Colleges have been rapidly corporatizing. That’s old news. But too rarely considered is the machinery that has inspired, enabled, and accelerated that corporatization. Enterprise systems, business-process re-engineering, balanced scorecard, computer business systems (or CBS, the acronym I’ve come to favor)—call them what you will. In this new millennium, chances are excellent that the college you work for has for years been spending some three-quarters of its IT budget on such networks.
The impact of these systems has most often been for the worse, catalyzing the most dehumanizing aspects of corporatization. CBSs—linking the workstations of every employee, whether university president or graduate teaching assistant—use data to evaluate performance in real time according to management-approved metrics. Largely invisible, described in 500-page trade manuals’ effusions of jargon from engineer to engineer, then M.B.A. to M.B.A., the systems long ago broke out beyond their corporate origins, flooding the scholarly world, reaching trade schools and ancient bastions of the humanities alike.
I’ve spent 15 years studying the genesis and effects of these networks on both sides of the Atlantic—in England, where they’ve corroded higher education via central-government monoliths, and in America, where disparate organizations, public and private, have been withered by the same forces, through the spread of worst “best practices” rather than by federal fiat. Whether the data networks were the chicken or the egg to the idolatry of free-market efficiencies, the resulting hardships have undoubtedly come home to roost.
At Oxford, that wellspring of the humanistic tradition founded in the mid-12th century, a harried classicist may be found worrying about “departmental line managers” monitoring her output, whether a conference she attended would count as an “indicator of esteem,” wondering why she’d been passed over for colleagues of no great distinction who had nonetheless shone in the academic-production metric known as the Research Assessment Exercise, abbreviated RAE, and now renamed, in the spirit of George Orwell, the Research Excellence Framework, or REF. Impact is weighted toward the effects on “end users” like businesses and public-policy makers. With 52,409 academics entered for the RAE of 2008, more than 200,000 items of scholarship reached the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the body which administers this academic-production regime on behalf of the British government. For the previous RAE, of 2001, the avalanche of academic work was so great that it had to be stored in an unused aircraft hangar near the funding council’s headquarters, in Bristol.
Consumer technologies like iPods, iPhones, and iPads are our servants (albeit servants that closely tally our use of them). But CBSs have turned on its head the relationship between people and machines. In this world, the machines dominate.
“The bureaucratization of scholarship in the humanities is simply spirit-crushing.”
CBSs shape how work gets done, determine its flow and its goals, then monitor progress toward those goals. The systems give senior executives a panoptic real-time view of what is happening within their corporate domain. Context, persuasion, perspective, or the pensive, playful intervention? No time for that. College presidents, vice chancellors, and division and department heads are as likely as Walmart managers to succumb to the enticements of digital power.
Said one young historian working in a London university:
“The bureaucratization of scholarship in the humanities is simply spirit-crushing. I may prepare an article on … my research area, for publication in a learned journal, and my RAE line manager focuses immediately on the influence of the journal, the number of citations of my text, the amount of pages written, the journal’s publisher. Interference by these academic managers is pervasive and creeping. Whether my article is any good, or advances scholarship in the field, are quickly becoming secondary issues. All this may add to academic ‘productivity,’ but is it worth selling our collective soul for?”
In Britain there will be scholars who will continue to produce exceptional work despite such mindless regimentation. But by treating universities as if they were the research division of Great Britain Inc., the U.K. government has relegated the scholar to the lower echelons of a corporate hierarchy, loading the odds against his or her achievement of real excellence, and doing so by surrounding the scholar with hordes of managerial busybodies bristling with targets, benchmarks, incentives—and penalties.
In America, public higher education is the responsibility of individual states, and the sway of private universities also ensures that there can’t be a federal entity exercising the same sort of monopolistic powers over research support. The security provided by academic tenure, shrinking though it may be, also provides senior academics with some confidence in standing up to university managers. But their leverage is undercut by the dubious bargain many of them have struck: doing relatively little teaching, especially undergraduate teaching, in return for time to carry on with their own research.
One result has been that in the United States, the burden of IT-intensive managerialism has fallen more heavily on the teaching than the research side of university life, felt worse the lower down the hierarchy one looks. In April, The New York Times carried an editorial on “the college faculty crisis” concentrating on the corps of “contingent academics,” especially the tens of thousands employed at America’s 987 community colleges. Those are mostly “part-time instructors who typically have no health or pension benefits and are often abysmally paid, earning in the vicinity of $3,000 per course.”
The Times drew heavily on a recent report from the University of Texas’ Center for Community College Student Engagement, “Contingent Commitments,” which examined the predicament of the adjunct work force in detail, especially at community colleges, where these academics teach 58 percent of classes. The Texas report paints a grim picture confirming a decade of exhaustive research on contingent academic life. That includes Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein’s seminal The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), John W. Curtis and Monica F. Jacobe’s “AAUP Contingent Faculty Index 2006,” and Michael Dubson’s chilling Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty—and the Price We All Pay (Camel’s Back Books, 2001).
The continuity of these findings over a decade suggests that nothing much has changed in the life of the contingent academic work force despite the emphasis that President Obama has placed on community colleges as places where displaced middle-class workers can ostensibly acquire the new skills needed to survive in the global information economy.
Contingent academics are not subject to micromanagement by Computer Business Systems in the way that shop-floor workers at Amazon and Walmart are, their movements from unloading bays to storerooms and shelves subject to time and motion studies measured to the nearest second. But these academics are still subject to the powers of measurement and control, treated as units of production from whom maximum effort can be extracted at minimum cost.
The Texas report is full of examples of how the squeeze on contingent academics’ time denies them the scope to do things essential for their professional self-respect and well-being: to prepare adequately for their overload of classes; to do their own research; to hold office hours for their students; to pursue professional-development opportunities; to have access to administrative and technical support (including the use of computers); even to have space to store their books and documents.
Could full-time and tenured faculty members, including those the Texas report calls the academic “leaders,” have done more to rein in all these denials and exclusions afflicting their contingent colleagues? The fact that these dispiriting practices have persisted unchecked for more than a decade suggests that academe’s traditional concern with status and hierarchy, along with a strong instinct for self-preservation among the privileged, has allowed the crisis to fester. The big losers are not just adjuncts but also the students who are not being taught as well as they should be and whose life prospects are suffering as a result.
Schuster and Finkelstein, in The American Faculty, describe a “renegotiation,” along corporate lines, of the social contract between faculty members and administrators, with declining mutual loyalty, increased bureaucratic oversight, and a star system underwritten by a vast new academic proletariat. Scholars themselves, however, have to share blame for allowing what amounts to academic apartheid to flourish.
It’s now time to resist these corporate machines, the literal ones treating scholars and knowledge like so many bits of coded product and the human ones whose professional, emotional, and intellectual networks have been corrupted by an alien regime.
Simon Head is a senior fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, a senior member of St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, director of programs at the New York Review of Books Foundation, and author of Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans (Basic Books, 2014).
