The Suit Walks the Corridor

At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving penguins, and it does not glance up. The suit has a nine-fifteen.

Two floors down, in what used to be the geography library, forty academics sit at long white tables under a ceiling of fluorescent tubes that hum in B flat. This is the open-plan floor, and the brochure for it, printed on stock heavier than any journal, promised it would foster collaboration, agility and spontaneous encounter. The spontaneous encounters mostly involve someone's lunch. A senior lecturer in social work is trying to speak to a student whose mother died on Thursday. She has looked for a room. The two bookable rooms are booked until March. The third holds a technician who is fixing a projector, and has been fixing it, in the manner of a medieval siege, since the start of semester. She has settled for the far corner beside the recycling station and is speaking in the flattened voice of a person who knows that four colleagues within earshot are pretending, with great tact, to be deaf. The student is crying. The recycling station says please rinse containers before depositing.

The gown and the calendar

The same scene plays in Palmerston North and in Melbourne, in Manchester and in Toronto, with the same furniture from the same Scandinavian catalogue, because the suit has become the true academic dress of the modern university. The gown was a costume that said, this person has read something. The suit says, this person has a calendar. Over the last two decades the second claim has quietly outbid the first at every appointment panel that matters, and the buildings record the result in concrete and glass. The corner offices with the view of the ranges belong to people whose job title contains the word strategy. The people who do the actual work of a university, reading a thesis chapter at midnight with a cold cup of tea, marking two hundred essays on the causes of the First World War, sitting with the student whose father has just died in Manila, have been moved to hot desks, where the hot part refers to the temperature under the skylight in February.

The open-plan office is the suit's great fashion statement, and like most fashion statements it is worn by other people. No Deputy Vice-Chancellor has ever been sighted at a hot desk, wiping someone else's crumbs off the surface before setting down a laptop. No Chief Operating Officer has ever been observed pacing the fire stairs in search of somewhere to take a private call. The people who commissioned the consultants who wrote the report that recommended the floor plan are, to a person, sitting behind a door, and the door has their name on it in brushed steel. The report itself, ninety pages of it, with a cover photograph of young people laughing at a whiteboard, cost more than the annual research budget of the school it rearranged, a fact that deserves to be engraved on a small brass plate and screwed to the recycling station.

The lounge

To see the suit in its natural habitat one has to leave the campus and go to the airport, and specifically to the part of the airport behind the frosted glass, where the armchairs are leather and the sauvignon blanc is free and nobody has to sit beside anybody. The suit is there. The suit is there a great deal. It is on its way to Singapore for a partnership conversation, or to Melbourne for a benchmarking exercise, or to London for a global rankings summit, at which the people who run the rankings explain to the people who pay for the rankings why the rankings are important, and everybody gets a tote bag. The suit flies business, naturally, because the suit has to arrive fresh, and the university travel policy, which the suit wrote, says so in clause seven. On landing it will post a photograph from the hotel gym with the caption grateful.

Back on the open-plan floor an anthropologist who has spent nine years earning the trust of a fishing community in the Sundarbans has just received an email, four lines long and signed by nobody, informing her that field travel is paused this year owing to budgetary headwinds. A colleague whose paper was accepted at the leading conference in her discipline has been told that conference travel will be considered on a case by case basis, and that her case, on consideration, is closed. The school's research budget has been trimmed by a sum that would not cover the executive team's airline lounge memberships, and the memberships are a line item. They sit in the accounts under a heading called executive enablement, three rows above a smaller heading called library.

Nobody grudges anyone a flat bed on a long flight. What deserves attention is the arithmetic of who the comfort is for. The university now spends its money on the mobility of the people who describe the university and withholds it from the mobility of the people who are the university. The anthropologist's trip to the delta produces knowledge that nobody else on earth possesses. The suit's trip to the partnership conversation produces a photograph of two people shaking hands beneath a banner, posted to LinkedIn with the word delighted and a string of flag emojis, and a memorandum of understanding that nobody will read again. One of these activities is called research. The other is called leadership. Only one of them flies flat.

Credentials

Here is the thing nobody says out loud at the town hall, where the slides are blue and the sandwiches are triangular. A large share of the people now deciding what counts as excellent research have never done any. Some of the suits hold doctorates, and the ones who still remember what a doctorate costs a person, in years and in teeth ground flat at night, are a small and precious minority. Many hold an MBA, a fine credential for running a chain of gyms. A surprising number hold a bachelor's degree and a long apprenticeship in the arts of the restructure, and their CVs, when they surface, read like the itinerary of a cruise ship: two years at the bank, three at the council, a stint at the consultancy that used to advise the university, then the university itself, as the natural next port. They arrive convinced that the university is a badly run business that has not yet noticed it is a business, and they set about breaking the news.

The disdain takes longest to see because it is so beautifully tailored. It never appears as contempt. It appears as patience. The suit listens to the professor of history explain why a two-year micro-credential in heritage engagement will not replace the history major, and the suit nods, and the suit says, I hear you, and then the suit says, but the market, in the tone a vet uses to discuss an elderly dog. The suit believes that academics are the friction in the machine, the legacy cost, the reason the numbers on the dashboard refuse to move. In the suit's mental model the university would run beautifully, like a Swiss watch or a Danish airport, if only the people who teach and research could be persuaded to stop asking why. The whole architecture of the modern campus, the open floor, the room-booking software with its fifteen-minute increments, the travel approval form with eleven mandatory fields and a drop-down menu for purpose of journey that does not include thinking, has been built around a single institutional anxiety, that somewhere in the building a person with tenure is having an idea.

Accountability

The suit talks about three things, and it talks about them in the same order in every speech, on every slide, with the same three-colour chart that a graduate in the design school could improve in an afternoon and will never be asked to. Efficiency means that the professor now books her own travel, her own rooms, her own timetable, and files her own reports to four separate dashboards that measure her, in the hours she once spent reading. Cost means that her school has lost a third of its staff since the last restructure and, by coincidence the suit has not yet examined, a third of its students. Growth means that the international pipeline the suit flew to Delhi to open has been forecast, in a spreadsheet the colour of a swimming pool, at a figure the suit will have left the institution long before anyone checks.

The genius of the arrangement, and the word is used with something close to admiration, lies in its asymmetry. The suit measures everyone and is measured by no one. The academic has her publications counted, her grant income counted, her student evaluations counted, her citations counted, and her hours counted in fifteen-minute blocks on a workload spreadsheet that assumes a doctoral chapter can be read, digested and commented on in forty-five minutes, presumably by someone who is also eating. The suit has a performance agreement nobody outside the seventh floor has seen, with targets reset each year to whatever happened to be achieved. When the growth fails to arrive, the suit announces a further restructure to address the challenging environment. When the restructure saves nothing, because the consultants cost what the redundancies saved and the redundancy payouts cost the rest, the suit announces a transformation, and gives it a name with a colon in it. The suit is then recruited by a larger university to do the same thing again, at a higher salary, in a better suit, and leaves behind a farewell morning tea with a cake nobody ordered.

The promise

The public university was built on a promise a society made to itself. Tax money, public land, and in Aotearoa the obligations of Te Tiriti o Waitangi were placed in trust so that a community of scholars could teach the young, pursue knowledge without asking permission, and tell power things power did not wish to hear. Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States founded their public universities on versions of the same bargain. The bargain assumed that the people running the place would be drawn from the people doing the work, and that the buildings, the budgets and the travel would serve the classroom and the laboratory. Every clause of that assumption has been reversed within a single working lifetime, and each reversal was announced, at a town hall with triangular sandwiches, as modernisation.

In its place stands a managerial class that treats the university as an asset to be sweated and the scholar as an operating cost with opinions. The consequences are visible to anyone who walks the building, and they are the consequences the suit prefers to leave off the slide. Across the English-speaking world humanities departments have been closed or folded into schools with names like Creative Industries and Society, and the executive floor has grown a wing. Sessional and fixed-term staff, paid by the hour and parked in the corridor between classes, now teach most undergraduates in several national systems. Academics report burnout at rates that would trigger an inquiry in any industry with a union that still had teeth. Students pay more, borrow more, and see their lecturers less, and the lecturers they do see are looking, with mounting desperation, for a room. The carpeted corridor lengthens by a few metres every budget cycle. The white tables on the open-plan floor edge a little closer together each year, and the social work lecturer has taken her grieving student out to the car park, because the car park, whatever else may be said of it, has walls.

The suit, passing the window on its way to the lift, glances down and sees them there between a hatchback and a skip. It makes a note, for the next slide, that the car park is an underutilised asset.