Many readers have sent me this piece authored by Iain Pears: Download The palaeographer and the manager. It is a devastasting critique of the attack on the humanities, including philosophy, at KCL, which is symptomatic of a worrying trend in British universities. An excerpt:
The powers that be there seem to taking their cues from a chapter on bullying in the Modern Manager’s Handbook. Staff are being required to reapply for their own jobs – the unspoken (but obvious) concern being that any who protest unduly may find that their reapplication is viewed with disfavour.
They will be reappointed not because of the importance of their subject, but more because of how much money they earn for King’s and according to their “confirmed future output” and “esteem indicators.” At no stage so far has anyone outside a narrow band of managers and the most senior academics been consulted; decisions were presented with no alternatives and little real chance of serious amendment.
These are the distasteful tactics normally associated with the call centre or sweat-shop. They are surprising, to say the least, when they come from an institution which is supposed to be a bastion of free and independent critical thought.
Why does it matter? Because it represents a surrender at the highest level (and you don’t get much higher than King’s) to the powers of management in a sector once known for its reliance on co-operation, goodwill and institutional accountability.
This transformation of Higher Education has been going on for some while, beginning with the reforms of Margaret Thatcher (taking away of tenure, institution of assessment exercises that stressed quantity rather than quality, the erosion of the powers of university senates). These changes, and the target-based culture of Labour, resulted in the emergence of a new and powerful managerial elite whose success at moving into the universities and taking them over has been extraordinary.
Certainly the managers have been as efficient as MPs and BBC Talent (and much more discreet) at finding ways of diverting public money into their own hands. Whereas academic salaries have risen slowly in the last couple of decades (although much less than the number of students), pay at the top has rocketed.
The average vice-chancellor now earns nearly three times as much as a professor, much more than the prime minister and more than the average private sector chief executive. The Principal of King’s, Rick Trainor, had a pay package which rose to £312,000 in 2008/9 from £292,000 the year before and £250,000 in 2006/7. His predecessor made do on £186,000 in 2002. While one person at King’s earned more than £150,000 in 2001/2, this had risen to 79 in 2009.
Keeping palaeography alive by cutting back on the generosity to senior staff does not appear to be an option for discussion, although reducing Professor Trainor’s package to a mere quarter of a million would help out, and a 5 per cent cut in take-home pay for the top 79 earners would produce more than a million pounds, enough for several departments of palaeographers.
Equally, there has also been a massive increase in the resources consumed by the administration.
While King’s is proposing to cut 22 jobs from the Humanities, it is simultaneously advertising for two senior management positions (salary up to £85,000) to administer a “strategic plan to deliver a world class Asset Management Programme of Campus based services.” And an applications analyst (“results oriented”) to support the College’s “enterprise business applications.” And a Distance Learning Administrator. And a head of Principal Gift Development who must also, of course, be “target-driven and ambitious.”
Professor Trainor has an executive team with all the managerial bling of a fully-fledged multi-national, complete with two executive officers and a Chief information officer. There is also a public relations department, an external relations directorate, a marketing department, a quality assurance unit, a corporate design unit (which “protects the brand”), a corporate services section… and on, and on.
According to the College’s own accounts, administrative costs rose to £33.5 million in 2009 from £28.5 million the year before – a rise of 17.5 per cent and more than twice as fast as the rise in cost of academic departments. In 2003, administration cost £16.5 million – making a 103 per cent rise over the six years.
To give a comparison, King’s is now proposing to decimate the Humanities to save £2.4 million. This will claw back less than half of the increase in administrative expenses for 2009 alone.
Anyone who finds it surprising that King’s should be getting rid of teachers while simultaneously recruiting administrators does not understand that universities (in the eyes of both vice-chancellors and ministers) are no longer institutions of learning. They are part of a nationalised industry, and increasingly behave like one.
They have, moreover, become vehicles for a bureaucratic technocracy to advance its own interests, in the way described by Milovan Djilas in 1957 when he analysed the rise of the “New Class” in communist states.
In this new set-up, everything -- and particularly the idea of the university, a place where all knowledge should be promoted in a place of mutual esteem, and where association of differing disciplines can stimulate fruitful new ideas, where knowledge is to be protected as well as advanced -- can be jettisoned whenever necessary.
In its place comes the short-term vision of the speculator. Along with palaeography, all the humanities (and even subjects like theoretical physics) are now being nationally targetted as unproductive; indeed anything which does not have a measurable pay-off in the short-term is under threat....
If academics accept such premises, and try to argue back in terms of economic relevance, they are doomed. There is no way to demonstrate that the study of Voltaire or Milton or palaeography is of any use whatsoever once the argument is defined by such language, any more than you can justify curiosity or imagination or the ability to think and argue.
In the past couple of decades many have learnt to parrot out the language of efficiency and transparency, of output and relevance, of competitive bidding and market share, of metrics and impact, without seeming to realise that it meant accepting also the assumptions underlying these terms....
[I]f these proposed cuts are challenged – if palaeographers are defended by social scientists, scientists, as well as teachers in the humanities; if lecturers from other institutions protest as well – if, in sum, academics rally to defend the integrity of their profession as a whole, rather than looking only to their own position and advantage – then some good might come out of it all.
They might even remember that once the administrators were there to serve the institution, not to be its masters, and insist on taking that responsibility back into their own hands.
But if they do not – if they keep their heads down, sacrifice other people’s jobs in the hope of keeping their own, if senior professors identify with the managers rather than with their colleagues -- then the game will be over for good.
King’s, certainly, will be badly damaged, for such institutions depend above all on the unquantifiable factors of co-operation and cameraderie to prosper. The “brand” which it so zealously tries to commercialise will be tarnished for a very long time.
But British academics in general will end up as mere drudge workers in the knowledge economy, doomed to follow every fad and command which comes down from on high.
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