Skip to main content

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.

Popular posts from this blog

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 wit...
Read more

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 ...
Read more

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde   Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation.  These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South.  The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...
Read more