Thread by @deontologistics

Everything must be leveraged to the hilt.

"Conceivably Manchester’s ambitious building programme, which includes for example the Alliance Manchester Business School with attached 19-storey hotel, reduced their ability to absorb the shock of the virus."

theguardian.com/education/2021…

To be completely clear, universities were one of the last sectors to be fully infected by the mind-virus of general purpose management, a slow motion crash in which the worst of public and private sectors collided and destroyed the economic base of centuries old institutions.

Everything thats happening to UK universities are delayed consequences of choices made by New Labour in the 90s. Not just fees, but the whole metrics based approach to maximising student enrolment. It's so obvious that one feels a bit strange when it's said out loud in the media.

The key point to understand is this: if a sector has a money pipe that keeps funnelling cash into it regardless of how bad manager's decisions are, the sheer extent of the compound failures will be disguised even as they keep awarding themselves greater compensation for vision.

The most egregious feature of this in the case of universities is that VCs and their coteries have consistently seen themselves as innovators with grand visions despite reactively copying everything their peers are doing, like a swarm of lemmings guiding one another off a cliff.

The excesses of university administrations over the last few decades should be seen for what they are: bacchanalian echoes of the orgy of finance-forward strategies (e.g., leveraging, mergers, outsourcing, precaritization...) that spread like a rash across industry from the 80s.

This is what academics really mean when they talk about the 'neoliberal university', but their perspective on it is often distorted by their own theoretical proclivities, in ways that prevent them from engaging with their colleagues in business schools and economics departments.

This lack of thought mirrors the lack that is constitutively built into most such schools/departments, who were in many ways the platform from which the neoliberal revolution was launched, generating class solidarity and theoretical alignment between management and finance.

The crisis of post-war Keynesian liberalism that hit in the 70s paved the way for a convenient (and only loosely consistent) combination of Hayekian/Friedmanite ideas (and institutions) to capture the imagination of the political class, but this is really only part of the story.

The new class of general purpose managers emerging from business schools, whose curriculums could only include generic topics (e.g., logistics, finance, and 'human resource' management), had their understanding/interests calibrated in a way that aligned them with finance capital.

Over the course of decades they projected a new culture down through the org charts of industry, such that even if one came up from the shop floor, one had to acclimatise oneself to and internalise the systemic ignorance of the industrial base encoded in the managerial culture.

There's a hell of a lot that could be said about this culture and its intellectual content (ask @KeirMilburn and @stephenbdunne), including the major thinkers who provided its ideological resources (e.g., Taylor, Mayo, Drucker, etc.), but I'm trying to trace the arc of history.

Instead, I think it's worth pointing to @davidgraeber's work on bureaucracy and bullshit jobs, which turns a key anthropological eye to the structures within organisations that enforce the dominant managerial culture. What he calls 'managerial feudalism'.

Organisations are increasingly divided into an inside and an outside, a microcosm of the wider distinction between core and periphery, and it is essentially a matter of who falls within the sphere of HR and who falls without, even though HR itself polices this split.

Those trapped within the core get to have careers, while those pushed to the periphery are increasingly reduced to a series of overlapping gigs, even when these gigs are all contracted by the same institution. This is the reality of contemporary wage labour.

For those who have a choice, the question is increasingly which form of psychic violence one can more readily tolerate: the soul crushing irrationality of life in an organisation steered by a bureaucracy tuned to the whims of idiots, or the anxiety of involuntary self-employment.

There are some people who are naturally suited to either context, but most aren't, and have to fit or be fitted to one or the other, unless they somehow achieve the entrepreneurial dream of building a platform they can live off, or sell it for enough money to refactor their life.

This is where this line of thought eats its own tail, because the bureaucratic metastasis of HR, through which the remaining dreams of social liberalism are channeled, is accelerated by the ramifying failures it eventually brought to the education sector. Hiring is meta-fucked.

The problems of the university are only partly a matter of top down marketisation. There's also an endogenous dynamic whereby the (d)evolution of metrics creates explosively non-linear resource wastage, and fucks the information signals on which the hiring process is based.

This secular problem is held at bay in some sectors by sectarian professional standards that have either persisted despite the noise/signal overload affecting demand/supply negotiation in the labour market (e.g. lawyers), or been developed in response to it (e.g. software devs).

I explained how this plague of ramifying metrics has functions in the context of UK higher education in a recent conversation with @cstross (

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1346568690846867457?s=20

). What I'm saying here is that universities are entangled in more a general historical trend at multiple points.

However, it's important to note that academics (even para-academic peripatetics like myself) have a tendency to see the social ills of the rest of society through the lens of the university, and this leads to exaggerations and elisions we must diagnose and avoid.

There's a strain of this in Graeber's work, which is to be expected when an anthropologist is faced with the task of a system that they themselves are enmeshed in. It's also a veritable tradition in academia (cf. insidehighered.com/views/2015/04/…)

So, take everything I've said here with a pinch of salt. Season these ideas liberally before offering them up for consumption. That's the thread.