A fascinating example of how an academic can touch on very fundamental issues of life and work. From the Minnesota review
Changing the managed university (and the "politics of work" therein) requires understanding that the "market fundamentalism" current among university managers has no more purchase on what is and should be than any other system of foundational belief. A humanly-engineered historical emergence of the past three decades, the "managed university" names a global phenomenon: the forced privatization of public higher education; the erosion of faculty, student, and citizen participation in higher education policy, except through academic-capitalist and consumerist practices; and the steady conversion of socially-beneficial activities to the commodity form (Rhoades and Slaughter, Slaughter and Leslie, Martin). As Randy Martin makes clear, these circumstances are not brought about in the North American and European context because the state has "withdrawn" from higher education, but because it "invests itself" ever more aggressively "in promoting an alignment of human initiative with business interest" (7). Globally, the IMF and World Bank have actively promoted a similar "reform agenda" with respect to higher education and used their power to impose involuntary privatization on national higher education systems, especially in Africa, requiring tuition fees, and effectively "recolonizing" cultural and intellectual life throughout the global South, as direct policy intervention combined with neoliberal "constraints" caused universities to "substitute new staff, standardize pedagogical materials and marginalize local knowledges" (Levidow para. 24-36).
In the pragmatist-managerial version of "materialism," collective human agencies are conspicuously absent: "markets" are real agents and persons generally are not, except in their acquiescence to market dicta. Miller, for example, writes: "the truth is that the question of who's qualified to teach first-year writing was settled long ago by the market" ("Let's" 99). In a world of systems "governed" by the "arbitrary," the "only possible" human agency becomes something like flexible self-specialization, the continuous re-tooling of self in response to market "demands," a subjectivity that Richard Sennett observes is just as unsatisfying a "corrosion of character" for those who "win" the market game as those who "lose." In this view, persons can only be agents by adopting the arts of corporate domination and by fitting themselves to the demands of the market, "working within a system governed by shifting and arbitrary requirements" (Miller, "Arts" 26). Representing corporate domination as a fact of life, this brand of pragmatism ultimately conceals an historically specific ideological orientation (neoliberalism) behind an aggressive (re)description of "reality," in which "left-wing" bogeymen are sometimes raised as the threats to human agency. (The real threat to human agency is the corporate-bureaucratic limits to human possibility established by the pragmatists themselves.)
What most troubles me about managerial pragmatism is the way it seeks to curb the ambitions of our speech and rhetoric. In the managerial account, contemporary realities dictate that all non-market idealisms will be "dismissed as the plaintive bleating of sheep," but corporate-friendly speech "can be heard as reasoned arguments" (Miller, "Arts" 27). More important than such adjectives and analogies, however, are the substructure of assumptions about what rhetoric is for. The implicit scene of speech here is of "pleasing the prince," featuring an all-powerful auditor with values beyond challenge, and a speaker only able to share power by association with the dominating logic of the scene—a speaker whose very humanity depends upon complicity. As a cultural-studies scholar, I understand the lived realities of subjectivity under domination and the need for acts of "complicity." But, this scene of complicity need not be mistaken as the central topos constitutive of human agency, nor should intellectuals committed to transformation mistake the prince—however powerful—as the object of our rhetoric.
