The repressive university is a product of the neoliberal turn, and a robust instance of the authoritarian nature of the neoliberal ideology.
The neoliberal ideology, articulating the idea that the "free market will take care of societal ills and challenges" promotes itself on the rhetorical appeals of freedom and opportunity.
As I have argued elsewhere (Dutta, 2017), the perpetuation of this ideology relies on communicative inversions, "the turning-on-its head of materiality."
The ideology itself needs repressive strategies for it to be perpetuated.
Let's take for instance the neoliberal university's culture of monitoring and controlling faculty facebook posts, what my colleague Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt refers to as "tone policing." Norms of civility are typically used to justify and perpetuate this repression.
That a faculty member has violated some norm of civility, embedded in ideas of those in power, becomes the basis for the harassment of faculty members. The ideological workings of power perpetuate explicitly through repression of communicative acts, marking communicative acts as acceptable or unacceptable based on the tastes of the ruling classes. Professor Dutt-Ballerstadt has been a vocal critic of Whiteness in the academe and in our classrooms, more specifically of repressive administrative policies, and therefore, has been systematically targeted for such tone policing.
For the neoliberal university, the race to rankings is managed through techniques of reputation management.
Reputation is intertwined with the reproduction of risk. An idea that is threat to reputation is a risky idea to be managed and silenced. In Reshmi's work as a faculty member, her interrogation of strategies of Whitness mark her as the subject of surveillance.
Large corporate communication teams are put into place for media monitoring, social media analytics, and crisis management. The main job of these teams is to gather social media analytics, harness big data to identify the patterns in the perceptions of the university, identifying potential threats and risks to reputation.
The measurement of risk becomes the basis for developing strategies for managing the risk.
If a faculty member's facebook or twitter posts are picked up through the surveillance tools as threats to reputation, the faculty member is brought under the control of techniques of monitoring, measurement, and discipline. Strategies of disciplining are put into place for ensuring that the faculty member does not speak up on social media and other public platforms.
The argument offered goes along these lines: "Your activities are harming the reputation of the university." Usually, some clause on a handbook that are written in fine print and mostly left to obscurity is called upon and a printed sheet is handed out to the faculty member, reminding her of her responsibility to maintain the university's reputation as a member of the university.
These tools of reputation management are particularly at work when faculty members interrogate policies, decisions, and steps taken by the university. Reputation is the tool for ensuring silence and erasing opposition to the neoliberal transformations of the University. The risk to reputation is reproduced as an instrument to silence for instance criticisms of the metricization of the University, often carried out by mediocre managers who are failures as academics. The interrogation of the everyday forms of communicative inversions carried out by administrators becomes the subject of control.
Through such control, administrators in the repressive university ensure they perpetuate the techniques of control. New policies can be randomly introduced, new metrics can be randomly implemented, new forms of evaluation can be put into place at random without accountability. The silencing of the academic voice is integral to the reproducibility of the neoliberal University.
This turn to repression is a form of communicative inversion itself. The neoliberal University peddles freedom as its branding strategy and as its tool for securing legitimacy precisely as it practices a wide range of techniques of repression.
The faculty member as the subject of the repressive university is a reputational assett/liability. We internalize these techniques of repression even as we share in whispered tones our experiences with being called in by one of the Dean underlings, a Dean, or a Provost underling, or even a Provost. We internalize these techniques of repression as we then start monitoring not only what we say in Facebook and/or Twitter, but also what we share, what we like, what we comment on.
We internalize and perpetuate these techniques of repression when we forward facebook posts to the said administrators and managers, with the hope that we will somehow be rewarded for doing so.
The neoliberal university asserts its power through the individualization of the faculty and the production of the risk-benefit calaculating pragmatic. "What is in it for me?" "How will I advance to the next stage of promotion and tenure?" "How can I progress in my career?" become the sorts of guiding questions that shape faculty behavior.
In a climate where academic jobs are under threat, the individualized faculty member is told "you are lucky to have a job." The work of the academic then becomes one of carrying forward the neoliberal mission of the university.
That the repressive university is fundamentally antithetical to the generation of academic thought ought to offer the entry point for how we as academics organize in our unions as academics.