Higher Education, crisis and volatility


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. The marketisation of higher education is turning University life into a series of tactical engagements designed to extract value from public goods, rather than a set of spaces in which we might be able to confront the crisis. This crisis is enabling capitalism to overcome barriers to value production and extraction, and underpins an inevitable revolutionising of HE. This recalibration of HE is focused on the rate of profit, and a purported need to balance the sector’s contribution to the economy.

However, the extraction of value, or the focus on the rate of profit, is high-risk and catalyses volatility and it neglects the wider, systemic, socio-environmental issues that provide the context in which education-for-growth exists.

TWO. In his work on False Accounting: Why Higher education Reforms Don’t Add Up, Andrew McGettigan analyses volatility, instability and indenture in HE.

The income–‐contingent repayment loans offered to students are also future–‐policy–‐contingent, potentially creating an indentured class of graduates from whom higher repayments can be extracted. In sum, the Coalition has concocted a higher education funding regime which fails on its own criteria. It introduces fiscal instability into the sector and offers the nation minimal savings in return. While the deficit may be slightly reduced, large borrowings are required over the next two decades before the scheme is expected to pay for itself. These expectations may be pricked if adequate graduate repayments fail to materialise – leaving future governments to rectify the situation.

He goes on to state that the debate about HE reform is obscured by economic illiteracy.

the government’s deficit reduction strategy is aimed at slowing the growth of the debt. Reducing expenditure reduces the need for additional borrowing to meet any shortfall between annual income and expenditure. Loans have a lower impact on the deficit than grants – but they affect the debt separately to their contribution to the deficit. This is a very important matter and one that has been systematically obscured from the debate around higher education reform.

He then states that the overall effect is high-risk and based on modelling that makes serious assumptions about growth.

The large–‐scale move from grants to higher loans brings uncertainty into the heart of higher education as the viability of the loan scheme depends on making predictions about the general shape of the economy and graduates within it for the next three to four decades. Current indications about the graduate premium suggest it will be eroded further except in a small group of professions.

TWO. This connects to Christopher Newfield’s argument about the new proletarianisation. He argues that it is difficult to sustain a positivist argument for economic growth, especially where it is tied to the generalised, emancipatory potential of technological skills in a new economy. In part, this is because under neoliberal capitalism, technologies are used to promote consumption, production gains or to increase the rate of profit. The logic of their use and deployment is for productivity gains, or for workplace monitoring and surveillance and management and stratification, or to catalyse the creation of value by opening up/harnessing new markets, or by stimulating innovations that further valorise capital. Thus, Newfield highlights three different types of knowledge or skill:

  1. Type C is ‘commodity skills’, which are ‘readily obtained’ and whose possessors are interchangeable. This category includes most ‘pink collar’ work that involves skills like ‘typing and a cheerful phone manner’.
  2. Type B is ‘leveraged skills’, which require advanced education and which offer clear added value to the firm that hires such skill, and yet which are possessed by many firms. Computer programmers or network administrators are examples of essential employees who worked long and hard to acquire their knowledge, and yet who are relatively numerous. Ironically, they may have entered the field because it was large: its size may have signalled to them when they were picked a major in college–and to their stability-minded parents–something like ‘the high-tech economy will always need computer support specialists’. Yes, but not any particular computer support specialist, and not at a very high wage.
  3. Type A consists of ‘proprietary skills’, defined as ‘the company-specific talents around which an organization builds a business’. The knowledge manager must nurture and cultivate only the skills that directly contribute to the firm’s propriety knowledge, and stamp out (or radically cheapen) the first kind of knowledge worker, whose skills are interchangeable commodities. Only the star producers–those who create proprietary knowledge–enable the firm to seek rents, and only they are to be retained, supported, cultivated, and lavishly paid.

In an indentured world focused on economic growth above all else, not everyone will enjoy the life-styles of those who produce proprietary knowledge.

THREE. Yet, economic growth is coupled to energy use. The Royal Society Science Policy Centre report People and the Planet argues that growth based on extant socio-economic models is extremely problematic.

in the most developed and the emerging economies unsustainable consumption must be urgently reduced. This will entail scaling back or radical transformation of damaging material consumption and emissions and the adoption of sustainable technologies, and is critical to ensuring a sustainable future for all. At present, consumption is closely linked to economic models based on growth. Improving the wellbeing of individuals so that humanity flourishes rather than survives requires moving from current economic measures to fully valuing natural capital. Decoupling economic activity from material and environmental throughputs is needed urgently for example by reusing equipment and recycling materials, reducing waste, obtaining energy from renewable sources, and by consumers paying for the wider costs of their consumption. Changes to the current socio- economic model and institutions are needed to allow both people and the planet to flourish by collaboration as well as competition during this and subsequent centuries. This requires farsighted political leadership concentrating on long term goals.

Furthermore, in their IMF working paper on The Future of Oil: Geology versus Technology, Benes et. al. note that:

the problem of oil becoming harder and harder to produce in sufficient quantities was an important factor that would have significantly increased oil prices regardless of shocks.

it requires a large increase in the real price of oil, which would have to nearly double over the coming decade to maintain an output expansion that is modest in historical terms. Such prices would far exceed even the highest prices seen in 2008, which according to Hamilton (2009) may have played an important role in driving the world economy into a deep recession.

There is likely to be a critical range of oil prices where the GDP effects of any further increases become much larger than at lower levels, if only because they start to threaten the viability of entire industries such as airlines and long-distance tourism.

a point forecast that implies a near doubling of real oil prices over the coming decade, and an increase in prices over and above the very high recent levels even under a very optimistic scenario, at the lower 90 percent confidence interval. The world economy has never experienced oil prices this high for anything but short transitory periods, and we reiterate our previous statement that this might take us into uncharted territory, where a nonlinear, convex effect of oil prices on output might be a more prudent assumption.

And to add to the volatility Hamilton, in hi Oil Prices, Exhaustible Resources, and Economic Growth,  notes:

Coping with a final peak in world oil production could look pretty similar to what we observed as the economy adapted to the production plateau encountered over 2005-2009. That experience appeared to have much in common with previous historical episodes that resulted from temporary geopolitical conflict, being associated with significant declines in employment and output. If the future decades look like the last 5 years, we are in for a rough time. Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fuelled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting a resource that was extremely valuable and useful but ultimately finite and exhaustible. It is not clear how easy it will be to adapt to the end of that era of good fortune.

FOUR. Tom Murphy writes eloquently about energy, and how a growth-fuelled politics traps us.

Many of us have great hopes for our energy future that involve a transition to a gleaming renewable energy infrastructure, but we need to realize that we face a serious bottleneck in its implementation. The up-front energy investment in renewable energy infrastructures has not been visible as a hurdle thus far, as we have had surplus energy to invest (and smartly, at that; if only we had started in earnest earlier!). Against a backdrop of energy decline—which I feel will be the only motivator strong enough to make us serious about a replacement path—we may find ourselves paralyzed by the [energy] Trap.

In the parallel world of economics, an energy decline likely spells deep recession. The substantial financial investment needed to carry out an energy replacement crash program will be hard to scrape together in tough times, especially given that we are unlikely to converge on the “right” solution into which we sink our bucks.

Politically, the Energy Trap is a killer. In my lifetime, I have not witnessed in our political system the adult behavior that would be needed to buckle down for a long-term goal involving short-term sacrifice. Or at least any brief bouts of such maturity have not been politically rewarded.

FIVE. Higher Education is focused on a series of tactical manoeuvres: employability; internationalisation; public-private partnerships; value-added; outsourcing; the REF; student number controls; cash-flow and staffing costs; retention and progression; learning analytics; mobile learning; work-based learning; value-for-money; efficiency; economic growth.

Yet higher education does not exist in a vacuum.

What is to be done?


A note on technologies for control, systemic violence and the militarisation of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

In their review of militarism and education normal, Meiners and Quinn argue that there is a three-fold mechanism by which public education in the United States is shaped through hegemonic militarisation: by offering a perception of choice to those denied any such choice as a result of their socio-economic status – where enlisting is an institutionalised way out of poverty and is catalysed through connections between education and the military; by serving as a catalyst for innovation and change in the forms of education, through taking-over schools/colleges and militarising the curriculum; and by using the vast revenues devolved to the military for research inside education. This latter point is critical for these authors when they turn their gaze to higher education.

[M]ilitarization, according to researchers, asymmetrically shapes contemporary higher education, channeling resources to sub-fields within science, engineering, mathematics, and particular areas of linguistic and political inquiry, while the remaining disciplines—art and humanities, in particular—receive no military dollars.

The interaction between the military and the pedagogies of/curriculum for technology is not new. Beyond the neuroses of the battle for education inside the Cold War, Dyer Witheford and de Peuter have argued in Games of Empire that the production of games like America’s Army and the development of augmented/virtual spaces in partnerships between the military and university knowledge labs enable capital to leverage the power of the state to ‘reassert, rehearse and reinforce Empire’s twin vital subjectivities of worker-consumer and soldier-citizen’. With a focus on the marketing of the game Full Spectrum Warrior, they highlight how curricula designed around the cultures of game production, as well as the processes/relationships of modding and hacking, demand “the total obedience of the culture industry to the protocols of the War on Terror – its immediate ingestion and reproduction of the state’s paranoias”, and that“new kinds of militarized formats” fuse “technological innovation and the erotic charge of combat” in “renewed, compulsive militarization”. Such compulsive militarisation is made manifest in the connections that emerge between firstly the virtual frontline, secondly coding and narrative and design inside/beyond the classroom, and thirdly the living room as space for play.

The ways in which the interplay between formal/informal spaces for educational engagement and the neoliberal development of curricula enables societies of control to emerge, is also seen in the normalisation of technologies for the management of risk and in promoting the idea of acceptable, business-like performance/attitudes in students and teachers. Here the demand to maintain the duality of worker-consumer and soldier-citizen results in the development and use of technologies for systemic violence through control. Thus, in the physical campus we see the increased use of kettling and a para-militarised response to dissent, with little opposition offered by institutional senior managers or staff. The classic example in the global North lies in the student protests and occupations at UC-Berkeley in 2011, which highlighted the increased politicisation of young people, the increased militarisation of our campuses, and the increased bravery of people as co-operative social forces in the face of State authoritarianism. However, the global South has also born witness to widespread use of military force/technologies in the spaces around campuses and student life, as witnessed in Chile. The result is the enforcement of consent through coercion, and a diminution/marginalisation of the space for alternative narratives to develop.

In part, the use of force on campus enables corporations to overcome the attrition on the rate of profit that emerges from the unnecessary circulation time of immaterial commodities like credit default swaps realised as student loan debts, and in part it enables the State to discipline the thinking/actions of those citizens who feel that they might be anything other than those twin subjectivities. As the interplay between subject-identities and the system is normalised and structured through debt, those identities/attitudes/actions are controlled and managed through the mining of data and an obsession with analytics. Surveillance and monitoring become means by which technologies can be used to effect biopolitical power, or the subsumption of individual wills to the creation of value. Thus, the use of management data to normalise and marginalise, and therefore overcome the risk inherent in the use of debt/future earnings/labour to secure an increase in the rate of profit, is key. Debt-fuelled economic growth demands that the management of risk, including the risk that students might be other than businesslike, should be controlled. Anything that is seen as abnormal in this space is disciplined. Such discipline includes use of physical force by paramilitary police on campus, but it extends beyond this, to the increasing homogenisation of campus-based or institutional technologies through public/private partnerships, and the refusal to support marginalised innovations, often located in open source communities. The physical space is coerced and enclosed, in order that capital can legitimise the extraction of value from the virtual.

However, even those more marginal spaces risk replicating the systemic inequalities and acts of violence that are catalysed by hegemonic positions. As Hoofdargues, all forms of activism/innovation risk their own subsumption inside structural regimes of domination. In fact

the current mode of [neo-liberal] late-capitalism relies on the continuous extension and validation of the infrastructure and the optimistic discourses of the new information technologies. Discourses that typically get repeated in favour of what I designate as the emerging speed-elite are those of connection, instantaneity, liberation, transformation, multiplicity and border crossing

Thus, even those educators who claim to be hacking or co-creating or accelerating ‘new spaces’, or personal learning environments/MOOCs as opposed to institutionalised systems, are operating inside structures which were created with the goal of facilitating global capitalism and its elites, and “that allow for the on-going perfection of military power through technologies of surveillance”. Whether such surveillance takes place in institutional or personal or massively-open learning environments is irrelevant when it is performed inside the totalising logic of capital. Thus, Hoofd argues that “The idea that subjectivities from social movements are in any way less produced by neo-liberal globalisation is highly problematic.” For Hoofd, these movements might form the collective opposition realised in the EduFactory, but her concerns might also be extended to those radical education projects discussing an exodus from formal higher education, or those communities and networks engaged in innovations against the grain of the institution. Without a structural critique that ‘outs power’ as decisions are made, the systemic violence and alienation enacted in the name of capital cannot be escaped. This makes the co-option of educational performance by the state for control or for violence or by the military a normalised outcome. 

Thus, education and educational innovation/transformation is folded inside a discourse that threatens alienation and violence, in the name of value and the reproduction of established, hegemonic positions of power. It is inside this connected set of spaces that the connections between the military, the market/corporations and public education needs to be discussed. If we are really for education as transformation there is no ignoring of the ramifications of:

  1. the recent discussion of the relationship between DARPA, hackerspaces and schools;

  2. the neoliberal networks that connect Blackboard to the Pentagon;

  3. the neoliberal networks that connect Pearson to the US Department of Defense through educational innovation and assessment, and then to its own policy think tanks that are setting an agenda for educational marketisation;

  4. the connections between hacking competitions, education departments and national security, and the co-option of hacking as a pedagogy of/curriculum for control;

  5. the use by Universities of drones, through which The Salon reports connections between the U.S. military, academic research, and defence contractors;

  6. public/private partnerships in the UK that focus upon wireless video surveillance;

  7. the deep connections between the military and research inside UK universities; and

  8. the disconnect between our activist promotion of technologies that are apparently transformative in the global North at the expense of their implication in war in the global South, like the Raspberry Pi.

Hersch, in her review of the ethics of university engagement with/research for the military, noted several preliminary conclusions.

  • Military research on offensive weapons is considerably more likely to contribute to reducing than increasing security.

  • By diverting resources from other areas, military research both distorts the research climate and balance between different subjects and reduces the resources available for creative holistic approaches to conflict resolution.

  • Banning military research is not counter to academic freedom, but such a ban would be difficult to achieve in the short term.

  • The resources associated with military research and the associated research climate may be impeding genuinely creative and innovative research, which often takes place at the boundaries.

  • Useful civilian spin-offs from military research is totally unfounded as a basis for justifying military research.

My contention is that we need to ask fundamental questions about the ways in which our educational spaces and the technologies we actively deploy inside them, contribute to: the normalised violence of coercion or control or marginalisation of students; or the militarisation of the physical spaces of our campuses; or the direct co-option of our own/our students’ immaterial labour in making stuff for the military. As the storify that describes one narrative of the connection between DARPA and Make notes, at issue is the possibility of creating non-militarised spaces that are not underpinned by systemic violence. As austerity bites and as the State, alongside transnational global capital, seeks to reinforce its control over the debt-fuelled obligations of its worker-consumers, the role of the University in applying a critique of the ways in which such control is engineered and our complicity in it has never been more necessary.


A note on humanity or ethics, mobiles and the Raspberry Pi


Posted by hallymk1

I have argued elsewhere about the resources for a critique of mobile learning and its relationship to notions of capital and what Hardt and Negri have termed Empire. I have just submitted a draft book chapter on this issue, in which I quote several passages from Peter Eichstaedt’s work on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This work highlights the issues of labour rights, resource accumulation, geographical dispossession and supply-chains that underpin the means of production and distribution of mobile technologies. Notably this focuses upon the production and distribution of coltan and tin, although it also connects to conflicts over other resources. An analysis of this work might be tied into the human and labour rights of those engaged both in mining the resources that enable technologies to scale efficiently and in the assembly of those products.

These abuses are connected through webs of transnational global finance, mining corporations and media firms to the educational practices that are increasingly common in the global North, and which underpin the active re-production of the imperatives of capital. Ware has argued that:

Coltan is increasingly exploited in the mountains in the conflict torn eastern part of the country. The Rwanda and Uganda backed rebels have primary control over the ore and are reaping huge profits which maintain and finance the protracted war. It is estimated that the Rwandan army made $20 million per month mining coltan in 2000. As coltan is necessary for the high-tech industry and as demand increases, motivation to pull out of the DRC by Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi decreases.

Eichstaedt writes that despite the relatively small role that tin and coltan from the DRC play in the global market for rare earth metals, the revenues flowing from the control of mines in the east of the country is hugely significant in terms of local geo-politics. He notes

That significance can be counted in the millions of dollars and the millions of lives lost or damaged over the past sixty-five years in the worst human death toll since World War II.

Global Witness argued that

In their broader struggle to seize economic political and military power, all the main warring parties have carried out the most horrific human rights abuses, including widespread killings of unarmed civilians, rape, torture and looting, recruitment of child soldiers to fight in their ranks, and forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The lure of eastern Congo’s mineral riches is one of the factors spurring them on. By the time these minerals reach their ultimate destinations – the international markets in Europe, Asia, North America and elsewhere – their origin, and the suffering caused by this trade, has long been forgotten.

In terms of the global supply of rare earth metals like coltan, a small amount comes from the DRC, which means that for transnational corporations, invoking due diligence policies for these mines is not worth the cost. Thus, there is little incentive for those corporations to invest in tracking systems or in maintaining the mines, and their withdrawal means that miners will be left without incomes or placed at the mercy of militias and less scrupulous governments. At issue then is the extent to which educators who are framing a demand for [mobile] learning are implicated, through their relationships as consumers or promoters of the hardware of multinational companies that may source conflict minerals.

For Eichstaedt it is here that the personal becomes political and might underpin action.

We all use and depend on all sorts of high-tech devices in our daily lives… We are all linked on our shrinking planet… Forming personal and lasting bonds with people is the most effective and powerful way to effect change… Feet on the ground, followed by time, toughness, and commitment to change is needed. Nothing less. 

Educators are nodes in networks of power that form circuits for accumulation and profit and the re-production of the structures and agency of capital. These structures cover all of human life, though marketing, game-play, work, privatisation of public assets, data mining, advertising, the constant renewal and upgrades of mobile technologies and so on. It is these networks that then underpin ‘immaterial labour’, through the commodification of our desire for play or for the latest cheap, powerful, miniaturised device.

Thus, for instance, the ‘Raspberry Pi‘ is connected to the desire to engage young people in programming through affordable, flexible, mobile devices that reveal the inner workings of the machine as it relates to programming. Yet, there has been little discussion of the component parts that make up the machinery, and how they are sourced. The machine uses a broadcom corporation bcm2835 SoC (system-on-a-chip). According to a company engagement report made by the Triodos ethical bank in 2011, broadcom was uneligible for ethical investment during that financial year because of their performance regarding conflict minerals, co-operation with repressive regimes and on human rights.

Recently, the <nettime> email list has focused a little on “Conflict minerals and radical impotence”. The original posting is here. The attempt to create a discussion on the ethics of the production practices on the Raspberry Pi site is here. It includes a site moderator declaring:

I will be keeping an eye on it [this discussion] and if it degenerates into outraged moral pouting, then closed it will be.  Oh btw, isn’t Ethics in Howondaland?

The originator of the discussion thread then posted a response that he received from Raspberry Pi, which can be read here. The manufacturers dismissed the issue because “it’s almost impossible to avoid conflict minerals, [and that's why we ignore them]“. There are three issues that emerge here. Firstly, why do manufacturers ignore ethical or moral positions? Secondly, why do they seek to dismiss those who raise legitimate questions about the production practices that underpin those technologies? Thirdly, how are we as educators or users of technology in the Global North culpable in not asking questions or lobbying or refusing?

It isn’t especially difficult to ask questions, and the Enough project provides company rankings based on surveys of the 21 largest electronics companies to determine what progress they are making toward conflict-free supply chains and a conflict-free mining sector in the DRC. In the case of the Raspberry Pi, I recognise the desire to engage children in the process of making things and in understanding the craft of work with software or hardware, in all its forms. However, I am unnerved by the refrains of radical impotence that emerge when we [refuse to] discuss our [ethical/moral/humane] use of technologies, just as I am unsure about our engagement in defence-driven education projects, or our uncritical promotion of cyber security challenges. Each of these initiatives connects to wider spaces or networks or hegemonies that link education to issues of ethics or morality or humanity.

As one <nettime> contributor argued:

We used to evaluate our electronic devices on criteria such as price, computational power or interface design. Some of the more politically-inclined users prefer devices that support open source operating systems rather proprietary ones. But, given the state of the world, we should also consider ecological and social impacts of a company’s practices as important criteria.

Some, like the ETICA project, have made a start.

Some, like MastersDegree.net, have started to map out how our tech addiction hurts people.

We might continue to ask, what is to be done?


For the University and against a neoliberal curriculum


Posted by hallymk1

In her keynote at Discourse, Power and Resistance ’12, Rosemary Deem highlighted the isomorphism that is occurring within and across universities in the United Kingdom as the ideology of marketisation is insinuated into the practices and policies that shape the higher education environment. This is not a new process, but the pace with which it is now being rolled-out is a dislocation or shock that enables change to be enforced through uncertainty. This is one of the ways in which capital uses systemic crises to renew itself. This quickened process is made visible in: the re-catagorisation of Universities as businesses in the HRMC regulations on taxation; the Coalition Government’s use of VAT regulations to open-up a space for marketisation through shared services; and by enabling for-profit providers to obtain the same VAT exemption on educational services as not for-profits. Andrew McGettigan has highlighted how this enables private providers, which are able to ‘leverage’ private equity, to steal a march on the rest of the sector, which as it is not for-profit cannot access such funds, and this leaves those institutions at the whims of private, philanthropic donations, or needing to chase increasingly limited and limiting (research) funding. These sources of money, often sought from those with a specific ideological position to further, then disciplines what the University is able to research or produce or critique. In Christopher Newfield‘s terms this process is yet another example of ‘state-subsidised privatisation’. It is a form of enclosure enacted as a discourse veiled inside the logic of democratic capitalism.

[NOTE: please see Andrew McGettigan's comment below for an elucidation of his position.]

Deem also focused on the role of private equity companies and hedge funds in opening-up what is perceived of as being a public space for the market. This process is complex and related to the ways in which some educational functions prove profitable and can be privatised, like vocational training that can be provided at low cost using part-time or precariously employed (post-graduate) lecturers or courses that can be delivered via distance or work-based learning. These map onto leveraged or marginal or menial skills that are developed inside the knowledge economy. Those activities that require much higher infrastructural investment, and which are of marginal profitability in the market but which have a higher social utility, like medicine, can be left to the State to fund. Post-education, these proprietary skills can be harnessed for profit, for instance through the privatisation of healthcare. This whole process of marketisation forms a system of enclosure, or in David Harvey’s terms of accumulation by dispossession. It is a way in which rents can be extracted from individuals and institutions, in the form of services or fees that are contracted for and which might include technological services or actual courses of study. The latter are increasingly to be paid for from indentures/loans that inscribe education as an individualised good, rather than from general taxation that views educational spaces as a social good.

This process is exacerbated because the State, acting as regulator rather than funder, is regulating for the market and for enterprise, and not for the society of people. This is part of a neoliberal discourse in which the practices and activities of higher education are folded inside the subsumption of all of social life inside the dynamic of competition. Here the State is proactive in acting as midwife to the re-birth of public assets as market-oriented commodities. This idea of neoliberalism as a discourse is especially important in Stephen J. Ball’s work on Global Education Inc.. Ball traces the development of neoliberalism very deliberately as a discourse designed to promote shared libertarian, market-oriented entrepreneurialism that in-turn fosters a new nexus betweeen capital and the State, in order to re-shape all of society inside its hegemonic, totalising logic. In part, Ball sees this as facilitated by networks of power and affinity, that enable the re-production of ‘geographies of social relationships’ that are in the name of money, profit, choice and unregulated markets. These networks form shifting assemblages of activity and relationships that reinforce hegemonic power. Moreover, they are transnational activist networks consisting of academics and think tanks, policy-makers and administrators, finance capital and private equity funds, media corporations and publishers, philanthropists/hedge-funds interested in corporate social responsibility etc., which aim at regulating the state for enterprise and the market.

Importantly, this forms a neoliberal curriculum. The use of the word curriculum is hugely important in the roll-back of the State and the roll-out of the neoliberal agenda. Not only does it refer to a course of action that moulds individuals into persons, but it also anchors that discourse educationally. Thus, the focus is on creating uncertainties in the spaces in which the State operates, telling common-sense stories about the value of private enterprise in ‘leveraging’ both performance and cost reduction, and in connecting those stories to a meta-narrative of there is no alternative. In turn these meta-narratives reinforce World Bank and IMF orthodoxies related to structural readjustment, freedom and choice. Thus, the networks of interconnected actors and corporations, acting as transnational advocacy networks, then reinforce these dominant positions through their: activities; conferences; prizes; media attention; control of funding; research programmes and outcomes; evidence-based approaches to data-laundering; regulation etc.. Ball describes the reality of several networks that reinforce hegemonic power, and which connect academics to education providers and research groups, and interconnects them with technology firms, as well as to finance capital and think tanks, in particular in opening-up the Indian education system for marketisation. Ball highlights how academics based in the UK, like James Tooley and Sugatra Mitra (who has keynoted about his hole in the wall project recently, for example for the Association for Learning Technology) operate inside neoliberal networks that amplify the complex geographies of neoliberalism, which are made influential and powerful by money, policy advocacy, relationships, and action on the ground.

At issue then is how to create counter-hegemonic networks, policy and relationships, that might develop counter-hegemonic positions. What alternative actions might be taken to reinforce the idea that there is an alternative value position that can be take, both socially and in relation to higher education? In this, Deem argued for the role of academics acting as public intellectuals. Interestingly she also highlighted how ahead of the 2014 REF, the social sciences panel defined impact in wide-ranging terms, including public benefit. This is important because research impact is a crucial site of struggle in the commodification of the University and its subsumption under the logic of capitalist expansion. The ways in which academics might go into occupation of terms like impact, in order to redefine its use against that prescribed by the regulatory logic of the State or transnational advocacy networks, is important in moving beyond the use of the term simply as the impression of academic activity. Impact as impression objectifies activity and relationships and people’s subject positions through behavioural demands. What can be measured is part of a neoliberal discourse related to efficiency and consumption.

As the University becomes an overt site of capitalist accumulation, and as a result a site for entrepreneurial investment, the occupation of regulatory terms or regulations forms one concrete way in which resistance and refusal might be catalysed. There are two important points that flow from this kind of activity. The first is that the University remains a site of the production of mass intellectuality, where knowledge claims can be legitimised and critiqued. However, as a neoliberal discourse increasingly kettles the academic process and practices, it takes courage to act against the prevailing, hegemonic narrative. The cost of resistance is high and it is important therefore that academics act communally to shine a critical light on the activities of the state in regulating the University for the market. This requires that the increasing number of communal activities, like radical education projects/free universities outside the University and protests or refusals inside the University, are joined in solidarity.

The second point is about leadership. It is increasingly less certain that institutional leaders, Vice-Chancellors or Vice-Principals, will challenge the dominant narratives of the State, in terms of the marketisation of higher education. Acting as CEOs the logic is that they will attempt to compete rather than co-operate. Thus, in the UK, University leadership was quiet over the threats of violence made by the State against students who protest, and we witnessed banning orders being sought against protest on campus, PhD students being suspended for protesting via poetry, and elected student representatives being removed from University committees for protesting. This enactment of the University as an enclosed space for dissent is a logical outcome emerging from the rhetoric of competition. Earlier this year I wrote about the communal university, and noted that the marketisation of the sector reminded me of the establishment of the English Football Premier League in 1992, as a marketised space in which clubs were businesses and where the social health of the league as a whole was less important that that of the individual clubs acting as businesses. In this set of spaces, the public, or supporters, were of secondary, instrumentalist importance to the structural need to inscribe clubs as institutions inside the market.

The possibility that the HE sector may come to resemble the English football league post-1992 following the deal made to form the Premiership, which lead to: the league being ruled by the power of money (witness the power of BSkyB, the influx of transnational capital in the form of hedge funds and corporates in club governance); the ossification of success/competitiveness (witness the limited number of clubs capable of sustaining challenges for the League or for Cups); the growth of indebtedness and administration (in particular where clubs chase access to the Premiership/TV deals); and the need for special pleading for/activism by supporters (in terms of fan ownership, supporter democracy and the rising costs of attending games).

In this process of enclosure, we might ask whether our academic leaders will be able to work communally or co-operatively to roll-back the neoliberal discourse that commodifies all of our social life inside the market, and which kettles free debate about what is legitimate. We might ask then what is the role of the academic as activist in developing alternative discourses that argue for a re-humanisation of educational life and activity.

One of those roles is to develop analyses of the transnational advocacy networks that influence the spaces in which we operate, and through those networks to reveal how the neoliberal discourse is played out in our society. So we might ask: how do the technologies we procure, and the procurement practices we use inside the University, and the people we ask to keynote our conferences, and the evidence-based research we enable to be used for advocacy, and the money that we take for research, and the learning/teaching and employability strategies that we agree and implement, and the definitions of impact/sustainability that we agree and use, re-inscribe both the power of a neoliberal discourse and transnational networks of power? Is it possible for scholarly communities of academics and students, working in society, to act in public against this discourse? Where do we identify communal spaces for solidarity and courage? Taking action that is against polyarchic, univeralised norms might enable a counter-hegemonic set of alternatives to be debated or created that support an alternative way of doing. The flip-side is that we do nothing as the whole of our lives and our sociability is subsumed under the abstracted rule of money.


Educational technology and the war on public education


Posted by hallymk1

On Tuesday I am presenting at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, at their conference, ‘The Problem of “Dirty Hands” in UK Universities‘.

I’ll be developing some ideas around the theme of educational technology and the war on public education. My slides for the event are at: http://slidesha.re/GNqhFc. My argument will be as follows.

ONE. Educational technology is a site of struggle inside the University, through which the relationships between management and (immaterial) labour are reinforced and re-produced. More broadly the deployment of educational technology is a form of state-subsidised privatisation and is a space through which the marketisation of education can be rooted.

TWO. Through educational technology, labour inside the University is at risk of coercion, measurement and surveillance, in order to meet the marketised demands of competition and profit-maximisation. Educational technology is a way in which hegemonic positions can be protected and developed inside education

THREE. Academics and educational technologists/staff developers are complicit in the ways that educational technologies are deployed at the heart of the University through teaching and research. At issue is whether these same groups have a critical (ethical) lens through which to critique the nature of the technologies that they re-sell beyond a focus on the student experience? How might critical insight about the ways in which educational technologies enable the co-option of University teaching, research and development for value formation and accumulation be catalysed?

FOUR. Uncritical, technologically-mediated behaviours inside the University are conditioned through the politics of education, which reproduces polyarchic governance through a form of the shock doctrine.

  • Polyarchy is an elitist form of democratic engagement that describes what is manageable/appropriate in a modern society, and what is acceptable and what can be fought for in terms of organisation and governance. It rests on universal, transhistorical norms based on the tenets of liberal democracy and capitalism, and which make it unacceptable to argue for other forms of value or organisation. Thus, it is not possible to address the structural dominance of elites within capitalism, or the limited procedural definitions of democracy or participation or power. This political enclosure is reinforced technologically and inside systems of education.
  • The Shock Doctrine focuses upon exacting political control by imposing economic shock therapy. In terms of higher education this focuses upon:

i.    structural re-adjustment through enforced competition and coercion (fee structures and student indenture; internationalisation; distance learning);

 ii.    a tightening/quickening of the dominant, economically-driven, anti-humanist ideology (student-as-consumer; HE-as-commodity);

iii.    the transfer of state/public assets to the private sector (consultancy; outsourced services);

iv.    the privatisation of state enterprises/elements in the name of consumer choice, economic efficiency or sustainability (state-subsidised privatisation)

FIVE. In response to this ideological or political enclosure, the space for the implementation of educational technologies is legitimised by organisations that support/influence universities. Thus, the HEFCE focuses on technological deployments for cost-reductions, business-process re-engineering and efficiency gains, which themselves might underpin radical transformation of the university as a “business”. HEFCE states that it works with key partners like JISC and the HEA in supporting institutions in technological transformation. The JISC’s Transitions Group has reported the importance of the HE/FE sector for economic growth, and it connects and relates changes in these sectors that are political, financial, technological and competitive. These changes mean that JISC must operate within “stringent new financial realities”, in order that it is “better geared to achieving a large impact”. Thus, recent JISC-Announce emails clearly connect technological innovations to a discourse of “cost savings”, “value for money”, “value and impact”, and organisational efficiency and effectiveness. This legitimation of a discourse that connects educational innovation to fiscal “realities” is also revealed in the HEA’s values, which highlight the importance of value for money and place it alongside the HEA’s other organisational values of student learning and institutional innovation.

SIX. The recent Coalition Government budget for 2012 further tightens control of the technological policy and practice of universities through its focus on: universities working in the “business” of education; on VAT and shared services, and the need to treat “commercial universities” “fairly”; and by creating a research investment fund that “will attract additional co-investment from the private sector”. This reinforcement of the deep connections between commercial and financial leverage, technology, and education-for-employment are part of an on-going governmental discourse about the value/purpose of education, outlined for instance by Michael Gove at BETT.

SEVEN. It is from inside this space that educational technology is implemented by educational technologists, staff developers and technicians, and then adopted by practitioners and students. Thus, the following serve as examples of how technology is often implemented based on problems of performance, efficiency and scale, without a broader, political, contextual analysis or questioning.

  • Cloud Computing is argued for from perspectives of scale and organisational/labour efficiency, with a limited critique of: the geo-political and legal issues that arise, in particular related to national security legislation; the ways in which the cloud enables the separation and surveillance of proletarianised work, and the re-production and redistribution of commodity- and leveraged-skills to low-wage societies through outsourcing (and cutting labour costs for in-house work); the attempts that are being made to commodify and sell the idea of cloud computing in terms of green IT or sustainability, despite the lack of evidence that the cloud is ‘greener’, with industry wrapping itself around this concept as a space for further service-led innovation; and the privatization of public, academic services through outsourcing/consultancy/rent.
  • Blackboard is utilised as a Learning Management System in particular across the global North, and, as with other providers in the marketplace, the Company provides services that are rented by/licensed to Universities that are funded in some cases by the State. In 2011 it was reported that Blackboard had an “expanding footprint in the defense sector”, and that as a result “The Pentagon gets a manageable software program that helps instructors in subjects like military logistics and infantry tactics get a handle on the coursework flow of thousands of occasionally far-flung active duty military personnel. Blackboard, on the other hand, has a neat little honeypot that has, in many ways, saved the company.” Moreover, in 2011 Blackboard was acquired by Providence Equity Partners, a private-equity company. Providence was advised by, amongst others Goldman Sachs, on its acquisition of SRA International, a company that “is dedicated to solving complex problems of global significance for government organizations serving the national security, civil government, health, and intelligence and space markets.” Should those links between the investment banking/finance, defence and education sectors be discussed in the context of a University’s mission or in the sector’s aim to work for the public good?
  • Mobile learning is championed across the sector and by various funding bodies in supporting personalisation and anytime/anywhere learning, with limited critique of this in relation to the human/labour rights abuses that have been revealed in the factories where mobile technologies are manufactured or the mines from where raw materials are produced, and in spite of the threat of the enclosure of content on the open web due to the commercial, competitive imperative to create a market for mobile applications. How should revelations around human/labour rights, especially in the global South, affect institutional policy?
  • The implementation of communications-solutions like MS Lync often underpins an integrated systems architecture that connects communications and information-management capabilities across an institution. However, the development of such architectures also makes possible institutional surveillance of academic practices and labour, and the disciplining of marginalised practices, like the utilisation of open source solutions like Linux, or of practices that are defined outside technocratic norms. Framing discussions about the implementation of specific technologies as politically-neutral instances of problem-solving removes the imperative, for instance, to engage with trades unions about the management and monitoring capabilities of such tools as an aggregated whole. How often do academics or educational technologist discuss labour rights and safeguards when deploying a technology or designing an architecture?
  • The coming fetishisation of learning analytics and data-mining, linked to diagnostic and summative assessment, alongside progression and retention agendas, is in-part technologically-driven, and connects academics to the daily measurement of their practices and to impact measures for teaching. Do educational developers or technologists or academic staff consider the means by which their everyday existence is incorporated inside the means of re-production of capital? Do they consider how technologies further objectify our social relationships as commodities from which value can be extracted through, for instance, the monitoring and harvesting of personal data, the enclosure and control of spaces or applications of consumption, the use of venture capitalism to support specific social networks, and the technological augmentation and capture of affectivity?

EIGHT. These examples serve to highlight the risks in any uncritical, techno-determinist deployment of technology. So we might ask, what is to be done? This is important in the face of governmental/funding policies that are in-turn constricted by transnational global capital, and in particular by the compression and enclosure of time and space wrought by technologically-transformed, finance capital. It is natural that those who work inside universities would escape into problem-solving tactics like ‘social inclusion’ or ‘equality of opportunity’, which are liberal themes so often connected to discourses that emerge around emergent, assistive or participative technologies.

NINE. However, everyday scholarly activities are becoming increasingly folded into the logic of capital through, for instance, indentured study and debt, internationalisation, privatisation and outsourcing. As a result, the internal logic of the University is increasingly prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships as against fetishised products and processes of valorisation.

TEN. Yet the University remains a symbol of those places where mass intellectuality can be consumed, produced and more importantly contributed to by all. Academics then have an important role in arguing against the conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and hence private property, catalysed through processes of virtualisation that are driven by the commodification of research and teaching and the emergence of commercially-viable, proprietary products that can be marketised. The capitalist processes of deskilling and automation, fetishisation of products, and proletarianisation of labour are at the core of this process.

ELEVEN. This struggle is given life in the range of radical academic projects and occupations in the UK, which are an attempt to re-inscribe higher education as higher learning dissolved into the fabric of society. In some cases these projects are working politically to re-define issues of power. In most cases they see the institution of the school or the university as symbolically vital to a societal transformation. They form a process of re-imagination that risks fetishisation or reification of radical education, but which offers a glimpse of a different process that shines a light on the University as one node in a global web of social relations. This also focuses upon rethinking in public the role of academics in society, facilitated through educational technologies but realised in concrete experiences on solid ground.

TWELVE. Thus, in the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity academics need to consider their participatory traditions and positions, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production. In the critique of knowledge production, revealed through the production/consumption of specific educational technologies, the University can grow in excess of its symbolic role. Thus, students and teachers might reconsider how they engage with these technologies, in order to contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction. How do students and teachers contribute to public dissent against marketisation, domination and foreclosure?


Forking the University: legitimising deliberation in physical and virtual space


Posted by hallymk1

The theme of the place and politics of the Academic Commons crops up often in my writing and work. In particular I am taken with ideas of how and where academics and students as scholars can resist and then push back against the enclosure of the spaces and places for academic practice and critique. At DMU this has led to two inter-connected ideas: the virtual DMU Commons; and our new, physical Speaker’s Step in Magazine Square.

The Commons apes those other examples of virtual common-land, for instance at Lincoln, and CUNY, and BCU, and which our student DMU Commons Gardener is documenting here. Our Commons connects to a deeper history of protest, negation and refusal, and stories of custom-in-common that define a shared, collective identity, which I wrote about here. So our Commons is:

a shared place for the production of learning and research that is personally and socially transformative. Our DMU Commons will connect the social world of DMU to the resources, artefacts, networks and conversations that emerge from our thinking. The DMU Commons will nurture, stimulate and enhance respectful and generous learning conversations, within and beyond the University. It will help us to realise our ambitions through co-operation and our shared labours.

This connects to a second strand of thinking about hacking or forking the University, which is being developed nicely as a research project by Joss Winn at Lincoln, and which embeds ideas of craft and skill and tradition and production, and then links them to personal and social identity. I see this as a position from where the negation of ourselves as subjects inside the University might be fought. Moreover, it offers a way to connect with Christopher Newfield‘s desire for Re-Making the University in the face of austerity.

Thus, at DMU we might take the idea of craft and re-making or re-producing, in order to develop an idea of commonality around which we might also offer-up, create or carve out spaces for local/University developers, like the Leicester Linux Users’ Group, to engage with users, like the DMU Mashed group. This might then enable those new partnerships to use gizmos (Arduinos, Pis and drones) and sandboxes (part of a private cloud) to engage with real data (OpenAccess, OAuth and Big), in order to give a forked DMU community the opportunity to re-create/re-produce the University, and to solve problems inside enterprising, politicised, open spaces. In part this re-making depends upon the engagement of multiple and disparate groups in a set of shared problems, worked out in common or on a commons. Thus, the DMU Commons might become important as a place where research groups, developers, students, external friends of the University, alumni etc. might meet or see or review or hack or fork each other’s work.

However, we are now moving towards the idea that a DMU Commons might also need a physical place where ideas might be catalysed and problems identified and solutions debated. The need for a physical, communal spaces that also serve as ciphers for administrative or juridical or political groupings has a long tradition: from wapentakes/hundreds in English political administration; to the histories of general assemblies in, for example, student struggles; to workers’ councils; to the history of political reform meetings; and the recent histories of political struggles in Syntagma Square in Athens and Tahrir Square in Cairo. As spaces become enclosed the risk is that our opportunities for deliberation and free debate are stifled. The need is then for the courage to reassert in common our rights to deliberate in shared spaces.

At DMU we have begun to open-up just such a communal, deliberative space in Magazine Square, and we are reclaiming its use for the University-in-the-City. The space was first co-opted by Nick Clegg at the 2010 General Election and then, in response, by Ed Balls in 2011 in the run-up to the Leicester South by-election. Both Clegg and Balls stood at the same point on the same concrete podium, which serves as a seat in the Square, in order to make their election pitches. This is important precisely because it invested the square as a political space, but it is also important that the Square itself is centred on one of Leicester’s most historic spaces, by the Castle Magazine, Castle Park, St and Mary de Castro Church, and with a resonance through the University’s name to Simon de Montfort’s first Parliament.

It is also important that the seat, or step, sits very near to the the DMU/Leicester City Council boundary line. The demarcation is clearly marked by metal studs in the ground, and two brick square studs in the grass behind the speakers’ step. The deed lines for the land ownership are fascinating as they move along the front of DMU’s Hugh Aston Building and across the Magazine. This rudimentary sketch of the DMU/Leicester City Council Boundary shows this a little more clearly. Although the step wall where Clegg and Balls spoke technically belongs to Leicester City Council, there is no permission required given that speaking there will be an open public forum, taking place in an open public space. We are going to mark what we now refer to as Speaker’s Step with a plaque inscribed with Nelson Mandela’s quote that:

“Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great, you can be that generation”.

We have already held Student Union hustings on the Step, and on Thursday 8 March, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to DMU, we are hosting a series of speed lectures, hopefully complete with heckles and interruptions and questions, which will further inscribe Speaker’s Step as a space where we might reconnect the University with the public and the City. The idea for these speed lectures is to discuss the idea of the University as a public good, and Executive Board members, academic staff and students will be deliberating issues that matter to them around: local governance; creativity; open education; the NHS; software design and the history of computation; why we need another inquiry into housing; management information, universities and £9k fees; language development and education for the multicultural learner; and the cultural importance of Margaret Atwood and Florence Nightingale. We hope that this will be the beginning of a recapturing of this public space by the staff and students of DMU, as a way to re-create and re-produce the University as a public good deeply connected to the politics and place of Leicester.

As important will be our attempt to catalyse the use of the space for hustings, meetings, general assemblies, rallies and so on, as a legitimate form of re-imagining the University-in-the-City. Legitimising ways and places in which people can colonise and develop ideas and problems, and hopefully then re-produce or hack or fork the University, in order to solve those problems is central to this project. It is in the legitimation and interconnection of our DMU Commons with our Speaker’s Step, and the wider University/City, that we begin this political process.


A note on the digital university and dislocated politics


Posted by hallymk1

In her latest post on the digital university, which focuses upon information literacy, Sheila MacNeill argues that “technological change in the production and consumption of information content” should “not allowed to obscure the importance of developing the educational, ethical and democratic dimension of the digital society”. Thus, information literacy “is portrayed in terms of improving the information behaviours required to access and search various information systems to extract and use information for social, economic and educational purposes.” What this means for our work or labour, and for the society that such work/labour reveals is not developed here beyond MacNeill’s identification of the key strands in UNESCO’s Alexandria Proclamation, which focus upon information for trade or as exchangeable commodity, and literacy for employment or democracy, which I assume is accepted, pre-defined forms of liberal democracy, as opposed to alternatives like communes or workers’ councils or general assemblies.

This begins then to re-inscribe the polyarchic limits to our discussion of the digital and the digital university. I have previously noted that polyarchy

is an attempt to define an elitist form of democracy that would be manageable in a modern society. It focuses upon normalising what can be fought for politically, in terms of: organisational contestation through free and fair elections; the right to participate and contest offices; and the right to freedom of speech and to form organisations. This forms a set of universal, transhistorical norms. It is simply not acceptable to argue for other forms of value or organisation without appearing to be a terrorist, communist, dissident or agitator. Within the structures of polyarchy it no longer becomes possible to address the structural dominance of elites within capitalism, or its limited procedural definition of democracy inside capitalism. Compounding this political enclosure is the control of the parameters of discussions about values or value-relationships like democracy and equality, or power and class, or as George Caffentzis argues over the morality of student loan debt refusal.

So whilst MacNeill and Johnston’s conceptual matrix highlight’s digital participation, it does not move to a critique of what participation is/might be, beyond the limits imposed by western, liberal democracy and the role of the University in that model. That role is framed by business-as-usual, employability, economic growth and the politics of austerity. Thus, it is noted that “Digital participation, in this context, can be seen as a fundamental part of any knowledge economy or information based democracy and therefore has substantial implications for educators. Digital participation needs to be optimized to ensure continued economic growth in parallel with the development of an informed, literate citizenship.” The boundaries of this enclosed debate over digital literacy or information literacy or the knowledge economy or the information society are further revealed in Lawrie Phipps‘ post about White and Le Cornu’s Visitor and Resident’s model, which is limited to enabling institutions “to understand [how] these staff behaviours, perceptions and motivations can help identify which technologies or artefacts can be deployed most effectively to support different types of staff”. There is no space here for a wider digital politics or critique of digital literacy/identity/university.

Our limited perspectives of the digital world inside the University, and what the University is for (business-as-usual because there is no alternative) amplifies the view that academia is locked into problem-solving theory, which is aimed at supporting, interacting with, and adjusting the dominant order. This leads us to the artificial organisation and construction of knowledge, which in turn closes off a revelation of how society works and alienates. It depoliticises and avoids, and it disempowers us in our attempts to transform the world, through a critique of how we experience our life, and how we accept the elite’s interpretive myths/their hegemony over us.

If we are to develop a meaningful engagement with digital/information literacy, connected to models of digital participation and the digital University, we need a critique of the established ideological or intellectual frameworks that enclose this debate. We need a critique of their legitimacy within/beyond higher education. This critique forms a set of political acts, which are also open to critique but which do not simply accept the strictures of neoliberal political economy. Our critiques of what digital participation is/might be within higher education are historically situated, and connected to capitalist work as our living history and our lived experiences.

The work sketched out in models like MacNeill’s/Johnson’s and White/Le Cornu’s becomes important where it offers a possible interface with the world beyond the University, the world in which the University is networked or digitised. Thus, critiques of these models offer ways to connect the work of the academy to the dislocated realities of the world beyond it, which are not simply about employability. Thus, the development of relationships that support participation in re-creating the world needs to connect our digital habitus to the altered realities of global politics, in terms of either the coercive policies of governments or the reaction of Anonymous or occupations or revolts to those policies.

Thus we might usefully re-connect/situate our models of the digital university/digital participation within a world that is:

In the face of this mass of events against extant models of citizen participation inside western, liberal democracy, I wonder whether we can connect our discussion of the digital university to a deeper, radicalised political critique.

Addendum

There is a point to be made about the individal and the social here. So much of our discourse is about individuals/individualisation that is developed using limited, liberal education terms like personalisation and differentiation. As we talk about individual literacies and participation we tend to neglect the social construction and situation of these things. In fact, we tend to neglect the relational aspects of ourselves. In focusing on the personal or the individual, at the expense of our associations, we risk doing the market’s work for it. We commodify ourselves as wage-slaves who need to develop a competitive edge. Because there is no alternative. If there is one thing that Marx reveals to us it is to remember the social/associational/co-operative. This is why I become more interested in long-term co-operative endeavours that offer the possibility that we might re-frame our relationships using technology. And here I am not sure that I am looking at MOOCs or badges. I think I am looking at #ds106. Not as a fetishised solution. But as a shared sense of the possible and a shared set of relationships in which power might be outed/critiqued/contested, that has implications for participation (as labour-in-and-beyond capitalism) and learning/education/the university beyond the market and enabled, in-part, digitally.


Presentations about the assault on public education


Posted by hallymk1

I’m presenting two linked papers on higher education/the assault on public education in the UK.  I’ll blog what I plan to say here, and link to my slideshare.

The first presentation is at Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, at their conference, ‘The Problem of “Dirty Hands” in UK Universities‘.

Title: Educational technology and the war on public education

Abstract: This paper will discuss the ways in which educational technologies reflect and amplify the commodification of the University as a set of spaces and practices, and how technological determinism and narratives of technology-as-progress reinforce academic complicity in the processes of marketisation and enclosure of higher education. Such complicity is determined by the uncritical manner in which educational technology is procured and deployed inside Universities, and the ways in which that deployment further commodifies our educational experiences.

Thus, state-subsidised capitalism, revealed through the engagement of private technology providers, outsourced solutions, the enclosure of the web through locked-down technologies, and consultancy in educational technology, will be related to critiques of the neoliberal assault on the idea of the University. In uncovering this relationship, the power that academics have in defining how they can operate in the University, and the place of technology in that struggle, is important. Thus, in suggesting strategies for academic agency or activism, the paper will highlight how using open technologies in public might help to re-inscribe a different set of possibilities upon the University.

This might be viewed as a crack in the Coalition’s assault on education as a public good. At issue is whether students and teachers are able to recapture educational technologies in order to dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest and to develop alternatives. This might be seen as an attempt by capital to enter, control and enclose what has previously been seen as open source or as the terrain previously set-out and negotiated by hacktivists. However, it does open up a space for academic activists working with programmers and educationalists to challenge the dominant logic of how we construct and re-produce our educational worlds as commonly-defined, social goods, against state-subsidised capitalism and proletarianised work. We might then consider how to re-engage our actions and the technologies we deploy asymmetrically; to refuse and push-back against marketisation, to realise the possibilities of the hacker ethic, and to use technology to describe more social forms of value.

The second is at the Discourse, Power and Resistance: Impact conference, at the University of Plymouth. I will base my talk on this slideshare presentation.

Title: In, Against and Beyond the Neoliberal University

Abstract: This paper will briefly discuss the political possibilities for academic activism in the face of the shock doctrine, or neoliberal responses to socio-economic and environmental disruption, in the UK. The paper will argue that academic activism and occupation offer sanctuaries in which critiques of the idea of higher education can develop. It will be argued that they offer possibilities for academics and students, contributing as scholars to a shared process, to be against the foreclosure of the idea of higher education by the twin pedagogies of debt and the kettle. This process offers spaces in which such scholars can re-conceptualise and negate the alienation of their labour as capitalist work inside the academy. In the face of global disruptions in social access to both historic capitals and liquid energy resources, a radical critique of capitalist social relations inside the University holds the possibility of moving beyond this neoliberal foreclosure, towards revolutionary transformation enabled through processes of self-creation and praxis. It is intended that this brief paper will take 15 minutes and offer 20 minutes for discussion of possibilities for scholars to stand inside the neoliberal University, to be against its enclosure of the possibilities for higher learning, and to move beyond its foreclosure of resilient futures.


On Elsevier and the academic project


Posted by hallymk1

The Cambridge Mathematician, Tim Gower, has highlighted a campaign against the publisher Reed Elsevier for the tripartite crimes of: high pricing; bundling, which pushes what Gower hints are inappropriate or poor quality journals with those that are good; “ruthless” behaviour in cutting off access to all their journals where libraries attempt to negotiate better deals; and their support for SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act. Whilst Gower mentions earlier criticism of business practices, the main thrust of his argument is outrage over the pricing of and access to publically-funded research. In fact, Gower accepts the commercial logic of publishing’s current stranglehold over higher education as a business. He argues:

Returning to the subject of morality, I don’t think it is helpful to accuse Elsevier of immoral behaviour: they are a big business and they want to maximize their profits, as businesses do.

However, in an earlier set of criticisms about Elsevier, Tom Stafford reminds us of that Company’s involvement in arms fairs and the subsequent academic campaign against them. This was very much an ethical campaign of academic groups working in association with organisations like Campaign Against The Arms Trade. For Stafford, unlike Gower, the ethics of business were central:

I felt that Elsevier were making academics complicit in the arms trade and that this was something we, collectively, could take a stand on and where I, personally, could effect a difference.

In part the success of the campaign outlined by Stafford was based on de-legitimisation of Elsevier’s engagement in the arms trade through its involvement in arms shows, and linking this to pre-existing, global networks and associations, in order to hit the company’s economic value(s).

The pre-existing global networks that academics define offer more than a limited, horizon for their activism, beyond perceptions of academic freedom, or open access, or monetisation, or the alleged needs of developing countries. However, the case against Elsevier’s engagement in the arms trade for profit throws the limited and limiting scope of much academic argument for/against methods of production/distribution of content into sharp relief. Too often the only language that we have is money. Money as value is almost the only form of academic cohesion that we are able to articulate. Thus, David Wiley opines that “Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers” and calls for more(state?) funding “Because this stuff costs so much to do, if no one steps up to the funding plate the entire field is at serious risk.”

And yet the State and its institutions (at least in the global north) have demonstrated a willingness to enclose and discipline academic practice in multiple ways, from physically kettling students to psychologically kettling academics through the REF. Moreover, the landscape of higher education is riven with State-encouraged public/private partnerships, outsourced technologies/services, knowledge transfer/exchange partnerships, engagements with closed services for the production/distribution of content/learning. This historic enclosure of academic work, reinforced through governmental regulation, then enables rent to be extracted by corporations, in the form of subscriptions or licenses.

The key here is that the value of our work, or our labour, forms part of the productive/distributive relations of capitalism. This is not a debate that stops at the simple production of reified content or open educational practices. In short academic labour or immaterial labour or cognitive capitalism has value, in-part through its production of immaterial things in the form of content, and profit can be squeezed from it. In a time of austerity, rents provide a more sure form of income; so why should we see any respite for those who are forced to license or rent spaces that have been regulated away from open/enclosed? In fact, as the rate of production of surplus value from riskier, financialised, private ventures is reduced, a migration towards enclosing public spaces and extracting value from them is natural. As I have argued elsewhere

This amounts to a form of what Christopher Newfield calls “subsidy capitalism”, which “means that the public, directly or indirectly, does not participate in the investment, research, and development decisions that remake society year in and year out. It hands over resources and all decision rights at the same time.”

And so there are two issues interconnected here, and they are linked to the value of academic work as labour. The first is the reality of academic work inside capitalism, which means a reduction of the debate about open education to the addition of value and the subsumption of open under dominant labour processes. As Joss Winn and Mike Neary point out hacking, hacktivism and open source cultures have had some impact here, but the discussion of open educational resources has tended to reduce to commodification and an inability to critique academic labour inside cognitive capitalism.

The second issue is the reality of academic practices compromised inside the logic of profit maximisation. In this reality we find, for instance, mathematician’s railing about Elsevier’s business model (whilst at the same time recognising the logic of these business practices) but we hear silence on the issue of Blackboard’ engagement with the Pentagon, our re-selling of Apple as an educational technology in spite of its human/labour rights’ record (although we might comment on its foreclosure on developers), or the enclosure issues I raised previously in this post on the war on public education.

Yet, as Tony Hirst reminds us here, we have a history of examining and re-examining our complicity or otherwise in State-sponsored narratives of privatisation/enclosure/injustice. Hirst argues this point for data, but it applies for the politics of any academic field:

1) there may be stories to be told about the way other people have sourced and used their data. Were one report quotes data from another, treat it with as much suspicion as you would hearsay… Check with the source [sic.].

2) when developing your own data stories, keep really good tabs on where the data’s come from and be suspicious about it. If you can be, be open with republishing the data, or links to it.

This view is amplified through connection to the “hopes” of World Bank insider, Michael Trucano, when speaking of mobile learning, that:

in 2012 practical insights into what this mobility might mean for both educators and learners based on real life experiences will emerge in greater volume and depth, so that policymakers and planners can make more informed decisions about how to direct increasingly scarce resources in ways that are cost-effective and impactful.

And the point may then be that in our re-examination of our academic labour practices we need to be explicitly political. It is not good enough to accept the polyarchal limits of our work, as they are defined by money, marketisation and impact, but to fight for some other form of value that defines our social relationships. Stafford argued

that the institutional rational that defines the modern corporation is pathological, creating them so that they fundamentally cannot take account of any humane values, being motivated solely by the pursuit of profit.

This moves us beyond the disempowerment of special pleading or cries for different funding models. It is the recognition of the responsibility of academics to extend the terrain for struggle, so that we might reassess the production and distribution of our work, our cultures and our academic society, for something more humane. This might be in fighting for open access, or in taking part in the struggle for alternatives, or in publically debating University governance and financialisation, or in critquing the spaces for occupation. But it has to be about more than the poverty of efficiency, subsidy and impact.


A note on academic activism, hyper-neoliberalism and the problem of power and consent


Posted by hallymk1

In her seminar on “Diagnosing the contemporary: prolific activism, hyper-neoliberalism and the problem of power and consent”, Janet Newman drew on her research into feminist critiques of the ideology and practices of neoliberalism, in order to challenge the realities of academic activism. I have blogged before about academic activism, in particular connected to the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity and the possibilities of exodus, and the types of radical spaces that the University might open up. However, Newman’s work demonstrated how, within the overarching re-formation of capital under neoliberal doctrine, it is the similarities across disparate positions that are in-and-against that re-formation, which offer spaces and possibilities to move beyond them.

In Holloway’s terms Newman’s work on critique and criticality from the perspective of gender politics is one of those cracks in the productive relations defined by capitalism, which itself needs to be connected to other stories or cracks that reveal the everyday and historical injustices of the politics of austerity and our polyarchic state apparatus. One of Newman’s key points was how to create spaces and places through which mappings between community activist and academic positions could emerge, and thereby lead to new analyses and actions. These spaces are crucial because they enable communities, or networks, or society to test what Stuart Price calls “truth claims in a story world”, like the idea that there is no alternative.

So, Newman highlighted a conceptual analysis of positions based on the experiences of women who have brought personal and political commitments into their working lives, in particular since the New Labour project. Her work highlighted the following themes/issues/possibilities that emerged on the boundaries between academic/activist positions.

  1. Mechanisms through which both academics and activists can confront power.
  2. Ways in which critical engagements, including knowledge work, could be developed.
  3. Spaces for close encounters with those who act as/for monitoring power (ostensibly based around financial power and efficiency).
  4. Revealing the mechanisms and strategies through which activist/minority/dissenting discourses are appropriated/incorporated by those in power, as a form of undoing. In this way radical or marginalised positions are neutralised in the process of co-option or are de-legitimised or even erased.
  5. The need for an on-going focus on relational positions or relationships, rather than transactions between groups or communities or individuals.

This final point seems to me critical in the approach of the occupy movement, or the flowering of oppositional, free education movements. It connects deeply to the edufactory collective’s tripartite strategy for opposing the restrictions and enclosure of academic practices imposed by neoliberal educational policy, namely: for a new educational politics based on the general assembly; for militant research strategies; and for activity in public. Newman also revealed a similar position in calling for a new constituency of activist academic positions that can hold politicians to account. She argued for: making our collective work visible; for engaging in public conversations; and for generative labour, or doing new things. This, for her, was a move to connect critique and criticality to our everyday practices.

I am left, therefore, with a deepening sense of the strands/cracks of continuity across stories. Moreover, there is the revelation that these strands/cracks are enabling us to recognise the ideological impact of austerity and neoliberal dogma on the possibility that we might become subjects in our own lives. There is the possibility that in the spaces opened up in occupation, we might form counter-narratives or counter-hegemonic positions. The stakes in this discussion are high: not only do we face socio-environmental crises, but the coercive state is being revealed on a daily basis, in the attacks on welfare, the militarisation of the police, in increasing authoritarianism around the Olympic Games etc..

However, we see in opposition to coercion more than simply hope; we see courage being revealed and the possibility that subject positions might be recuperated and that new spaces/places might be opened up across civil society. Richard Murphy reminds us of this in his work on the courageous state; and we are reminded of this courage in the worker/student actions of Tent City University, and the Space Project, and students at UC Berkeley, and Occupy Oakland, and student protests in Santiago, and Turin, and Dhaka, and at University College London, and Kent State University, and Manila, as well as in Venture Communes, and beyond. This mapping of political, scholarly, historical activism enables us to discuss what might be recuperated by us against the incorporation of dissent inside the dominant narrative. Moreover, this discussion enables us to keep each other’s narratives alive in the face of coercive power, and more importantly enables the legitimisation of our alternative narratives in the face of the de-politicisation imposed inside polyarchy.

So we might then ask how do we escalate dissent beyond the individual cracks shown by our own narratives? How do we join our dissenting narratives, our hopes for alternative possibilities, into something new? How do our local positions scale, so that the coercive power of the state can be critiqued and alternatives debated? And what is the role of academics as activists in that critique? In part, I think, this is a process of finding the courage to move beyond hope. To accept that there is no hope for/from a better capitalism, and that we need the courage to debate and try something new. This is what I take from a re-reading of the zero percent and the call to occupy everything, in the search for an alternative that is not simply in-and-against capital, but that wishes to move beyond it.