As South African universities have changed, a sense of malaise has emerged among many academic staff. Yet South African debates on tertiary institutions have tended to sideline and objectify the role of academics.
The Council on Higher Education’s (CHE) website, for example, lists some 70 publications, all dealing with crucial tertiary education issues; but none of them are directly concerned with the changing academic role and working environment, nor with the politics of collegiality. What is happening with universities and their academics?
The university in neoliberal informational capitalism
The changes that have occurred in many northern universities in the era of informational capitalism revolve around a rapid rise in student numbers, the retreat of states from underwriting this expansion, and making universities in large part pay their own way. In the neoliberal climate of the late 1980s and 1990s, which involved opening up previously protected and publicly owned areas of economies to the blast of global competition, universities turned to the corporate business model as the proven private sector means of managing cost-cutting and profit-making while externalising costs on society at large.
This has led to a diversification of institutions, students, types of training and “markets” for research. Corporate-style managements have attempted to instil a business culture and ethos throughout university structures. As an entrepreneurial model comes to predominate, there has been a rapid expansion of part-time and informalised faculty and the development of a two-tier academic labour system (a third of Canadian academics were part-time by 1993), and the increasing digitalisation of university processes.
The case of South Africa
In addition to Africa-wide issues such as deficient funding, language of instruction, low research outputs and weak institutional management, South Africa has the issues of deracialisation, diversity and a low skills base in an economy demanding high levels of skill.
South African tertiary educational policy has not only allowed the play of global market forces but it has also imposed on universities a new set of regulatory imperatives and limits, reflecting the government’s agenda of redress and national development. Government activism has created the conditions for corporate managerialism before that of university managements, through constrained funding policy, a strong demand of institutional accountability, the rationalisation of post-school institutions from 306 separate institutions to 72, the introduction of outcomes-based education and a focus on interdisciplinary, practice-oriented “mode 2” knowledge.
The government’s salutary attempts to align the output of universities with national development goals have fused unhappily with the dominant ideology of neoliberalism to create a quasi-business model — for example, in portraying a core component of the academic job as “knowledge production” — entrapping us in a discourse in which academic work and creativity are substantially commodified.
This subordinates the more characteristic university processes of debate, critique and enquiry in which students and researchers move through conceptual, disciplinary and empirical rigour to the cacophony of the real and its unknowns. Further, academic exchange of knowledge involves a transferential working-through of teaching and authorial authority — most effectively through relational interaction and debate — to a position of opening questioning rather than deference to an overbearing system of expertise. This is not knowledge production.
Jonathan Jansen lists the following points, which together, he says, have changed the lives of academics in a dramatic, disruptive and alienating way:
- “There is a much greater sense of the need to compete, both within the institution and with competitors outside.”
- Greater vulnerability from the erosion of job security, and fears of employment equity among some whites.
- “There is a much greater sense of the need to perform, the result of a new regime of surveillance in the form of performance management systems, quality assurance protocols and institutional benchmarks on everything from research outputs to pass rate.”
- There is more awareness of students as “clients” and as resources to be pursued.
At the same time, Jansen highlights some constants in this turbulence. Academic staff, especially senior academics, have remained dominantly white. Further, the institutional cultures of higher education “still bear their racial birthmarks in terms of dominant traditions, symbols and behaviours”.
Other studies confirm the alienation and disruption found by Jansen, mentioning issues such as doing more work for less pay, being forced to compete with colleagues, that the fabric of departments has disintegrated, deepening alienation from university management, diminished job satisfaction, low morale of employees and the recourse to coping strategies such as the use of tranquillisers.
Eddie Webster and Susan Mosoetsa, in a survey of six academic institutions, found similar themes, with the additional issue of the “increase in emotional labour”, by which the authors mean “the management of human feeling, during social interaction within the workplace, as dictated by organisations”, which leads to academics seeing themselves as “units of resource [and] auditable bodies”.
The case of Unisa
Compared with other South African universities, Unisa is further down the road of massification, digitalisation and distance learning, factors which are characteristics of the future, according to Philip Altbach.
Over several decades Unisa staff have adapted to a bureaucratised institution of mass learning. The problem is not so much getting academics to cooperate with technocratic administrative systems but rather, with the reduction of academics’ discretionary control over their work, and with mushrooming workloads and systems of monitoring, getting them to recognise a more creative, autonomous and expansive academic role.
In the late 1980s, colleagues told me that most Unisa teaching staff were “amptenaars” — employees with an unimaginative civil service mentality. In reality, there was significant diversity in politics, academic capability and culture. But significant numbers had modest academic aspirations and fitted into the sturdy administrative culture of late-apartheid Unisa.
The academic staff was overwhelmingly white, and Afrikaans; many lecturers had family members working in administrative jobs at Unisa. Unisa comprised a significant niche in the white middle-class economy of Pretoria for several decades. But even today, while there has been a deracialisation of top management and a significant growth in black academics, academic staff were still in 2006 mostly (72%) white, especially at professor level (over 80%), where white males strongly predominate.
From about 1996 ongoing paroxysms of change have been felt at Unisa. These waves of change included conformity to the South African Qualifications Authority and employment equity; the merger of small departments; modularisation and semesterisation; the implementation of research output obligations and National Research Foundation ratings; an expansion of short learning courses and Unisa’s enforced merger with Technikon South Africa; rationalisation of modules and qualifications; the advent of an “integrated performance management system”; a new digitalised interface with students and digitalised file movements; and a rollout of a vast tutor system which will move academic labour at Unisa firmly towards a two-tier system.
These changes were in the context of a huge rise in student numbers, from some 131 000 in 1995 to 244 000 in 2006, while teaching staff decreased by 5% in the same period from 1 410 to 1 339, the student/staff ratio rising from 93/1 to 182/1. In 2006 this and the merger helped to cause a cascade of dysfunction in assignments, despatch, printing and other Unisa systems. With the merger came an ongoing assault on staff conditions of service in the interest of making savings to the university.
The impact so far on academic staff at Unisa has been varied. Some researchers and academic entrepreneurs have done very well in the new research regime. Unisa has actually reduced the number of temporary staff over the past 10 years. Unisa has also managed in most cases to preserve functional academic department units.
At the same time, many academic functions have become grossly overloaded. Chairs of department and other academic administrators have a massive administrative overburdening. Many junior academic staff have tuition and administrative loads which greatly impede their progress. In some departments there are demands on staff to supervise unmanageable numbers of theses.
If these factors are added to the constant disruption of work by change, and to worsened benefits, working hours and labour representation, it is not surprising that there is a sense of malaise, stress and cynicism among many academic staff, especially as regards new obligations imposed by management.
Perverse investments in authoritarianism
Building on Webster and Mosoetsa’s concept of “emotional labour”, on Mary Taylor Huber’s discussion, from an American perspective, of the “audit culture” in which managerial technologies “encourage individuals to constitute their work and themselves in terms of the norms through which they are governed”, and on Jenny Ozga’s amplification of a British debate on “colluded selves”, I wish to advance further arguments on the pathologies that can be engendered by arbitrary and undialogic authority and management.
Eric Santner, in The Psychotheology of Everyday Life (2002), outlines a theory of how modern authority and law, expressed through the state, institutions, policing and new forms of leadership, links to patterns of passivity in individuals which are sustained through superego-based fantasies of aggression or submission to authority. This mode of being, while producing some intense behaviours to try to instantiate authority or to resist it, is disconnected from what Santner calls “the midst of life”, the here and now of objective context, relationality and politics.
This fantasy-based interaction with authority is exacerbated and put into crisis in massively organised systems, especially where those dispensing power enforce their own arbitrary plans, but this forcefulness conveys no meaning. Kafka’s fictional accounts of the terror of unavoidable bureaucratic entrapment provide an image of this, for Santner.
To the extent that staff are dependent on the authority of rules, management decisions and government policies — as opposed to having an autonomous, constructive-critical approach — they are likely to engage in this hysterical economy of fantasy; and as a class fraction whose status is declining, many academics look to authority to confirm their shaky status.
By the same token, if management pre-empts academic decisions and objectifies academic staff as dependent, obstructive and passive, then management will engage in thesame institutional fantasy, as the “Big Other” who exercises arbitrary control and who through spectacular action carries out enjoyment on behalf of those who are dependent.
There is also the option of collusion. It would appear, from a scan of
recent editions of the South African Journal of Higher Education, that many lecturers in education departments nationally have a tendency to make academics the passive object of the subjective dynamism of the new systems of managerial injuction. Indeed, one proposal from this stable views a renewed academic professionalism as consisting of mastery of the new systems regulating academics!
Whether academic work feeds hierarchical struggle and mimesis or whether it feeds a sober practice depends on whether the academics are free from both connivance and ressentiment as regards authority and the structure of rules they work within. The negative dynamic created by an ecstasy of authority needs to be resisted, but creatively and realistically.
A critical collegial movement
A move towards a renewal of the ethos and purpose of academics must come from academics themselves. To do this, I believe that some form of collegial movement should be formed.
The Weberian notion of collegiality is that of decentred power countering centralised bureaucratic power. Theodore Veblen’s view, a century ago, was that collegiality also has a cultural dimension involving an environment of freedom which is not compatible with business ethos.
The idea of “collegial professionalism” (for example, in John Bennett’s book of that name) is as a counter to the individualist model of the academic role. Collegiality, in Bennett’s conception, is relational, stressing intellectual community and working together. Bennett advocates a systematic reworking of academic roles to a communitarian and collegial ideal.
Bennett’s strong communitarianism should be balanced with Bill Readings’s notion, in The University in Ruins, of the contemporary university as “a community of dissensus”, a view of community “that abandons either expressive identity or transactional consensus as a means to unity”.
Rather, the community is of people with different thoughts and strong irrational dependence on others — a community able to use its differences to see each other “in the midst of life”. The health of this level of community can be taken as a prerequisite for both strategies of creative autonomy and the strategies using the relational rationality of collegiality.
Aims of a critical collegial movement
A critical collegial movement could engender a new professionalism and empower academics by:
- Fighting for fully collegial processes and decisions in the university, including in senates and departments, and investigating having an academic principal alongside a financial affairs principal. Collegiality should include junior and temporary academics and should be tuned to the community of dissensus;
- Re-instilling in academics a sense of sanity and ethical connection in a workplace where positive and negative staff identities are formed too often from an academic’s fantasy-based engagement with official injuction and punitive jouissance;
- Educating academics about patterns of university change and their impact on academics, especially the commodification of education and the uncritical use of business practices but also the changing tuition needs of students;
- Forming a gender-sensitive, egalitarian and Afropolitan academic culture — an “Afropolitan” culture being Africa-centring without ressentiment, aiming “to redeem the breaches and terrors of a broken history” (Achille Mbembe);
- Reworking our symbolic status beyond old symbols and new performance ratings;
- Reinvesting in teaching and its practical and symbolic role; and
- Encouraging good academic work of different kinds.
Ideally, there should be an alliance of ethical and creative academics, democratic management and committed students. In the present context, power is too unequal, and, to paraphrase Woody Allen, if the lion and the lamb lie down together, the lamb won’t get much sleep.
Peter Stewart is professor in the department of development studies at Unisa. This article is based on his inaugural lecture at Unisa, and the full version appears in the latest edition of the Journal of Higher Education in Africa (vol 5 no 1 pp 131-147)