Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the emergence of the notion of a global knowledge economy on which many current university reforms are predicated. It provides facts and figures about the speed and extent of reforms. It highlights how the session’s papers explore anthropologically how students, academics and managers participate in reforms.

Paper long abstract:

The first half of the paper provides a context for the session. It sketches out the emergence of the notion of a global knowledge economy and the ways it has been used to propose major changes to universities. The paper then provides some facts and figures to capture the speed and extent of the current wildfire of reforms, often originating in New Zealand and Australia, sweeping into and across Europe and then moving onward to other parts of the globe, now, importantly, including many emerging and poor economies. In this section the paper draws on an 'anthropology of policy' to explore how policies and their associated technologies travel.

The second half of the paper briefly introduces the other papers in the session by highlighting some of the ways they draw on anthropology to explore how students, academics, managers and other actors participate in different aspects of these reforms. Here the focus widens out to consider how to study the language, symbols and power in often localised contests and struggles over large scale processes of transformation.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The restructuring of universities in New Zealand is often seen as a paradigm case of neo-liberal governance. Drawing on fieldwork among university staff and students, I explore the contradictions inherent in the reform process and the conflicting visions and practices it has engendered.

Paper long abstract:

The restructuring of education in New Zealand is often proclaimed as a paradigm case of neo-liberal governance and New Public Management. In New Zealand, as in Europe, universities have become central to government's vision of the future, one increasingly shaped to meet the demands of the global knowledge economy. However, that vision contains contradictory agendas. While government calls on universities to drive its 'economic transformation agenda' and promote greater internationalization and commercialization of university research, it also expects universities to play a key role in nation-building, social cohesion and 'national identity' - as well as upholding the mantle of 'critic and conscience of society'.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the consequences of these often contradictory agendas. It asks: how are universities reconciling the multiple purposes they have been ascribed? How do staff and students experience these reforms, and how are they impacting on academic culture and practice? What new kinds of political subjects and subjectivities are being created as a result of these changes?

Architects of the EU's 'Bologna Process' have noted that university reforms can only take effect if they are 'owned' by academics and incorporated into their everyday thinking and practice. Focusing on recent examples of conflict and tension within New Zealand's universities, the paper explores the extent to which academics and students have embraced and internalized management's vision for its universities, and the technologies and pressures that have been brought to bear to make them do so.

Paper Download (167 KB)

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper contributes an ethnography of the "Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural" in Mexico, a new kind of university strongly influenced by the transfer of European notions of "interculturality" and which aims at empowering indigenous peoples.

Paper long abstract:

Multicultural discourse has reached Latin American higher education as a set of policies targeting indigenous peoples, which are strongly influenced by the transfer of European notions of "interculturality". In Mexico, innovative and often polemical "intercultural universities or colleges" are being created either by governments, by NGOs or by pre-existing universities. Paradoxically, this trend towards "diversifying" both ethno-cultural profiles and curricular contents, coincides with a broader tendency to force institutions of higher education to become more "efficient", "corporate" and "outcome-oriented". Accordingly, these still very recent "intercultural universities" are often criticized as part of a common policy of "privatization", "neoliberalization" and "particularization" which weakens the universalist and comprehensive nature of Latin American public marco-universities. Indigenous leaders, on the contrary, frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering ethnic actors of indigenous or afro-descendant origin.

Going beyond this polemic, this paper proposes an ethnographically based case study of the ways political and educational networks are being configured around the actors participating in the configuration of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), located at the Mexican gulf coast. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in the four indigenous regions where the UVI offers a B.A. in "intercultural management for development", the appropriation of as well as the resistance against the discourse of interculturality is studied by comparing the actors' teaching and learning practices, which are strongly shaped by an innovative and hybrid mixture of conventional university teaching, community-oriented research and "employability"-driven development projects.

Paper Download (284 KB)

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the way Portuguese social sciences' faculties and research centres have been living the present pan-European university reform. We take the implementation of the "Bologna Accords" in Portugal as an illustration of the ways erratic and unsupported reasoning affect decision-making.

Paper long abstract:

Italian historian Carlo Cipolla noticed that stupidity is as prevalent in the university as in any other social institution. Thus, anthropologists dealing with the university "reform" should not underestimate that inconsistent practices and discourses disturb widespread assumptions that institutions are nurtured by Reason.

"Bologna" advocates argue that it represents a unique opportunity to bring "excellence" to Portuguese universities. At the same time, the compression of degrees has been presented as a chance for students with inadequate skills to get higher qualifications, an argument university managers and key opinion-makers reiterate. For the authorities, as "science" and "technology" are central to the rhetoric of "modernisation" and "Europeanization" of the country, the stress on performance measurements and comparative rankings as essential tools of the universal desire to reform the University creates new ground for political appropriation of academic work. University isn't expected to produce meaning but to be a rationally managed enterprise.

This raises troubling questions about the changing concept of the University. Given that most scholars in Portugal failed to address them, instead adopting a submissive attitude towards the undergoing changes, could it be that a plot to enhance "competence", "quality", and "excellence" in higher education is hastening the end of the University as a place where (moderately) creative thought is encouraged? If yes, aren't we dealing with a state of affairs requiring an approach to social institutions in which illogicality is taken into account not as a mere derivative of overpowering Reason but as a central feature of human collective existence?

Paper Download (56 KB)

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an attempt to develop a framework for analyzing university reform in Turkey. After an explication of the past beginning with the constitutional changes of 1960s, the paper focuses on the privatization of university education under the duress of neoliberal economies, importation of liberal arts model, and prospects of Bologna process.

Paper long abstract:

Reformation of Turkish university system has occupied a prominent place in the political agenda of the Republic since 1960s. At every turn in political regime, every ten years, there have been attempts to re-form universities, both in form and content. Constitutional changes of the 1960s envisioned the university as a semi-autonomous entity. Sixties witnessed the foundation of new universities with American style campuses, and a multitude of private universities. Approaching the seventies, against the backdrop of student protests, private and foreign universities were nationalized and 1970 military intervention ended university autonomy with a constitutional change. In the following decade, reform was again on the agenda, particularly the question of autonomy, content, and legal framework of university education. With the 1980 coup, came the Council of Higher Education, and centralization and standardization of education, both administratively and in terms of curricula. Starting with nineties, new state and foundation universities have sprung up over a wide landscape of the Republic, making Turkey a country with one of the highest number of university students in the world. Against this historical backdrop, I will attempt to develop a framework for analyzing university reform in Turkey and make projections for the prospects of Turkish university education under the under the duress of neo-liberal economies, importation of liberal arts model, and prospects of Bologna process. Of particular interest is the experience of foundation universities, and university-business cooperation, in the process of privatization and democratization of university education.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The presentation offers an in-depth analysis of a 2006 incident in Serbian higher education, to illustrate the ways in which different actors in the educational arena appropriate discourses such as "neo-liberalization" and "globalization" and use them in their political struggles.

Paper long abstract:

An incident arose in 2006 concerning the question of whether students who had graduated from Serbian universities should, in accordance with the European Credit Transfer System, be awarded the title of Masters, since their previous education matched the master requirements. This argument encountered a decisive opposition from higher education bodies, whose representatives feared that granting graduates the title of master would turn them away from pursuing MA degrees, which would represent a great loss of money for higher education institutions. Months of fierce debates and public protests by student bodies ensued, while the media and students themselves increasingly sought to portray their struggle for the recognition of titles as the struggle against neo-liberalization and globalization of education. The debates came to abrupt end in December 2006, just prior to elections, when the Republic Parliament - to much surprise and opposition from public education institutions - passed a bill stating that students can be awarded the title of Masters.

My analysis concentrates on "disentangling" this incident and pointing to "vested" interests in the field of educational reform in Serbia. I claim that, despite the seemingly empowering discourse of the students, their voices were actually appropriated by a number of Serbian political parties and used as an asset in the electoral struggle. The key lesson to be drawn from this example is that anthropologists should strive for precise understanding of the cultural context and social forces that shape the field, in order to fully apprehend the reproduction of power structures in higher education.

Paper Download (172 KB)

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Post-apartheid university reforms in South Africa have not delivered according to the promises made, and at the former Black Universities students and staff are particularly frustrated and upset. This paper aims to analyse the effect of the reforms from the vantage point of students.

Paper long abstract:

The post-apartheid tertiary sector has seen a difficult transition from the racially segregated system under the former regime to an open and free-market, competitive system since 1994. The new system brought with it new and less favourable funding regimes and increased competition over students, and in this setup the former black universities have been particularly prone to funding shortages and decreasing levels of students, since black students (and the best qualified black academics) have now been allowed entrance into the well-funded, former white universities in the urban metropoles of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria.

After the turn of the Millennium the ANC led government has pushed through merger reforms in an attempt to turn the tertiary education sector around and make universities more responsive to public service needs. The policy frameworks are very ambitious, but they seem to be somehow out of tune with the reality on the ground. Given the funding shortages, University of Limpopo keeps increasing the tuition fees and costs related to on-campus accommodation, which means that students from poor backgrounds find themselves in jeopardy during the annual registration in January, while students of the black upper or middle-class will often have drifted to former white institutions. This is one of the reasons why the students at University of Limpopo engage in riots and demonstrations styled with reference to the former struggle against the apartheid regime .

Paper Download (96 KB)

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an ethnography of marketisation and the development of strategic plans and institutional reforms to increase international students, and student responses to these reforms. The paper will then examine how a student protest movement developed in response to the proposed reforms.

Paper long abstract:

The Bologna Process in Europe has created a climate of greater academic mobility for students. While providing short and long term benefits to students, institutions are engaged in complete administrative restructuring which aims to capitalise on student mobility by attracting international students. Such reforms include curricular adaptation to perceived international student demands and the development of focused marketing campaigns to attract desirable international students. This paper will use the anthropology of tourism to interrogate institutional reforms debated at the University of Sussex which explicitly sought to increase international student enrolment and a counter movement organised by students, Sussex Not 4 Sale, which sought greater input into these reforms. At the centre of this controversy were the marketisation of higher education and the growing interpretation of students as consumers. By conceptualising student mobility as a form of educational tourism, institutions hope to maximise the opportunity to increase their sources of funding. Educational tourism is shown to be a key marketing goal of the reforms at the University of Sussex, where international students pay the full cost of their education and may have different academic needs or goals from British students. This ethnography allows for a close examination of how institutional reform is overtly undertaken in order to maximise student enrolment, how student and faculty consultation can be incorporated into the reform process, and how the goals of institutional reform within the UK context will transform higher education.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Germany’s universities resemble a laboratory: for years now the most startling experiments in economising and educational excellence have been being performed on them in the name of modernity and the future. The remodelling of the university landscape in accordance with economic criteria has exacted its sacrifices – in particular from a discipline called Social Anthropology. Here an autoethnography.

Paper long abstract:

My lecture refers to a letter circulating lately at my university. The management was planning changes to the hurriedly designed BA-MA programmes. "To make liveable", the positive-sounding phrase used, stood in stark contrast to the catalogue of strict regulations according to which the new programmes had to be re-designed. These demands were flatly rejected by the faculty; in their eyes the central administration had overstepped its bounds. At bottom, however, the potential resistance against reforms has declined. Since the seventies, German universities have been caught in an ongoing reform that has worn them down and resulted finally in the introduction of the Bologna Process in the absence of any serious protests. The policy that devised an advertised competition for the title of "University of Excellence" has met with little opposition. It plans to transform a few universities into elite institutions on the model of Harvard. Most German universities took part in the competition for the sake of the attached research funds, which have otherwise become scarce. The farewell to Humboldtian principles of higher education, truth and freedom of research proceeded without further ado.

In my autoethnography, I describe the transition of the German university from the status of a public corporation to that of an economic enterprise. The discipline of Social Anthropology has been particularly affected by this development, for it has little to offer by the standards of cost analyses. In many anthropology departments positions have been cut, courses of study dropped and colleagues were forced into interdisciplinary departments.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

IIn 2002 a new law was passed that was meant to render Austrian universities more efficient, effective, business-like and more responsive to economic interests. This paper explores some consequences of the neo-liberal reconceptualisation of universities for the teaching and research of anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

From the 1990ies onwards Austrian universities were submitted to global neo-liberal processes of transformation, due to legal preconditions made by the state as well as to decisions of their own administration/management. The university law of 2002 granted universities an ambivalent kind of "autonomy" tied with a new mode of state regulation through strategic target-setting ("Globalziele") and the introduction of new means of audit. New Public Management has become the new credo of the university reform with its economic understanding of quality and the move from centralised bureaucratic structures to decentralised, management oriented systems.

These developments are analysed based on the theoretical concepts of neo-liberal governmentality, managerialism and audit cultures. After presenting an outline of the current Austrian university reform the paper proceeds to explore consequences of this neo-liberal/managerial reconceptualisation of universities for the learning and teaching of anthropology at the University of Vienna. How do economic values enter anthropology as a university discipline? Where do tendencies towards a standardization of the "commodity" university studies and the "service" of teaching and research emerge? How are students, teachers and researchers being transformed into neo-liberal subjects? With the focus of my inquiries resting on the teaching of anthropology, the reorganisation of the institute's structure, a new curriculum based on the Bologna-architecture and more oriented towards the job market, precarious working contracts (for teachers as well as for researchers) and new forms of (teaching) audit can all be regarded as aspects of the neo-liberal economisation of our discipline.

Paper Download (52 KB)

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The introduction of the University Reform has had a snowball effect on the Department of Anthropology. By listening to the voices of teachers and students of Anthropology, I try to analyze as the way of intending university space and Anthropology have changed after the introduction of Reform.

Paper long abstract:

My paper focuses on the changes produced by the introduction of the University Reform in the Anthropology Department at the University of Rome "La Sapienza."

The introduction of the new educational system, with its Learning Agreements, its Program Descriptions (which set out the professional qualifications and employment outcomes which each program aims to provide), its ministerial charts, has resulted in various transformations:

- Teaching and research have been tightly bound to the ministerial grids, and to the logic of credits. The scientific pursuit of knowledge has been squeezed between academic/bureaucratic and economic levels;

- Teachers have been forced to confront new challenges: organization of degree programs and duties of management and monitoring;

- The new courses have permitted the students to feel much earlier on that they belong to a scholarly community, to see themselves as participants in a common endeavor, to critically engage with theoretical and research-related developments in their field, and also to ask questions about future employment.

The reform has broken the old academic organizational scheme and has opened this space to new subjects and new interests: teachers, students, companies, NGOs, social cooperatives, and government agencies.

By closely observing the practices of teachers and students, by listening to and analyzing the narratives they produce, which make sense of the university experience and render it objective, I attempt to grasp how the University Reform has been negotiated with local traditions and how the idea of Anthrolopogy has changed in accordance with its configurations, both academic and non-academic.

Paper Download (199 KB)

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper contributes to a discussion on the dramatic changes over the past decade in higher education in Scotland. These have been partly driven by 'widening participation' agenda, a requirement to standardise teaching, learning and assessment internationally, and to 'assure' quality.

Paper long abstract:

The paper takes as its starting point the institution of two new courses delivered to second year university students. After reorganisation into a 'school' system, within which one intention was to soften subject boundaries, all students in the school are now required to do generic theory and research methods courses in their second years if they are studying social or political science. Using the two new courses as an ethnographic case study, the wider contexts within and beyond the university are explored discursively. Thus the courses emerge in a complex and contested arena where the very function of university teaching, production and reproduction of knowledge and new academic generations can be examined.

Despite apparent transparency of sectoral and institutional reforms through strategic planning, committee structures and national policy reforms, this paper seeks to address the inherent cultural particularities and peculiarities of this HE institution which have a significant part to play in the process of change, and not least in the delivery of academic knowledge.

Paper Download (176 KB)