Book of the week: Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University - Comments

I really appreciate the heads up to this book, and the insightful review. I particularly liked the comparison between accountability and the Panopticon. It's on my Christmas list.

Strange to see a PVC reviewing this book and agreeing with the author. If somebody has been a PVC for ten years then she must have substantially contributed to the endorsement of everything that Tuchman sees as damaging higher education.

I saw all this coming in my St Leonard's College Annual Postgraduate Address delivered in 1992 at the University of St Andrews where I was Professor of Divinity. The lecture republished as 'The End of the University and the Last Academic' in Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences (CUP 2002). For the implications as regards the implications for the elimination of personal agency see "Personhood and Performance: Managerialism, post-democracy and the ethics of 'enrichment'", Studies in Christian Ethics, 21.1 (2008) 63-84. Unlike Susan Basnett, who stayed at the top my interventions cost me my academic career.

@Richard H Roberts. Susan Bassnett served for four years as a member of the QAA board of directors and not many academics would argue that QAA is an organization promoting academic freedom.

Have a look in this connexion at Paul Taylor's "Humboldt's rift: managerialism in education and complicit intellectuals" (available on the web) - "There are three main types of character responsible for this situation [the universities now being riddled with one-dimensional managerialist thought]: non-academic managerial vandals; former academics who have crossed over to the managerial dark side, and supinely acquiescent academics. The most dispiriting and ironic aspect is the failure of the [last] group to apply to their own situation the critical thoughts they often research and teach." It's all so simple: you get rewarded - frequently with big carrots - for crossing over to the dark side and often punished, like Richard H. Roberts, for not only telling the truth but acting on it.

Industrial managerialism is often associated with the early 20th-century work of efficient expert Frederick Winslow Taylor. For a critique of this thinking in higher education see "The Global War on Taylorism": http://collegiateway.org/news/2008-gwot

Why have universities arrived at the position described by Prof. Tuchman? Could it be that the "corporate university" is a response to the "socialist university," which has thrived these last 40-50 years. Free speech is was as feared by the old Lefty masters as it is now by the new "bottom-liners."

Tuchman's conclusion is invalidated by the fact that she has spent her time writing and publishing this book in the first place.