Stefan Collini’s London Review of Books essay “Squadrons of Pigs”, on the slow hollowing-out of Britain’s “world-leading” universities, is the most devastatingly precise diagnosis I’ve read on the subject in years.
From the Blair years and the drive to send 50 per cent of young people into higher education, through the remaking of universities as competitive providers serving student-consumers, successive rounds of tuition fee reform, the long freeze in the value of domestic fees, and the growing dependence on international student recruitment to plug the gaps left by an increasingly threadbare funding model, this longitudinal disaster has unfurled itself with all the inevitability of Greek tragedy.
As a long since former academic, I recognize some parts of that story only abstractly, as what the American sociologist C. Wright Mills might have described as a public issue of social structure. Other parts I recognize at a more unsettling, visceral level: brief moments of perforation, visible only sporadically and often only in retrospect, when things-out-there ceased to be abstractions and irrupted into life-in-here, marking—in every sense of that word—the trajectory of a career before one had quite understood what was happening.
Back in 2009, I secured my first academic appointment at what was then one of the best social science departments in the country. I was still naïve enough to think universities were, at some level, self-governing communities of scholars. Having completed my PhD at the same institution, I’d grown complacently accustomed to the company of brilliant, eccentric, principled, dishevelled academics—if not in wood-panelled seminar rooms, then at least in spaces recognizably ordered around learning, where the importance of knowledge, research and dialogue was somehow expressed in and through the built environment itself.
Then, in the wake of the coalition government’s fees reforms of 2010-12 came the senior managers who called what we published “outputs”, wore sharp suits and stern looks, parked top-of-the-range cars with effortless ostentation next to your clapped out old banger, circulated spreadsheets, spoke only in PowerPoint bullet-points, transformed staff spaces into student-facing facilities replete with unnecessarily bright plastic seats, sofas and infantilizing bean-bags, all decked out in the latest corporate colour palette, and who then quietly, with synthetic regret, terminated whichever supposedly “low-value” assets—academics, research clusters, courses—most efficiently balanced the books by being disappeared.
In the wake of the reforms of 2010-12 came the senior managers who called what we published “outputs”, wore sharp suits and stern looks, circulated spreadsheets, and spoke only in PowerPoint bullet-points.
And while all of that economically unproductive academic capital was being cleared out of the way, another round of appointments to a new administrative cadre would be announced: not the old departmental staff who kept their office doors open and helped with photocopying, scanning, printing, but functionaries who facilitated the dissemination and subsequent monitoring of menial tasks for you to complete by a certain date, kind regards, Gemma (She/Her).
“Matters are not helped by the adversarial culture which is the result of the managerialism to be found at the higher end of some university administrations”, writes Collini. “Adopting the cruder versions of the now dated business school dogma of the late 20th century, vice-chancellors and pro-vice-chancellors are often brought in from outside a university on the premise that insiders will be unable to wield the axe ruthlessly enough … A track record of having slashed a budget and made staff redundant at one university becomes a prime recommendation for appointment at another”.
And all of that rings true. But there was undoubtedly a libidinal element to the carnage, lower down the managerial suit-chain. Men and women who were either non-academics, or academics who had absolutely no feel for the institutional spaces in which they were at least nominally trained to think, hired other similar men and women on only slightly less lavish salaries. The right type of people cultivating and employing the right type of people, all of them enjoying the newfound thrill of executive power, not unlike the prison guards in Zimbardo’s ill-fated 1970s experiment, gradually intoxicated by the petty sovereignties and sanctioned cruelties suddenly available to them.
The middle managers were not unlike the prison guards in Zimbardo’s ill-fated 1970s experiment, gradually intoxicated by the petty sovereignties and sanctioned cruelties suddenly available to them.
With this came a distaste for anything other than large, performative addresses to the massed ranks of the downtrodden salariat, now effortlessly repositioned as inconsequential overheads on a cost centre that had to justify its own contribution margin. Managers didn’t so much deliver talks oriented towards reciprocal discussion with members of a scholarly community as orate into an institutional space where biomass attached to payroll codes and National Insurance numbers happened to be present.
It always struck me, too, that the opacity and secrecy they favored were not so much strategically essential as a way of theatricalizing their own importance. How do you plan to…? “Relevant members of faculty will be informed in due course”. Could you just expl…? “Details will be cascaded via your line manager”. Where do you see our departm…? “That’s a matter for the Senior Leadership Team” (always spoken in capitals). Is th…? “I don’t want to comment on that until the steering group has fed back into the wider process currently being coordinated out of the Vice-Chancellor’s office”.
This is of course only one fragment of the rubble strewn around the newly erected managerial university. Collini supplies the larger hazard map. But for those of us who lived through this partial enclosure of the academic commons, and who now glance back occasionally at these gaudy, over-leveraged monuments to corporate folly from afar, his account has the force of bitter truth.
