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 whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

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Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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