Neo, neoliberals, and nonsense #2
Neo, neoliberals, and nonsense.
After taking
the plunge with blog number 1, I now have to decide on some sort of direction
of travel (making the assumption that more blogs will follow and that they may
actually have to lead to somewhere or something). Thinking about coming up with
that direction reminded me of how many years ago a colleague at another
University asked me about my “five year research plan”. At that stage of my career,
I was quietly confident of a rough sketch covering the subsequent 5 days or so,
but months or years was well beyond my limited attention..>-SQUIRREL![1]
Now of
course I have some ideas about things I would like to read about, summarise and
share with you, but I have some concerns. First, a hypothesis 6 (about why I
might want to write a blog), might be that it would compel me to read at least
something of an economic and political literature that isn’t exactly unpleasant
per se, but has a tendency to raise my blood pressure beyond its typical
marginally “unhealthy, but you will live for now” limits. Markertisation,
neoliberalism, politics in the West, capitalism, Marxism. Why not read about
hops for beer making, or look for cute animal photos on Facebook?
In fact
hypothesis 1 about why British academics have been largely complicit in the
generation of the current mess, is that we often feel fatalistic about broad
scale change, and in some sense get all Dunkirkian about taking it on the chin
with good grace, stiff upper lip and all that. To this day, after over 30 years
living in the UK, I remain perplexed by how much crap British people are
willing to take from their governments, local and national, let along from
their tradesmen and local restaurants. And have you seen the state of British
hosepipes?
Figure 1. British hose attachment. Note several interlocking plastic components, and waterlike substance draining from the lower part of the figure.
As usual, I have strayed off topic. I now need to find some
way to get to Chaucer. Not Chaucer per se, but a fictious University
academic who happens to be mad about all things Chaucer. Maybe the way in is to
talk about Neo and the Neoliberals.
Neo, played by the enigmatic Keanu Reeves in the Matrix films,
is talking with Morpheus (if you don’t recognise any of this feel free to skip
to the section on neoliberals. Better yet jump to the bit on Kim Kardashian as
she is a cultural reference that you will get). Morpheus says something to the
effect of “Do you often have this nagging feeling that this world and
everything in it isn’t just quite right”? (At that point in the film, everyone
in the audience with an IQ over 80 perked up, if they did not actually find
themselves actually nodding). The actual dialogue was “Let me tell you why
you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t
explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is
but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad”.
If you substitute “world” with “university”, well this works surprisingly
well for many of us on staff. We all know things aren’t quite right. We also know
it has something to do with “marketisation” (admittedly we don’t really know
what that means, but it sounds like it has something to do with sales, right?).
At this point, British fatalism combines with dozens of person-specific overdue
tasks demanding some psychic space, and we sink comfortably back into our unrealised
life as batteries[2].
From Neo’s ill-considered angst, we now need to name and
shame, albeit in a very oversimplified way, “neoliberalism”. In my confused
mind, this has something to do with a kind of “capitalism good, governments
bad” world view, loved by people like Sajid Javid or Rand Paul, men in political
positions of power who were pretty impressed by Ayn Rand. [3]
I have started reading something
about this business and, especially in the context of higher education in
Western countries at least, it has a remarkable consistent world view and
associated agenda. I haven’t read much of it yet (and my word there is a lot academic
critique of it—is this why governments hate all those non STEM lefties in
politics, economics history and geography so much?).
Some of this
kind of material really appeals to my inner conspiracy theorist. “OMG the
Universities in Spain, Sweden, Australia, and Canada are all going through
exactly the same bullsh*t as UK universities, justified with the exact same
managementspeak that comes right out of the neoliberal playbook. Do these
people get together after their Ronald Reagan book club meetings and share
trade secrets? Do they have a secret society with an associated secret handshake?
WHY DOESN’T EVERYBODY KNOW ABOUT THIS MOUNT PELLERIN SOCIETY?
“One way to exert power in restraint of democracy is to bend
the state to a market logic, pretending one can replace “citizens”
with “customers”. Consequently, the neoliberals seek to restructure the
state with numerous audit devices (under the sign of “accountability”
or the “audit society”) or impose rationalization through introduction of “new
public management”, or better yet, convert state services to private
provision on a contractual basis” (Mirowski, 2014, p57; bold added).
At some stage in this blog I fear we will have to grapple
with what is meant by the market, which will lead us to what is meant by money,
and what is meant by capital and…You can see why I fear I might lose all four
of you in droves! Do I go the right-wing conspiracy route? When I talk about the
UK Brexit Conservatives and their evil incompetence in our lunchroom, my
colleagues glaze over as if stepping over a ranting psychotic on the pavement on
their way to Starbucks[4].
Or do I go the economics/politics route,
go a little too far down the technical rabbit hole, and lose you in that glaze
that follows from too much social science jargonspeak?
This quotation above (some of the clearer prose of Mirowski,
unfortunately) speaks to three problems that drive me to tears. Students (or taxpayers
in general) as the “consumer” or” customer” of the “product”; audits, audits and
more audits including the ludicrously tautological research assessment exercise
(“Cambridge get a lot of research grants; this must mean they are good, yeah? Let’s
give them more money), the teaching excellence framework, and numerous within-house
and national surveys of student “satisfaction”; and finally, “outsourcing” work
(estates, travel, marketing, web pages, recruitment) from university-paid
employees to private companies (the private sector always do it better you see?[5]).
One interpretation of this message is
that you University academics cannot be trusted to do your jobs, and that a
professional class needs to monitor and vet your activities to ensure “quality
and efficiency”. How did we let this happen?
For the first of problems, students and society as consumers
of the university “product”, many of my colleagues have been mainly concerned,
perhaps rightly so, about students becoming more entitled because they are
paying for their degrees through the student loan system. “Entitled” has become
shorthand for excessively demanding, under-engaged (itself a sort of shorthand
for all kinds of problems), and generally “wingy” (see previous blog Lily Allen
gag).
This is only part of the problem, of course. It did not take
a great deal of foresight to appreciate that in no time whatsoever,
Universities would be competing with one another to “sell their products” to as
many customers as possible, out of sheer corporate-style greed (English Red
Bricks, are you listening?[6])
or out of fiscal necessity. After all, in freemarkets, customers choose the
“best products” and ones that are not “value for money” (another phrase from the
neoliberals that makes my blood boil) will fall by the wayside—a sort of
capitalist Darwinian market (Neoliberals are all sort of Darwinians, but not in
a good way).
This move from block grants to Universities to a loans for
students in 2010 falls out from some pretty slick accounting tricks to make
debts seem like assets (McGettigan, 2017), and strange (read: crap) reasoning
that goes something like this: University graduates make more money. Why should
taxpayers who aren’t graduates foot the bill? Let’s pass graduates the bills by
way of student loans to pay tuition. We will sweeten the deal by saying if you
don’t make much money you won’t have to pay us back. Oh and by the way, now
that you are a paying customer, let’s work very hard to make all of the
Universities ensure that they provide good “value for money”, and lets collect lots
of “information” in the form of league tables to help you choose which product
to “buy”. (There is a lot of danger in the overuse of inverted comments in this
kind of material, but I mean REALLY you cannot make this up!). This set of
circumstances, of course will require a lot more marketing and management posts
to help Universities navigate these neoliberal waters.
More on this is a future blog, but in a nutshell, Liberal
Democrats and pre-Brexit Tories, let me explain how in a progressive tax system
people who make more money pay more tax? Or let’s try your logic in another
way: Why should that couple who have no children pay for other people’s kids to
go to school? Why don’t old people pay a lot more tax because they are the ones
using the national health service? (Let’s hope no neoliberals are reading this
blog and think these are great ideas, but the UK Tories are not miles away from
example number 2. Sad that their ageing political base do not see this).
The idea occasionally suggested that the formerly
anti-tuition Liberal Democrats, who in coalition helped create the student loan
horror show, were compromising with the Conservatives to keep things from being
even worse, is a bit rich. Those freedom-loving liberals!
This right wing view of universities as businesses that need
to sell their wares to survive gets married in a very odd, not very free to do
as you wish way, in which our activities are catalogued and monitored by a
managerial class from government that want to ensure “value for money” for not
just loan-addled students, but taxpayers in general. This is the audit culture
mentioned by Mirowski that has the interesting side effect of increasing posts
for more managers. This universities being like private companies that make
electric air fresheners leads us to some moral philosophy (lite, I promise)
about what Universities should be for and what constitutes a public good. This
is something many of us think about, in a like Neo “I am not sure that this is
quite right” way that Universities seem to operate. So here are two crude attempts
at the point.
Some years ago I “developed”[7]
a story I tell other academics about a fictitious University Professor. Let’s
call he Professor Felicity Brown. Prof Brown works in a medium-sized British
University that has, against the odds, managed to hold on to a Department of
English. Prof Brown did her Ph.D work in English at a UK red brick university (more on
them in a later blog) on paradoxically, Goethe[8]. She worked on how translations of Goethe into English has made a mess of
some otherwise brilliant prose. But after a postdoc (also on Goethe) and a later
postdoc on Schiller, Prof Brown landed her first lectureship. On a whim, she
started looking into Chaucer. The tale could get complicated here (as I am
making this story up and am, as you know by now, quite distractible) but
suffice it to say that Dr Brown become immersed in Chaucer studies and
eventually worked her way to a full Professorship, as a now internationally-recognised
expert on Chaucer’s middle period. She
cut her teeth in debates for some time about whether or not there really is a
distinct phase in Chaucer’s writing that could be characterised as “middle”. By
this stage in her career, she has written dozens of papers on this topic as
well as two single authored books. She attends a biannual conference on
Chaucer’s middle period, attended by many of the 20 or so other academics from
all over the world who share expertise on this, some might argue, rather niche
topic in English and literature.
In the mid 2020’s, Felicity’s scholarly efforts were becoming
more and more difficult to sustain. Successive UK governments disdain for non
STEM[9]
subjects had the expected effects on decreasing resources for departments such
as Felicity’s. Her salary, eroded by non -inflationary pay awards
was not what it used to be, and her job satisfaction was increasingly eroded by
managerial intervention into what a workload formerly sculpted by her own academic
choice and decision making. At one stage, a heated argument developed in a
meeting where a university administrator challenged the “value for money” of Felicity’s
academic work. (Did I mention earlier that I don’t like this term? Can I stop
with the air quotes now, the point made?)
At this
stage of course any of you old timers can see where I am going. For the younger
readers who can’t be bothered to even google the name “Chaucer”, I confess to
know not much more about his literature than you do (I probably was compelled to
read some in my youth, but as I wasn’t forced to memorise passages as I was for
Shakespeare and Dickens - the memories are long gone). When I came up with this
little parable, I wanted to use Dickens instead of Chaucer because I really did
not like Dickens[10]
but this would be blasphemy in the UK.
Our evil
antagonist manager in the story wonders aloud, albeit it in managespeak[11],
about whether the cost-benefit analysis of Felicity’s 75K salary, her biannual
trips to the conferences and so on are really worth “it”. The manager points
out that her work can’t be said to have impact in any economic or medical
sense, her scores on papers in the Research Assessment Exercise are not judged
by her peers as 4*[12],
and her citations are not nearly as good as those of her colleagues who write
about Taylor Swift or Kim Kardashian[13].
“It” in this
previous paragraph, is the rub. I mean, can you imagine the taxpayers outrage
when they realise that someone is getting paid, pretty good money in fact, to
be an expert on a topic that is only of interest to 20 or so other people in
the entire world?? Look, Kim Kardashian is probably paid a lot more that
Felicity Jones, but at least she has 75.1 million followers on X.[14]
Talk about impact![15]
I, of course, think of fictitious Felicity as the hero in the
story. Her salary, her conference trip costs, her research grants and so on,
even if multiplied by 100,000 other Felicity Brown’s [16]working
on specialist subjects dotted around the globe, are worth every penny, pence
and lire. Think of them as intellectual Olympians, the product of a system
which encourages excellence and scholarship over a lifetime.
It is obvious of course, that their efforts are not as penetrable
as a Usain Bolt or a Lionel Messi. (Heck these two are not even in the ballpark
as Kim Kardashian). These athletes and entertainers are of course very well compensated
indeed for their efforts, in spite of the fact that their “work” doesn’t build
a better battery or electric air freshener (although they might help sell some
of those electric air fresheners developed by someone else[17]).
So why Chaucer’s middle period? Why the mating cycle of a particular species of
slave-making ant? Why distance estimation in the Mongolian gerbil? [18]
Here is
where I get stuck. I usually say something like “We are the only sentient
species in the Universe that we know of. That we produce people like Chaucer
who do what they do is miraculous enough, that we have people ponder how
miraculous he was is, in itself, even more miraculous”. (In my earlier
incarnation as a scientist interested in sensorimotor control, I was quite
struck by our superior dexterity in the control of our fingers, hands
and arms. Consequently, I would use trips to my local zoo to taunt the other
great apes with my speedy finger-thumb opposition skill).
Isn’t this worth a few percentage points of
our “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP)”? Don’t get me started on poetry! How much is
a Brian Bilston poem “worth” to us, compared to those champions of the free
market like Musk, or the bankers who broke the economy of the world in 2009? And
of course (segue to example 2), sometimes “pure” research leads to something
super useful to everybody, like Teflon {cough}. Look, sometimes we as a species
just want to know things for the sake of knowing them (or writing things for
the sake of writing them, cough). I was speaking to some students about this a few
years back: “Look, the European Space Agency just spent billions of Euros to
land on that comet to discover that, yes indeed, it was made of the sort of stuff
that telescopes had already let us deduce! Isn’t that marvelous?”. Sadly, one of the
many (at least 4) readers of this blog was across the hall and listening. Mull
Paulins (not his real name) without missing a beat, responded in a clear Kiwi
accent: (not his real accent) “David, some day we might have to blow one up. Haven’t you seen those two movies that unfortunately came out in the same year?”.
Then I find myself saying “knowledge is, in and of itself, a Platonic GOOD. Why epistemologists since John Locke have…..” {fade to Charlie Brown teacher speak [19] as my student is already shifting to social media reading and Taylor Swift by this point].
At this moment of writing this blog I was wondering how to
get myself out of this maze of digressions. I was listening to an interesting
talk by this Mirowski chap (who is speaking in a style a little more accessible
than his writing! Meow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBB4POvcH18&list=PLA-JcpetpbiMqgkkwj9enRE7Z1DFHhdht&index=1).
But I kept getting interrupted by ads in Youtube, including one for some
product called “Otter”. Otter transcribes spoken speech into text. The
attractive salesperson tells you how this now “frees her to actually listen
to the lecturer”. (In such a world of this person, and I suspect that of many
undegraduates of the current era. note taking doesn’t require any listening
per se, presumably because you are writing-down-everything-the-lecturer-is-
saying.
Figure 3: A screenshot of the advert that interrupted that talk of my new pal. Mirowski. I suspect some of you would like Otter to summarise what the heck it is I am trying to say in this overlong blog.
And
it’s “free”[20]! We are told. And it will give you an AI-generated
summary (because listening to the whole lecture recording AGAIN is just so
2012, no thanks!). And this all links to an AI who you can ask questions of! (Of
course you wouldn’t want to ask the ACTUAL LECTURER, would you?).
OMG.
(warrants it own paragraph).
You
can ask Otter things like “did the lecturer say what might be on the exam?” As
someone who used to spend a lotta time writing and searching through notes, “Otter
has been a game changer!” she almost squeals.
O.M.G.
We
end here with this eerie end product of the marketisation of higher education.
[1]
Readers of a certain age may remember this gag form Pixar’s “Up”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrAIGLkSMls
[2] I
did warn you to skip to neoliberals or Kardashian if you don’t know about the
Matrix.
[3]
In their defence at one time I was impressed by Ayn Rand. I was 16 or so,
having been fed a fairly long term diet of anti-government/pro “freedom” malarky
by a right of centre press in my native Alberta. Mirowksi, in response to
questions after a talk, said “I just think of Ayn Rand as a kind of gateway
drug, right? You’re 14, you read it, you got all excited, and then you know the
Liberty Fund know how to identify you”. The Liberty Fund, is indeed a scary
thing: https://www.libertyfund.org/.
Just start looking at the subtitles of some of the books and DVDs in their
“library”. Ironic that these book burners have libraries, really. If you have
never heard of Ayn Rand, apologies, and well done for getting so deep into this
particular aside when you should be reading about Kardashian.
[4]
“Pavement” is Britspeak for “sidewalk”. This is the place where we often see
the mentally ill in the UK. For more information google Thatcher “care in the
community”. Apologies I am in the ranting conspiracy paragraph of the blog and
just cannot help myself.
[5]
There is not a good word in English that captures the audacity of right wingers
in Britain still telling us this, after British rail, English water companies, electricity
providers, and the Royal Mail privatisations, that “outsourcing is more efficient”
than run as not-for-profit by government.
[6]
In a future blog I will document how in my discipline class sizes at many
English universities rocketed after caps on student numbers were removed.
Paradoxically, the manageriat in some of those institutions has fiscal rushes
of blood to their heads and are now in deep financial doodoo.
[7]
“Developed” feels rather generous here.
[8]
Who was German, you see. Maybe you should just skip to the bit on Kardashians?
[9]
Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine. Policy makers the world over
prefer the acronym “STEM”, because is sounds nice, is easy to remember, and
they have trouble with longer utterances that are not in pre-programmed managementspeak.
[10]
For you youngsters whose only exposure to Dickens is the film “Scrouged” with
Bill Murray, my recollection is that he would describe, in beautiful detail,
the texture of the curtain in a room where two characters were interacting,
rather than just get on with the damned story.
[11]
More on this is a later blog, and see gag in blog number 1.
[12]
Read as “Four star”. If this sounds like a funny label for the top point on a
Likert scale, well, people who developed the RAE and the REF in the UK really
think that Felicity and the rest of us need to be giving 110%. More on this in
a later blog.
[13]
If you could work them both into the title of your next paper, like “Beatles
song title: real thing the paper is about”, you would be on to a real winner,
no?
[14] True at time of writing in June,
2024. I think this parable is metamorphosing into something more like farce or
parody, is it not? If only I had studied English under someone like Felicity
Brown I probably know the distinction without having to google it. Having said
that: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-parody-satire-and-farce:
known
to give good advice at times
Although
the three devices mentioned here might share some fundamental elements, they
are meant to serve very distinct purposes in the art of storytelling
A Parody (sometimes referred to as a
spoof) is essentially imitative work. It uses the skeleton of an original work
and adds its own comedic elements that strive towards either exaggerating the
flaws of the original work or trivializing it, or in some cases both. There are
many examples of parodies out in the mainstream media right now. A good one
would be the Scary Movie franchise
in which each movie borrows from the most popular shows and movies as well as
current events from the last year or so and creates a story line parodying
them. There are also channels on YouTube entirely dedicated to building
parodies of hit videos and movies.
A Satire on the other hand uses
irony, and in some cases, exaggeration to expose vices and shortcomings of an
entity, be it an individual or a complex and interdependent system such as our
society. Humor might be part of it, but the end result is almost never funny.
It is used to elicit thinking and realization in the audience. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan
Swift is considered one of the best satirical works in English literature. Some
contemporary examples of satire would be shows like The Colbert Report, The Daily
Show, etc. where the hosts use humor to provide social commentary on issues
that currently plague the society.
A Farce is
a comedy that uses highly exaggerated situations to entertain its audience.
These situations are more often than not exaggerated to an extent that
ultimately renders them improbable.
[15]
In the event that I ever have non-UK readers, this is a shot at part of the
Research Assessment Exercise that we have n the UK.
[16]
I was about to make a joke about handedness at this point, but realised that I
have, in the past, worked on something even more specialised than that. After
my first conference poster in the 1980s, my brother noticed an article about
the Society for Neuroscience meeting n a Canadian newspaper. As such articles
do, in a throw away sentence about the depth of coverage, the journalist uses
the old tried and tested bookend technique: “research covered in the conference
includes {medical/neuroimaging example here} to ‘distance estimation in the Mongolian
gerbil’”. More on distance estimation in
the Mongolian gerbil in a future blog (No, seriously!). Depth of coverage could
be part of a pun here with a little more thought, but I can’t be asked, I want
to finish this blog.
[17]
No doubt a graduate of some Western STEM discipline. Improbably, more on
electric air fresheners in a future blog.
[18] I
know continuity is not one of my strong points, but you really do have to read
these footnotes.
[19] I had hoped, by Googling “Charlie Brown
teacher speak” I would not just find a link to an example, but a scholarly
paper, by some Felicity Brown type, on how this is a wonderful comedic metaphor
for people losing interest, etc. Instead, I find an electric air freshener equivalent:
https://salesgravy.com/charlie-browns-teacher-syndrome/#:~:text=If%20you%20use%20the%20same,networks%20broadcasts%20a%20Peanuts%20special.. By
this stage you realise that “electric air freshener” is my metaphor for all
things completely useless in our frivolous world, or, if you prefer, for capitalist
consumerism in its most ridiculous manifestations. By the way I suspect that
Varsha Eluri has a nice piece somewhere on metaphor versus simile versus
something else. Having said all this OMG De Pew, K. E. (2004). The body of Charlie
Brown’s teacher: What instructors should know about constructing digital
subjectivities. Computers and
Composition, 21(1), 103-118.
[20]
But of course it is, LOL! “Free” and “Freedom” are important idea for
market-lovin’ neolibs out there. More on this in a future blog, but for my UK
readers think “sovereignty” in the Leave the EU campaign in 2016.
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