The crisis in higher education
is the result of a privatized culture of management. This is a plea for
turning universities back over to the sciences.
Over
the last 1.5 years, the VU University Amsterdam has been embroiled in a
battle against the severe budgetary cuts pursued by the university
board. The university board — consisting of three members, one of whom
is the former CEO of a port company and another the former CEO of a bank
— has launched a reorganization program that includes budget cuts of
€33 million. This reorganization will result in 500-600 lay-offs and the
elimination of many small educational programs and courses — and it is
already underway.
The
opinion piece that follows was written by university employees and
published by the Dutch daily, NRC Handelsblad, on April 8, 2013.
Although the article draws on the situation at the VU Amsterdam, it
takes a broader perspective that implicates higher education as a whole.
The rising competition between academics and departments, the
commercialization of education programs, and the cuts to public funding
are recognizable across universities. A broader crisis in higher
education is playing out at the VU, and our organized response to it can
serve as a model for resistance.
The article was translated to English by Donya Alinejad and Dimitris Pavlopoulos.
The VU University Amsterdam is facing a crisis of governance. This crisis was covered in NRC Handelsblad
when the newspaper published articles covering the 9-month-long
conflict between the university board, the Works Council, the unions,
the deans’ council and the employee platform, ‘Concerned for the VU’.
Since then, Lex Bouter, the VU’s Rector Magnificus resigned from his
post. As members of ‘Concerned for the VU,’ we would like to take this
opportunity to publicly elucidate own position on the matter.
The
problems that we have raised during this period are not specific to the
VU. Nor are they simply the result of failed management or shoddy
policy. Rather, this crisis exposes much broader, structural problems in
higher education. Namely, academic research and education have been
overrun by a comprehensive commercialization process, which is
accompanied by a shift towards the model of a Manager’s University. As
we wage our opposition to this development at the VU, we are aware of
the presence of the same problems at universities across the Netherlands
and Europe more generally.
The
university’s commercialization process rests on three pillars. The first
is the introduction of a new management model that was made official in
1998 with the Modernization of University Governance law. With this
legislation, the independence of departments, faculty members and
students was seriously undermined. Universities came under the control
of a new generation of managers trained on the principles of New Public Management.
The core philosophy was that running a university is essentially the
same as running a commercial company. The consequence was that students
are treated as clients, degrees as products, while researchers and
lecturers are the personnel of the production line.
The
second pillar is the creation of a ‘market’ for higher education,
especially through a funding model that rewards universities according
to the number of degrees that they grant. Universities are incentivized
to attract as many students as possible and encourage them to graduate
as quickly as possible. The role of public relations and marketing
workers has become increasingly important as universities are stimulated
to follow their ‘competitors’ while carefully sustaining their
university’s positive image on the market. Our colleagues in other
universities are suddenly seen as competitors.
The
third and final pillar is both the least visible and the most
reprehensible: the ‘financialization’ of universities and the adoption
of the practices of financial markets. In a nutshell, this strategy
means that universities must borrow increasing amounts, for instance, in
order to finance the construction of new buildings. This has made banks
increasingly important behind-the-scenes players in the task of
upholding universities. Proponents of this approach expected the
advantage of increased efficiency.
However,
realistic evaluation reveals that these policies have had disastrous
consequences. For the managers who see the university simply as another
commercial entity it is not the quality of education that is of primary
concern, but revenue and competitiveness. The result is the
intensification of education in the pursuit of economies of scale
(larger class sizes, fewer contact hours and the emergence of wide
curricula with catchy names and little substance), but also lowered
labor costs (hiring of young, less-experienced lecturers on temporary
contracts). Moreover, universities have taken on the status of debtors,
and must therefore ensure that their credit is good. Yet, as we have
come to see, this is partly subject to the evaluation of their
management. As a result, several small and specialized educational
programs come to be evaluated as ‘loss-making’.
Moreover,
a system of allocating funding according to student success rates
produces distorted incentives as it creates a systematic pressure for
all involved to give students a passing grade. In some cases, the no-cure-no-pay
principle is being applied even to thesis supervision. If a student
fails to submit the dissertation on time, the supervision hours are not
remunerated. Fortunately, the large majority of academics have developed
a professional ethic that leads them to continue ensuring the quality
of student output. However, these systematic flaws are at odds with that
ethnical drive.
In the workplace,
managers and faculty have become increasingly alienated from one
another. The most highly specialized group of employees in the country
is treated as a dispensable labour force and faces more and more
standardization, penalization and sometimes even straightforward
surveillance. Coffee-breaks are reserved for the fittingly cynical
condemnation of managers and their ludicrous newspeak, their clumsy
involvement in the university’s core tasks of education and research and
their superficial advertizing campaigns. Unfortunately, however, the
resources, time and energy to do remedy this situation are often
lacking.
The VU governance crisis –
which we owe in part to our own passivity – can be seen as a potential
source of positive publicity for the university. This crisis is a sign
that employees here are rejecting a stance of cynical resignation and
demanding the university be given back to faculty, the administrative
personnel and the students. The market principles that were introduced
20 years ago within the semi-public sector have clearly failed to
improve higher education. While the managers that have benefited most
from this development seem to be in a deep state of denial, the
university employees at the VU are no longer buying into their
narrative. Our hope is that this crisis will not end with the empty
‘sacrifice’ of the Rector, but will instead become the beginning of a
radical change in the way higher education is organized at the
university.
What we need is a
realistic alternative. This alternative will not come from the national
government. Therefore, we call on all university employees across the
country and the continent to think and act with us.
Jan
Abbink, Donya Alinejad, Ellen Bal, Femke Brandt, Lenie Brouwer, Elise
Dijkstra, Bertie Kaal, Elly Pauelsen, Dimitris Pavlopoulos, Mark Peters,
Marina de Regt, Jeroen Rodenberg, Arjan de Rooy, Matthias van Rossum,
Ida Sabelis, Josephien Sierag, Boris Slijper, Bert van der Spek, Houkje
Vlietstra, Hans de Waardt, Pieter Wagenaar
from here
And here is a related post from November 2013
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