the meaning of truth may
vary, depending upon a scholar’s discipline or philosophy, the call of truth is
the same for all. Truth is an aspiration: it is about trying to get things right,
whether empirically, conceptually, ethically or aesthetically. Research sus-
pends prejudice, and turns all certainty into questioning. It means to search
and search again. Thus research converts every closure into an opening, and
every apparent end-point into a new beginning. It is the guarantor that
scholarship can carry on. This is why research is a primary responsibility of
the academy.
   §19 Under the current framework of evaluation, the meaning of research
has been corrupted beyond recognition. It has become a game, in which uni-
versities and their academic personnel are players. It no longer has to do
with critical scholarship and is instead defined by its products, the values of
which are measured by conformity to uniform standards of assessment
rather than by any appeal to truth. It entails the collection of ‘data’ and their
processing into ‘outputs’ which, in their application, could have measurable
‘impact’. Such a production-line conception of research may have its place in
corporate industry where, in an ever more intense competition for dwindling
returns, only innovation sells. In our university, however, research will be
driven neither by market demand nor by the expectation of novelty. It will be
driven rather by curiosity – by the burning desire to find things out. We are
curious because we care deeply about the things we study. Care, not impact,
is the hallmark of the ethically responsible search for truth. And in our uni-
versity, care and curiosity will be recognised as two sides of the same coin.
   §20 This will be equally true of our teaching. Since research turns all an-
swers into questions, it cannot be taught as if the questions were already an-
swered. Truth is never given in advance; it is rather a horizon of attainment


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that ever exceeds our reach. It is not therefore available for transmission, as
is implied by models that measure teaching and learning by the achievement
of predetermined outcomes. There can be no such outcomes, beyond training
in skills of so superficial a nature that their transfer can be achieved and as-
sessed through the completion of tick-box exercises. Teaching is not about
the transmission of pre-existent knowledge; it is about guiding students in
journeys of growth and self-discovery that they necessarily undertake to-
gether.
    §21 These are often difficult journeys without fixed end-points, in which
both teachers and learners participate. It is the job of a teacher to help and
inspire students, to stretch their imaginations, not to make things easy for
them. A good teacher is exemplary in the conduct of scholarship, a generous
guide and companion for students, and a tireless critic of their work. It is in
this sense that teaching, in our university, will be research-led. This does not
mean that students receive their knowledge at first rather than second hand.
It means, rather, that students will be immersed from the start in an educa -
tional environment that is dedicated to the search for truth.
    §22 Generosity, open-endedness and criticality are fundamental to all ed-
ucation, whether in teaching or research. But this is not how education is un-
derstood by the current regime of university management. In succumbing to
the market-driven rhetoric of teaching and learning with its calculus of mile-
stones and measurable outcomes, and in divorcing research as the produc-
tion of new knowledge from teaching as its dissemination, the university has
abandoned its educational mission. Learning has been reduced to the
smooth and painless acquisition of information, so that students can obtain
good grades with minimal effort and leave as satisfied customers. Teachers,
then, become little more than facilitators, tasked with assembling the infor-
mation to be acquired and delivering it in userfriendly form.
    §23 In our university, we will refuse to regard the provision of higher edu-
cation as a service industry. We will treat our students neither as customers
nor as consumers of the ‘experiences’ we provide. Marketing courses, selling
experience and inducing satisfaction are not, in themselves, educational ob-
jectives. We aim to recruit and retain students with ambitions to study and to
learn, whatever their means and background. We will respect these ambi-
tions, and will support students in their fulfilment. Our task is to give stu-
dents the intellectual tools and the critical confidence to address the chal-
lenges of the contemporary world, not simply to provide them with a pass-
port for future employment and debt relief. In our university, policies of


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96                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


teaching and learning will be geared to the proper objectives of education:
the search for truth, the promotion of tolerance and the pursuit of justice.

Community
   §24 Our university is its people: its scholars, its students, its staff and its
alumni, coming together in the service of higher education. The university is
a community. We are that community.
   §25 The university is not just one great community; it is also a collection
of smaller communities, made up of scholars, students and staff working in
different academic disciplines as well as in associated areas of activity. Many
of these are called departments. In our university we will strengthen depart-
ments by formally recognising their role in the working of the organisation
as a whole. We will acknowledge that they may conduct their affairs in differ-
ent ways, depending on what is appropriate and practicable for their respec-
tive fields, and we will respect and nurture this diversity. We will ensure that
departments or their equivalents are adequately represented in the constitu-
tion of the university, at all levels of inclusion, with elected representatives
at every level. At the most inclusive level, the university will be represented
and led by its Senate.
   §26 We do not pretend that the university community is a harmonious
place, free from conflict and argument. On the contrary, it is a sign of its vi-
tality that disagreements are openly discussed and debated, rather than hid-
den behind a veneer of consensus that often serves as a disguise for manage-
rial imposition. In our university we will encourage open debate in prefer-
ence to ‘consultations’ which, in soliciting opinions, admit no space for criti-
cal dialogue. However, we will also seek to replenish the reservoir of goodwill
that makes it possible for differences to be resolved.
   §27 Management harbours an inherent tendency towards verticality and
centralisation. In our university we will counteract both tendencies by insti-
tuting a decentralised organisation in which departments or equivalent units
are granted, as far as is practicably feasible, the autonomy to run their own
affairs, as trusted professionals and informed colleagues. Time and money
saved from supporting and responding to managerial functions will be rein-
vested in teaching and research.
   §28 Communities depend on regular face-to-face interaction. We will en-
sure that scholars, students and staff in our university have the time, oppor-
tunities and congenial physical spaces, including common rooms, to meet
and interact. We will accordingly seek to reduce the proportion of the work-


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ing day that is spent in front of computer screens. IT systems have their uses,
and in much of what we do they are indispensable. But overdependence on
these systems has pronounced negative effects, inducing isolation, deper-
sonalisation, alienation and even ill-health. It does much to erode the sense
of belonging among both staff and students.
   §29 More insidiously, corporate IT systems have become instruments of
managerial control. In our university we will not allow the requirements of
these systems, or the assumptions that underpin their design, to govern the
way we conduct our affairs, to restrict what or how we teach, or to limit the
practice of our research. They should work for us, not we for them.
   §30 Our university will need leaders. They will have a genuine vision for
the university as a beacon of scholarship, and will be committed to its core
values of wisdom, tolerance and humanity. Our leaders will be part of, and
will identify with, the greater community. They will be chosen by the com-
munity, not by shadowy committees whose members may have little experi-
ence of higher education, nor by firms of head-hunters which have their own
business interests at heart. They will be accountable to the constitutional or-
gans of the University, and will be transparently remunerated, like everyone
else, at a level commensurate with their experience and responsibility, to be
determined by these organs.
   §31 As a large and complex organisation committed to the support of aca-
demic life, our university will also need administrators. They include registry
officers responsible for the recruitment, admission and support of students,
finance officers responsible for budgetary oversight, research officers respon-
sible for the administration of grants and awards, and personnel officers with
responsibility for staff recruitment, contractual arrangements and welfare,
and for ensuring compliance with employment law. We will embed these ad-
ministrative functions at appropriate levels of organisation, so that those
who perform them can play a full part in the communities they support.
   §32 We will additionally ensure that the boundary between scholarly and
administrative roles remains permeable. We will expect the majority of
scholars to undertake some administrative duties, as they do at present, but
we will also encourage those whose primary role is administrative to partici-
pate, to some degree, in teaching and/or research. Through this sharing of
experience, scholars and administrators will be better able to work together.
   §33 Equally important to the effective operation of the university are its
librarians and curators, IT specialists, secretarial and office staff, estates offi-
cers, porters, cleaners, and a host of others. In our university, everyone will
be positively valued and respected for the work they do, and for their com-


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mitment to the community as a whole. We will not, for that reason, classify
as ‘non-academic’ those whose contributions lie primarily beyond the fields
of scholarship.
    §34 Our university will need leaders, and it will need administrators. It
will not need managers. The current regime of management, having seized
executive powers over the institution, is acting as if the university were in its
exclusive possession. Having arrogated to itself the role of sole employer,
management treats those who work for the university as employees or ‘hu-
man resources’, to be used for the regime’s own purposes and subjected to its
increasingly arbitrary and authoritarian command. At the same time, the
sense of community that scholars, staff and students of the university have
forged over the years has been reduced to a market brand, designed to attract
potential ‘customers’. But the university community is not for hire, nor does
it rightfully belong to the regime. It belongs to us. It is our university, and we
mean to have it back.
    We have the opportunity to rebuild our university. We must seize it now.




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