Tag Archives: university

quit moaning about the TEF


Posted by hallymk1

The Role specification: Subject Pilot and Year Three Panel members and assessors for the TEF has been published. As ever, HEFCE claims that TEF “is a scheme for recognising excellent teaching, in addition to existing national quality requirements… It provides information to help prospective students choose where to study.” Now, as we move towards subject-level TEF, HEFCE is looking to recruit another 100 academics and students to work on subject pilot panels. I assume that they will also provide some form of deliberative, distributed leadership on the on-going implementation of the TEF in their own institutions.

I mention this move to widen academic labour’s complicity in the implementation of the TEF, because it reminds me that last year, in response to a call on the National Teaching Fellow listserv for positive engagement, I wrote about resistance: “It feels important for me as an NTF neither to consider nor to do this work.”

In part this is because I refuse to have my work as an NTF, and my professional practice, co-opted by a Government that is seeking to damage further the idea of public higher education. The TEF is a means to further the twin agendas of marketisation and privatisation in the sector, which emerging through the White Paper fundamentally damage social mobility and social justice. I simply cannot lend my intellectual and social capital to it. Some of this rationale is set out in the Alternative White paper:https://heconvention2.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/awp-introduction/

My second reason issue is that UCU is currently in dispute over pay, including working to contract. This dispute is focusing our attention on issues of overwork and anxiety/mental health problems amongst staff, increasing casualisation and precarious employment, and gender disparities in remuneration. Many of us resigned as external examiners in support of this campaign (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/may/26/why-we-are-resigning-as-external-examiners). Out of solidarity with colleagues on the HE single pay spine fighting for better pay and conditions I cannot justify doing this work.

The TEF is likely: to increase casualisation; differentiate between teaching and research staff; generate further performance management; damage academic autonomy and freedom; enhance the risks of market exit, reinforce the link between employment/future earnings and league table metrics for subjects; and so on. Each of these issues damages not only the quality of teaching and learning, but also the relationships between teachers and students.

There is plenty of other stuff that I have written against the TEF. However, my endpoint that the TEF will damage both the quality of teaching and learning and the relationships between teachers and students, and that far from enhancing and celebrating teaching (through a culture of promoting excellence) it will solely focus upon the commodification of university life through the proxy of student labour market outcomes, has been amplified. This was emphasised both in Jo Johnson’s speech to UniversitiesUK on 7 September 2017, and also in Chris Husbands’ keynote at the DMU learning and teaching conference yesterday.

Johnson’s speech, titled Embracing accountability and promoting value for money in Higher Education, reiterates the core of the TEF lessons learned summary policy document. In this, strengthening accountability through the integration of rich data about graduate employment (using LEO data), alongside a new supplementary metric on grade inflation, emerges at the same time that the reliance on NSS data is to be reduced. For Johnson, there is a need to pay lip-service to the humane values that underpin higher education, whilst pivoting the re-engineering of higher education around surplus value.

The pursuit of knowledge is the hallmark of a civilized society and for many people a sufficient end for the higher education system in and of itself.

That said, we must accept that the transition from an elite to a mass system of higher education brings with it an expectation of a strong economic return too.

Johnson argues that the current and previous governments’ re-engineering of the system will enable him to support academic and academic leaders in rejecting “the arguments of the statists and the pessimists”, and in justifying the continued existence of English universities through a process of on-going reform. There is no alternative, and “we should welcome the scrutiny and embrace accountability.” However, as Catherine Boyd and David Kernohan note, this “moves the TEF away from something that is done on behalf of applicants towards being something that is done for reasons of policy implementation.” They highlight:

For those who have argued that salary outcomes are a crude or inappropriate measure of teaching excellence, this is bad news. Alongside the halving of the NSS weighting, it looks like the TEF is becoming more focused on student labour market outcomes than teaching excellence.

There was always an inevitability about this transition away from our recent history of quality enhancement across the sector, towards a new normal that subjugates teaching under the rule of money framed by new public management/performance management. Thus, a range of academics no longer discuss the politics of the TEF, rather the focus is how to make it more objective or efficient. This is teaching becoming more efficiently unsustainable beyond the market. Simon Marginson argues:

for better and for worse we live in an era of performance management in higher education. This is dictated ultimately by public accountability, and it is an unanswerable requirement.

There is no space in this argument to deliberate over “outcomes in fundamental areas” or “educational and social objectives”. The rule of money, amplified through the commodification of higher education, becomes the only “viable method for assessing teaching and learning”. This, of course, refuses the history of evaluation rooted in institutional audits, or other models for enhancement-led institutional review (for instance in Scotland).

Marginson continues:

The key to achieving the best possible and least damaging performance management system, is to create a virtuous circle between real outcomes, performance measure and the resulting competitive position.

Outcomes, performance management and competition are the rules through which academic labour is to be kettled.

There is no point in looking for alternative narratives or leadership from senior management within institutions. Janet Beer, the new President of UUK, broadly accepted Johnson’s stated position and argued that universities need to make the case for their work more clearly. Her predecessor, Julia Goodfellow previously noted that “the challenge will be to develop the system to ensure the information is properly communicated and helpful to students in the decision making process”. Effectively, it’s the only game in town so we all better quit moaning and get on with explaining ourselves more effectively. In this moment, the kettle tightens: money in the form of student and institutional debt as a key input; and money in the form of student outcomes/salaries as the key output. This is our teaching excellence.

So yesterday at DMU’s annual learning and teaching conference, the TEF chair, Chris Husbands, reiterated the key points from his post-match analysis of the TEF in a talk entitled 10 lessons from the TEF. The takeaways were a reiteration that: first, democratic accountability is conditioned through value-for-money and efficiencies; second, irrespective of contestation over datasets and outcomes, processes like the NSS and the TEF enable institutional leaders to focus minds on quality improvement; and third, it could be worse (we could end up with the equivalent of Ofsted). There is no space here, and no takeaway, for a discussion of alternative, dialogic processes or strategies. To reiterate, this is the only game in town so we all better quit moaning and get on with it.

Husbands’ 10 lessons focused upon the TEF:

  • measuring the things that matter to students (work, retention, assessment, quality of teaching);
  • being outcomes focused, rather than measuring the things that universities are good at talking about like changes to inputs or processes;
  • enabling metrics and benchmarks to deliver hypotheses and judgements;
  • enabling judgements to be made about strategic clarity, in the relationship between policy, practice and outcomes;
  • focusing minds on impact rather than describing initiatives;
  • catalysing coherent strategies for improvement;
  • shining a light on data (il)literacy, and the impact of innovation on students;
  • supporting analyses of genuine student involvement, embedded at all levels;
  • refusing to accept context as an excuse or point of analysis/challenge for poor performance; and
  • demonstrating that excellence and diversity are interconnected.

He ended by talking about the importance of the subject-level TEF for the investment decisions of students and their families.

Intrigued by his starting point in the strategic value of NSS data that could be triangulated with other datasets, and the importance he placed on situating the TEF against the sector’s history of quality enhancement initiatives, I asked the following:

Following Jo Johnson’s speech to UUK, with the inclusion of LEO data and the reduction in NSS weighting in future iterations of TEF, it appears that salary outcomes are to be used as the measure of teaching excellence. Are you worried [not concerned but worried] that the TEF is becoming more focused on student labour market outcomes than teaching excellence?

[c.f. Andrew McGettigan’s worked on the Treasury view of HE, and this report in the Times Higher Education about reinforcement of sector hierarchies]

He replied: “I’m going to give you the politician’s answer”. He stated that his role was to ensure that the TEF process as defined by government and HEFCE could be robustly implemented; that it was his job to deliver the institutional TEF.

Here I am reminded that I once wrote against a neoliberal curriculum, about who has voice/is silenced and the role of 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.

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.

Game over. Thanks for playing.

 


on weltschmerz and academic ill-being


Posted by hallymk1

In part because I am working on a book on academic alienation, and in part because this week has focused upon the relationship between alienation, overwork, illness and well-being ill-being, the damaging effects of academic labour on both the academic Self as s/he becomes a self-exploiting entrepreneur, and on her humanity as a species-being, have been live for me. I’ve written about this over at WonkHE in terms of academic ill-health. However, more theoretically this might be situated in the relationship between Hegel’s work on particularity and universality, and extended through a more dialectical focus on the internal relations that reveal our subjectivity. Here the realities of an academic life framed by the violence of abstraction are laid bare:

This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations. Marx, Grundrisse.

I wrote previously how this violence of abstraction leads to a sense of academic hopelessness or academic world-weariness. I have developed this into an article for tripleC on the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality. One of the sections of my draft, which I shortened in the accepted version was on weltschmerz, a world weariness that lies beyond anxiety, anguish or ennui, and which perhaps reflects a deeper sense of hopelessness about the academic project. Increasingly, in line with Marx’s focus on subjectivity in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the German ideology, I view the importance of this in terms of what it reveals about the particularity of the Self and the universality of the individual as a species-being in the current crisis of capitalism.

What is this world of capitalist work doing to us and can we imagine anything different? The issue, of course, is how to see this as a dynamic process, in order to move beyond alienation, hopelessness, world-weariness. I have reproduced the original section on weltschmerz, below.

Increasingly, academics face an intense sense of weltschmerz; a world weariness that lies beyond anxiety, anguish or ennui, and which perhaps reflects a deeper sense of hopelessness about the academic project. This is a recognition that the world once hoped for may never be, and that the concrete world now abstracted for value may never embody our deeper humanity. In fact, in our abstracted world such hopelessness is connected to a loss of autonomy/freedom that is itself rooted in the inability to escape from capital’s domination. Much worse is the fact that the cultural terrain upon which capital works reinforces within us a sense that we are not productive enough, and that this is a sin (Jappe 2013, Kierkegaard 1981). Moreover, our life choices emerge inside a system of structural domination that increasingly alienates us both from ourselves and from our place in the social and natural world.

In response to the revelation that under austerity, academic labour is increasingly a site of alienation, new ideas of good/public and bad/private are projected onto the University (Campaign for the Public University (CPU) n.d., Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) n.d.). It is hoped that the idea of the public good of HE can be recovered against the market. Inside the politics of austerity, academics can either incorporate performativity and control, or internalise the loss of what they hoped the university might become. However, this risks the development of a new depressive position through which despair restricts autonomy and where the overwhelming feeling is one of hopelessness. Addressing such a depressive position requires a different level of grief and mourning to be internalised, so that academics can address their alienation and lack of autonomy in an authentic manner, and in relation to wider society.

The critical issue is that academic alienation is rooted in enforced compliance and coercion, and in a refusal to locate solidarity across a wider social terrain (The Institute for Precarious Consciousness 2014). Instead of loss or grief, competition and entrepreneurial activity are internalised (Kelman 1958), and the induced behaviour is made congruent with the inner, academic self through the signalisation and dressage of performance management (Foucault 1975). As a result, refusal or mourning reflect the incongruence between performance management and a deeper set of personal, educational values.

Our hopelessness is rooted in the academic’s apparent loss of her labour, as it is brought into the service of value. Marx (1844) knew that this is the logic of capitalism that defenestrates labour, in order that it can accumulate autonomy:

Is then only the semblance of an activity, only a forced activity, imposed upon me only by an external and accidental necessity and not by an internal and determined necessity… My labour, therefore, is manifested as the objective, sensuous, perceptible, and indubitable expression of my self-loss and my powerlessness.

Such powerlessness is a reflection of how social or communal spaces, places, identities, and relationships are all means of extracting value or hoarding private wealth. Moreover, with the formal subsumption of higher education under capitalist social relations, this sense of hopelessness is reinforced as we witness just how far the limits to our alienation from space, society and nature can be pushed. As Berardi (2009, 73) argues:

To be recognized in the networked universe one must become compatible with the generative logic of the matrix. What does not belong to a codified domain is not socially recognizable or relevant, although it still exists in the domain of irrelevance, of residuality. It then reacts with rage and despair, in order to violently reassert its existence.

For academics, this is the alienation and subsequent hopelessness of intellectual dispossession that Stiegler (2010, 125-126) argued forms a

toxic economy of regressive tendencies, implemented by consumerism exercising the psychopower of its cultural hegemony through the intermediary of psychotechnologies, in this way controls the becoming of individual and collective behavior, as well as the dynamic processes of the technical system.

Our atomisation and automisation cannot enable liberation, agency or the reassertion of academic autonomy. The technological system that valorises capital itself co-opts and reproduces social relationships that it then attempts to modify or destroy. We are constantly torn between social (re)combination and individual atomisation/entrepreneurialism. The social relations of production extend their domination beyond the space-time of our work, into the space-time of our life, in order to occupy and valorise humanity and kindness. Control enacted through the internalisation and adoption of automatic operational systems forces us to incorporate negative internal objects. The anxieties of capital as a machine, and the anxieties of the University as a node in our machinic whole, are incorporated and projected onto others.

What this entails for the academic/student is an end to self-care; of hopelessness in the face of overwhelming odds; of the apparent impossibility of scaling-up kindness. This demands a culture of omertà, or the silence of those in the know, who must co-operate even as they compete, and thereby generate complex inter-relationships rooted in uncertainty and anxiety (Hall and Bowles 2016). The question is how to negate rather than accept the basis of domination, through the academic fails to realise her potential for happiness. Is it possible to define a new form of sociability? For Marx (1844/2014, 82), this reveals the tensions between marketised, economised existence that is predicated on the ‘increasing value of the world of things’ at the expense of the ‘devaluation of the world of men’. The questions are whether that world can be superseded across the social factory (Federici, 2012), and what is the role of the university in that overcoming?

References

Berardi, Franco. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Translated by Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia, with preface by Jason Smith. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

CDBU. 2017. Council for the Defence of British Universities. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://cdbu.org.uk/

CPU. 2017. Campaign for the Public University. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://publicuniversity.org.uk/

Federici, Sylvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.

Hall, Richard and Bowles, Kate. 2016. Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety. Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor 28, 30-47. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://bit.ly/2dQMx8X

The Institute for Precarious Consciousness. 2014. We Are All Very Anxious. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://bit.ly/1KnFiOi

Jappe, Anselm. 2013. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 25 (2): 25–37. Accessed April 10, 2017. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2014.906820

Kelman, Herbert. 1958. Compliance, identification and internalization: Three processes of attitude change. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (1): 51-60. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://scholar.harvard.edu/hckelman/files/Compliance_identification_and_internalization.pdf

Kierkegaard, Søren. 1981. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Kierkegaard’s Writings, VIII) (v. 8). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1844. Comments on James Mill. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/

Marx, Karl. 1844/2014. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. London: Bloomsbury.

Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Malden, MA: Polity Press.


The rise of academic ill-health


Posted by hallymk1

Over on WonkHE I’ve just had a piece published on academic ill-health, which touches on some issues I have raised previously about anxiety, the University as an anxiety machine, overwork and alienation. It complements these things I have previously written about academic labour:

on the University as anxiety machine

on academic labour and performance anxiety

Notes on the University as anxiety machine

on academic hopelessness

on world-weariness

notes on academic overwork

notes on desire, anxiety and academic luddism

Re-engineering Higher Education: The Subsumption of Academic Labour and the Exploitation of Anxiety (with Kate Bowles)


published: Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

Working with 20 co-authors, Joss Winn and I have just had published Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education. The edited collection forms part of Bloomsbury Academic’s series on Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education.

The abstract, key features and table of contents are noted below.

Abstract

Higher education in the UK is in crisis. The idea of the public university is under assault, and both the future of the sector and its relationship to society are being gambled. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable, its historic institutions are becoming untenable, and their purpose is resolutely instrumental. What and who have led us to this crisis? What are the alternatives? To whom do we look for leadership in revealing those alternatives?

This book critically analyses intellectual leadership in the university, exploring ongoing efforts from around the world to create alternative models for organizing higher education and the production of knowledge. Its authors offer their experience and views from inside and beyond the structures of mainstream higher education, in order to reflect on efforts to create alternatives. In the process the volume asks: is it possible to re-imagine the university democratically and co-operatively? If so, what are the implications for leadership not just within the university but also in terms of higher education’s relationship to society?

The authors argue that mass higher education is at the point where it no longer reflects the needs, capacities and long-term interests of global society. An alternative role and purpose is required, based upon ‘mass intellectuality’ or the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge.

Key features

  1. The book critiques the role of higher education and the University as an institution for developing solutions to global crises that are economic and socio-environmental. In this way it offers an analysis of the idea that there is no alternative for higher education but to contribute to neoliberal agendas for economic growth and the marketisation of everyday life. The restrictions on the socio-cultural leadership that emerge inside the University are revealed.
  2. The book describes and analyses concrete, alternative forms of higher education that have emerged from worker-student occupations, from academic engagements in civil society, and from the co-operatives movement. These projects highlight a set of co-operative possibilities for demonstrating and negotiating new forms of political leadership related to higher learning that are against the neo-liberal university.
  3. The book argues that the emergence of alternative forms of higher education, based on co-operative organising principles, points both to the failure of intellectual leadership inside the University and to the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge. The concept of ‘Mass Intellectuality’ as a form of social knowledge that is beyond the limitations of intellectual leadership inside the University is critically developed in order to frame socially-useful responses to the crisis.

Contents

Introduction

  1. Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education ~ Richard Hall and Joss Winn

Section One: Power, History and Authority

  1. Pedagogical Labour in an Age of Devalued Reproduction ~ Stevphen Shukaitis
  2. Co-operation, leadership and learning: Fred Hall and the Co-operative College before 1939 ~ Tom Woodin
  3. Academic Voices: from Public Intellectuals to the General Intellect ~ Mike Neary
  4. Openness, Politics and Power ~ Martin Paul Eve

Section Two: Potentialities

  1. The (im)possibility of Mass Intellectuality: Viewing Mass Intellectuality through the lens of the Brazilian Landless Movement ~ Joyce E Canaan
  2. Still spaces in the academy? The dialectic of university social movement pedagogy ~ Eurig Scandrett
  3. Bradford’s Community University: From ‘Constellations of Knowledge’ to Liberating the ‘General Intellect’? ~ Jenny Pearce
  4. Aesthetic Education, Critical Pedagogy and Specialist Institutions ~ Jonathan Owen Clark and Louise H. Jackson

Section Three: Praxis

  1. Six Theses In, Against and Beyond the University ~ Birmingham Autonomous University
  2. Reconciling mass intellectuality and higher education: lessons from the PPE experience ~ Joel Lazarus
  3. Somewhere Between Reform and Revolution: Alternative Higher Education and ‘The Unfinished’ ~ Gary Saunders
  4. Permaculture education as ecology of mind: the head, hands and heart of transformation ~ Tom Henfrey
  5. Mass Intellectuality from the Margins ~ Sara C. Motta

Conclusion: Politics, Aesthetics and Democracy

  1. Practicing What We Preach? Writing and Publishing In, Against and Beyond the Neoliberal University ~ Gordon Asher

Dismantling the curriculum in higher education


Posted by hallymk1

On 22 November I’ll be speaking at the University of Greenwich Open Lecture Series, on the issue of dismantling the curriculum in higher education. I will build on my work on academic alienation, mass intellectuality and decolonising the curriculum. The abstract is appended herewith.

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability for academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market.

This discussion argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to a crisis of sociability, revealing the commodification of the curriculum is central. This enables us to discuss the possibility that an open curriculum rooted in ideas of mass intellectuality might enable new forms of social wealth to emerge in opposition to a curriculum for private/positional gain. One possible way to reframe the curriculum is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces forms of colonisation. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in an engaged and co-operative curriculum, with a focus on praxis.


on being in-and-against the TEF


Posted by hallymk1

For there to be winners, there have to be losers.

Truth is an act of love.

I’ve been writing about against the TEF forever. In order to celebrate yesterday’s TEF results, I thought I would see just how much I had written as a recognition that resistance may appear futile but what else are we going to do? The list of posts is given below, but there are three bits that stood out on re-reading, alongside the positions of UCU and NUS.

The lynchpin of our subordination: my availability for my students; my teaching preparation; my relationship to my precariously-employed peers; my turnaround times; my willingness to sit on committees; my NSS scores; my TEF scores; my REF scores; my on-line presence; my impact; my scholarly outputs; my innovation; my everything. My desperate everything, including the subordination of life to work, as a means for the internalised production of anxiety that will help me to re-produce the desires of the machine for productivity and intensity.

Anxiety, alienation, desire, competition, subordination. A machinic whole.

The TEF is likely: to increase casualisation; differentiate between teaching and research staff; generate further performance management; damage academic autonomy and freedom; enhance the risks of market exit, reinforce the link between employment/future earnings and league table metrics for subjects; and so on. Each of these issues damages not only the quality of teaching and learning, but also the relationships between teachers and students.

A key issue is where does our limited energy go in all this? Resisting on all fronts is an exhausting impossibility. Resisting whilst we try to live is also potentially exhausting. Can we resist where we have a lack of agency or control? How do we push back against the normalisation of metrics that feeds into the violence of aspiration, or the internalised desire to optimise our personal and familial outcomes, as they are set by the market?

How do we work collectively inside and across institutions, and between teachers and students, to refuse the TEF? Or must we simply attempt to occupy and recompose the TEF?

How do we build a movement against standardised testing and metrics-driven education? How do we recover our humanity through connection to other campaigns?

How do we connect our work inside institutions to other, concrete and local, social campaigns against austerity?

Elsewhere, Sally Hunt of UCU has stated:

‘If the government is serious about improving teaching quality it should improve the working conditions of the tens of thousands of teaching staff employed on insecure, often zero-hours contracts and the impact this has on students’ learning experience.’

Elsewhere, Sonia Vieru of NUS has written that:

We do not believe that the Teaching Excellence Framework accurately measures teaching quality. The NSS Boycott has shaken one of the core metrics of the Framework and exposed its manipulability and fragility. Students’ unions across eleven institutions have confirmed to NUS that they successfully lowered their fill out rate to below 50 per cent, rendering the data unusable for one year of the next TEF award.

The NSS Boycott has shown that mass student mobilisation around what some would have considered a complex policy issue is possible and effective. The widespread impact of the NSS Boycott campaign will go further than one year of data destabilisation. Thousands of students have taken part in the campaign and have demonstrated their opposition to an assessment regime which is carried out in students’ names, but not to our benefit or to the benefit of higher education as a whole.

The TEF and its results today have opened up a conversation about the quality of teaching across the sector: but it is not a conversation which has been for the good of students or higher education.

’cause we all need heart and we all need courage/In these times

In no particular chronological or thematic order, these are some of the things I have written. They focus upon policy, practice-based implications, resistance, the proletarianisation of the University, and the emotional impact on/of academic labour.

notes on saying “no” to the TEF

notes on metricide

Notes on education-as-gaslighting

on the HE and Research Bill as a terrain of alienation

notes on HE finance: nothing is sustainable

on world-weariness

notes on the reserve army of academic labour

notes on education for a future of ‘declining returns on humans’

the Alternative HE White Paper

notes on desire, anxiety and academic luddism

on resistance to the HE White Paper

on the HE White Paper and academic practice

notes on academic overwork

against the HE Green Paper


Against boundaries: Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

On Thursday I’m speaking at the University of Worcester Teaching and Learning and Student Experience Conference . The title of my talk is Against boundaries: Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education, and will be based on this Open Library of the Humanities paper. The abstract is appended below, and the slides are posted below that.

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability for academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market. This keynote argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to a crisis of sociability, revealing the bounded nature of the curriculum is central. One possible way to address this crisis is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces forms of colonisation. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in an engaged and co-operative curriculum, with a focus on praxis.


BLTC17, The really open university: working together as open academic commons


Posted by hallymk1

On Wednesday I’m speaking at the Brookes Learning Teaching Conference 2017. I love this kind of invite, which enables a testing of ideas and a lot of listening to the practices, activities and hopes of others. My abstract is detailed below, with the slides posted after that. The talk enables me to return to that practical work I was engaged with in 2010-12, around the idea of/re-imagining the university. It also enables me to reflect on my recent work inside the University, on commons and co-operative practices.

This talk questions the role of pedagogic scholarship and innovation in addressing global crises of social reproduction. It argues that working together has both possibilities and impossibilities, which need a richer discussion inside the University.

In the past decade, fall-out from the Browne Review has given birth to a number of alternative education projects. These alternatives focused on creating spaces and curricula that prefigure more democratic ways of doing higher education, in which the boundaries between student and teacher are dissolved and where co-operation and peer-projects between scholars become fundamental. Examples include the Social Science Centre in Lincoln and the Really Open University in Leeds. These projects developed grounded, co-participatory scholarly communities, which acted as incubators for pedagogies like Student-as-Producer (Neary and Winn 2011; Pusey 2016).

However, they also share characteristics with transnational platforms like #RhodesMustFall and#Whyismycurriculumwhite, in attempting to push back against the structuring logics represented by the curriculum (Hall and Smyth 2016). These platforms also connect to co-operative forms of higher education like Mondragon University in the Basque country, the Little Schools of the Zapatista Movement, and the education sector of the Brazilian Landless Movement.

Reflecting on these alternative forms is helpful in analysing our responses to the crisis of higher education, in order to locate spaces for truly progressive pedagogies inside the university. If such spaces do exist, on what are they based and what is their relationship to the curriculum? How do they enable academics and students to respond to issues of inclusivity and diversity, collaboration and peer production? Three responses may be considered:

  • open, academic commons supporting a sharing economy inside and across a porous interdisciplinary curriculum;
  • safe, scholarly communities of practice, perhaps forming solidarity economies that refuse enclosure; and
  • positioning the university and curriculum within (and against?) the development of ‘mass intellectuality’, or socially-useful knowledge produced outside the university.

References

Hall, R., & Smyth, K. (2016). Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education. Open Library of Humanities, 2(1), p.e11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.66

Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2011). The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In M. Neary & J. Winn (Eds.), The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience (pp. 192–210). Continuum. Retrieved from http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1675/

Pusey, A. (2016). Pusey, A. (2016). Strike, occupy, transform! Students, subjectivity and struggle. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 26(2), 214-32. Retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2016.1240133


notes for ‘alternative education’


Posted by hallymk1

On Wednesday I wrote that a while back I’d been asked to contribute to some work-in-progress on the idea of dangerous words. The three terms I selected were ‘immiseration’, ‘managerialism’, and ‘alternative education’. The work-in-progress hasn’t progressed so I’ve decided to publish what I wrote a year ago, starting with ‘immiseration’ and ‘managerialism’, and finally with ‘alternative education’ today.

The brief given was to:

  • explore the connections between a particular set of selected terms and their role in contemporary social relations, where these words function as one aspect of social relations and not as ‘empty signifiers’;
  • question the increasing use of some words in the public and private domains and to explore the effects of these words and the logic that underpins them, on meaning-making and on creating possibilities for improving life;
  • critique these terms as one aspect of social relations in education;
  • discuss acts of separation that are made possible through simultaneous processes of distinction, differentiation and stratification, whilst bearing the possibility for their representation.

The idea is to uncover tools to refuse the neoliberal/capitalist idea of education as a neutral and technical process, which in-turn imposes its ideology on us. This ideology uses a language that teachers, educators, researchers, students and parents are encouraged to co-opt. Occupying and refusing certain words, and finding alternative ways of doing, making, creating, sharing, pooling, gifting (against producing, services, productivity, entrepreneurialism and so on), are critical moments in resistance and refusal. Ultimately they are critical moments in a process of liberation.

Alternative Education

Alternative education raises questions about whether another world is possible. Alternatives ask educators and students to question the governance, regulation and resourcing of hegemonic, institutionalised forms of education, alongside their curricula, through both negative critique and prefigurative practices. The idea of an alternative questions the legitimacy of formalised spaces, often standing against both their forms and content, and as a result defining an educational undercommons (Harney and Moten 2013). Such an undercommons is a space for solidarity and resistance, from where resources and relations can be drawn. It might exist inside formal education, as a sector of the economy or in its institutional forms. An undercommons forms an underground that enables subversion and new forms of organisation, and which problematises dominant narratives about education (for entrepreneurship, growth, sustainable development and so on).

In this being inside-and-against the school or the university, alternative education takes the perspective of voices that are marginalised because they are racialised, gendered or rendered economically-valueless or indebted, in order to re-imagine and re-produce new forms of educational life or sociability. The idea of an alternative also emerges beyond formalised spaces, in autonomous communities that exist beyond the school or university as it is re-purposed as a factory (Cleaver 2002; The University of Utopia n.d.).

This idea of alternatives being in, against and beyond recognises that hegemonic educational institutions have been subsumed within the circuits of capital. This means that the governance and forms of such institutions, and the work of academics, professional service staff and students, have been re-engineered by capital on a global terrain. Moreover, the labour that takes place inside these institutions is repurposed and re-produced in its relation to money capital, productive capital and commodity capital, in order to generate surplus value, surpluses, profits and so on. The domination of capitalist social relations over academic labour is driven by the abstracted power of money and the generation of surplus value. This opens up the possibility for alternative forms of education, both inside formal spaces and beyond the boundary of the formal, to become new sites of struggle in response to the on-going crisis of sociability. This crisis is signalled by the co-option of socially-useful knowledge, or the general intellect, so that it can be valorised (Hall 2014; Virno 2004). Educational relationships have been productively intensified in order to facilitate the expansion of capital, rather than for the solution of global, socio-economic and socio-environmental crises. Inside the school or the university, educational innovations are fetishised as emancipatory, whereas in working against and beyond these spaces, scholars in alternative educational spaces are working to abolish the relations of production that drive societies to ignore concrete emergencies (Hall and Smyth 2016).

From inside-and-against the hegemonic institution, alternatives articulate the limits of formal education, including its problematic nature as a public or private good (Marginson 2012). Here, the idea of the school or university as a form of enclosure of knowledge and practice is refused through public intellectualism or educational activity that is conducted in public. Such activities widen debates over ideas and fields of study beyond the academy to the public, in that they refuse both the colonisation of disciplinary spaces by academics and the delegitimation of certain voices. This public activity contains the germ of militancy (Neary 2012; Thorburn 2011) because it aims to do and then to be counter-hegemomic. As a form of workers’ enquiry, militancy in research or pedagogic practice points towards projects that produce knowledge useful for activist ends. This may take the form of open education or scholarship that refuses neoliberal recuperation (Eve 2015) for the production of marketised outcomes like performance data, or new spaces for the generation of surpluses or profits. Such refusals question the societal value of business-as-usual models for public, higher education (Open Library of Humanities 2016).

However, experiments that are against hegemonic practices also offer the potential for radical experiment, alongside the re-imagining of education as a distributed, co-operative, democratic activity. Such experiments question education’s relationship to society. Prefigurative responses then emerge in the pedagogic practices of social movements rooted in pedagogy (Caldart and the Movement of Landless Workers 2011), and through forms of resistance inside the university grounded in community and environmental justice (Pearce 2013), resistance to gender-based violence, and trades union educational activity (Scandrett 2014). This work situates the experience of the educator and student against that which emerges from within social movements, in order to address the possibilities for alternative forms of knowing and being. Here traditions of critical pedagogy are central to the ways in which critical knowing and being emerge to challenge the dominant framing of learning, teaching and scholarship as separate from society and everyday life (Amsler 2015; Motta 2016).

Work that emerges beyond formal educational contexts is situated in practical, alternative initiatives that point towards alternative, societal re-imaginings of education. Such re-imaginings are forms of autoethnogaphy, framed by the idea of the student or educator as co-operative activist, and as such operating collectively through organic intellectualism (the Social Science Centre 2016; People’s Political Economy 2013). Such alternatives offer a means of using critical sociology and critical pedagogy to analyse concrete moments of crisis of specific communities, such as the politics of austerity and climate justice (Buxton and Hayes 2015; Lockyer and Veteto 2013).

In particular, these alternatives are infused by comparative analyses with the pedagogic practices of indigenous communities and people of colour (Motta 2016; Zibechi 2012), for whom the crisis of sociability imposed by capitalism is on-going, historical and material. These analyses specifically relate co-operative, inclusive educational practices of creating and legitimising communities, and challenge the on-going colonisation of knowing and being. They offer ways to refuse the dominant power relations of knowledge production inside contemporary capitalism, and instead speak of decolonisation by feminised and racialised subjects on the margins. This enables those projects to establish unique analyses of educational possibility from within new, emancipatory horizons. These analyses recognise the desire for progressive and democratic forms of education: first, in terms of its governance and politics, and the social relations that circulate inside educational spaces; and second, in terms of enacting radical pedagogies grounded in the abolition of power relations in the classroom.

From this complex educational ecosystem, alternatives sit against the neoliberal enclosure of existing structures and forms, like the school and university. They stress: first, democratic activity, based upon a radical politics; second, militant research strategies, which see research as a tool for political action and for widening the field of struggle against the re-production of alienating forms of education; third, the re-definition of scholarship undertaken in public, as a revolutionary activity. In a politics of community engagement and cross-disciplinary activity, and in radical education collectives, these strategies form cycles of struggle that point towards possibilities for: detonating the school or university (Amsler and Neary 2012); using prefigurative pedagogical practices that enable labour to become the crisis of capital, so that it might become for itself rather than being for capitalisation or valorisation (Occupied California 2010; Holloway 2002); and describing what society might become (The School or Designing a Society 2016).

Alternative education is a reminder of how the sociability that was once understood as emerging from the fluidity of the classroom is increasingly lost to educators and students, as value (the determining purpose) now drives sociability. This is the world of financialisation and marketisation, which strip academics, professional services staff and students of their autonomy. Thus, educational lives are restructured as accumulated value, impact, excellence, student satisfaction and employability. It is here that alternative education offers a way of disengaging from these normalised behaviours, in order to re-engage with problems of the global commons. The alternative is a form of collective, educational repair, rather than our response to crisis focusing upon becoming more efficiently unsustainable.

By engaging with marginalised voices inside, against and beyond educational contexts, alternatives attempt to define safe spaces through which the collective work of dismantling can begin. This work of dismantling is rooted in revealing power structures and ways of building the world that are alienating, because they they strip our work, our cultures, our relationships and ourselves from us, in order to valorise them or to silence them. This work of dismantling operates at the level of the institution and the classroom, but it also operates at the level of society (Hall and Smyth 2016; Motta 2016; Rhodes Must Fall 2016). Thus alternative education establishes sociability as the critical, pedagogical project, grounded in actually-existing examples of academics, activists and communities engaging with the work of dismantling our abstract experiences, and addressing their concrete impacts. As a result, it is possible to associate educational repair with wider societal repair, where it is framed by a re-focusing of life upon self-actualisation as dynamic and fluid, and rooted in a different conception of what is to be done (bell hooks 1994).

References

Amsler, S., and Neary, M.. (2012). Occupy: a new pedagogy of space and time? The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 10, no. 2: 106-38.

Buxton, N. and Hayes, B (eds. 2015). The Secure and the Dispossessed. London: Pluto.

Caldart, R.S. and the Movement of Landless Workers (2011). ‘Pedagogy of the landless, Brazil’, in Wrigley, T., Thomson, P., and Lingard, B. (eds), Changing schools: Alternative ways to make a world of difference, pp. 71-84, Routledge: London and New York.

Cleaver, H. (2002). Reading Capital Politically. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Eve, M. 2014. Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, R. (2014). On the abolition of academic labour: the relationship between intellectual workers and mass intellectuality. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 12 (2), 822-37. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/597/638

Hall, R., and Smyth, K. (2016). Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education. Open Library of the Humanities, 2(1), p.e11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.66

Harney, S., and Moten, F. (2011). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions.

Holloway, J. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press.

hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to Transgress. London: Routledge.

Lockyer, J., and Veteto, J. (eds. 2013). Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Permaculture, Ecovillages and Bioregionalism. Oxford: Berghahn.

Marginson, S. (2012). The Problem of Public Good(s) in Higher Education. 41st Australian Conference of Economists. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/people/marginson_docs/ACE2012_8-12%20July2012.pdf

Motta, S.,and Cole, M. (2016). Constructing 21st Century Socialism in Latin America: the Role of Radical Education. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Neary, M. (2012). Teaching Politically: Policy, Pedagogy and the New European University. The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 10, no. 2: 233-57.

Occupied California (2010). After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://libcom.org/files/afterthefall_communiques.pdf

Open Library of Humanities (2016). Retrieved 5 July 2016 from https://olh.openlibhums.org/

Pearce, J. (2012). Power in Community: A Research and Social Action Scoping Review. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www/ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Pages/Connecte-Communities-Scoping-Studies-and-Research Reviews.aspx

People’s Political Economy (2013). 2013 Inaugural Report: from foundations to future. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from https://agentofhistory.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ppe-report-2013.pdf

Rhodes Must Fall. (2016) Rhodes Must Fall. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://rhodesmustfall.co.za/

Scandrett, E. (2014). Popular Education methodology, activist academics and emergent social movements: Agents for Environmental Justice, Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements, 6 (1): 327-334.

School or Designing a Society, The (2016). Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.designingasociety.net/

Social Science Centre, The (2016). Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://socialsciencecentre.org.uk

Thorburn, E. (2012). Actually Existing Autonomy and the Brave New World of Higher Education. Occupied Studies. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://bit.ly/xzcPRO

University of Utopia, The (n.d.). Anti-Curricula: A Course of Action. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.universityofutopia.org/sharing

Virno, P. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Zibechi, R. (2012). Territories In Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements. Oakland, CA: AK Press.


notes against educational ‘managerialism’


Posted by hallymk1

Yesterday I wrote that a while back I’d been asked to contribute to some work-in-progress on the idea of dangerous words. The three terms I selected were ‘immiseration’, ‘managerialism’, and ‘alternative education’. The work-in-progress hasn’t progressed so I’ve decided to publish what I wrote a year ago, starting with ‘immiseration’ yesterday, and with ‘managerialism’ today.

The brief given was to:

  • explore the connections between a particular set of selected terms and their role in contemporary social relations, where these words function as one aspect of social relations and not as ‘empty signifiers’;
  • question the increasing use of some words in the public and private domains and to explore the effects of these words and the logic that underpins them, on meaning-making and on creating possibilities for improving life;
  • critique these terms as one aspect of social relations in education;
  • discuss acts of separation that are made possible through simultaneous processes of distinction, differentiation and stratification, whilst bearing the possibility for their representation.

The idea is to uncover tools to refuse the neoliberal/capitalist idea of education as a neutral and technical process, which in-turn imposes its ideology on us. This ideology uses a language that teachers, educators, researchers, students and parents are encouraged to co-opt. Occupying and refusing certain words, and finding alternative ways of doing, making, creating, sharing, pooling, gifting (against producing, services, productivity, entrepreneurialism and so on), are critical moments in resistance and refusal. Ultimately they are critical moments in a process of liberation.

Managerialism

Managerialism is now operating much more intensively inside increasingly corporate educational institutions. It rests on a belief that traditional, public-sector organisations are inefficient and lack the organisation and leadership to maximise student learning outcomes or teaching quality (Friedman 1962; Gates Foundation 2014). New forms of public management, like deliverology (Devarajan 2013) or the World Bank’s science of delivery, are implemented to rationalise and quantify processes and goals that are grounded in techniques of performance management. Often these processes are crystallised inside individuals and institutions as performativity, or the incorporation of hegemonic practices and beliefs (Ball 2003; Butler 2015). Across educational domains, managerialism reshapes the curriculum around commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of teacher/student performance, like income generation, research outputs, employability metrics, or student outcomes and progression rates (Hoareau McGrath et al. 2015). Any hope for those opposed to new forms of managerialism that radical subjectivity might emerge from the messy realities of the curriculum are lost in the processes of performance that subvert the concrete work that teachers and students do inside and outside the classroom.

In theorising these processes, Ball (2012) writes of three stages of neoliberalism, as a governance project that seeks the managerial control of everyday life. The first proto stage refers to the intellectual genesis and maturation of the neoliberal project. This stage witnesses a cultural attack on the everyday reality of the public and of the State, and it lays the groundwork for managing a consensus around the value of the market in defining the production of everyday life. In the second, rollback stage, social life that was hitherto experienced as public, and which included free-at-the-point-of-delivery education, is broken-up. Rollback connects to the third, rollout stage of the new neoliberal normal, through for instance: public policy that enables privatisation; the insuring or indenture of access to public goods like higher education; and, opening-up access to public, educational data for private gain.

Inside education in the global North, these processes are reinforced through new public management techniques (Davies 2014), which accelerate the quantification of academic practices through performance metrics related to teaching quality, learning environment, student outcomes, and research impact (Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) 2015). Managerial processes that are grounded in the quantified academic self are amplified by competition, which forces individual universities: to restructure using bond finance to enable capital investment; to rebrand themselves for international markets; to engage in labour arbitrage, or the reduction in labour costs, through precarity and outsourcing; to drive strategies for entrepreneurialism or social enterprise, which refocus academic work on spin-out companies and intellectual property or generate new brand identities; to engage explicitly in corporate partnerships with publishers and finance capital that pivot around the production of value. Here the proto phase of the marketization of higher education meets the rollback of State funding and regulation, and the rollout of opportunities for marketization and accumulation, in a messy and contested set of spaces (Mazzucato 2013).

Such contestation demands the imposition of managerialism inside the corporate university, in order to regulate the institution and those who labour within it. This is imposed through: techniques of co-ordination, like service development plans and workload management that identify academics and students as resources (Ball 2003; McGettigan 2015); performance management techniques that seek to optimise outcomes or impact (DBIS 2015); and the imposition of systems of command, such as those which emerge from more nuanced analysis of the data produced by academics and students, including learning analytics (Crawford 2014) and ‘liquid information’ (Manyika et al. 2013). As a result, managerialism signals appropriate behaviours amongst academic communities, so that obedience is reproduced (Foucault 1975; Tiqqun 2001). For Foucault (1975), such forms of regulation crystallise disciplinary management by: drawing up tables; prescribing movements; imposing exercises; arranging tactics. Disciplinary managerialism enables a qualitative shift in the types of outcomes accumulated, whether they are framed as student satisfaction, research impact, institutional surpluses, teaching excellence, and so on.

A critical moment in the generation of managerialism across higher education is the entrepreneurial turn inside the University, as that working space mirrors the generation of the creative-commodity economy outside. This turn recasts the academic as innovator whose formation inside-and-outside the University can be witnessed and judged as creative and valuable, not because it is useful but because it can be exchanged and can generate a surplus or a profit (Hall and Smyth 2016). This is not about the relationships that the academic has either with her peers, her students, or most importantly herself (Amsler 2015; bell hooks 1994). It is about the enclosure and commodification of that life under the organisation of the market.

A critical managerial impact of this internalisation of performance is the reduction of academic autonomy, which is accompanied by new, systemic myths that prioritise ‘resilience’ as key performance characteristics (Plan C 2014). An individual’s resilience inside an organisation is here defined as a positive emotional and cognitive adaptation despite experiences of significant adversity. As managerialism generates academic alienation, for instance through targets for external income generation, faster turnaround times for assessment feedback, and new workload models, the resilient individual has to adapt to survive. Managerialism enables the restructuring of the University as a business through the alienated academic self (Tokumitsu 2015). Target-driven fears and anxieties form the internalised boundaries of a structural and structuring performance management (Ball 2003; Hall and Bowles 2016). In education, such internalised managerialism reifies certain forms of work because they are intellectual, creative or social, whilst also internalising the demand to be competitive and outcomes-focused. Thus, as managerialism enforces the routinisation and proletarianisation of educational work (Cleaver 2002), academic labour becomes subsumed inside a structure that exists for the autonomy of Capital alone (Hall 2014; Marx 1993).

One crucial rupture point in this struggle between Capital and Labour for autonomy is the raising of voices that are systemically marginalised. Processes of managerialism tend to increase the pressures on subjects who are female, feminised and/or racialised, in workplaces that function as white, male hegemonies (Alexander and Arday 2015; Gallant 2014; James 2013). Managerialism re-produces educational practice through a white curriculum that is rooted in colonial power, and inside institutions where it is exceptionally difficult for individuals racialised as black to attain high status positions, like professorships (Rhodes Must Fall 2016; Why is my curriculum white? collective 2015). The managerial recalibration of institutions around specific forms of performance that are productive of value amplifies methods of exclusion, because the construction of educational settings is framed by those who have the power to voice in those spaces, and to co-author those spaces. The underlying, on-going logics of colonialism are revealed inside educational institutions that reflect a power structure rooted in further colonisation that serves the purposes of value production, circulation and accumulation.

In responding to the on-going colonisation of education by managerialism, it is important that educators and students contest the democratic deficit inside their own institutions, which is revealed in day-to-day performance management and governance practices (McGettigan 2014). Emergent themes connected to personal narratives need to highlight the local, regional and transnational impacts of managerialism on the bodies and souls of educators and students (Hall and Bowles 2016). This is important because managerialism that is designed to open-up and connect datasets around academic performance, like progression, the repayment of student fees, and future earnings profiles for graduates, stitches education into global geographies of financialisation and marketisation (Ball 2012). As educational performance becomes a tradable commodity, and as curriculum inputs are re-engineered to enhance futures trading in educational outcomes and earnings (McGettigan 2015), there is a need to think through how the management and governance of education might be liberated as a form of open, co-operative, common property that is itself rooted in social struggle beyond the University. Might educators and students build something that is engaged and full of care, and where they no longer simply learn to internalise, monitor and manage their own alienation?

References

Alexander, C., and Arday, J. (eds 2015). Aiming Higher, Inequality and Diversity in the Academy, London: Runnymede.

Amsler, S. (2015). The Education of Radical Democracy. London: Routledge.

Ball, S. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215-228.

Ball, S. (2012). Global Education Inc. New Policy Networks and the Neo-Liberal Imaginary. London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Crawford, K. (2014). The Anxieties of Big Data. The New Inquiry Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-anxieties-of-big-data/

Davies, W. (2014). The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition. London: SAGE.

DBIS (2015). Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/474227/BIS-15-623-fulfilling-our-potential-teaching-excellence-social-mobility-and-student-choice.pdf

Devarajan, S. (2013). Deliverology and all that. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/deliverology-and-all

Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.

Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Gallant, A. (2014), Symbolic interactions and the development of women leaders in higher education, Gender, Work & Organization, 21 (3): 203-216.

Gates Foundation, The. (2014). College-Ready Education, Strategy Overview. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/US-Program/College-Ready-Education

Hall, R. (2014). On the abolition of academic labour: the relationship between intellectual workers and mass intellectuality. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 12 (2), 822-37. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/597/638

Hall, R., and Bowles, K. (2016). Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety. Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labour, 28.

Hall, R., and Smyth, K. (2016). Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education. Open Library of the Humanities, 2(1), p.e11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.66

Hoareau McGrath, C., Guerin, B., Harte, E., Frearson, M., Manville, C. (2015). Learning gain in higher education. RAND Corporation. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR996.html

hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to Transgress. London: Routledge.

James, J. (2013), Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, New York: Routledge.

Manyika, J., Chui, M., Farrell, D., Van Kuiken, S., Groves, P., and Almasi Doshi, E. (2013). Open data: Unlocking innovation and performance with liquid information. McKinsey Global Institute. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://bit.ly/28Qy8aN

Marx, K. (1993). Capital, Volume 2: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.

McGettigan, A. (2014). Financialising the University. Arena Magazine. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://arena.org.au/financialising-the-university/

McGettigan, A. (2015). The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment. Political Economy Research Centre, Papers Series 6. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/PERC%206%20-%20McGettigan%20and%20HE%20and%20Human%20Capital%20FINAL-1.pdf

Plan C (2014). We Are All Very Anxious. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/

Rhodes Must Fall. (2016) Rhodes Must Fall. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://rhodesmustfall.co.za/

Tiqqun. (2001). The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://bit.ly/mTWhMI

Tokumitsu, M. (2014). In the Name of Love. Jacobin Magazine, Issue 13. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/

‘Why is my Curriculum White?’ collective (2015) 8 Reasons the Curriculum is White. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://wire.novaramedia.com/2015/03/8-reasons-the-curriculum-is-white/