The development and reproduction of Anthropology has been closely bound to the history of the university. It is therefore critical to attend to changes in this institutional context, particularly today as universities are being transformed, if not destroyed, in the wake of neoliberalism, managerialism and academic capitalism. Comparing experience in different countries, this studio will explore how possible university futures, driven by privatisation, marketisation, de-professionalisation and commodification, will impact on the future of Anthropology. It aims to sketch out what an anthropology of higher education might look like, how it can contribute to wider disciplinary concerns, and what it implies for imagining the university ‘otherwise’.
Description:
It is often noted how Anthropology emerged in the context of the colonial encounter and the rise of science, yet Anthropology’s development is also closely tied to the history of the university as a Western institution, idea and set of practices. Despite this, with some notable exceptions, there are still relatively few ethnographies of universities or academic life per se. Given that Anthropology prides itself on being a critical, reflexive discipline that seeks to understand peoples and cultures in their wider socio-cultural contexts, it behoves us to pay more attention to the changing institutional contexts in which Anthropology reproduces itself. Exploring university reforms and changing labour relations is particularly relevant given recent pronouncements on the crisis, demise and even ‘death’ of the public university, as well as calls to decolonise higher education. These reforms intersect with growing casualisation, managerialism and financialisation that render the university compliant with the imperatives of neoliberalism.
This studio explores these trends, their effects and their implications for university futures and Anthropology. Themes include:
• The re-framing of higher education from a ‘public good’ to a private career investment, with the concomitant emphasis on skills training and employability.
• The withdrawal of state support for public universities, cost-saving austerity measures and the search for new income streams and other ‘Third Mission’ activities.
• Increasing marketisation and privatisation and the turn towards ‘digital solutions’ and public-private partnerships.
• Changes in university governing boards with increased representation from business, commerce and finance.
• The increasing de-professionalisation and stratification of academics, along with casualisation and mounting precarity of the workforce.
• The replacement of student grants with loans, rising student debt and the effects of long-term indebtedness.
• Commodification of university degrees, recasting students as ‘customers’, and the reification of the ‘student experience’ as a category to be regulated through the norms of consumer law.
• Prioritisation of STEM and vocational training and the de-funding of critical humanities and social science disciplines.
These changes reflect the steady shift towards outsourcing, unbundling and privatisation, along with legislative changes seemingly designed to facilitate the capture of university assets by for-profit providers.
Reflecting on these processes this studio asks:
• How do university policies and reforms differ between countries, what tensions are they creating and how are academics, students and managers engaging with, or resisting, these changes?
• How can Anthropology make sense of these changes and what effects are they having on the production of anthropological knowledge?
• Where is the current trajectory leading and is it possible to imagine alternative university futures?
The studio also aims to map the contours of what an ‘anthropology of higher education’ might look like, how it can contribute to, or draw upon, wider disciplinary concerns and expertise, and its implication for imagining the university ‘otherwise’.
With references to Chile and Argentina, this paper discusses some of the differences in resistance to neoliberalisation in UK HE, why it matters to anthropological scholarship that education must be public, and offers lessons to be learned from the Global South.
Paper long abstract:
This is not the first time over the past twenty odd years that I am writing about – and against - neoliberalisation in Higher Education in the UK and its impacts on the reproduction of critical scholarship. Thus it feels like covering old grounds but with conditions, predictably, having generally and comprehensively worsened. This paper asks about the extent to which UK HE can still be described as a public education system or whether back-door privatisation has conquered the sector so far that, like the melting of the world´s ice sheets, it has crossed a tipping point? What does public education mean beyond the question of cost-free access, yet what is the role of current funding and employment structures and policies, and how do they impact on the intellectual life of HE institutions? Why is the public university so crucial to the discipline of anthropology? To discuss the British experience, I will reference two other cases, each exemplary in their own right. The first one is Argentina, perhaps a unique case, where privatisation and neoliberalisation of HE have been quite effectively and almost comprehensively resisted since the late 1980s. The second is Chile, where an impressive student movement this century embarked upon doing the unthinkable: to turn back the tide of privatisation in education that was initiated by a brutal Pinochet military regime which took direct command of the country´s public universities.
In both cases, the struggle for public university education acted as a catalyst for wider social and political movements and shifts in society. That is itself suggestive about the difference between public and private education. Hence, it is through these examples and the role and insertion of the public university in the wider social struggles where we can explore the significance of Public Education and its potential for genuine intellectual and societal development, much needed in today´s world plagued by crises, state bankruptcies, depression, austerity, corruption and wars, among many other items on a growing list of ills.
‘Public’ and ‘private’ spaces, structures, institutions and configurations are bread-and-butter analytical and theoretical areas of concern for anthropologists to which an extensive array of publications, current and past, testifies. But they rarely reflect on their own institutional background and conditions despite our discipline taking pride in its reflexive method.
Moreover, I contend that global academic hierarchies hamper knowledge flow from the South to the North in social and political fields, and it is for this same hierarchical reason, I fear, that the fate of the survival of Public Education in the Global South unfortunately also rests with the development of how the conflict between private and public education in dominant countries such as the UK plays out. But if academics and students in Chile and Argentina can reclaim the university as a public good despite the history of bloodstained repression, then why not in Britain? In this contribution I will examine some of the contributing factors in creating these differences as well as some lessons that could, urgently, be learned.
In this contribution, we would like to call for an open discussion on the status of critical anthropology within neoliberal academia.
Paper long abstract:
In the past decade, Polish university has undergone two major reforms aimed at reshaping various aspects of academic life. The new law not only forced structural adjustments but also set in motion a process of reformulating the very idea of a university. These changes can be explained in terms of neoliberalisation, as a process of transforming the university into an institution driven and dominated by discourses of efficiency. To achieve this goal, various tools developed to measure academic and teaching performance, and assess research quality and institutional effectiveness were introduced. This situation has provoked resistance in the anthropological community, which has primarily expressed its dissatisfaction with various "rituals of verification". There have also been many critical statements and analyses devoted to the issue of neoliberalisation.
In this contribution, we would like to call for an open discussion on the status of critical anthropology in neoliberal academia. Following Stephen Tyler statement: “Critique cannot dis-criminate between itself and the crimes it seeks to certify and proscribe” (Tyler 1991: 91) we propose to reflect on how critical anthropologists (re)produce the regimes of entrepreneurship, power relations, and mechanisms of subjugation that they criticize. We would like to argue that critical anthropology must inevitably recognize its own internal aporia, which can be illustrated by the metaphor of a "blind spot." This metaphor is meant to indicate a cognitive tendency that can be described as a tendency to invoke its own epistemological objectivity and axiological neutrality while ignoring the fact of entanglement with the object of anthropological criticism. To illustrate our arguments, we would like to refer to our own academic experience.
Cris Shore (Goldsmiths)
Short Abstract:
The development and reproduction of Anthropology has been closely bound to the history of the university. It is therefore critical to attend to changes in this institutional context, particularly today as universities are being transformed, if not destroyed, in the wake of neoliberalism, managerialism and academic capitalism. Comparing experience in different countries, this studio will explore how possible university futures, driven by privatisation, marketisation, de-professionalisation and commodification, will impact on the future of Anthropology. It aims to sketch out what an anthropology of higher education might look like, how it can contribute to wider disciplinary concerns, and what it implies for imagining the university ‘otherwise’.
Description:
It is often noted how Anthropology emerged in the context of the colonial encounter and the rise of science, yet Anthropology’s development is also closely tied to the history of the university as a Western institution, idea and set of practices. Despite this, with some notable exceptions, there are still relatively few ethnographies of universities or academic life per se. Given that Anthropology prides itself on being a critical, reflexive discipline that seeks to understand peoples and cultures in their wider socio-cultural contexts, it behoves us to pay more attention to the changing institutional contexts in which Anthropology reproduces itself. Exploring university reforms and changing labour relations is particularly relevant given recent pronouncements on the crisis, demise and even ‘death’ of the public university, as well as calls to decolonise higher education. These reforms intersect with growing casualisation, managerialism and financialisation that render the university compliant with the imperatives of neoliberalism.
This studio explores these trends, their effects and their implications for university futures and Anthropology. Themes include:
• The re-framing of higher education from a ‘public good’ to a private career investment, with the concomitant emphasis on skills training and employability.
• The withdrawal of state support for public universities, cost-saving austerity measures and the search for new income streams and other ‘Third Mission’ activities.
• Increasing marketisation and privatisation and the turn towards ‘digital solutions’ and public-private partnerships.
• Changes in university governing boards with increased representation from business, commerce and finance.
• The increasing de-professionalisation and stratification of academics, along with casualisation and mounting precarity of the workforce.
• The replacement of student grants with loans, rising student debt and the effects of long-term indebtedness.
• Commodification of university degrees, recasting students as ‘customers’, and the reification of the ‘student experience’ as a category to be regulated through the norms of consumer law.
• Prioritisation of STEM and vocational training and the de-funding of critical humanities and social science disciplines.
These changes reflect the steady shift towards outsourcing, unbundling and privatisation, along with legislative changes seemingly designed to facilitate the capture of university assets by for-profit providers.
Reflecting on these processes this studio asks:
• How do university policies and reforms differ between countries, what tensions are they creating and how are academics, students and managers engaging with, or resisting, these changes?
• How can Anthropology make sense of these changes and what effects are they having on the production of anthropological knowledge?
• Where is the current trajectory leading and is it possible to imagine alternative university futures?
The studio also aims to map the contours of what an ‘anthropology of higher education’ might look like, how it can contribute to, or draw upon, wider disciplinary concerns and expertise, and its implication for imagining the university ‘otherwise’.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Heike Schaumberg (University of Buenos Aires)
Marta Songin-Mokrzan (University of Lodz) Michal Mokrzan (University of Wrocław)