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| On February 28th, 2020, Janet Napolitano, the President of University of California fired 54 UC Santa Cruz graduate students for going on a strike for a Cost of Living Adjustment to address untenable living conditions |
(Based on popular demand from colleagues in academe, I am going to translate some of my academic writing on communication and engagement in a series of blog posts. In these blog posts, I will set up a fictitious academic organization, the Engagement University, and use the context of the University to unpack my thoughts. Of course, the analyses connects well with various industries, NGOs, political processes, social-cultural processes. At the end of each post, I will provide links to some of my published articles as anchors for further conversations).
The neoliberal University, driven by its accelerated managerial turn toward profits, efficiency, markets, and rankings, pursues a wide range of strategies of financialization and commoditization.
The mission of the University, written in the terminology of efficiency, is coded into strategic plans, management objectives, and key performance indicators. Students are markets, non-academic staff are cheap labour, and academic staff are turned into disciplined instruments for efficiency maximization (For all its discourse of efficiency, the neoliberal university is largely inefficient. More on this in a later strand).
To achieve the process of financialization of the university, where every activity of the university is turned into a financially measurable metric, the managerial class that is put in place to run the neoliberal University must make authoritarian decisions that consolidate total power in the hands of management. Of course, while such authoritarian strategies of managerial decision-making might be entirely palatable in the capitalist sector, the University has historically been anchored in ideas of academic freedom and faculty participation, both tied to notions of voice and democracy.
Secured through decades of organizing on university campuses across the globe, various processes and infrastructures have been established within Universities to protect academic freedom, and these processes and procedures have historically been anchored in ideas of democratic participation. Elected committees, senates, and faculty voting therefore have been codified into University processes.
Elected committees play key roles in representing student, non-teaching staff, and academic staff voices in the everyday governance of the University. Growing up, witnessing my union organizer father work in leading collective processes, I came to appreciate the power of the union of non-teaching staff in holding the University decision-makers to account. The University could come to halt if its non-academic staff so decided. Such was the power of collective organizing in the democratic University.
The neoliberal University must dismantle these processes and fundamentally undermine democratic participation in order to carry out its processes of commoditization and financialization. Student unions, employees unions, and various academic committees must be effectively silenced to push forth series of decisions grounded in the logic of maximizing profit. The ideas for managing the neoliberal University therefore are often exported from authoritarian regimes such as Singapore, where the regime's techniques of controlling dissent perfected in the University can now be universalized as techniques of effective University management.
University managers, driven by profit maximization, are under continuous pressure to innovate. Each administrator competes to outdo the other one, to come up with new terminologies and new language to demonstrate her/his competence in this management to financialize. One only needs to look at the World Economic Forum conversations on the future of the academe, where this race is on full display, ironically making visible the mediocrity and lack of orginality in most of these ideas. Terms such as grand challenges, artifical intelligence, sustainability, and digital futures are bandied around as innovations, devoid of meaning and devoid of radical visions for addressing the urgent challengs facing humanity. Most importantly, these grandiose statements issued by the managerial class are rightly aligned with their capitalist masters, complete with the recipe for turning what remains of the University into the incubation lab and sweat shop for the one percent.
Funded by the corporate class, the strategic vision of the neoliberal University converges on turning knowledge production into a techno-deterministic tool of financialization.
This work of consolidating total control is likely to face a great deal of resistance from the democratic processes that have been put into place in Universities. Unless you are operating in an authoritarian regime such as China or Singapore, the academe is organized into various elected bodies that are going to place pressure on authoritarian consolidation. To manage this challenge from the democratic university, the neoliberal university therefore has invented the terninology of engagement, imported from forms of public opinion management in authoritarian regimes. Regimes such as Singapore silence democratic articulations through the performance of engagement, creating sites and spaces for controlled voicing under the surveillance and control of those in power.
The Engagement University thus has teams of public relations professionals working overtime to manage processes of engagement. Decisions pre-configured by authoritarian managers chasing KPIs are disseminated through pre-configured communication channels to give the appearance of democratic participation. All the while that this engagement is being performed, real opportunities of participation are attacked and erased. The message is loud and clear, you disagree and your job is on the line. As subjects in the Engagement University, we quickly learn to channel our voices in appropriate ways, to fall in line with management, to follow blindly the dictatorial orders issued by management. To question is to stand outside. To ask for evidence is to risk your job. To articulate your voice is to stand in the way of the neoliberal University.
Engagement is the fundamental tool of deception in the Neoliberal University. We must draw upon our critical habits, as students, non-teaching staff, and faculty to interrogate the meaning and forms of engagement. We must ask questions such as: Who controls the platforms for engagement? Who issues the calls for engagement? Who makes up the rules of engagement? Who controls the information we have access to and the information we don't have access to? Recognizing the onslaught on democracy in the University is the first step to taking back our democracies.
References
Dutta, M. J. (2018). Communicating public engagement, public interest and participation: Culturally centring community voices. In Public Interest Communication (pp. 64-83). Routledge.