#04 Bacchus reading group summary
This month’s reading: Fleming, P. (2019). Dark academia: Despair in the neoliberal business school. Journal of Management Studies.
Notes of the comments made during the discussion:
The discussion of the reading material touched upon that many of the claims made by Fleming, need to be taken upon trust as he does not develop them fully in the paper.
Arguably, some themes are better developed in the subsequent book that came out, where he raises the level of analysis to the entire university.
An important issue that was raised is that of critical mass and reverence for something worth preserving. In the sense that, yes there have been various voices that quite forcefully argue that there has been a detrimental change to the university culture, however most of these are departing from personal experience and subsequently lack the critical mass to make any substantive wide reaching claims.
Likewise, a claim that there is something worth preserving about the university culture which is being lost, presupposes that there was something good with the university conduct in the first place which is in danger of being lost.
This “something” needs to be articulated and defined in order to preserve it and offer resistance to concurrent changes.
Additionally, it is also important not succumb to a (faux?) sense of nostalgia for a system that ahs been. The cause being, there are reasons of why change occurred and without a proper treatment of these, no workable solution for resistance is possible apart from sentimental feelings that are bound to be disappointed.
The increase in size of the university sector, appears to be a reoccurring theme in the sense that management strategies for an elite section of academic labour that only constitutes a small fraction of society cannot be the same as management strategy for a university sector that has a new mission of mass education.
Unintended consequences from academics own conduct, represented another strong theme in Fleming’s characterisation of what constitutes the ‘dark’ side of academe.
The performance measures imposed, lose their utility when they no longer represent the thing that they are supposedly are measuring but rather become a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that it is instrumental for career advancement to be seen to do well in these metric, as it then becomes a game.
Any criticism of the status quo, also needs to acknowledge that there are activities for example in teaching that are trying to resist concurrent counterproductive trends. In the sense, that it is not a judgement that academics are not doing their best to carve out spaces for proper education to take place. Rather, the discussion ought to focus on what are the pressure points that complicate such conduct in the first place?
The “boiling frog” metaphor was mentioned, in the sense that many of the counterproductive changes imposed by management, are difficult to resist, as they are gradual and the stemming from the collective consequences of individual conduct. Which in isolation might be considered beneficial, only in hindsight and taken from a collective level of analysis does it then become obvious what the counterproductive tendencies are.
Likewise, the status and prestige of academics needs to be defended not based on claims of authority alone, but rather a form of authority that is recognised and acknowledged by the involved parties, i.e. the wider community.
Here the notion of trust was mentioned, and how easy it is to lose trust compared to the difficulties in building it, as well as how it relates to the necessary time for research so that the contained claims are robust and trustworthy.
“Calling out” problems as one sees them, and articulating them does represent a first step in the process of resistance, as it allows for the articulation of the problem formulation.
