I have just finished reading an article by Paul Taylor written way back in 2003 (Waiting for the Barbarians and the Naked Emperor's Chicken).
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Despite it being over 15 years old the things he wrote about (with such style) are current today and I could not resist sharing some of the most delicious quotes with you.
To begin with he argues that using neoliberal managerialism ideology as it operates within higher education, managers use change (and frequent change) as a tool to prevent people from thinking too deeply about what is going on.
Taylor suggests change is rather like the naked emperor who, in his glass-topped carriage, "hurtles past too quickly for his nudity to be proved" (p. 14).
Part of the strategy in "hurtling past" so fast is the use of what is now called in the literature "bullshit language."
In higher education, for example, we talk about quality, and no-one would deny that delivering quality learning opportunities to students is a really important element of higher education.
However, whilst we are all solemnly agreeing that yes, of course, we support initiatives that lead to quality and quality improvement, we are simultaneously being exposed to strategies that make it more and more difficult for us to deliver this to our students.
For example, the student:staff ratio continues to increase and the time allocated to each student continues to decrease. We have a management who argues that what we do online with students is not teaching and who simultaneously spruik the 5 star student satisfaction rating.
Taylor writes: a "sector whose raison d'tre is the search for disinterested truth has become fatally compromised by the institutionalised process of lying encouraged by auditing regimes."
Taylor's rich description of this disjunction between what academics and management perceive as quality is an example of the "sub-optimal by an ersatz managerial expert rarely recognised beyond his/her own office corridor.
Educational environments are created where operational requirements precede substantive justifications" (p. 13).
As a consequence, under neoliberal managerialism, we are creating a higher education sector that misses important national targets "with an amnesiac's sense of timing and the marksmanship of Mr Magoo" (p. 16).
What Taylor means by that is that we are educating students narrowly, so that they meet the required learning outcomes identified by external agencies and employers, and not giving them the skills necessary to function as critical citizens in a participatory democracy.
And accompanying this bastardisation of the original mission of higher education, is the lack of resistance from staff within the sector. Taylor argues (p.20): "The most dispiriting feature of contemporary academia, however, is the alacrity with which its community uses 'let's do it to ourselves before they do it to us' excuse.
Rather like turkeys assuming responsibility for sorting out Railtrack's problems in time for Christmas Eve, academics inexplicably contribute to the anti-intellectual systems and practices of managerial ethics."
It seems that many display a "desire to climb back into an amniotic sack of memo and committee-inspired tranquillity" rather than perform as "midwives of intellectual development we have become the undertakers of this bureaucratic death instinct" (p. 20).
Taylor continues (p.21): "A vivid illustration of managerialism's success has been the way it has managed, under the banner of 'quality' to transform such idiosyncratic independence into behaviour more appropriate of lemmings."
Rather than behaving like lemmings we have to collaborate and resist the "needless managerial activities" imposed upon us. "For example, when words such as 'quality' are used indiscriminately, or students are referred to as 'customers', we should listen to our bleeping bovine odure detectors and say something.
We also need to criticise consistently and contemporaneously the internal inconsistencies" of managerialism" (p21). What Taylor is suggesting is that we need to have the courage to be like the little boy who pointed out that the emperor has no clothes.
The alternative is to continue to work in a climate where we are all so busy pretending that the emperor's clothes are magnificent that we have no time to do the actual work we are employed to do: teach our students to the best of our ability, research and ask difficult question of the world around us and support our community.