To date, we have looked at market mechanisms and competition in universities and shown that a) they aren’t in fact all that neo-liberal and b) particularly with respect to expanding access, there are some upsides. Today I want to look at two other facets of modern universities that often get described as neo-liberal: performance data and management.
There is some variety in the way this topic is approached – see this blog from the London School of Economics (h/t to Marc Spooner for pointing me to this piece) for one of the more reasoned ones – but basically they all comes down to the same argument, which goes as follows:
- Corporations are by definition neoliberal
- Corporations manage by objectives
- Universities seem, increasingly, to be managed by objectives (this same claim works for pretty much any public or quasi-public entity, but our focus here is higher ed)
- Objectives, by definition, need to be measured
- Therefore, by transitive property, both management and measurement are neoliberal, or at least tools in service of neoliberalism
(Some provocateurs actually extend this argument a bit further and claim that because measurement requires extra staff, the proliferation of “bureaucrats” – read: non-academic staff – is in fact a neoliberal outcome. I personally find this argument hilarious because if staff unions ever caught on to that it would be BRING ON THE NEOLIBERALISM! but so as not to caricature the larger argument I will stick to the basic five points above).
Now, without much elaboration, you can use those five points to come up with a pretty damning indictment of many aspects of modern higher education. Many objectives are difficult to measure and institutions/government sometimes box themselves into measuring some pretty ludicrous things as proxies. With only a little spin, such maladroitness can be painted as being part of a vast neo-liberal plot, of a one with the overthrow of Allende, etc. Those with a bent for self-righteousness can really go to town using those five points.
But, here’s the thing. Not all of those five points are equally true. And therein lies the problem.
Point five is true, more or less, if all of the previous points are true. Points 3 and 4 are mainly true. Point 1 depends a bit on your definition of neoliberal, but let’s posit for the moment that it is true.
The problem is point 2. Yes, corporations get managed by objectives but so do have pretty much all organizations from time immemorial. When Eisenhower was managing the invasion of Normandy, no one said to him “hey, you know what, I worry that the 82nd Airborne is looking too neoliberal, maybe we shouldn’t hold anyone accountable if they don’t take those two bridges over the Merderet River on Day 1”. Similarly, when Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuits and commanded his followers to set up missions in distant lands, it did not occur to Francis Xavier or any of the others to suggest that maybe put less emphasis on actually counting the number of people converted on because this might appear overly neoliberal.
Or, to take a more nakedly non-capitalist example, when Stalin set up a five-year plan filled with useless unit-level metrics, no one said, “Koba, dude, neoliberalism”. And that wasn’t just because the word hadn’t been invented yet or because anyone who questioned five-year plan targets tended to end up as wolf fodder on the taiga, but because the idea that Stalin was neoliberal is pure batshit crazy.
It’s not that some types of management and metrics in universities are not pernicious (some are, some aren’t – horses for courses, etc). Rather it is that identifying these things as neoliberal requires a massive and wilful ignorance of history. If it were just kids arguing this, you could shrug it off. But it isn’t: many people with PhDs – some even in history – seriously argue try to argue this point. And I think it is this more than anything which reveals much of the unseriousness of the talk about neoliberal universities.
That doesn’t of course mean that there is nothing to the idea of neoliberal universities – territory I’ll cover in tomorrow’s blog. It just means that there is a lot less of it than casual ideological poseurs would have you believe.
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This series continues to suffer from a poor-to-nonexistent definition of ‘neo-liberal’ and additionally from some very dubious argumentation.
In general, the form of the argumentation through the four posts has been: universities are x, x existed before neoliberalism, therefore x is not a reason to say universities are neoliberal. This is a poor argument. Neoliberalism contains elements that existed before neoliberalism.
But even more to the point: who is arguing that universities are neoliberal? At best, I’ve seen some people arguing that universities are *becoming* *more* neoliberal, but nobody claims universities *are* neoliberal. So who, or what, is the target of this series? Why is it being argued at all?
Further, the argument form above is shockingly bad, so bad it is not likely anyone actually offers it. It also misuses the transitive property.
Transitivity is the following: if a=b, and b=c, then a=c. The key is that it is based on the relation of *equivalence*. But nobody is saying that a university is equivalent to neoliberalism.
You might be thinking of categorical or hypothetical syllogisms, which can be expressed as follows: all a are b, all b are c, therefore all a are c; and if a then b, if b then c, therefore, if a then c.
But none of these come close to fitting the form of the argument you’ve actually presented, which is as follows: a is c, b is c, therefore a is b. No version of this argument is valid. Nobody argues that one thing is the same thing as another because they share a property (that would be like arguing ‘Alex is male, Stephen is male., therefore Alex is Stephen’).
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: so long as you are not addressing real arguments made by real people, your counterarguments are irrelevant. You are setting up non-real opposing arguments and then knocking them down. This is not good reasoning and the people you actually want to influence will dismiss it.
If you’re worried about a poor/inconsistent definition of “neoliberalism”, I can only work with the material I’m given. For reasons explained in part 1, the definition of the concept is pretty loose. I was pretty clear about how I was operationalizing it.
The idea that “no one” is claiming universities are neoliberal is…interesting. Maybe you’ve heard of Sheila Slaughter? https://www.jstor.org/stable/40342886?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. or you can see here: https://academicmatters.ca/2014/10/neoliberalism-and-postsecondary-education-a-view-from-the-colleges/, or here: https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/default/files/s63_14rustin_0.pdf. or you know what? Google the term. There are plenty of people making these arguments.
Perhaps you mean I’m not addressing the arguments *you* would make, and perhaps that’s true. But you know, go ahead and make the argument then. I’m listening.
thanks for the H/T.
In terms of war analogies- another is McNamara’s bodycount as a Key Performance Indicator of success in Vietnam- easily quantified, but terrible indicator, peverting goals to horrific outcomes
Mr Downes,
You may also wish to read Busch who strongly argues that neoliberalism has overtaken higher education; these blogs do provide food for thought and a more balanced perspective. At the very least, they provide a less fearsome depiction than Busch and many others (Sheila Slaughter, Wendy Brown) that “neoliberalism” is driving education where its going to hell in a hand basket.
Busch, L. (2017). The Knowledge for Sale : The Neoliberal Takeover of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.