Managing the neoliberal University

The neoliberal university is replete with a large-scale overload of managers. These are non-academics, mostly without PhDs, that are hired to manage academics and the academic processes of the University.

These managers have mostly never stepped into a doctoral programme, a research field, or the classroom. So mostly they have no clue about the academic mission of a university.

This is a problem because if you don't know the service or the product you are managing, you would be clueless about how to manage that service or product.

So, although these managers are hired to increase efficiency, they end up severely depleting efficiency, cause harm to university processes, destroy the academic culture of the university, and severely deplete its productivity.

These managers infantilize academics and mostly have very little respect for the labour of academics. This results in the ongoing devaluing of academic labour, be in teaching, research, or public engagement, with academics bogged down by the metrics and surveillance.

Ironically, there is no performance management of the managers. There is no accountability. There are no metrics or evaluation processes imposed on the managers.

The result is that when the managers put in place a wrong-headed programme or organisational process, and the process ends up severely hampering efficiency and productivity, they don't face the consequences of the fall-out. There is no accountability. There is no consequence.

In private sector organisations, such decisions would have a large price to pay. Poor-performing managers would be removed, and processes would be set in place such that mistakes like this are not repeated again. Unfortunately in universities, managers operate with impunity.

We as academics must find ways to performance manage the managers, hold them to account, and cut their numbers to one-tenth. A university with 100 such managers, with each manager paid around $100K would save $1,00,00,000 per year. Consider the cost savings.

Academic councils, senates, boards, unions must find ways of taking back academic control of the university.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

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