#11 Bacchus reading group meeting
This month reading: Miller, B. (2014). Free to manage? A neo-liberal defence of academic freedom in British higher education. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 36(2), 143-154.
The article dealt quite well will the idea of ‘neoliberalism’ showcasing the nuances between the actual philosophical justifications, and the emergent properties of managerialism that are often associated by not necessarily connected.
Admittedly, what he labelled as ‘neoliberalism’ could be attributed to liberalism in general, likewise some tendencies of genuine neoliberal issues were seemed to be brushed over in favour of crafting a compelling argument.
An important point that was raised, was that whilst a community ought to accept ‘amateurish’ tendencies in terms of the pursuit of knowledge, this does not mean that it is lacking rigour and structure of how academic communities and academic freedom are maintained in practice.
Academic communities depend upon complex negations between the in-group and out-group, that are almost tribal in nature
Likewise, academic freedom is only granted as much as the individual manages to make the inquiry relevant to research inquiries of the community
An omission of the article, was that it did not address infringements of academic freedom from below, from the very academic community itself.
Either by, utilising these “neoliberal” outcome measures to either further one’s own career ambition
Alternatively, when the organisational structure is used to disqualify someone else’s argument not aligned with one’s own ideological preferences
Academic freedom is a protector of other freedoms in society at large, in that it allows academics to champion other causes outside of the university
Issues of academic freedom seem to constitute something akin to a nested collective action problems, in the sense that individually there might be good rationales for each and every choice but taken together they become problematic/counter-productive
Another issue, is that the distributed nature of the decision process no individual decision makers is aware of the full implications of their actions
The institutionalisation of free speech can work, but it needs to be a bottom up process where the will of the academic community is served by management, and not managements goals over that of the community
Also it is an open question of what to do, when the goals of the “community” are counter to academic freedom principle?
Furthermore, there needs to be a certain tolerance of ‘wastefulness’ and exploitation, in that it is not immeditaley obvious in a situation of new knowledge which an idea or an individual falls within, especially if the new idea/inquiry stretches different disciplinary lines
Constraints are an inevitability in every system, and hence it may also represent a communication problem, in that different members of the system (admin, researchers, students etc.) are not synchronised in their language, and simply “wasting time” filling in unnesesarcy forms
Better synchronisation would allow to turn the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy into freedom by competently and effectively filling in the “forms”, here the professoriate are “master form fillers” that if filled in correctly can make resources appear
An academic article, is also a “form” in a sense that it contains a formulaic way that it is written and constructed
