While fundraisers foresee gloom, the economic meltdown may be a tonic for higher education. For this to happen, however, it will require plain talking on the damage that has been done to the university (and its calling) over the past three decades.
It is certainly true that almost every other social institution is also damaged — health, welfare and others besides. It is also so that universities are way down this pecking order — but without them countries shrivel, even die.
To understand fully what is at stake for universities now, some undergrowth must be cleared. Theologically inclined economists continue to insist that the unfettered market will be back, but it is clear that it is destined for Trotsky’s dustbin of history.
As social theorist Jurgen Habermas recently put it: “Politics, not capitalism, is responsible for promoting the public good.”
This is why more considered economists believe that prosperity lies in turning away from economic orthodoxy: not embarking on the spendthrift ways of old, mind, but investing public money for future prosperity.
Even the pro-market Wall Street Journal recently took this Keynesian line, arguing that all countries should spend more on education.
But here’s the rub: universities are big ticket items. They need large amounts of money to survive, let alone thrive. Understanding this suggests why the elephant in the common room for the past three decades has been the certain knowledge that the scale of money required to sustain a successful university — let alone a university system — cannot be found in the private sector.
This view runs, however, counter to the stubborn view that took hold with the establishment of the University College of Buckingham (now the University of Buckingham) in the early 1970s. Then, as now, Buckingham was the poster-child for market-driven higher education.
And it didn’t take long for Margaret Thatcher (who had laid Buckingham’s foundation stone and would go on to become its chancellor) to savage government funding of universities by arguing that to be more effective they needed to be more efficient.
The slowing of public spending on South African higher education, which commenced as apartheid was ending, drew from the same intellectual well. As the new South Africa emerged, this direction in policy was confirmed in a scarcely documented showdown between students and university administrators — the latter were determined to toe the new government’s line — early in the Mandela presidency.
Their choice turned out to be a triple whammy. First, the financial noose was further tightened; second, local universities were called upon to carry the burden of educating a cohort of poorly prepared students; and third, South African higher education was exhorted to compete internationally.
The resulting adaptation and transformation have been very difficult.
As multiple contradictions sharpened, crisis management has become all too common in our universities. The very next of these convulsions — as everybody knows — is what to do about an ageing professoriate that continues to carry the country’s research reputation.
But if we are to recover intellectual life, the approach to public management that has drawn market-based thinking into the centre of the university, and which has done such damage to intellectual life, needs to be reconsidered.
First, some intellectual history. For three decades policy making has turned on the promise of economics.
As this happened the policy eye was caught by rational choice, the theory which underpins modern economic thinking. Policy making set out to imitate the techniques and language of a discourse, “management studies”, which had foreshadowed the rise of Thatcherism.
Faced with this change in approach an established profession, which had unobtrusively supported intellectual work — “university
administration”, it was called — adopted an increasing interventionist approach to its labour. It is certainly true that the new approach stripped away a cult of privilege upon which, it was often claimed, standards were maintained. But at its sharp end, it was little more than the new authoritarianism which was increasingly found in the private sector.
The effect was felt immediately within the university workplace. Faced with weak trade unions and drawing on cost accounting, which had reshaped thinking around employment practices, the right of academic tenure was whittled away and the accepted rite of the academic sabbatical was turned from a right to a privilege.
This (and other similar) work was carried out by a cadre of academics and administrators who took it upon themselves to modernise the universities: to bring these institutions, as the breezy language of a decade ago insisted, towards globalisation. Their
calling was to “changemanage” the antiquated infrastructures and procedures of the university in line with “best international practice” — to deliberately use two of the vacuous ideas which were to smooth their path.
These moves eroded the sovereign standing of academic disciplines. Within faculties, deans with executive power explored ways to work around what is known as “academic rule”.
And university senates found themselves responding not only to a new language of control, but to the diktats of policy makers both within and without the university.
Over time the core business of the university — to choose another phrase from the new lexicon — was no longer the pursuit of knowledge or the teaching of students: it was solely to address the ongoing (often declared) state of emergency around the university budget.
Off campus these shifts in intellectual life were roundly applauded.
Politicians were delighted that the disciplining of unruly students had moved from the streets on to the campus.
They also appeared content that academics were rewarded with “what the market would pay”, or argued that academics weren’t interested in money, notwithstanding that professional salaries skyrocketed elsewhere in the economy. Business representatives on university councils triumphantly proclaimed that there was no difference between running a university and managing a business — a belief that was reinforced by the fact that consultants were often called in for advice on all conceivable issues, including academic ones, and were rewarded with market-linked fees.
In this wake long-standing pedagogic goals — such as strengthening citizenship by enhancing the public good — were driven to the corners of campus life. The theory into which all this fitted was, of course, Thatcher’s: the purpose of higher education was to serve the economy — in that most famous phrase, “there was no alternative”.
This closing-out of intellectual space was condemned by academics worldwide — although one South African vice-chancellor, the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Malegapuru Makgoba, thought Thatcher’s relations with the academy were desirable.
The impression of continuous crisis was reinforced by the pattern of foreign funding: most found its way into the development of management skills. Very little, if any, was destined for academic disciplines — social work, music and classics, to mention three of many — the enrolment numbers of which had raised the eyebrows (and then the ire) of planners and which, as a result, faced closure.
Strategic planning, five-year rolling plans and endless policy documents were churned out by a growing number of experts and managers. In these exercises academics were little more than servants to the savants who were, so it was claimed, “saving the universities” — and the jobs of academics.
Essential university-wide interactions — such as wage negotiations — were turned over to the world of the so-called expert: a development, incidentally, which explains the increased stranglehold exercised by human resources departments within every South African university.
As they looked upon all this, academics found themselves generating the funds to employ managers and facing ever-increasing numbers of students in order to do so. Disciplines which should have been drawing closer together to improve academic offerings (and increase their efficiency) were divided by fear of cutbacks, or sidetracked by the patronage offered by managers.
In research, which was said to be a priority area, access to funding became more and more impossible as bodies such as the National Research Foundation asserted conditionalities on the pursuit of intellectual work.
Even more worrying than this, publications were turned into revenue sources for the university with the predicable consequence that far too many now read like pulp fiction.
So more, not less, regulation is the lot of the contemporary university. And, as elsewhere in society, managers — the modernisers, the globalisers, the controllers — are positioned at the very centre.
This brings us back to the consequences of the meltdown.
Stripped of the status accorded them by choices made three decades ago, university mandarins are no different from their traditional counterparts in the police, the military or colonial administration.
And, as the economic crisis has deepened, everyday distrust (and anger) towards both enforcement and enforcers has returned.
Habermas recently caught this irritation with the rhetorical question: “What is so admirable about the character and mentality of [well-paid] people who do their jobs in a halfway competent manner?”
Of course, it would be folly to believe that the hold of managerialism can end immediately. However corrosive and enduring the meltdown turns out to be, institutional practices and vested interests will resist change.
And, more importantly perhaps, the attitude to these issues of a new generation of academics, whose only experience is the managed university, is unknown.
But one thing is clear: the platform upon which managing universities currently rests is shaking. Thirty years ago, as free market thinking asserted itself, the American sociologist Edward Shils wrote a book in which he spoke about “the dignity of the academic calling”. Isn’t it time to revisit this inspiring idea?
Peter Vale is Nelson Mandela professor of politics, Rhodes University, and visiting professor in the humanities at the University of Johannesburg