Tag Archives: alienation

notes on education for a future of ‘declining returns on humans’


Posted by hallymk1

To set you up for life [in debt]

Going to university is still a big decision, and it’s a choice which more and more of you are making. We want that decision to pay off, to set you up for life, and our reforms will make sure universities do just that.

Jo Johnson. 2016. Open Letter to Students

The measures will enable information on earnings and employability to be evaluated more effectively which will inform student choice. This data, presented in context, will distinguish universities that are delivering durable labour market outcomes and a strong enterprise ethos for their students.

DBIS. 2015. Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act: Education Evaluation fact sheet.

We intend to increase undergraduate tuition fees for home/EU undergraduate students in line with the inflationary increases allowed by government. You should therefore expect an inflationary increase in your fees in each subsequent academic year of the course, subject to government regulations on fee increases.

Exeter University. 2016. Tuition Fees

it is certainly not fit for the future

We all know that there is still a big debate to be had about the financial viability of the student loan system. This afternoon is not the occasion to rehearse the fragility of the Ponzi scheme that now underpins that system, but I often used to debate with the Minister’s predecessors whether Britain could look forward to a debt write-off of £70 billion or £80 billion. The basic message was pretty simple: the student loan system as currently set up is not fit for purpose, and it is certainly not fit for the future.

Liam Byrne. 2016. Higher Education and Research Bill, Second Reading

Peter Lampl and the Sutton Trust, who have championed that access for more than a decade, repeated their fears in their briefing on the Bill, including, specifically—this has been alluded to but the Secretary of State was unable to give an answer—the fact that English students have the highest level of debt in the English-speaking world. The figures are: £44,000 on graduation and over £50,000 for those requiring maintenance loans.

Gordon Marsden. 2016. Higher Education and Research Bill, Second Reading

We know that loans and more debt at a time of economic uncertainty are a luxury few in our society can afford. The biggest division in our society today is between those who are able to turn to the bank of mum and dad, and those who are not; university education and the possibility of higher fees is simply a bigger part of that picture of whether we may end up crushing talent, rather than developing it, if we do not act. Nothing in this Bill will change that. Nothing that this Government are doing will change that problem of all 18-year-olds being held back by not having the bank of mum and dad—I refer not just to those who want to go to university, but to those who have fantastic business ideas and those who want to go into FE. A truly socially mobile country would seek to work for 100% of 18-year-olds, not just 50% of them. It would recognise that the debt they might incur might affect not only their choice of whether to go to university, but their ability to get on the housing ladder and the ability for their families to look to the future at all. I say that as someone who represents too many families who have £10,000 to £15,000-worth of unsecured debt hanging over their heads as it is. If the Bill does not address that issue—indeed, if some of the changes it is making are making it even more likely that these people will incur higher debts—we will lose that talent, to the detriment of us all.

This is taking place in a country where a rising number of middle income families are now in rented accommodation because they simply do not have the savings even to begin to get on the housing ladder. We are asking them to take on more debt, and potentially to subsidise more debt for their children, and this will hold too many back.

Stella Creasy. 2016. Higher Education and Research Bill, Second Reading

The experiences of graduates in the labour market in their first six months after graduation were mixed and heavily dependent on the subject they studied and the institution they went to.

Degree subject and institutional type have a large impact on graduate earnings and there are clear gender inequalities in graduate pay.

We found that many of the attitudes graduates had last summer about the cost of their degree, its overall value, and their levels of student debt had not changed over time.

The freezing of the repayment threshold on student loans has undermined graduates’ trust and confidence in the student loans system.

Graduates are accumulating non-student debt and are carrying debt over from their time studying.

Graduates are struggling to afford life after university and are choosing to live back with their parents to save money.

Ultimately, the student loan system threatens to add to the increasing intergenerational unfairness. The concern over student debt and the rising consumer debt owed by graduates is creating a cash shortage for many, leading to expectations that home ownership and even a pension are out of reach. This is coupled with the issue of the varied graduate outcomes that the cohort have received. Poor job security and low wages are hitting many graduates, particularly those who are from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, which is compounding the impact of debt and creating a fairly grim outlook for the last of the millennial generation.

NUS. 2016. Double Jeopardy Assessing the dual impact of student debt and graduate outcomes on the first £9k fee paying graduates.

immiseration and the organic composition of capital

Over and above differential access to different types of HE, individuals’ socioeconomic background may also continue to have an effect on their labour market outcomes after graduation. This might be because students from more advantaged backgrounds have higher levels of (non-cognitive) skills (see for example Blanden et al. (2007)) skills that are not measured by their highest education level, or by their degree subject or institution. Alternatively, advantaged graduates may earn more because they have greater levels of social capital and are able to use their networks to secure higher paid employment. The literature on this is quite limited in the UK but does suggest that graduates from more advantaged backgrounds, particularly privately educated students, achieve higher status occupations and earn a higher return to their degree.

Britton, J., Dearden, L., Shephard, N., and Vignoles, A. 2016. How English domiciled graduate earnings vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socio-economic background. Institute for Fiscal Studies, p. 7.

The IFS working paper proposes an economic model in which firms choose between two organisational forms: the old, centralised form and the newer, decentralised one. Here, we think of the choice of organisational form as a choice of ‘technology’, just like IT is a kind of technology. The decentralised organisational form is more profitable if and only if the supply of graduates is sufficiently high. When the economy starts with a very low proportion of graduates, the traditional organisational form will dominate. As the relative supply of graduates increases, the relative wage will fall and, once it reaches a critical threshold, firms will begin to adopt the newer decentralised form of organisation. The relative wage will stay at that critical level until all the firms have switched to the new form. After that, the relative wage should fall if the supply of graduates continues to rise. Thus, there exists a transitional period when the relative wage of graduates is invariant to supply changes.

Hence, we believe future increases in the proportion of graduates in the UK will tend to reduce graduates’ relative wages, unless some other skill biased technology becomes available. And that technology has to be sufficiently general to be applicable in all sectors (like how the IT revolution and decentralised organisational form spread across the economy). But we do not expect a future UK higher education expansion to automatically generate such a new general technology. The decentralised organisational form was first implemented by US firms and US multinationals before it was adopted by UK firms. Now that the UK is surpassing the US in terms of the proportion of graduates, there is not another readily-available general technology that the UK can adopt from the US.

Blundell, R., Green, D. and Jin, W. 2016. The Puzzle of Graduate Wages. IFS Briefing Note BN185.

We estimate that our average teacher would have cleared his debt by age 40 under the old system, but would still have £37,384 of debt in 2014 prices under the new system and have £24,479 to be written off at the end of the repayment period (age 51). (The debt to be written off under the new system would rise to £42,247 if he had borrowed enough to cover a PGCE course as well.) By contrast, we estimate that our average lawyer would repay his debt in full under both systems, achieving this in his early 30s under the old system and in his early 40s under the new one.

savings at younger ages under the new system are offset by increased costs in later life. After the point at which graduates would have repaid their debt under the old system, most will end up paying substantially more per year for several years. These costs amount to around an additional £430 per year on average between ages 31 and 40 in 2014 prices (equivalent to around 1.6% of net earnings) and around an additional £1,090 per year on average between ages 41 and 51 in 2014 prices (equivalent to around 3.7% of net earnings). This may make it more difficult for affected individuals to meet ongoing expenses over this period.

Crawford, C. and Jin W. 2016. Payback Time? Student debt and loan repayments: what will the 2012 reforms mean for graduates? IFS Report 93.

what worries the strategists of capital

If the low economic growth of the past decade continues, the proportion of households in income segments with flat or falling incomes could rise as high as 70 to 80 percent over the next decade. Even if economic growth accelerates, the issue will not go away: the proportion of households affected would decrease, to between about 10 and 20 percent—but that share could double if the growth is accompanied by a rapid uptake of workplace automation.

These findings provide a new perspective on the growing debate in advanced economies about income inequality, which until now has largely focused on income and wealth gains going disproportionately to top earners. Our analysis details the sharp increase in the proportion of households in income groups that are simply not advancing—a phenomenon affecting people across the income distribution. And the hardest hit are young, less-educated workers, raising the spectre of a generation growing up poorer than their parents.

Dobbs, R., Madgavkar, A., Manyika, J., Woetzel, J., Bughin, J., Labaye, E, and Kashyap, P. 2016. Poorer than their parents? A new perspective on income inequality. McKinsey Global Insight.

At least as measured by GDP, the economy and society as a whole is 5% better off. But is it? The income of the already-rich has risen by just over 10%, while the income of the already-poor as fallen by 50%. Does the former really swamp the latter when it comes to the well-being of society?

This has been an uneven economic recovery, looking across regions, income and age cohorts. Large parts of the UK – many regions, those on lower incomes, the young, renters – have not experienced any meaningful recovery in their incomes or in their wealth.

it is clear that recovery has been associated with both the incomes and, more strikingly, the wealth of the least well-off having broadly flat-lined. Recovery has not lifted all boats, especially some of the smaller ones. This pattern may go some further way towards solving the recovery puzzle. Whose recovery? To a significant extent, those already asset-rich.

Haldane, A.G. 2016. Whose Recovery? Bank of England.

So the world economy has still not recovered to pre-crisis levels.  More important, the majority of households in the major economies have seen no ‘recovery’ at all.  The great jobs expansion is been mainly in low-paid, low productivity sectors or in self-employment where incomes are relatively lower.

What worries the strategists of capital is that their failure to get capitalism going again or reduce the burden for the majority to pay for it is beginning to end their political control of the majority. Brexit, the rise of Trump and other ‘populist’ leaders now threaten the end of the neoliberal ‘free trade, cheap labour’ agenda of globalisation

Roberts, M. 2015. Globalisation and whose recovery?

Policymakers should strengthen defenses against protracted periods of global financial turbulence and tighter external financial conditions.

Priorities include reining in excess credit growth where needed, supporting healthy bank balance sheets, containing maturity and currency mismatches, and maintaining orderly market conditions.

And policymakers need to stand ready to act more aggressively and cooperatively should the impact of financial market turbulence and higher uncertainty threaten to materially weaken the global outlook.

IMF. 2016. World Economic Outlook (WEO) Update: Uncertainty in the Aftermath of the U.K. Referendum, July 2016.

declining productivity is primarily reflection of the fact that an increasing proportion of the labour force and employment is essentially “warehoused” in lower productivity occupations, pending either their final elimination and replacement or (hopefully) an accelerated move into higher productivity occupations.

In other words, as technology evolves, parts of the economy become extremely competitive but these segments tend to slowly and gradually reduce productivity of everyone else. The classic example is clearly impact of Amazon on Wal-Mart or impact of electronic trading on equity or fixed income traders or technological impact on clerical, accounting or legal profession. Indeed, the same largely applies to manufacturing. Whilst economists were correct to argue in 2008/09 that the US would experience a manufacturing renaissance, we were right that it was unlikely to lead to any significant rise in employment, as technology can now deliver superior outcomes with much less labour.

Most investors would immediately argue that this is good news as there is higher productivity per employee. Unfortunately, these investors would be wrong, as this argument ignores cross-sectional movement of labour.

key difference is that whereas past technological evolutions were aimed to supplement humans, the Third Industrial revolution is aiming to replace them completely, and hence we continue to view it as intrinsically far more disruptive.

as billions of young people based in least developed countries might encounter much greater difficulty than the 1970s- 90s generation in integrating into the global economy. In a world of ‘declining returns on humans’ having too many young people might be a recipe for social and political dislocation rather than growth, even if the business climate is improved. In our view, it is quite likely that when historians examine the last one hundred years, they would classify 1950s-1990s as the ‘golden age’. Although there would be inevitable academic disputes about exact boundary (i.e. whether the golden age ended in 1980s or whether there were two golden ages, i.e. 1950s-mid 1960s and 1980s-90s), however, as an overall period, we think it was time of increasing opportunities and generally rising returns on human capital. However, 2000-2030s will likely be classified distinctly differently.

Macquarie Research. 2016. What caught my eye? v.61 ‘Lumpenproletariat’ & deglobalization.

Education for a future of ‘declining returns on humans’.

Vesuvius, I am here/You are all I have/Fire of fire, I’m insecure/For it has all been made to plan

Though I know I will fail/I cannot be made to laugh/For in life as in death/I’d rather be burned than be living in debt

Sufjan Stevens. 2010. Vesuvius.


notes on desire, anxiety and academic luddism


Posted by hallymk1

Stay in the shadows/Cheer at the gallows/This is a round up/This is a low flying panic attack

Radiohead. 2016. Burn the Witch.

ONE: showing-up as the limit of our educational hopes

Years ago I wrote the following about our relationship to the University.

I wonder if the University’s functions now are being redesigned so that they reproduce a sense of anxiety as a permanent state of exception inside teams and individuals. I wonder whether the focus on productive labour, on the socially necessary labour time of abstract academic work, and the entrepreneurial turn across higher education, each create an atmosphere of anxiety. I wonder whether the reproduction of an ambiance of anxiety is a co-operative endeavour that emerges from inside the University as a means of production that is governed by metrics, data and debt, and out of which value is scraped through the alienation of time. This reminds me of persistent inferiority and internalised responsibility, and of the shock doctrine that recalibrates what is possible.

Are defence or refusal possibilities inside the University as an anxiety machine? What is the psychic impact of: alienated labour; the disciplining of academic labour; the cognitive dissonance inherent in the contradictions of abstract/concrete labour; the rule of money? How do we learn to self-care as opposed to self-harm inside the University? One of the ways in which self-care might emerge is in looking at who is pushing back against financialisation and alienation, be that in casualised labour, or trades union anti-casualisation strategies, or through a precariat charter, or in actions like 3cosas, or in post-graduates for fair pay. These are not organisations of those with tenure, but they force us to consider both the university as anxiety/performativity machine and the idea of making opposition public, as an association of the dispossessed or impacted. They reignite the concrete/abstract relationship between higher education and the public.

Did we hope that these things would pass, and that we would not end-up being recast over-and-over inside the university as an ever-expanding site for the consumption of our educational souls and the re-production of their domination over our pedagogical possibilities? I wonder if we simply hoped that the global crises of social reproduction that we face on a daily basis would somehow not infect the university. That somehow the distilled class hatred of the HE White Paper, with its relentless focus on the rule of money, on elites, on a degree as a token of bourgeois, elitist consumption and position, on the deconstruction of higher learning as services to be commodified and purchased, would not come to pass. That somehow we would find the collective will to stitch the university back into the context and form and content of those crises, so that we could find meaningful responses to the brutality of austerity, to the brutal circulation of refugees, to the ideological brutality of Prevent and Islamophobia, and our on-going inability to care enough about environmental degradation.

And we have failed to find the collective will. We somehow felt that it was enough to be spared the rod. Or that even if we were not to be spared taking our place in the brutal execution of austerity, then we could at least find spaces for self-care as opposed to self-harm. That we could still show-up for our students or for each other, or maybe even, at a push, for ourselves.

TWO: the university as machinic whole

And all the time are revealed global narratives that bear witness to the machine-like qualities of the university as it morphs and re-morphs into something that is beyond our control. Something that is beyond our imagination. Our working lives reimagined as exchangeable or tradable services. Our working lives broken down through workload plans and performance management, so that our everyday activities can be monitored and measured, and then flung back into the machine, in order that the machine can be repurposed. Our turnaround times for assessments; our loading for preparation; our scholarly outputs; our annual teaching loads; our key performance targets; our national student survey data; our teaching excellence; our casualised contracts; our adjunct status; our educational everything; and more.

So that the university becomes a site for the ever more efficient consumption, or purchase and distribution, of societal hopes and desires. The rule of money ensures that that the university can only expand based upon the control of flows of energy that underpin these hopes and desires. So that the productive futures of our students and their families depend upon the efficient and maximised production of value, recomposed as future earnings or employability. Where the production of value is a fusion of, first, humanity made productive and efficient, and second, renewed capital infrastructure, so that the space and time of the university can be made to operate as a self-regulating and machine-like, capital-sink.

And we are reminded that in The Grundrisse, Marx wrote:

Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.)

The creation of a system of higher education intensifies the context and reality of teaching and learning, in order to drive efficiency and productivity. More technology; more efficient processes; more metrics; more performance management; less trust in the unprogrammable human; more trust in the programmable and knowable data; more. And the generation of a market through competition will ensure the domination of constant capital and infrastructure, and the power of organisational development and technology. These will ensure that the constant innovation in the motive parts of the machine determine the on-going extraction and circulation of surpluses. The machine will demand the on-going alienation of the general intellect from us, and we willingly offer this up, in the hope that we can be spared the worst.

We innovate. We manage our own performance. We offer up new efficiencies. We over-produce research and knowledge exchange or transfer. We are impactful. We do not protest the loans, or the new providers, or the reduction of educational faith and hope to commodities, or the reduction of our assessment to the machine or the learning analytics. We do not go into occupation of the terms of the struggle or the site of the struggle. We sit and hope that they do it to Julia.

And again we are reminded that in The Grundrisse, Marx wrote:

No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.

This is the systematic conversion of our work into the definite functions of the machine. So that our work as students, or professors, or professional services staff, or adjuncts, and our work as researchers or teachers or students, and our work as managers or admissions staff or on open days, and on and on, are sites for the generation of new pieces of apparatus; new parts of the machinic whole. A machinic whole designed to be productive and to generate surplus, and inside which the generation of educational hope and faith and possibility are desires that can be reduced to means of production.

THREE: higher education and the machining of desires through anxiety

And the persistent re-production of the machine enables those desires to be machined. And the machining of those desires, the re-working of those desires, is made possible through anxiety. The anxiety that is both ours and of our students. And the terrain for this is widened because the machine is infrastructure and constant capital but it is also our culture and our language and our pedagogy and our curriculum and our very, educational breath. As Virno states:

the so-called ‘second-generation autonomous labour’ and the procedural operations of radically innovated factories such as Fiat in Melfi show how the relation between knowledge and production is articulated in the linguistic cooperation of men and women and their concrete acting in concert, rather than being exhausted in the system of machinery.

It is our concrete acting in concert that is needed, wanted, desired by the machine. So we remember that in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari wrote how

There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.

That the desires we internalise from the machine are the machine’s own desires for efficiency and mindfulness and resilience. The machine’s projected desires for production and productivity and intensity, internalised by us, so that our desires are alienated and disfigured. So that we have impact or excellence. That the social desires projected into our students, for elite consumption and competition and educational positionality or comparability, for future earnings and employability, recalibrate our own desires as well as our students’ own.

Our desires situated within a field of desire recalibrated by the market. So that our higher education is disfigured through competition. So that our place in it becomes unknowable beyond the measurement of the market. And our recognition of this disfiguring is the site of our anxiety, just as we hoped that by becoming complicit with it we might save ourselves from the worst of it. Yet all along we are subordinated to the machine’s desire for our anxiety. For The Institute for Precarious Consciousness:

Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination.

The lynchpin of our subordination: my availability for my students; my teaching preparation; my relationship to my precariously-employed peers; my turnaround times; my willingness to sit on committees; my NSS scores; my TEF scores; my REF scores; my on-line presence; my impact; my scholarly outputs; my innovation; my everything. My desperate everything, including the subordination of life to work, as a means for the internalised production of anxiety that will help me to re-produce the desires of the machine for productivity and intensity.

Anxiety, alienation, desire, competition, subordination. A machinic whole.

FOUR: on academic luddism

And we recognise the damage that this does to us, as we are stripped of our educational connection to our students or our precariously-employed peers, or to our partners in other, soon-to-be-competitor institutions. The Institute for Precarious Consciousness recognise “the breakdown of all the coordinates of connectedness in a setting of constant danger, in order to produce a collapse of personality.” To struggle against this stripping-away is anxiety-inducing as we resist where we think we have limited agency. Or else it leads us towards dissociation, as we deny we have any power so we may as well exist elsewhere (behind our metrics). Or else it leads towards micro-management of our everyday experiences, so that we feel we can exert some control: at least I can negotiate the limits of my own [impact/excellence/data-driven] exploitation.

And in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari wrote of the conflicted nature of desire. That our own, concrete educational desires, for emancipation, are subsumed and disfigured by the abstracted desires of the machine. That recognising that the true liberation of our concrete desires, against their bastardisation as data about future earnings, employability and enterprise, requires that we rethink our re-production of the machine, and its anxious control.

If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence — desire, not left-wing holidays! — and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.

Through Virno, we stretch this focus on desire by relating it to what has been taken from our public education and sequestered as private-property. This is re-imagination as a form of desiring activity that is against the State and against the market, that is against the enslaving of lives through competition, that is against the idea of what the university has become, and that is against intensity, impact, resilience, mindfulness, excellence, whatever.

the question is whether the peculiar public character of the intellect, which is today the technical requirement of the production process, can be the actual basis for a radically new form of democracy and public sphere that is the antithesis of the one pivoting on the state and on its ‘monopoly on political decision’. There are two distinct but interdependent sides to this question: on the one hand, the general intellect can affirm itself as an autonomous public sphere only if its bond to the production of commodities and wage labour is dissolved. On the other hand, the subversion of capitalist relations of production can only manifest itself through the institution of a public sphere outside the state and of a political community that hinges on the general intellect.

For The Institute for Precarious Consciousness this subversion is situated against anxiety:

what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have. If we see from within anxiety, we haven’t yet performed the “reversal of perspective” as the Situationists called it – seeing from the standpoint of desire instead of power. Today’s main forms of resistance still arise from the struggle against boredom, and, since boredom’s replacement by anxiety, have ceased to be effective.

Instead they argue that we need to:

  • Produce new grounded theory relating to experience, to make our own perceptions of our situation explicit, recounted, pooled and public;
  • Recognise the reality, and the systemic nature, of our experiences;
  • Transform emotions through a sense of injustice as a type of anger which is less resentful and more focused, and as a move towards self-expression and resistance;
  • Create or express voice, so that existing assumptions can be denaturalised and challenged, and thereby move the reference of truth and reality from the system to the speaker, to reclaim voice;
  • Construct a disalienated space as a space for reconstructing a radical perspective; and
  • Analyse and theorise structural sources based on similarities in experience, to transform and restructure those sources through their theorisation, leading to a new perspective, a vocabulary of motives.

The goal is to produce the click — the moment at which the structural source of problems suddenly makes sense in relation to experiences. This click is which focuses and transforms anger. Greater understanding may in turn relieve psychological pressures, and make it easier to respond with anger instead of depression or anxiety. It might even be possible to encourage people into such groups by promoting them as a form of self-help — even though they reject the adjustment orientation of therapeutic and self-esteem building processes.

Above all, the process should establish new propositions about the sources of anxiety. These propositions can form a basis for new forms of struggle, new tactics, and the revival of active force from its current repression: a machine for fighting anxiety.

New propositions as a basis for new forms of struggle. And we remember that we might need to become academic luddites as a basis for a new form of struggle. That in order to overcome the loss of time and agency, and the stripping away of our curriculum-power and our educational intellect and our pedagogical capacities into the machine, we need to insert ourselves differently into the anxiety-machine. That we need to consider how we resist the subsumption of the university and of higher education further into the re-production of a system of alienation, precisely because it is a system of alienation, and not because our is privileged, skilled, crafted, abstracted work. This is a resistance of social rather than occupational displacement, precisely because the terrain of higher education has become a means for the re-production of specific, alienating desires across society.

We owe our publics and our society that much at least.

Thus, it is against what education is becoming, solely as a means to re-imagine what society might be, that we might strike. That we might strike to reclaim the parts of the machine that are socially-useful: the knowledge, the curriculum, the relationships, the technology, the language, the culture, and more. This is the reclamation of educational exchange-value as social use-value. Reclaiming and repurposing the parts of the machine that enable us to share our solidarity with other public workers who are being brutalised. That we might reclaim and repurpose the parts of the machine that enable us to provide solutions to global crises, rather than waiting for the market to act. That as a by-product or as a lever, we might refuse our abstracted labour where we can, as external examiners, or as reviewers for for-profit journals, or in working to rule, or wherever.

However, whilst these spaces inside the machine are a terrain for struggle, this also emerges from attempts to reclaim and to repurpose time. Slowing production and circulation and consumption time across a sector or across a society is a reminder of our humanity. It reminds us that our labour-power (and labour-time) is the source of all value. That exploited and dehumanised labour is the source of all value. As Marx argued, Capital’s desire to reduce labour-time is twinned with its desire to endless extract surplus value from that very labour as its source of power. It wishes to annihilate labour-time at exactly the moment that it desires to expand its potential for exploiting that labour-time. How then is this tension to be amplified inside the university and in solidarity actions across higher education and within society, without generating further levels of anxiety and performance and precarity? How do our struggles reclaim time from inside-and-across the terrain of higher education as a form of machine-breaking that repurposes the machine? For Marx, such struggles are rooted in the free development of individualities through associations that demonstrate the limited and limiting rule of value over our lives. They are rooted in pedagogies and curricula for association; in solidarity actions and solidarity economies; in co-operation and co-operative education.

The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.

Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.

There is something here about our collective liberating of the forces of production; our revealing and recomposing our social relations; our recognition and reclamation of time as a pedagogical project. With our students and our peers, and beyond them into society. Of finding collective spaces and times, in order to generate forms of academic luddism. As a form of academic machine-breaking that reconnects and recombines the machinic whole with its social whole for a different purpose that is calibrated by a different time.

The question is then how? And maybe when?


Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety


Posted by hallymk1

With Kate Bowles, I have an article coming out in volume 28 of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, entitled:

Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety

The article looks at the psychological impacts on academics and students of the re-engineering of HE, and of concomitant academic overwork. It undertakes this from a transnational perspective, with a focus both on anxiety amongst academic workers including students, and on the idea of the University as an anxiety machine. The article is in a special issue that employs Marx and Engels’ critical categories of labor, value, the commodity, capital, etc. in reflexive ways which illuminate the role and character of academic labor today and how its existing form might be, according to Marx, abolished, transcended and overcome (aufheben). Our focus is on the concept of subsumption.

The abstract is appended herewith.

This article analyses the political economy of higher education, in terms of Marx and Engels’ conception of subsumption. It addresses the twin processes of formal and real subsumption, in terms of the re-engineering of the governance of higher education and there-production of academic labour in the name of value. It argues that through the imposition of architectures of subsumption, academic labour becomes a source of both overwork and anxiety. The article employs Marx and Engels’ categorizations of formal and real subsumption, in order to work towards a fuller understanding of abstract academic labour, alongside its psychological impacts. The article closes by examining whether narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse and then move beyond their alienated labour.


notes on academic overwork and surplus value


Posted by hallymk1

I

In a presentation at DMU today Bahram Bekhradnia of the Higher Education Policy Institute argued that research inside universities was being conducted at the expense of teaching. His evidence for this was not academic staff workload data, but student study time. The latter emerges from his reading of HEFCE’s REFLEX project on flexible working plus the HEPI/Which? Student Academic Experience Survey from 2013. Student study time is lowering, therefore the value of degrees was lowering (as less labour was embedded in them), and therefore staff could refocus on research.

I remain unconvinced by this apparent correlation between variability in the average student study time and reallocation of time by academics between research and teaching. In particular, I do not think that it adequately reflects issues of workload stress and overwork in the sector, which have been highlighted by UCU, and in countless narratives about quitting higher education, and to which I referenced in my recent post about overwork. A counter-narrative is that the amount of surplus-labour being undertaken by both academics and students, and accumulated as surplus-value by institutions is growing. This is not a zero-sum game between research and teaching. Rather it is on-going and constant expansion of the research/teaching system, rooted in the search for absolute and relative surplus-value. It is the incorporation of everyday life as working time, so that academics extend their working day/days, so that they can increase their research and teaching and administrative outputs.

II

It is important to see this work of teaching and of research in terms of absolute and relative surplus-value.

The goal of capitalist production is not value, but the constant expansion of surplus value – the amount of value produced per unit time above and beyond that required for the workers’ reproduction. The category of surplus value not only reveals that the social surplus is indeed created by the workers, but also that the temporal determination of the surplus implies a particular logic of growth, as well as a particular form of the process of production.”

Barbara Brick and Moishe Postone (1982). Critical Pessimism and the Limits of Traditional Marxism,Theory and Society, 11(5) 636.

Inside all sectors of the economy, and now revealed inside higher education, growth is connected to ongoing processes of proletarianisation. These processes are catalysed technologically to promote consumption, production gains or to increase the rate of profit. The logic of innovation is for productivity gains, or for workplace monitoring and surveillance and management and stratification, or to catalyse the creation of value by opening up/harnessing new markets, or by stimulating innovations that further valorise capital. Thus, Christopher Newfield highlights three different types of knowledge or skill, which we might usefully relate to the expansion of capitalism through the generation of surplus-value (through the disciplining of labour and the utilisation of labour-power as a commodity).

Type C is ‘commodity skills’, which are ‘readily obtained’ and whose possessors are interchangeable. This category includes most ‘pink collar’ work that involves skills like ‘typing and a cheerful phone manner’.

Type B is ‘leveraged skills’, which require advanced education and which offer clear added value to the firm that hires such skill, and yet which are possessed by many firms. Computer programmers or network administrators are examples of essential employees who worked long and hard to acquire their knowledge, and yet who are relatively numerous. Ironically, they may have entered the field because it was large: its size may have signalled to them when they were picked a major in college–and to their stability-minded parents–something like ‘the high-tech economy will always need computer support specialists’. Yes, but not any particular computer support specialist, and not at a very high wage.

Type A consists of ‘proprietary skills’, defined as ‘the company-specific talents around which an organization builds a business’. The knowledge manager must nurture and cultivate only the skills that directly contribute to the firm’s propriety knowledge, and stamp out (or radically cheapen) the first kind of knowledge worker, whose skills are interchangeable commodities. Only the star producers–those who create proprietary knowledge–enable the firm to seek rents, and only they are to be retained, supported, cultivated, and lavishly paid.

In an indentured world focused on economic growth above all else, not everyone will enjoy the life-styles of those who produce proprietary knowledge. Through global labour arbitrage, businesses including universities ensure that commodity and leverage skills are outsourced/mechanised and that their costs are driven down. Conversely the hunt is always on for new knowledge to be valorised through exchange or transfer or through entrepreneurial activity, spill-overs and incubation.

In terms of teaching and research this bears some further analysis, especially related to the strands of teaching that enable proprietary skills to develop. These might emerge from the use of a teaching excellence framework as a gateway to drive data around teaching quality, learning environment and student outcomes/learning gain, which can be commodified so that new services can be exchanged. A side benefit is that these data then enable a medium-term justification for raising fees rooted in the competitive edge that can be generated from innovations in the production and circulation of education-as-a-service. This echoes the research terrain shaped around impact, which generates forms of proprietary knowledge.

III

Crucially, the distinctions between absolute and relative surplus value are important in engaging with the forms and content of academic labour, and an understanding of overwork (and its health-related impacts). A starting point here is a recognition that the academic working-day forms: first, the necessary labour required to enable the academic-as-labourer to re-produce her costs as wages: and second, the surplus-labour that can be materialised as profit (surpluses). In more under-developed capitalist production processes, like nascent teaching excellence processes or fee-driven contexts like that in English higher eduction, the search by universities is primarily to increase the absolute, social amounts of surplus-value that can be produced and accumulated. This happens by extending the working day, or by locating new international or lifelong markets from which to accumulate. Here the more limited returns available, plus the underdeveloped market/financial mechanisms, mean that there is less innovation that can reduce socially necessary labour time. A teaching excellence framework is situated against that, in order to generate productivity gains (and overwork).

However, competitive advantage can be gained by those universities that can innovate their academic production, so that they teach/assess/research in less labour time than that which is generally socially necessary. These universities have the possibility to produce more surplus-value relative to those with which they compete, in part because of the new capability and in part through increased capacity (generated by efficiency savings). As a result, these universities can then revolutionise the relations of production through new labour relations and working conditions. Thus, we see new management methods, workload agreements, absence/attendance management policies, and so on.

In terms of teaching, which has been weakly marketised and financialised, potential crises of underconsumption and weak profit/surpluses are offset by extending the working day, so that just-in-time teaching can take place or assessment turnaround times can be met, or so that new teaching technologies can be deployed. This process of searching for absolute surplus-value generates overwork, but it also reaches limits, in terms of the length of the working day or limited academic skillsets. As a result, universities see the application of more productive technologies or techniques that restore competitive advantage and relative surplus value. The search for relative surplus value attempts to make superfluous any academic labour (teaching, assessment, scholarship, administration, research) that is unproductive.

There are clearly contradictions between the commodity, leverage and proprietary skills of academic labour for teaching and those for research, and their relation to the generation of profit/surpluses, and as a response to sector-wide competition. The result is not research at the expense of teaching. It is the movement of absolute and relative surplus-value across the terrains of teaching and research, as a response to crisis. A further contradiction is revealed between, first the university’s need to reduce the costs of the academic labour-power that drives commodity production and exchange value (the socially-necessary labour time), and second the university’s need for new, entrepreneurial and creative concrete labour of academics in teaching and research. This underpins the constant revolutionising of the forces and relations of production, and the demand for constant reskilling and overwork. As Meyerhoff et al. Note, these contradictions flow throughout the university.

Even radical faculty who seek to enact transformations outside the university find themselves performing within the university as managers not only of their own labor, but of that of their students and their colleagues, designing curriculum and imposing regulations that require students be physically present and adopt a certain performative attitude during class time through the coercive metrics of attendance and participation grades.

Meyerhoff, E., Johnson, E., & Braun, B. (2011). Time and the University. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 10(3), 493.

The ramifications of these contradictions for universities, and the compulsion to generate both absolute and relative surplus-value, emerge from David Kernohan’s Summary of HE-related implications of 2016 Budget.

The digital revolution is transforming the world of work. As working lives lengthen and jobs change, adults will need more opportunities to retrain and up-skill. This Budget announces that, for the first time, direct government support will be available to adults wishing to study at any qualification level, from basic skills right the way up to PhD. During this parliament, loans will be introduced for level 3 to level 6 training in further education, part-time second degrees in STEM, and postgraduate taught master’s courses.

To promote retraining and prepare people for the future labour market, the government will review the gaps in support for lifetime learning, including for flexible and part-time study. The government will bring together information about the wages of graduates of different courses and the financial support available across further and higher education to ensure that people can make informed decisions about the right courses for them.

The government will continue to free up student number controls for alternative providers predominantly offering degree level courses for the 2017-18 academic year. The best providers can also grow their student places further through the performance pool.

Here is the investment in human capital that drives personal, debt-fuelled investment in education, connected to data-driven marketisation and financialisation, and further privatisation. This is education as the lifelong search for absolute and then relative surplus-value, through individual and institutional competition, grounded in the market and finance.

IV

At issue is what is to be done? One route for the generation of alternatives is to analyse the content and forms of academic labour in terms of social labour. This seeks to abolish the fetishised role of the academic whilst retaining the intellectual content of its labour at the level of society. Thus, intellectuality/intellectual activity would become a communal good, and its social development would stand against overwork.

Now if this assumption is made, the general character of labour would not be given to it only by exchange; its assumed communal character would determine participation in the products. The communal character of production would from the outset make the product into a communal, general one. The exchange initially occurring in production, which would not be an exchange of exchange values but of activities determined by communal needs and communal purposes, would include from the beginning the individual’s participation in the communal world of products… labour would be posited as general labour prior to exchange, i.e., the exchange of products would not in any way be the medium mediating the participation of the individual in general production. Mediation of course has to take place.

Karl Marx. 1986. Grundrisse. London: Penguin, p. 108.

Joss Winn quotes Peter Hudis in his analysis of this passage, with ramifications for this discussion of absolute/relative surplus-value, and individualised overwork, in the context of alternative, communal activity that is defined socially rather than abstractly.

First, Marx acknowledges that labour would have a ‘general’ character in a new society. However, its generality would be radically different from what exists in capitalism, where discrete acts of individual labour become connected to one another (or are made general) through the act of commodity-exchange. In contrast, labour becomes general in the new society prior to the exchange of products, on the basis of the ‘the communal character of production’ itself. The community distributes the elements of production according to the individuals’ needs, instead of being governed by social forms that operate independently of their deliberation. Labour is general insofar as the community directly decides the manner and form of production. Marx is not referring here to the existence of small, isolated communities that operate in a world dominated by value-production. As noted above, Marx never adhered to the notion that socialism was possible in one country, let alone in one locale. He is pointing, instead, to a communal network of associations in which value-production has been superseded on a systemic level. Labour is therefore directly social, not indirectly social.

Second, Marx acknowledges that exchange of some sort would exist in a new society. However, exchange would be radically different from what prevails in capitalism, which is governed by the exchange of commodities. Instead of being based on exchange-values, prices, or markets, distribution would be governed by an exchange of activities that are ‘determined by communal needs and communal purposes’. The latter determines the exchange of activities, instead of being determined by the exchange of products that operate independently of it.

Third, Marx acknowledges that social mediation would exist in a new society. However, mediation would be radically different from that under capitalism, where it has an abstract character, since ‘mediation takes place through the exchange of commodities, through exchange value’ and money. In socialism, in contrast, ‘the presupposition is itself mediated, i.e., communal production, community as the basis of production, is assumed. The labour of the individual is from the outset taken as [directly] social labour’.

See Joss Winn. 2015. Communism In Practice: Directly Social Labour.

(Hudis, P. (2013) Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Leiden: Brill. pp. 110-113.)

In overcoming overwork revealing the processes for the generation of absolute and relative surplus-value through academic labour are central. This is not a trade-off between research and teaching. This is addressing a culture of overwork and illness that is being structurally imposed as teaching intensity, learning gain, teaching excellence, and which is manifested as anxiety and illness. Only in this way can a discussion of meaningful, communal alternatives situate intellectual work at the level of society, rather than fetishised and exploited academic labour at the level of the market.


notes on academic overwork


Posted by hallymk1

This post was written whilst listening to Sharon van Etten’s Glastonbury set from 2015.

One: Preamble

This is a post about the proletarianisation of the university. This is a post about the exploitation of our labour-time. This is a post about how the political economics of higher education determine the annihilation of our souls because the very humane values we believed that we would live by have become fragmented and restructured by competition. Have become fragmented and restructured for value. This is a post about how our tears matters because they are the way in which our souls express solidarity with ourselves and those of others. This is a post about how we may lament that it was otherwise, when instead the abolition of the present state of things is our only alternative.

  • I have written about the proletarianisation of the University, in terms of the subsumption of academic life, through competition and financialisation, here.
  • I have made some notes about the [inevitable] proletarianisation of the University, in terms of student and staff narratives of dehumanisation, here.
  • I have written about Academic subordination to abstract time, here.

TWO: Broken

There is a different tenor of narrative emerging. Sets of narratives about how our whole, academic existence bleeds our souls in the name of value. Performance anxiety that bleeds our souls in the name of value. And so Liz Morrish has described how

This week I chose to open up to students about the relentless stress faced by academic staff in universities. Enough of the omerta, the conspiracy of silence.

What made me do this? Well, I have watched one after another of my colleagues taking sick leave, seeking help from the occupational health service, reporting loss of sleep or just looking exhausted.

I see the quitlit of academics daily. It is everywhere. I see the recounting of how the ongoing pain of academic reproduction, the constant reinvention of the academic Self in Student Satisfaction scores, relentless research publication and scholarship, entrepreneurial activity and knowledge transfer, workload management, performance management, is obliterating a meaningful life. This is overwork that obliterates the possibility that the academic might reproduce herself socially, because there is no time for care of the Self. That time is academically unproductive; unproductive for a life that is for work. And yet it also demands a level of productivity that is never enough. That can never be good enough. As Siobhan O’Dwyer argues

When your ongoing employment hangs on the outcome of a fellowship application that has a less than 20% success rate, it’s easy to abandon self-care in favour of working nights and weekends to increase your chances. When moving interstate or overseas is the only way to pursue your vocation, it’s hard to maintain a relationship or a sense of self. Almost every academic I know is either overweight, living with a mental illness, or has an autoimmune disorder. Those who’ve been lucking enough to avoid these things tend to be single, childless against their will, or in unhappy marriages. Almost all are financially worse off than their same aged, non-academic friends.

And this vocation is parasitic on the souls of staff and students, so that, as Liz Morrish continues, it enforces internalised overwork that then manifests itself as illness.

I told [my students] you could work 60 hours a week, never take a holiday or weekend off, have internationally regarded publications – lots of them, write textbooks, be a great teacher, and managers will still ask for more. And more.

I told them you are measured only by what you have not managed to achieve, not what you have achieved, never mind how valuable or prestigious.

I told them about the effects of long-term stress on the mind and body.

And Plashing Vole has outlined what this looks like in his 13 hour day. And a millennium ago, or so it seems, I explained how, in spite of and because of deteriorating mental health, I just had to keep on being productive. And Siobhan O’Dwyer argues that

you’ll understand why I put everything I owned in boxes and got on a plane when I was offered a permanent academic position in the UK. Although the move will set me back financially and require me, once again, to build a life from the ground up, it’s a small price to pay for certainty and the opportunity to pursue my passion for research and education at an international level.

Just look at what they make us give.

THREE: movements

I wonder how these narratives, which illuminate solidarity between staff and students, become more than moments of solidarity? How do they become movements of solidarity? As Kate Bowles argues academic narratives are important:

because our role is to educate, it really matters how we manage our own working. Whatever we speculate in marketing or curriculum about the future of work, the practice we model to students everyday is how we occupy our own jobs now.

If the expectations of academic pace and productivity are making work unsafe for some, shouldn’t we look harder at the values of the institution that causes these pressures to seem reasonable to anyone?

And the dissonance between values and pressures underscores protests by students at the University of Reading about their current Professional and Administrative Services Review of non-academic roles, as the University responds to a £14.8m deficit. As Niall Hamilton reports:

Today students and staff from University of Reading united in solidarity against job cuts happening across campus. Management at the University of Reading, under the PAS review, is currently targeting over 1,500 crucial but non-academic jobs.

About the same review, Nathan Hyde comments that:

The controversial £36 million review has prompted the university to adopt a new centralised operational model for administrative services and streamline those services by altering hundreds of job roles, offering voluntary severance packages and making redundancies.

Meanwhile at the University of Birmingham, values and pressures collide where there are ongoing threats of redundancies, in spite of surpluses being generated.

Dr Roland Brandstaetter , said: “We cannot see an end of this avalanche of proposed redundancies. Every few months, the University adds another unit. While we are negotiating on the avoidance of redundancies more and more individuals are added to the list of proposed dismissals. We are exhausting all negotiation options and soon we will have no other choice left than to ballot for industrial action. The stress levels staff members are exposed to are not acceptable any longer. I am seriously worried about the wellbeing of staff at the University of Birmingham.”

Is there a potential for a movement against exhaustion that might spill-over national boundaries? There are reports of 100 redundancies at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. And the Teachers’ Union of Ireland is concerned that the enforced mergers through the proposed Technological Universities Bill will damage staff.

We remain gravely concerned about the potential consequences of this Bill given the current crisis of underfunding, understaffing and precarious employment in the institutes.

I wonder if it is possible, in the face of this assault on academic identity that is enacted through time and performance, to imagine a more general transformation of social relations. To work for the abolition of the academic labour that we fetishize as much as our managers. To work for this abolition as we work for the abolition of wage-labour in general.

FOUR: the rule of money

And we know from our reading of McGettigan, and our reading of Universities UK assessments, and our reading of the HE Green Paper, that the rule of (value for) money dominates our academic existence. And I remember what Engels wrote on the Condition of the Working Class in England:

I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper… For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted.

Frederich Engels. 1845. The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie to the Proletariat.

The instantiation of money for our social relations drives competition between academics, between academics and professional services staff, between academics and students, between subject teams across universities, between higher education institutions, and so on. Competition for students, over scholarly publications, and most importantly, over time, so that we have no control over the surplus time that the University demands from us, and that the university seeks to manage though workload planning, absence management, performance management, teaching/research excellence. As a result, their domination of our academic clock-time becomes a means of internalising entrepreneurial activity.

Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes. Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their place. The workers are in constant competition among themselves as are the members of the bourgeoisie among themselves. The power-loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other.

Friedrich Engels. 1845. Competition.

I remember from my reading of Capital that the technological and organisational innovations being enforced on higher education are a desperate outcome of the logic of competition, which itself demands the development of the productive power of labour and an attrition on the costs of labour. We witness an increased technical composition of an individual capital or business, like a university, as a response to the need to increase surpluses (as a form of accumulation). This puts further pressure on the demand for labour, as investment in physical and virtual estates, and technological innovation in services, rise. As a result, there is a flow between:

  • the need for universities to compete and to remain productive through technological and organisational innovation;
  • the ability of universities to drive down the labour-time for assessing/teaching/publishing compared to competitor institutions, so that it can maintain competitive advantage;
  • the concomitant rise in casualised or precarious employment, because by driving down labour costs university senior managers buy a greater mass of labour power or ‘progressively replaces skilled labourers by less skilled, [and] mature labour power by immature’;
  • changes in the technical conditions of the process of academic production (through digital innovation, new workload agreements, and so on), which enable new accumulations of surplus academic products to become additional means of production. This drives new markets, or internationalisation or digital learning strategies, and offers the possibility of throwing academic labourers from one sphere of production (the university) into new ones (private HE providers or alternative service providers);
  • the ability to sustain surpluses, as concentrations of accumulated wealth, in part by forcing academic labour to set in motion more means of production, in order to reduce the relative size of its labour costs, and even worse to become self-exploiting entrepreneurs;
  • the ‘accelerated accumulation of total capital’ required to absorb new (early career) academic labourers or even those already employed, through the constant revolutionising of the means of production and the search for new markets for expanded cycles of accumulation; and
  • the drive to centralise and monopolise the production, circulation and accumulation of academic value (through league tables, enabling market exit, and so on), which changes the composition of capital by increasing the constant, technical parts (the estate) and reducing the variable costs of labour).

These [academic] labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal [in their teaching, assessment, feedback, research, scholarship, knowledge exchange], are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 1848. Communist Manifesto.

As Marx notes, this tends to create a surplus, precarious population.

it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus population.

Karl Marx. 1867. Progressive Production of a Relative surplus population or Industrial Reserve Army.

FIVE: overwork

Increasingly abstract time dominates academic labour: the 50-minute hour; the four-week turnaround for feedback on work; being always-on through tethered technologies; the production of journal articles and books; the production and circulation of learning materials; the production and circulation of assessments and feedback; the exchange of ideas as commodities; the governance of production and circulation by intellectual property, patent and copyright law. A value-chain that is real and virtual, and governed by abstract time whilst its temporalities are regulated by the cultural space/time of student-as-consumer.

Abstract time dominates the life of the University as academic labour is really subsumed and recalibrated by capital. As the products of academic labour are re-constituted as commodities, academic labour is disciplined by impact, performance management and internalising league tables and satisfaction scores. The focus becomes less the concrete labour that produces a journal article or a podcast or a report, but the value that can be extracted from those products as they are exchanged through research funding or knowledge transfer or the fees that accompany student retention, and then realised through the accumulation of wealth.

Amongst others, Adam Price asks How much do our academics work? and highlights that some staff are keeping and sharing informal tallies of their time on task, as evidence of academic overwork. And yet we need to be careful because managers need evidence of time spent on task in order to drive down the socially-necessary labour time for specific activities. Because, if they can evidence that she can turn scripts around in 15 days, why do you take 16? Or if they can evidence that we can turn scripts around in 15 days, why would you wish to study somewhere it takes 16?

And as a result of this domination of abstract time, and of the compulsion of managers to drive down socially-necessary labour time, overwork redefines academic life.

The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists

Karl Marx. 1867. Progressive Production of a Relative surplus population or Industrial Reserve Army.

In the academy, overwork is a function of, first the threat of cheaper labour, be it international or domestic and precarious, and second senior managers’ demands that we become perpetually efficient. That we are able to reinvent ourselves over-and-over, to do the teaching, preparation, assessing, feedback, knowledge transfer, curriculum design, scholarship, and so on, of multiple academics. To internalise the academic division of labour, that demands superhuman, entrepreneurial possibilities, or our reduction to cheapened, precarious teaching or research assistant, or project manager, or whatever. And we know that in the latter case, where the academic is unable structurally or personally to deliver superhuman capabilities, their labour risks becoming simplified and worthless.

And in the attempt t become superhuman, we generate and offer-up our own surplus labour time to the university. This is a desperate attempt to remain on-side, and the university as business, as competing capital, takes this as central to its model for grounding growth and competitive edge through exploitation.

Let us assume that the average necessary labour time = 10 hours, and that the normal surplus labour = 2 hours, hence the total daily labour time of the worker = 12 hours. Now assume that the capitalist sets the worker to work for 13 hours a day during 6 days of the week, hence 1 hour over the normal or average surplus labour time. These 6 hours amount to 1/2 working day in the week. Now one has to take into consideration more than this surplus value of 6 hours. In order to appropriate 6 hours of surplus labour, the capitalist would under normal conditions have had to employ 1 worker for 3 days or 3 workers for one day, i. e. he would have had to pay for 30 (3 × 10) hours of necessary labour time. With this daily extra hour of surplus labour he obtains half a day of surplus labour a week, without having to pay for the 3 days of necessary labour time he would have had to pay for under normal conditions, so as to appropriate the 6 hours of surplus labour. In the first case a surplus value of only 20%; in the second, one of 30%; but the last 10% of surplus value do not cost him any necessary labour time.

Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63. Absolute Surplus Value by Karl Marx: Advantageof Overwork.

They need our overwork. Our surplus labour time. Our exhaustion. Our internalised precarity. Our anxiety. In the face of the threat of restructuring and redundancy, they need us to internalise and reproduce their exploitation. To make their exploitation our means of academic reproduction. So that we truly become self-exploiting entrepreneurs. Because in such a high-status game, what could be worse than becoming worthless? And the double-bind is, for all the narratives of academic distress and quitlit, for all the stories in search of solidarity, that our overwork is a function of their marketised and financialised competition. It reduces us so that academic competes against academic, in order to reduce socially-necessary labour time, and to immiserate academic labour conditions further.

Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease.

The labourer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labour, either by working a great number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labour. The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does; so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class.

Wage Labour and Capital. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm

Saying no. Refusing work. Working to rule. How else to demonstrate solidarity?

SIX: social reproduction

And the stories are worse, because we know that academic overwork damages our wider social relationships. Our overwork squeezes the space and time available for the reproduction of the Self. It distorts the ability we have to care for ourselves. To clean, feed, love, nurture ourselves and those around us. So that, time-poor, we outsource so many of our needs or those of our families. So that work and accumulation colonises our care as well, and our souls are more fully lost to us in this ‘brutalising condition’ (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England). As Sylvia Federici states

while production has been restructured through a technological leap in key areas of the world economy, no technological leap has occurred in the sphere of domestic work significantly reducing the labour socially necessary for the reproduction of the workforce.

We are brutalised through the compartmentalisation and fragmentation of ourselves as academics or teachers or researchers, which reduces our humanity, and which is a result of our desperate urge to be socially productive. And so we help to conjure up new forces of production, through technology and organisation and innovation, which in turn further our exploitation and reduce our ability to take care of our social reproduction. This is an academic arms-race that we cannot win.

[T]hey mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.

Karl Marx. 1867. Different Forms of the Relative surplus population. The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation.

And here the terrain of the personal narratives noted above connects in-part through academic time. These narratives open-up the possibility that we might discuss a reduction of academic competition and overwork, in relation to academic time and the socially-necessary labour time of academic work, and the abolition of wage labour and exploitation itself. As Jehu notes:

Since the competition within the working class is over who will sell her labor power to capital, as a practical matter a reduction of hours would reduce the competition within the working class. But it could not reduce working class competition without also reducing capitalist profits. The working class thus not only must overcome competition within its ranks to reduce its hours of labor, the reduction of competition within the working class makes possible the end of wage labor itself. The reduction of hours of labor is just the periodic expression of the movement to end wage labor in its entirety.

Because the flipside is the need to internalise and incorporate the kind of employability bullshit that focuses on depersonalising (dissociating?), picking yourself up, brushing yourself off, and generating your own internal value (moving forward). Or, as Siobhan O’Dwyer notes, generating uncertainty as an acceptable form of academic post-traumatic stress disorder.

But here’s the thing: I still don’t feel certain. Twelve years of uncertainty and instability has taken its toll. Multiple moves have taught me never to get too comfortable; to not recycle the packing boxes but instead keep them at the back of the closet. As a result of the unpredictable mix of fellowship successes and rejections, I have internalised the message that I am not good enough. Too many ‘down to the wire’ moments –  in which I was forced to wait until just a few  weeks before a contract ended to find out if I would have another – have made me question my worth. And so I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I keep wondering why they hired me. I hesitate to buy new clothes or appliances, knowing they’ll max out the 30kg luggage allowance if I have to move again. I was genuinely confused when my new boss suggested I spend my first few weeks “just getting to know people.

Perhaps, as Amy Wendling notes, academic time appears to be our everything and must be made nothing. No thing at all. Our fetishized academic existence annihilated, so that we might return to some alternative form of intellectual, physical and humane existence.

[I]n the communist future, which is not subject to the calculus of value, time must diminish in importance. When we extrapolate Marx’s visions of free time, therefore, we must not only envision the lengthening of the disposable hours the worker marks between short stints of productive labor. We must instead imagine a modern life freed from time, or at least modern life freed from time’s abstract and alienating dominations. (p. 199)


notes in support of Rhodes Must Fall


Posted by hallymk1

I

My two most recent articles have referenced Rhodes Must Fall. The first, “Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety” (with Kate Bowles), argues that narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse and then move beyond their alienated labour. It develops a point that I have been trying to articulate about the process of abolishing academic labour. The second, “Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education” (with Keith Smyth), argues that the university is reproduced by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. One possible way to address crisis is by decolonising and then re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Master’s House community.

In both instances I have been trying, with my collaborators, to imagine what educational repair might look like. The idea of educational repair is critical because it focuses on liberating the curriculum as a social use-value, through a critical questioning of the received canon and the pedagogic practices that reinforce or reproduce hegemonic, social positions. One reading of educational repair is that by revealing and then challenging the racialized nature of the curriculum, it becomes possible to enable repair as a form of social justice. Just as the dominant social goals of education enact forms of violence against specific groups by marginalising or silencing them, more progressive pedagogic practices enable repair to the fabric of society and education. This is one of the key reasons why I support Rhodes Must Fall.

II

A range of campaigns by students and staff of colour have emerged as critical, transnational and local movements and moments in the struggle against power and capital in the university. These include: Rhodes Must Fall; the work of Cambridge students to get the Benin Cockerel statue returned to Nigeria; Dismantling the Master’s House at University College London, and related campaigns around #whyismycurriculumwhite and #whyisntmyprofessorblack; the campaign at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, #StandWithJNU; and the campaign to get the Harvard Law School to drop its shield because it incorporates the crest of Isaac Royal Senior, who built much of his wealth through slave labour.

As Azad Essa argues:

From Delhi to Addis Ababa to Durban, students have recognised that a grand collusion of capital and state is in the process of destroying their futures. The status quo is untenable.

In India, the rage manifests itself against caste inequalities, misogyny, communalism, and rising Hindu authoritarianism that hides itself under an agenda of “development” and “Make in India” or “India shining”.

In South Africa, the rage seen over the past six months over tuition fees and outsourcing, is a refusal to accept continued economic apartheid that excludes the majority of black South Africans under the guise of the “rainbow nation” and “non-racialism”.

[D]issent is not just restricted to education fees – students are demanding a decolonisation of syllabus, language, and the very ways in which knowledge has become a tool to keep people from thinking.

Azad Essa. #StandWithJNU and #FeesMustFall: The reemergence of the student movement.

I read these campaigns inside the university through a deeper connection with the work of those fighting for Black Lives Matter, and in particular its focus on restorative justice across society.

We are committed to collectively, lovingly and courageously working vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension all people. As we forge our path, we intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.

The guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter campaign, focused upon intersectional empathy and justice, might be the organising principles for a deeply pedagogical, alternative social form.

The collective work of students/staff across higher education matters because the university is a critical node inside which the intersection of societal injustices, through class, gender and race are revealed. For instance, campaigns like 3cosas demonstrated the asymmetrical impact on women of colour of the disparity between university and contract workers, in terms of sick pay, holidays and pensions. Injustice is also revealed through the governance and regulation of the university, and in the definition, design and delivery of its curricula. In particular, as a recent ContestedTV round table on What has and what will #RhodesMustFall achieve?, the movement is detonating issues that flow from the symbolism of artefacts (be they statues or the curriculum) inside and beyond higher education. These include the following.

  • The role of knowledge production in the heart of the historic British Empire, as an ongoing process for the transnational, colonial production/reproduction of capital. This does not accept the premises on which the curriculum and the university are built, namely dispossession. The legacy of Rhodes is the legacy of corporations and vested interests that despoil the planet continuing to enact their legitimacy through philanthropic work inside HEIs. This forces us to question how we conduct ourselves today, and how our educational cultures, curricula and organising principles enact violence in contemporary society
  • The hegemonic cultural context of knowledge production, scholarship and research, which reiterates the white voices that are to be heard and those (non-white) that are silenced. As a result, the power that is reinforced in the classroom defines who speaks/listens/assesses and on what terms. Importantly, the curriculum is often presented as neutral, in spite of its context.
  • That the construction of the curriculum and its assessment enforce differentials in attainment that then form the reproduction of racialized inequalities. Wider societal inequalities are amplified inside the university.
  • Control of the curriculum ensures that political knowledge and therefore political activism is limited. Cybernetic forms of control, through the reduction of the curriculum to a system prescribed by functions, feedback, analytics, and degrees of control, then tends to naturalise assumptions about performance. This risks creating ghettos inside-or-outside the curriculum.
  • The thinking led us into this wider crisis of sociability, which infects political economy and our global socio-environment, is not that which will liberate us. Moreover, the trans-historical nature of this thinking, rooted in neo-colonial, capitalist discourses, is provincial and racialized.
  • What is required is a decolonisation of the hierarchy of knowing/doing, inside the university, which then pushes back against fetishized university knowledge both in terms of its content and organising principles. This work sees the university as a node for the intersection of protest, where links to local communities emerge against a reified academia in response to concrete issues.
  • This movement of decolonisation cannot be created through university diversity manuals, which sidestep the everyday realities of silencing and political activism, and which ignore the intersection of race, gender and class. As Tadiwa Madenga notes “I also think it’s important to recognise the word that they will never use, which is decolonisation. They will always only ever use diversity. There is a reason they don’t want to even touch that word.”
  • Symbols, like statues and curriculum, remind us of the systematic violence on which much of higher education is built; they form reminders of accumulation by dispossession. They force us to interrogate domination. This is a process of decolonising our minds that is a reference point in the creation of counter-hegemony in the movement to abolish power.
  • The movement to decolonise or dismantle the university in its current form is one of disrupting the function of Empire, primarily in support of decolonising the global South (the former colonial/neo-colonial world). This is an entry point into a wider discussion about decolonialism and structural forms of racism.

When probed about what they mean by ‘history’, many of our critics actually reveal a deep ignorance of Africa, and Rhodes. What they really express is a desire to preserve infantile fables that reinforce their identities. History is not as simple or static as colonial apologists want it to be: removing the statue from its current position would itself mark the moment at which Oxford entered a more honest present. We should not be so overawed by history that we are afraid to make it.

By calling for the removal of the Rhodes statue, RMF wants to show just how far Oxford will go to defend the indefensible. Just how unwilling it will be to look itself in the mirror. Just what reflexes still dominate its systems of power.

Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh. Rhodes Will Fall.

III

Support for Rhodes Must Fall is immanent to academic activism, and the refusal of instrumental, conservative ideological positions that stress the exchange-value of higher education over its social, use-value. This forces us to question our engagement with the heart of the university, as a functional, technocratic space dominated by business cases for growth that are rooted in new markets rather than reparation. As Giroux argues, this is never enough.

In an age of overwhelming violence, war, and oppression, universities must create formative cultures that allow students to assume the role of critically engaged citizens, informed about the ideologies, values, social relations, and institutions that bear down on their lives so that they can be challenged, changed, and held accountable

Thus, intersectional, intergenerational movements that refuse the violent imposition of hierarchies onto our lives enable alternative infrastructures to be imagined. Student activism against such imposition has been, and continues to be, met with state-sanctioned violence. In the accelerated implementation of neoliberalism within the UK, opposition is branded as outlaw or is brutalised in the kettle. As societies are disrupted by climate change, debt, food production and energy availability, there is a quickening of the transformation of the state towards an iron cage of control, in the name of business-as-usual, growth and capital. And all this is a world where, as Žižek argues, our liberal aim is “to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on.” Žižek queries whether it is enough that “the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned.” We might argue that very set-up is demarcated by gender, race and class, and is framed by the failure of liberal democracy to humanise in the face of the State’s oppression and antagonism.

And so Rhodes Must Fall resonates for me with something I noted a long time ago:

what is needed is our co-operative conquest of power as a step towards the abolition of power relations. At this point we are able to re-inscribe a different set of possibilities upon the world. At this point we are able to move beyond protest about economic power and occupations of enclosed spaces, to critique how our global webs of social relations contribute to the dehumanisation of people, where other humans are treated as means in a production/consumption-process rather than ends in themselves able to contribute to a common wealth… As the everyday is folded into the logic of capital, and the everyday is subsumed within the discipline of debt and the apparent foreclosure of the possibilities for an enhanced standard of living for us all, then the everyday becomes a space in which revolt can emerge.

This echoes John Holloway’s work against power.

For what is at issue in the revolutionary transformation of the world is not whose power but the very existence of power. What is at issue is not who exercises power, but how to create a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity, on the formation of social relations which are not power relations.

We cannot live in ignorance of the power relations that dominate our lives. As teachers we cannot teach in ignorance of the power relations that dominate our lives. As students we cannot learn in ignorance of the power relations that dominate our lives.

NOTE: Danica Savonick and Cathy Davidson have produced An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies of Gender Bias in Academe. It includes a growing range of analyses of the struggles that are being recounted in the university, including the following (chosen here for their focus on gender and race).

Chavella T. Pittman. 2010. “Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students”. In Teaching Sociology.

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. Gonzalez, and Angela P. Harris, eds, 2012. Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Available at: http://www.usu.edu/usupress/books/index.cfm?isbn=8695
https://www.facebook.com/PresumedIncompetent?ref=br_tf

Joan C. Williams, Katherine W. Phillips, and Erika V. Hall. 2014. “Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias Against Women of Color in Science”. The Center for WorkLife Law.

These might also be extended to focus upon the experience of precariously employed staff, the mental health of graduate students and staff, the labour conditions of professional services staff, and so on.

IV

The political economics of this struggle are also critical, and reinforce the position of the university as a node in the flows and reproduction of global capital, in its productive, cultural and intellectual forms. Reflecting on Holloway’s discussion of the constrictive nature of capital and that the only autonomy possible exists for capital itself, we might think about the relationship of the university and struggle inside the university to this system of domination.

The argument against this is that the constitutional view isolates the [University] from its social environment: it attributes to the [University] an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the [University] does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the [University] does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any [University] that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the [University] territory.

As Mike Neary notes: “The struggle is not for the University, but against what the University has become.” This includes the role of the University in processes of global labour arbitrage, which strengthen the transnational power of activist networks that are using education as a countermeasure against a global reduction in the rate of profit. Thus, the World Bank Education Sector Strategy ties educational innovation and the rights of the child to ‘strategic development investment’, with an outcome being a strengthening of those labour pools for privatised knowledge, innovation, and enterprise. The globalised deployment of technologies is critical in this process, and underscores the aims of organisations that sponsor capitalist development through philanthropy, as philanthro-capitalism. Moreover, educational technology becomes a fundamental strand of a strategy for commodity-dumping and value extraction from other arms of the globalised system, including the flow of skilled labour from the global South to the global North.

This matters in the context of Rhodes Must Fall because, as Michael Roberts argues:

the huge low wage proletariat that has emerged in the last 30 years is the key to the profits of imperialism, transferred from the South to the North… In 2010, 79 percent, or 541 million, of the world’s industrial workers lived in “less developed regions,” up from 34 percent in 1950 and 53 percent in 1980, compared to the 145 million industrial workers, or 21 percent of the total, who in 2010 lived in the imperialist countries (p103). For workers in manufacturing industry, this shift is more dramatic still. Now 83 percent of the world’s manufacturing workforce lives and works in the nations of the Global South.

Roberts quotes John Smith’s recent book on super-exploitation:

The wages paid to workers in the South are affected by factors that have no bearing on or relevance to the productivity of these workers when at work, factors arising from conditions in the labor market and more general social structures and relations affecting the reproduction of labor-power, including the suppression of the free international movement of labor and the emergence of a vast relative surplus population in the Global South. This knocks a large hole in the tottering edifice of mainstream economics.

The exploitation of labour has increased through a shift in both absolute surplus value through a longer working day and a surplus population, and in relative surplus value through technological and organisational innovation, which both reduce the value of labour-power. However, a raft of super-exploitative movements impact workers globally by driving wages below the value of labour power, through an attrition on labour rights, an assault on social care and pensions, zero-hours contracts and precarious employment, enforced entrepreneurship, and so on. Moreover, this super-exploitation is also cultural, and ignores the fact that much growth or GDP in the global North, including that which is produced inside universities, is predicated upon resources from the global South.

much of the value in, say, US GDP is not value created by American workers but is captured through multinational exploitation and transfer pricing from profits created from the exploitation of the workers of the South. GDP confuses value creating with value capture and so does not expose the exploitation of the South by the imperialist North: “GDP as a measure of the part of the global product that is captured or appropriated by a nation, not a measure of what it has produced domestically. The D in GDP, in other words, is a lie.” (Smith, quoted by Roberts, p278).

Moreover, for Smith there are critical questions that have ramifications for the organisation and reproduction of the higher education as a node in a global web of production, namely:

the exploitative character of relations between core and peripheral nations, the higher rate of exploitation in the latter, and the political centrality of the struggles in the Global South (p223).

At issue are the connections between super-exploitation in both the global North and South, and struggles to decolonise not just the academy but our minds, as we become aware of the intersecting domination of our capitalist system of producing life as it plays out in race, gender and class terms. As Roberts argues

There may well be more room for imperialism to exploit the proletariat globally and so counteract falling profitability again, for a while. There are still reserve armies of labour from the rural areas in many countries to be drawn into globalised commodity production (and yes, often at below-value wages). But there are limits to the ability of imperialism to raise the rate of exploitation indefinitely, not least the struggle of this burgeoning proletariat in the South (and still substantial numbers in the North).

How we connect local examples of historical, material and on-going super-exploitation and dehumanisation, that respect and emerge through campaigns like Rhodes Must Fall, is one step in a movement of abolition.

V

I want to think about this movement in the context of the abolition of academic labour, in particular through an intellectual (rather than fetishized and academic) mental inversion. This takes Rhodes Must Fall as prefigurative of an alternative form of society that is decolonising its racism and neo-colonialism, as a precursor to decolonising our minds from capital. Here intersectional forms of solidarity, between communities fighting for reparative justice in a range of contexts, is central. These are systematic problems that demand a systematic movement the constituent elements of which articulate collective solidarity, and that contribute practices to that wider struggle. These situate the university as a node in the flows of capitalist social relations, and as such it becomes a space that needs to be refused, abolished, overcome, and reimagined through a process of social transformation.

At present the reproduction of the university for value is underwritten by a social infrastructure that has been corporatized. Indenture, bonds, debts, precarious employment, ad so on each reinforce the domination of a specific, financialised view of life, which then squeezes the space for students and staff (let alone activists) to reproduce themselves beyond the market. What movements like Rhodes Must Fall may offer us is an idea of an alternative infrastructure that gives us the capacity to move consistently against forms of oppression and domination, both inside-and-outside the university. This inside/outside context is important where we recognise that they have weaponised social reproduction (how we find the resources to remake ourselves for the market), in its racial, gendered and class-based forms. In so doing, we may be able to generate serious alternative versions of reproduction, where more exclusive forms are increasingly closed to many of us through the State.

As Robin D. G. Kelley argues, a movement for imagining alternatives operates both inside-and-outside, and enables:

black students to choose to follow Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call to become subversives in the academy, exposing and resisting its labor exploitation, its gentrifying practices, its endowments built on misery, its class privilege often camouflaged in multicultural garb, and its commitments to war and security.

However, Kelley is sanguine about the political limits of such practices in the face of silencing and (de)legitimisation.

The fully racialized social and epistemological architecture upon which the modern university is built cannot be radically transformed by “simply” adding darker faces, safer spaces, better training, and a curriculum that acknowledges historical and contemporary oppressions. This is a bit like asking for more black police officers as a strategy to curb state violence. We need more faculty of color, but integration alone is not enough. Likewise, what is the point of providing resources to recruit more students of color without changing admissions criteria and procedures? Why do we stay wedded to standard “achievement” measures instead of, say, open admissions?

Here there is a connection to the reality that the university is constrained by its position inside a wider, transnational geography and topography of capitalist domination.

A smaller, more radical contingent of protesters is less sanguine about the university’s capacity to change. Rejecting the family metaphor, these students understand that universities are not walled off from the “real world” but instead are corporate entities in their own right. These students are not fighting for a “supportive” educational environment, but a liberated one that not only promotes but also models social and economic justice. One such student coalition is the Black Liberation Collective, which has three demands:

1) that the numbers of black students and faculty reflect the national percentage of black folks in the country;

2) that tuition be free for black and indigenous students;

3) that universities divest from prisons and invest in communities.

Kelley makes the key point that through diversity and equality legislation, universities will become marginally more welcoming for black students, but they are wedded to systems of production that are alienating. As a result they cannot deliver the social transformation that Marx sees as central to humanity.

Harney and Moten disavow the very idea that the university is, or can ever be, an enlightened place, by which I mean a place that would actively seek to disrupt the reproduction of our culture’s classed, racialized, nationalized, gendered, moneyed, and militarized stratifications. Instead they argue that the university is dedicated to professionalization, order, scientific efficiency, counterinsurgency, and war—wars on terror, sovereign nations, communism, drugs, and gangs. The authors advocate refuge in and sabotage from the undercommons, a subaltern, subversive way of being in but not of the university. The undercommons is a fugitive network where a commitment to abolition and collectivity prevails over a university culture bent on creating socially isolated individuals whose academic skepticism and claims of objectivity leave the world-as-it-is intact.

This work is grounded in political education and activism that takes place outside the university. This work reveals the tensions of existing and being reproduced both inside-and-outside the university.

Why black students might seek belonging and inclusion over refuge is understandable, given their expressed sense of alienation and isolation, combined with the university’s liberal use of the family metaphor. It also explains why students are asking the university to implement curriculum changes—namely, the creation of cultural-competency courses, more diverse course reading lists, and classes dedicated to the study of race, gender, sexuality, and social justice. They not only acknowledge the university’s magisterium in all things academic, but they also desperately wish to change the campus culture, to make this bounded world less hostile and less racist.

But granting the university so much authority over our reading choices, and emphasizing a respect for difference over a critique of power, comes at a cost. Students not only come to see the curriculum as an oppressor that delimits their interrogation of the world, but they also come to see racism largely in personal terms

Violence was used not only to break bodies but to discipline people who refused enslavement. And the impulse to resist is neither involuntary nor solitary. It is a choice made in community, made possible by community, and informed by memory, tradition, and witness. If Africans were entirely compliant and docile, there would have been no need for vast expenditures on corrections, security, and violence. Resistance is our heritage.

And resistance is our healing. Through collective struggle, we alter our circumstances; contain, escape, or possibly eviscerate the source of trauma; recover our bodies; reclaim and redeem our dead; and make ourselves whole.

This, for me, is a key moment in my support of Rhodes Must Fall. That it offers us this: the possibility to love, study and struggle (c.f. Kelley) for reparative justice. It therefore offers us the possibility of reconciliation that reject the borders of exploitation. In the face of global crises of sociability, it prefigures alternative, mass intellectual and conceptual possibilities.

It is a choice made in community, made possible by community, and informed by memory, tradition, and witness.

 


Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

With Keith Smyth I have a paper forthcoming an Open Library of Humanities Journal, special edition on the abolition of the University. Our paper focuses on the higher education curriculum. It draws on Keith’s work on the space-time of the curriculum, and my on-going concern with the abolition of academic labour. The abstract is appended below.

More importantly, the paper reflects on the transnational campaigns that form a collective movement of students and staff members mobilising for direct action against the reality of institutional racism. These collective movements include #whyismycurriculumwhite, Rhodes Must Fall, and Dismantling the Master’s House. Their work is revealing the racialized nature of the governance, regulation and funding of higher education, alongside the alienating nature of the curriculum. Here I am reminded that the curriculum reinforces and reproduces hegemony, and that one of the critical moments of these movements is to remind us that the received canon that is the HE curriculum cannot be liberatory.

I will follow this up with a further piece describing my support for #rhodesmustfall, which has made me reconsider the intersection of class and race. I will also describe how my own position is therefore conflicted, in spite of my commitment to these counter-hegemonic movements.

Abstract

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability of academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market. This article argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to crises of sociability, revealing the bounded nature of the curriculum is central. One possible way to address crisis is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces an on-going colonisation by Capital. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in a co-operative curriculum, and which might enable activist-educators to build an engaged curriculum, through which students and academics no longer simply learn to internalise, monitor and manage their own alienation.

 


The University and the Secular Crisis


Posted by hallymk1

I’ve had an article published in the Open Library of Humanities, based on my inaugural lecture. If you want to revisit those fun-times, you can do so here.

The article is also on “The University and the Secular Crisis”, and it can be accessed here. The abstract is as follows.

The economic crisis of 2008 was followed by a persistent recession, with low levels of growth, weak aggregate demand, and high levels of underemployment or unemployment. For several recent authors this forced an engagement with the idea that the global economy is witnessing a secular stagnation or crisis. This article is situated against the changing landscape of English HE and seeks to understand the implications of the secular crisis on that sector, and on the idea of the University. It examines how responses to the secular crisis have amplified the twin forces of marketization and financialisation that are reconstituting the higher education sector for the production, circulation and accumulation of value. It then places this analysis inside the political economic realities of there is no alternative to the logic of choice and competition. The argument is then made that as this cultural turn affects the idea of what the University is for, both historically and materially, academics and students need to consider the potential for developing post-capitalist alternatives. The central point is that by developing a critique of the restructuring of higher education and of the idea of the University through political economy, alternative forms of knowing and developing socially-useful practices can emerge.


learning gain and kettling academic labour


Posted by hallymk1

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths

Banquo, Act 1, Scene III, Macbeth.

“Kettling is a police tactic to control crowds where officers surround a group of people on all sides. In some instances, police direct protesters toward a predetermined location. As the crowd grows, the police presence tightens around them. Police control access to the location and decide how to allow people to leave, perhaps through a predetermined spot.”

CBC News. 2012. Crowd control: What is kettling?

Academic kettling is a management/policy tactic to control academics and students where management surround a group of people on all sides. In some instances, protesters are directed toward a predetermined location. As the crowd grows, performance management tightens around them. Management control access to the location and decide how to allow people to leave, perhaps through a predetermined spot.

And so it goes.

We witness a barrage of new public management techniques for internalising control and producing value. A bureaucracy for impact, learning gain, teaching excellence. Strategies for internationalisation, enterprise, employability, community, quality assurance.

We are told that everything pivots around the student experience, to the extent that we forget ourselves. And we begin to internalise value-added.

We are led towards learning gain, and fail to notice the noose of financialisation that is being prepared. That our hopes for student outcomes form their means of hedging against future performance.

We let ourselves believe that student outcomes will be too messy to translate into measures of teaching quality, against the lessons of history and the messages of their corporate reports.

We forget the lessons of league tables and performance management in secondary education, and the relentless testing that eviscerates self-actualisation beyond the market.

We forget that their learning gain can never be defined by us, and that we will be co-opted by them in our attempts to use it for good. We refuse to believe that we might refuse.

We refuse to believe that learning gain and teaching excellence are two sides of the same process of hyper-financialising education.

We forget that this is about labour rights. The labour rights of students as well as staff. We risk losing ourselves.

And so it goes.

what defines learning gain? variable human capital and the rule of money

p. xi “such measures can be seen as important to the debates about the quality and impact of higher education, how we evidence the value of investment in it, and how we evidence students’ skills acquisition for employers.”

p. xi “the concept of ‘learning gain’ is defined as the ‘distance travelled’, or the difference between the skills, competencies, content knowledge and personal development demonstrated by students at two points in time. This allows for a comparison of academic abilities and how participation in higher education has contributed to such intellectual development.”

This allows for a comparison of academic abilities and how participation in higher education has contributed to such intellectual development. A comparison between individuals, courses, institutions on a national and global scale. Your pedagogy as their financialised data. The market will decide, once the market has the data. And who will facilitate that process?

p. x “the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), working in partnership with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA), commissioned RAND Europe.

p. xii-xiii “Learning gain measures… can also be used to support accountability, promote transparency and enable comparability of the outcomes of higher education”

beyond learning and the student experience

p. 2 “The learning gain in England project is influenced by two principal drivers, as detailed below.

1.1.1. Higher education financing mechanisms: “The change in funding arrangements and diversification of provision has contributed to greater pressure to justify to students, employers and governments increased investment in higher education.”

1.1.2. Quality and accountability in English higher education: “Changes in financing of higher education have also served both to underline the importance of quality in higher education, and position student choice as a key concern for the sector. Students’ expectations in terms of their course and experience are increasingly becoming a concern of universities and policy makers, and institutions have sought to provide more information to prospective students on the value of degrees…”

learning gain as a disciplinary tool, rooted in performance management and accountability

p. 12 “Indicators and measures of learning gain could also be used to help increase accountability in higher education (as they have in secondary education, for example) and could help governments justify value for money of investments in higher education to both students and other stakeholders.”

p. 14 “Comparison between student performance, disciplines, institutions and countries are all potentially valid uses of a measure of learning gain.”

McGrath, C..H., Guerin, B., Harte, E., Frearson, M. and Manville, C. 2015. Learning Gain in Higher Education. Cambridge: Rand Corporation.

learner excellence and labour rights

Phil Race: A5 #lthechat Learning gain is perhaps more about learner excellence than teaching excellence. Much learning happens without teaching anyway

Simon Lancaster: the more one understand’s about the practicalities the less likely to think it suitable for building league tables #LTHEchat

because those with power think it’s about human capital which is in itself de-humanising

p. 16 “higher education represents a critical factor in innovation and human capital development and plays a central role in the success and sustainability of the knowledge economy”

and this has to play out internationally and competitively because of rising costs, the rising organic composition of capital, and a globally falling rate of profit.

p. 26 “The first phenomenon of rising costs is a direct consequence of the expansion of higher education systems and wider participation, which have increased the financial burden of higher education as most countries have tried to expand their systems while limiting the adverse impact on unit costs and expenditure to maintain quality. Indeed higher education provision offers limited scope for economies of scale”

p. 26 “a second phenomenon of fiscal pressure to curb costs has arisen in many countries. Indeed, economic growth over the past two decades has been insufficient to sustain the rising costs of higher education resulting from massification in most countries across the globe”

p. 26 “the allocation of public funding for tertiary education is increasingly characterised by greater targeting of resources, performance-based funding, and competitive procedures.”

p. 28 “Competition has also been advocated as a tool to improve teaching quality, as well as institutions’ responsiveness to the needs of society, the labour market and students”

it’s producing and circulating data to signal social mobility and the autonomy of the market.

p. 28 “Signalling is an integral aspect of these increasingly competitive markets. Indeed, higher education has many features of an experience good, i.e. a service whose characteristics such as quality are difficult to observe prior to consumption. With such information asymmetry, consumers struggle with their consumption choices and reward reputation in the absence of more transparent measures of quality. Accordingly, HEIs as well as systems use a range of signals and marketing tools to showcase their worth and build their reputation… The emergence of global rankings and their growing importance is illustrative of this compelling search for signals and recognition”

and so we are told that we need learning gain and teaching excellence, as productivity tools

p. 30 “Performance indicators and external quality evaluations are an integral aspect of the new model of distant steering”

p. 31 “drop-out and underachievement incur economic costs as a result of lower returns to non-degree higher education compared to full degrees, while costs per student are the same in both cases… This raises questions about the scope for improving the “productivity” of higher education through targeted policies to enhance the quality of service provision, and as a consequence, students’ retention and success.”

p. 33 “most notably for the learning outcomes of higher education, while it would appear to be among the most important pieces of information on higher education, available data remains scarce in many systems”

p. 34 “a growing need has emerged to develop direct measures of learning outcomes to overcome the limitations of current proxies for the quality of teaching and learning”

p. 36 in the Bucharest Communiqué of Bologna Ministers in 2012: “To consolidate the European Higher Education Area, meaningful implementation of learning outcomes is needed. The development, understanding and practical use of learning outcomes is crucial to the success of ECTS, the Diploma Supplement, recognition, qualifications frameworks and quality assurance – all of which are interdependent”

p. 41 “Students’ learning outcomes are a key factor of institutional performance, and hence of aggregate system performance. While some indirect evidence can be gained from graduate destination surveys and student engagement surveys, to date, there are no instruments for international measurement.”

Tremblay, K., Lalancette, D., and Roseveare, D. 2015. Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes Feasibility Study Report Volume 1 – Design and Implementation. OECD.

and this will ensure a new hyper-financialised architecture for higher education or higher learning or higher pedagogy

“So the reforms we will set out in the green paper will improve teaching quality, empower students, open up the higher education market and drive value for money. To deliver our ambitions, we also plan to reform the higher education and research system architecture.

“We are a deregulatory government, and much of the higher education system is ripe for simplification… Our regulatory regime is still based upon a system where government directly funds institutions rather than reflecting the fact that students are the purchasers, and needful of all the protections that consumers of complex high value products receive in other regulated markets… Students are the primary source of income for undergraduate study, but their interests are insufficiently represented in our structures and systems.”

Johnson, J. 2015. Higher education: fulfilling our potential. BIS.

and this hyper-financialised architecture, rooted in reductionist approaches to outcomes and value-added and learning gain and efficacy, is being lobbied for and evidenced

p. 2 “It is increasingly possible to determine what works and what doesn’t in education, just as in healthcare. The elements of learning can be mapped out, the variables isolated and a measurable impact on learning predicted and delivered. This can be done at every level – a single lesson, a single individual, a classroom, an institution or a whole system. It can also be done for a product or service that’s designed to help people learn. As a result, there has been progress and there is now a real sense that we are on the brink of a revolution.”

because learning is about value and consumers, rather than humane values

p. 3 “things which are important, and which command a high level of investment, should be approached in a systematic, evidence-based fashion”

p. 4 “The expansion of education models that deliver measurably better outcomes, combined with the growing transparency of results, is leading to increased consumer expectations and demand for quality, as well as access.”

Fallon, J. 2013. Preface to Barber, M. and Rizvi, S (2013) Asking More: The Path to Efficacy. Pearson.

p. 42 “we intend to embed efficacy into the heart of our organisation. The key is to consider how to ensure that every major decision delivers both financial and learner outcomes”

Barber, M. and Rizvi, S., 2013. The Incomplete Guide to Delivering Learning Outcomes. Pearson.

and this is an anti-vision of higher education

p. 2 “The focus of policy has been the transformation of higher education into the private good of training and the positional good of opportunity, where the returns on both are higher earnings. Initiation into the production and dissemination of public knowledge? It does not appear to be a concern of current policy. Such an anti-vision of higher education – let the market determine what should be offered – unfortunately meshes with a stratified higher education sector which mirrors an increasingly unequal society.”

an anti-vision rooted in a disciplinary architecture of data and performance management

pp. 2-3 “Potential applicants to colleges and universities will in future benefit from information on the ‘employability and earnings’ of each institution’s alumni and alumnae. I quote:

[The measures] will also help to create an incentive and reward structure at universities by distinguishing the universities that are delivering the strongest enterprise ethos and labour market outcomes for their students.”

because the rule of money will dominate your pedagogy

p. 3 “If different degrees from different institutions result in very different levels of earnings for students with similar pre-university qualifications and from similar socio-economic backgrounds, then this might affect both student choice and policies designed to increase participation and improve social mobility.

That paragraph captures the two angles to this debate: it is not just applicants who want to know what their monetary return on further study might be. Moving beyond consumer choice, the government as lender is becoming increasingly concerned by the size of the subsidy built-in to the student loan scheme as the latter is buffeted by recession, low bank base rates, a troubling graduate labour market and earlier mistakes in the modelling of future repayments.”

your pedagogy reduced to human capital investment

p. 4 “The 2011 Higher Education White Paper presented undergraduate degrees as a human capital investment that benefits the private individual insofar as it enables that individual to boost future earnings. Universities and colleges are then to be judged on how well they provide training that does indeed boost earnings profiles. Such ‘value add’ would displace current statistical concoctions based on prior attainment and final degree classification. The key device is loans: they go out into the world and the manner in which they are repaid generates information. Graduates then become the bearers of the units of account by which HE performance is set into a system of accountability: ‘What level of repayments is this graduate of this course likely to produce over the next 35 years?’”

p. 5 “And here is the rub. The growing and unexpectedly large subsidy built into the current iteration of fee-loan regime points to that same problem: the government is not getting the maximum from borrowers or from universities”

p. 7 “the coming wave of ‘education evaluation’, threatens to supplant traditional understandings of universities as communities advancing public knowledge. Current regulations governing the awarding of degrees aver that standards are maintained and safeguarded only by the critical activity of the academic community within an institution. It will be harder and harder to recall that fact”

McGettigan, A. 2015. The Treasury View of HE: variable human capital investment. Goldsmiths: PERC.

and they need the data, so, you know, test everything

“The generic, non-subject-specific exams will be trialled by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to evaluate whether they could be used to measure undergraduates’ “learning gain” – the improvement in skills and competencies made by students during their time at university.

“The results of any nationwide standardised test could also be used to compare institutional performance, and may form a key metric in the planned teaching excellence framework.”

Havergal, C. 2015. HEFCE to pilot standardised student tests. Times Higher Education.

This research shows there is a wide range of approaches to measuring learning among students in higher education. Understanding the methods and the results from these pilots will help assess teaching quality and excellence and ultimately provide better value for all students.

Johnson, J. 2015. In HEFCE, £4 million awarded to 12 projects to pilot measures of learning gain.

Learning gain, value for money, teaching excellence and quality assurance, as a regime of control. And architectures of control. Kettling academic labour.

p. 15 “A significant number of responses to the discussion document identified a need to undertake a major shift in quality assessment and assurance activity to focus more on student outcomes than institutional processes. The proposals in this consultation take such a shift in focus as essential if a quality assessment system is to be accountable to students and other stakeholders in the areas that matter to them.”

“this collection of student outcomes data will be important in two key areas:

  • its use within an individual provider at the heart of their mechanisms to drive continuous improvement in learning and teaching and in the student academic experience
  • its use by the relevant funding body to undertake routine monitoring of institutional performance as a way to identify signs of concern about that student academic experience.”

HEFCE. 2015. Quality Assurance Review.


notes on a teaching-anxiety [excellence] framework


Posted by hallymk1

slower and more calculated/no chance of escape/now self-employed/concerned (but powerless)/an empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)/

calm/fitter, healthier and more productive/a pig/in a cage/on antibiotics

Radiohead. 1997. Fitter. Happier.

ONE. Endings

Endings are important.

Fucked-up endings remain. Corroding. With the loss and the grief.

Fucked-up endings and the bewilderment that coerces us to internalise the loss, and to incorporate the reasons for it. As if we caused it. As if we didn’t try hard enough.

Fucked-up endings that coerce us into complicity with the original act. That leads us to hope that we might be able to persuade. That this time it might be different. To hope that we might return to where we once were.

Fucked-up endings that leave us with no way out but lamentation.

Fucked-up endings that leave us bitter.

And what are we to do when the means to manage those endings are taken from us?

Corroding.

TWO. Walking to the end

And this matters because there are those of us who walked through London, and who spoke at teach-ins and occupations, and who wrote in defence of some idea of equality in education, and who were kettled for it. And there are those of us who protested the Browne Review and the increase in fees. There are those of us who knew what was coming.

And many of us did this because we had some formation of education as social justice or radical democracy or critical pedagogy at the heart of our work. And in these formations there are those of us who struggle to enrich the very relationships upon which our institutions are build. Who struggle for relationships that others have co-opted as excellence. Who struggle for relationships that others have co-opted in order to punish those who are “coasting”. Who struggle for relationships that others have co-opted as progression and retention and satisfaction.

Relationships co-opted as data and debt. Relationships abstracted as indentured study.

And what is worse, is that the co-option of our work for self-actualisation or care or relationships has been laid bare. It has been laid out in-front of us, not just in the teaching excellence framework but also in the Treasury view of higher education. What is worse is that we fought for relationships that were not rooted in the rule of money, and so we fought for ideas of students-as-producers or partners or co-creators, and for education as courage and faith and justice. And our struggle was rooted in a refusal of the logic of Browne and nine thousand pounds. A corrosive logic implanted in the very heart of our pedagogical souls.

On fees, Mr Osborne announced the lifting of the £9,000 fee cap when he said that “we’ll link the student fee cap to inflation for those institutions that can show they offer high-quality teaching”. That appears to be a reference to the government’s recently announced plans for a teaching excellence framework, aimed at driving up teaching quality, which has been widely seen as offering a possible mechanism for the government to allow fees to rise.

John Morgan. 2015. Budget 2015: fees can rise for universities with ‘high-quality teaching’. Times Higher Education.

The other major measure affecting higher education was the announcement that universities in England will be allowed to upgrade their tuition fees above £9,000 in line with inflation from 2017-18, so long as they can demonstrate high-quality teaching. Universities UK has recently pointed out the inflationary pressures affecting universities and their ability to provide the highest quality education, so the fact that the Chancellor has listened to this is welcome. The government’s focus on ensuring a high quality of teaching alongside any increases is understandable.

I think it’s safe to say that the government  is at least looking into whether the  Teaching Excellence Framework announced last week by Jo Johnson should be used as the metric as to whether institutions should be able to increase tuition fees, and Universities UK will certainly be taking part in the consultation process for this.

Alex Leonhardt. 2015. Big announcements for universities in the Budget. UniversitiesUK Blog.

Above all, to meet students’ high expectations of their university years and to deliver the skills our economy needs, we need a renewed focus on teaching.

This is vital unfinished business from the reforms of the last Parliament.

As David Willetts himself acknowledged in a recent interview with the Times Higher Education; “teaching has been by far the weakest aspect of English higher education”.

This must change.

There must be recognition of excellent teaching – and clear incentives to make ‘good’ teaching even better.

Some rebalancing of the pull between teaching and research is undoubtedly required.

Jo Johnson. 2015. Teaching at the heart of the system. Gov.UK

Performance measurement and management dominate our lives in-and-against higher education, and bring the relationships that emerge in the classroom and within families into stark, asymmetrical relation to the market. As a result, life inside-and-outside the classroom is collapsed around the need to generate value and exchange and enterprise. What happens inside the classroom becomes a primary, societal concern beyond the governance and regulation of individual universities or the higher education sector.

The Coalition government has quietly put in place a series of measures designed to support a new performance metric: repayment of loans by course and institution. It could become the one metric to dominate all others and will be theorised under the rubric of ‘human capital investment’.

The Small Business, Enterprise and Employability Act received Royal Assent at the end of March 2015. Section Six of the bill is titled ‘Education Evaluation’… I quote [the Act]

[The measures] will also help to create an incentive and reward structure at universities by distinguishing the universities that are delivering the strongest enterprise ethos and labour market outcomes for their students.

Andrew McGettigan. 2015. The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment. PERC Paper 6.

And now this logic is really subsuming our academic labour. Because we know that our work in care and self-actualisation and relationships will now underpin new metrics. A new teaching excellence framework. A set of metrics to dominate our pedagogical souls. And what is worse, for those of us who protested the iniquity of this, our work will now be co-opted and repurposed so that our excellence enables our providers of higher education to raise fees. The very spaces that we sought to defend now alienated from us, and turned against us. The very spaces we sought to defend used to amplify and accelerate the very thing we were protesting against.

So that the very acts we sought to protect are reproduced for value.

And what does this do to our souls?

THREE. We are all anxious entrepreneurs now

And we remember that the financialisation and marketization of the sector has enabled the social relations of production, which are rooted in the production and accumulation of surplus labour and surplus value, to enter the academic labour process. This entry alone is not enough for the real subsumption of the sector inside the law of value. But this process has been accelerating. With outsourcing and technologizing and performance management and zero hours contracts and open data and debt and knowledge transfer and whatever. The sector and the academic labour that shapes it being compelled to reproduce capitalist social relations. Being compelled to open up for the reproduction and circulation and accumulation of value.

For others.

And the landscape of higher education is restructured perceptibly so that its labour processes are transformed. Subsumed. Really. We have seen the creation of an infrastructure and a technocracy that monitors and measures higher education’s current means of production, in readiness for its recalibration. An infrastructure that hints at markets and surpluses and enterprise and data. An infrastructure that is predicated upon opening-up the sector and its labour processes and its data. An infrastructure that internalises in each of us performativity.

And this is a site of anxiety, because we can remember what went before. And we can feel its loss. And we are powerless. Because we see that capital cannot tolerate a space inside which the social forces of production are developed in a limited way. And we feel the acceleration of performativity and the loss of autonomy and agency. And we feel the recalibration of higher education through a real capitalist labour process. And so it goes: this recalibration changes the social relations of production and the modes of academic labour, so that they produce and reproduce the nature of capital.

And this incorporation corrodes. And it generates anxiety. So that as we internalise the University’s entrepreneurial turn, we in-turn become our own seats of anxiety. Our own generators and circulators and accumulators of anxiety.

As a result academic labour is really subsumed. Subsumed for value, not for humane values. It is performance managed or measured and made efficient, or it is disciplined by outsourcing or technology or zero-hours contracts. It is governed by codes of conduct and workload management. The governance, regulation and funding of higher education, together with the organising principles for the public University and its curricula, are transformed through financialisation and marketisation. Academics work under the structural domination of finance capital, disciplined by the idea of student-as-consumer, partner or entrepreneur, their labour enclosed by institutions driven by competitive positioning in increasingly volatile markets for educational services.

So that effective teaching practice can be reproduced as teaching excellence. So that teaching excellence can be converted into data. So that data can drive excellence-as-a-service. So that excellence-as-a-service can be sold back to us. Our souls commodified and repackaged and sold back to us. Because if only we internalised excellence-as-a-service we would be better teachers, professors, whatever.

And this process is anxiety-inducing. And the refusal of this process is anxiety-inducing.

So that the real subsumption of academic labour under the law of value has forced an emotional recomposition of the practices of the University itself, and thus of the experience of labouring inside it. The accelerated transition towards real subsumption has both restructured institutions and reduced the points of potential solidarity for academic labour. Just as points of solidarity have weakened, the competitive dynamics of commodity capitalism have catalysed new systems of production, organisational development and technological innovation, which are in turn further constraining academic autonomy and agency. As the compulsion is always towards productivity measured by the law of value, academics are forced to perform in ways that can be considered to be culturally-acceptable self-harming activities and which amplify trauma, anxiety and alienation.

Alienating. Corroding. Toxic.

FOUR. The University, corroded by excellence

And so a generalised state of anxiety has emerged in the governance and experience of work in global higher education systems, showing up as both perverse incentive and outcome. To understand anxiety in higher education and the idea that the university is a machine that feeds off the production, circulation and accumulation of anxiety, we need to accept that it is no longer a sign that higher education is not functioning as it should, but that anxiety has become the proper functioning state of all sectors within the global, neoliberal economy.

And this anxiety is rooted in academic performativity, uncovered through the mechanics of managerialism, systemic signalisation, marketisation, and the commodification of academic life, so that the ways in which we strive for care or self-actualisation or relationships can be co-opted as excellence and turned against us. So that in order for the University to maintain itself as a node in a transnational network nominally interested in the production of value, it has to become grounded in the production, consumption and distribution of anxiety itself. In part this anxiety is incorporated from an external environment that is responding to the systemic crisis and the politics of austerity; in part it is a projection of anxiety from inside the University across both its internal structures and external associations.

Because anxiety about inputs and outputs, about metrics and learning gain, about excellence and entrepreneurship, are the normalised and reproduced pedagogical moments of the university now. The University that collapses the future into the present, so that current productivity is not enough. We must internalise the management of risk so that the risks that exist in our pedagogical futures can be shorted or hedged. We are made to internalise anxiety about the future risks of failure of our curriculum or our students’ success or our own performance, in our ability to recruit or to progress or to repay our debts. To internalise that anxiety and to reproduce it, as a permanent state of exception.

Anxiety as a permanent, pedagogical state of exception.

FIVE. Points of [most excellent] solidarity

The argument against this is that the constitutional view isolates the [University] from its social environment: it attributes to the [University] an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the [University] does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the [University] does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any [University] that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the [University] territory.

Pace John Holloway. 2002. How to Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press.

Is it possible for academics and students to refuse both the valorisation of competitive success and the therapeutic recuperations currently servicing the sustainability of profit? Given that we are witnessing the annihilation of pedagogical space by work time. Given that we are witnessing ways in which our teaching as care and relationships and self-actualisation led us to fight fees, only to find that those principles upon which we fought have now been really subsumed so that fees can be raised further on the basis of our excellence.

As Marx notes:

The social productive powers of labour, or the productive powers of directly social, socialised (common) labour, are developed through cooperation, through the division of labour within the workshop, the employment of machinery, and in general through the transformation of the production process into a conscious application of the natural sciences, mechanics, chemistry, etc., for particular purposes, technology, etc., as well as by working on a large scale, which corresponds to all these advances, etc.

And we witness academic labour subsumed as a social force of production that is lost to us.

This development of the productive power of socialised labour, as opposed to the more or less isolated labour of the individual, etc., and, alongside it, the application of science, that general product of social development, to the direct production process, has the appearance of a productive power of capital, not of labour, or it only appears as a productive power of labour in so far as the latter is identical with capital, and in any case it does not appear as the productive power either of the individual worker or of the workers combined together in the production process.

And we witness the social productive powers of labour recalibrated for the production of relative surplus value, and as a precursor to competition rooted in finance capital, data and new markets.

The mystification which lies in the capital-relation in general is now much more developed than it was, or could be, in the case of the merely formal subsumption of labour under capital. On the other hand, the historical significance of capitalist production first emerges here in striking fashion (and specifically), precisely through the transformation of the direct production process itself, and the development of the social productive powers of labour.

And we have descriptions of the impact of this on our humanity. As our humanity is subsumed and our souls are corroded, in this annihilation of pedagogical space by work time.

Within all of this as an academic subject I am made uncomfortable again, out of place once more; my home in the ivory tower is being flattened by neoliberal bulldozers to make way for a fast-fact higher education franchise in which all knowledge has is price and which, as Ansgar Allen puts it, ‘is distinguished not by its greyness and economic subjugation, but by a gaudy proliferation of colour. It has become the rampant breeding ground of jobbing academics in search of the next “big” idea’. I began with both memories of and a critique of welfare education and end with a critique of neoliberal education, and have inhabited and struggled with the discomforts of both. I am left with a sense of process rather than destination, unease and refusal rather than affirmation, in a space in which I am (im)possible and in which sociology as a vocation, as something I do, is being re-inscribed as a resource for the management of the population, which is how it started.

Stephen J. Ball (2015): Accounting for a sociological life: influences and experiences on the road from welfarism to neoliberalism, British Journal of Sociology of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2015.1050087

The title of ‘professor’ contains within itself a statement that what they do is more than a job: they profess a set of beliefs or values which transcend their formal terms of employment… All this goes out of the window once the professor is left wondering whether the next phone call is to had her the price of a good holiday or summon her to an exit interview. Who will challenge (constructively or not) anything that happens when their are [sic.] such serious consequences? You’d have to be hard as nails to resist the tide in this way or – like me – resigned to finding fulfilment in my small but steady academic niche rather than in the warm glow of management’s regard. It’s not good enough… This morning I sat next to a dignified and professional man as he begged for his job, his livelihood and his personal and professional pride, watched across the table by a man in a suit who kept saying that he didn’t have time for this. For all the abstract points I’ve outlined above, this is what it comes down too: sleek bonus-seeking sharks forcing honest people to justify their existence in the most reductive terms.

Plashing Vole. 2015. You’re fired. Enjoy your summer.

In one university, as well as undergoing six-monthly performance reviews (as frequently as newly appointed probationers), professors must now meet exacting criteria for ‘quality’ of publications. Progression to the next professorial level must be achieved within five years, and this depends on meeting certain ‘drivers’, which include securing a research grant as PI every two years, producing REF 3* and 4* ‘outputs’, supervising graduate students, producing a significant impact case study, leading high-prestige international collaborations, and of course, continuing to teach. Failure to meet these expectations will result in the public humiliation of the Improving Performance Procedure, and possible demotion. No accrual of reputation can be permitted; the criteria must be met every year, not just over the course of a distinguished career. In this way, any prestige associated with the rank of professor must be considered temporary, as is its tenure. Professors, then, have been made to join the expanding precariat of the academy. Ben Knights (2013) cites Sennett (1998), who recognizes that “a regime which instills insecurity, in which you are… ‘always starting over’ is inimical to the longer term processes of memory and imagination.

It is common in the performance management documents I have collected, for reference to be made to ‘stretching objectives’ which are purported to sit in between an individual’s ‘comfort zone’ and the  ‘panic zone’. ‘Stretching objectives’ are presented as desirable, but objectives which place individuals in their comfort or panic zones are not. There is a disturbing presupposition in this discourse of comfort zones. To be asked to go beyond it makes the patronizing assumption that one’s life is normally comfortable.

Liz morrish. 2015. The paradox of the ‘under-performing professor’

Some of the most precious qualities of academic culture resist simple quantification, and individual indicators can struggle to do justice to the richness and plurality of our research. Too often, poorly designed evaluation criteria are “dominating minds, distorting behaviour and determining careers.” 1 At their worst, metrics can contribute to what Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, calls a “new barbarity” in our universities.2 The tragic case of Stefan Grimm, whose suicide in September 2014 led Imperial College to launch a review of its use of performance metrics, is a jolting reminder that what’s at stake in these debates is more than just the design of effective management systems. 3 Metrics hold real power: they are constitutive of values, identities and livelihoods.

James Wilsden et al. 2015. The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management.

Endings are important.