Academic Freedom in the Fetters of Managerialism

Recently, a junior colleague found herself in a precarious employment situation facing a salary reduction as her workload had slipped below the university’s minimum teaching load requirement under the workload policy. One of the units she had previously taught had been taken off her and assigned to another staff member.  As a substitute she was offered a unit which she felt compelled to refuse. She felt the new unit was not quite within her desired area of specialization and the timing of the offer did not allow her sufficient time to prepare to deliver the unit even as mentoring was part of the offer.  Had she accepted, she would have been safely within the policy minimum.

The case that played out made me wonder  if any other staff member in her situation would have acted in the same manner, or the financial disadvantage would have been too great a risk and so she/he would have accepted a unit she/he would rather not have under different circumstances. 

The university may have acted well within policy expectations to reduce her salary but to those of us  whose field of  practice is Higher Education Culture and Change Management, the case highlights the vagaries that academics now have to content now under the regime of management-defined academic practice.  This case reminded me of a case in the United States as reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education  where an adjunct professor of English has been denied further engagement by the college that had employed him.

The fight for the right to define and exercise academic freedom, the defining belief of the university and its professions, in many a university has been won by academic managers of the old school.  My colleague is just one in the trail of many wrecked academic lives left by the new governance logic of managerialism. 

In an era where old-style centralized management is ill-suited for the globalized corporate world, it seems to have found a niche in many universities.  Now ensconced, the university is redesigned to its specifications making strange the organization for its professionals.  All too evident are the outcomes of the operational logic of directive management.  Academics face tenuous security of employment, dis-empowerment and de-professionalization—the upshot of which is that freedom for the academic has been expelled from the university or at best severely controlled.