There is a growing malaise in higher education, and it is damaging core academic functions. David Macfarlane reports
Pessimistic about their academic futures, stressed in their jobs, and oppressed by newly bureaucratic modes of management, significant numbers of academics are opting out, or trying to. This is leaving tertiary institutions seriously stretched in their ability to perform their core function teaching.
These are some preliminary findings of research conducted by Wits University sociologists Professor Eddie Webster and Sarah Mosoetsa. They presented their paper, titled At the Chalk Face: Managerialism and the Changing Academic Workplace 1995-2001, at the Globalisation and Higher Education conference in Cape Town earlier this year.
The paper acknowledges “a small group” of academics in the research sample who have responded to new demands in the academic workplace “in innovative ways”. But the majority of lecturers whom Webster and Mosoetsa interviewed were pessimistic.
Anecdotal evidence of a malaise in academe is plentiful. Speak to almost any academic and you’re likely to hear about their endless meetings, job insecurity, underprepared students, increased working hours and unsympathetic management.
Earlier this year a university professor walked out of his department, leaving his computer switched on, and disappeared leaving even his family in the dark as to where he was. He had apparently been working exceptionally hard at teaching and administration in his department, and buckled under pressures of conflict and stress.
Some bitterly controversial academic staff dismissals in the past year have deepened the gloom. Academics are reluctantly waking up to a new reality: clash with university management, express your views in the open forum for debate that universities have traditionally nurtured (at least in the liberal conception of tertiary institutions) and you could be out.
While there are by now several studies of similar trends at universities in Britain and the United States, Webster and Mosoetsa’s research for the first time gives empirical solidity to widespread perceptions of the extent and nature of changes in the South African academic workplace.
Their research sample consisted of academics from six institutions: two historically advantaged, three historically disadvantaged, and one technikon. (Wits University, where Webster and Mosoetsa work, was excluded.) They also interviewed a staff representative and a human resource manager from each institution.
Interviews were conducted under strict conditions of anonymity and confidentiality. Despite clear differences among the institutions in the sample, Webster and Mosoetsa “identified what we consider a generalised model of university governance” and “decided to capture the general trends in the academic workplace” rather than stress institutional differences.
“There has been very little focus on the impact of restructuring on the academic workplace,” Webster and Mosoetsa write. “Our findings suggest … profound changes are taking place.”
They argue that the first stirrings of “a shift towards academic managerialism” in South African universities are discernible in the early 1990s a decade or so later than in the First World.
The example of Britain is therefore instructive: Webster and Mosoetsa cite one study that suggests three interlinked “strategies of control” have been discernible for several years. Firstly, there has been “a pronounced shift towards the creation of operationally decentralised units with the simultaneous attempt to increase centralised control over strategy and policy”. Secondly, competition has become the dominant principle by means of which the activities of decentralised units are coordinated. And thirdly, there has been “the development of processes of performance management and monitoring”.
Another study Webster and Mosoetsa cite argues that “social relations on campus are increasingly corporatised as faculties find their time, work and the products of their labour increasingly controlled by managers, who have extended their discretion at the expense of professional autonomy and arguably of the public interest”.
Former Wits vice-chancellor Colin Bundy summarises: “The broad trend of change has been the development of a self-consciously more corporate style of university executive management, one which draws directly upon the vocabulary, precepts and practices of the private sector.”
Running universities as businesses has changed employment relationships: there has been a shift from personnel management to human resource management. “When asked what the difference was between human resource managers in universities and the private sector,” the paper records, “respondents mentioned the difficulty in persuading academics that they are line managers.
“In the words of one manager, ‘Academics do not want to be line managers. In the universities you have prima donnas who earn respect as academics not as managers.’ Or in the words of another manager, ‘Academics need high maintenance. They are hypersensitive. If there is a slight to their professional qualification or status they get very offended.'”
For their part, academics “expressed a surprising degree of antagonism towards management”, Webster and Mosoetsa write. For most respondents, their relationship with management has redefined them as employees rather than colleagues.
“Many respondents expressed feelings of frustration, disillusionment and deep cynicism towards management’s intentions”, as well as alienation from many university processes. “At the core of this feeling of alienation is a sense of increasing control by management and being under constant surveillance.” And widespread academic pessimism is “accompanied, in some cases, by a fear of victimisation if [lecturers] were too outspoken”.
Students who are inadequately prepared for university account for another increase in the burden on academics. One respondent said he is expected to “nurse maid” students, giving him less time for his own research. Another said she has to be available for constant counselling; she could not go to the library and “browse”.
“It was also felt that lecturers had to be more responsive to students’ needs as they were now seen as clients that lecturers had to compete over,” Webster and Mosoetsa write.
One lecturer commented, “The nature of our work has changed. It used to be defined by the autonomy of the job. I now feel I am losing control. This is leading to stress. We have become marketers. I now have to try and attract students into the university. The responsibility has become that of the individual academic.”
All the respondents reported increases in the lengths of their working weeks. And administrative burdens have also increased: “We have to be efficient and competitive but administration staff have been retrenched and now we have to take on their tasks,” said one lecturer. “We are doing double the work.”
Academics express a powerful sense that their institutions no longer have a shared identity: they “do not feel that fellow academics are running the university”, one respondent said. “They feel very insecure and feel that they are being monitored. There is no longer that sense of community and trust in the university.”
Webster and Mosoetsa suggest that “at the core of the change in relationships is the increase in competition between staff … ‘This makes one less amenable to helping one’s colleagues [one lecturer said]. It seems to have become a matter of survival with the Sword of Damocles hanging over us. This creates uncertainty and anxiety.'”
Most respondents were pessimistic about the future. While the majority accepted the need for transformation, they “did not seem to recognise the extent to which the new economy and society was being restructured in a way that demands new skills and different career trajectories”.
But some academics did recognise this, Webster and Mosoetsa write. These they call “innovators”. Though few in number, they are academics who are “making links with organisations outside the university”. In one case, an academic historian is successfully marketing a course on the history and use of information technology. In another, a professor of philosophy has “‘reinvented’ himself as an expert on business ethics and established a centre generously funded by the private sector”.
Even so, the challenge in relation to the innovators is to ensure “that these activities strengthen … ‘the academic heartland’ [and], in the words of Bundy, to ‘fuse managerial imperatives with academic priorities'”.
Any solution to the demands facing academics in the changing workplace, Webster and Mosoetsa conclude, “will need to take seriously the views of academics … After all, teaching is the core business of the university and without the commitment and active cooperation of academics there will be NO university.”