The Managerial University:

A Failed Experiment?

– By David West | April 14, 2016

IN ESSAY

Photograph by Markus Spiske

Recent decades have seen a protracted attack and painstaking demolition of the traditional or ‘old’ university and an associated purging of academics. The rise of managers and ‘managerial’ doctrines were supposed to make universities more efficient and productive, more lean and transparent, and above all, more modern. In practice, managerial reforms have given rise to a range of pathologies and side effects. Bullying is widespread, many staff are unhappy. But the spread of managerialism is also threatening the university’s role as a centre of committed teaching, disinterested scholarship and critical research. Examination of the actual effects – rather than stated aims – of the managerial experiment is long overdue.

The managerial experiment has been inspired by a few guiding ideas but one basic assumption. Just as economics and political science assume that individuals and elected officials or appointed public servants behave as rational self-interested actors, this campaign assumes that university academics are generally out for themselves. According to this view, the old idea of the university as a community of self-governing scholars dedicated to humanist values of truth and learning was all very well in theory but never entirely realistic. Like many publicly-funded organisations, universities invariably fell short in practice. Scholars with guaranteed tenure became lazy. Teachers neglected their students and researchers rested on their laurels. These failings were allowed to persist, according to this story, because self-interested academics were also self-governing. These assumptions set the scene for root-and-branch reform.

In their enthusiasm for the ‘new managerialism’ and the ‘modern university’, however, politicians, bureaucrats and those academics who have hitched their fortunes to the new model seem wilfully blind to the practical results of their reforms. There is some truth in their criticisms of the old idea of the university, but in practice the management of the modern university also leaves too much to be desired. Some of the problems that beset the new model were anticipated by sceptical academics. Their criticisms were dismissed as the products of antiquated thinking and self-interest. What can you expect from academics defending their own privileges?

The theory of the modern university can be reduced to – and in fact amounts to little more than – a relatively simply set of rubrics. At the heart of the new model is the belief in the need for incentives, both positive and negative. The importance of incentives is at the heart of liberal and neoliberal convictions about the virtues of capitalism. Enterprises and workers within them are spurred to industry and innovation by rewards for success and punishment for failure. So academics must also be rewarded for their achievements and punished for their failures.

In principle, criteria of academic performance are based on the full range of academic activities including administration and outreach, teaching, research and grant applications. In practice, as most academics know, it is research output and, increasingly, grant applications that really count. The most obvious consequence of this mode of assessment is that the time and attention given by many academics to undergraduate teaching is declining, which directly compromises the quality of education.

Assessments of academic performance are translated into a schedule of rewards and punishments. Rewards or ‘carrots’ take the form of promotions, pay increases and ‘relief’ from teaching as well as more symbolic awards for varieties of ‘excellence’. Punishments consist in the absence of these rewards together with additional teaching loads, which are openly treated by managers and academic peers as penalties for failing to meet imposed research targets. Aggressive ‘performance management’ (sometimes thinly disguised as mentoring) and eventually dismissal are the ultimate ‘sticks’. Additionally, academics’ increasing administrative and teaching loads, the abolition of tenure, the phasing out of automatic salary increments and the tying of research funds to successful grant applications, mean that a successful academic career is almost impossible without the rewards. The life of the ‘underperformer’ who is subject to this schedule of punishments is unbearable.

Other features of the new university model flow directly from this commitment to incentives. One consequence is the almost exclusive focus of managers on metrics. If incentives are to be applied with all the rigour that the new model requires, then the ‘outputs’ of academics must be able to be measured and compared. In practice, since monetary values are not available for most forms of academic activity, rewards are based on quantified data sets factoring numbers of grants and publications with measures of ‘impact’ and ‘quality’. The latter are reduced to quantifiable criteria largely in the form of reputational surveys. The essential tool of the new managerialism is thus the spreadsheet, whereby qualitative complexities, varieties of insight and originality and disciplinary differences can be reduced to a table of figures.

An almost inevitable by-product of this focus on quantifiable metrics and the spreadsheet is the atrophy of managers’ ability to make judgments. Judgments concerning quality and originality, like judgments about character and personality, will always be difficult and sometimes contentious. The attraction of quantifiable data here is the promise that such judgments can be dispensed with altogether. Managers no longer feel they need to read and try to understand the work of those they assess. Academics are appointed largely on the basis of the résumé with its ever lengthening lists of grants won, publications and positive teaching evaluations.

In fact, it is risky to appoint new staff on this basis. With luck, the deceptive nature of an apparently impressive résumé may be revealed at interview, when a candidate’s shortcomings are too obvious to ignore. Even when the metrics are not deceptive, they are not designed, and so inevitably fail, to capture possible defects of character that may prove disastrous. Such mistakes are discovered only when it is far too late and then typically at great expense to the university. Mistakes are all the more likely since managers who have been relieved of the need to make judgments of quality, character or integrity quickly lose the ability to do so.

A third and related feature of the new university, already implicit in the focus on output and metrics, is the increasing reliance on image and reputation. Since quality itself obviously cannot be reliably and objectively quantified, the metrics treasured by modern management in fact rest on various kinds of opinion survey, which provide only crude, and often illusory, indicators of an academic’s performance. Teaching ability is assessed by student surveys which, whilst they may provide useful information to teachers and their departments risk confusing popularity with quality. The best journals are those that attract contributions from the best academics who, in circular fashion, must be those whose contributions are accepted by those journals on the advice of yet other ‘top-ranking’ academics recruited as editors. Furthermore, universities too are now ranked largely by surveys of reputation. The most prestigious universities are those favoured by academics at similarly prestigious universities whose status is itself based on reputation. And so it goes.