War on universities? Neoliberalism, intellectual positioning, and knowledge production in the UK Jana Bacevic Selwyn College University of Cambridge February 2019 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2 3 Preface Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee. 4 5 Abstract Jana Bacevic War on universities? Neoliberalism, intellectual positioning, and knowledge production in the UK This thesis contributes to sociological accounts of critique and, more broadly, to accounts of the relationship between knowledge and the social conditions of its production. It begins with a theoretical exploration of the tension between Bourdieu’s concept of sociological reflexivity and Boltanski’s sociology of critique, including the epistemic and political position from which knowledge claims in social sciences can be made and justified. This question becomes particularly important when the authority of such claims rests on the possibility of a conceptual distinction between the subject of knowledge (the ‘knower’) and their object (the ‘social’). The empirical part of the thesis provides an analysis of this process through the case of the critique of neoliberalism in UK higher education and research between 1997 and 2017. Intellectual interventions (books, articles, and other public statements) offering critical accounts of the transformation of universities are interpreted as forms of intellectual positioning, speech-acts that assign properties to objects and actors in the social realm. Through a qualitative analysis of interventions and interviews, the thesis reconstructs ontological assumptions entailed in forms of positioning, particularly those pertaining to the justification of epistemic authority of academics in the political and historical context of post- WWII Britain. The thesis uses these findings to situate the questions of knowledge, critique, and the role of social sciences within the longer discussion about the relationship between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’. Focusing on the relationship between positionality and positioning, the thesis shows how subject-object relationships form a fundamental part of the production of both critique and knowledge about its object. 6 7 Table of Contents Preface ........................................................................................................... 3 Introduction .................................................................................................. 12 Social and historical framing .................................................................................................... 16 Outline ..................................................................................................................................... 21 Chapter 1: Literature review and theoretical framing .................................... 24 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 24 Situating the object ................................................................................................................... 24 Sociology of critique and sociology of knowledge .................................................................... 32 Critique as discourse: the problem of power/knowledge ........................................................ 35 Critique as performativity: the problem of effects ................................................................... 39 Critique as strategy: the problem of fields ............................................................................... 42 Critique as reflexivity: the problem of self-knowledge ............................................................. 45 Summary of research questions ............................................................................................... 51 Chapter 2: Description of study and methods ................................................. 54 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 54 Historical and political context ................................................................................................. 57 Data ........................................................................................................................................... 60 Analysis ..................................................................................................................................... 62 Interventions ............................................................................................................................ 63 Data ........................................................................................................................................... 65 Analysis ..................................................................................................................................... 66 Interviews ................................................................................................................................ 67 Data ........................................................................................................................................... 67 Analysis ..................................................................................................................................... 69 Ethical considerations .............................................................................................................. 70 Positioning and positionality .................................................................................................... 72 Interpretation and explanation ................................................................................................ 75 Limitations and constraints ...................................................................................................... 80 Contribution to literature ......................................................................................................... 81 8 Chapter 3: Political and policy framework ...................................................... 86 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 86 Two elites: a history of conflict? .............................................................................................. 86 Universities and the state ........................................................................................................ 90 20th century ............................................................................................................................. 94 Robbins to Jarratt ...................................................................................................................... 96 New Public Management ........................................................................................................ 101 New Labour, same neoliberalism? ......................................................................................... 105 REF and TEF ........................................................................................................................... 109 Brexit: experts against themselves? ...................................................................................... 115 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................ 118 Chapter 4: Interventions .............................................................................. 123 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 123 Early critics: from cultural Marxism to audit culture .............................................................. 124 Audit culture .......................................................................................................................... 132 Words and worlds.................................................................................................................. 133 The name(s) of numbers ........................................................................................................ 139 Playing (with) politics ............................................................................................................ 141 Justification: from ontology to epistemology (and back) ....................................................... 144 Thatcherites and bankers: political agency ............................................................................ 152 Barbarians at the gate? Freedom of speech and universities’ ‘culture war’ ........................... 157 Conclusions: the intervention imperative ............................................................................... 164 Chapter 5: Interviews .................................................................................. 169 Introduction and a note on transcription ............................................................................... 169 More than a feeling ............................................................................................................... 170 The accidental expert ............................................................................................................ 172 Speaking for the people: universalism of the particular? ....................................................... 177 The ambivalent institution ..................................................................................................... 181 Boundary subjects ................................................................................................................. 185 Knowledge and (human) interests ......................................................................................... 192 Writing is fighting? Limits of interventions ............................................................................ 196 Conclusions: navigating ambiguity ........................................................................................ 199 9 Chapter 6: Synthesis .................................................................................... 204 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 204 Setting the stage .................................................................................................................... 205 (B)orders of worth .................................................................................................................. 212 Fields of sense ........................................................................................................................ 215 Reflexivity, positioning and self-knowledge ........................................................................... 221 Conclusions ................................................................................................. 226 Concluding summary .............................................................................................................. 226 The justification of justification .............................................................................................. 232 We were never modern…but we keep trying .......................................................................... 237 How to do (no) things with words .......................................................................................... 240 Postscript: dream of detachment ........................................................................................... 242 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 246 Appendix 1: Ethical approval form ............................................................... 279 10 11 12 Introduction What is the relationship between critique and the social? At first glance, this may seem like too general a question. Any attempt to offer an answer is inevitably going to come up against problems in defining both critique and the social (cf. Latour, 2005, 2004). This does not mean sociology is not critical. Particularly in the UK, sociology has a tradition of association with progressive politics, allegedly prompting Raymond Aron to observe that “British sociology is essentially an attempt to make intellectual sense of the political problems of the Labour Party” (Halsey, 2004, p. 70). 21st-century sociology, in this sense, has certainly travelled a long way from Weber’s doctrine of axiological neutrality (e.g. Hamati-Ataya, 2018; Hammersley, 2017). Discussions about the relationship between ideas, identities, and politics of those who produce knowledge surface time and again, in tensions surrounding, for instance, the movement to decolonize higher education (e.g. Mbembe, 2015; Mamdani, 2018), climate change (e.g. Dunlap and Brulle, eds., 2015; Clark, 2011), or intersectionality (e.g. Hill Collins, 2009; Hancock, 2016). They engage a variety of theoretical resources: from Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, to feminist critique of positionality and standpoint epistemologies, Foucault’s work on the knowledge/power nexus, and, of course, different forms of critique of ‘ideology’, from Frankfurt School to post-structuralism. As interesting and dynamic as these debates are, one of their key aspects has remained significantly undertheorised. It concerns the relationship between knowledge and agency, or, more precisely, critique as a form of knowledge of social reality, and the way different actors orient themselves towards this reality. As a consequence, the potential of critical sociology – and critical social knowledge in general – to inform people’s ideas and consequently their actions tends to be taken for granted. This problem is implicit in many forms of critical knowledge of reality. Raymond Geuss, for instance, identifies it in both the first and second generations of Frankfurt School: 13 A critical theory, then, does not predict that the agents in the society will adopt and use the theory to understand themselves and transform their society, rather it ‘demands’ that they adopt the critical theory, i.e. it asserts that these agents ‘ought’ to adopt and act on the critical theory where the ‘ought’ is the ‘ought’ of rationality (Geuss, 1981, p. 57). The starting ambition of this thesis is to examine the relationship between critique and the social conditions of its existence and, in particular, their relationship in the political and economic context of contemporary UK academia. Rather than the normatively inflected discussions inspired by the legacy of the Frankfurt School, which would merit an altogether separate investigation, this thesis takes a slightly different route. Its starting point is at the intersection between sociology of knowledge, sociology of intellectuals, and social theory. In an analogy with ‘the social life of methods’ (e.g. Law and Ruppert, 2013), this approach could be described as ‘the social life of theory’, or, more specifically, ‘the social life of concepts’. It is concerned less with the links between theory and sociopolitical change, and more with the relationship between the processes of production of concepts and statements about the nature of reality, and the social context of their justification. This is particularly pertinent given the idea that social sciences at the start of the 21st century are experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. This time, the crisis is brought on not by the scrutiny of their own epistemic and ontological foundations, but by the introduction of market competition and performance-based funding to institutions and practices of knowledge production. Struggles surrounding the future of the university – what interventions analysed in this thesis refer to as ‘the war on universities’ – are often at the heart of these discussions. The university, and its existence as a publicly funded institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, are seen to be under threat. The sources of this threat take many forms, but they usually entail a mix of governmental control and increased domination by economic and financial interests. This combination is oftentimes framed under the umbrella term ‘neoliberalism’. Diagnostic narratives related to the transformation of the status of knowledge, thus, go together with the critique of the effects of neoliberal policies on its production, and, in particular, on ‘the university’ as an institution. 14 Given how widely accepted the idea of the sources as well as detrimental effects of these changes in contemporary academia seems to be, it may be appealing to accept this type of diagnostic at face value, rather than see it as an object of research in its own right. Yet, if the university is in crisis, developing critical capacity to understand our own assumptions – including those about the crisis – seems pertinent. Furthermore, if we accept that critical capacity is one of the sources of legitimacy for sociology (and other social sciences), understanding how this capacity relates to the social context in which justification takes place has important consequences for knowledge production both at present and in the future. In order to examine the critique of neoliberalism in higher education and research as an object, this thesis builds on Luc Boltanski’s sociology of critique (e.g. Boltanski, 2011 [2009]). Sociology of critique is an elaboration of the project of ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’, developed by Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, Ève Chiapello, and others once associated with Groupe de sociologie politique et morale in Paris (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007 [1999]). Pragmatic sociology of critique developed precisely as a form of considering the relationship between critique (including that practiced by social sciences) and the conditions of its production as internally related, rather than assuming critique exists outside the conditions it addresses. Boltanski and his collaborators emphasized critical capacity as, in principle, available to all social actors, and thus an essential part of the production of the social, rather than an exceptional practice activated only in moments of ‘crisis’. This angle was, in part, motivated by desire to move away from Bourdieu’s characterization of human agency as driven by internalized dispositions and, in part, to account for the reproduction of capitalism under conditions of political plurality. Early summary of the research programme, Boltanski and Thévenot’s On Justification (originally published in 1991, in English translation 2006) analyses the repertoire of justifications – narrative frames of reasoning, including the invocation of overarching moral or ethical frameworks – actors use in situations of ‘dispute’, or any situation where differing interpretations and thus different courses of action are possible. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello (English translation 2005, originally published in 1999) attempt to explain the 15 transformation and reproduction of capitalist ‘ethos’ in the 1980s and 1990s through the appropriation of the type of critique associated with the ‘spirit of 1968’ into managerial and organizational discourse. In addition to presenting one of the precursors to studies of neoliberal ideology in the context of production and transmission of knowledge, New Spirit of Capitalism was instrumental in drawing attention to the fact that critique can serve to reinforce rather than just to challenge social and political order. Finally, Boltanski’s On Critique (2011, originally published in 2009) engages in more detail with epistemological implications of the relationship between critique – both in the sense of Bourdieu’s critical sociology, and in pragmatic sociology of critique – and social reality. More specifically, it queries the constitution of ‘complex exteriority’ which, Boltanski claims, is key to the constitution of critical stance of social sciences. Despite somewhat limited reception in Anglo-American contexts, pragmatic sociology of critique has been highly influential in France and in some other continental European contexts. Like any other school of thought, it is not devoid of internal contradictions, not least those generated by the evolution of its own theoretical and ontological postulates. This thesis does not aim to provide a theoretical exegesis of these arguments (good overviews are available in Susen & Turner eds. 2014; Blokker, 2011); rather, its objective is to use some of the question opened by this research programme – in particular the relationship between epistemic position and forms of justification entailed in the distinction between simple and complex exteriority – to query the constitution of critique of neoliberalism in the case of UK higher education and research. This thesis starts from the following positions. First, it moves beyond the popular perception of critique as primarily a form of contention towards seeing critique as a constitutive part of social and political order. In this sense, it reframes critique as a topic for, primarily, social theory1, and, secondarily, sociology of knowledge2. 1While there are many interpretations of ‘social theory’, in this thesis the concept refers to the labour of defining, discussing, and clarifying the meaning of terms used by academics (usually, but not exclusively, in the social sciences and humanities) to describe, interpret, and explain objects, mechanisms, and relations commonly agreed to belong to the ‘social’ domain. See e.g. Abend, 2008; Swedberg, 2016). 2Sociology of knowledge’ can refer to a number of approaches and paradigms: from Mannheim’s phenomenologically-influenced historical sociology, to sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) of the ‘Edinburgh School’ (e.g. Bloor, 1976) and actor-network theory (e.g. Latour, 2005, also for the summary of these distinctions), to ‘New Sociology of Ideas’ (e.g. Camic, Gross and Lamont, 2011). 16 Second, by focusing on how critique is produced by those who do it ‘professionally’ – that is, intellectuals, or academic intellectuals more specifically – it shares pragmatic sociology of critique’s refusal to invest any particular group of actors (including social scientists) with a priori epistemic privilege in producing critique, but ‘flips’ it from seeing common-people-as-experts to considering experts-as-common-people. In this, it takes a step beyond the postulate of sociology of critique that ‘ordinary’ people have the same critical capacity as social scientists, towards assuming that ‘professional’ production of critique must, in the final instance, be subject to the same regularities and mechanisms as apply to any ‘ordinary’ member of society. This does not mean there are no elements specific to critique as a form of social practice; however, these elements have to be subject to the same set of explanatory criteria as other practices, lest we end up reproducing the assumption that critique somehow stands ‘outside’ of the social context. Last, rather than seeing critique as independent from the conditions that it aims to describe (for instance, capitalism and/or neoliberalism), it asks what it would mean to say that critique is mutually constitutive with conditions that are its object. In this, the intention of this thesis is to engage productively with one of the key questions left open in sociology of critique – that is, the relationship between knowledge of social reality and acting in social reality. The main challenge it approaches, thus, is to think the relationship between the current conditions of knowledge production in the academia, and their critique, without back- or foregrounding either. In this, its goal is not to affirm or deny the critical potential of sociology and other social sciences, but rather to ‘unpick’ the nexus between knowledge, critique, and action, and to consider how it relates to present conditions. Social and historical framing This thesis was written in the political context of post-Brexit-referendum Britain and Donald Trump, where effects of rampant climate change have only begun to gain coverage in mainstream media, and where ‘post-truth’ was Oxford Dictionary’s ‘word of the year’ in 2016. In such a world, it may be tempting to Here, ‘sociology of knowledge’ is used in the most general sense, as the study of social factors and processes influencing the production of human knowledge. 17 revert to principled assertions of epistemic authority and value of academic knowledge (cf. Latour, 2013, 2004). Social sciences, in particular, are prone to what Mike Savage (2009) dubbed ‘epochalism’: the tendency to frame political or historical events as calling for disciplinary (re)orientation. This, for instance, has been a frequent mark of recent work on the ‘crisis of expertise’ (Nichols, 2017; Cruickshank and Sassower, 2017), which invariably ends up reasserting the relevance of academic inquiry, particularly for its critical potential (see also Bacevic, 2017). However, this position lends itself easily to a somewhat circular argumentation where the diagnosis of a specific historical moment is used to justify the need to maintain the position that enables precisely that kind of diagnosis to persist. Academic critique of neoliberalism in universities is a case in point: it uses a diagnosis of a particular set of conditions – the neoliberal ‘onslaught’ on teaching and research – in order to justify the need for more research and teaching, including about the phenomenon it diagnoses. This, of course, is not to say that neoliberalism is ‘not real’ or that its effects are ‘only in people’s heads’. While there is a longer debate on the exact meaning, validity, or usefulness of the term (e.g. Rodgers, 2018; Venugopal, 2015; Springer, 2016, 2015), political technologies associated with neoliberalism have visible and material corollaries as well as experienced, and embodied consequences, both of which would probably be there even if it were not for consistently growing scholarship on the matter. Yet, this does draw attention to the need to carefully consider the relationship between the transformation of economic and political conditions of teaching and research and critical scholarship about this transformation. This is not very likely to ensue from ‘epochalist’ narratives, in part because they prefigure the reality of the perceived threat and, as the ‘war’ metaphor suggests, focus on the defence. In contrast, this thesis sets out to think about the relationship between this sort of diagnosis and its effects – that is to say, the link between diagnostic and performative parts of critique in their particular social and political environment – and, rather than seeing critique as a ‘reaction’ to the changing conditions of knowledge production, to theorise how the two are related. The relationship between neoliberalism and critique has to be thought in the context of broader transformation of social and cultural conditions of knowledge production at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. This 18 transformation is often linked to the problematization of the legacy of the Enlightenment and the project of Western rationality as a whole. While postmodernism is credited (rarely laudably) as the ‘source’ of this problematization, the relationship between knowledge, critique, and political power has been a concern for social theory at least since Adorno and Horkheimer, if not Marx (see e.g. discussion in Bernstein, 1989). In this sense, critique can neither disavow its Enlightenment legacy nor its relationship to the question of reason. In Foucault’s poignant summary, “[c]ritique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up in the Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of critique” (1984, p. 38). The historical constitution of critique as a distinct social practice is coextensive with the emergence of the public sphere. As Hohendahl argued, [i]n the Age of Enlightenment, criticism cannot be separated from the institution of the public sphere. Every judgement is designed to be directed towards a public; communication with the reader is an integral part of the system (1982, p. 52). This has particular bearing on the constitution of critique in the UK. Habermas (1989) situated the origins of the modern public sphere in the specific context of the constitution of mercantile bourgeoisie as the carrier of the political order in the British Isles. While the function of the public sphere in other European countries was to present a counterweight to the absolutist state, in England this opposition was mediated by what Terry Eagleton (1988) dubbed “intimacy of cultural, political, and economic preoccupations” (p. 11) between gentry and aristocracy on one, and emergent mercantile class on the other side. This intimacy will continue to mark the relationship between the political class and intellectuals: The currency of this realm is neither title nor property but rationality…but because that rationality is not the possession of a single class within the hegemonic social bloc – because it is a product of an intensive conversation between those dominant classes…it is possible to view it as universal (Eagleton, 1988, p. 26). 19 In this sense, debates related to what the cultural critic Henry Giroux dubbed “neoliberalism’s war on higher education” (Giroux, 2014) may focus on neoliberal policies, but the values, assumptions, and ideas different sides draw on are older than neoliberal ideology. They include the sources and status of knowledge, the role of institutions that produce it, the relationship between those who do (intellectuals) and the knowledge produced. From this point of view, while arguments invoked in this dispute may concern the relationship between universities, markets, and governments at the end of the 20th and the beginning of 21st centuries, they relate to the broader questions of the role and status of knowledge in, and its relation to, society. At this point, cynics (or political/IR realists) might be tempted to assert that, in accordance with what is known as ‘Sayre's Law’ (alternatively attributed to Henry Kissinger), academic politics is nasty precisely because nothing is at stake. The key conflicts of the 21st century are more likely to concern oil fields in the Middle East and water wells in Misrah than university campuses in the Midlands. Similarly, the future of universities will more likely be decided in boardrooms of policy institutes and think-tanks than in intellectuals’ books and blog posts. There is both a trivial and a non-trivial sense in which this is true. In relation to the first, the role of critique has to include understanding its own limits: it is, in part, a heuristic. From this perspective, studying the relationship (or lack thereof) between academic critique and sociopolitical change has obvious bearings on how we understand both. Boltanski and Chiapello make a similar point in the preface to New Spirit of Capitalism: Stressing historical structures, laws and forces tends to minimize the role of intentional action. Things are what they are. Yet the critical approach becomes meaningless if one does not believe that it can serve to inflect human beings’ action, and that this action can itself help to change the course of things in the direction of further ‘liberation’...But if, in the final analysis, all relations are reducible to conflict of interest and relations of force, and this is a ‘law’ immanent in the order of the ‘social’, what is the point of unmasking them in the indignant tones of critique, as opposed to registering them with a dispassion of the entomologist studying ant societies? (2007, p. x) 20 In a non-trivial sense, the question of limits of critique may point to another longer- lasting feature: separation between the world of ‘thinking’ and the world of ‘politics’. This topic, which Hannah Arendt explored at length (Arendt, 1981, 1989, 2005), finds contemporary expression in the bifurcation of technical and critical forms of knowledge and expertise (Davies and McGoey, 2012). The flipside of its Enlightenment legacy, therefore, is that critique can become part of ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ (McGoey, 2012a, b) not only revealing but also, even if unwittingly, obscuring the relationship between knowledge and forms of political power. This is not necessarily to suggest that critique might have “run out of steam” (Latour, 2004) or that it had ‘sold out’ to neoliberal capitalism. Understanding the limits of critique and framing critique as part and parcel of social processes means, very simply, that we have to focus not only on what it says but also on what it does. The return of the popularity of Marxism in social theory, in particular, means it would be easy to write off critique as a form of ‘superstructure’. Yet, as this thesis hopes to demonstrate, framing critique as an epiphenomenon of ‘real’ social processes – as well as, conversely, their cause – is unnecessarily reductive. It is precisely the relationship between the two that needs to be explored. The starting question of this thesis, therefore, is what the critique of neoliberalism in UK higher education and research can tell us about the social processes of production of knowledge, their organization, transformation, and contestation in the political domain. From this, the thesis opens into the broader theoretical consideration of critique as concept and practice – and the related question of effects, that is, how critique acts. This is used to interrogate some of the assumptions of social sciences as the site of production of authoritative knowledge, with emphasis on the role and possibility of self-knowledge, or reflexivity, in this context. 21 Outline The first chapter begins with the theoretical framing of critique of neoliberalism in higher education and different ways to approach it as an object of study. It elaborates why it is useful to move beyond reductive framings of critique (or intellectual interventions more generally) that see it as either foundational or epiphenomenal and explores the theoretical and methodological implications of seeing critique as co-constitutive with the social. It puts sociology of critique in conversation with Foucault’s concept of discourse, Bourdieu’s concepts of field and intellectuals as the ‘dominated fraction of the dominant class’, and performativity of concepts that draws on the work of Austin, Butler, and Searle, as well as sociological conceptualisations of reflexivity. Last, it shows how sociology of critique can help bridge the structuralism of realist accounts, on the one hand, and the constructivism of pragmatist accounts, on the other. The second chapter proceeds to outline how these concerns translate to the design of this research project. It outlines methodological approaches that guided data collection and analysis, specifies limitations and constraints, as well as objectives. Specifically, it discusses the double bind of positionality and positioning in the context of research, and its epistemological implications. The ensuing three chapters are primarily concerned with the presentation, exposition, and analysis of the collected material. Chapter 3 presents the historical and political background of transformations that are the object of critique analysed in the thesis. This chapter focuses on the changing relationship between universities and political authority throughout the 20th century and in the early decades of the 21st century. Most critical discourses place the origin of the trends identified as neoliberal in the years of the government of Margaret Thatcher. However, given the scope and political origin of the changes, it offers a summary of the early history of higher education in the UK before moving on to post-WWII developments, up to the most recent events – that is, discussions concerning the role of universities, knowledge, and intellectuals (experts) in the context of ‘Brexit’. 22 Chapter 4 introduces the main topics in the critique of the ‘war’ on universities. It analyses the evolution of ideas, the shifting framing of critique, as well as changes in the portrayal of specific entities (or actors) in the context of UK higher education and research. It shows how critique evolved, from an early predominantly Marxist analysis of the university as a site of class struggle, to ‘culture wars’ in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Chapter 5 presents the analysis of these forms of critique through interviews with a selected group of academics. While Chapter 4 focuses on the discursive content of critique, Chapter 5 analyses the narrative strategies and reflection on intellectual positioning as the frame for critique. These threads are brought together in Chapter 6, which shows how forms of justification – qua speech acts – define the position of different ‘speakers’ and other entities in the field. However, they go beyond that: they also define the field itself, thus reflecting the conditions that allowed it to be created in the first place. It is at this point that they encounter the tension between speaking and acting inherent in critique. This chapter therefore redescribes the ‘war on universities’ as a form of conflict. Despite the fact it rarely claims actual lives or results in large-scale destruction of physical environment, it is equally concerned with questions of ontology – or the “whatness of what is” (Boltanski, 2011, p. 35 et passim). At the end of the day, this struggle to define (or have privileged epistemic access to) ‘whatness’ of stuff shapes trajectories, stakes, and strategies of different human actors involved in this particular set of relations. The concluding chapter examines the implications of this analysis for how we understand the nature of academic knowledge and its role in contemporary societies. In this sense, the thesis aims to provide a meta-theoretical yet empirically informed narrative that seeks to understand how critique, as a form of practice, works to constitute relations and categories in the social domain. 23 24 Chapter 1: Literature review and theoretical framing Introduction This chapter elaborates entry points in the Introduction by situating the critique of neoliberalism in higher education and research as a topic of inquiry. In order to do this, it frames it as an intellectual intervention, a form of speech-act that combines descriptive and normative elements. This provides an opening for putting the postulates of sociology of critique in conversation with four major theoretical concepts: discourse, performativity, fields, and reflexivity. The chapter shows how these concepts help further refine questions opened by framing of critique of neoliberalism as an object of sociological inquiry. The methodological tenets of this inquiry are further elaborated in Chapter 2. Situating the object There is a war on for the future of the university worldwide. The stakes are high, and they reach deep into our social condition. On one side are self- proclaimed modernisers who view the institution as vital to national economic success. Here the university is a servant of the national economy in the context of globalization, its driving principles of private and personal enrichment necessary conditions of ‘progress’ and modernity. Others see this as a radical impoverishment of the university’s capacities to extend human possibilities and freedoms, to seek earnestly for social justice, and to participate in the endless need for the extension of democracy. (…) Choose sides3. The blurb for Thomas Docherty’s Universities at War (Docherty, 2015) is perhaps the most succinct summary of the predicament of UK higher education. Docherty, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick, was at the centre of a dispute widely reported in the national media the previous year, when he had been suspended from the university for, alllegedly, “undermining the authority” of 3 https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/universities-at-war/book244608 25 a senior member of the management (Gardner, 2014). However, critics claimed the real cause was Docherty’s sustained critical attitude towards university reforms in higher education in the UK, some of which he had also addressed in his previous book, For the University (Docherty, 2011). While the reaction they provoked certainly makes Docherty’s books exceptional, their diagnostic framing is not unique. Since mid-2000s, there has been a veritable boom of literature critical of the transformation of university sector and its relationship with the state. Titles include Killing Thinking: Death of the Universities, (Evans, 2004); The Assault on Universities (Bailey and Freedman eds., 2011); A Manifesto for the Public University (Holmwood, ed., 2011); What are Universities for? (Collini, 2012); The Great University Gamble (McGettigan, 2013); Death of the Public University? (Wright and Shore, eds., 2017), What’s Happened to the University? (Furedi, 2017); Speaking of Universities (Collini, 2017), and A University Education (Willetts, 2017), to name just those published in the UK. The diagnosis also appears in articles (in e.g. Times Higher Education Supplement or The Guardian) and blog posts. In a piece published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2015, distinguished Marxist critic Terry Eagleton wrote: From Cape Town to Reykjavik, Sydney to São Paulo, an event as momentous in its own way as the Cuban revolution or the invasion of Iraq is steadily under way: the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique. Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism. Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism (Eagleton, 2015, my emphasis). 26 Besides propensity towards metaphors of disaster, war, or conflict, these books, articles and blogs share other characteristics. While their authors are usually academics, their tone is, in most cases, relatively popular; that is, they address the general, albeit educated, reader. They rarely, if ever, engage in systematic collection and presentation of data: though some of these will use numbers and figures for illustrative purposes, the onus is usually on the author, as the witness, narrator, and analyst of the trends that these books, articles, and blog posts describe. In this sense, despite the fact that their authors usually occupy academic positions, the type of epistemic authority they perform through these forms of critique is closer to that usually associated with “public intellectuals” rather than with “specific experts” (Baert, 2012). These narratives have a common structure. They begin by identifying a crisis in the university. They locate the origins of this crisis in the transformation of the governing principles of the university, associated with the changes in the ‘social contract’ between the universities and the state. This transformation is framed as part of the broader ideological shift concerning the provision of public services, usually identified with neoliberalism. They proceed to explain how this transformation poses significant dangers to a particular concept of the university (public, critical), to the point of representing a serious attack – or ‘war’ – on its very essence. They argue for defending or reinstating the public university, usually by reference to its contribution to critical inquiry, democracy, modernity, or even the Western civilization or the legacy of the Enlightenment as a whole. Neoliberalism, in this sense, is taken as an overarching term for the ideology or modes of governance responsible for the transformation of the relationship between universities, as institutions of knowledge production, and the state. This transformation is primarily associated with the withdrawal of the state from direct provision of public services, and reorientation towards private, or ‘market-based’ models of allocation of resources. Yet, as the metaphor of ‘war’ suggests, critique of neoliberalism in universities – or, more broadly, knowledge production (comprising both higher education and research) – often frames this process as the final stage of ‘decline’ of the status of knowledge (and those who produce it) in society. 27 In this sense, the ‘war on universities’ can be seen as part of a longer narrative concerning changes in status and the role of intellectuals, something Baert and Shipman (2012) dubbed the ‘declinist thesis’. As a genre of critique, the declinist thesis holds that, in Western societies, intellectuals – defined as those who have monopoly on the production of authoritative knowledge – are losing power and influence. In its contemporary form, this loss of influence is usually defined in relation to two spheres: politics and economics. On the one hand, intellectuals are ‘losing ground’ to politicians and managers, whose actions betray an interest in the accumulation of power and prestige. On the other hand, intellectuals – as much as the values they embody – are retreating in front of the unstoppable advance of the forces of the market. Combined, this portends the ‘capitulation’ of universities in front of neoliberalism. The combination of descriptive (or diagnostic) and normative (or prescriptive) elements suggests these forms of critique can be identified as intellectual interventions. Eyal and Bucholz (2010) proposed this term as a way of refocusing the study of intellectual life from the emphasis on a fixed role or identity (‘the intellectual’), towards a more contingent or processual emphasis on the relational nature and effects of the production of authoritative statements (intervention): The difference between sociology of intellectuals and the sociology of interventions is that the former takes as its unit of analysis a particular social type and is preoccupied with showing how the social characteristics of this type explain where its allegiances lie, whereas the latter takes as its unit of analysis the movement of intervention itself and is therefore interested in how forms of expertise can acquire value as public interventions (Eyal and Bucholz, 2010, p. 120). Rather than importing the ‘declinist’ narrative, and trying to show to what degree and why intellectuals (in this case, those working in universities) are losing their standing, we should look at how these narratives are created and disseminated, how they are recognized and valued in public as well as, not less importantly, what they aim to achieve. 28 Theory of intellectual positioning (Baert, 2015, 2012; Baert and Morgan, 2018) builds on the concept of interventions to posit that intellectual products serve to position their authors (and others) in the intellectual and political arena. In this sense, critique is not only ‘reflective’ but also performative; intellectual interventions create effects in and for both actors and the field. They achieve this by attributing specific characteristics to differently defined actors, objects, and institutions. Succinctly, intellectual interventions are performative because they establish a link between how things are (description) and how they should be (prescription). Their effects, in this sense, derive primarily from the possibility to assert a version of this link that is acceptable and influential at a particular place and time, and with specific people. The concept of social life as defined by competing forms of definition and justification is also the cornerstone of pragmatic sociology of critique (Boltanski, 2011; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007). Boltanski and Thévenot argued social situations are characterised by a relatively fixed set of rules (‘grammars’), vocabularies, and forms of valuation that actors resort to in order to justify their own, as well as qualify the identity and conduct of others. These underlying structures of thought become visible not only in situations of dispute (i.e., when there is an actual conflict), but whenever actors need to justify different courses of action. In On Justification, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) demonstrate that seemingly different normative (or ethical) frameworks these forms of justification invoke nonetheless coalesce around a finite number of arrangements4 of reasons, objects, and persons. These arrangements can be further categorized as orders of worth, polities5, and worlds. Orders of worth define the overarching moral principle according to which persons and objects are placed within categories; these logics of justification are called ‘polities’. Six polities are established at first – civic, inspired, domestic, industrial, market, and reputational6; Boltanski and Chiapello 4 Or ‘assemblages’; early sociology of critique makes quite explicit its shared theoretical background with Latour’s and Callon’s actor-network theory. 5 Expression in French is cités, which in English translations appears as both ‘city’ (e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) and ‘polity’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006, Boltanski, 2011). I find the latter closer to the original meaning, so this term will be used throughout the thesis. 6 Previously translated as ‘fame’, but appears as ‘reputation’ in the 2007 edition of New Spirit of Capitalism. 29 (2007) will go on to add a seventh, the ‘projective’ polity. Briefly, the civic polity entails judgments of value on the basis of contribution to the common good of all its citizens; the inspired, built on the model of St. Augustine’s ‘City of God’, on asceticism and divine inspiration; the domestic, on the basis of contribution to the ‘household’ (one could say, maintenance of patriarchal order); the industrial, on the basis of hard work and cooperation; the market, on the basis of commerce; and the reputational, on the basis of fame; and projective, on the basis of future- generativity. The application of these polities to ‘reality’ – everything that is constructed – is what gives rise to ‘worlds’, that is, different conceivable arrangements and relations between elements positioned in either. This theoretical framework may at times appear too specific or complex, not least because of the shifts in the meaning and use of specific terms between early and later framings (cf. Stones, 2014). However, given the key objective of the thesis is not to offer an exegesis of its theoretical or ontological postulates, these terms will be used to the degree to which they are useful in illuminating the present discussion. From this perspective, the core constitutive operation for ‘orders of worth’, ‘polities’, and ‘worlds’ is positioning: by placing objects and actors in specific domains, those who formulate critique simultaneously introduce a diagnostic (‘what is something’) and a normative dimension (‘where should it belong/where it shouldn’t belong’). Critique (or, more broadly, any kind of discursive justification) rests on an ontology that is fundamentally positional, or, in broader terms, relational. In this sense, the sociology of critique is compatible with the theory of intellectual positioning (Baert, 2015, 2012) and shares ontological postulates of Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism (cf. Susen, 2014b, c; Nachi, 2014) (as well as, in the broader sense, Chomsky’s generative grammar). However, while it is possible to claim that relationality is ‘generic’, what is brought into relation is not. Differently put, the cognitive operation of classification may be a common human capacity and thus relatively equally distributed among actors, but the persuasiveness, success and durability of those forms of association are not. Similarly to intellectual interventions, then, critique rests on the capacity to assert an authoritative interpretation of the relationship between ‘what is’ and ‘what should be done about it’. 30 This brings into sharper relief the relationship between access to knowledge of social reality and the position from which these claims can be made. As Boltanski points out, this epistemic position is not simple: Critical theories…necessarily rely on descriptive social science to paint a picture of the reality subject to critique. But compared with sociological descriptions that seek to conform to the vulgate of neutrality, the specificity of critical theories is that they contain critical judgements on the social order which the analyst assumes responsibility for in her own name, thus abandoning any pretention to neutrality (Boltanski, 2011, p. 4). On Critique engages with the relationship between knowledge of social reality of ‘ordinary actors’ and that reliant on reflexivity derived from scientific instruments. This, in part, comes from pragmatic sociology’s qualification of ‘metacritical theories of domination’ – in particular Bourdieu’s critical sociology – as prone to posit a distinction between critical awareness of sociologists, on the one hand, and ‘ordinary’ actors, on the other: Metacritical theories of domination tackle these asymmetries [of power] from a particular angle – that of the miscognition by the actors themselves of the exploitation to which they are subject and, above all, of the social conditions that make this exploitation possible and also, as a result, of the means by which they could stop it. That is why they present themselves indivisibly as theories of power, theories of exploitation and theories of knowledge. By this token, they encounter in an especially vexed fashion the issue of the relationship between the knowledge of social reality which is that of ordinary actors, reflexively engaged in practice, and the knowledge of social reality conceived from a reflexivity reliant on forms and instruments of totalization – an issue which is itself at the heart of the tensions out of which the possibility of a social science must be created. (Boltanski, 2011, p. 9). The tension between ‘lay’ and ‘expert’ position is particularly pronounced in the critique of neoliberalism in higher education. Namely, those engaging in critique 31 ‘sit’ uneasily between the two categories. On the one hand, their authority is derived from their position within the system of knowledge production, that is, their access to the ‘instruments of totalisation’ that Boltanski refers to as part of the vocabulary of social sciences. On the other, their critique addresses this very system: this means they simultaneously occupy the position of ‘ordinary actors’. This is particularly interesting since most critics in the case of critique of transformation of universities are not ‘experts’ in higher education in the strict sense of the term. While their academic backgrounds vary – some, like Thomas Docherty and Stefan Collini, are literary scholars; some, like John Holmwood or Steve Fuller, are sociologists – none have higher education, let alone higher education policy, as their primary field of scholarly expertise. This suggests forms and logics of justification involved in academic critique of neoliberalism can provide particularly useful insights for the delineation of ‘lay’ and ‘expert’ epistemic positions, and the negotiation of this boundary. This is compatible with the shift in the study of knowledge production from precisely defined individuals, groups, or fields, towards distributed, networked agency and ‘interstitial’ domains – precisely what Eyal and Bucholz emphasised in arguing for moving away from 'intellectuals' and towards intellectual interventions (2010, pp. 129–133). This thesis, therefore, will treat these as positions on an ontological continuum, which is why it is interested in the dynamics generated by the internal tension between different actors’ occupation of any of these positions at a specific point in time. Philosophy of social sciences is no stranger to the question of the relationship between position – that is, a person’s role and identity within a particular social setting – and knowledge, including epistemic authority. The concept of positionality (Smith, 2000; Alcoff and Potter eds., 1993; Kukla, 2006; Rose, 1997) engages specifically with the epistemic implications of gendered, raced, and other identities; perspectivism elevates this to the level of philosophical doctrine (cf. Graeber, 2015; Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017; Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2017). While generating numerous discussions and interesting research programmes, these perspectives nonetheless privilege the question of knowledge. This account, on the other hand, through the combined lens of sociology of critique and the sociology of interventions, has to address both the question of knowledge 32 and the question of practice; in other words, not only the content of interventions, but also their effects – intended or unintended. In a formal-logical sense, intellectual interventions are a form of a Russell paradox: a set that simultaneously is, and is not, a member of itself. Every intellectual intervention that describes the state of UK higher education qualifies for membership in the set ‘state of higher education in the UK’, but also aims to be outside of that set, by encompassing it as a totality. This self-referentiality of critique has important implications for how we can go about studying it. It also makes the ‘war on universities’ a particularly interesting case through which to explore the relationship between truth claims, contexts in which they are made, and the agency and identity of those who make them. It is to this relationship we turn next. Sociology of critique and sociology of knowledge Framing critique as a problem of knowledge suggests we need to engage with the question concerning the relationship between the social (or social structure) and the production of knowledge. Sociology of knowledge7, especially in its early days, developed on the assumption it is possible to distinguish knowledge claims from their social context. This provided the ground for the analysis of their relationship, in most cases assumed to flow in one direction (Camic, Gross and Lamont, 2011, p. 9). In Marx’s German Ideology (1977 [1932]), for instance, material relations and conditions of production give rise to ideologies. Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1936) posited that the degree of distance from material conditions gave intellectuals a critical ‘edge’ in terms of knowing the social. Even when the link was assumed to run in the opposite direction, from ideas to material conditions – as in Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2003 [1905]) – the possibility of ontological separation between social context (or 'background'), ideas (or intellectual products), and those who make them (intellectuals) was taken to represent at least a possibility. 7 Sociological approaches to studying knowledge production vary in scope (from ‘folk’ knowledge to scientific knowledge), methods (from focus on written texts to production in the ‘laboratory’), as well as ontological status ascribed to different elements (from naturalism to constructivism). More specific interpretations of the term, including its relationship to the sociology of intellectuals and the sociology of critique, are developed further in this chapter and in the thesis. 33 In contemporary societies, critique involves at least three elements. One is the author – that is, someone who ‘produces’ critique by uttering a specific form of propositional statement. Of course, there is no need to reappropriate the mythology, together with terminology, of the ‘lone hero’/‘genius’ of the Enlightenment (Collins, 1998): critique is clearly not only a product of a single author, locked away in his (for it must be his) proverbial ivory tower. Yet, despite instances of collective writing (manifestos, petitions, etc.) intellectual interventions are still, to a great degree, treated as an outcome of the work of a single person. Similarly, ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ of interventions – from negative repercussions to financial, status, and other awards – are also, though not exclusively, individual. Secondly, critique involves the act itself – the writing, or uttering, as well as the outcome of it – the ‘product’. Intellectual interventions can take the form of spoken word – a public lecture, an appearance on TV or the radio, a YouTube video – but, more often, they are written. Historically, this had to do with reproducibility and ‘portability’ of intellectual products, but it remains the case despite the fact that technology blurs the boundaries between ‘traditional’ and new forms of interventions. Similarly, written interventions range in form from longer pieces, articles, and books, to blogs and posts on social media. Clearly, not all of these have the same relevance; while some examples suggest a single Tweet can have serious consequences (Bacevic, 2018), more often than not written interventions are longer and their influence tends to increase with the degree to which they are subject to ‘gatekeeping’ – that is, editorial and publication – practices. This brings into focus the third component: the context, that is, the network of social relations in which interventions are made. Much like ‘society’, this term can be extended to encompass everything from the historical context of interventions, to institutional and political-economic infrastructures which enable them (cf. Latour, 2005). Yet the possibility of distinguishing knowledge claims from the social context in which they are made is particularly questionable when there is a close overlap between context, on the one hand, and critique that rests on the knowledge of that context, on the other. Rom Harré pointed out some of these challenges: 34 Knowing is a complex relational concept. There is one who knows, the knowledge he or she possesses and that about which the knower has knowledge…in the context of this discussion, the three entities in play can be seen as ‘persons’, ‘representations’ and ‘societies’, the last decomposed into institutions, structures and practices. But then we realize that forming representations of social matters is itself a social practice (1998, p.38). The challenge, therefore, is to theorise the interaction between context, intellectuals, and critique, without postulating any of these as foundational, and others as epiphenomenal8. Accounts of social action are not immune to epiphenomenalism, elision, or conflation (cf. Archer, 1995, p. 81–85). Downward conflation refers to accounts that see social structures as entirely or at least predominantly deterministic, and individual behaviour determined through the force of norms or socialization. An example would be seeking to explain the critique of the transformation of higher education as a consequence of authors’ class, or, more broadly, position in social structure. Gramsci’s concept of ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intellectuals (Gramsci, Hoare, & Smith, 1972) can be seen as an instance of this downward-conflationary view, in which class acts as the determinant of an individual’s oeuvre. While more sociologically nuanced, Mannheim’s view – in which intellectuals have a privileged access to truth by the virtue of being relatively independent, or unattached, to a particular class – follows the same logic: that of intellectual production as grounded in, or flowing from, a particular position in social structure. An analogous position here would be to say that the critique of neoliberalism is a reaction to large-scale structural changes, such as massification or internationalization of higher education. Upwards conflation, or ‘microreductionism’ (Archer, 1995) works in the opposite direction, by framing social structure as an epiphenomenon of human action. This type of account tends to place an emphasis on the role of individual intellectuals 8 ‘Epiphenomenalism’ refers to the tendency to treat one element of social explanation as a product (or, more precisely, byproduct – epiphenomenon) of another, which is in turn designated as ‘fundamental’– for instance, to treat agency as an epiphenomenon of structure. Archer argued such forms of elision or conflation are the main sources of confusion in social theory: “(...) [w]hen discussing ‘structure’ or ‘culture’ in relation to agency I am talking about a relationship between two aspects of social life. However intimately they are intertwined, these are none the less analytically distinct...The basic reason for avoiding this is that the ‘parts’ and the ‘people’ are not co-existent through time and therefore any approach which amalgamates them wrongly foregoes the possibility of examining the interplay between them over time” (1995, p. xiv). 35 (or groups) in the creation of durable cultural or structural properties. A number of influential accounts after 2008, for instance, suggested that ascendance of neoliberalism can be explained by the influence of a specific intellectuals or epistemic communities. In Masters of the Universe, Daniel Stedman Jones argues that “[n]eoliberal ideas had been generated slowly over fifty years or so by ‘academic scribblers’ in Europe and the United States” (2012, p. 2). Mirowski and Plehwe’s The Road from Mont Pelerin (2009) similarly locates the origin of neoliberal policies in a ‘thought collective’ of economists. While such accounts can offer compelling explanations for the success of specific ideologies, they fail to specify reasons why one type of ideology would be adopted over another. Ideas, in this sense, are assumed to have agency of their own, a sort of ‘lure’ they exercise over hapless actors (see particularly discussion in Thompson, 1991). Both forms of conflation have serious limitations in terms of understanding the relationship between critique and the social. Critique cannot stand ‘outside’ society, because, in itself, it is a practice of forming representations about the society; these representations are not just reflections but are always already part and parcel of the society in question. Critique is thus necessarily reliant on instruments, procedures, and institutions of validating knowledge of ‘the world’. Boltanski emphasizes this point when he writes that “critical theories of domination necessarily rely on descriptive social science to paint a picture of the reality subject to critique” (2011, p. 4). Of course, the link does not have to be straightforward: critique can aim to evaluate dominant discourses generated by a specific scientific discipline – for instance, claims about ‘racial’ differences in intelligence. This means critique cannot be analysed without engaging the question of procedures for the production and validation of knowledge – procedures that are discursive in nature. Critique as discourse: the problem of power/knowledge It is relatively unproblematic to assert that critique is discursive. Obviously, critique can involve other media – e.g. drawings, cartoons, memes – but most of the time it is composed of verbal statements. Equally, some acts can in themselves represent a form of critique: for instance, not standing up in court can convey lack of acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the judiciary; raising one’s fist in a salute 36 can convey identification with a social movement’s critique of racism and inequality. But even these acts require a verbal interpretative framework in order to be effective; in other words, their existence and utilisation depends on a linguistic universe in which words have an important role in the constitution of human society. The concept of justification is equally embedded in language. While it may involve elements of affect and materiality (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999), justification is fundamentally discursive: it consists of social/political actors asserting the claim that a particular situation should be evaluated or judged in accordance with a specific set of moral principles. While it is possible to argue orders of violence, love, or familiarity represent partial exceptions (ibid.), reasons for action are inevitably grounded in discourse. This focus, of course, is in line with the pragmatist lineage of the sociology of critique, in common with most of the late 20th century accounts such as Habermas’ and Honneth’s (Basaure, 2014). Yet, what is interesting is not so much the ‘wordiness’ of critique as what this wordiness implies. Koch writes that “Critique only exists in relation to something else, as a means for a future it will not know nor happen to be” (2002, p. 524). This, Koch argues, is the root of its epistemological modesty and iconoclastic immodesty: critique may be reticent about its claims to knowledge, but it is hardly reticent in its claims to truth. It needs authoritative access to ‘how things really are’. In this sense, critique needs to have recourse an order that is extra-discursive, or in Boltanski and Thévenot’s terms, metapragmatic. Yet, where does this order come from? If we are not to accept the idea of divine confirmation, it makes sense to look at the historical constitution of the order of discourse – and, in particular, how it was intertwined with political power. Probably the most influential theoretical account of historical constitution of discourse comes from Michel Foucault. Foucault’s work has been steadily gaining popularity, particularly following the translation of his 1978–9 Collège de France lectures on the birth of biopolitics (Foucault, 2008), now considered foundational for the study of neoliberalism. From this perspective, it is easy to forget how radical the emphasis on disciplinary production of bounded ways of knowing and talking 37 about the world would have been in a context where the Althusserian concept of ‘ideology’ as supervenient on material conditions exerted enormous influence. Of course, the fact Foucault’s early work focused on sexuality and mental illness – where the nexus of knowledge, discourse and power was particularly pronounced – probably helped: even the most materialist among historians (or historical among materialists) would have found it hard to deny that linguistic framing and classification of these cases is at least, if not more, important as their ‘material’, or physical base. Yet, the production of disciplinary power was quite obviously not limited to asylums, nor, for that matter, to issues of classification. The broader point was simple: concepts we use to think about the world fundamentally define and limit the ways in which we can act in it. The cunning of disciplinary power is exactly in the fact that through discourse – or, more precisely, the knowledge/power nexus – it makes people want to do things that contribute to its reproduction. This probably helps explain why Foucault’s work has been so influential in the critique of neoliberalism: the notion of the intersection of disciplinary power and surveillance as the origin of subjects’ compliance sits well with the inability of different forms of resistance to fully capture, let alone to subvert, the logic behind it. This puts in sharper focus the relationship between knowledge, power and critique. In Foucault’s view, on the whole, subjects remain ignorant of the form of exploitation they are subject to. This is in line with Boltanski’s qualification of metacritical theories of domination, which “tackle asymmetries from a particular angle... of the miscognition by the actors themselves of the exploitation to which they are subject and, above all, of the social conditions that make this exploitation possible and also, as a result, of the means by which they could stop it” (2011, p. 9, my emphasis). This, of course, does not mean that subjects cannot produce knowledge; but this kind of knowledge would not be immune to the power/knowledge dynamic. This means that critique should not be seen only as a form of Polanyian ‘double movement’ to economic and political transformations. It also needs to be understood as part and parcel of those transformations, integrated rather than outside of the networks and power relations that it focuses on. In other words, one has to look at the critique of neoliberalism in order to understand neoliberalism. Foucault seems to have suggested something similar: 38 The way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and one that implies more relations between theory and practice…consists in taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point (…) Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies (2000, p. 329). This is not to claim that critique is complicit in the neoliberal transformation of higher education and research. Nor is it to uncritically endorse what STS and the Strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge of the Edinburgh school (SSK) have dubbed the ‘symmetry principle’ (e.g. Bloor, 1976), which assumes all forms of knowledge can be studied in the same way, regardless of procedures of verification. It is simply to state – and draw theoretical and methodological implications of the statement – that critique is not exempt from operations of power that constitute it. This translates into the following question:  Given that critique is discursive, and discourses reflect as well as are productive of power relations, what forms of power are embedded in and reproduced through critique of neoliberalism in higher education? Yet the most interesting implication of the discursivity of critique is, at the same time, one that Foucault never got around to engaging with in detail: how discourse works. Discourse analysis can, at best, establish a correlation or correspondence between the ways of generating knowledge and talking about the world, and the reproduction of power relations, but it doesn’t tell us how this happens. This problem is present in both New Spirit of Capitalism and On Justification, which focus on the analysis of discourses in textbooks and professional guidebooks: while they offer excellent accounts of the ‘ideology’ of management, the question of their effects on society and/or actors remains somewhat unclear. Discourse, therefore, can explain how critique is constituted, but not necessarily what it does – nor, even more importantly, how it does it. For this, we turn to the concept of speech acts and theories of performativity. 39 Critique as performativity: the problem of effects Pragmatic sociology of critique and theory of intellectual positioning have common philosophical grounding in theories of performativity, insofar as both critique and intellectual interventions can be theorized as speech acts. J.L. Austin (1961, 1975) developed the concept to consider the philosophical nature of the relationship between spoken language and its effects. A speech act is a form of utterance that was meant to produce an effect by the mere fact of being said – the paradigmatic case being saying “I do” in a marriage ceremony. Every utterance, Austin claimed, has three facets: the locutionary, which refers to what is being said; the illocutionary, which refers to the intended effects of what is being said; and the perlocutionary, which refers to the actual (produced) effects of saying it. John Searle (2010) extended the concept of speech acts to one of the formative principles of society as a whole, by emphasising their role in the constitution of what he dubbed institutional facts. For Searle, institutional facts are any kind of fact (that is, ontological statement) that depend for their existence on human societies; thus, they are fundamentally social. In the introduction to The Construction of Social Reality, Searle states: “With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations” (2010, pp. 12–13). Declarations pertain to any statement that has the form “X counts as Y in C” whereas C is the community (linguistic or social) in which this holds true, X is the referent, and Y the sign. This frames language, and, more specifically, speech-acts, as the key building block of human reality. It bears mentioning that this primacy of speech (i.e. human language) in the constitution of society may seem to position the theory of speech acts, and performativity more broadly, among highly constructionist social theories (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). Yet, the theory of speech acts does not posit that illocutionary acts do not have durability once performed, on the contrary; whilst marriage may be a social convention, performing a marriage ritual by saying “I now pronounce you husband and wife9” has actual consequences, which go beyond 9 Or husband and husband, or wife and wife, obviously. 40 the speech-act itself – which is precisely why Searle dubs these facts ‘institutional’. Similarly, speech-acts are, in this view, primarily oriented towards the social: they do not presuppose that, for instance, the natural world is constituted in the same sort of way (Lawson, 2016). This type of relationship between language and reality is the foundation of theories of performativity. Judith Butler (2010) defined performativity as the capacity of language (that is, speech-acts) to create durable effects in the ‘real world’: in this view, social reality is maintained through repeated performances – e.g. of gender identity, nationhood, or authority. The ‘performative turn’ in social sciences traces its lineage to American pragmatism and ethnomethodological approaches of Garfinkel and Goffman, in postulating that reality (or at least ‘social’ reality) is instituted through a series of verbal and non-verbal acts. However, it also goes beyond that, in ways that have important implications for analysing critique as a form of speech-act. Muniesa identifies three distinct meanings of performativity: the narrow – reflected, for instance, in Lyotard’s use of ‘performative knowledge’ in The Postmodern Condition (1979) – with emphasis on uses, or practical purposeability; the mid-range, which brings together approaches such as Callon’s (e.g. 2007) and Latour’s (e.g. 1993), on the one, and Butler’s (e.g. 1990), on the other hand; and the ‘expressive’, which he associates with ethnomethodology (Muniesa, 2014, pp. 9–12). Yet Muniesa also identifies the ‘stronger’ philosophical undercurrent of the idea of performativity: that reality is real only when it is realized, or, in other words, that speech-acts do not only organize reality, but can actually create things (objects), as it were, ex nihilo. That means that descriptions “add to the world” (2014, p. 19): as soon as something is stated, it is effectuated. This ‘strong’ notion of performativity informs most versions of the critique of economics as ‘performative’, in the sense in which economic discourses are said to create and institute objects and value-relations. Neoliberalism, in this sense, is seen as a form of governance that gives primacy to this type of discourse, allowing it to ‘colonise’ other forms of relations and practices, all of which become commodified. Unlike, however, Marxist critique, according to which commodity obscures the relation between labour and capital, in this version of performativity 41 there is no reality behind; objects are indeed fashioned, as it were, out of ‘thin air’, ‘provoked’, or ‘realised’ in the Deleuzian sense, which Muniesa claims is closest to the original American pragmatist meaning of the term (2014, pp. 21–27). Theory of intellectual positioning (Baert 2015, 2012; Baert and Morgan, 2018) builds explicitly on the concept of performativity. It interprets intellectuals’ public performances as particular instances of positioning – that is, acts whose effect is to define both the speakers and their intended audiences or opponents. Positioning, in this sense, defines speakers in a social context, and thus produces effects – both for the speaker herself, and for the context in which the act is performed. Intellectual interventions are seen as performative in that “they bring something into being – they do something” (Baert and Morgan, 2018, p. 5, original emphasis). Yet, does this make them performative in the same way in which economics is held to be performative? Namely, if economic discourse is performative – that is, if speech-acts that can be classified as ‘neoclassical economics’ have the power to institute objects and relations (e.g. Mackenzie, Muniesa, and Siu, eds., 2007) – then, by definition, the critique of those discourses must be performative in the same vein. In other words, intellectual interventions that seek to challenge the transformation of higher education and research have, in principle, the same power as those that are enacting those changes; which means that critique should have the power to ‘subvert’ the dominant discourse of neoliberalism. The challenge, therefore, is to explain why it does not (or, if we accept performative anti-realism, what makes certain discourses more performative than others). This leads to the following question:  If critique is a speech act, and speech acts are performative, what are the effects of the critique of neoliberalism in higher education? This should not suggest ‘effects’ should be equated with intentions. Performativity, after all, does not postulate it is necessary for agents to have full knowledge or awareness of what they are doing. However, it does emphasise the relationship between different ways in which we can conceive of possible effects and the concept of ‘the social’. This is perhaps most obvious in critique as a practice of intellectual positioning: in order for the practice to exist, there needs to be a context 42 in which the positioning is performed. Questions of context concern the configuration of political space, or, more specifically, the space for interventions. For this, we turn to questions of strategy, and the concept of fields. Critique as strategy: the problem of fields The idea of intellectuals as strategic actors is not particularly new. This view can be traced back to the Dreyfus affair, arguably the public début of intellectuals as a group with specific political interests, distinct from those of other classes (Jennings and Kemp-Welch, 1997). Similarly, Julien Benda’s famous treatise on the ‘betrayal’ of intellectuals (Benda, 1928) is an early example of the position that intellectuals who become affiliated with particular political interests or parties ‘sell out’ to less elevated concerns. The contrast between the world of intellect as one of ‘pure’, ‘objective’ speculation, and the world of politics as one of the pursuit of self-interest, runs through the study of intellectual life, in particular in the first half of the 20th century. As Hannah Arendt (1981) argued, this dichotomy can be traced to ancient Greece: in this sense, the idea of separation between the ‘life of the mind’ and the life of the polis was constitutive of the very idea of ‘intellectuals’ as a distinct class or category. The relationship between intellectuals, institutions of knowledge production, and social reproduction was one of central pieces of Bourdieu’s œuvre. In contrast to Marx’s view of the primacy of economic capital (ownership over means of production) in structuring relations of inequality, Bourdieu posited different forms of capital: social, cultural, and, later, symbolic and intellectual. Social life, in this view, is defined by the struggle within and over different ‘fields’: structured spaces of interaction between different actors that entail the production, circulation, and valuation of different forms of capital. The state acts at the final arbiter of relative weighting/power and influence of fields, each of which retains a distinctive logic. Intellectuals, in Bourdieu’s world, are engaged in a battle on, as it were, two fronts: for dominance within a specific field, and for the position (or dominance) in relation to other fields. Bourdieu initially developed work on the education system (Bourdieu, 1984; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) in order to explain the reproduction of social 43 inequalities in and through French education institutions at the time, but his later work repeatedly engaged with the question of intellectuals, their role and relation to society (e.g. Bourdieu, 1996, 2000). Crucially, in this process, Bourdieu broke with the assumption that intellectuals were by definition ‘outside’ of power relations, which enabled them to observe them in a detached manner, or, worse, that they automatically belonged to ‘the oppressed’ within social structures. In his famous coinage, intellectuals were the “dominated part of the dominant class” (Bourdieu, 1990): marked by possession of relatively high amounts of cultural and social capital, but ultimately subordinated to elites whose power derived from control and ownership of economic, and consequently political, forms of capital. This means speech acts could be re-interpreted as a form of strategic action meant to produce effects both in the field of cultural production and in the broader public sphere. Intuitively, this seems right: intellectual interventions have consequences both in the academic arena (publishing, promotions, research grants) and in one’s social environment (recognition, prestige, but also, particularly in repressive regimes, threats to material security, violence, imprisonment, or even death). However, there are a few complicating factors. To begin with, it is difficult to a priori define the ‘field’ that critique of neoliberalism operates in. While in some cases it can yield benefits in a specific professional field, being (too) publicly engaged can also be seen as a sign of ‘poor’ scholarship or insufficient dedication to the virtues of scientific inquiry, reflected in the pejorative meaning of phrases such as ‘academic celebrities’, ‘superstar academics’, and so on (Bacevic, 2016). Even more problematically, as the Docherty case suggests, engaging in critique could have negative results, in the sense of suspension or even loss of job. On the other hand, it is possible to claim that capital travels in the other direction: intellectuals use symbolic capital accrued within a specific (disciplinary) field to boost their public profile (as in the case of Foucault’s ‘specific’ intellectual, who uses their expertise in order to comment on matters of broader public significance). In the UK, the blurring of fields is particularly pronounced with the introduction of impact as an element of research assessment, which aims to measure the influence of particular (social-scientific) ideas on policy and the broader public. Yet this also hinges on a predefined notion that assumes it is possible to isolate effects of specific interventions within fields. 44 As Doreen Massey argued, tying the consequences of action (or, more specifically, of strategies and tactics) too closely within a field produces the reification of space (2005, p. 26). Obviously, this does not mean we need to adopt a ‘butterfly-effect’ approach to interventions, but rather to state that there need not be a clear, let alone one-to-one relationship between an act and its effect. When, how and whether this happens is an empirical question, but one that hinges on how we define fields and those who inhabit them (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012). Rather than assuming that interventions fall neatly within a field, it makes more sense to study their effects on the delineation of fields (Lamont, 2012; Lamont & Molnàr, 2012; see also Gieryn, 1983). This allows an engagement with critique as both a productive and relational practice, that is, a form of action that involves both a representation of and engagement with different elements of the social. This also allows to forge a clearer link between pragmatic sociology of critique and Bourdieu’s field theory (cf. Susen, 2014b; Nachi, 2014). Assigning properties to specific ‘beings’ serves to define boundaries between ‘worlds’, that is, different normative spheres (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). In this sense, the way that interventions specify the properties and qualities of different objects can shed an insight on the broader context in which these ‘entities’ are situated, as well as the practice of justification itself. In this sense, remaining agnostic about the number and relation of fields avoids the trap of infinite regress – finding smaller and smaller contexts in which interventions make sense – whilst equally refusing to assert a major, top-down framing (e.g. the state as the final arbiter between fields). This means that fields are not ‘out there’ in the sense of being independent from individual (and collective) forms of agency, but rather that they are constituted (and reconstituted) by and through forms of interaction; and, further, that actors’ ideas about the field play a decisive (though not determining) role in the structuring of the social space – ‘the context’ – in which interventions take place. This allows to further specify the question of effects:  What kind of field effects does critique of neoliberalism in higher education have, and, especially what kind of effects on delineation between academic and other fields? 45 This also makes possible to account for what Butler (2010) emphasised as the possibility of ‘performative breakdown’ – the inability of speech-acts to produce desired effects. ‘Strategic action’, in this sense, has to be understood in relation to the ideas that specific actors have both about the ‘field’ (that is, the context and constraints under which they operate) and about their own possibility to influence it. Rather than taking strategic action as a given – that is, rather than assuming that intellectual interventions occur in a pre-ordered, already stratified system of fields – this allows to look at it as an achievement at least in part activated through actors’ knowledge of, or ideas concerning, the possible effects and the structure of fields. This brings us to the problem of self-knowledge, and the concept of reflexivity. Critique as reflexivity: the problem of self-knowledge Like discourse, performativity, and fields, the notion of reflexivity has a longer history in social sciences. At the end of the 20th century, Anthony Giddens and other theorists of ‘late’ or ‘second’ modernity emphasized the ‘reflexive’ nature of post-industrial societies, arguing that they entail an imperative to engage in a cognitively recursive way with both the self and the world. Beck, Giddens, and Lash (1994) dubbed this ‘reflexive modernization’ as a way of indexing the self- referentiality of contemporary modernization projects. In this view, late modernity entails the revision of categories that constituted ‘first’ modernity, its predecessor – such as class, progress, nature, and society – simultaneously the key categories of sociology itself. The concept of ‘double hermeneutic’ is of particular interest here. Giddens asserted that the distinctive characteristic of social sciences’ style of inquiry was the inevitably reflexive nature; that is, the porousness of the boundary between ‘lay’ and ‘scientific’ concepts. In late modernity, in other words, it is no longer possible to draw a clear demarcation line between the observer and the observed: those we study utilize our concepts and ‘talk back’. This observation, of course, is not unique to Giddens: anthropologists, for instance, were already well acquainted the problem of informants ‘talking back’ as an epistemic and political implication of the discipline’s involvement in the colonial project. However, double hermeneutic emphasised the ethical and theoretical questions opened by the fact the tools, 46 methods and vocabularies of social sciences were no longer exclusive domain of social scientists (cf. Pleasants, 1999). In this context, Giddens claimed that the role of sociological knowledge, or social theory, is to correct for the always partial knowledge actors have of the implications of their own actions. In other words, Giddens assumes that, although they can act strategically, actors immersed in practice by definition cannot grasp the unintended consequences of their actions. The role of sociologists (and other social scientists, in this sense) is thus to rectify actors’ fallible perception of their own circumstances, by injecting a degree of sociological distance: The critical activities in which social scientists engage as the core of that they do have direct implication for the beliefs which agents hold, in so far as those beliefs can be shown to be invalid or inadequately grounded. But such implications are especially important where the beliefs in question are incorporated into the reasons actors have for what they do…when these are subjected to critique in the light of claims or findings of social science, the social observer is seeking to demonstrate that those reasons are not good reasons (Giddens, 1984, p. 338). The role of sociological narratives, thus, is to act as a sort of ‘external’ corrective. Yet, this begs the question where the position of ‘exteriority’ comes from in situations where production of knowledge itself constitutes a form of practice. When intellectuals are immersed in the context they are writing about, what is the epistemic status of critique they produce? From what position can critique provide a corrective if boundaries between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ are not clear-cut? In other words, how does reflexivity work if the social practices of knowledge production are equally the subject and the object of critique? Bourdieu’s elaboration of the concept of reflexivity (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, Bourdieu, 1990) aimed, in part, to address this problem. While always to some degree implicated in the reproduction of the structures they criticize, sociologists10, 10 Bourdieu’s own disciplinary background was split between philosophy, sociology, and anthropology (or ethnography), so despite his later tendency towards discipline-specific positioning, it makes sense to assume he would not restrict this epistemic ‘hack’ to those trained in sociology departments (or would he?) 47 he argued, can become aware of this loop. Sociological reflexivity, in this view, entails a ‘double bind’ by both providing an awareness of the conditions of one’s existence and one’s own contribution to these conditions. This is not the same as ‘commonplace’, everyday reflexivity; Bourdieu recognized that common people also engage in deliberation about their course of action. Yet, Bourdieu drew a clear distinction line between reflexive burdens of ‘ordinary’ actors and those whose profession entails the creation of knowledge about those actors. Intellectuals are subject to a triple bias: the bias of social background – equivalent to those of ‘ordinary’ actors; the bias ensuing from the peculiarities of the academic field; and the ‘intellectualist’ bias, the tendency to objectify social relations and treat the society as a form of ‘spectacle’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 39) – what, in Pascalian Meditations, will be diagnosed as raison scolastique (Bourdieu, 2000). Sociological reflexivity is meant to engage with all three, simultaneously providing the knowledge of the dynamics and mechanisms of social relations one is embedded in and a degree of distance from them. Bourdieu suggested that critique is both improved and further legitimised by making analysis itself subject to the tools of sociological analysis. On this account, sociological methods are a superior tool for the construction of critique, as they unmask the ideological assumptions of epistemic systems, their own included (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 38). Sociologists are justified in their claim to a privileged epistemic position as they are in the position to comprehend both the dynamics of particular interactions that give rise to unequal power relationships, and the way in which their own position in social structure influences their accounts. Sociological reflexivity, in this sense, provides a form of exit from the ‘interiority/exteriority’ conundrum. Bourdieu’s own ‘double bind’ of simultaneously inhabiting the roles of an empirical sociologist and a critic comes to the fore: he wants to emphasise the inextricability of the categories sociologists (and other intellectuals) use to comprehend the world from the world itself, but he also wants to maintain the possibility of critique as a form of (even if temporary) detachment from that world, which requires him to reach, again, into the delineation of ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’. Yet this brings us squarely back to the problem that Boltanski identified in metacritical theories of domination. They hinge on a distinction 48 between forms of reflexivity, or the potential for the knowledge of social reality, exercised by ‘lay’ actors, on the one side, and sociologists – or academics more broadly – on the other. This distinction is reliant on a particular gesture of distancing: The project of taking society as an object and describing the components of social life or, if you like, its framework, appeals to a thought experiment that consists in positioning oneself outside this framework in order to consider it as a whole. In fact, a framework cannot be grasped from within. From an internal perspective, the framework coincides with reality in its imperious necessity (2011, p. 7). What Boltanski emphasizes is that this form of (self-)reflexivity relies on a particular set of techniques, as well as forms of validating them. He analyses the construction of this position of ‘complex exteriority’ in relation to distance from one’s object of research: In the case of sociology, which at this level of generality can be regarded as a history of the present, with the result that the observer is part of what she intends to describe, adopting a position of exteriority is far from self-evident. The fact that its possibility even poses a problem in a sense leads the move to externalization to become self-conscious. This imaginary exit from the viscosity of the real initially assumes stripping reality of its character of implicit necessity and proceeding as if it were arbitrary (as if it could be other than it is or even not be); and then, in a second phase, restoring to it the necessity it had initially been divested of, but on which this operation of displacement has conferred a reflexive, general character, in the sense that the forms of necessity identified locally are related to a universe of possibilities. (2011, p. 7). Further, Boltanski notes the key role that institutions of knowledge production play in separating social-scientific forms of knowledge from those available to ‘lay’ actors: 49 In sociology the possibility of this externalization rests on the existence of a laboratory – that is to say, the employment of protocols and instructions respect for which must constrain the sociologist to control her desires (conscious or unconscious). It is thus that descriptive social sciences can claim that they sustain a discourse of truth. It must be added that this truth claim, which is bound up with a description carried out by occupying a more or less extra- territorial post vis-a-vis the society being described, generally gives the social sciences, whatever they are, a critical edge (and this even, albeit in highly limited fashion, in the case of expertise). For, if the very substance of their object was constantly in full view of everyone, the social sciences would simply have no reason to exist (2011, p. 8). Presumably, in order to practice reflexivity (or, in Boltanski’s terms, metareflexivity) critics need to stand outside of their social context. Yet, this ‘standing outside’ will be subject to the same conditions as any form of epistemic positioning: that is, it will be a product of social, academic, and intellectualist biases, or, in other words, power relations. How to avoid the conceptual trap of infinite regress? An element of Margaret Archer’s concept of reflexivity (Archer, 2012, 2010, 2007) can help clarify the perspective. Archer conceives of reflexivity as a form of ‘internal conversation’ that renders visible the relationship between structure and agency. Rather than positing that structure is always inherently and inextricably present, manifested, and recreated through acts of reflection – or speech-acts in general – people’s agency proceeds through narrative positioning in relation to their knowledge of the world, which is discursively exercised. This knowledge is always imperfect; yet, it is precisely through the possibility of a critical stance towards – and, simultaneously, distance from – that the contours of this world become tangible. This is particularly relevant in relation to Boltanski’s concept of ‘complex exteriority’: In the case of theories of domination, the exteriority on which critique is based can be called complex, in the sense that it is established at two different levels. It must first of all be based on an exteriority of the first [simple, J.B.] 50 kind to equip itself with the requisite data to create the picture of the social order that will be submitted to critique. A metacritical theory is in fact necessarily reliant on a descriptive sociology or anthropology. But to be critical, such a theory also needs to furnish itself, in ways that can be explicit to very different degrees, with the means of passing a judgement on the value of the social order being described (2011, p. 8). Pragmatic sociology of critique thus can bridge different accounts of reflexivity. Forms of ‘internal conversation’ actors use in order to construct the position of complex exteriority, thus, provide an insight how they conceptualise self in society and, by extension, the distance between themselves and society. Given the relevance of this ‘distance’, critique inevitably relies on positioning. Positioning occurs not only in relation to other actors, but also in relation to ‘the world’ in the broadest possible sense. This ‘world’ includes things that are the object of critique: other humans as actors, certainly, but also structures, ideas, institutions, events, and other assemblages of different forms. In this sense, for our inquiry here, the ontological status of objects that positioning involves is less relevant than the fact that they are used in order to define the coordinates of the space in which acts of positioning can happen. Critique entails a picture – a diagnosis – of reality that is seemingly irreducible to the subject, even when critique is substantially informed by the author’s subjectivity. In these cases as well – e.g. anti-racist movements, or some forms of feminist epistemology – critique as a form of social practice aims to insert a degree of distance between the immediate, lived experience, and the narrative it produces, even if by the mere fact of engaging in the descriptive (and normative) rendering of that reality. Reflexivity, in this sense, works a bit like GPS: it determines ‘end points’ – that is, parameters of the coordinative system – in order to be able to perform a meaningful act. As Simon Susen argued, “[c]ritique can be regarded as a reflexive force that permits us to distance ourselves from three worlds of experience: ‘the’ external world (objective realm), ‘our’ external world (normative realm), and ‘my’ internal world (subjective realm)” (2014a, p. 174). This provides the framing for the last question: 51  What kind of knowledge of and relationship between the world (object) and of the self (subject) is produced through critique of neoliberalism in higher education? Rather than a Bourdieusian game of ‘chasing after’ biases, reflexivity in this key can be seen as the discursive game of producing a position in the sense of relation to ‘external reality’ and its multiple manifestations (cf. Pleasants, 1999). From this perspective, critique is performative not because it brings about a certain reality, but because it contributes to the reproduction of a social space where speech-acts can be performed. The relationship between this space and speech-acts, thus, is what this thesis hopes to explore. Summary of research questions Rather than assuming a direct link or conduit between critique and elements of the social, the present study aims to understand how they are related. In this, it moves beyond earlier tendencies in sociology of knowledge, and social theory more broadly, to posit specific elements as foundational and others as epiphenomenal. In this sense, it retains the methodological separation between critique (as a form of discourse), the author (intellectual), and social context (both the setting and the object of critique), but refuses to assert the ontological (as opposed to historical) primacy of any of these. Critique is defined as a form of discursive practice that combines descriptive and normative claims. These claims take the form of intellectual intervention, a speech- act that addresses the nature of reality and the ways in which it could be improved. These claims are based on specific vocabularies of justification, that is, assertion of truthfulness and/or the validity of claims in relation to the difference between knowledge of social reality available to ordinary, ‘lay’ actors, and those available to social scientists, including those who engage in critique. This boundary, however, is particularly tenuous in cases in which critics are at the same time participants and observers in the context in which they are making claims. This thesis offers an account of how ideas about reality (ontology) and ideas concerning the knowledge of that reality (epistemology) shape and are shaped by the 52 negotiation of this context. Critique of neoliberalism in higher education and research provides a salient case for the empirical investigation of how this tension operates and is negotiated in practice. Building on these assumptions, the thesis aims to answer the following questions: • What are the social, historical and political conditions under which the critique of neoliberalism takes place? Given that critique does not ‘invent’ the world from scratch, but rather addresses a set of ‘pre-existing’ conditions – some of which govern how it can be performed – what are these conditions and how do they influence the production of critique? • If we accept critique is a form of discourse, how does it describe the world? What kind of ‘beings’ (agents, objects, and their mutual relations) are posited? How is the knowledge of these asserted and legitimated? • What kind of ideas concerning social ‘space’ or field(s) are implied in critique as a form of positioning? What kind of ideas about other actors? • What is the relationship between professional (i.e. reliant on sociological vocabulary and/or theoretical concepts) knowledge and knowledge of social world related to practice? How do actors reflect on the relationship between the two in the context of their own work? • What are the implications for thinking about critique as a form of social practice? 53 54 Chapter 2: Description of study and methods Introduction Building on theoretical framing developed in the previous chapter, this chapter specifies the parameters of the study. It provides contextual framing of the critique of neoliberalism in higher education and research, describes methods and techniques of data collection, modes of analysis and interpretation, and discusses some of the implications as well as limitations and constraints of this case. It makes sense to start from the assumption that the critique of neoliberalism develops in parallel with its object. In the UK, ‘neoliberalism’ is strongly associated with the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and, later, John Major (e.g. Ledger, 2018). Thatcher’s austerity measures were aimed at reducing public spending, stimulating private investment, and limiting the power of organised labour. This was reflected in the introduction of mode of governance known as New Public Management, with public services subject to periodic assessment and performance targets. As a diagnostic, however, ‘neoliberalism’ only started gathering traction around the turn of the century (Boas and Gans- Morse, 2009). Some authors attribute its growing popularity to the 2008 economic crisis, which rendered visible the imbrication of financial and political power in global capitalism. However, ‘neoliberalism’ can also be a way to describe what for intellectuals on the Left must have been a surprising continuity between Thatcher’s policies, on the one hand, and those introduced by the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – including in higher education. In UK universities, neoliberalism can primarily be linked to two strands of policies: the introduction of tuition fees, and the introduction of performance-based research funding. However, the label could also be applied to a host of other policy developments, including the abolishment of tenure by the Education Reform Act of 1988 (Tight, 2009). Initially, ‘neoliberalism’ sometimes appeared as a synonym for, and sometimes as the broader theoretical framing of, ‘audit culture’, denoting ideological shift to forms of assessment. While the latter has slowly been going out of fashion in the last decade, the popularity of neoliberalism as a diagnostic mot du jour shows no intention of subsiding. This led some authors to suggest it is now 55 emptied of all diagnostic or analytical power and has become a rather vague catch- all term for a host of contemporaneous, though not always linked, developments (Springer, 2016, 2015; Venugopal, 2015; Peck, 2010). While the intellectual history of ‘neoliberalism’ as a term would warrant its own exploration (e.g. Eagleton-Pierce, 2016), in the present study neoliberalism is primarily used as shorthand for the diagnosis of ‘economisation’, ‘privatisation’ or ‘marketisation’ of different spheres of social life. ‘Economization’ (which William Davies (2014) succinctly defined as the “disenchantment of politics by economics”), in turn, has been the subject of a substantial and growing body of scholarship, focusing in particular on the role of economics (and economists) in shaping modes of governance (Çalişkan and Callon, 2010, 2009; Callon, 2007; MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu, eds., 2007). In the context of higher education, however, it most often takes the form of a denouncement of the ‘incursion’ of economics into a domain that should be protected from it, such as education (or knowledge production more broadly). While not all examples of this type of critique deploy neoliberalism as a dominant diagnostic term, they tend to converge around the idea that economization, privatisation, or marketisation of knowledge are (1) happening, (2) undesirable, and (3) something to be opposed, or resisted. While policies they address often go back to the ‘early days’ of Thatcher’s reforms at the end of the 1970s and beginning of 1980s, the majority of interventions analysed in this thesis were published between 1997 and 2017. The rapid expansion of critique in the past decade, to some degree, has to do with the proliferation of digital platforms, particularly social media (e.g. Dahlgren, 2012). In addition, ‘traditional’ media have become increasingly reliant on social media not only for disseminating but, increasingly, generating content. However, the proliferation of critique should also be seen in relation to changes in the political environment. Between 2010 and 2017, the UK saw the introduction of at least eleven pieces of primary legislation (acts and amendments) pertaining to higher education, some vehemently opposed but still passed in the Parliament, White Papers and policy reports. It witnessed its possibly greatest wave of student protests in recent history, in 2010 and 2011. The results of the referendum concerning membership in the European Union (‘Brexit’) in June 2016 sent a particularly strong shock through universities, many reliant on EU research funding and EU nationals as staff. 56 Finally, universities found themselves at the centre of a number of ‘culture wars’, concerning their alleged ‘left-wing bias’, free speech and the Prevent legislation. In line with the metaphor in the title, it would not be an exaggeration to say that new fronts are opening on an almost monthly basis. From this perspective, it may appear strange that this study places an emphasis on the critique of neoliberalism, rather than on neoliberalism itself. Surely, one could say, every war has at least two sides: thus, in the war on universities, it would make sense to devote equal attention to those who attack as to those who defend them. There are, however, a few strong reasons to prioritise critique of neoliberalism over neoliberalism as a research object. To begin with, as noted, there is a substantial – and steadily growing – amount of scholarship that does the latter. However, there have been, to date, literally no attempts to analyse these forms of critique as a distinct genre or mode of intellectual production. Secondly, and more interestingly, few intellectual interventions explicitly engage in promoting or supporting neoliberalism in higher education. One notable example is Conservative politician David Willetts, former Minister of State for Universities, whom many see as responsible for the introduction of Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the removal of tuition fee caps. Yet even Willetts is reluctant to use the term ‘neoliberalism’ in a positive sense: in fact, in an event described in Chapter 4, he goes as far as to accuse his critics of espousing neoliberal ideology. Of course, Marxists would be quick to point out ideology works in part because it is invisible. Peck (2010) noted that hardly anyone self-identifies as a neoliberal. This has somewhat changed recently, with e.g. the Adam Smith Institute ‘coming out’ as neoliberals (Slobodian, 2018, p. 3), but on the whole, the concept is still used predominantly as a derogatory term (Venugopal, 2015; Boas and Gans- Morse, 2009). In this sense, relative scarcity of contemporary intellectual interventions that endorse or visibly propagate the neoliberal model could be taken as evidence of its total victory: neoliberalism has become common sense. While there is merit in this interpretation, the question is not whether it is true, but rather how (and if) intellectual interventions aim to change this. This is why it makes sense to ‘unpack’ the assumptions on which the critique of neoliberalism is predicated. Otherwise, critique becomes reduced to the resigned reproduction of “the rhetoric of gloom and doom” (Belfiore, 2013), which, despite possibly 57 benefitting the careers of its authors, leaves the broader question of the relationship between critique and social conditions of its production unproblematised. This thesis analyses the critique of neoliberalism in UK higher education and research on three levels. The first concerns the political – that is, the level of policies and antecedent historical events that are the object of interventions and shape the social and political context in which they are made. The second is discursive, which concerns the content of actual intellectual interventions, as well as contexts in which they are made. The third is the reflexive, which concerns actors’ narratives about interventions, including reflections on the relationship between the political context and their own agency. Building on Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), and Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), the study interprets each of these levels as positing a specific ‘world’, that is, a set of beings/objects and their relations. The interpretative part aims to show how these three worlds are related, that is, brought into alignment or conflict through interventions. The explanatory component aims to show how these connections – or forms of justification – depend on relatively stable ideas about the nature of reality, forms of agency exercised through speech-acts, and, in particular, the relevance of epistemic access to reality for the validity of claims. This expands the pragmatic account of critique to show not only types of beings and relations invoked through forms of justification, but also assumptions about the fabric of the social world that play a role in the constitution of space for interventions, and in actors’ own reflections on the course of action. Finally, the study discusses the implications of this framing for thinking about the relationship between critique and the social. Historical and political context Critique of UK universities has a longer (one could say, venerable) history. Texts now considered ‘classic’, and often incorporated or referred to in the contemporary critique, such as Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University (1852), frequently started as a critique of ideological tendencies in higher education combined with ideas how to correct them (cf. Collini, 2012, p. 39-60). For instance, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Woolf, 1992 [1932, 1929]) 58 used the absence of women from universities, in particular Oxford and Cambridge, to reflect on women’s general position in society. After WWII, F.R. Leavis’ Education and the University took the teaching of literature at universities to be indicative of the overall standard of literacy and humanist culture (Leavis, 1948). Yet, until the second half of the 20th century, both the target and the intended audience of this type of critique were overwhelmingly academic. Halsey notes that (D)iscussion did not break out of narrowly academic circles until Robbins reported in 1963. Up to that time the journalistic portrayal of university life was confined to the staid pages of Universities Quarterly and the reporting of appointments, deaths, boat races, and rugby football results from Oxford and Cambridge on the appropriate page of The Times (1992, p. v). With few notable exceptions, critique was thus mostly an ‘in-house sport’; when it ventured beyond the walls of the academia, as in Woolf’s case, it was in part by taking universities as indicative of the society – or, more precisely, of its educated classes: Three Guineas, it is worth remembering, talks about the difference in the importance (and financing) of education between girls and boys – of wealthy families. These early forms of critique were characterised by relatively unfavourable evaluations of the state of universities at the time. Frequently framed as polemics, they took issue with many of the problems embedded in universities: sectarianism, disciplinary enclosure, elitism, and exclusion of the less privileged. Education, in this sense, was seen as an expression of everything that was wrong with the English society as a whole. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the discourse began to shift. Intellectual interventions increasingly started focusing on governmental policy towards universities. Correspondingly, the object of critique changed from the university to the government and its policies. This overlapped with the growing public interest in higher education: Meanwhile, and signalling full acceptance of higher education into the higher and middle journalism, the Times Higher Education Supplement published its first number in October 1971. Thus, during the 1960s and 1970s, 59 discussion became more widely shared. The growing number of graduates swelled that branch of the mass media industry which supplies more or less entertaining and informative ephemera to itself in the 'up-market' weeklies and supplements. The discussion also became more explicitly political, partly because higher education developed into an avid consumer of the financial patronage of the state, partly because universities and polytechnics came to vie with the hustings and the workplace in bids to displace parliament as the forum of political argument... (Halsey, 1992, v.). The shift from seeing the university as, in a manner of speaking, a culprit, to seeing it as a victim, is thus coextensive with the mainstreaming of higher education as a topic of concern. There is possibly no better way to convey this than the difference (and similarity) between two seminal volumes published thirty-five years apart. Moberly’s The Crisis in the University (1949) squarely eschews financial matters and diagnoses a lack of spiritual purpose as the source of the crisis. By contrast, the title of Peter Scott’s The Crisis of the University (1984) reflects widespread agreement – at least on the Left, in the broadest sense of the term – that the task of critique is to defend, rather than attack, the University. What changed? One explanation has to do with massification of higher education. As a growing proportion of commentators and journalists started coming from the academia, it is plausible they saw fit to put universities at the heart of political issues, as well as do that in a more laudatory manner. On the other hand, it could also have to do with what some authors have dubbed the ‘institutionalisation’ of critique. Russell Jacoby (1984), for instance, argued that from the 1960s onwards, intellectuals increasingly abandoned the bohemian lifestyle of cities and relocated to university campuses. Obviously, this to some degree has to do with the specific spatial and geographical organisation of higher education in the US, but it reflects a broader trend: for about two decades after the end of the 1960s, an increasing number of intellectuals became permanently (or semi-permanently) employed at universities. In the UK, the institutionalisation of critique was particularly prominent in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham (cf. Rojek and Turner, 2000). As Chapter 4 will argue, this means their concerns became increasingly mediated through the environment of the university, giving rise to what Bourdieu (2000) has referred to as the ‘scholastic’ 60 disposition: that is, the tendency for scholarship to, even if unwittingly, reflect the specific condition of being embedded within the institutions of knowledge production. Neither of these factors, however, should detract from the fact that in the second half of the 20th century national governments indeed became more interested in higher education. In this sense, the rise of critical commentary on changes in the relationship of the state towards universities cannot be explained solely in terms of the changing characteristics of the academic or, for that matter, journalistic profession. This is particularly relevant given that intellectual interventions at the end of the 20th century overwhelmingly take the form of critique of policies, framed or supported by philosophical or sociological arguments. This, of course, does not mean all writing about universities can be reduced to critical commentary on higher education legislation. However, crucially, it also means that the context in which these intellectual interventions occur cannot be understood without paying attention to the structure and dynamics of the relationship between universities and the state. Of course, in the context of UK higher education, ‘the state’ takes a rather particular form. Educational legislation is devolved to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and universities in these parts of the UK are, in this sense, subject to different regulatory regimes than those in England – reflected, among other things, in different tuition fees. However, Scottish and Welsh universities as well as Queen’s University in Belfast are still part of the UK political and policymaking landscape: some are members of the Russell Group, their student unions are represented in the National Union of Students, and their academic staff are members of the University and College Union (UCU). Devolution, thus, should be seen as a factor in the overall political, rather than a reason to presume interventions would necessarily relate only or primarily to England. Data The reconstruction of the context in which interventions take place provides an overview of the development of UK higher education, in particular the relationship between universities and the state. It provides a summary of the developments 61 preceding World War II, but is mostly concerned with the ensuing period, particularly the expansion of higher education in the 1960s and the 1970s, followed by changes introduced to the systems of funding and audit in the 1980s and the 1990s. It continues with policies introduced by New Labour government between 1997 and 2010, and the subsequent Coalition (2010–5) and Conservative governments (2015–present). While the history of these policies, at least in broad brush strokes, will probably be known to those familiar with higher education in the UK, this reconstruction is not meant only as a historical ‘refresher’. Rather, its main goal is to identify the relevant actors and documents, as well as place them in a social and political context. Understanding intellectual interventions is impossible without knowing what they address. A systematic overview of the political and policymaking landscape of the ‘war on universities’, thus, is vital for understanding the object of critique. However, as noted earlier, this political and policy framework is not only relevant because it constitutes the object of critique analysed here. It simultaneously shapes its context, in the sense in which it enables and constrains certain forms of intervention. In order to reconstruct the evolution of the relationship between universities and the state, this part relies on approaches in historical and political sociology (e.g. Hay, 2002), drawing on a combination of primary and secondary sources. Primary sources include Parliamentary minutes, legal texts (Acts, Bills, White Papers), as well as other forms of political documents not necessarily included or referenced in legislation, such as alternative White Papers, texts of politicians’ speeches etc., most of which are in the public domain. Secondary sources include sociological and historical studies of UK higher education and research; most of these were written between 1980 and 2010. While there is a wealth of literature dealing with changes in higher education at the end of the 20th and the beginning of 21st centuries, the majority of these texts are more easily classified as interventions, rather than sources. This doesn’t mean sources included in this part of the analysis never take a position on the processes they are describing. However, they can be distinguished from interventions in the strict sense inasmuch as their focus is on data or analysis, rather than commentary 62 or critique. Of course, it is possible to question overall reliability or epistemic status of resources: obviously, even authors who claim to provide an ‘objective’ analysis of a particular context – say, the transformation of employment patterns in UK higher education and research – are not exempt from its effects. For practical purposes, however, it is possible to establish a provisional boundary between genres. For instance, while interventions often rely on secondary or primary data in order to strengthen an argument, this form of knowledge is almost always used as illustrative of a broader critical point they are trying to make. In this sense, they are rarely presented in a way that would permit discussion about sources of data: references are incomplete or absent, major theoretical works are brought up in passing without delving into the intricacies of their argument, and evidence is almost always anecdotal. Additionally, interventions often rely on authors’ first- hand experience, but rarely in conjunction with methodological or theoretical caveats that tend to precede its use in genres like auto-ethnography (cf. Sparkes, 2007). Thus, while interventions can draw on what Boltanski dubbed ‘instruments of totalization’, only exceptionally do they make the process by which these instruments are put to use open to scrutiny. Sources, by contrast, perform their academic authority by putting ‘data’ upfront and keeping commentary – especially if critical – to the minimum. Analysis The analysis of policies and legislation focuses on how relevant actors – the universities, the state, intermediary and regulatory bodies – were established and transformed during the course of the 20th and 21st century. The third ‘actor’ that plays a prominent role in critique, the market, only enters the political landscape through governmental policies, i.e. via the state. In this sense, ‘the market’ cannot be treated as a political actor in its own right. This, of course, does not mean that markets do not play an important part in intellectual interventions: but these markets have more to do with publishing and platforms than governmental policies. The opening question for the analysis was simple: who calls the shots? Who has the power to influence what goes on at universities? This question is further placed in the context of historical and social situation in the UK at the time – how did this come about? What was (at least intended) purpose of these changes? How did 63 different actors react? Last, but not least, this is used to develop the analysis of the relative powers of relevant actors: who is agentified through these policies? What (and whom) do they enable, or conversely, proscribe? Policies, in this sense, are treated as both discursive and performative. On the one hand, they encode different forms of power relations between different agents. They are also ‘ideological’, in the sense in which they promote specific values or goals, rather than others. This doesn’t mean that their implementation directly translates these values or goals into actors’, as it were, hydraulically (cf. Archer, 1995, 2003). However, it does define, prescribe, and incentivise specific ways of acting or going about, what Foucault referred to as ‘conduct’. They are performative because they make certain venues for action available or more likely, whilst minimising or circumscribing others. Keeping in mind that critique operates within, rather than outside this framework, also means that its production is inevitably bound up in the configuration of political power and the venues in which it can be exercised. The main contribution of this layer of analysis, therefore, is to reconstruct the political and social ‘world’ in which interventions take place, and to which they refer to. It provides a historical view on how some of the social processes that are key in understanding the transformation of UK higher education and research (for instance, massification after World War II, or the abolishment of difference between universities and polytechnics in 1992) came about; it introduces the main political actors (or agents) that entered the field in this period (for instance, funding councils), as well as the main policy instruments (for instance, tuition fees); and it specifies some of the relevant political dynamics that happened in relation to these (for instance, the election victory of New Labour in 1997, or the student protests in 2010–11). From there, we move on to the analysis of intellectual interventions that make up the critique of UK higher education and research between that time and the present. Interventions The second part of the thesis analyses intellectual interventions. Following Eyal and Bucholz (2010), intellectual interventions are defined as discursive forms, or 64 speech-acts, that contain a combination of descriptive, or diagnostic, and prescriptive, or normative, statements. In intellectual interventions these tend to be logically dependent on each other: the authority of the prescriptive is predicated on the authority of the descriptive. Intellectual interventions, in this sense, are discursive devices: they tell us how the world is, but also have effects on how it becomes. Theory of intellectual positioning takes the effects of interventions to flow from their capacity to position people (in this case, intellectuals) in the context of the overall social and political environment of their time. Positioning, in this sense, involves the attribution of certain characteristics to a person, group or situation (for instance, the World War II). This attribution, performed via speech acts, has effects both for the positioned actor (‘object’ of positioning), and for the actor doing the positioning (‘subject’ of positioning). The relationship between subject and object is mutually constitutive: the position of the subject hinges on their capacity to position the object. This is equivalent to the attribution of characteristics to ‘beings’ (entities) involved in Boltanski and Thévenot’s account of justification. Whereas theory of intellectual positioning primarily follows the acts of attribution that are personal (or inter- personal) – such as an intellectual ascribing certain characteristics to another intellectual, or to group of authors – this study, following Boltanski and Thévenot, does not assume that objects of positioning are limited to humans. In this sense, ascribing agency to ‘neoliberalism’ is not the same as ascribing agency to a particular vice-chancellor, or a civil servant, but both are relevant. Without delving into the question of which is more relevant (and why), it makes sense to start from a ‘flat ontology’: that is, from the assumption that, if we are studying positioning, we should be interested in all objects it involves and applies to (cf. Latour, 2005). This means abandoning the assumption – even if temporarily – that ‘entities’ positioned via intellectual interventions are necessarily the same as the entities identified in the first part of the study. “The University” as an object of an intellectual intervention is not necessarily the same thing as a particular university in the ‘real world’. Leaving temporarily aside the question of whether this means that there is such a thing as the ‘real world’, this part of the study focuses on the type of objects posited through interventions; the attributes, characteristics, and 65 forms of agency ascribed to these objects; and, last but not least, the characteristics, tendencies, and forms of agency (self-)ascribed – or implied – to subjects of interventions, that is, their authors. Data The corpus for the analysis predominantly consists of written texts, though some ‘live’ interventions – e.g. in public debates or book launches – were also included. The authors of these interventions could all be said to fall under the category ‘public intellectual’. While, as Eyal and Bucholz noted, the category is slightly too self-referential to be uncritically applied in the analysis, some (though, obviously, men more frequently than women) are referred to as such in public contexts. Almost all authors of these interventions are academics, in the sense in which academic labour constitutes (or constituted, for those who are retired) a major source of their livelihood. However, a similar caveat in relation to classification applies: increasing precarity of academic careers means that some people will go in and out of the academia, and/or may be engaged in temporary contracts that will not necessarily present their main occupation (or source of income). On the other end, some of the influential intellectuals may have retired, gone into civil service, or other occupations. The total corpus of surveyed interventions included fifteen monographs and edited volumes, seventy-two articles, and fifty forms of online content, including web pages and blog posts. Due to the volume of collected interventions, not all of these are cited in the text, which focuses on the most representative illustrations of the genre. All of the books were written so as to address general, albeit educated, readership. Some clearly state that they are not intended for a purely academic audience: only one was published by a university press. This is also why no academic article in the strict sense of the term was included: intellectual interventions are distinguished by aiming to engage with the general public, despite the fact that what is construed as ‘the general public’ may not necessarily correspond to the general demographics of the population of the British Isles. Articles were published between 2000 and 2017. The most frequent outlet is the Times Higher Education Supplement, followed by The Guardian (sometimes its Education pages, and sometimes Opinion), The London Review of Books, and The 66 Independent. Other interventions were published on authors’ own, or their organisations’ web pages or blogs; some of these were subsequently published in outlets listed above. While some were shared and promoted on Twitter and other social media, very few of these count as standalone intellectual interventions. This was complemented by participant observation in different public events where some of these intellectuals were invited to speak. Analysis Following from theoretical exegesis in Chapter 1, the first level of analysis approaches these interventions as forms of discourse. In order to analyse them, the study draws on the application of discourse analysis in positioning theory (e.g. Slocum-Bradley, 2010). This means identifying narrative practices whereby entities in the social domain are established, given certain properties, and attributed specific forms of agency. Wilkinson and Kitzinger identify three such practices: “(a) naming or indexing a category; (b) invoking categorical membership; and (c) invoking attributes” (2003, p. 174). The concept of ‘position’, in this sense, extends beyond rights, duties and obligations (cf. Lawson, 2016). Positions come with an implied set of characteristics, though this does not mean that they are exhausted by these characteristics, nor that the characteristics neatly overlap with any particular position. The second step, following Boltanski and Thévenot, relates these practices of positioning to specific ‘worlds’. The analysis focuses on entities such as “university”, “Government”, “academics”, “management”, and how they are defined, situated, and related. Particular attention is paid to those objects (or persons) that do not ‘fit’, and ontological assumptions invoked in justifications of the degree to which they do (or do not). This aspect of the analysis aims to highlight the relevance of practices of positioning for the construction – and delineation – of domains (or ‘worlds’), especially in relation to the ‘world’ of markets. The third level of analysis treats interventions not only as discourses positioning other objects, but also as objects or intellectual products themselves. This means situating them in relation to the environment in which they are produced, and possible effects they can have. For instance, where have they been published (and 67 by whom)? How did the process come about? How are they circulated? What kind of impact did they have – for their authors, but also for the field as a whole? The last part of the analysis turns to actors to see how they reflect on the relationship between the two. Interviews The third part emphasises (human) actors and the role of reflexivity in the process of positioning. This part therefore engages with ideas, reasons and narratives of authors of interventions, primarily collected through interviews. Data Given the volume of interventions, not all of their authors were contacted for interviews. Priority was given to those who were particularly prominent, influential, or have engaged in interventions closer to the time of fieldwork. Some of the analysed interventions could reasonably be interpreted as a ‘one-off’; in this case, priority was given to authors who had a longer, and recurrent, history of engaging in critical commentary on higher education. Fourteen potential interviewees were approached, and ten in-depth interviews collected and analysed. The process of arranging interviews involved getting in touch with prospective participants, usually via email, sending information about the research project, and inquiring about their willingness or ability to be interviewed. Two potential participants declined; one never responded; and one interview proved logistically difficult to organise. On the whole, however, they usually responded quickly, enthusiastically, and showed willingness to meet. Interviews took place between January 2017 and January 2018. The length of interviews ranged from 75 to 140 minutes, usually taking place at the participants’ places of work – in this case, London, Cambridge, University of Warwick, and Oxford. One interview was conducted via Skype. This was often combined with attending events where participants were speaking or taking part. While this does not amount to ethnographic fieldwork in the strict sense of the term – that is, I did not systematically inhabit participants’ social milieu for an extended period of time 68 – it helped anchor the process of data collection in a physical/material, rather than just ‘ideational’ space. This is particularly relevant as the sociology of intellectuals traditionally conceived, as well as intellectual history, sometimes place an emphasis on the ‘intellectual’ space of interventions to the extent of excluding all other forms of data. Interventions are related to other interventions, or, at best, to broad sketches of the social and intellectual ‘milieu’ in which they were created. Obviously, to some degree this is an effect of historical distance – in some cases we can only rely on reconstructions, or, at best, witness accounts of particular social and historical setting. An alternative approach, particularly prominent in social studies of science, places an emphasis on the day-to-day processes of ‘creation’ of knowledge and facts, usually through ethnographic research at sites of knowledge production – universities, laboratories, but also think tanks, multilateral and governmental agencies and institutes (Latour, 1993; Collins, 1981). While this yields useful insights, it is very difficult to apply in the case of intellectual interventions, which, as a ‘boundary category’, do not fit easily into a particular spatial or social context. In other words, there is no pre-defined social space in which interventions are routinely produced. They, in most cases, happen ‘on the side’ of participants’ day jobs. While spaces of social interaction in which interventions happen are important – which is why events such as public debates or book launches were part of fieldwork – interviews still provide the best, though necessarily incomplete, insight into the process of their creation. The interviews followed a semi-structured format. While questions were adapted to specific participants and to the flow of conversation, they usually revolved around three elements: point of entry (that is, how intellectual interventions came about); process and effects of engagement (that is, how participants described their involvement, and how they perceived its consequences); and their views on the state of higher education in the UK more generally. Some examples of specific questions include: (1) How participants became interested in higher education and research as an object; (2) What prompted their initial involvement, that is, led to their first intervention (many, obviously, had published more than one); (3) How this process came about (i.e. whether they were contacted by publishers or editors or initiated it themselves); (4) How the interventions were received; (5) How 69 interventions related to their careers and/or personal lives; (6) What they thought about the possibility to influence people and events via interventions; (7) How they thought universities, or higher education and research in the UK, were going to develop in the future. While the objective of this approach was to allow for a participant-centred narration – that is, one that puts interviewees at the centre of ‘the story’ – this set of questions was also meant to elicit their views on the context, that is, how they perceived the environment in which interventions were taking place. Analysis The analysis concentrates on the way participants narrate their interventions in relation to two main parameters. One concerns their overall professional and personal biographies or trajectories – that is, how they conceptualise their own identity and agency. The other is in relation to the social and political context in which positioning is taking place – that is, ‘the world’. The objective of this layer of analysis, therefore, is to identify what objects exist in the participants’ social worlds and how they define the form, meaning and purpose of intellectual interventions participants engage in. The secondary layer of analysis consisted of reconstructing different characteristics and forms of agency ascribed to these entities, as well as causal relations assumed to obtain between them. The final step entailed reconstructing the ‘practical order’ operating in participants’ social worlds, that is, the way in which they construct and narrate their own agency in relation to it. This allows positioning to emerge from participants’ recounting of strategies for negotiating, and possibly transgressing, different social spaces. As noted earlier, not framing this context as ‘the field’ serves to avoid pre-emptively postulating the existence of specific and clearly demarcated fields. In this way, it becomes possible to reconstruct the ‘landscape’ of interventions from the ground up, in the sense in which fields become demarcated through and by specific acts of positioning. 70 Ethical considerations Prior to commencing fieldwork, the project underwent the ethical approval procedure required by the University of Cambridge and the Department of Sociology (form included in the Appendix). Given interviews deal with human subjects and handle potentially sensitive data, particular care was taken to ensure participants will have sufficient information about the research project, as well as understand how the data generated in interviews would be used. Approaching (contacting) potential participants was accompanied by a short note describing the research project and its main questions, followed by a consent form. The consent form specified that the data generated will be used only for the purposes of the present research project, that it will be kept in a secure location in anonymous form, and that the author was the only person who would have access to recordings and transcripts. Interviews were transcribed using an online transcription software (Trint), which works on the basis of voice recognition aided by manual correction, which means no other person was involved in transcription. The presentation of interview data in the text aimed to avoid the possibility of attributing specific quotes to any of the authors cited in Chapter 4. To this end, identifying characteristics, such as place-names, unambiguous references to disciplines or institutions, as well as, of course, other persons, were avoided or altered. This is also why participants’ demographic characteristics (age, ethnicity, location, or occupation save for academic) were not revealed; the only characteristic left unaltered was gender, in part because it provided for grammatical coherence of sentences, and in part to prevent incidentally erasing potential gender differences in positioning. While this ‘minimalist’ approach to the presentation of interview data could make interviews sound ‘anonymous’ or devoid of ethnographic detail, it was necessary in order to ensure the anonymity of participants. A very careful reader would probably be able to make conjectures concerning the provenance of specific interview excerpts; however, there is no way for anyone who had not been present in the interview to decisively establish this link. Another potential ethical issue concerns the epistemic status of interpretation and explanation in contexts when those who are ‘objects’ of research themselves have 71 recourse to the vocabulary, and in some case methodological apparatus, of social sciences. Raymond Geuss offered a particularly pertinent description of this problem: There is on the one side the standpoint of the ‘anthropologist’ or the ‘ethnologist’ who is a (theoretically inclined) observer trying to give good descriptions of the concepts, beliefs, convictions, and the characteristic theoretical views of an odd tribe, the members of contemporary ‘liberal’ societies. As such an ethnologist I have special interest in the views of medicine men, warlocks, archimandrites, faith healers, and shamans of this tribe, among them ‘analytic philosophers’. These philosophers, however, are both an object of study and, to some degree, a pool of informants (…) It is true that my attitude towards witch doctors like Rawls and Nozick is characterized by the same ambiguity that sometimes inflects the ethnologist’s relation to an informant (…) The witch doctor has his ‘theory’ of what us going on, just as Rawls has his, but also just as I have mine (2016, p. 14–15). Delineating levels of interpretation is both a relational (and thus ethical) and an epistemological issue. This was a serious concern, especially given the relatively small social space of UK academia, which meant there was a possibility of encountering participants in future professional contexts. As the interview information sheet contained relatively little on theoretical or interpretative frameworks of the project, I explained to participants that I was happy to discuss these, providing the discussion could take place after the interview, so as to minimise the likelihood of ‘theoretical transfer’. Most participants seemed very happy with this and showed relatively little inclination to discuss these aspects of the project. I also made sure to keep a field diary and record on any thoughts emerging directly from interviews; an excerpt from this diary that helps illuminate some of the conclusions is included in Chapter 5. Relational concerns are revisited at the end of the same chapter, which talks about ambiguity and ambivalence when it comes to describing human conduct. 72 Positioning and positionality Interview situations inevitably encode relations of power and authority, as well as displays of knowledge related to them. In qualitative research methods literature, these questions are primarily investigated in the framework of elite interviewing (e.g. Petkov and Kaoullas, 2016; Harvey, 2011; McDowell, 1998). In broader theoretical literature that deals with questions of epistemology, they are primarily investigated from the perspective of positionality. Both perspectives are relevant here. While the definition of ‘elites’ is relatively fluid (Wedel, 2017), it makes sense to identify participants as at least in principle belonging to a privileged stratum. Bourdieu (1990) framed intellectuals as the “dominated part of the dominant class”: while in British sociology (as well as in participants’ narratives) the former interpretation tends to bear more weight than the latter, it is worth remembering that almost all the interviewees were (or had been) permanently employed at some of the most prestigious Russell Group universities. Similarly, while their class of origin varies – some openly reflected on their ‘modest’ background – all seemed to be in a financially comfortable position, often with additional income coming from royalties, speaking engagements, etc. Last, but certainly not least, the fact they all had access to an often elaborate network of public platforms means most could be designated as ‘influencers’ within the taxonomy of elites in global capitalism. Given the public profile of participants, it was expected that at least some of them would treat interviews as semi-public events. Some steps were taken to minimise the effects of this: the consent form as well as the opening conversation communicated clearly that anonymity was guaranteed, and that, even if they chose to waive it, no interview data would be attributed to specific individuals. It is possible to view this, in a manner of speaking, ‘enforced’ anonymity as a way of balancing or reversing power inequalities involved in interviewing elites. In this case, however, it was used to ensure participants would feel comfortable reflecting on their public profile from a more personal or private perspective, rather than just ‘perform’ the role of public intellectual. 73 This does not mean inequalities in power or status can be swept aside. Most research on elite interviewing assumes a relatively clear imbalance of power between interviewer and the interviewed, in which the former has to vie for access to and time of the presumably very busy interviewee. Obviously, I signalled willingness to travel to interview participants at their place of work, as well as remained flexible concerning timing, but on the whole the interviews were not difficult to arrange. It is quite possible that my affiliation with the University of Cambridge greatly helped in this. On the other hand, other elements of my identity – gender, (perceived) age, status, or ethnicity – also played a role in some of the rejected requests, and certainly in the way interviews proceeded. Given the majority of participants were white, male and Anglo-American, and given I am a woman of Central Eastern European background, it makes sense to assume these characteristics would have placed me in a lower status category than research participants. Professional status was a bit more complicated: while I was doing interviews as part of research for my PhD, I did not neatly fit the concept of a ‘PhD student’. I have another doctorate in anthropology and prior to coming to Cambridge, had held permanent academic positions, including a relatively prestigious Marie Curie fellowship in Denmark within which I was researching public engagement in universities in the UK and in New Zealand (e.g. Bacevic, 2017). Therefore, not only had I spent significant portions of time in the UK academic and social context (including a year of my first PhD as a Chevening fellow at Oxford); I actually had relatively detailed knowledge of the UK academic context, both historically and in relation to the political developments at the time of research. In some cases, being identified as naïve or unknowledgeable (PhD student, woman, and foreigner) can be seen as an advantage as it tends to make participants narrate at length, assuming the interviewer has no prior knowledge of context, and thus provide a very detailed insight into how they see the world (cf. Mason-Bish, 2018, p. 28). On the other hand, this needs to be balanced against at least two concerns: one is the imperative of honesty with participants, and the other is the need to create an atmosphere that at least mimics the dynamics of ‘normal’ conversation. In this case, this was particularly important, as I wanted the participants to be able to engage in reflection at length on their own positioning as well as positionality – 74 that is, how they go about making their way through the world, and how they think their specific epistemic position, mediated or not through their institutional or professional position – plays a role in this. The third constraint, obviously, was time: while most participants were generous with it, in all cases interviews had a time limit. This created an interesting conundrum. On the one hand, I wanted to avoid participants narrating at too great a length about the ‘objective’ characteristics of the context (i.e. ‘explaining’ UK politics, higher education, or social structure to me), as this would leave little time for actual reflections. On the other, the way they perceived the context in which their interventions were made (and were about) – i.e. ‘the world’ – was an integral part of the study. This meant I occasionally signalled agreement with ways in which they framed issues: for instance, nodding, or saying “mhm” when they would mention specific policies or dates (e.g. the REF). This was meant to signify acquaintance (I knew what they were referring to) and encouragement (they were welcome to go on) while, at the same time, retaining neutrality in terms of my own opinion – so neither approving nor disapproving what they said. This is also why my own ‘public engagement’ remained relatively low during the period of data collection. Having previously been active in public contexts, I was interested in getting involved in discussions concerning higher education in the UK as well. However, given that communicating my opinion publicly could possibly shape or influence rapport with the participants, I kept it to a minimum. I did, however, start a blog, and maintained my Twitter profile – though withholding from commenting on anything I thought may obviously clash with the opinion of those research participants who were active on Twitter at the time. Obviously, during the interviews, participants occasionally asked what I thought about different things, or asked for agreement (“don’t you think so” or “wouldn’t you agree”). In these cases, I would usually try to answer the specific question as succinctly and honestly as possible, particularly in order to invite their further reflections. Positionality, however, is not only a question of how the researcher is perceived in a specific context, or how this influences relations in the field. It is also an 75 epistemological question, in the sense in which it affects the type of knowledge produced. As a woman, I was keenly aware of differences in gender and how it is perceived, both in the specific way women I interviewed performed the role of ‘public intellectual’, and in the way in which it influenced my own positioning. As a foreigner, I am prone to paying attention to the classed nature of both English higher education and its public sphere. Some of these impressions were formed during my stay at Oxford, and it is very likely that they influenced my subsequent engagement with the sector, as well as with research participants. At the same time, affiliation with both Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the fact that I come from an educated middle-class background, helped navigate the social environment in which fieldwork took place. Again, this should not be seen as unanimously a ‘good’ thing: during the course of the study, it occasionally became clear that some of the participants were seeing, addressing, and, finally, ‘positioning’ me as a representative of, or shorthand for, the institution I came from – with all the values it usually connotes, including elitism and exclusivity. In the context of epistemic distance, it is quite possible that the form of epistemic ‘distancing’ that this thesis performs, in the sense in which takes an evaluative stance towards other modes of knowledge rather than taking them at face value, can in part be attributed to the specific position of Oxford and Cambridge, as institutions traditionally thought to have preserved the greatest degree of the scholarly disposition that Bourdieu (2000) associated with the leisurely pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. While the objective of the thesis was not to remain outside of the sphere of critique but, rather, to render its assumptions clearer and thus, hopefully, enable a more powerful and efficient political engagement, this epistemic position itself draws on the possibility of temporarily stepping ‘outside’ day-to-day experience of academic knowledge production under neoliberalism. This certainly played a role in my decision to write the thesis as a second PhD (rather than, say, applying for shorter-term research funding). Whether a similar narrative would have emerged from a different institutional, political, and economic position remains, obviously, in the realm of speculation. Interpretation and explanation Qualitative research privileges the processes of meaning-making over establishing fixed relations between different types of data. Rather than Humean ‘constant 76 conjunctions’ concerning the nature of events, accounts of social reality developed in the post-positivist tradition give priority to actors reflexively producing their lived environments. This, however, does not mean that the logics of ‘explanation’ and ‘interpretation’ are mutually exclusive (Glynos and Howarth, 2007; see also Apel, 1984, Outhwaite, 1986). Even research programmes usually associated with a strong constructivist bend, such as the Edinburgh programme in Strong sociology of knowledge, allow for causal inference. Bloor, for instance, admits that any account that focuses on the reconstruction of social conditions for knowledge would be “causal, that is, concerned with the conditions that bring about belief or states of knowledge. Naturally, there will be other types of causes apart from social ones which will co-operate in bringing about belief” (1976, pp. 4–5). Critique is fundamentally a process of meaning-making, not only because it is rooted in language, but because it literally consists of naming elements of social reality and assigning value to them. Yet, these elements of reality are not exhausted by the meaning and values assigned to them through intellectual interventions: for instance, ‘the university’ as an object is not only what is described and framed in participants’ interventions, nor in interview narratives. Intellectual interventions do not ‘create’ worlds from scratch. Therefore, the task of this study is to first establish convergences, differences and commonalities between objects in relation to which positioning is performed, and then try to offer an explanation for why these acts take the form they do, as well as what their effects are. While questions of ontology are traditionally more readily associated with realist than intepretativist approaches to understanding social processes, it is quite obvious that the way humans ‘make their way in the world’ entails specific ideas what ‘the world’ is composed of (cf. Latour, 2005). This starting point, for instance, informs the ‘ontological turn’ in philosophy, anthropology, and social studies of science and technology (e.g. Graeber, 2015; Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017). While differences between ontological turns are interesting in their own right, what they share is the overarching belief that the existence and properties of objects – in this case, social objects – is a fundamental element in both understanding and explaining why social interaction takes a specific form. 77 This is what Boltanski (2011, pp. 56–99) has in mind when he refers to social disputes as concerning the “whatness of what is”: fundamentally, acts of positioning occur in relation to specific objects and their properties. Instead of pre- defining the space in which positioning occurs – as, for instance, the concept of ‘field’ – this thesis, however, uses acts of positioning in order to re-trace the configuration of this space. It should be noted that ‘space’ in this sense does not denote any specific extension or configuration of objects in physical space: it primarily relates to the set of trajectories relations between fields, relations of power, and actors who constitute them. The interpretative part begins by summarising and comparing different elements entailed in acts of positioning. The research data gives an insight into three layers relevant for critique. The first layer entails the objects and relations usually associated with the political field: policies, Parliamentary committees, regulatory agencies, etc. All of these can act in specific ways, enabling or constraining the agency of others. In this sense, however, this ‘field’ – or layer – also includes academics, as it defines the ways in which they can act. This doesn’t mean it exhausts it, of course; but it does incentivise or, conversely, proscribe certain behaviours. The second layer concerns the discursive ‘worlds’ constructed through intellectual interventions. Equally, these posit a number of objects and relations (usually relations of power) that obtain between them: academics, universities, government and its agencies, but also disciplines, departments, and more general forces (capitalism or neoliberalism). All of these, again, can act in specific ways, and are assigned specific moral properties. These properties are not purely ‘adjectival’: they do not only ascribe fixed characteristics, but also (and more importantly), a tendency to act. For instance: vice-chancellors have a tendency to act in ways that harm their staff, or: economic forces have a tendency to act in ways harmful to universities. This ontological fixing, or, in Boltanski and Thévenot’s terms, establishment of worth narrows down the meaning of the range of ‘values’ by appending an ethical or normative interpretation to the existence of specific objects. 78 Interview data provides an insight into this space as it appears to authors of interventions. It focuses on the lived experience of ‘making their way’ through it, as well as epistemology – that is, how they frame and position themselves as epistemic subjects. Much like the previous two, this world also entails a set of objects, and their relations. Most of these will be the same objects as those that appear in previous two worlds: universities, governments, colleagues, managers, etc. Yet, their meaning – i.e. range of values – may not be the same across these worlds. ‘The university’, in this sense, denotes both a place ‘under attack’ by forces of neoliberalism and a dreary place for long committee meetings on Tuesday mornings. This serves to highlight the role of ambiguity and ambivalence in human conduct (e.g. Berliner, 2016; see also Merton, 1976, Bauman, 1991). This is particularly relevant in order to avoid another form of ‘authenticity bias’ (cf. Baert, 2012): assuming that authors’ ideas about social space will neatly conform to those presented in intellectual interventions, as well as, more broadly, in order to underscore the fact that people’s presentations of knowledge about a certain domain are not necessarily identical nor even compatible with the knowledge they apply when navigating that domain. The second part of the synthesis accounts for specific acts of positioning within this space. In this, it draws on retroduction as a mode of social analysis (e.g. Glynos and Howarth, 2007). Retroduction assumes that the work of social science is, primarily, to establish mechanisms that contribute to specific sociocultural manifestations. Such mechanisms can be said to include, on the one hand, factors associated with ‘reductionist’ modes of explanation – for instance, class, background, institutional position, etc. – and, on the other, more complex/intersectional factors, such as, for instance, interaction between institutional incentives (e.g. REF) and personal motivations (e.g. wanting to get a promotion in order to secure a loan for a house). The third step is identifying, among these mechanisms, those that make a particular outcome more likely: that is, those that offer a more persuasive explanation for the specific configuration of critique of neoliberalism in higher education. 79 The challenge, in this sense, is how to include individuals without resorting to either methodological individualism, which would see critique as an outcome of individual strategies or decisions, or social reductionism, which would identify it as a reflection of authors’ class, status, or biographical effects of large-scale social processes. In order to do this, we need to understand the relative weight attributed to different factors that inform acts of positioning, from the standpoint of actors themselves. This is where reflexivity comes in. This allows us to replace the last step of retroduction – asking ‘What must reality be like in order for this to hold true?’ with a related question: ‘What must participants assume reality is like in order for this to be true?’ Rather than necessarily ‘importing’ participants’ views of the world, asking what the world must be like for critique to be possible, instead, recognizes the relational and reflexive nature of intellectual interventions. This shift is primarily methodological, rather than philosophical; it is to ask not what entities are, but what they must be to make anthropological sense (e.g. Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017, p. 4). This brings the focus back onto positioning as a practice of achieving a social world – or, at least, a social world in which positioning can happen. The revision of this question allows to re-socialise and de-naturalise critique as a form of practice. Instead of trying to assess what reality must be like, we ask what ontological assumptions participants must hold in order to engage in intellectual positioning; and, secondly, what the way these acts work tells us about the nature of social reality. This also allows us to construct a bridge between pragmatist and (critical) realist ontologies. The double identity of speech acts – the fact that they are about something, but also the fact that they are something – is what allows them to be performative in the first instance. This, however, is not a question of effectiveness in the narrow sense: it isn’t necessarily the case that speech acts that are a better ‘fit’ with reality succeed, while others do not. Neither, however, is it the type of performativity in the sense in which intellectuals can just say things in order for them to become ‘real’; if this were indeed the case, we would have a multiplicity of parallel and possibly incommensurable universes floating about. We do not, at least in the strict sense of the term, and establishing the parameters of possible 80 universes as well as what they have in common is a fundamental step in explaining why the one we inhabit looks the way it does. Limitations and constraints The greatest asset of retroduction as a mode of analysis is simultaneously its greatest weakness: it can explain how things came to be in a certain way, but it cannot predict how they will develop in the future. Of course, most social sciences have by now abandoned the idea of the possibility of predicting the course of events. However, when it comes to processes very much in flux – as is certainly the case with the transformation of higher education and research in the UK – it is almost inevitable to raise the question of applicability of the analysis to events in the future. A related challenge is to avoid the appeal of ‘retro-fitting’: that is, adapting the interpretative model so as to ‘fit’ the events that took place after the period of data collection. In the context of this question, two events that occurred in the process of writing of the thesis are of primary significance. The UK referendum on membership in the European Union, where a slight majority voted in favour of leaving – ‘Brexit’ – took place at the end of the first year of this project. It was expected (and turned out to be the case) that there was going to be an upsurge in intellectual interventions, given the relevance of European Union funding for research and the generally cosmopolitan nature of the academia. This opened the option of refocusing the study on intellectual interventions concerning the implications of Brexit for higher education. Despite political appeal, the idea was abandoned as the number of interventions eventually waned, while the political process itself remained too obscure to allow for meaningful analysis. Instead, the implications of Brexit were included in the political and policy framework in the first part of the study. Similarly, the second event – the series of strikes of members of University and College Union (UCU) in response to changes proposed to pensions within the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) – took place after the conclusion of data collection, so there was no possibility to include them in the scope of the study. However, the strikes provided an interesting ‘sounding board’ for some of the ideas and concepts developed here. 81 Like other explanatory accounts, this one is necessarily fallible, in the sense in which its conclusions can turn out to be wrong. Similarly, the mechanisms whose existence it hypothetises may work very differently in practice. For instance, it is possible to claim that ontological assumptions play no role in the practice of positioning, or that fields or ‘worlds’ exist completely independently of positioning practices. In the concluding part, the arguments presented here will, to a degree, be examined in relation to these claims. Last, but not least, this case poses important questions in terms of extendability, that is, the degree to which its findings can be applied to contexts other than the UK, or beyond the present moment. While the analysis here certainly aims to show how historical and political configuration of UK higher education influences and informs the specific form of interventions grouped under the critique of neoliberalism in the academia, it clearly has broader implications. These implications concern understanding the social production of knowledge, and, in particular, critique as a specific form of knowledge about, and intervention in, social reality. Contribution to literature On these premises, it is possible to specify levels on which this study aims to make a contribution. On the first level, this study contributes an empirical account of the construction of a specific genre of intellectual interventions, here defined as critique of neoliberalism in UK higher education and research. While both the origins and primary referents of this genre of critique reside within the UK intellectual context, similarly to a number of other concepts in ‘metropolitan science’ (Connell 1998), it can and has been applied beyond the British Isles In part because of this, there is intellectual value in showing how this form of critique comes about, that is, how it is constructed through specific forms of agency in a specific social, political, and cultural context. In this sense, this study shares an agenda with other detailed reconstructions of paradigms or intellectual movements sometimes labelled the ‘new sociology of ideas’, whose notable proponents include Charles Camic and 82 Neil Gross (see Camic and Gross, 2002; Gross, 2002, 2008; Camic, 1992). Yet, it also departs from these in a number of ways. To begin with, rather than specifying an author or intellectual ‘movement’, it focuses on a specific genre of critique, as a combination of diagnostic and normative components. In this way, it grounds its analysis in the concept of ‘intellectual interventions’ and away from the concept of ‘intellectuals’ that characterises a number of other approaches to studying knowledge production (Eyal and Bucholz, 2010). Secondly, rather than focusing on the influence of different structural factors on the work of particular authors, it shifts attention to the way in which authors reflect on and frame these structural factors, including in, but not limited to, their work. In this sense, this study follows Baert’s analysis of the rise of Sartre as, in part, a consequence of his successful reinterpretation of the question of wartime collaboration as an issue for Existentialist philosophy (Baert, 2015). However, it also differs from this approach in the sense in which it aims to capture, to the degree possible, how critical positions are articulated in ‘real time’. Obviously, given time lag between the publication dates of various interventions and the time of interviews, some effects related to reconstruction from memory and retrospective interpretation are inevitable. Yet, the study aims, whenever possible, to ‘capture’ critique in the process of development. Methodologically, the study applies a similar approach to the pragmatic sociology of critique, which aims to reconstruct positions taken by different social actors in situations of dispute. However, despite Boltanski’s identification of the tension between the ‘lay’ and ‘expert’ forms of critique as the key theoretical issue for the sociology of critique, empirical work in this tradition has not explicitly focused on the specific epistemic position of those who mobilise knowledge through intellectual interventions. This tension, by contrast, is exactly what this study aims to bring to the fore. The second level of contribution, thus, concerns epistemic implications of the position intellectuals occupy when they critically intervene in a context that simultaneously constitutes the conditions of possibility for their intervention. Critique of neoliberalism in universities is produced within the context of neoliberal universities and its authority is in part derived from the same conditions that sustain this context. ‘Disentangling’ intellectual interventions (as, in part, a form of production of knowledge) from the conditions of the production 83 of this knowledge therefore offers an important insight into both the possibilities and limits of self-knowledge, in the context in which the knowledge of one’s own situation is an integral part of the critical position. Of course, to some degree this holds true for all forms of knowledge: critics of capitalism are not exempt from operations of the capitalist economy; critics of gender oppression do not live in a genderless universe; the consequences of climate change equally impact climate scientists as the rest of us. Yet, the specific nature of academic knowledge production puts a particularly sharp emphasis on the tenuous boundary between ‘lay’ and ‘expert’ perspectives: given that intellectuals whose interventions are analysed in this study occupy an unclear position on the continuum between ‘expert’ and ‘layperson’, analysing the discursive and reflexive tools they deploy in, conditionally speaking, ‘stabilising’ or ‘fixing’ an epistemic position from which speech-acts become possible provides a novel angle on the question of the role of identity and subjectivity in the production of knowledge, especially when they cannot be reduced to, nor retroduced from, categories such as gender, age, race, class, or the intersection of any of these. Of course, the question of the subject-position and the construction of epistemic authority is not new in the philosophy of social science, sociology of knowledge, or STS. The social construction of expertise, in particular, has become more central with the rise of ‘contentious’ issues such as climate change or artificial intelligence. This study, however, represents a slightly different case. Unlike in contexts of ‘contestation’, where scientific knowledge can be (and is) put on a trial (e.g. Brandmayr, 2017) – both metaphorically and literally – the epistemic space of the ‘war on universities’ is more uneven and fragmented. There are no trials or expert committees where intellectuals are invited to give evidence that neoliberalism is, indeed, destroying higher education. On one side – that of critique – the diagnosis seems to be universally accepted, at least in broad terms. On the other – where policy discourses are generated – neoliberalism is hardly even mentioned. Rather than assuming that the lack of overlap between these discussions speaks to the existence of different ‘fields’ or, alternatively, to the ultimate victory of neoliberal ideology, this thesis will aim to explain why they keep talking at cross-purposes – and, indeed, what sort of purpose the very talking at cross-purposes may serve. 84 On the third level, this study engages specifically with theorisation of the form of social action that intellectual interventions represent. By simultaneously asking what is it that interventions are, and what is it that they do, the thesis hopes to provide an account that bridges the gap between pragmatist and critical realist approaches to the relationship between knowledge and social action. For critical realists, speech-acts are effective because they encode reality in a certain way; if they fail, this, at least in part, can be because reality ‘pushes back’. For pragmatists, linguistic constructions of reality are all there is, at least as far as social objects are concerned. This would make the successful performance of speech acts dependent on consensus or persuasiveness, but not on reality ‘as such’, given that the latter cannot be held to exist independently of its representations. While most accounts of knowledge production decide a priori on the type of approach, the assumption of this thesis is that examining critique as a form of social practice requires to simultaneously engage with both. Furthermore, it assumes that examining the relationship, similarities and differences between these two approaches can illuminate some of the assumptions implied in the production of all forms of social knowledge (e.g. Lohse, 2017) that also have implications for the relationship between critique and the social world. 85 86 Chapter 3: Political and policy framework Introduction This chapter situates intellectual interventions in historical and political context. While no historical account can claim to be ‘neutral’ or distinct from theoretical and political concerns, situating speech acts in a social context requires understanding specific political configurations they respond to. This, of course, does not mean intellectual interventions should be seen as simply (or only) reactions to political developments of the day. Both policies and interventions should be understood as parts of broader social and political dynamics. The chapter therefore intends to show how policies aimed at regulating higher education and research, and the politics of knowledge production more broadly, evolved in relationship with demographic, geopolitical, and historical trends that influenced Britain in the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century, in order to pave the way for showing how critique of neoliberalism in higher education relates to this context in subsequent chapters. The chapter builds on existing material related to the history of higher education and research in the UK, placing an emphasis on the constitution of actors and dynamics that would come to play a major role in the ‘war on universities’. It starts with an overview of the early history of universities in Britain and their place in the world. After that, it moves to the 20th century and more specifically the post- war period of educational expansion. It revisits some of the crucial points in the history of British higher education – the 1963 Robbins report, the 1988 Education Reform Act, the abolition of distinction between universities and polytechnics in 1992 – before focusing on the recent period, which started with the election of 1997, and lasts to this day. Two elites: a history of conflict? The relationship between universities and their political environment was only exceptionally, if ever, a smooth one. There is possibly no better case to illustrate 87 this than the establishment of the University of Berlin, the blueprint for the famed Humboldtian university of the critical imagination. Its development was to a great degree stimulated by the industrial expansion of the Prussian Empire, and the need to educate statesmen and intellectuals capable of advancing, administering, and leading such a political construct. For this reason, and with the ambition of using this knowledge to advance the interests of the new state, Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm gave mandate to Wilhelm Von Humboldt to develop an institution that would bring together scholarship (still greatly influenced by mediaeval model of reading, rereading and commentary of texts) and research (the latter understood, at the time, as a venture into the unknown, not unlike the exploits of Alexander, the other Von Humboldt). Having exposure to both sides of academic enterprise was seen to combine the best elements of tradition and innovation: ensure progress by maintaining order; and ensure order by maintaining the rate of progress. In this sense, the ‘modern’ research university was not only coextensive with, but essentially co-dependent on, the development of the modern nation-state. Models most frequently invoked in contemporary discussions – the German research university and the American public university – are a case in point (Ash, 2006). American ‘founding fathers’ replicated the Humboldtian model not only for its capacity to harness innovation, but also for its capacity to foster the idea of a nation. The third formative influence, French ‘Napoleonic’ university, was equally, if not more, dependent on the state: its elite institutions (Grandes Écoles) were developed to provide training for public administration and other professions vital for the maintenance of the state apparatus, such as doctors, engineers, teachers and lawyers (Bourdieu, 1996; Ruegg, 2011). The coevolution of universities as institutions, and nation states in the modern, Westphalian sense of the term, is one of the reasons why universities so readily become sites of political contestation. As Jaspers (1959) argued, the ‘idea of the university’ is not independent from the idea of who constitutes the (relevant) political community, and thus who should be included in and excluded from it. The idea of an intimate connection between universities and the body politic was reflected in practices such as numerus clausus – restricting the number of available places on the whole or in specific degree programmes for members of specific groups, historically most often applied to Jews (e.g. Karady and Nagy eds., 2012) 88 – as well as, of course, principled or structural exclusion of women, ethnic minorities, or political dissidents from universities. Its echoes can be heard in contemporary debates about immigration, where migrants’ exceptional educational or scientific achievements are often used to argue against UK’s immigration policies as well as specific ways of monitoring migration (for instance, including students in overall migration figures). This brings us to the relationship between the universities and the state in the UK. One of peculiarities of the history of higher education in the UK is that the establishment of universities in England and Scotland predates the establishment of the nation state. As there was no nation in the modern, ‘Westphalian’ sense of the term, there was no drive to develop academia in ways that would foster its solidification. Instead, the early history of universities in the UK was marked by dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in relation to both secular and religious authority: on the one hand, the feudal state and the King; and, on the other, the Church. Their later history, in the 19th and into the 20th century, is marked by the dual dynamics of the development of Empire, on the one hand, and the provision of knowledge, ideas, and workforce necessary to support its expansion, contraction, and dissolution, on the other. Oxford, the oldest university in England (and in the English-speaking world), was initially established as a small centre of scholarship after Henry II temporarily forbade English students from attending the University in Paris (Paris had provided asylum to Thomas Beckett). The founding of the University of Cambridge is traced to the dispute (read: violent conflict) between scholars and townspeople in Oxford, leading a few of the former to escape and establish a separate institution in Cambridge. Early conflicts between ‘Town’ and ‘Gown’ resulted in the privileged status of the latter through penalties that Henry II imposed on townsfolk, including the obligation to attend annual Mass at the University Church. Oxford and Cambridge, in this sense, combined intellectual and ecclesiastic authority, though not always without friction. Papal bulls issued in the 13th and 14th centuries granted graduates ius ubique docendi (the right to teach throughout Christendom) and ecclesiastic independence. The Act of Supremacy in 1534, which separated England from Papal authority and confirmed Henry VIII as the 89 Head of the Church of England, as well as ensuing dissolution of the monasteries (1539-1541), brought changes to Oxford’s and Cambridge’s material fortunes – including the buildings and funds they had access to – but, more importantly, strengthened the interest of royalty in how they were run. With Protestantism and the Reformation came interest in humanism and Italian Renaissance, though scholasticism continued to thrive. More importantly, however, the social base from which students were recruited shifted away from clergy and towards the sons of gentry and rich merchants. Of course, Oxford and Cambridge have always to some degree drawn men from different social strata; with the solidification of the gentry and the rise of the mercantile class, however, their financial patronage – and thus their influence – became more prominent (Green, 1974, pp. 21–29). This does not mean clerical affairs were no longer of interest. Oxford and Cambridge remained deeply embroiled in religious disputes. John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman, author of The Idea of the University, was at the forefront of the Catholic revival at Oxford in the 19th century. While parts of this treatise most often cited concern the value of ‘knowledge for its own sake’, most of it is, in fact, devoted to the relationship of theology to (scientific) knowledge, and the position of Christianity in the context of university education (which he sought to affirm) (Newman, 1907 [1858]). Colleges, in this sense, were usually agglomerates of scholars with similar religious inclinations. During the 17th and 18th centuries, they alternated between growing and losing in fondness for the ruling ideology of the day; Green, for instance, describes the period between 1650 and 1800 as “decline” (1974, p. 28), owing particularly to the fact that Oxford and Cambridge were content to stick to the education of ministers in order to minimize friction with the state. This period is also marked by the flourishing of universities in Scotland, as well as in Dublin. While the first colleges in St. Andrews opened in 15th century, real expansion is tied to the period of the Scottish Enlightenment, with the opening of colleges in Glasgow and Aberdeen, and the Medical School (later Royal College of Physicians) in Edinburgh. Adam Smith did not pass on the opportunity to refer to the older universities as “sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices found shelter and protection” (Smith, cited in Green, 1974, p. 50). Owing in part to a broader (and more diverse) social base, less regulatory control, 90 and eventual abolishment of the college residency requirement, Scottish institutions acquired the reputation as more liberal, open, and democratic than the conservative and exclusionary institutions in England – adjectives that, though certainly disconnected from their initial context, would continue to be used to describe the difference between English and Scottish higher education well into the 21st century. Universities and the state By the beginning of the 19th century it was clear that higher learning in England was ripe for reform. The reform would become both extensive – in the sense of expanding the number of institutions of higher education – and intensive, in the sense of transforming the way universities were run. The main direction of reforms can be gleaned from Sir William Hamilton’s letter in the Edinburgh Review: “It is from the State only, and the Crown in particular, that we can reasonably hope for an academical reformation worthy of the name” (cited in Green, 1974, p. 64). The first Royal Commission to examine the state of universities was set up in 1850. Unsurprisingly, it encountered decisive opposition in both Oxford and Cambridge. In response to the commissioners’ inquiry, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, a certain Dr Corrie, wrote: “I feel obliged by a sense of public duty to decline answering any of the questions which I had the honour to receive from you a short time ago” (ibid, p. 65). While Corrie – like other Oxbridge dons – eventually assented to the inquiry and the reforms proposed in the Parliament came to pass, notable in his interpretation of ‘public duty’ is the idea that ‘the public’ is not necessarily best represented by the Parliament, despite it being the formal institution established to represent public interests. Royal Commissions’ university reforms of 1854 and 1877 are commonly regarded as having instituted ‘seismic’ changes (cf. Bogdanor, 2010). However, they were performed on the explicit recognition that they should cause minimal disturbance to both Oxford and Cambridge. One side of this was practical: reforms needed donnish assent in order to work, and their direction was to a great degree an outcome of negotiation between the more modern elements of the universities and the commissioners. The other, however, was social: despite potential differences 91 in political leanings or careers, both the reformers and the reformed came out of same educational institutions. Vernon elaborates on the sensitivity of instituting reforms in Oxbridge: Over the centuries, Oxford and Cambridge Universities had become integrated with religious, social and political elites. Yet, constitutionally, these Universities and colleges were autonomous corporations with legal privileges, and the accumulated wealth to maintain their independence. What might induce a government to interfere with what were effectively arms of its own authority? Their very intimacy with the establishment, however, meant that the universities constituted a political issue that could not easily be ignored. Similarly, their wealth and privileges, and oligopoly in the educational world, meant that they could not be regarded simply as private concerns. Thus, if it was felt that the universities were failing to fulfil their functions as national institutions, governments had a responsibility at least to encourage them to do so. Even so, state intervention sat uneasily with early nineteenth century governments, especially when dealing with institutions of such long-standing status … Building on internal pressure, state activity was primarily devoted to providing a framework within which reform could take place (2004, p.10). Some of the defining characteristics of the configuration of higher education in England were therefore already in place at the start of the Victorian Era. Oxford and Cambridge had begun to turn away from the insular, monastic model of scholarship that sought to reduce or minimize contact with the society that surrounded them. They were, much like other social institutions, embracing ‘public good’ as the framework for justification and main source of legitimacy. However, the academic oligarchy that presided over England’s oldest universities reserved the right to know or define for themselves what ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’ was supposed to mean. This, in addition to the high degree of intermingling between intellectual and political elites, meant that state-driven reforms could only proceed slowly and with a great degree of deference towards universities. From this perspective, it is not particularly surprising that the main 92 route for the transformation of English higher education led not through Oxford and Cambridge, but around them. The University of Durham, based on the Oxbridge collegiate model, was established in 1832 and awarded a Royal Charter in 1837. The University of London was created through the incorporation of University and King’s Colleges in 1836. Its establishment was beset with controversy, not only because of their different take on religious matters (University College was non-denominational, King’s fervently Anglican), but also because its purpose was not entirely clear. Initially, the University of London was set up only in order to administer examinations: in other words, it was providing a much-needed centralized service of certification and awarding of qualifications to the burgeoning stratum of middle- class professionals. By mid-19th century, however, the pressure on the University of London to teach its own programmes had increased, reflecting the growing demand for higher qualifications delivered away from Oxford and Cambridge. Discussions and negotiations on how best to organize this went on for years, without reaching conclusion; multiple royal commissions were set up. The last, Cowper Commission, managed to combine dual needs: a teaching institution for London, and an examining one for the expanding Empire (Vernon 2004, p. 79). It took a concerted push from two prominent intellectuals at the time, however, to implement the reform: one was R.B. Haldane; the other was Sydney Webb. Haldane and Webb combined some of the most prominent characteristics of the nascent middle class at the time. Haldane was a Liberal, educated at Göttingen, from which he took a fascination with Humboldtian approach to higher education. The influence of the Humboldtian concepts of autonomy and academic freedom is reflected in the ‘Haldane principle’ (1918), which proposed that funding decisions related to academic research should be made by academics. Webb was a Fabian socialist, primarily interested in education as a means of improving the condition of the working class and alleviating poverty, who also went on to establish the London School of Economics (LSE). The University of London reflected both; an influence of idealism and ‘higher learning’ in philosophy and the arts, and more practical, utilitarian orientation adapted to the needs of the developing society in fields such as economics or engineering: 93 The move towards industrialization and a society based more upon machinery than crops meant that those engaged in this work required some kind of training, no matter how elementary, to operate in this new sphere (…) skills had to be learnt, at worst by recruitment to the exploited work force, at best by instruction and examination…there was an upsurge of the new professions, new ventures through joint stock companies, new careers and fortunes to be made, for which an education at the ancient universities, or no education at all, was unsuited (Shinn, 1986, p. 19). The 19th century thus brought profound change on several fronts. The French Revolution left a belief in the importance of enfranchisement and extension of political rights to ‘the masses’ – not least, in order to secure order – and education was a means of inculcating basic skills, such as reading and writing, needed to exercise these rights. Reading and writing also enabled participation in the developing ‘public sphere’, fostering the appetite for news and commentary on current affairs. The seeds of the expansion of higher education, in this sense, grew in the same pot as the seeds of critique: in the idea of a shared political space. The future of this polity was increasingly reliant on knowledge of the physical forces responsible for processes such as combustion, which fueled its technological development. England’s supremacy in trade and technology had seemed secure until the Great Exhibition of 1851, when the advances of other nations, especially Prussia, became clear. It did not take much to connect Prussia’s impressive technological development with the reform associated with Von Humboldt. The idea of ‘civic’ universities, as a crossover between studium generale – no longer aimed at indulging theological or other less spiritual interests of the sons of the wealthy, but the future civil servants, engineers, and explorers – and practically- oriented education, originated here. The needs of the burgeoning Empire could no longer be served solely either by the duopoly of Oxford and Cambridge, or by the board of examiners in London. The expansion of civic, ‘redbrick’ universities is synonymous with the expansion of regional, largely industrial, centres (Whyte, 2015). Victoria University in Manchester, developing on the foundations of Owens College – established thanks to the endowment of a wealthy Manchester merchant – and incorporating the 94 Manchester school of medicine, received a royal charter in 1881 (Vernon, 2004). Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Bristol followed in quick succession. The University of Wales, with colleges in Cardiff, Aberystwyth, and Bangor, was established in 1893. Initially, most of these institutions were set up as subsidiaries of larger regional centres; during the course of the 20th century, most acquired royal charters of their own. This underlines the importance the state had begun placing on higher learning. Oxford and Cambridge had grown ‘organically’, at times only cursorily connected to, and at times explicitly positioned against, the interests of the state. Two oldest British universities were, in a manner of speaking, older than the British Empire. By the start of the 20th century, however, the state had more than done its share to shift the balance towards a more centralized system of institutions delivering higher degrees. A more centralized system also called for tighter regulation. A more expansive one, at the same time, required new funding arrangements. The development of higher education in the UK in the 20th century will, to a great degree, be defined by these – at times opposing, at times converging – tendencies. 20th century The most remarkable development in British higher education in the early 20th century was the establishment of the University Grants Committee (UGC). Initially proposed in a report by a commission chaired by Haldane in 1904, the Treasury formally established the UGC in 1919. In this sense, the UGC was part of the broader reconstruction process in the aftermath of World War I, in part to prepare for the expansion of the sector to include ex-servicemen and the growing number of secondary-school entrants, in part to ensure state aid – because grants were classified as aid – would be distributed in the most rational way possible. At its founding, the UGC had “no statutory basis or powers, no bank account, no income- generating capacity, and no grant [was] made to it” (Salter and Tapper, 1994, p. 70). Its primary purpose was to distribute funding allocated by the Treasury. At that point, state aid constituted not more than one third of universities’ income – the remaining two-thirds coming from the combination of endowments and local authorities’ funds. 95 Yet, even this change was monumental from universities’ standpoint. In 1920, the Oxford Magazine carried a letter that compared the introduction of government funding with the effects of the Royal Commissions’ reform in the 18th century. The concerned writer argued: The academical year which is now closing has witnessed three gigantic changes, which will slowly turn the course of the University into new channels. The accumulated effect will be as momentous in the eyes of future generations as that of the First Commission. I refer to the abolition of compulsory Greek, the admission of women to membership and degrees of the University, and the acceptance of money from a government department (1920, cited in Bogdanor, 2010). Possibly for this reason, during the first two decades the UGC clearly deferred to universities, with no question about who was more powerful in the relationship: Up to 1939, the universities dictated the terms of the ideological climate within which any discussion of the universities took place. Academics, civil servants and politicians alike considered it perfectly natural that the state should be very much the subordinate partner…and that the administrative arrangements should reflect that subordinate position (Salter and Tapper, 1994, p. 107). This does not mean UGC’s hands were tied. Its role was that of an intermediary, left to channel the conversation between universities and the state in the way thought most appropriate to the order of things – in which universities were an important political actor of their own right. Unsurprisingly, this conversation had more than a touch of an ‘in-house’ quality. Members of the UGC and of the Treasury belonged to the same club (not just metaphorically: many frequented the Athenaeum in London), sharing “unwritten conventions and the personal and social relations of a homogeneous community of university men, in and out of government, who share common tastes and a common outlook” (Dodds et al., cited in Salter and Tapper, p. 105). 96 In other words, the peaceable arrangement between universities and the state derived not so much from an alliance of political interests, as from cultural and social – read class – homogeneity, with UGC mostly successfully ‘smoothing out’ ripples. So it remained until, as well as in the first decade after, World War II. Recovery from devastation caused by the war, the Suez crisis, and the beginning of the process of decolonization all meant that universities were ‘off the radar’ for a while. Yet, it was obvious this would not last. The society was changing rapidly; British universities would have to follow. The second half of the 20th century gave rise to two elements that would substantially shape contemporary discussions concerning the role of the university. One relates to expansion, and mass attainment, of higher education; the 1944 Education Act introduced universal secondary schooling (Bathmaker, 2003) and thus formally opened the pathway to higher education for an unprecedented proportion of the population. The second concerns the introduction of measurement, which presented a first step towards a fully developed system of performance assessment. To a great degree, this happened in the interstice of two reports: one is known by the name of Lord Robbins; the other is known as the Jarratt report. Robbins to Jarratt Not unlike Newton’s Idea of the University, the way in which the Robbins report is remembered does not necessarily reflect the full extent of its arguments. In contemporary discussions, Robbins is most often associated with opening up university education to “all who qualified by ability or attainment” – in other words, with being the precursor to massification and democratization of higher education (Robbins, 1963). Yet, political history as well as legacy of the committee and its recommendations is more complicated; some elements of it exhibit characteristics that will remain a prominent element of social dynamics underpinning the discussions in the sector to the present day. The Robbins committee met from 1961 to 1963. It was preceded by the Anderson committee, which addressed student finance in view of the expanding number of 97 secondary-school graduates. Robbins’ initial mandate was to “review the pattern of full-time higher education” (Robbins, 1963, Preamble), and propose principles for its long-term development, including the question of institutional and numerical expansion. Rapid industrialization and expansion, not to mention population growth, required, it was argued, a more skilled labour force. The report’s celebrated formulation – to open higher education “to all who qualify, by ability or attainment” (Robbins, 1963, p. 48, art. 133–4) – was, in the first instance, simply an acknowledgment of demographic and social trends, which were creating a much broader pool of potential applicants than would have been the case thirty or fifty years prior. Secondly, and this is where the report did fall more in step with its time, it was also an acknowledgment that existing institutions of higher education were not necessarily conducive to this expansion. In other words, while possibly performing well in terms of educating those who qualified ‘by attainment’ – which, in this context, meant by the virtue of previous education – they were, possibly, not including everyone who qualified by ability. This represented an important step towards equating social justice with governmental intervention: the implication was that, left to their own devices, universities were unlikely to work towards this goal. The third and most important contribution of the report, less visible because it was bordering on obvious, was to, for the first time, conceptualise higher education as a system and thus a distinct domain of public policy. In 1964, the UGC officially became part of the newly created Department of Education and Science (DES) (Tight, 2009). Instead of a set of disparate universities and colleges, with their histories, traditions (or lack thereof), and institutional trajectories, higher learning became a matter for the nation-state – and, consequently, its development deemed relevant for the well-being of its citizens on the whole, not just for the (still small) proportion of those who attended them. This is how the expansion and massification of higher education became the main ‘lever’ for governmental intervention into university governance. Universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, could only accept the idea of becoming part of a system under the aegis of a central government if this brought benefits. In return, the government committed to financing higher education on previously unprecedented scale. In addition, it pledged to open new institutions, in order to satisfy what was projected to be growing demand. The essence of the ‘social compact’ between the university 98 and the state, thus, was always a tradeoff between expansion and funding. Universities accepted public money, but had to, in principle, accede to the fact that the source of that money – the taxpayer – may now have a say in how it should be spent. The end of the 1960s was marked by pronounced growth, on two fronts: total number of students (from 217,000 in 1962–3 to 376,000 in 1967–8), and the number of institutions. The degree of expansion, exceeding even Robinson’s projections, should not come as much of a surprise. In a society as classed and yet as socially immobile as the UK, with high inbound and almost non-existent outbound migration, university degrees offered a rare opportunity to increase economic, social, and cultural capital – at least by proxy. The model of ‘ancient’ universities, both conceptually and spatially, reflected the assumption that students needed to live and socialize away from the environment they came from. Higher education, thus, had not just an intellectual, but also an enculturating function: it aimed to equalize the cultural and social capital of those who participated in it, ‘elevating’ non-traditional entrants to the status and social tastes of the more traditional ones. In this sense, it emulated, to a large degree, Oxford and Cambridge; soon it would become clear that the model that had initially been developed in order to distinguish the elite could not be seamlessly transposed to the rest of society. In order to solve this problem, the government established a new form of tertiary education: polytechnics. Thirty-one were founded in 1960s and the 1970s, often expanding from (or integrating) local colleges of advanced technology (CATs). They were marked by a different focus – more technical and applied, less liberal arts-oriented; they were also explicitly aimed towards attracting students from the local area. The expansion of applied higher education, thus, was also an attempt to move away from the residential model that characterized Oxbridge and ‘redbricks’. In the speech that inaugurated what would come to be known as the ‘binary policy’, Anthony Crosland – Minister of, at that point, newly elected Labour government – presented a curious mix of social differentiation and social mobility. Crosland endorsed the division of higher education into “what has come to be called the autonomous sector, represented by the universities”, and “the public 99 sector, represented by the leading technical colleges and colleges of education” (Crosland, Speech at Woolwich Polytechnic, 1965). However, explaining why the government supported this system, he explicitly stated the objective was to avoid academic drift, (…) with Universities at the top and the other institutions down below…characterized by the constant rat-race to reach the First or University division, a constant pressure from those below to ape the Universities above, and a certain inevitable failure to achieve diversity in higher education the society needs (ibid). While bringing universities under the wing of the state, Crosland was also clear that the main role in educating the public was to be performed by polytechnics and CATs. Universities were to remain self-governing; at this point, the government had not yet tried to manage them directly, developing instead a parallel sector in order to extend higher education to a wider population. It also established the Open University, which aimed to further open access to higher education through correspondence-based learning, or education at a distance. Enthusiastic expansion in the 1960s was followed by contraction. Student numbers fell: for a variety of reasons, demand was not conforming to the projected figures. A much more important reduction, however, was in the domain of funding. Stewart noted that “From 1974 to 1977 every kind of university grant (…) was withheld wholly or in part at some point…This was generally agreed to be the worst financial crisis experienced by all universities in peacetime and it came when sixteen new ones were hoping to build strength” (1989, p. 162). As deindustrialization progressed, job losses and inflation gave rise to growing social insecurity and sense of discontent, reflected, among other things, in recurrent strikes of workers in the public sector. Neither the Labour not Conservative governments managed to do much about the economic downturn. Economic trends only became a precursor to a deeper transformation of the relationship between the universities and the state. Universities in England were established by (in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, given) Royal Charters. In the context of the administrative apparatus of the state, 100 this meant that the highest authority concerning university governance was the Privy Council. Expectedly, however, the Council remained largely uninvolved in day-to-day management, using its visitation rights only as a formal guarantee of the right of the Crown and the Parliament to have a say in university matters. But, with the extension of financial support, followed the extension of power. UGC suddenly became subject to demands for reporting: When a grant in aid represents the major source of income of an organisation, the normal rule is that the organisation is required to render its accounts to the Comptroller and Auditor General for audit, or to grant him access to its books and records, so that he can report to Parliament on matters of financial administration and control…Expenditure by the universities is at present the sole major exception to this rule (Committee of Public Accounts, 1967, cited in Salter and Tapper, 1994., p. 42, my emphasis). In the 1970s, the Treasury started for the first time actually monitoring expenditure on universities. Though different authors disagree about the degree to which the waves of student protest in the 1960s (which, in all cases, had limited resonance in the UK, when compared to France, Czechoslovakia, and the US) played a role in the rise of audit, it makes sense to assume that successive governments were on watch in order to prevent campus politics from going haywire, especially after the discovery of the Cambridge spy ring in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Warwick University occupation that E.P. Thompson described in Warwick University, Ltd. (Thompson, 2014 [1970]). The degree to which the introduction of this oversight was seen as departure from ‘business as usual’ is reflected in the following anecdote. In a meeting of the Expenditure Committee, Chairman of the Science Research Council was asked to explain why the council was funding postgraduate research. He responded: “My answer to your question why we do it when perhaps it is a bit illogical that we should – I quite agree – is that, if we had not, nobody would have done so” (Select Committee on Expenditure, 1973, xxviii, cited in Salter and Tapper, 1994, p. 44). Historically speaking, the roots of what critics will dub ‘audit’ lay in the need to justify this growing public expenditure on higher education. Yet accountability was never the only issue. The commitment of consecutive governments to cut public 101 spending meant that increasing insight into how universities were using government-dispensed grants was always with the intent of if not reducing, then at least redistributing public funds. The suspicion with which academics viewed any attempt at governmental oversight, as the anonymous gentleman cited earlier in the chapter, who ranked it alongside the admission of women in terms of disruptiveness, was not entirely unjustified. The precursor to what would become the practice of systematic assessment and review of higher education was the Jarratt report, published in 1985 and commissioned by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (later Universities UK). This was the first direct review of university management and other practices conducted by an external public committee; some would describe it as a ‘pre-emptive’ or defensive strategy, meant to give universities advantage in surveying the sector. However, Jarratt came at the tail end of a longer trend in transforming the relationship between universities and the government. Austerity and what will come to be known as New Public Management only provided an ideological framing (and, possibly, justification) for a more substantial restructuring. New Public Management As an ideology and a style of governing, New Public Management (NPM) has been extensively written about, mostly from a critical perspective. This approach to public services was motivated by the desire to cut public spending, which, in turn, was predicated on a set of economic and social policies that will come to be associated with neoliberalism. While NPM in the UK is first and foremost connected to the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (and later John Major), the introduction of increased governmental oversight was a longer and more complex process. Thatcher’s encounter with neoliberalism, as many critics argue, came through reading Friedrich Hayek (Evans, 2004; Gamble, 1994). Regardless of the degree of influence of the writing of Mont Pelerin society (see Ledger, 2018, p. 2), it makes sense to recognize that NPM was a bureaucratic technology at least as much as an economic ideology (Dunleavy and Hood, 1994). 102 Thatcher’s election in 1979 followed a series of public sector employees’ strikes and a growing economic crisis. Therefore, it is not surprising that cutting public expenditure, which formed the backbone of the political programme of the new Government, was going to extend to funds earmarked for higher education. Cuts were primarily envisaged in two forms: funding of international students – whose subsidies were progressively withdrawn – and expenditure on home students, which the Government had committed to reduce by 8.5% by 1983–4 (Perraton, 2014). The reforms will reach their height with the 1988 Education Reform Act, which effectively abolished tenure by allowing dismissal of university staff on grounds of redundancy. The act also wrestled the control of polytechnics from local education authorities (LEAs). For universities, the greatest shift was the abolishment of the University Grants Committee, and its replacement with the Universities Funding Council (UFC). To some academics, this constituted an outright attack: “The 1979–83 government attacked higher education without real thought of the consequences, and the UGC implemented government policies too loyally and on particularly narrow and socially unresponsive criteria” (Kogan and Kogan 1983, p.110). This reading also conveys a shift in the perception of the role of the UGC, from a ‘defender’ of universities to instrument of governmental ideology. Its replacement with the UFC, therefore, was not just semantic. UGC used to make sure that the relationship between the government and universities retained a friendly character. UFC was of a somewhat different nature. No longer composed of former academics, it was instead a proper bureaucratic body. Universities, in this sense, lost a long-held position of equal (if not dominant) partner in determining the direction of higher education policy. Instead, they became constituents: a sector like any other, with interests and channels for lobbying, but no longer with a privileged position from which to do so. The assumption of automatic convergence between the political and the intellectual elite was broken. Some critics ascribe Thatcher’s alleged animosity towards universities to her experience at Oxford (e.g. Edwards, 1989), where she was reportedly exposed to ridicule for her accent and lower-middle-class antics. Regardless of the value of biography-based policy analysis, this interpretation speaks to a broader trend: the political and intellectual elite no longer necessarily had shared dispositions. 103 Obviously, in many cases the ruling stratum was still recruited from Oxford and Cambridge, thus ensuring the continuity of ‘in-house conversation’. But the fact that the Prime Minister, despite having gone to Oxford, did not partake in the habitus of its elite, meant that the days of easy alignment between interests of the government and that of universities were over. Education Reform Act of 1988, the first substantive piece of educational legislation introduced by Thatcher’s government, initiated this through reinforcing the position of statutory commissioners to assist in the rewriting of university statutes to allow for the dismissal of academic staff on the basis of redundancy. In practice, whereas previous grounds for dismissal would normally fall in the domain of serious violation of code of conduct, triggering a lengthy disciplinary procedure (and, certainly, often did not happen at all) – this, for the first time, put universities – and that means university management – in the position to say staff were no longer needed. It turned the lever for the development of higher education decisively away from academic self-governance: whereas, previously, universities were more-or-less built around the preferences, agendas, and research interests of scholars, in this new arrangement, academics were becoming more like regular employees, serving the interests of the enterprise. Importantly, then, from an independent position set to provide a buffer between universities and the state, Commissioners turned into an instrument of the latter – one aimed at destroying the employment security of university staff, at that. This led John Akker of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) to assert that “the appointment of Commissioners…represents a very pronounced encroachment by the State” (cited in Salter and Tapper, 1994, p. 67, my emphasis). The fact that this was felt to be an encroachment reflects the degree to which the assumption that universities are self-governing was a natural starting point. When the state wanted to manage, in other words, it did so via polytechnics and CATs; universities, by and large, were left to handle their own affairs. Yet even this, most hallowed of distinctions, was going to change. The 1992 Further and Higher Education Act abolished the distinction between education provided by universities and that provided by colleges of further education, allowing 35 polytechnics existing at the time to acquire the status of 104 universities (usually referred to as ‘new’ or ‘post-1992’). It also further reformed financing, replacing the UFC with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and corresponding funding councils for Scotland and Wales. The distinction was at the time primarily symbolical, in view of the broader process of devolution; later on, however, it will acquire additional political significance, with the differentiation of tuition fee regimes. Last, but by no means least, the 1992 Act introduced the practice of periodic research assessment: Research Assessment Exercise, later known as the Research Excellence Framework. Tight argues “market rhetoric and associated behaviours were by now firmly embedded among senior academic managers and central university staff, even though the sector hardly behaved like a conventional market” (2004, p. 83); Trow similarly noted that “since government controls the price universities can place on their services, and the amount and variety of services they can sell, universities currently operate not in a market but in something more like a command economy” (1996, p. 310). The ‘managed market’ approach can be seen as a strategy of balancing relative scarcity with relative abundance. In this case, the abundance related to the number of institutions and growing numbers of students; the scarcity to the absence of funds to support their further expansion, at the time when trends in employment were suggesting the demand for higher and further education was going to grow. Periodic reviews or assessments became the prime instrument for measuring the efficiency of spending and influencing the future direction of policy. The first research assessment exercise (RAE) was conducted in 1998, initially introduced in order to provide a ‘benchmark’ against which to measure the quality of universities’ research output. The obvious motivation for the RAE was the need to distinguish between pre- and post-1992 institutions; as university status as the instrument of classification was abolished, research performance was the next-best proxy. The universities, predictably, were not particularly pleased by the direction in which the sector was going. From the happy days of growth mediated by the UGC as a reliable buffer between the government and the universities, the sector was facing not only the prospect of economic scarcity, but also a future in which government funding was becoming conditional on their performance. Higher education in the UK became, in a manner of speaking, a victim of its own success: massive expansion – establishment of new institutions, removal of barriers to entry 105 and, finally, extension of university status to polytechnics – made the vast majority of the sector vitally reliant on public funding. The balance of power had fundamentally shifted. This lead Salter and Tapper to observe: After decades of incremental progress, the state has acquired powers which mark a qualitative shift in its relationship with the institutions of higher education. It is now in the position to orchestrate change on a scale and in a manner that knows no precedent (1994, p. 1). New Labour, same neoliberalism? Many hoped the landslide victory of the Labour Party headed by Tony Blair in the 1997 would herald a sea-change in higher education policy (Brown, 2003). After all, Blair had famously designated “education, education, education” Party’s priorities in the election campaign (Finlayson, 2003). The emphasis on learning and soft skills went well with New Labour’s focus on moving away from reliance on industry – which had been devastated equally through technological obsolescence and the Conservative policy of outsourcing labour to China and other Asian markets – by creating an economy based on knowledge, populated by highly flexible, mobile individuals. New Labour’s project of a ‘knowledge-based’ economy was never a purely economic one (Hay, 1999; Finlayson, 2003; Crouch, 2004). On the one hand, of course, it was adapting to realities of a post-Fordist, largely globalized world of intersecting trade routes, one where Britain no longer had necessarily preferential access to the goods produced in former colonies. Focusing on knowledge and knowledge industries, in this sense, was also a way to retain a fraction of its competitive advantage in global markets: Britain no longer had mines or factories, but it certainly had universities. On the other, knowledge (or information) was also a way of governing the polity, both in terms of knowing its population, and in terms of allowing it to have more direct access to policy-making. This political vision was one of constant, uninterrupted communication: the citizens were to inform the Government about their preferences; the Government was to inform them about its 106 intentions, not necessarily on the scale of fiscal or foreign policy – in fact, those decisions were usually kept away from public scrutiny, as in the case of the Iraq War – but certainly on the level of participation. As Finlayson notes, Constitutional reform has been seen as the beginning of an unstoppable movement towards new forms of pluralism, decentralization and civil engagement that will break conservative hegemony and allow new forms of radical politics to emerge. Directly elected mayors for London, and some other large cities, may increase awareness of the relevance of municipal action. Citizenship classes in schools surely suggest an interest in revitalizing the democratic tendencies of our society, while devolution of Westminster power forms a key plank in what the Blairites sometimes call ‘re-connecting’ with the people (2003, p. 104). The idea, therefore, was to ‘fix’ the crisis of representative democracy by pluralizing the arenas for public discussion and debate. New Labour, in this sense, can be seen as the last stage of belief in a truly democratic, Habermasian public sphere, with a vibrant civil society (Giddens, 1998; Blair, 1998). Information technologies, from the promise of the World Wide Web to e-governance, were designed to circumvent the problems of parliamentary, party politics. Participation in the public sphere obviously required a population capable not only of using new technologies, but also navigating this increasingly complex world. This is why education was deemed to be of utmost importance: it was the solution to both Britain’s position in the world, and political dilemmas at home. Yet, Labour did not encounter a blank policy landscape. The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, chaired by Lord Dearing, was commissioned in 1996 in order to provide a major review of the state and future direction of higher education in the UK, the first such report after Robbins. Importantly, the committee had been set up by both sides of the bench, in order to remove the issue of higher education funding from the 1997 election campaign. The reasons were clear. Student numbers had expanded significantly: from 15% in 1988 to 35% in 1998 (McGettigan, 2013, p. 17). However, expansion was mostly done ‘on the cheap’; that is, by reducing the unit (per student) cost, mostly through enrolments in ‘new’ universities, that is, former polytechnics (Clark, Conlon and Galindo-Rueda, 107 2005). Furthermore, the growth in total enrolment did not necessarily mean a significant change in the social composition of students. The proportion of those from working-class backgrounds remained stable, or actually fell (Chitty, 2014, p. 205). The question the new government faced, therefore, was how to continue expanding higher education on a shrinking public budget. The fact that widening participation was by then almost unequivocally accepted as a desirable policy orientation should not detract from the fact that neither of the parties had committed to increasing public expenditure. From this point of view, the Teaching and Higher Education Act of 1998 comes as less of a surprise. The Act introduced tuition fees (initially for all students, though the Scottish Parliament abolished them for Scottish universities soon after devolution), abolished maintenance grants, and revised the provision of student loans. The response from teachers’ and student unions was predictably damning, with admissions services reporting an almost immediate drop in enrolments, most among part-time, mature, and minority students (Chitty 2014, p.206). The full extent of the shift to market mechanisms, however, would only be revealed in the much-awaited 2003 White Paper, The Future of Higher Education. The White Paper announced that universities would be allowed to charge ‘top-up’ fees of up to £3000 per year for the most popular courses, with a clear intention of removing this cap further down the line. Reactions to this to a great degree controversial idea are indicative of the configuration in the higher education landscape that had begun to emerge. After 150 Labour MPs signed a motion against the Higher Education Bill that proposed ‘top-up’ fees, Vice-Chancellors of five UK’s most prestigious universities (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, UCL and Imperial) wrote a letter to The Times urging Tony Blair to ‘no[t] retreat’ over fees, claiming that fees were necessary to maintain the quality of UK higher education (Halpin, 2003). They also threatened to resort to recruiting more ‘overseas’ students should they be banned from charging ‘top-up’ fees in order to make up for the anticipated shortfall in income (Chitty, 2014, pp. 210–1). The ‘professionalization’ of university management had begun in the late 1990s, but they were still overwhelmingly recruited from academic ranks, placing the UK in the category Burton Clark dubbed ‘collegial governance’. During the course of the 2000s, however, vice-chancellors and heads of schools and departments 108 increasingly came from outside of the university sector (Deem, Hillyard and Reed, 2007). While many were (former) academics, their experience usually included the private sector, industry, or politics. The position of university managers, therefore, was ambiguous. On the one hand, they were placed at the helm of the university, in charge of its sustainability (including financial) and wellbeing, and thus also the first line of ‘defence’ against possible interference from ‘outside’. On the other, they were also – especially by academics – increasingly seen as conduits or enablers of exactly these forces. This institutionalised an important rupture: the welfare of the university was no longer seen exclusively (nor, it could be argued, primarily) in terms of the wellbeing of its students and staff. Rather, it became synonymous with the financial sustainability of the institution. This enabled the managers to distinguish the two and, in situations of perceived ‘threat’, sacrifice former to the latter, as in the case of arguing for tuition fees (a clear disadvantage for students) and justifying it as a matter of quality of teaching delivered by the institution. After the Higher Education Bill was passed in 2004 the new configuration of the higher education landscape became clear. On one side were the government and its policy of ‘market welfarism’, which suited the leadership of elite universities, who expected they would not encounter problems attracting students even at an increased fee. On the other were unions, disaffected Labour MPs, and all those feeling ‘shortchanged’ by the new policy direction. In 2005, two hitherto largest trade unions for university staff (AUT and NTFHE) merged, creating University and College Union (UCU). In part, this was driven by the growing realization of the problem of casualization. While ‘tenure’, in the strict sense of the word, had ceased to exist in the UK with the 1988 Education Reform Act, the second half of 2000s was marked by an expansion of numbers of casually employed and sessional teachers11. 11 As UCU reports (2013, 2015, 2016) have argued (and my own research confirms), it is very difficult to provide exact figures, as data-keeping is problematic and beset by controversies, in part because UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency only began gathering data on the type of contract in the past two years (most of which is still obscured by the ‘atypical contract’ category), and in part because universities have seemingly systematically under-reported the reliance on casual labour. Yet, as UCU (2018) clearly states, at least 25% of undergraduate teaching at universities is currently performed by casually employed (hourly- or termly-paid) academics. The Russell Group universities usually have a higher reliance on casual labour than ‘post-1992’ institutions. 109 The end of the reign of New Labour saw a university sector primed for full marketization. Financing and the question of value-for-money figured prominently in the 2010 General Election. Liberal Democrats, in particular, campaigned for the student vote on the claim they would not remove the cap on tuition fees, something both Labour and Conservatives were expected to do. While clearly successful as an electoral strategy, the promise turned out to be little more than that: after entering the Coalition government with Conservatives, they quickly went back on it. REF and TEF Like Labour in 1997, the new Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition did not inherit a blank slate. Another review, commissioned before the elections but set to deliver in its aftermath, was to provide a solution for the funding of higher education in the wake of the economic crisis. This is something that the Browne Review (Browne, 2010), report of the committee chaired by Baron Browne of Madingley, former chief of BP, certainly took into account. The review was published in October 2010, recommending a series of changes, most important being the removal of caps on tuition fees and the replacement of student grants with student loans. When David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, announced the government’s policy early in November of the same year, Browne’s recommendations were not followed in full. Importantly, Willetts’ announcement diverged on the issue of fee caps – not removing them altogether but raising them to £9000. The purpose of this much-debated and criticized move was to allow universities to set prices in accordance with what they perceived was the real value of courses they offered, with the expectation this would lead to a ‘natural’ hierarchical distribution in which the most expensive courses at the most prestigious institutions would set fees at the top of the scale, with less prestigious ones leveraging their presumably smaller appeal with lower fees. 110 This is how the idea of university autonomy was directly linked to the idea of the market: universities were ‘free’ – but to set prices within a narrowly defined range of market behaviours. Another move that cemented the unpopularity of the proposal was the abolishment of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA). Introduced in the 1960s, EMA provided a means-tested support to young people from poorer backgrounds to continue into higher education. Student loans, which also offered a ‘top-up’ living allowance, were meant to replace this: however, it was obvious that higher education financing had been set on a trajectory of no return. The biggest student protest in Britain to date broke out shortly after. On 10th November 2010, the student march set off from the Parliament but, changing course, occupied the headquarters of the Conservative Party in Millbank. The protesters made clear their opposition not only to tuition fees, but to the austerity agenda on the whole. Not only did students show a remarkable degree of radicality, but the responses to it were remarkable as well, for a number of reasons. The Government deployed riot police, which applied the strategy known as ‘kettling’ to prevent the protests from spreading in the streets of London, as well as tear gas and batons, a degree of force highly uncommon in student demonstrations in the UK (Brock and Carrigan, 2015). The polarization on the Left became visible when both the general secretary of the UCU (University and College Union) and president of the NUS (National Union of Students) condemned the protests, denouncing the violence of a ‘handful of protesters’, opting to focus instead on the quiet, ‘backdoor’ route: lobbying Liberal Democrat MPs in the period leading up to the vote on fees (Myers, 2018). Last, but not least, cleavages were showing in the Coalition, with even some Conservative MPs announcing their intention to vote against fees. While it would probably be incorrect to frame it as his ‘brainchild’, the policy nevertheless should be understood in relation to David Willetts’ views on social justice. Educated at Nuffield College, Oxford, Willetts rose through the ranks of the Conservative Party thanks in part to the recognition of his intellectual potential, reportedly earning him the nickname ‘Two Brains’. His career reflected his interest in politics as theory rather than just practice: after working for Margaret Thatcher in the Downing Street Policy Unit, he went on to establish and serve as the director 111 of studies at the Centre for Policy Studies, a liberal-conservative think tank. Throughout this period, he continued to publish treatises and papers on different aspects of social and economic policy, seeking to furnish – or shape – Conservative ideology, which had been struggling to rediscover its raison d’être for some time (e.g. Willetts, 1992). The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future – and why they should give it back (Willets, 2010) presented his argument that higher education was effectively subsidizing the middle class. The book uses statistics to show that students enrolling into higher education and accessing student loans were more likely to come from affluent parts of the middle class. This meant that, as long as higher education was funded from public money, benefits disproportionally accrued to those who were already able to afford it – according to Willetts, children of the 1960s and 1970s ‘baby boomer’ generation. From this perspective, tuition fees were a ‘levelling’ instrument designed to create a fairer set of opportunities, by setting a relatively high repayment threshold and additional grants available to the most underprivileged. Rather than ‘purely’ neoliberal, then, these reforms presented a peculiar mix of market fundamentalism and social justice. This places Coalition policies on a political continuum with, rather than a decisive departure from, New Labour. The idea of the market as ‘the great leveller’ extended to institutions. Willetts identified the oligopoly of Oxbridge and similar institutions – or, rather, the prestige economy – as a factor in maintaining and reproducing social inequalities through higher education. In line with his views on cartels as one of the main obstacles to markets’ efficient functioning (Willetts, 1992, p. 79 et passim), he sought to break up the perceived dominance of the Russell Group. The proposed solution was to open the system to ‘alternative’ providers, later called ‘challenger’ institutions (Willetts, 2017), and to reframe research assessment in a way that would stimulate competition both within and between institutions. The effects of the first have so far been somewhat limited, clashing both with deeply-seated class stratification in Britain, and with the Government’s own restrictive immigration rules. The second became known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF). 112 REF drew on research assessment overhaul plan that HEFCE had announced in 2007, as well as on the report of the committee chaired by Lord Sainsbury, The Race to the Top: A Review of Government’s Science and Innovation Policies (Sainsbury, 2007), commissioned by Gordon Brown during his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The report emphasized the need for the UK to boost science and innovation in order to compete against “low-wage, emerging economies, such as India and China” (Sainsbury, 2007, i), arguing particular attention should be paid to efficient transfer of research into publicly demonstrable outcomes, such as start- ups and economic growth. Its position was that academic research in the UK was remaining isolated from the rest of the society, preventing its transformation into a dynamic, competitive, knowledge-based economy. While, in itself, the argument was not new – the ‘deficit’ model related to public understanding of science had been present at least since the Bodmer Report in 1985 (Rayner, 2012) – this framing provided a clear pathway for tying measurable (or demonstrable) societal effects of research to institutional funding. It resulted in one of, to this day, most contentious criteria in research evaluation: impact. The funding councils defined impact as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia” (HEFCE et al., 2011), specifying there needed to be a “clear link between the research and the engagement or involvement activity” that goes “beyond ‘business as usual’ engagement or involvement” (HEFCE et al., 2012). This added a new and important layer to processes of evaluation. Until that point, the criteria used in evaluating research were mostly congruous with (or copied from) those applied by academics: papers published in prestigious (‘high- impact’) journals, invitations to speak at important disciplinary gatherings, etc. While the mechanism and principles of accounting and rewards were set up by the government, they, to a great degree, mimicked the dynamics of peer review ‘autochthonous’ to the academic community. With the inclusion of impact in the REF, however, not just allocation – deciding how research should be rewarded – but also the mechanisms of valuation – that is, deciding how specific outputs should be qualified – shifted further away from universities, and, in turn, from academics. 113 Unsurprisingly, the opposition – which Willetts once euphemistically described as “a lively discussion” – in the academic community to the idea that societal value of research can be measured was so strong that the announcement of REF had to be postponed until 2011. In many cases, it never stopped, as the process of reframing assessment criteria in relation to the aforementioned ‘lively discussion’ continues. In 2015, The Metric Tide, an independent review of the effects of metrics on research, was published (Wilsdon et al, 2015). While the report was critical of the drive to quantify research, emphasising the importance of peer review and other ‘non-quantitative’ methods of assessment, its overall message leaned more towards riding on, rather than drowning under, the ‘metric tide’. Another independent review, this time by a committee chaired by Lord Nicholas Stern, followed (Stern, 2016). While Stern recognised some of the ‘pathologies’ of REF – including the cost of assessment and tendency towards ‘gaming’, that is, adapting employment practices so as to attract staff with highest scores approaching the REF cycle – the report recommended maintaining the combination of qualitative and quantitative indicators of research output, with a view of shifting completely or predominantly towards the latter once measurement techniques are ‘perfected’ (ibid.). For universities, REF had obvious relevance not only because it was tied to research funding, but also because it was tied to staff progression and dynamics of employment. While the actual prevalence of ‘gaming’ strategies is difficult to establish, the purpose of the REF was also to distinguish between those who did ‘excellent’ research from those who did not, channeling the latter into teaching – or, as the unspoken assumption went, outside higher education as a sector. REF, in this sense, acts as a sorting mechanism designed to ‘weed out’ weak institutions: it establishes value on the basis of research output, and then supports investment in high performing institutions, while letting others merge or die out. A similar mechanism is at the core Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), announced in the 2016 White Paper, Success as a Knowledge Economy (DBIS, 2016). TEF ranks institutions according to three categories: Gold, Silver, and Bronze. While the first round, conducted in 2017, was voluntary, the Government made it clear they were hoping to move towards mandatory participation, at least for institutions in England. Restricting the possibility of charging higher tuition 114 fees to institutions ranked as Gold, TEF results should operate as a major ‘price signal’. Whereas on the one hand it can be seen as a continuation of the policy of introducing ‘diversity’ by removing tuition fee caps, on the other, it clearly represents a much heavier state involvement in the running of universities. Despite its unpopularity among students and trade unions, the concept of ‘variable’ fees still allowed universities to set them. Making fees dependent on TEF performance, on the other hand, reintroduces price control, but places it in the hands of the government – or, more precisely, its interpretation of student satisfaction scores. Of course, TEF was not the first instrument for the measurement of teaching quality at higher education institutions in the UK: many institutions were conducting evaluations for much longer than that, and the National Student Survey (NSS) was introduced in 2005. Commissioned by the Department for Education and the HEFCE and carried out by Ipsos MORI, NSS was meant to challenge the assumption that universities highly ranked in league tables had the highest quality of teaching. Not entirely surprisingly, student unions at Oxford, Cambridge, and a few other highly ranked Russell Group universities initially ignored it, and the National Union of Students (NUS) remained divided. Yet, despite the ‘naming and shaming’ element, and despite the fact it was meant to influence demand by signaling to the students where they were most likely to experience high-quality teaching, the NSS was never explicitly tied to tuition fees. The fact it was included as a metric in TEF, then, led student unions to call for its renewed boycott. While most academics saw TEF as yet another form of governmental interference in their work, university managers and PR departments were not ashamed of boasting about their institutions’ TEF scores. What we can conclude, then, is that – possibly contrary to what would be expected – there was more continuity between New Labour and Coalition approaches to higher education than between Coalition and the Conservative Government that came into power in 2015. The start of 2016 saw the restructuring of the sector towards heavier-handed regulation, which, although officially ‘in the name of the market’, entailed a renewed dosage of government intervention. Higher education and research bodies were restructured and recentralized: it was announced that, from 2018, the research councils will be united into UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and that HEFCE would morph into the Office for Students (OfS). 115 Before any of that, however, one thing the Conservative government did inherit from the Coalition took place: the Brexit referendum. Brexit: experts against themselves? The referendum on United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union took place on 23 June 2016. The referendum itself was a consequence of a pre-2015 election promise David Cameron made in order to boost the appeal of Conservative Party for presumably anti-immigration voters – essentially those who supported UKIP and/or had previously supported the BNP, but also Labour voters disaffected by the effects of the continuation of austerity policies under Blair and Brown. A strong emphasis in the campaign went towards linking the issues of European Union membership with immigration, on the one hand, and with unemployment and cuts to public services, on the other. One example was the Leave campaign poster that (falsely) claimed Albania and Turkey were joining the European Union, clearly hinting at the presumed droves of cheap labour coming to British shores. The other was the bus sign claiming that three million pounds UK was paying to the European Union would be used to fund the NHS which, at that point, was under a long period of austerity-driven cuts. The Remain campaign, by contrast, focused on demonstrating the value of the European Union through ‘hard facts’ and data, and, towards the end of the campaign, on the idea of a shared European identity with foundations in the WWII. Whatever else can be said about this campaign strategy, it clearly betrayed those in charge of the campaign assumed they were primarily addressing educated voters – that is, those who could be persuaded by appeal to facts and data. This, in part, is what provided the overture for Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education between 2010 and 2014, to notoriously pronounce that “people of this country have had enough of experts”. Whereas Gove managed to lump together the educated, cosmopolitan, and relatively well-off, this was never reflected in the campaign: while the Leave vote provided coexistence – if not synergy – of nationalist Conservative and racist UKIP sentiments, Remain could not muster together the pro-European elements of Labour, Conservatives, and Liberal Democrats. 116 This should not necessarily be seen as a consequence of ideological incongruity or personal animosities: Liberal Democrats’ decision to join the Coalition in 2010 had alienated even the ideologically proximate parts of Labour; their experience in the Coalition Government, as the same time, made them vary of any form of collaboration with the Conservatives. Simultaneously, Labour was struggling for a clear political direction, riveted by internal conflicts: Jeremy Corbyn had been elected as leader in September 2015, but was already facing strong opposition within his own party. While it was clearly going to be a close call, opinion polls on the eve of the referendum suggested a slight majority would vote to remain. Murder of the Labour (and pro-European) MP Jo Cox by a white supremacist was expected to tip the scales decisively in that direction. This chimed with what most pundits, as well as leaders of political parties, believed: that the chances of Britain actually leaving the European Union were very small. It must have been a surprise when, the morning after the referendum, Nigel Farage’s smiling face greeted them from the BBC website: the early vote count suggested 51% voted in favour of leaving the European Union. Much has been written about the referendum, the social dynamics that precipitated the outcome, and much is still being written about its consequences (e.g. Outhwaite, ed., 2017; Balibar et al, 2016). What is relevant here, however, is that the period leading up to the Brexit referendum, as well as its immediate aftermath, saw an exceptional engagement in the debate from the side of universities (Finn, 2018). It wasn’t just the public intellectuals, that is, the usual pundits who weighed in on the referendum; vice chancellors and other members of senior management, normally reluctant to step into the limelight apart from promoting their institution, also got involved. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, many wrote angry or highly critical pieces that, almost unanimously, labelled Brexit as an outright disaster for the higher education sector. This should hardly come as a surprise. For most intents and purposes, the UK had a highly favourable position in the European higher education and research area. Major research universities – predominantly coterminous with the Russell Group – drew substantial funds from European Commission. These funds included research grants made through its Framework programmes (5, 6 and 7), those distributed via the European Research Council (ERC), as well as structural funds, 117 for instance those that supported regional development, where universities were able to partner with local authorities. The UK was a net benefactor of EU funding, both in absolute terms and proportionately (Courtois, ed., 2018). The other relatively important value for UK universities came from students from EU countries. They weren’t straightforwardly a source of income: since European Court of Justice ruled that EU students could access higher education in the UK on same terms as British nationals, EU students not only paid the same fees, but could also access the grants and loans (James, 2016). Combined prestige of UK higher education institutions and global spread of English as lingua franca, however, meant that, on the whole, UK was a ‘receiving’ rather than a ‘sending’ country. Many of these students were financed or co-financed through schemes such as Erasmus. Almost equally importantly, services catering to international students (including student housing) provided an important boost to local economies, especially in parts of the country that had previously been severely hit by cuts to industry and public services (Finn, 2018). At the time of writing it is still early to draw conclusions about the effects of Brexit on the economy of UK higher education in research, especially given the lack of clarity concerning its participation in research programmes beyond Horizon 2020. However, even a cursory overview suggests the sector is set to suffer net losses. Collectively, UK institutions are the second biggest recipient of Horizon 2020 research funding (Courtois, ed. 2018, p. 13), preceded only by Germany. The country also has the highest number of principal investigators on European Research Council (ERC) and Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions (ibid.), confirming its reputation as a preferred destination for research leaders. Doubt, experience of xenophobia, and considerations of leaving were widely reported among UK-based EU research staff in the aftermath of the referendum. Direct concerns related to staff and culture on campus are, of course, important. However, in the context of this study, there are political and economic implications of Brexit that are at least equally, if not more relevant. One concerns the possibility of losing access to European Union funds for higher education and research. While a proportion of this funding is channeled through research councils of England and devolved nations, the majority goes directly to 118 institutions and/or individuals, through a series of competitive grant programmes (for research) as well as through tuition fees, Erasmus schemes, and intra-EU portability of student grants and loans (for teaching). In practice, the EU represents an important source of independence from the state. Of course, EU funding is not without its own strings, formal as well as informal. Reporting procedures, for example, are notoriously cumbersome, and staff on research grants often have little job security or are forced to ‘buy out’ their own teaching time, shifting precarious contracts further down the line. Yet, on the whole, access to EU funds represents both a source of non-state income, and a source of prestige that can be used as a political lever. The second implication relates to the overall projections for the British economy. Unsurprisingly, compared with the possibility of food or medicine shortages, the needs of higher education and research rarely make front pages. However, it seems reasonable to assume that UK higher education and research will suffer the economic effects of Brexit at least equally as other sectors of the economy. This, obviously, means that universities will be further pressed to cut spending or engage in increasingly competitive forms of demonstrating ‘value for money’ in order to obtain public funds. The combination of two trends suggests that ever-growing proximity between universities and the state may, eventually, lead to a collision. Even a marginal shift in the availability of EU funding for British universities is likely to produce significant challenges for the maintenance of their day-to-day operations, not to mention forms of expansion – especially infrastructural investment – many have undertaken in the past decade. Even if the UK government were to honour its promise to cover the ‘shortfall’, this will likely involve even tighter restrictions and conditionalities on access. Much like initial strategies of Thatcher and Major administrations, this will probably be with the overall aim of reducing expenditure, and, in the long run, further ‘disciplining’ universities. Conclusions Higher education and research policies at the end of the 20th and beginning of 21st century in the UK, as much as their critique, need to be understood in relation to 119 the history of universities’ relationship with the state and ‘the society’ in a more general sense. The growth of British Empire spurred the expansion of universities beyond the mediaeval institutions of Oxford and Cambridge and the (somewhat younger) institutions of Scottish Enlightenment. Until after World War II, however, universities were still relatively ‘few and far between’; a very small fraction of total population went on to study at them, and those who did came almost exclusively from the wealthy and privileged strata comprising landed gentry and the growing mercantile and industrial middle classes. Given that top-level civil servants were similarly recruited from these classes, there was a ‘natural’ affinity between those who taught and led universities, and those who were leading the country. While Oxford and Cambridge were traditionally wary of the extension of state funding, fearing this would necessarily mean the extension of its influence, on the whole the period went relatively smoothly. After all, university funding still constituted a minuscule portion of state budget – so minuscule it was funded directly by the Treasury, rather than by a specific Department – and, given that the parents of most entrants could well afford to pay tuition, the issue hardly arose. This changed substantially in the aftermath of WWII. With the universalization of secondary education, the number of potential entrants expanded overnight. The report of the Robbins Committee (1963), convened to advise on how to fund higher education in these circumstances, suggested opening it to new entrants. To some degree, this was a logical extension of the universalization of access to secondary education; more than that, however, it reflected the belief that higher education was becoming increasingly relevant for the country as a whole. It tied education to economic outcomes, thus connecting ‘human’ with economic capital. This does not mean universities were naturally ‘given’ to this purpose. In order to provide technical and practical education, the Labour government of 1965 introduced polytechnics. In some ways, this was a form of expansion, but it was also an essentially conservative social policy that recognized that each part of the sector had something to contribute, but on different terms. Universities and polytechnics thus continued carrying different class and social significance. Differently put, while higher education as a whole was being reframed, universities’ position in society altered only fractionally. The biggest change was at the level of perception: rather than a separate set of institutions only cursorily 120 connected to the rest of the governing apparatus of the state, universities became part of a sector. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the fortunes of universities continued to be tied to the fortunes of the economy – with growth came expansion, with contraction came reduction. Universities were still not required to take a proactive role in economic development: it was sufficient they did not obstruct it too much. Occasional bouts of campus radicalism notwithstanding, universities in the UK were well integrated into the industrial and political landscape of the time, with frictions significantly smaller than those that were, at similar times, rippling through campuses in the West and East of Europe, US, and parts of Central America. Similarly, social critique fitted relatively seamlessly into institutions of higher education; the next chapter will deal with some of the reasons for, and implications of, this peculiarity. In sum, until the 1980s, universities were a rather marginal concern for the government. Thatcher’s reviled NPM was not in itself a particularly systematic ‘attack’ on universities; it was an integral part of the assumption that universities were part of the public sector, which needed to be reduced on the whole. The abolition of tenure with the 1988 Education Reform Act should be seen in the same light; while academics unsurprisingly saw it as a direct attack on their profession, it was a strategy oriented primarily towards cutting costs. What greatly helped, however, was not just the deterioration of bargaining power through changes Thatcher had introduced to weaken politically and infrastructurally influential unions (Towers, 1989); it was also the fact that most academics did not necessarily see themselves primarily as workers. To some degree, this was a simple empirical statement – working class academics were a minority – but it also reflected the broader dynamics of the academic profession, where allegiances tended to reside within the discipline or the institution, rather than the notion of academic ‘work’ as a whole (Becher and Trowler, 2001; Halsey, 1992). Despite its critics, then, New Public Management was not that much a policy that ‘attacked’ universities as one that reversed the hitherto held principle of treating them as an exception to the governance of the public sector. This principle – often miscoded as Haldane’s, or associated with Humboldtian values of university autonomy and academic freedom – was, in itself, a historically and geographically 121 specific answer to the same question: how should universities help the state run in the most efficient manner? In nascent nations of 19th century Europe, the answer was: by training its henchmen, solidifying the national spirit, and providing independent technical knowledge. For all these reasons, it was not only beneficial but necessary to keep them at an arm’s length from the administrative apparatus of the state. In this sense, Weber’s admonishment to new students to stick to value- neutrality (Weber, 1958 [1918]; see also Shils, ed., 1974), rather than a heroic exercise of epistemic and political self-control (to fans), or a self-aggrandizing illusion of objectivity (to critics), was a statement of the obvious: neither stood to gain much from tighter connections between universities and the state. In the UK, where ‘ancient’ universities predated the formation of the nation-state, the proverbial arm was longer. The abolishment of the difference between universities and polytechnics in 1992, then, was not an ‘elevating’ as much as a levelling act: it simply meant that onwards all higher education institutions were to be treated equally – as sources of (possibly unnecessary) expenditure that had to prove their contribution to economic prosperity. New Labour took on this assumption. Unfortunately for academics, New Labour also took on the belief that education had a role in reorienting UK decisively towards a new growth strategy, reflected in the concept of ‘knowledge economy’. While Thatcher’s Conservative government, paradoxically, wanted universities to be as little trouble as imaginable (and sought to achieve this by minimizing expenditure), Blair’s and Brown’s Labour wanted them to be as active, visible, and productive as possible – but ideally at a fraction of the cost. The conjunction of maximum impact with minimum expenditure, in other words, provided the blueprint for governing knowledge production. This is how neoliberalism, regardless of initially divergent economic ideologies of Labour and Conservative governments, came to be seen as policy orthodoxy. The rest of the story is well- known. In the aftermath of the financial and crisis of the Eurozone, the Brexit vote, and crescendoing anti-immigrant sentiment, universities found themselves amidst multiple and intersecting political currents. How they will navigate them remains to be seen. The following chapter turns to interventions that have engaged with these developments to see how they framed different elements of this process. 122 123 Chapter 4: Interventions Introduction This chapter analyses intellectual interventions that form the corpus of contemporary critique of neoliberalism in UK higher education and research. As argued in Chapter 2, in the second half of the 20th century, critique that addressed perceived shortcomings and failings of universities of the sort reflected in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (Woolf, 1992 [1938]) gave way to a more systematic engagement with policies aimed at governing them. This had to do, first, with massification of higher education – with universalization of access to secondary schooling and especially following the report of the Robbins Committee in 1963, universities stopped being unproblematically seen as exclusive reservoirs for the wealthy and the privileged (Halsey, 1992). Some of these changes were reflected in the genre of the ‘campus novel’: from Mary McCarthy’s Groves of the Academe (1952) and Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954), to David Lodge’s trilogy Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988) (cf. Showalter, 2005). Not least importantly, student protests in different corners of the globe in the 1960s drew attention more prominently to both campus politics and the relationship between universities and their social and political context (e.g. Vinen, 2018). This should not suggest universities suddenly became central or even particularly prominent locus of public attention. The growing appetite for critical commentary on different matters, including those pertaining to higher education, should also be seen as an effect of the broader transformation of the sphere of cultural production. Newsrooms and editorial boards were staffed with recent university graduates, developing not only networks of shared cultural affinity but also, importantly, conduits of information between academia and the media (Halsey, 1992). This included dedicated higher education supplement of The Times, Times Higher Education, inaugurated in 1971. Challenging somewhat the tradition of mistrust towards intellectuals in Britain (Collini, 2006), it was also an effect of the growing importance and institutionalization of a particular way of performing critique, 124 associated with cultural Marxism12 and, in particular, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham. The chapter begins with a summary of implications of this particular mode of Marxist analysis for the critique of transformations of higher education and research that developed at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. Tracing its history from cultural Marxism and the critique of ‘audit culture’ developed in anthropology to contemporary ‘culture wars’ surrounding the ‘Leaver/Remainer’ dichotomy in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the chapter discusses the main ontological tenets of these interventions, focusing on arguments and concepts in notable examples. Identifying a set of common assumptions and modes of justification provides a backdrop for discussing how these assumptions relate to intellectuals’ self-narratives in Chapter 5. Early critics: from cultural Marxism to audit culture The roots of the critique of neoliberalism in UK higher education can be traced to a strand of critical writing that blossomed at the end of the 1960s and reached its apex in the 1980s and 90s. Its philosophical origins were Marxist, but it incorporated the semiotic and cultural turns of French post-structuralism. For this reason, it is often classified as a form of ‘cultural Marxism’ (Dworkin, 1997), or, geographically more specifically, as the ‘British School of Cultural Studies’. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham can be considered its institutional ‘home’, though, obviously, both its representatives and its influence travelled more widely. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, established by Richard Hoggart, was officially inaugurated in 1964. The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1958) had sold so well that Hoggart managed to convince Allen Lane, 12 In the past decades, ‘Cultural Marxism’ has (particularly in the US, but increasingly in the UK as well) been deployed by right-wing commentators as a blanket term for post-structuralism, post- modernism, and many other forms of theorizing concerned with politics of representation, in order to claim that this type of thinking is responsible, or connected to, a number of progressive causes these commentators find problematic (emancipation of women, LGBTQ rights, fight against sexism, racism and homophobia, and so on). The use of ‘cultural ‘Marxism’ in this thesis has nothing in common with this sort of diagnostic, and is primarily analytical in the sense of reflecting the focus on the role of elements associated with ‘culture’ in reproduction of social, i.e. class, inequalities that are the object of the ‘earlier’ generation of Marxist theory. 125 its Penguin Press publisher, to fund a centre dedicated exclusively to research into different elements of lay or ‘popular’ culture (Webster, 2004). Cultural studies never represented a unified field: initially dominated by literary studies, in part due to the influence of Hoggart and Raymond Williams, it substantially overlapped with the nascent field of media studies, as well as anthropology and sociology (Hall, 1992) – the latter, particularly, proving a source of tension or friction at times (Rojek and Turner, 2000). Even so, it left an indelible mark on the idea of how to go about studying the social. Possibly most of all, Stuart Hall, who took over the directorship of CCCS from Hoggart in 1969, epitomized the new kind of public intellectual, who openly fused theoretical work and praxis (Collini, 2006; Dworkin, 1997; Rojek and Turner, 2000). To fully grasp the influence of this type of analysis on critique of higher education in the UK, it is necessary to understand the ambiguous nature of education in traditional, ‘orthodox’ Marxism. Following Marx’s German Ideology (1977 [1932]) all ideas – including those transmitted through institutions of higher education – are expressions of material conditions of their production. This is what lends the Marxist notion of ideology its negative connotation: institutions for the transmission of ideas are necessarily meant to convey the ideas of the ruling class (see particularly discussion in Thompson, 1990, pp. 33–40). Education institutions can be expected to perform the function of ‘sorting’ people according to their class of origin: working class children will be ‘funnelled’ out of schools and into (ideally) productive labour at the earliest possible age, those with some social and cultural capital into white-collar professions, often administrative or lower managerial, and those with greatest amounts of both social and economic capital will attend schools that will prepare them to govern and lead. Education institutions, in this sense – from schools to universities – cannot help but be instruments for reproduction of the ruling order: their narratives, forms of evaluation, and awards they bring, will all have been designed with the singular goal of contributing to this type of social reproduction. However, both from the perspective of Lenin’s ‘vanguardist party’, as well as Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectuals’, consciousness-raising is a necessary step in overcoming capitalist domination. Given that a shift of consciousness is primarily a cognitive operation, education becomes the primary avenue through which the 126 working class can become aware of exploitation it is subject to. In Marxist political ontology, this clearly poses a problem: if ideas are expressions of material conditions of their production, education institutions are likely to reflect the classed nature of the society that supports them. How does one commit to revolutionary praxis from an institution that is ‘always already’ implicated in the ruling order? This tension, arguably, motivated Bourdieu’s initial theoretical engagement with institutions of knowledge production (Bourdieu, 1984, Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), as well as his later work on the production of ideology (see especially Bourdieu & Boltanski, 2008 [1976]; also Susen, 2014c, 2016a). On a grander scale, the tension was key to the post-war Ideologiekritik of the Frankfurt School (particularly Marcuse’s, see e.g. Kellner et al. eds., 2009; Walzer, 2002). In the British context, however, it took a somewhat different route. The difficulty of maintaining a position simultaneously within and against the existing order was a prominent theme in one of the earliest expressions of the type of critique analysed here: E.P. Thompson’s Warwick University, Ltd. (Thompson, ed., 2014 [1970]). Initially appearing in New Society as “The Business University”, the book concerns the conflict between students and administration at the University of Warwick that took place in 1970. Warwick University, established in 1965 on the outskirts of Coventry – a city that had been bombed to the ground in World War II – belonged to the group of new ‘plateglass’ universities, specifically boosted by the expansion following the Robbins Report (Beloff, 1968). Students and staff at these universities were often more politically progressive than their counterparts in older universities; Warwick was particularly notable for student activism, including its student union. Despite this, the university administration was slow in providing the union with space they could use on a permanent basis. In February 1970, in protest of prolonged refusal of the management to provide such space, students broke into and occupied a set of administrative offices on campus. In and of itself, this wasn’t such an extraordinary event: while Britain never saw student protests on the scale of France, Czechoslovakia, or the US, the ‘spirit of 1968’ did reach its shores, and student occupations were not unheard of (Vinen, 2018). What the students discovered, however, made national news: files kept separately from other 127 documentation, testifying to systemic police surveillance of students and staff, in order to keep tabs on potential ‘political radicalism’ and protect the interests of industrial capital invested into the expansion of material infrastructure – that is, new buildings – at the university. Even by the standards of Cold War paranoia, especially following the discovery of the ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring, this was extraordinary. What did not help ‘silencing the matter’ was that the university tried to prevent students who discovered the files from ‘leaking’ them to the press. In response, E.P. Thompson personally copied some of the documents and distributed them to his colleagues in order to alert academic staff. The discussion quickly turned the question of the interests of capital in higher education, and, in particular, the involvement of industrialists in running the University of Warwick – what, some decades later, will be referred to as the ‘academic-military-industrial complex’. After rounds of deliberation, the matter was settled, but not before it reached national media in March. Later that year, Thompson and student activists gathered the documents, and, together with an extended commentary from Thompson, published it as Warwick University, Ltd. with Penguin Press. The title as well as the overall tone of the volume clearly identify the main problem as the involvement of industry, or the interests of capital, in matters of higher education: …This analysis points towards a general situation, to the operative modes of power and of money in Britain in 1970s, and the relationship of our institutions of higher education to industrial capitalism (…) Just as the great landed aristocracy of the 18th century exerted their power by manifold exercise of interest, influence and purchase, so the new lords seem to infiltrate the command-posts of our society, including our educational institutions (Thompson, 2014 [1970], pp. 16–17) Owing, in part, to the serendipitous discovery of incriminating documents, the “matter at Warwick” showed that industrial capital, universities, and the state were deeply intertwined. It also showed the near-impossibility of disentangling them efficiently: 128 In the conflict it became apparent that what was wrong was not a close relationship with ‘industry’ but a particular kind of subordinate relationship with industrial capitalism – which, moreover, exerts its influence not only directly in the councils of the University but also within the educational organs of the State…In this sense the case of Warwick no longer appears as unique. How far it is a paradigm or prototype of other places, how far it points towards tendencies only beginning to reveal themselves elsewhere – this is for our readers to decide (ibid., pp. 16–17). Thompson offered a sobering corrective for the idea that getting ‘rid’ of capitalism would be easy: Nor can the malaise of Warwick be diagnosed in the single personality of the Vice-Chancellor. His policies of ever-closer relationship with ‘industry’ have been …supported by government, by the University Grants Committee, and by Science and Social Science Research Councils, as well as by industrialists on his Council. And a good part of these policies has been readily assented to by leading members of the academic staff (ibid., p. 17). The last excerpt is particularly interesting, as Thompson refuses to ascribe Warwick University’s surveillance of students and staff purely to ‘commercial’ or ‘industrial’ interests. What he says, in effect, is that institutions of knowledge production, including universities, have become increasingly politically and economically dependent on industrial capitalism; and, even more chillingly, that at least some academics knew about and went along with this. The pessimism of this insight is telling. Barely seven years since the report of the Robbins Committee had passed; Stuart Hall had taken over as the director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham a year earlier. In many ways, for critique, the period was one of cautious optimism. What the ‘matter at Warwick’ revealed was that, in many cases, institutional expansion came at a price. For intellectuals on the Left this presented an obvious problem, both politically and theoretically. Accepting full implications of the imbrication of education institutions and industrial capitalism meant one would have to abandon the hope of 129 revolution from within the academia. E.P. Thompson left his position at Warwick shortly following these events; while he continued occasional lecturing in the UK and abroad, he never assumed another full-time university post (it is also possible to see this in the context of his broader distancing from the British New Left, following his ‘ousting’ as the editor of the recently established New Left Review by Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, and Robin Blackburn – see Collini, 2006, p. 171; also Nehring, 2011). Poverty of Theory (Thompson, 1978), for instance, can be read as an indictment of academic ‘theorising’, or rather, the form of knowledge that privileges academic procedures of apprehending reality, and pits it against the practical, everyday knowledge as accessed by men and women of the working class. The other route available to academics was to continue to work within existing institutions in hope of changing them from the inside. This, arguably, is what intellectuals associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham set out to do. Drawing on Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and counter-hegemony, the driving idea was that a revolutionary class can adopt the methods and institutions of the oppressor to build a momentum towards revolution. Rejecting crude class distinctions of Marxist analysis as outdated, they shifted attention from material (re)production – ownership over means of production, control of factories and supply chains – towards factors of cultural reproduction: literature, the arts, and the media. Numerous authors have provided both contemporaneous and retrospective accounts of the influence of cultural studies on scholarly and political life in the UK and beyond (e.g. Dworkin, 1997; Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler eds., 1992; Hall, 1992; Edgar and Sedgwick, 2005; Grossberg, 2010). Attempting to summarise them would take up more space than available in this thesis. For the purposes of present analysis, however, two things are important. One is that cultural studies provided theoretical framing for the move away from orthodox Marxist emphasis on class and labour relations towards, to borrow Geertz’s (1973) formulation, ‘webs of meaning’ – which meant the production of symbols, texts, and objects that were seen as part of ‘culture’. The other is that, until late in the 1990s, higher education did not really figure on its research agenda. This particularly notable not only because of the contrast with Bourdieu’s work in 130 France but also because, at the same time, critical studies of primary and secondary education were thriving (e.g. Willis, 1981 [1977]; CCCS, 1981). The absence of structured focus on universities and politics of knowledge can, in some ways, be seen as an effect of the shift towards a ‘counterhegemonic’ strategy. This entailed fighting for institutions, rather than against them. From this perspective, the struggle for legitimizing working class culture – in part, through its constitution as a valid object of research – became coextensive with the struggle for the working class as such. Similarly, the drive to include migrant, youth, and ethnic ‘subcultures’ among legitimate topics of academic research was meant to change both the public perception of these groups, and their standing in the academia. In this sense, belief in the power of cultural representation led to the fusion of the theoretical (that is, academic) and political. In Rojek and Turners’s words, “[c]riticism, often of a literary or quasi-literary bent, has generally been more prominent than plans for the reconstruction of the social and cultural fabric” (2000, p. 630). While Hall and others were no ‘armchair philosophers’, the integration of critique within institutions of higher education thus came with a flipside. This flipside was the assumption that changing academic culture was sufficient to change the nature of institutions. An interesting dichotomy between critique ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the university thus developed in the 1980s and the 1990s. Critique oriented towards the ‘outside’, engaging with multiple facets of Thatcher’s policies, was thriving. Simultaneously, intellectuals were engaged in a struggle to position cultural studies in relation to other theoretical paradigms on the inside (Weber, 2004; Schulmann, 1993). It was almost as if critics were forgetting that the same relations that obtain on the outside must also apply to the inside. The first element of university life that would command attention of the national press after ‘the matter at Warwick’ was telling. Ostensibly breaking out over the disputed appointment of a lecturer at University of Cambridge’s Department of English, the affair revolved around the relevance of ‘theory’ – which, in the early 1980s, was code-word for French poststructuralism – in literary studies (Morgan and Baert, 2015). At Cambridge, the study of literature had been split between a more traditional, formalist stream, and a more ‘cultural’, poststructuralist one, the 131 latter including Raymond Williams himself. The conflict around the recognition of cultural studies as a legitimate paradigm and field of inquiry in an institution as conservative at Cambridge, then, was a clash between ‘old’ and ‘new’ ways of approaching knowledge – the new, obviously, being associated with the lively interdisciplinarity of cultural studies. As entertaining (and at times vicious) as the affair was, it also highlighted the fact that positioning critical scholarship within the university had taken primacy over questioning the position of the university in the broader society. Critical theoretical engagement, in this sense, became coextensive with critical political engagement. Particularly when the former was going well, it is not particularly surprising that less attention went into how this very practice was, at least in part, made possible by precisely the processes it aimed to criticize. As Laurie Taylor recently summarized, critics were reluctant to “bite the hand that feed(s) them” (Times Higher Education, 4 October 2018; see also Fitzgerald, 2018). Rojek and Turner offer a particularly acerbic diagnosis of this process: Hall’s advocacy of Gramsci's concept of the ‘organic intellectual’ stereotyped the work of ‘traditional intellectuals’ as superficial and evasive. This bestowed an automatic moral significance upon the cultural studies approach which contrasted with the alleged acdemicism of established research traditions. (…)The self-image of organic intellectuals is of intellectual workers who are closer to material reality and more seriously interested in `what is really going on'…This conveyed palpable moral force upon Birmingham School research and writing. The work in the 1970s on schooling, ideology, culture, the media, policing and Thatcherism has tremendous zest, and this partly reflects indignation that these subjects are neglected in other research traditions. But it also produced its own variety of moral arrogance, intellectual narrowness and over-confidence which has carried over into the cultural studies critique of established humanities and social science disciplines. This invested cultural studies with a proselytising impulse which remains evident to the present day (2000, p. 634). From this perspective, it is less surprising that the closure of the CCCS, ostensibly over its low performance in the RAE (initially through its integration into the 132 Department of Sociology in 1992, and then altogether in 2002) came as such a shock. Rather than a more decisive political engagement, however, it galvanized the first comprehensive theoretical diagnosis of the changes going on in higher education. It came from anthropology, under the name ‘audit culture’. Audit culture The concept of ‘audit culture’ was initially introduced by Michael Power in The Audit Explosion (Power, 1994), and The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Power, 1997). Power’s project is a critique of the techniques of governance associated with the introduction of New Public Management, primarily in the UK, emphasizing the relationship between the increase of instruments of measuring performance associated with the reform of public services, and the ritualistic quality of public policy and governance. It was imported into social sciences – and from there into broader critical vocabulary – through the work of three anthropologists: Marilyn Strathern, Cris Shore and Susan Wright. In 1998, Strathern, at the time president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), convened a panel at its annual conference on the topic of audit. Shore and Wright, who had previously been involved in studying policy (Shore and Wright, 1997), had also become interested in how the changes in higher education could be framed anthropologically. The title of their article published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute conveyed a clear diagnostic: “Audit culture and anthropology: neo-liberalism in British higher education” (Shore and Wright, 1999). A slightly expanded version of that article, along with a number of other presentations from the EASA panel, were published as Audit Cultures: Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy (Strathern, ed., 2000). More than a third of the volume was dedicated exclusively to changes in institutions of higher education. This was significant, even when viewed from the turn towards ‘studying up’ (e.g. Nader, 1972) and ‘anthropology at home’ (e.g. Peirano, 1998). The use of the concept of ‘culture’ can be read in two registers. One is the ambition to claim the terrain for anthropology as a discipline that had previously held the monopoly on academic application of the concept; this would 133 have been even more important in the aftermath of the closure of CCCS at Birmingham, as well as in order to delineate it from sociology. The other, more interesting one, has to do with cognitive estrangement that ‘anthropologising’ techniques of measurement and governance creates. To frame audit as a culture, in this sense, meant more than signaling its ubiquity or all-encompassing nature. It also meant suggesting that ‘members’ of this culture could be studied as ‘the Other’, foreign, different. In other words, it implied the culture was not one shared by anthropologists who coined the term. Defining ‘audit culture’ as coextensive or synonymous with neoliberalism established a genealogy between this type of study and critique practiced by Hall and other CCCS members. It simultaneously provided a catchy term for changes in higher education and managed to position the source of these changes outside of the university. There was also a methodological affinity, in the sense of an interest in how forms of representation – discourses, media narratives, and so on – shape society. In the context of ‘audit culture’, critical analysis of discourse was applied to texts – for instance, policy texts – in order to infer intentions, and thus reconstruct the ideological background, of its authors. This approach to critique, which we can dub ‘literary-cultural’, remains influential to this date. Next, we turn to its some of its notable examples. Words and worlds Stefan Collini is probably the most famous representative of the literary-cultural style of critique of higher education in the UK. Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, Collini first began writing about higher education in the Times Higher Education in 1998 and is at present a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books. From “HiEdBiz”, which reviews the 2003 White Paper, The Future of Higher Education, to “Browne’s Gamble”, which is an extended critique of Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education: An Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance (the Browne Review), to his books (What Are Universities for?, published in 2012 by Penguin, and Speaking of Universities that came out from Verso in 2017), Collini has evolved into England’s most celebrated higher education critic. 134 Collini’s approach to critique is to deconstruct the language and arguments of higher education policy documents, exposing their assumptions in an ironic and often highly entertaining way. The books extend this form of critique into a case for the kind of education universities should be providing. Collini clearly places his work in the broader tradition of intellectual interventions. Preface to What are universities for? (WAUF) states: [WAUF] is not a philosophical monograph any more than it is a White Paper. The literary category to which it most nearly approximates may be that of the polemic, which in turn overlaps with the genres of satire, jeremiad, manifesto, and essay in cultural criticism. (…) They do not attempt to compel assent by means of either logical indefeasibility or empirical comprehensiveness, and they do not rest their case on thoroughly worked- out proposals (WAUF, xiii). The choice of contrast with (a) White Paper to position the book (intellectual product) in a genre is telling. For one, it can serve to pre-empt the potential reader’s expectations of, say, empirical data in support of the main argument. But it also serves to underline general mistrust towards the form of speech-act that relies on facts, figures, and statistics in order to persuade. A great proportion of Collini’s writing, in fact, focuses specifically on the critique of the kind of policy language that characterizes White Papers and other forms of governmental intervention into teaching and research. Writing about university rankings, for instance, he says: The language here betrays a kind of mercantilism of the intellect, a fear that the stock of national treasure will be diminished rather than augmented by the success of enterprises elsewhere. It is remarkable how quickly and easily this language has become naturalized in the past two or three decades, even though it is damaging to the intrinsically cooperative nature of all science and scholarship (WAUF, p. 17). Collini’s critique of the 2003 White Paper is an even clearer example. Published in the LRB under the unfailingly sarcastic title HiEdBizUK, the article qualifies the paper as “pseudo-market guff” and goes on to present an extended 135 linguistic/literary analysis of its text. This is how it depicts the process of policymaking: It is not simply the fact that no single institution could successfully achieve all the aims crammed into this unlovely paragraph, taken from the introductory chapter to the Government’s White Paper, The Future of Higher Education, published earlier this year. It is also the thought of that room in Whitehall where these collages are assembled. As the findings from the latest survey of focus groups come in, an official cuts out all those things which earned a positive rating and glues them together in a straight line. When a respectable number of terms have been accumulated in this way, s/he puts a dot at the end and calls it a sentence (Collini, 2003). And further: There are two sentences in that paragraph. The first, which is clear enough though not a thing of beauty, says that the main aim of universities is to turn out people and ideas capable of making money. The second, which is neither clear nor beautiful, says there are a lot of other points that it’s traditional to mention in this connection, and that they’re all good things too, in their way, and that the official with the glue-pot has been having a busy day, and that we’ve lost track of the subject of the verb in the last line, and that it may be time for another full stop (ibid.). On one level, this is obviously a critique of the bureaucratic language of policymakers. On another, however, it also reveals something about the background assumptions concerning the policy process. In this account, civil servants throw together words expected to elicit positive responses from the public. It is, in fact, meant to be an only slightly exaggerated satire of New Labour approach to governing: ‘Modernization’ is, of course, trademark NewLabourSpeak, here combined with the language of the personnel departments of commercial companies. What it essentially means is that, given a number of people doing roughly 136 the same job, a way has to be fund to pay some of them less than others (WAUF, p. 161). What this type of analysis relies on, however, is more than just a tinge of sarcasm towards meaning-oriented modes of governing. Fundamentally, it assumes a causal relationship between framing of a concept, an idea, or a problem, and forms of political agency. Alan Finlayson associates this type of political strategy with the post-Habermasian shift from a ‘culture debating’ to a ‘culture consuming’ public: Contestation of the boundaries that hedged off political speech from other sorts of speech has been central to democratic politics…latterly, this has extended into a general challenge to the distinctiveness of political communication. What counts as a political statement or expression had also been subject to challenge such that any form of communication can be regarded as political (…) It was from this world of nervous individualization, social anxiety shared between strangers, permanent and competitive judgment, mass media distraction, fear of collective activity and constant search for leadership, that New Labour was born. Our condition is that of simultaneous proliferation of meanings and a downscaling of their meaningfulness. Everything needs to be read but nothing is really worth reading. In drawing on this culture…New Labour revealed to us something about what it is and how it works. It cannot simply speak and ‘do’ politics in ‘traditional’ ways. It is engaged in the process of ‘making sense’ (Finlayson, 2003, p. 30–34). As the title of Collini’s second book on the topic, Speaking of Universities, suggests, the way something is talked about – spoken – has the power to bring things about. There is a direct line between ‘marketspeak’ and policies such as REF, rankings, and so forth. This vision of society shares the basic assumptions with Orwell’s 1984: ideology is transmitted through words, and these words can serve to distort reality. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength; repetition of such words is sufficient to convince the ‘receiver’ – the audience – of their truthfulness, successfully obscuring the nature of things, and thus changing how subjects relate to the world around them. 137 A similar line of critique is pursued in Killing Thinking: Death of the University (Evans, 2004). Mary Evans, Professor of Gender Studies at the LSE, analyses the transformation of UK universities in relation to two social trends: massification and the rise of audit and assessment. In her view, audit is “conceptually illiterate” (2004, p. 30); the obsession with testing and measurement reveals an impoverished imagination that cannot conceive of the value of knowledge for its own sake, probably best reflected in the statements of Charles Clarke, then-Secretary of State for Higher Education, who famously referred to it as “a bit dodgy”. Evans explicitly compares the language of university reforms to 1984 and concludes: Eroding the meaning and the use of language is, as every dictator knows, an important part of recreating a social world. The invasion of the academy by 'transferable skills', 'relevance' and 'entrepreneurship' is part of the creation of a new academic world - an academic world which is assumed to be more 'modern' than the one it replaces. This rhetorical agenda about – and for – universities is all too welcome to some academics and academic administrators, since it suggests that universities could become an integrated part of the social world, a world of decision making, profit enhancing and energetic social intervention. Maintaining the boundary between the academic and the non-academic world is not easy, and the seduction of the new rhetoric of learning is that it apparently promises a part in the matters and events of the wider social world. Rather than being sidelined to some social and cultural dead end the universities are promised a part in that 'project of modernity' which is dear to so many hearts (Evans, 2004, p. 66, my emphasis). Tracing the lineage back to Orwell thus means more than a ritual invocation of the English intellectual whose name had become synonymous with the critique of public language. It also serves to affirm that words matter, both in the general sense – that is, they require close attention, are not trivial – but also in the sense in which they have ‘real’, ontological effects. To paraphrase, words create, shape, and can also merge worlds. 138 The assumption that ‘words create worlds’, of course, is not uniquely applied to the policies of New Labour. In For the University, Thomas Docherty traces it to the period between 1960s and 1980s: The culture of mistrust that dogs and threatens the sustained viability of the University is something that is at least tacitly endorsed, if not actually inaugurated, by political discourse. The debate here, over the question of social and cultural authority, might have its roots in real politics. We should recall that, in the 1970s, miners in the UK successfully challenged the centre of political authority. Edward Heath, faced with a powerful strike, went to the country explicitly inviting people to decide who rules Britain? The people duly did decide and, in the election, they ejected Heath from office. That political mistake was not to be repeated. When miners again went on strike a decade later, in 1984, the question of who rules Britain was not posed. Instead, the government established a new kind of language for a new debate (Docherty, 2011, p. 2, my emphasis). Here we can see more explicitly how the link of language, culture, and politics is established through maintenance of the boundary between rhetoric (or discourse) and ‘real politics’. Language is the primary point of epistemic access: it both reveals and obscures the intention of civil servants, or the ‘true face of power’. The role of the critic, then, is to unmask intentions hiding behind language, using the same tool: superior powers of language. Obviously, given the literary background of Collini, Docherty, and Evans, it is not surprising they should choose to focus on the language of policies. Yet, by the start of the 21st century, it was becoming clear this line of critique cannot fully account for how things came about. The ambiguity of Docherty’s “at least tacitly endorsed, of not actually inaugurated” line is telling. Is discourse more about directing the preferences of specific actors, or does it literally create realities? Does policy language, on par with Orwell’s 1984, ‘brainwash’ people into actually believing that, to borrow Thatcher’s famous dictum, ‘there is no alternative’? If so, how does this come about – who has the power to make this happen, and how did they acquire it? Answering these questions seemed to require a more serious engagement with the political and economic mechanisms by which these ideas were translated into 139 practice. This gave rise to a slightly different strand of critique, one that can be dubbed ‘political-economic’. The name(s) of numbers Andrew McGettigan’s The Great University Gamble: money, markets, and the future of higher education (GUG) set out explicitly to provide an account of “political economy of institutions in their new environment” (McGettigan, 2013, x). McGettigan’s book is widely cited and, despite the inflation in the number of volumes that focus on the critique of the transformation of higher education and research in the UK, remains highly influential. At the point of publication, McGettigan offered one of the rare economic analyses of policy changes in higher education accessible to a broader audience. The book traces the neoliberalisation of higher education and research through connected analysis of massification, changes in student financing (including tuition fees, introduction of loans, and abolishment of EMA), and techniques of market-making including sector deregulation (the rise of for-profit and private providers), introduction of private equity, and, finally, the selling of student loan book. Rather than mocking the ‘gibberish’ of Government’s policy papers, McGettigan engaged with numbers and statistics concerning, for instance, student numbers, calculation of financial (actuarial) risk, and the role of private equity. While the book is written in a relatively accessible journalistic prose, it does not shy away from tackling technical concepts, or utilizing tables and graphs. In the years following the economic crash of 2008 these concepts have filtered from specialized into general critical vocabulary; however, at the time of publication, in the context of critique of higher education and research they were still, in many ways, ‘anathema’ concepts. McGettigan, therefore, did two things: one was to take financial instruments seriously; the other was to try to explain to an educated but still ‘lay’ audience what they were: Above all, we need to be attuned to the inflections of ‘privatisation’, which in common parlance is normally limited to the transfer of assets and 140 responsibilities from the state to the private sector. In higher education, we see different processes, policy considerations and initiatives: 1. Marketisation or external privatisation, whereby new operations with different corporate forms are allowed to enter the state system to increase competition. (…) 2. Commodification – the presentation of higher education as solely a private benefit to the individual consumer; even as a financial asset where the return on investment is seen in higher earnings upon graduation. 3. Independence from regulation – private providers assessing the student loan book are not bound by numbers controls and do not have to comply with reporting or monitoring requirements nor widen (sic) participation initiatives. 4. Internal privatisation – the changes to revenue streams within institutions so that for example, direct public funding is replaced by private tuition fee income. (GUG, p. 8). The interesting thing, however, is that McGettigan is not an economist, a political scientist, or even a sociologist. Originally trained as a philosopher at the University of Warwick, McGettigan was in the process of completing his PhD at the University of Middlesex when the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) was closed. The closure of CRMEP became one of causes celèbres of the ‘war on universities’. In 2010, one of administrative reforms at Middlesex announced that the hitherto highly regarded Centre would be split into separate units, each to be integrated into bigger Departments/Faculties. Such reforms have, by that point, become quite common in UK universities: in particular, social sciences and humanities departments, frequently dubbed too expensive, were disbanded and/or transformed into smaller units – usually within a suitably marketable environment, such as schools of business and management. With Middlesex, however, the matter drew both an opposition from academics in the UK, and support from philosophical luminaries abroad – from Badiou and Butler to Sloterdijk and Žižek. It was eventually resolved by the relocation of CRMEP to Kingston University (Alliez et al, 2010), whose then-Vice-Chancellor, Peter Scott, was himself a prominent and fervent critic of Government’s higher education policies. While, in this sense, CRMEP and its staff were luckier than many of their counterparts in other UK universities, to many commentators this 141 only confirmed that social sciences and humanities across the country were under attack by neoliberal forces (e.g. Segal, 2010). In this sense, McGettigan shared the same starting point as critics of ‘audit culture’ who witnessed the closure of the CCCS. Yet, his opening positioning is narrated quite differently: In 2010, a series of events brought me to the realisation I knew hardly anything about what was happening in English universities, despite having been around them as a student, lecturer and employee for the best part of 20 years (GUG, vii) This represents a significant departure from previous entry points. Despite having no professional knowledge of higher education policy, economics, or public administration, neither literary scholars such as Collini, Docherty, or Evans, nor anthropologists such as Strathern, Wright, or Shore exhibited much reticence about writing on higher education. Having a position within higher education seemed to constitute sufficient epistemic legitimation. McGettigan, by contrast, began by admitting that despite having been part of the system he knew very little about how it works. From this perspective, the relevance of engagement with ‘facts and figures’ – especially the latter – becomes clearer. A more serious engagement with policy instruments, in turn, should be placed in the context of intellectual mobilization around the Campaign for the Public University and the Council for the Defence of British Universities. Playing (with) politics The Campaign for the Public University (CPU) was initially established by John Holmwood, Gurminder Bhambra, and a group of PhD students who were at the University of Warwick in the period leading up to the publication of the Government’s 2011 White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System. Building on the momentum of 2010 student protests, the Campaign aimed to provide a broad platform for academics – mostly from social sciences and humanities – to mount an opposition to higher education reforms. Not long after, another organization with a similar agenda was established: Council for the Defence of British 142 Universities (CDBU). Unlike CPU, which was a broad coalition of academics, students, and activists across the UK, CDBU was predominantly comprised of high-ranking professors from Russell Group universities with a heavy representation of Oxford and Cambridge. The Campaign and the Council initially worked together, but eventually came to disagreement concerning level of ‘political radicalism’ in their publications. Despite ideological divergence, two groups’ political strategies were quite complementary. CDBU published articles on its website and also funded McGettigan’s book. Its major role, however, was to use the influence of individual members to lobby the House of Lords to exercise rights of veto, especially since there seemed to be a chance of stirring up cross-bench opposition to reforms. Additionally, David Willetts was the Minister for Universities, which probably contributed to belief it would be possible to exert some influence over policies13. While CPU also produced what could be considered more ‘traditional’ forms of intellectual interventions – articles in Open Democracy, letters in The Guardian, and two edited volumes, most of its energy was channeled into the Alternative White Paper. In Defence of the Public Higher Education (further: AWP) was published on the Campaign’s website in 2011. Announced and promoted through social media, it adopts the format and style of a ‘regular’ policy paper: clear and concise, with relatively few references, headed by a point-by-point executive summary, and followed by proposals for what the authors and signatories think the Government should do for, or about, higher education. The fact it is more policy- friendly than literary critique is evident from one of the opening paragraphs: We do not argue against the market, as such, but for the recognition that market relations cannot encompass all social relations and that there are 13 Willetts often accepted invitations to share the platform with critics of the Coalition’s reforms, though, as can be gleaned from tuition fees and the REF, not necessarily allowing himself to be swayed by his opponents’ arguments. Rather, this strategy of engaging in debate with a wide range of social and political actors should be seen as an application of neoliberal policy of ‘governing by consensus’. In other words, inviting consultation on specific policy issues was more of an attempt to pacify sources of possible resistance by giving them a voice and thus co-opting them into the political process, a strategy that, in and of itself, is associated with neoliberal (or post-liberal) forms of governing. 143 important social conditions that are necessary for markets to flourish. Subjecting education to the market risks undermining what enables both society and markets to flourish. (AWP, para. 1.6) This is quite far from the dismissive mockery of policy narratives that characterises literary critique. The following sentence in the same paragraph helps position the narrative more clearly: It is illogical that a financial crisis brought about by market failure should be used by government as the occasion for the marketisation of our system of public higher education (ibid.) This situates the paper clearly within the domain of the political, rather than outside of it. Its purpose is to argue higher education has a public role, which cannot be reduced, expressed, or served by market instruments. It lists some aspects: maintenance of confidence in public debate, intergenerational justice, health and well-being. In this sense, the paper shares with other interventions the emphasis on public, as opposed to private, value of knowledge. Where it departs from them, however, is the vocabulary of justification: instead of a principled assertion that education is not for sale, it engages in economic and political analysis that aims to show that education is not entirely subjectable to market forces. In this, its tone is remarkably different from the refusal to entertain the language of ‘markets’: it argues for rebalancing public and private elements of higher education, rather than dismissing the latter entirely. In Boltanski and Thévenot’s terms, this mode represents a ‘compromise’ (2006, pp. 293–335) between different worlds. It hybridizes different orders of worth: from the ‘civic’ world it takes the relevance of democratic deliberation and trust; from the ‘market’ world it takes the relevance of economic flourishing. It would be possible to interpret this mix of public and private – or ‘social’ and ‘market’ – logics as a vestige of belief in the possibility of combining market mechanisms with social justice, which certainly informed New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ (e.g. Hay, 1999), as well as with the broader project of social democracy. The paper occasionally approvingly cites the Dearing Report (Dearing, 1997), which, despite introducing ‘top-up’ fees, nonetheless affirmed the public purpose of education 144 (leaving aside the question of whether for reasons other than rhetorical). More simply, however, it could be seen as a reflection of the genre: the AWP is not a ‘jeremiad’ or a soliloquy, and, as such, is not necessarily addressed to other intellectuals. If its purpose is to engage seriously with governmental reforms, then it makes sense it should do so in a language palatable to civil servants: not invocations of eternal or universal value of social sciences and humanities, but arguments that attempt to convince the intended audience that their plans have harmful consequences in the long term, including in relation to their own criteria. The contrast of this more market-friendly (or, more precisely, more market-order- friendly) approach is particularly pronounced when compared to two related publications that came out at the same time: The Manifesto for the Public University (Holmwood, ed., 2011), published by Bloomsbury, who also published Docherty’s For the University, and The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance (Bailey and Freedman, eds. 2011), published by Pluto (who also published McGettigan’s book). Despite their titles, and the inclusion of a set of political commitments, both publications are edited volumes, closer in style and layout to ‘classical’ intellectual interventions than to political pamphlets and manifestos. They do not mean to demonstrate that marketisation is happening or that neoliberalism is bad, but, rather, to provide a set of intellectual interpretations of these trends. Justification: from ontology to epistemology (and back) Interventions converge around the mode of justification when it comes to arguments why education should not be subjected to market logic. While diagnostic aspects, as we could see, can ‘adopt’ the language and tools of policy discourses, normative aspects almost inevitably entail a shift to the ‘ontological’ mode: in other words, the assertion of the ‘whatness of what is’. In the opening chapter of The Great University Gamble, for instance, McGettigan uses the ‘nature’ of education to argue against the damaging effects of the market: 145 Is education a consumer good that benefits from market reforms? It is not consumed in the same way as gas, electricity and water, where privatisation has hardly been an overwhelming success (GUG, p. 10, my emphasis). Later in the book, he qualifies the category of ‘beings’ education belongs to in order to correct what he feels is government’s misunderstanding of its true nature: In two ways, the government misunderstands the kind of ‘good’ that education is: The market is being set up as if undergraduate education were a normal consumer good: it is not. For better or ill, undergraduate HE in England is a positional good: institutions are ranked in hierarchy, and opportunities are restricted. Its reforms treat it as solely of benefit to the private individual, missing the associated public benefits which are now at risk (GUG, p. 55) Collini takes a somewhat similar approach to drawing distinctions in comparing universities and private companies: The truth is, of course, that universities are not businesses and they do not operate in a market... All comparisons and analogies are potentially misleading, but it would be less inaccurate to say that, historically, British universities have been national cultural institutions that more closely resembled, say, the British Museum or the BBC rather than, say, Bhs or BP (Collini, 2010, reprinted in WAUF). This is how critique demarcates different worlds. On the one hand, there is the market world, where entities such as businesses or oil companies reside. On the other, there is the sphere of un-quantifiable goods (or good), which is what should be the proper location of universities and academic knowledge. From here, we can draw implications for how they should be valued: …There are some kinds of intellectual enquiry that are goods in themselves, that need to be pursued at the highest level, and that will almost certainly continue to require a certain amount of public support. These may now form 146 a relatively minor part of the activities carried on in universities, and it is much easier, using economic and utilitarian arguments, to justify the other activities; but they remain indispensable. Amid the uncertainties currently facing universities, the only certain thing is that these are all problems which will be exacerbated rather than solved by placing them in the lap of the market. (Collini, 2003) The positioning of higher education (or knowledge) as a good, thus, proceeds in two steps. The first is to claim education is not a ‘normal’ consumer good. This serves to destabilise its association with the world of the market. The second is to claim that, as such, it should be excluded – in total, or in part – from the order of worth that aims to reduce it to elements ‘amenable’ to market inclusion. Trying to reassign (or reposition) them to the first sphere is bound to create adverse effects. Rather than curry favour by pretending that these are in fact the chief purposes of universities, their defenders might do better to acknowledge the non-utilitarian nature of much intellectual enquiry... As a start, one might want to insist, first, that intellectual activity can, for the most part, be judged but not measured; second, that although a number of ‘skills’ may be a by- product of a university education, they are not its defining purpose; and third, universities only bear superficial and largely misleading resemblances to commercial companies (ibid.). The third step, thus, seeks to specify forms of evaluation, or types of ‘test’, that are admissible from critics’ point of view. If intellectual activity can be judged but not reduced to a number, it should only be judged by those who have spent years perfecting academic ‘ways of seeing’; that is, other academics. Given that it is premised on an assertion about the nature of knowledge and/or education, this mode of justification can be dubbed ‘ontological’: it concerns, in Boltanski’s terms, ‘the whatness of what is’. Further, this ontological mode morphs diagnostic and normative facets: asserting the nature of knowledge as a non- marketable commodity, and the non-identity between universities and companies, translates into the way they should be governed. In Collini’s argument, that entails prying knowledge (or, more precisely, certain forms of knowledge) away from 147 attempts to measure it or reduce it to market principles. McGettigan’s approach is to assert knowledge also has value that cannot be expressed in terms of private benefit or utility, and thus measured in economic terms. While one frames knowledge as the opposite of marketable goods (commodities), and the other as not entirely commensurable with, they share the argument that appeals to an essence of things. Contrasting knowledge with goods such as electricity and gas, or universities with private companies, then, is a form of asserting ontological non- equivalence: not only that one cannot be reduced to another, they also cannot be measured (or judged) according to the same criterion. The ontological mode of justification is not an exclusive reserve of intellectual interventions critical of higher education reforms. David Willetts’ A University Education (AUE), which came out at the end of 2017, presents a lengthy narrative of the history of universities in the UK in the first part, to develop proposals (‘solutions’) for how they should be run in the last. Interestingly, Willetts opens the book with a critique of precisely ontological modes of justification: We shift from is to ought, from descriptive to normative, and that account of a university becomes the standards against which all contemporary universities are judged. Many are then found wanting. This leads straight into narratives of betrayal and ruin, which is often attributed to the very growth of higher education which Whiggish optimists celebrate. It looks as if the critics are uncomfortable with the reality of mass higher education (AUE, p. 37). While Willetts associates ‘essentialist’ reasoning with the critique of the transformation of higher education (and, by extension, with an idealist tradition), his own account is no less prescriptive: We need an account of what it is to be a university which is neither so loose that anything counts nor so stringent that it ends up left behind and irrelevant like Pattison’s hysterical attacks on Gladstone’s Victorian reforms of Oxford. We can already see the outlines. A university is an independent corporation devoted to higher education. It is a community of scholars and students. Its autonomy, evidenced above all in the right to award its own degrees, sets a 148 university apart from other forms of higher education. For education to be higher it must be at the frontiers of knowledge: that does not mean it must include research but at least its teaching needs to be informed by new discoveries and current arguments (AUE, p. 37, my emphasis). There is a lot going on in this paragraph: in addition to using the opportunity to position critics of governmental reforms as a bunch of outdated elitists by drawing a not-too-implicit analogy between writers like Collini and Pattison (and, by extension, Gladstone and himself), it also attributes particular characteristics to ‘the university’. Some are inconspicuous enough, like independence. Some, however, less so: the definition of autonomy as “the right to award its own degrees” is very different – and has strikingly different political implications – than, for instance, definitions that emphasise the independence of universities from state interference, assert the principle of territorial integrity, and so on. It is also notable in the breaking up of the unity of teaching and research: if a university need not necessarily include research, this clearly opens the path for the bifurcation and further stratification of universities into ‘teaching only’ – precisely one of possible outcomes of the REF. Positioning the book as an intellectual intervention, Willetts takes particular care to delineate it from other representatives of the genre: (…) Crude conspiracy theories claim to explain what is happening to a complex institution. One such narrative is ‘Universities are under attack from managers/ministers/markets threatening my/your/all disciplines’. Another is ‘Universities are ivory towers: there are too many of them and too many people go’. That is why I have tried to convey what I have learned from my university education over the past decade and assembled the evidence to explain why both of those narratives are wrong. Such is my respect for the values of the academia that, even if one may suspect this is a heavily disguised ministerial memoir, it is at least the first example which has been subject to academic peer review (AUE, p. 361). Despite ostensibly criticising ‘essentialist’ approaches, Willetts is equally concerned with the whatness of what is – in this case, the nature of ‘the university’. 149 His account is framed as more historical than others; yet, to assert that the nature of the institution is fundamentally defined by its history is no less an ontological statement than the assertion that knowledge is not the same as gas or electricity. While clearly writing against a particular approach to critique – one defined here as ‘literary-cultural’ – Willetts nonetheless asserts authority through the same sort of epistemic positioning that presupposes a privileged access to reality: I know what the university is. The importance of epistemic positioning became evident in the encounter between Collini and Willetts during the launch of Collini’s book, Speaking of Universities in March 2017 (which I attended as part of fieldwork). The event, entitled ‘The Future of Our Universities’, was hosted by the London Review of Books and took place in University of London’s Senate House – notable both for its grand interior, and its 1984 associations. Besides Collini and Willetts, speakers included Marina Warner, another prominent critic and former professor of English at Essex (from which she resigned in protest of managerial reforms), and Dinah Birch, Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, as the chair. The event started inconspicuously enough – with an opening statement about the ‘state’ of higher education (grim) and worries about the future of universities (justified), followed by praise for Collini’s book, as is customary (Bacevic, fieldwork notes). Collini spoke for about fifteen minutes, framing some of the main points of the book. Then Willetts got up to speak. DW: Thank you very much for the opportunity to join you this evening. And of course I enjoy what Stefan wrote about British intellectual history in the 19th and 20th century, and I am kind of obliged to read everything Stefan writes about universities. And there are flashes of brilliance in what he writes. I thought his description of what is ‘the real world’ in his book What the universities are for is absolutely to the point. Nobody is trying to argue that the values and distinctive characters of universities are entirely to disappear and be entirely absorbed by other values of other organisations in the society. The positioning in the opening statement is clear on a few points. While asserting knowledge of Collini’s writing of universities (‘kind of obliged to read everything’) 150 it consigns Collini’s epistemic authority to intellectual history. It also immediately qualifies its distance from Collini’s argument, by framing the latter as an overstatement. [Willetts paused] DW: But -- and it's a very big but. But, the-- this language of defending universities from all these terrible outside threats seems to me very far from the reality that I see. [Ironic laughter in audience: Ha! Ha!] Here we have both an emphasis on language – not unlike the focus of Collini, Warner, and other representatives of literary-cultural genre of critique – and the assertion of epistemic authority through claims of an insight into ‘reality’. DW: And if I’d try to do a Stefan Collini on Stefan Collini, I would say: what is the cultural phenomenon that lies beneath this argument that both Stefan and Marina Warner espouse very elegantly and passionately, and of course believe in? The framing of opponents as emotional, as well as misguided, is remarkably similar to the ‘brainwashed’ VCs, ‘sadist Hitlers’, and ‘Thatcherite ideologues’ of other interventions. DW: But it’s a picture of the government as either incompetent or a liar, [shouts in the audience: Oi! Oi! Boo] [Willetts pauses, laughs, says ‘O, let us hear’ and carries on] It’s a picture of government as both incompetent and a liar. Now, where have I come across this? This is classical, neoliberal, small business, ‘let’s get government out of the way, they are the problem, they are the enemy, they are dangerous’. 151 In this, Willetts fascinatingly managed to position himself as a critic of neoliberalism through framing his ‘opponents’ as closet neoliberals. He proceeded to quote passages from Collini’s book that supposedly confirmed this reading, and to ‘fact-check’ Collini, listing a number of ‘incorrect’ statements he had supposedly made (Bacevic, fieldwork notes). The audience grew increasingly agitated, with one member eventually getting up and practically heckling Willetts. The event was notable not only for this ostensive ‘breach’ of academic etiquette, but also, more importantly, for the assertion of epistemic superiority. Rather than frame his critique in political terms – as, after all, most of the audience expected – Willetts was saying, basically, that Collini did not know what he was talking about. The specific feature of critique of neoliberalism in UK higher education, thus, is assertion of authority via claims to superior access to the ‘whatness of what is’. This assertion is meant to circumvent adherence to moral frameworks for justification associated with Boltanski and Thévenot’s polities: the assertion that this is because of the inherent nature of things/goods, at the same time, positions the speaker as someone whose view of reality trumps these distinctions. While some interventions will include arguments that fit within one of six orders – for instance, the argument that commodification of education is bad for democracy fits the ‘civic’ polity – they always entail, at least in addition, the ontological mode of justification. The ontological mode of justification, however, does not lend itself easily to reality tests. Asserting that education is not a commodity, or that universities need not necessarily engage in research, remains a purely ‘academic’ statement unless somehow brought to bear on reality. Knowledge or universities do not ‘naturally’ behave in any sort of way. Ontological justification thus inevitably has to invoke a social agent that has the power to make certain things happen. This brings us to how interventions frame political agency. 152 Thatcherites and bankers: political agency Asserting that education and market values are non-commensurable would seem to be at odds with the broader diagnostic of intellectual interventions: namely, if something is not a commodity, how come it’s being sold? McGettigan readily admits that markets in higher education are an outcome of governmental intervention: “Markets of this kind have to be created. In the longer term, these measures are designed to create a wholly different system with markets determining what is offered” (GUG, pp. 5–8) The logical question is who and why creates markets: Market solutions are a key plank of a general ideology that runs across all political parties. Many ministers and influential individuals in government today were junior ministers and advisors in the heyday of Thatcherism. For them the ‘discipline of the market place, the power of the consumer and the engine of competition’ was needed in education…the market envisioned by Conservatives in higher education, as a lightly regulated sector with a variety of providers, cannot appear fully formed. It has to be created (GUG, p. 55) There are free market ideologues in both Coalition partners who simply see increasing competition and student consumerism as battering rams with which to overcome university inertia. (…) Ultimately, these aspects come together in a single ideological aim. The broader vision in the UK is to roll back the state to a minimum function – to broker deals between finance and private sector provision. This continues a strand of 1980s public policy but one revivified by improvements in data management and, yes, financial derivatives (GUG, p. 8) Any question as to who benefits would need to clearly demarcate the self- positioning, constantly lobbying elite and new private providers primed to enter the ‘level playing field’ from the middle tier. What motivates this gamble is not hard to find. The clear intent of the government is to make universities more customer-, business-, and industry-focused (GUG, p. 7) 153 Neoliberal or market ideology is therefore a vestige of the time of Thatcher. This establishes a continuity between education policies of the Conservative Party, and those implemented by the Coalition Government. Yet, while ascribing ‘general ideology’ to all political parties, interventions are reticent to specify the role played by New Labour in implementing these reforms. One of the chapters in The Assault on Universities, titled “The war against democracy and education”, argues that The formation of the Conservative and Liberal government in the UK context has intensified a war against democracy…recent changes in policy in education need to be seen in terms of continuation with certain elite strategies from the past. The main difference lies in terms of the aggressive abandonment of any idea of social citizenship (that was still evident within New Labour) for a more hard-nosed liberal citizenship (Stevenson, 2011, pp. 71–75). It is not difficult to interpret this as equally a consequence of the awareness of many of the critics that a much-hoped-for Labour Government continued (and expanded) neoliberal policies, and that Liberal Democrats went back on their widely trumpeted commitment to tuition-free education. This suggests a broader political unease: there were, literally, no ‘good guys’ (on the) left. One way in which interventions attempt to resolve this, as we can see, is by establishing a clear lineage between the political ideology of decision-makers at present, and “Thatcherite free-market ideologues” of the past. This serves to frame neoliberalism as ‘Other’, both politically and institutionally. The other is to identify what could collectively be called market Träger, or ‘agents of neoliberalism’: bankers (e.g. Baron Browne of Madingley), consultants for international corporations (such as McKinsey), etc. The third became to situate these ‘agents of neoliberalism’ inside universities: among university managers and, in particular, Vice-Chancellors. Distrust towards university managers, as we can remember, was already a strong motive in EP Thompson’s Warwick University, Ltd. On the one hand, this can be seen as a reflection of their association with the ‘boss’ or capitalist class, consistent with the ontological tenets of Marxism. Yet, the degree of viciousness in some 154 cases went far and above the critique of politicians or even bankers, especially when it came to interpreting managers’ intentions or motivations. Evans’ Killing Thinking is illustrative: We need to try and enter the nightmare world of the university appraiser or quality assurance manager. We have to assume (although it is sometimes difficult) that these women and men cannot be compared with the piano player in the brothel – these people do actually know that they are working in universities. So we could perhaps assume that assessors choose their careers in order to make good the absence of God in a secular society. Judgement in the twenty-first century no longer lies in the hand of God: without this moral compass, however rigid it may have appeared, we enthusiastically create our own systems of judgement. The facile belief that a secular society is in some way free of the authority of judgement would be proved false by a day spent in a British university. Since God no longer exists, we have invented assessment... Equally, the expression 'little Hitlers' might have a resonance for many academics; despite its unfortunate anti- German connotations, most people are familiar with the idea that there are some people (be they in universities or any other community) who simply cannot resist the opportunity to evaluate, judge and even reach the paradise of the appraiser, the condemnation of the appraised (KT, pp. 34–35). Literary embellishment aside, this is a rather stark condemnation in itself. Managers and assessors are equated with automatons, but not sufficiently unthinking automatons as to excuse them from political responsibility: on the contrary, they enjoy and willingly choose the opportunity to evaluate academics. ‘Thatcherite free-market ideologues’ get an easy hand, by comparison. Marina Warner used her position as the chair of the committee for the Man Booker Prize – which meant she had the opportunity to read a lot of Chinese novels – to compare the management of universities with the Chinese version of corporate communism. In an article in the London Review of Books, she remarked: 155 The world of Chinese communist corporatism, as ferociously depicted by their authors, keeps reminding me of higher education here, where enforcers rush to carry out the latest orders from their chiefs in an ecstasy of obedience to ideological principles which they do not seem to have examined, let alone discussed with the people they order to follow them (Warner, 2014). The idea of an insurmountable rift between academics and managers probably reached crescendo with the furore over the salary of Vice Chancellor of the University of Bath, Glynis Breakwell, that broke out in 2017. Through articles in The Guardian and elsewhere, academics and journalists started drawing attention to the frequently excessive pay and benefits packages given to top managers of UK universities. “People running our universities” were described as “fat cats” (Chakraborty, 2017). The mantle was taken up by Andrew Adonis, former Labour MP who was Minister of State for Education in Tony Blair’s government, and Head of Policy Unit at Number 10 in 2004 – thus also indirectly responsible for New Labour’s policy on tuition fees. The forms of positioning here were quite clear in drawing boundaries between managers, on the one hand, and academics (and, presumably, students) on the other. Managers became proxies for the capitalist class as a whole: their interests and agency, correspondingly, were associated with the interests of Big Capital, including ‘Big Pharma’ companies such as Astra Zeneca, whose representatives sat on the council of the University of Manchester. By implication, academics were positioned as almost completely devoid of financial interests. This unease about the concept of interest – or utility – will, as we will see in the next chapter, play a prominent role in intellectuals’ self-narratives. This is also when the concept of ‘precarity’ started figuring more prominently in mainstream media (e.g. Evans, 2018). While the casualization of academic labour had been going on for a while – legal grounds for the abolishment of the UK equivalent of tenure were instituted by the 1988 Education Reform Act – insecure employment mostly became an issue only when institutions were ‘restructured’ or closed, as in the cases of the CCCS at Birmingham or CRMEP at Middlesex. In this sense, labour insecurity primarily meant insecurity for those who were already employed at a higher education institution. This framing rarely focused on the 156 growing army of reserve labour, primarily composed of graduate students and postdocs – summarily referred to as ‘early career researchers’ – who may never achieve the stability or security of employment necessary to identify with a particular institution. Until the USS strikes in spring of 2018, the notion of precarity remained the reserve of activists, unions, or, alternatively, academic publications specializing in work and labour relations. It is possible to read the absence of precarity in intellectual interventions as an effect of their focus on the ‘war’ on universities: namely, if the emphasis is on the institution, different situations, statuses, and positionalities of those who make up the institution – especially if they do not remain employed at any single one long enough – can be of lesser interest. A more likely explanation, however, is that these issues remain invisible because they would puncture the image of ‘the’ university as a unitary institution besieged by enemy forces from the outside. They could also suggest that divisions and power relations within the institution are not necessarily reducible to ‘managers’ vs. ‘academics’, and that ‘academics’, after all, is not a unitary notion. They would serve as a reminder that hierarchical divisions exist and persist within the academic community, and that exploitation tends to happen between academics – and especially between ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ ranks. The rise of the notion of precarity may signal a return to a Marxist emphasis on labour and labour relations. However, it also bears mentioning that ‘precarity’ still foregrounds the identity of ‘the academic’ (even if qua worker), thus framing political agency primarily on the continuum between ‘in [academic] employment – outside [academic] employment’. It equally serves to position ‘academics’ as a collective political subject. In this sense, the critique of precarity also draws on the dichotomy between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’: ‘inside’ is constructed as a place of (relative) security, while ‘outside’ is constructed as a dangerous space full of neoliberals. From a similar Marxist pedigree, however, comes another strand of critique, also concerned with the boundaries between outside and the inside. For this strand, however, the enemy is truly and well on the inside. 157 Barbarians at the gate? Freedom of speech and universities’ ‘culture war’ The salience of distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is crucial to understanding the strand of critique that associates the current crisis with the decline of standards within the university. Primarily through the work of Frank Furedi and other contributors to the online magazine Spiked!, this strand of critique has evolved into an attack on what is perceived to be the ‘culture of political correctness’; in recent years, this argument had been taken up by a number of politicians and commentators, including, most famously, Jo Johnson, Minister of State for Universities between 2015 and 2018, and Toby Young, briefly appointed in 2018 as the Head of Office for Students. Spiked! represents a curious mix between radical (‘anti-Stalinist’) Left and Alt- Right. It originated in the Living Marxism journal (later abbreviated to LM), once associated with the Radical Communist Party of Great Britain. Increasingly, however, the defence of ‘free speech’ has brought Spiked and associated authors closer to the libertarian end of the spectrum: the magazine is reputed for receiving funding from the Koch Foundation, and has become a staple reference for Alt- Right commentators who share its disdain for what they perceive to be ‘censorship’ and ‘content policing’. What this line of critique has in common with other forms examined here is suspicion towards outside intervention and its effects. The only difference is that, for many representatives of this strand of critique, the ‘capitulation’ has already happened. While it may at first appear as if it is concerned with attacking, rather than defending the university, its broader argument is that, in order to be saved, the university needs to be purified or saved from forces inimical to it, many of which are already ‘within the gates’. This argument has origins in the critique of decline of standards of intellectual inquiry and the rise of ‘philistinism’, facile commentary on current affairs. Furedi’s Where have all the intellectuals gone (2004) is an early representative of the genre. Furedi decries the ‘dumbing down’ of public debate, which he sees as a consequence of the erosion of universal standards of truth and culture intellectuals are historically best positioned to provide (2004, pp. 10–15, 72–90). This has been 158 replaced by the plurality of standards and ‘cultures’ that give political primacy to individual (or group) experience over common standards – in other words, by ‘identity politics’. In this sense, it shares the vocabulary and ideological background with the critique of the deteriorating fabric of liberal democracy, as well as, in line with its title, diagnosis of deleterious effects of these changes to the figure of ‘public intellectual’, characteristic of the ‘declinist thesis’ (Baert, 2015; Baert and Shipman, 2012). Yet, it also includes a specific claim about the effects of the instrumentalization of knowledge, which brings it closer to other types of critique examined so far: When knowledge is regarded as a product, its relationship to its own cultural and intellectual origin becomes indistinct. Knowledge is increasingly seen as the product of a technical process rather than of human intellectual work (Furedi, 2004, p. 7) (…) Dumbing down is fueled by powerful forces that treat knowledge and culture as merely the means for the realization of a wider and higher objective…an orientation that is defined by a dogmatic commitment to instrumentalism (2004, p. 12). This is how the link is established between the general decline of standards as a social trend, and specific changes in higher education. What’s happened to the university? (Furedi, 2017) frames the transformation of universities as the last stage in decline of Enlightenment legacy of high culture and reasoned debate. Instead of this, Furedi argues, universities have given in to a “therapeutic culture” that perpetuates the image of students as permanently immature and in need of protection from any potentially disturbing experiences – from conflict with their peers to teaching material that discusses slavery, racism, sexual and other forms of violence in ways that can be hurtful to students or disrespectful of their origins (ibid.). In his view, this prevents them from confronting challenges that are an essential part of higher learning, as ‘recognition’ and ‘validation’ of ‘feeling’ takes precedence over the ability of reason to discern particular from the universal. This line of critique takes particular aim at ‘trigger warnings’, but expands it to include various cases where student unions on both sides of the Atlantic have ‘no- platformed’ controversial speakers, cancelled parties, and used other means to 159 protect themselves from exposure to ideas that, from the standpoint of Furedi and associates, would have a beneficial effect on their development or maturation as free thinkers, intellectuals, and academic citizens. Students, however, are not the ones to blame. This line of critique traces the beginnings of the practice of ‘coddling’ to university administrators, who, in their view, not only tolerate but actively promote the infantilization of students. This, in turn, is connected to the growing importance of student experience, that is, student satisfaction with services they get on campus, and the administrators’ fear of ‘bad press’ or student revolt. The reason why students can exert this sort of pressure, of course, is the shift to fees-based financing models, which allow them to act as consumers; in other words, neoliberalism. This is not necessarily the same object as in previous interventions. This line of critique focuses on the ‘paternalistic’, protectionist side of higher education policies: in other words, those policies that seek to protect or defend the interests of students qua consumers. It has fewer or no issues with markets as such; in fact, it welcomes the exchange of goods and services in the same way in which it welcomes the exchange (‘marketplace’) of ideas. What it does have an issue with, however, is that anyone would try to obstruct its flow. This line of critique converges more substantially with other forms examined here on the basic assumption that words are important. While, on the one hand, it takes ‘offense’ or ‘trauma’ to be questions of (over)sensitivity – that is, it claims that students and other representatives of ‘language police’ invest words with the power they do not have – on the other, it sees few problems in investing ‘free speech’ (literally, words as autonomous agents) with the same set of powers. In one case, words can wound or otherwise affect human beings – in the other, those same words (if allowed to flow unrestricted) can impact, transform, and in general improve their lives. In fact, exposure to these free-floating ideas is, in the view of the advocates of ‘free speech’, the purpose of higher education, and being able to engage in free exchange of words the very road to wisdom. ‘Freedom of speech’, thus, is not so much about what is being said, as about who has the right to determine what will be said at universities. The problem, then, is in the shift of the distribution of this power towards (‘spoiled and coddled’) students, or regulators, university administrators, parents – in other words, anyone but themselves. 160 This type of narrative positions the speaker as the purveyor or conduit of ‘true university values’; he (or she) knows what higher education really should be about. Sometimes, it is justified by references to academic freedom and/or academic self- governance: that is, the idea that higher education is best left to academics, who should have the final (if not the only) say in how it should be run. Speaker’s privileged access – epistemic or political – to the real nature of this inquiry is, of course, rarely explicated and even less often questioned. The detached tone of a concerned observer, thus, combines the positionality of an insider – someone who is an academic – with the epistemic authority of an outsider – that is, someone who stands above the petty squabbles and divisions that inform life both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. The position from which this defence is made presupposes that the speaker has privileged access to universal values, and the power to give an authoritative interpretation of what they are in situations of dispute. Steve Fuller’s Academic Caesar (Fuller, 2016) takes a similar route. In part a sociocultural critique similar to the style of Furedi, in part a semi-cynical ‘how-to’ manual addressed to the hypothetical university leader who seeks to steer the University through ‘troubled waters’ while accepting the ‘reality’ of neoliberalism, the book fuses the defence of the universalist tendencies of liberalism with ‘strategic’ or instrumental reasoning, justified, again, by the exigencies of the present moment: Why should the state, as the custodian of society, be interested in sustaining the teacher-researcher role that underwrites the university’s corporate integrity? Consider the talk about the need to foster a ‘climate of innovation’. Fidelity to the concept requires more than using the word ‘innovation’ a lot and boosting each and every crazy idea to paradigm-shifting status. Rather, it involves the public’s exposure – both in and out of the classroom – to people who embody the dynamic rush of intellectual life (…) They routinely move others away from their comfort zones, as they move themselves from their own. It is in this deep sense that universities provide a ‘climate of innovation’ which merits continued state support. But who is capable of leading such people? Enter the Academic Caesar (Fuller, 2016, p. 41) 161 Lest the audience retain any doubt over the speaker’s qualification to advise ‘the Academic Caesar’, Fuller reminds his readers where academics’ true allegiances should lie: … AC must also maintain a clear distinction between the university’s ‘internal’ and ‘external’ constituencies – say, on the one hand, academic staff, students and alumni, and on the other, representatives of politics, business, etc. This is how a university in the imperial mode retains its republican core, and the AC can legitimize his/her exercise of power in terms of the protection of institutional autonomy. Thus, the AC must prevent external constituencies from unduly influencing the governance of the internal constituencies, say, by allowing a large client-oriented grant to an academic department to set a standard to which other departments are then held accountable. Rather, the AC should see such grants as, in the first instance, upsetting the institution’s equilibrium, which of course need not be negative. However, the AC must then use grant overheads creatively to engage in compensation or redistribution across the institution (ibid, p. 52). There is hardly anything particularly ‘revealing’ in this injunction: in fact, it is highly likely many academic managers apply similar reasoning when engaging in their work. What it does do, however, is affirm the speaker’s epistemic authority to adjudicate the boundaries of the university – what should be in and what should be out. In a manner of speaking, this approach merges elements of civic, domestic, and industrial orders; the figure of the ‘Academic Caesar’ is a crossover between the ruler of the polity (in this case, the republic of academics) and pater familias (in the sense in which the university is a ‘home’ or household) whose ‘job’ is to create value for his constituents/family. At the same time, there is more than a whiff of military leadership, as his task is above all to protect those who are ‘inside’ (within the household/boundaries of the polity) from incursions from the ‘outside’. This dynamic of inside/outside, in the end, will assume a particularly salient form in the aftermath of the Brexit vote and in the discussions about universities’ alleged ‘Remainer’ bias. 162 Among the few consistent characteristics of referendum results was the fact that, on the whole, university town tended to vote Remain (Finn, 2018). Obviously, there are different ways in which this can be interpreted sociologically: university towns visibly benefited from immigration (which was also more educated and more highly skilled than on average); the population there was already more affluent, with higher levels of cultural and social capital; and so on. None of these, however, prevented right-wing tabloids – as well as some of mainstream media – from launching a campaign alleging universities’ ‘pro-Remainer’ bias. This particular instance has to be understood in the context of longer discussions concerning the relationship between higher education and political orientation. Like some other ‘moral panics’ (including the ‘free speech’ one), this one was in part imported from the US, where discussions of alleged ‘left-wing’ bias in universities (and especially social sciences and humanities) had been going on for some time (e.g. Haidt & Lukianoff, 2018; Bloom, 1987). Obviously, like in the US, the ‘concern’ is not entirely unfounded: it is not a big secret that academics in social sciences and humanities are more likely to hold left- than right-wing views, and that students can do the same. However, inferring that students are pro-EU because their lecturers are could be seen as a variation on the ‘free speech’ argument that assumes students are incapable of forming opinions independently of the university and thus will inevitably be ‘led on’ by what their lecturers are saying. What made the case transcend the confines of the Daily Mail was a letter sent to the Vice-Chancellors of a number of universities by the Conservative MP Chris Heaton-Harris in 2017, asking for EU-relevant syllabi. After a scandal broke out in the media, Heaton-Harris tried explaining the request was for his ‘personal research’, but to no avail. Left-leaning social media had already zeroed in on accusations of censorship, in turn fueling the right’s charge of a ‘Remainer bias’. Again, much like in the ‘free speech’ debate, the issue revolved around who has the right to decide what counts as the acceptable range of opinions, and the boundary between universities and the world of politics. Shortly after the Heaton-Harris letter, Will Davies, lecturer at Goldsmiths and one of Britain’s prominent academic political commentators, published a blog post that offered a critique of dynamics behind the ‘enemies of Brexit’ narrative: 163 If universities didn’t exist, these voices would need to invent them, if only for their own therapeutic purposes. The university has become a simulacrum onto which the anger and resentments of contemporary conservatives can be poured (…) As the frustrations of the Brexit process and long transition kick in, universities (and experts) may serve again as villains for some. (Davies, 2017) To some degree, then, the focus on universities can be seen as part of the broader attack on ‘experts’ and ‘liberal elites’, supposedly out-of-touch with popular sentiment (which, as the common wisdom went, was in favour of Brexit). Yet, what was becoming obvious was that universities were starting to be framed as stand- ins for ‘body politic’ as a whole. Davies was not alone in feeling indignant about the fact that universities, and particularly what they teach, had become a kicking post in the Brexit debacle. Yet, while previously mostly sticking to comments on social media, this period marked a shift towards connecting universities’ alleged ‘bias’ more explicitly with other sociopolitical trends: Neoliberalism has meant that universities have mastered the arts of economic justification. Their financial acumen, their marketing rhetoric, their calculations of graduate employability are now far more advanced than they were in the 1980s. They are no longer permitted to absent themselves from broader economic discourses or the capitalist obligation to compete. Brexit means that universities may now have to master equivalent skills in political and cultural justification. There is no point denying that there are forces pitted against them, many of which simply want to disempower them. But to simply join a culture war on the same terms as the instigators is to invite deadlock (ibid.) From audit culture, to culture war: the critique of transformations of higher education and research has truly come full circle. The following section will summarise this trajectory, before engaging with the ways in which authors of interventions narrate and reflect on their object. 164 Conclusions: the intervention imperative The ‘war’ on universities and, correspondingly, the need to defend them, can be distilled to the following argument. The government is trying to ‘impose’ on universities a mode of measurement, recognition, or valuation that is inimical – opposed – to the nature of the institution and what it produces. This, however, is not just a question of miscognition: if it were, academics would have little to fear beyond mild annoyance at talking at cross-purposes. However, if the government has the power to create markets – and to make students and other actors behave like consumers within them – that means it can change the very nature of education. Any attempt at reducing knowledge to economic utility, and express its value or contribution through numbers, metrics, or ranking, is, therefore, an ontological – or existential – threat. How do interventions address this threat? As Des Freedman writes in The Assault on Universities, We also have another responsibility: to defend the idea of university education as a public good that is reducible neither to market values nor to instrumental reason. Attack is often the best form of defence, and this book is a contribution not simply to thinking about how best to preserve what we have in higher education but to demand much more (Freedman, 2011, p. 10). This, in part, is what intellectual interventions set out to do: invent, or reinvent, a vocabulary or frame of thinking that could counter what is perceived as a threat to the university’s very existence. McGettigan writes: As universities and colleges are forced to operate in commercial terrain, it is basic business imperatives that come to the fore. Our habits of thought about higher education are no longer appropriate for this new terrain (GUG, ix); And later: 165 Willetts and his counterpart, the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, favour a new wave of public sector privatisation. In response, we must develop new methods of analysis and concepts which grasp the transformation we are living through (GUG, p. 9) Interventions thus share the assumption that words, that is, intellectual products, are an efficacious way to address changes to universities. In exceptional cases, these interventions address more directly the domain of the political: for instance, CPU’s Alternative White Papers were also meant to provide a policy blueprint for a potential Parliamentary opposition to legislative reforms. The majority of interventions, however, take a more ‘classical’ form, such as books – Collini, 2017, 2012; Willetts, 2017; Furedi, 2018, 2004; Docherty, 2015, 2011; McGettigan, 2012; Evans, 2004; edited volumes – Holmwood, ed., 2011; Bailey and Freedman, eds., 2011; articles, opinion pieces, ‘Letters’, and blog posts. Within these, two main ‘styles’ of critique can be identified. One, which can be described as ‘literary-cultural’, focuses on the meaning (or, as it often claims, lack thereof) of language of specific policies. The emphasis is on mocking the ‘bureaucratese’ of civil servants, pointing out the vacuity of their pronouncements or their own internal inconsistency. There is a transfer from epistemology to ontology implied here: since the ‘minds’ (or intentions) of civil servants are primarily knowable through words – that is, the language of policies – the best way to address them is more words – that is, intellectual interventions. The other style of critique, which can be described as ‘political-economic’ entails a more direct engagement with politics. Clearest examples are Alternative White Papers of the Campaign for the Public University (CPU et al., 2011) and Convention for Higher Education (Holmwood et al., 2016), which, especially in the latter case, are closer in form to policy papers than ‘traditional’ style of academic critique, but this approach is also present in Andrew McGettigan’s The Great University Gamble, for instance. This line of critique, which became more prominent after 2010, pays more attention to economic foundations (or, in the contemporary version, its financial instruments) of the relationship between universities and different social groups (academics, students) than to representations or meaning of policy language. In a manner of speaking, this can 166 be taken to signify a return to an older, materialist version of Marxist analysis, away from the ‘literary-cultural’ version associated with the influence of cultural Marxism on late 20th critique in Britain, and, especially, its institutionalization in universities. When it comes to forms of justification, however, interventions converge around the assertion of authority via claiming privileged access to – true knowledge of – the ‘nature’ of universities, knowledge, or other actors. This ‘ontological’ mode of justification entails the assertion of what Boltanski referred to as “the whatness of what is” – that is, true (and relatively stable) characteristics of reality. In this, they stake their authority on positioning other objects and persons within specific domains or worlds, where the most salient distinction is between the ‘worlds’ of universities (pure, unspoiled knowledge) and the market. Actors (‘beings’) that transgress the boundary of these worlds – predominantly coded as the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (of the university) – such as politicians or university managers and administrators are coded as ‘Other’. Through this, interventions also constitute the position of the speaker/author as someone on the inside, who, presumably, speaks for other academics – and for the university. Similarly, while certain interventions include public ‘performances’, such as book launches, panels and conferences open to ‘general audiences’ – but these events should not be mistaken for occasions of public confrontation. In Boltanskian terms, they are ‘truth tests’ rather than ‘reality tests’. They usually entail an exchange of opinions among like-minded individuals, meant to provide opportunities for the affirmation of a shared diagnostic; in other words, for the communal participation in pronouncements, or speech acts, that confirm rather than dispute ‘the whatness of what is’. In this sense, the Collini—Willetts encounter seems like a potential rupture. From the context of intellectual positioning, however, this act is less ‘disruptive’ than it may appear. Willetts’ own book, A University Education, came out barely eight months after the Senate House event. It was also promoted through events featuring only slightly differently composed ‘expert’ panels; the flagship one took place half a block away, at University of London’s Institute of Education, in January 2018. In line with Willetts’ critique of ‘impressionistic’ interventions, this can be seen as an act of epistemic positioning that signals belonging to the 167 world of educational (that is, specific) expertise rather than the general commentariat. This means we need to explain both how these come about, and what, specifically, makes authors choose a specific mode of or venue for interventions. After all, many other responses to changes to universities are imaginable: from silence and compliance, to organizing a protest or strike, running for office on a political platform that would seek to challenge these processes, or – even – leaving academia altogether. However, with few marked exceptions, these responses were almost entirely absent. Until the USS strikes in 2018, labour organising at universities was relatively weak and haphazard, and UCU membership stood at a historic low. Similarly, despite the preponderance of discourses about the deterioration of working conditions in the academia – including, especially in the aftermath of the suicide of Stephen Grimm of Imperial College in 2015, rising concerns about ‘mental health’ and ‘well-being’ – ‘protest’ resignations remained few and were usually motivated by other compounding factors, such as in the case of Sara Ahmed, who left her post at Goldsmiths College in reaction to the institution’s refusal to address a case of sexual harassment. Accounting for interventions, therefore, requires engaging with actors’ own explanations and reflections; for this, we turn to interviews. 168 169 Chapter 5: Interviews Introduction and a note on transcription Preceding chapters situated intellectual interventions in historical, political, and economic context, and provided a formal analysis of their content. This chapter focuses on how authors of some of these interventions narrate their own identity, agency, and position, starting from the point at which they decided to engage in interventions, through their relations with other relevant actors in the higher education landscape – from fellow academics to university managers, administrators, and politicians – to their reflections on the political moment and the role of interventions (and, by extension, intellectuals as such) in it. In this sense, authors’ reflections and self-narration are assumed to represent an accurate (though, obviously, imperfect) reflection of their views of ‘the world’ and what it means to intervene in it. As elaborated in Chapter 2, interviews were relatively unstructured, allowing participants to develop their train of thought and conversations to flow as naturally as possible given the constraints of the situation. Of course, like any form of self-narration, these reflections are both stylized and themselves a product of interaction between narrators and the interviewer. To provide a better sense of how some of these reflections emerged dialogically, longer excerpts from interviews occasionally include my lines or questions, indicated by [JB]. Similarly, excerpts from field notes are included in cases where they are helpful in illuminating the context of the situation. In most cases, however, participants’ narratives are at the front. In accordance with this, narratives are minimally edited for clarity (e.g., erased hesitations and repetitions), and identifying elements have been omitted. As noted in Chapter 2, this can make participants seem distant, or ‘incorporeal’; however, this was a necessary precaution against specific quotes being too obviously traceable to a specific author. Participants were also assigned random pseudonyms; these are further varied in the exposition, which means their primary purpose is to allow for relatively ‘natural’ sentence structure whilst maintaining anonymity of their authors. 170 The concluding parts of the chapter offer some reflections on what the way in which participants narrate and reflect on their social world means, in particular in the context of the relationship between knowledge, interventions, and reflexivity. More than a feeling As an anthropologist, I was very aware of preconceived notions about the field, and particularly about participants’ intentions or motives. The opening part of the interviews immediately challenged some of these notions. Namely, intellectual interventions – as the name suggests – are usually thought of as intellectual products. This connotes a process of thinking, possibly engaging or applying theoretical or analytical ‘toolkit’ of one’s own discipline, as well as positioning that product in different social contexts where it is meant to have effects. Prior to coming to Cambridge, my views on intellectuals were primarily shaped through reading Bourdieu (especially 2000 and 1984) and New Class theorists (in particular those who focused on Eastern Europe – e.g. King and Szélenyi, 2004; Eyal, Szélenyi and Townsley, 1998), both of which emphasized the role of strategic, rational conduct when it came to intellectuals. It could be said I had an overcognitivized notion of interventions. Yet, as the interviews began with questions about how interventions came about and what prompted them, most participants narrated their initial entry as prompted by a feeling. Beatrice*, for instance, narrated how her initial intervention came about in response to redundancies at the higher education institution where she was working at the time: …it was terrible because they were basically cutting back people on the basis of not having adequate grants – really losing people who were very far from being dead wood, but who didn't meet some sort of fairly rigid criteria, and I can't quite remember it, but I was sufficiently exercised to write something that eventually got into Times Higher… Anne* described the process of deciding to write a book about changes in higher education: 171 I was really angry about it and I wanted to make the case in public, so this is where [the book] came from, yeah – and I've seen so much going wrong. I just thought there was so much happening that I was not happy with and so much happening that I thought was just nonsense, absolute nonsense, and I thought I have no place here and I want to explain why. Luke* framed his frustration with both the political situation and the changes in higher education in the following manner: …various things were really getting under my skin all at once so I began to realise that universities were becoming a sort of lightning rod for all of the frustrations and sort of neuroses and fantasies of Britain... “Angry”, “frustrated”, “exercised”, “under [my] skin”: these words suggest participants experience the processes they are writing about in a highly personalized and visceral way. Of course, this is congruous with a steadily expanding set of scholarly work that focuses on the affective, or ‘felt’, effects of neoliberalism in universities (Loveday, 2018; McNeill, 2014; Burrows, 2012; Gill, 2009; Sparkes, 2007). Some of this work is influenced by the ‘affective turn’, but a lot of it draws on the tradition of feminist analysis as well as Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structure of feeling’, designed to link phenomenological and ontological aspects of Marxism. Yet, while most of these analyses focus on internalization of feelings, and the often-detrimental effects on academics’ general or mental health, participants in my study talk about externalization, that is, the drive to ‘get it out there’. This suggests interventions can be seen as a way of translating a visceral, felt experience of one’s working conditions into an intellectual product. One participant, for instance, recounted how they wrote an entire book in “about six weeks…it was all settled in my head and then it was about a chapter a week”. Anne* similarly said: 172 Oh I wrote it really really fast. I wrote it in about three months, and I knew exactly what I want[ed] to say, and if I was to write it again I would go back and be a bit more careful about things. But no, I didn't find it difficult to write. For Richard*, the speed of output was one of the criteria in deciding how to frame, or pitch interventions: I can write very quickly and I just go get it off my desk, whereas the problem with doing things for those sorts of [edited] publications is they want to send it round and round and round over several months. I think psychologically that's not very -- it comes back again two weeks later and it comes back…there are times when that sort of thing can and can be conducive. So that's why I think I like blogging, it's much more, sort of, it's done and then it's gone kind of. This participant has published via other channels: newspapers, journals, even podcasts. However, he sees the editing process, in some contexts, as an unnecessary encumbrance in placing interventions ‘out there’. Yet, this distinction can normally be made only from an already established position; in other words, in order to be able to choose a particular route, one needs to have access to both ‘gatekeeper’ publications and own venues for publishing. Thus, despite the feeling of ‘immediacy’ that characterizes participants’ descriptions, the process of producing interventions requires more than ‘just a feeling’. It was interesting to see how – and if – participants would narrate other factors. The accidental expert The very definition of intellectual intervention presumes its successful accomplishment, at least to the degree of placing it ‘out there’. What began to emerge from interviews was that possibility of making an intervention hinges on access to different kind of social networks. This is how George* described his initial involvement: 173 I've written for [journal] for quite a few years on the ordinary things I write about; I can't remember why, I think I must have just one point suggested could I write something about -- or maybe they suggested would I write something about -- current higher education policy. But once I started doing it then it became more an expectation, when there was a new piece of legislation or policy, they would contact me and say would I write something about it... Ellen* recalled being approached by a publisher after a public lecture: I think I've given a talk and maybe the publisher came to me; I mean I didn't have to find a publisher. I know that; I just thought, okay they came to me; and I mean okay that was perfectly a perfectly fine publisher so…I'll go in that direction. Nigel*’s book, similarly, emerged from the dialogue with a publisher’s agent: …and the colleague from [publisher] stuck around for a little bit of coffee together and we got chatting, and to be absolutely frank I rather rashly promised the book. They published another {of} my book{s}. So publisher came and we spoke about the series, and as sometimes happens, the question well what about you as editor, have you got anything? So I said well as a matter of fact yes I do. JB: What made you rashly promise it? N: Because I felt I wanted to write it and I've got on very well with colleague from [that press]. And so he said 'it's a great book you've got there, it all sounds really interesting, what's it about? And I kind of made it up there and then, saying a bit of chapter on this, a bit of chapter on that and so on. Publishers seem to take quite a proactive role in bringing about interventions. Fred*, for instance, had good connections in the publishing world, and had served as editor for a number of book series: 174 So we had good relations with people at that publisher. Because of being the sort of connected in those ways then publishers are interested to chat about who have you spotted amongst your colleagues, who we should be approaching for books. The phrase ‘the sort of connected’ reflects the social capital involved in being able to place interventions ‘out there’. This underscores the importance of belonging to the same social networks as publishers and editors. Of course, not all participants – at least not initially – had contacts in the publishing world. Some publishers are less accessible – the London Review of Books, for instance, has a reputation for publishing only commissioned pieces – while others are more open to unsolicited contributions. Some participants placed their interventions in smaller outlets, or ran personal blogs, before being taken up by a major publisher. This is how Paul* described his initial foray into higher education writing: I guess the first editor who was looking around for someone to work with asked me -- I just knew him, so it was accidental somewhat that I became focused on writing on higher education. It is not very difficult to infer from this a class affinity between the world of literary and media editors and that of academics. As Halsey noted, this is also a feature of the specific dynamic and direction of growth of both sectors (1992). It is interesting to ask, however, why these factors do not merit even a passing mention. Of course, the fact participants described interventions almost as if happening ‘by accident’ can be read as an artefact of modesty or perhaps a particularly English tendency to speak of oneself in a deprecating tone14. Yet, quite a few – if not all – were familiar with theories of social reproduction, making frequent references to factors such as class, gender, or background in other parts of interviews. This means it would be reasonable to expect participants to make at least a passing reference to their social 14 It warrants mentioning that while all participants live and work in the UK, not all of them are English. Even if they were, the validity of inference on the basis of a ‘national character’ is truly doubtful. 175 status. This did not happen; what they did talk about was how a particular institutional position or context shaped their interventions. Some participants’ initial foray into higher education as a topic of intellectual inquiry was shaped by their experience in administration or management. Ellen*, for instance, became head of her department at the time of the introduction of research assessment. This is how she describes the experience: I split myself down the middle and also made it very clear to [my staff] that I was unhappy and had a lot of critical problems with the research assessment exercise. And to make that good I thought I should take on what was happening as a research topic and try to understand it intellectually, and become interested in it so to speak, that research will do [what] research always does, which is get one involved and interested. Fred*, who took on the position of social science dean, reflected on how demands of managing time shaped his interest in the topic: …it is very difficult to manage doing research and being a dean, unless you make being a dean part of your research. So I became interested to see…all the background of it, I had to be interested in higher education policy. For Paul*, researching higher education became a way to reconcile managerial and academic logic: And then research of course. We would get research contracts. After a while I became a Pro Vice-Chancellor, it was a part-time role at that point – half- time; so I would have sort of 9–5 job in the administration and [teaching] a three-hour class in the evening. JB: Did you have any qualms about accepting the Pro-VC position? P: No. Because I think it was quite a different context at the time, these were rotating posts, it was a very traditional model of academic governance. I mean it was changing quite rapidly at this point. Previous PVC had no 176 management responsibilities, didn't have to do performance management, any of that. But just before I came they changed it, so that was quite...but in a way it was interesting because if you study education it’s all like very extended fieldwork, being a higher education manager [my emphasis]. Interventions emerge from a particular situational tension, that between being an academic, and being a manager or administrator – which, for some participants, meant they would necessarily be taking part in exactly the sort of activities that critique of neoliberalism denounces. Trying to apprehend an object or practice intellectually thus becomes a strategy for managing the experience of simultaneous (or sequential) occupation of conflicting roles. This could be a variation on framing interventions as a strategy for dealing with negative feelings such as anger or frustration; in this case, however, the feelings in question were more ambiguous. Translating ambiguity about occupying a position that is simultaneously ‘Us’ (academic) and ‘Them’ (manager) into an intellectual interest, thus, can also be a way to justify involvement with ‘dirty’ elements of higher education, such as management, power, or finance. Research, in this sense, can simultaneously be a technique of cognitive-affective management, and a technique of signaling: I’m not in this for power/money, this is all like extended fieldwork to me. This is particularly interesting as some participants were quick to disavow any claim to expertise in the traditional sense. Anne*, describing her work as “in a sense a conceptual answer to what I was searching for, which was some kind of framework within which to start putting my own comments”, added: [When] I say research – I mean, I didn’t do any respectable first-hand sort of science research, you know, I read a bit and thought a bit and wrote some ironic essays. George* mentioned his longer-standing interest in the history of universities, but hastened to add: I didn't believe anything I was saying was very original. I thought I was – not recent work, but I really only rearticulated in a moment what's going on. 177 Rearticulating a relatively familiar conception, I thought that was what I was doing then. While downplaying their own expertise can again be attributed to modesty or perhaps even to the interview situation (some of my own work included what could be dubbed ‘respectable first-hand research’), the weight of this admission becomes clearer when seen in the context of interventions. As noted in the preceding chapter, most authors assume an authoritative voice, often without qualms about extrapolating their experience to the universal level, or at least that of their audience. In this sense, how participants construct their position as speaking for other academics warrants particular attention. Speaking for the people: universalism of the particular? Interventions present the state of higher education as it is, rather than as it appears to them; references to the specificity of one’s epistemic position are rare, if not entirely absent. In other words, authority in interventions is performed through appeals to universality, rather than positionality. Through interviews, however, it became obvious that participants often based validity and/or veracity of their arguments on assumed agreement and recognition coming other academics. George*, for instance, talked about his surprise at the volume of reactions: What I remember is the extraordinary postbag that I got, that is to say a response from people so – I mean I'd written occasional things which were went beyond the specialist audience but {this went} far beyond it, I got letters from all kinds of people, academics principally, not only, but dozens. Oh they were just immensely grateful that someone was saying it, and {they were} expressing their agreement. Ellen*’s early experience of talking about developments at UK universities abroad played a decisive role in framing her interest: On the way I stopped at […]. They wanted me to give a paper and I thought, well, I’ll give them something really exotic, I’ll talk about what’s happening 178 in British universities, you know, this will blow their minds, you know – unheard of. But everybody turned around to me and said ‘this is happening here’. Okay. So that sort of shook the braincells a bit. Obviously, who the audience is (or is imagined to be) is not irrelevant in this context. While most participants talk about ‘the public’ in general, interviews suggest they see their audience as primarily composed of other academics. This audience is assumed to share the predicament and thus at least tacit agreement with authors of interventions. In this sense, intellectuals interviewed here construct their role as speaking for, or on behalf of other academics. Early in the interviews, George*’s remark caught my attention: The interesting thing you stick your head above the parapet is everybody comes along and congratulates you on doing it, but nobody else will do it. It's a lonely place up there. This would suggest participants do not think themselves particularly exceptional in terms of intervening, it’s just that somebody has to do it. This calls to mind Gramsci’s ‘organic’ intellectuals, who act as representatives of their class. Yet, this raises two questions: if participants are not ‘experts’ in higher education in the strict sense of the term – and we saw they do not claim epistemic privilege on the basis of scientific justifications of authority – what makes them better suited or positioned to talk about it than any of their colleagues? Furthermore, if they speak for other academics, what does this imply about claims to ‘universality’, especially those deployed in the ontological mode of justification? Sociological accounts of intellectual interventions rarely focus on what makes authors achieve a position from which they feel they can intervene. In part, this is an epistemological consequence of the past tendency to treat ‘intellectuals’ as a relatively coherent social group: from this point of view, anyone with an academic position (or disposition) and an opinion about a particular topic has equal possibility (if not capacity) to contribute to public discussions. In accounts that emphasise individual or biographical factors, actual success or effects of intellectual interventions flow from a combination of personal inclination and social circumstances: this, for instance, is the case with Gross’ (2002) biography 179 of Richard Rorty, and Boschetti’s (1988) analysis of Sartre (see also Baert, 2015). Those that put an emphasis on social or structural factors tend to frame interventions as outcomes of a fortuitous coupling between specific configurations of ‘markets’ for intellectual interventions (including editors, publishers, presses, and the media), intellectuals’ work or domain of expertise, and the political and historical salience of a particular topic – as, for instance, in Baert’s account of the rise of Sartre and the popularity of existentialism in the aftermath of WWII. What these accounts do not delve on, however, is what makes intellectuals feel they have the right to intervene. In other words, where does this ‘intervention imperative’ stem from? This is quite relevant given that, at any given point in time, the number of people who could intervene on particular topics is greater than the number of interventions that eventually become articles, books, etc. While self-selection certainly plays a role, it would be a bit naïve to assume this is the only or even decisive factor. For instance, being recognized as able to make an authoritative public intervention depends on gender, race, age and seniority (Evans, 2009; Solnit, 2014; Penny, 2014; Spivak, 2003; McKinnon, 2016), as well as different intersections between these categories (Hill Collins, 2009). Similarly, it makes sense to assume that the perception of relative security of one’s own position plays a role in interventions, though not necessarily in straightforward ways. While a detailed study of the relationship between these factors and interventions merits a treatise on its own, it was interesting to see if participants reflected on how these factors shaped – that is, enabled and constrained – their own interventions. One interpretation my participants offered is that other academics were simply unaware of, or uninterested in, changes going on in the sector. Describing his initial involvement in writing on higher education, Jake* remarked: I was surprised at how little critique these developments were attracting in the 1980s, and I think particularly because most academics really just seem rather unaware of them. Nigel*, however, offered a more nuanced account: 180 There's a kind of huge debate I think in the academic community at the moment over the fundamental issues of academic freedom; [but] for many many colleagues, there is no issue over academic freedom. They never think about it, they've no concerns about it, they just do their stuff. By contrast at the other extreme there are some colleagues who fear that anything they [do] -- touch the keyboard or open their mouth, they are jeopardizing their careers. In this latter group, is the group obviously that is critical of the tendencies and directions of travel of higher education generally and that it can be locally, in a particular institution, nationally within the UK, internationally, worldwide and so on. It tends to be people who are taking an interest not just in the work that they do but the conditions under which that work is made possible or made difficult. This opens the more complex question of the relationship between the perception of risk stemming from ‘speaking out’ and one’s own career. In other words, it brings in the question of position from which intellectuals think it is possible to intervene, as well as ways in which one’s position within the academia can enable or, alternatively, limit this form of engagement. This situates interventions more clearly within the context of academic structures and, consequently, power relations. Fred* remarked: Very few academics have really spoken out, I think. How audit functions is that it creates a rank order, and it creates people who are successful and people who are not, and those who are successful aren't willing to criticise the mechanism that produces their success. Joseph* delivered a similarly, if not more, damning account of academic resistance: A significant minority of academics are completely gone and internalized [current trends]. I don't think academics feel particularly brave at the moment in terms of staying against the spring, because particularly in America, you do get clobbered, you know. But so what? So there's a kind of conformist element and I think that at the end of the day sort of most academics would 181 just rather have an easy life. I mean, we're not living in an age of rebellion at the moment in terms of strong, important intellectual causes. For Fred*, this amounts to willful ignorance: I'm saying UCU hasn't noticed that casualisation benefits some senior academics who also benefited by the way the REF operates. But that's the mechanism by which academics are being kept, you know, the rewards, every professor is in the 10 percent or possibly the top five percent [of earners]. So if you say well what's happening to universities, is what's happening to wider inequality – you're not innocent of that. I think too many academics are sort of quasi neoliberals, whilst being protected from that sort of realization. This is a much more differentiated view of agency than the one implied by the “fat cats and evil Thatcherites vs. good academics” in interventions. Interestingly, Fred* also belongs to the top five to ten percent of earners; yet, he obviously does not count himself as one of “quasi-neoliberals”. This serves to highlight the role of interventions as a form of mediating structural contradictions. It is almost as if participants think that critique can ‘purify’ them of implication in the sort of structure that they are describing. In turn, this brings in a more ambiguous view of power relations within and outside of the university. The ambivalent institution During one of the interviews, Laura* criticized at length research assessment system that rewards the greatest number of published journal articles. Given that she had recently published a book – a publication that, while counting towards the institution’s research assessment score, was not a journal article – I half-jokingly asked whether publishing a monograph was a performative statement against the ‘overproduction’ of scientific publications. Laura* paused for a moment, and responded very seriously: 182 It was a performative statement {inasmuch as} by that time I was a professor and I was well-established myself, and I thought, okay, I have this position, and nobody is going to not promote me or, you know, tell me that I’ve got to get a load of research money. I can do it. So I’ll occupy that space. Beatrice* similarly reflected on the way her disciplinary position and success in obtaining research grants created a space from which she felt she could speak out without fear of being either seen as self-interested, or risking censure. I am one of the few people who, I regard myself as in the sciences…I feel I should speak out because it looks paradoxical to be a successful scientist [who] published a lot, you get occasionally a big grant, so I thought that it doesn't look like -- I can actually say I think that this system sucks and I've been very lucky because I've been funded by a charity. I haven't been dependent on the university system to sort of keep it going, I've been going on a parallel stream. The paradox, obviously, is that participants recognize their part-dependence on the academic rewards and promotions system that sustains their capacity to criticize that very system (or, at least, its newer manifestations). The position of relative safety that gives my participants the security to engage in interventions is, after all, the effect of awards accrued through channels that form part of the broader ‘ecosystem’ of research funding: if not universities, then charities and research councils. While – at least in this participant’s view – being framed as alternatives, or counterweights, they are effects of precisely the processes that forms the object of their critique. Charities, for instance, have stepped into higher education and research funding in part in order to fill the gap created by the restructuring of state expenditure, particularly in the field of basic research. While some charitable bodies – for instance, the Wellcome Trust – have a longer history of funding research, the introduction of performance-based research funding made these organisations more central to financing research in public universities. Public engagement and impact agenda within REF, in particular, incentivised the involvement of partner organisations from industry, charities, or the public sector. Last, but not least, the 183 very expansion of the charitable sector, and especially its extension into R&D activities, can be seen as part of state withdrawal from financing research and/or replacing direct funding of research with public-private partnerships (e.g. Birch, Tyfield, and Chiapetta, 2018). Even without delving into layers of political economy of research in the UK, however, there is a more obvious sense in which participants are dependent precisely on their object of critique: namely, most forms of research funding require recipients to be affiliated with a public higher education institution. This means interventions entail a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, participants depend on universities not only for their livelihoods, but also for the position from which they can apply for alternative sources of income – such as research grants – which, in turn, can provide a degree of independence from the institution. This degree of independence is, at the same time, what allows them to be critical, including, in some cases, of the institution itself. As Luke* framed it, succinctly: I think I feel the privilege of being at this university quite highly in the sense that its entire, you know, brand – is the sort of critical public intellectual, and if you work within that kind of spirit I don't think anyone can really criticise you ever. You could say something outrageous, but I think they couldn't criticise the intentions of trying to contribute to that kind of debate. Obviously, not all institutions are equally tolerant of their staff vocally engaging incritique. As the case of Thomas Docherty suggests, being perceived as too critical of one’s own institution can bring serious repercussions. In practice, participants often frame their interventions in a way that avoids targeting their home institution. Reflecting on possible consequences, Richard* said: Actually it's interesting that the Daily Mail and co. and the Telegraph have really gone for the Russell Group. I think that they're looking for bigger scalps in a way than this university, that's the way I would see it. But I didn't want to get the university in any trouble. 184 Beatrice* described how the Head of Department approached something she had written: I think I almost fell out of rank with [HoD] at one time because we got a circular around saying that we should pick up four papers with an impact factor to put in for the REF, and I went ballistic and I didn't just respond to him, I did a circular for the whole department and he was really nice. And subsequently when he read my blog he said, he just came to me: ‘I'm not going to stop you doing this but if you're going to write this again, could you please first let me know?’, and some thought because -- I think what had happened is I had been careful not to name names too much. But he was the chair of the panel [for the discipline] as well so it was really difficult, but he was a very nice man basically at pains to tell me I was free to say what I wanted. JB: Did you warn him next time? B: Yeah. JB: Did that change anything? B: Not really {laughs}, he said ‘thank you, it's nice to know it's coming’. George* said: There have been people especially those who've been involved in some senior position in universities – who have either said to me directly or it's been reported to me that it is their view that this is potentially counterproductive and troublemaking, that governments and officials don't like this kind of criticism, and that it's important for universities to get on well with the Department of Business and its officials and so this really is very ill-advised. So there's been a little bit of that. But from colleagues in the immediate sense, I've only just encountered support. 185 This brings us closer to the source of ambivalence in participants’ interventions. On the one hand, the capacity to engage in interventions, including critique of higher education policies, is dependent on their position within the academia. At the same time, the university management has the power not only to reprimand but also, in some cases, seriously limit staff’s freedom to teach and research (during suspension, for instance, Docherty was forbidden from having any contact with students). In this, universities are framed as fundamentally ambiguous institutions: they are simultaneously sites of protection and enablement and of potential punishment and constraint (cf. Bacevic, 2018). This fundamental ambiguity helps explain some of the ways in which participants relate to different actors, or elements, in their context. Boundary subjects As noted in the previous chapter, interventions tend to position sources of neoliberalism on ‘the outside’. ‘Outside’ denotes social space beyond the university, but also forces, or values, that are inimical or dangerous to it. There are two main categories of actors associated with the introduction of neoliberalism to universities: politicians and policymakers on the one hand; and managers and administrators on the other. What distinguishes these two groups is precisely the degree of proximity to the university: politicians and policymakers are, at least on average, properly ‘on the outside’. Managers and university administrators, however, are ‘inside-outsiders’, that is, conveyors of neoliberal ideology within the university. This leads to a rather interesting difference in how they are treated in participants’ narratives. Laura*, for instance, described initial reactions to the Jarratt report as [I felt] we were judged by the people who had no experience of universities (…) I mean just the sheer absence of any fundamental understanding of what academics are supposed to be doing. And the way secondly what was expressed, a nonsense language, aims and objectives, etc. etc. Or, as Luke* put it: 186 It's been clear that since Thatcher [that] governments have been trying to find ways of shrinking autonomy of universities and of academics in various ways…like, you know -- to represent what goes on in universities in as either purely financial, which is one part of it, or as some sort of politically correct form of resentment or something is just, you know, who are these people?...And don't dump that shit on the universities. “Who are these people?” is a succinct summary of participants’ attitude towards policies for higher education and research – or, at least, those who make them. This is where we encounter bankers and Thatcherite politicians of intellectual interventions in a different guise: people who had no experience of universities, or, in other words, people who are not ‘One of us’. Joseph* recounted his first experience of being assessed: I remember because the year my son was born we had our first ever quality assurance inspector. I was chief examiner at that time. And I just remember being horrified by this guy coming into my class and talking to him afterwards. I said ‘Well, what do you think?’. And he basically had no clue. And he said to me he wasn't interested in the content of my lecture, but was interested in whether I ticked the right box, with process and everything, you know, that I was aware of all the different skills or outcomes…and I basically said I couldn't give a flying fuck. The perceived lack of competence is also a salient topic for Luke*: I don't think that any of these wankers writing about universities out there, or in their 50s, have a clue what it's like to be a student right now. But I suppose I felt like…how dare you say how you going to measure teaching when you clearly have no idea what teaching is actually like?...Like someone pitched up and said ‘you know, there's now this sort of new way of evaluating architecture’ and yet they knew nothing about buildings or design. The question of knowledge, or epistemic position, re-emerges in participants’ feeling of indignation: policies for higher education and research are being made 187 by people who have neither the requisite experience nor knowledge to make those judgments. Here we can see the main elements of the ‘war’ as portrayed in interventions analysed in the preceding chapter: language (or discourse) that seems at odds with what participants think universities should be about; the tying of education and research to economic outcomes; the introduction of measurement (audit and surveillance) mechanisms to ensure universities conform to these objectives; and, last but not least, the sense of disempowerment compounded by the fact that academics felt they no longer had a say in how universities are run, and that those who do have a say do not necessarily know a lot about universities. In this sense, who are these people? reflects both the outrage at the changes introduced in higher education and research that academics presumably have no influence on, and, not less importantly, the feeling that people who do have an influence have no place, or do not belong, in universities in the same way that academics do. Consider, for instance, Joan*’s reflection on possible causes of Margaret Thatcher’s animosity towards higher education: I mean…it's just the snobbery of Oxford that she met. She had a funny accent, you know, she went to Oxford at the point where there was a generation of women who had the place to themselves during the war, an incredible generation of women philosophers in Oxford in particular who really dominated philosophy in the post-war period…I think that really the culture, certainly in women's colleges, and with senior members of those colleges where there was a sense of 'we know who we are and this is the way in which we operate in the world'. And this rather prissy young woman would have been absolute anathema to that view of the world and that kind of presentation of self...and I think you could see it so powerfully in those women that for Margaret Thatcher – you know, Margaret Thatcher was just something which they had no liking of. Joan* is hardly a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher; having experienced the effects of Conservative policies on teaching and research, she criticized Thatcher at length in other parts of our conversation. Yet, this does not prevent her from admitting that universities can be alienating and exclusionary places; in the same 188 vein, she discusses the role of class dynamics – the snobbery of intellectual elites, and the strange way in which gender, coded as a specific idea of (alternative) standards of femininity among post-war women philosophers at Oxford – could have played a role in Thatcher’s alienation. In effect, she reconstructs the process by which Thatcher was positioned as not ‘one of Us’. The question of knowledge and experience also emerges in Anne*’s reflections about Jo Johnson, Secretary of State for Universities at the time of the interview. While this participant is way less ‘understanding’ of Johnson’s position than Joan* is of Thatcher’s, she bases her critique precisely on the idea that Johnson has no direct knowledge of universities; that, in fact, his policies are based on hearsay – more precisely, on bad experiences recounted to him by his constituents: Because [politicians] make me terribly cross when they do say stupid things or – I mean I get incredibly cross with Jo Johnson because I think he deliberately distorts things to make it look as if we're all lazy bastards and so kicking around it a bit. But, at the same time, if it was possible to talk to him and explain what was wrong about TEF I would like to try and do that. The problem is that everybody agrees that he is particularly impervious to anybody else's point of view, determined to push this path (…) I think he must have talked to voters who have as kids {had} bad experiences, that {they offered} this sort of anecdote 'I had a constituent whose son had such and such tutor’ attitude. He is rather sort of rampaging in and he always starts his speeches, as they all do, by saying British universities are the envy the world but then he starts talking about ways of tearing them apart, basically. The value of knowing what one is talking becomes particularly pronounced when this sort of narrative is contrasted with the way participants talk about David Willetts. Quite a few of my participants had the opportunity to interact with Willetts, and while it would probably be fair to say most disagree with him politically, there is a clear sense of a different attitude: I have often put two or three times been on some kind of panel or event with him and although clearly we have different views, he was always very civil, he's really a clever sophisticated man. 189 Beatrice* described a panel in which another academic (also a participant in the study) was sharing the floor with Willetts, saying: You know here is another lefty person who's all sort of conspiracy and paranoia ‘everybody in power is bad’ and I do find myself thinking ‘no, that's not the way to go with Willetts’. You know the way to go with Willetts [is] to sort of recognize by his own lights I think he's an honest man who's doing his best in trying to come up with ideas, you know, he's a crafty bugger but at the same time, you know, I think if you were him you would have to be very pragmatic and say what would you put in its place or you how would you prove you're accountable, you've got to engage and -- always with politicians, one thing we've always been told even with scientific communication you can't just sort of put something on a problem, but you have to give an answer, you have to give your own solution, and it can't be ‘overthrow the Tory party’. Apparent incongruity between the former Minister’s manners and his ideology, for instance, was a source of bafflement for Laura*: We've been on panels together and he's actually, he's very well mannered, he is quite articulate and he is not unresponsive. So you wouldn't just meet him and think ‘oh why am I here’, you know, ‘what am I doing’. There's something there which is thoughtful but it's such an incoherent – I mean perhaps we all are – that you know you can see the mix, you know, [of] this wish to be thought a civilized person genuinely interested in education with, on the other hand, absolute commitment to the market and the market resolving all difficulties and the market resolving higher education. What takes place is an interesting differentiation in the ways in which participants interpret and narrate motives of other people. Namely, there is no reason to assume Willetts’ commitment to market ideology is different or less sincere than that of any other politician. Yet, in his case, participants are quick to emphasise his good manners and readiness to enter into reasonable argument; his belief in the power 190 of the market is seen to be somehow misguided, representing a source of bafflement. Contrast this with the way participants judge and narrate the actions of university managers and administrators. Paul* explained: I think most senior managers have adopted a kind of managerialist ideology, very broadly defined. I think it's… what their personal convictions are I think is often different from their public stances have to be…I think a lot of VCs are quite politically naïve, they thought that they would get high tuition fees this would increase their income. But actually otherwise the world wouldn't change than much. They didn't realise this was a bargain. JB: A bargain in exchange for what? P: Well in the sense that once you once you adopt you know people will there will be extra demands for value for money...it will encourage students to take a very instrumental view of what they are buying. And then also bring in the state as the regulator to protect the 'best interest' of the students. Richard* said: Vice chancellors seem so scared of saying anything, and maybe they’re appropriately cautious, maybe if they did start stirring things up they would just have their funds cut back even more…That's what it seems to come down to, they're afraid to criticise government because it will put them in a difficult position. But I mean I think if they got together…they could make a strong case, but I think the problem is that people [who] got into positions of being VCs are either already coming from businesses or else they seem to get completely corrupted by being in that position, no longer remembering what academic life is, what the intention of it is. Here we encounter again the critique of managers as ‘inverted’, corrupted, no- longer-academics. Of course, Vice Chancellors’ ‘corruption’ by business interests can also be seen as a reflection of the ‘fat cats’ narrative in the media. Yet, the fact 191 participants’ narratives equalise the pursuit of economic ‘self-interest’ (implied by VCs’ high salaries) with the pursuit of financial or economic interest of the university as an organization suggests that this particular form of justification serves to lump everything dedicated to the pursuit of economic ends as ‘Other’. In this sense, situating managers in the ‘market world’ also serves to distinguish them from other academics. This is particularly interesting since economic rewards for working in higher education, obviously, are not uniquely distributed to the managerial profession. While they perhaps could not aspire to the astronomical sums offered to the Bath Vice-Chancellor, none of my participants work for free; in addition to their regular income, they benefit from book royalties, speaking fees, as well as, for some, consulting work – including in the private sector. Yet, they are adamant about maintaining the boundary between the type of ‘self-interest’ that could be identified with academic values – presumably non-economic – and the type of self-interest ascribed to Vice-Chancellors, politicians, and other people ‘not like us’. This is why the moral status of actors has to be relatively fixed: they are either ‘good’ (on ‘our’ side, that is, defending public higher education), or ‘evil’ – that is, corrupted or led astray by financial or economic interests. Their politics – their agency – is assumed to flow more-or-less unproblematically from these foundations. Unsurprisingly, this moral ontology does not deal well with ambiguity; actors that seem to ‘cross’ boundaries – e.g. David Willetts – are seen as a source of bafflement. While some participants allow for a degree of ‘uncoruptness’ among, for instance, administrators, as a whole this group is placed in the moral-ontological category of the Other: foreign, abject, reprehensible. This is particularly pronounced in contrast with the accounts of the relationship with university administration before the introduction of techniques of audit and management. Ellen* reflected on this: There was a very interesting moment in 1992 in this university. There was an audit of administration, survey of administration and the results of the survey were, well, this university must be quite a good place, well it was doing quite good things, but we don't we can't see how it works. Now instead 192 of asking or thinking – ah, maybe there's something between it being quite a good place and not knowing how it works, maybe there's a connection -- but OK, that's not of course what happened. What happened was 'oh, they can't see how it works!' and that was the point [at] which the university began building up its huge managerial machinery. I mean up to that point one of the things why things worked because you know you trusted people, because you only know a few people to trust. I mean it the administrators were basically sort of semi-academics, just a handful of them and then after that of course we have the present huge administrative structure, it's quite different. Basically, what Ellen* is protesting is not just the subsumption of knowledge to a system of measurement; it is the fact that it was being valued by someone other than ‘Us’. This form of positioning thus entails defining one’s position in relation to ‘Others’ who are trying to occupy, or shape, the same space. Positioning is performed not only through the assertion of cognitive (or experiental) superiority of the speaker, but also through the assertion of moral (non-)equivalence. Framing neoliberalism as something foreign to universities thus serves to distinguish between those on the inside who benefit from these changes, and those on the inside who are adversely impacted by them. ‘War on universities’, thus, is both topological and ontological: it serves to delineate political space in which interventions happen, and to define actors and other entities within it. In this context, practices of delineation and positioning are mutually dependent and reinforcing: the positioning of actors at the same time serves to validate the construction of social space in which positioning can be performed. Knowledge and (human) interests For Ellen*, current conflicts are a reflection of a longer, and deeper, societal division: I think there is something that we're seeing all over again, its effects under the present review, which is the drive of utilitarianism just doesn't give up. 193 The measurement of things, I mean, however you dress it up you know…This utilitarianism shows itself in various ways one of which is drawing down elites, attacking elites. And that's very pervasive, and higher education – I guess if you were in soccer or rugby is would be a little bit different, but in higher education expertise and achievement is, you know, elitist; universities are open to the charges of elitism and then that becomes looks like a question of self-interest. In fact it would be very interesting for you to plot what is and is not valued as self-interest because self-interest in these Brexiteers we were talking about (is), an alignment of self-interest, that's good; academic self- interest in the promotion of science, that's baaad. The relationship between knowledge (or critique) and self-interest, of course, is a central concern for both social theory (Habermas, 1972) and sociology of knowledge/science. In this context, however, it seems participants equate ‘interest’ with particularity, that is, loss of position from which it is possible to claim a general or universal ‘outlook’. In other words, ‘interests’ are equated with professional interests, that is, the idea that academics no longer ‘speak for the whole’. As Luke* noted, I mean I'm an academic so I have a personal interest in this and I suppose I feel quite defensive of my students in a way… So there was a slight sense of just general professional 'back off, fuck you' aspect to it. This also brings back the tension between ‘public’ good as defined by authors of interventions, and possible other definitions of ‘public’. Unsurprisingly, it is most pronounced when it comes to questions of Brexit. As noted in Chapter 2, while there had been a point at which I considered reorienting the whole research project towards intellectual positioning in relation to Brexit, I had not, in fact, planned to discuss it with research participants. However, given the timing of the research project, it was possibly inevitable it would come up. The tensions between universality, particularity, and universities’ stance on Brexit emerged very clearly in Richard*’s narrative: 194 I mean there is something quite provincial about universities saying we don't like Brexit as a – parochial in the sense of self-serving, in the sense that universities have an axe to grind, you know for all sorts of obvious sort of fiscal and sort of cultural reasons and so on. So I think Brexit in this sort of populist moment does throw academia to a very strange position but it's not really familiar with, where, on the one hand kind of you know dating back to the origins of sort of Western thought, a kind of a vocation to try and kind of speak for the whole in some way, while also having to be very very aware that actually we do not speak for the whole, and that we are now the enemy in some respects. The current political situation, therefore, is framed as a moment of reckoning, where universities are pitted against the forces of both markets and nationalism. The difficulty Richard* identifies with finding the position from which universities can ‘speak for the whole’ stems from the erosion of the social and political foundations of epistemic authority of institutions of knowledge production. This erosion, reflected in part in diagnoses of social trends such as ‘post-truth’ and the crisis of expertise, is not, however, reducible to the consequences of a specific set of policies. As he notes, it concerns the very foundations of Western thought, including the question how universities – as institutions that deal both with knowledge production and social reproduction – relate to society ‘as a whole’. This, at the same time, brings us closer to the theoretical inquiry at the heart of this thesis: how do we conceive of the relationship between institutions and practices of knowledge production and ‘the social’? In other words, how do my participants think about the relationship between universities and the society? Fred* mused: I think you know we're in a moment of incredible danger in relation to Brexit, we've got fragmented politics, the interest in higher education and interest in the universities is an expression of democratic knowledge. Yet the impact agenda is now behind that. We've got, you know, the university as a 195 {maiden} sort of space to look at populism, and there is going to be a scapegoat when Brexit fails, and that scapegoat is going to be... the scapegoat is going to be the ethnic minorities. Jake* said: I think it is clearly the case that universities do not encourage nationalism. Any more than banks encourage nationalism, I mean, universities are as much about trying to sort of erode national borders just as much as finance or free trade does, you know that. And I think that {universities} are for internationalism and quite rightly so. From the crisis of the university, to the crisis of the economy, to the crisis of society: the war on universities, it seems, concerns much more than three- or four- star publications. These narratives suggest participants see the crisis of the university as at least a reflection, if not straightforward equivalent, of the political – and, further, of the crisis of the society as a whole. The tension between ‘universal’, democratic participation, and national, exclusionary political agendas associated with populism and the Brexit vote, is transposed onto universities as the struggle for defending the right of academics to assert and define standards of reasonable argument. The way in which participants perceive conflicts over who gets to be (and who gets to be heard) at universities, therefore, becomes indistinguishable from the question of who gets to be (and speak for) the society as a whole. For some participants this brings up the question of ‘self-interest’: what motivates interventions or, more precisely, what position are they made from. Chapter 4 showed how this framing of position is performed in, and through, intellectual interventions. There, objects are assigned qualities that serve to anchor them within a set domain, or ‘world’. For example, saying ‘knowledge is not for sale’ serves to position knowledge outside the spheres of the economy or the market. Interviews, on the other hand, offer an insight into how participants reflect on this space and, equally importantly, how their views on this space influence their practice, from the decision to engage in interventions to day-to-day navigation of the political and social environment of the academia; as well as, in turn, the degree to which they 196 think this environment is coextensive with the space of interventions. At the end, then, it makes sense to turn to how they perceive the effects of their own interventions on this space. Writing is fighting? Limits of interventions What about the future? I chose this question for the closing part of interviews, in part as a way of shifting the conversation out of the slightly depressing tone it took at times (given the topic, this was not surprising), but in part also to see how participants thought about their own capability to influence the development of higher education. The answers I got were highly illustrative, both in their resignation (to the state of affairs) and in their commitment (to continue engaging in interventions), so a selection from transcripts and interview notes is reproduced below without comment. 5/05/2017 F*: So, for me, we have failed to defend higher education. It's a very real failure so that shows and… You know you couldn't say well we will at some point start again and do it. So that's somebody else's task now. JB [notes]: ‘defence’ (twice underlined) 3/05/2017 N*: I dislike what was referred to as unearned authority, otherwise known as brute crude power…And I've always challenged it and I will continue to challenge it. JB: How do you go about doing that? N*: Well I continue to write, I mean there's this other book coming out, and I may write a memoir about the events. JB [notes]: ‘Nevertheless we persisted??’ 197 5/05/2017 F*: There is this quote – I can't remember who it comes from, since I think it comes from somebody really weird like TS Eliot…-- ‘the reason why we fight for a lost cause is not to lose but so that others may be reminded that these are causes and then they may win’. So this has been a fight for a lost cause; there are other causes to fight for. Yeah. The university one may come back. There's not enough of us. Numbers, and willingness to -- I mean, actually just academics are timid. That's just the truth. JB: Do you mean like reluctant to speak in venues that are not strictly academic? F*: Just timid. JB: Do you think social media could change that? F*: In the absence of political organising and so people doing stuff, you know, social media – social media is just politics of recognition. 23/01/2017 E*: I'm not a political person by temperament. I normally don't put my head above the parapet, a bit of a coward, I did think in what I was doing here that I was speaking out to a degree I needed to and I wanted to but I felt I did so from and using privilege in another sense; I did so from the privilege of being part of the system I was criticising. But here I was an insider and I felt {that} really allowed me to be a critic. 5/04/2017 R*: I have never been able to find this so it may just be something I've made up: ‘All academics are librarians’. That is faced with the need to do something, ‘well I've got a lot an article to write’; ‘tell you what, I'll write an article about it’. So that's [where] academics prefer to be - in the library rather 198 than in the street. That's true and there are moments when that's right. Not when they're dismantling your life. JB [notes]: ‘Walzer’. The last note refers to Michael Walzer’s quote in The Company of Critics: “In the battles of the intellect, as in every other battle, one can win, finally, only on the ground.” (2002, p. 180). A few months after I concluded the last interview, UK higher education staff engaged in industrial action on a scale that had not been seen previously in the sector (e.g. Grove, 2018). The ‘USS strikes’, as they became known, revolved around a projected increase in employee contributions to a pension scheme that staff at most ‘pre-1992’ universities were part of. In the context of present study, three things are notable about the strikes. As if heeding Walzer’s envoi, they included ‘fighting on the ground’ in the form of daily picket lines, occupations, and a series of protest marches/walks in London and around campuses. Secondly, they engaged high numbers of early career and precarious staff; a great deal of mobilization, in fact, took place via Twitter and other social media. Thirdly, they almost instantly generated an industry of ‘meta’- commentary, or rather intellectual interventions that sought to explain, situate, and in different ways position “the Great University Strike”. The vocabulary of these interventions represented a curious mix: some were framed in the well-exercised ‘evil neoliberalism’, ‘(return of) academic freedom’, or even ‘defence of Enlightenment’ tropes, but others engaged in more detail with, at times highly technical, actuarial detail of the calculation of pensions ‘risk’. Does this suggest that the critique my participants engaged in has finally found its political expression? Those who believe in the power of ideas to guide political action would likely suggest so. However, on second look, USS strikes were in many ways a surprisingly conservative form of political mobilization. To begin with, they revolved around a pension scheme, probably one of rare points of shared interest for older and younger academic staff. As noted in Chapter 4, while the strike raised broader issues in higher education such as precarity or gender pay gap, these were not sufficient to galvanise a similar level of support. Secondly, social media aside, the strikes, at the end of the day, employed the most traditional union 199 strategy available: withdrawal of labour. It is possible that this alone (buttressed by the threat of ‘fees strike’, that is, possibility students would expect universities to pay them back tuition for teaching missed during the strike) was sufficient to convince heads of universities and Universities UK, their representative, to negotiate with UCU. Last, but not least, a decisive political moment in the strike was the revelation of the disproportionate role that constituent colleges of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge played in the drive to ‘de-risk’ the scheme. This, in turn, was a reminder of both exceptional power of Britain’s two oldest universities, and the durable importance of elite networks. Regardless of whether we interpret USS strikes as the victory of intellectual critique of neoliberalism, or as an illustration of its limitations, it is clear that most participants know they are not the same thing. Differently put, hardly anyone among my participants can be said to be unaware of the fact that ‘preserving a vocabulary’ of critique is not the same as mounting barricades. From this perspective, it becomes even more interesting to find out what kind of assumptions about the nature and role of critique support the decision to continue engaging in interventions. Conclusions: navigating ambiguity Intellectual interventions and participants’ narratives both organize and ‘order’ the world. They identify and position different ‘entities’ – politicians, civil servants, managers, other academics – and organize them in specific domains, whose most salient feature is the way in which they further define the boundary between universities and the ‘outside’. The configuration of this space that emerged through interviews, however, is less well-defined than in intellectual interventions. On one level, this is hardly surprising – intellectual interventions are stylized (and edited) speech-acts that adhere to conventions and utilize specific tropes and rules of the genre. They portray contexts, actors, and objects in relatively unambiguous terms, sometimes intentionally overstating particular characteristics to emphasise their point. The everyday ‘world’ my participants navigate, however, is inhabited by less clear-cut entities. In this sense, it is not surprising their narratives are marked by ambiguity. 200 As Berliner (2016) notes, ambiguity can be seen as, in part, just how the world ‘is’. Examples such as the environmentalist who flies around the world lecturing on the dangers of climate change or the doctor who smokes (Berliner even uses the example of ‘critic who nonetheless participates in the academic rat race’) are, in this sense, typical of late modernity. This is consistent with both Marx’s view of capitalism as inevitably generating contradictions, and Weber’s view that capitalism requires rationalization or justification. Lambek (2016) reminds us of Bourdieu’s (1977) and Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) warning against imputing ‘etic’ contradictions: ‘neoliberal’ side of interventions is not in contradiction with its critical content if participants see no such contradiction. Leaving the question of the source of contradictions temporarily aside, what we need to ask is what kind of effects are produced by navigating them. Differently put, we must consider not why participants engage in action they think produces no tangible results, but what effects are produced by their engagement. The objective is not to ‘catch out’ inconsistencies by pointing out to participants that their actions violate their verbal commitments (‘how can you criticize neoliberal academia and yet reap profit from your books?’). It is, rather, to ask if (and how) participants justify continuing to do that, and what kind of belief in the power of critique (or speech-acts in general) this entails; whether that means they do not ‘know’ what happens; and, last but not least, what kind of role critique plays in this process. What unites my participants is the feeling of being compelled to intervene, thus translating a form of vague (or not-so-vague) dissatisfaction with a particular setting, or situation, into words – and, further, into a concrete intellectual product. For many participants, this feeling of dissatisfaction arises from occupying an ambiguous position: for instance, “Ellen”, who got engaged in critique of higher education while implementing the Research Assessment Exercise, or “Paul”, who developed his interest in higher education as an object of research while accepting the position of Pro-VC. However, ambiguity does not stem only from temporary occupation of potentially incommensurable roles. To begin with, most participants seem aware of the fact that being in the academia, in itself, constitutes a form of privilege. While not all 201 came from a privileged social background, their job, status, and, not least of all, access to publication platforms means most of my participants belong to the elite, certainly in terms of social and cultural, if not necessarily (visible) economic capital. The second source of ambiguity, thus, is the fact many participants are aware their influence derives from the structures and institutions that are the object of their interventions. Being at a university, in combination with the networks they have access to (often also by the virtue of having studied at a particular university), puts them in a position from which they can make an authoritative intervention. Navigating this landscape, therefore, places participants in a slightly awkward spot from which they have to ‘defend’ universities without, at the same time, seeming as if they are endorsing institutional and personal privilege. This leads some of them to the complicated question of interest and self-interest. This question finds expressions on different scales: what (and who) do universities stand for, for instance, when it comes to Brexit? Who do academics speak for when they criticise research assessment? Last, but not least, who do my participants speak for – what gives them the right to speak for academics (or universities) as a whole? In this, they position themselves in relation to other academics, whom they frame as either afraid to speak out, or as ‘silent neoliberals’, actually benefitting from changes to higher education and research. In the first case, positing a ‘silent majority’ serves to justify participants’ interventions: they are, in this sense, speaking ‘for the people’. In the other case, it serves as a way to distance themselves from ‘silent neoliberals’, in part because, as we could see from “Fred”’s case, purely demographic criteria do not lend themselves easily to this distinction. After all, in some ways, my participants have also ‘benefited’ from neoliberalism, if ‘benefiting’ means being able to continue teaching and researching, not to mention receive public attention that comes with interventions. Interventions, in this sense, can be seen as a way of justifying continued participation in institutions of higher education, as ambiguous and ambivalent as they may be. This is in line with Boltanski and Thévenot’s observation that justifications proliferate under conditions of ambiguity; it makes sense to assume that, when participants feel ‘under attack’ but they do not want to leave, they will 202 come up with different explanations for this particular contradiction. This helps illuminate the third and crucial ‘contradiction’, the fact that participants said they were committed to continue engaging in interventions despite feeling that the “war on universities” had been lost. Obviously, it is appealing to see continued engagement as a heroic act, perhaps, with the participant who quoted TS Eliot, heroic precisely for its futility. Yet, this would be ‘passing the buck’ too early: what, after all, are interventions if they have no – at least not a tangible political – effect? 203 204 Chapter 6: Synthesis Introduction Preceding three chapters presented intellectual interventions from three angles: through the lens of politics and policy, that is, ‘antecedent conditions’ they speak to and about; as forms of discourse and situated speech-acts, that is, utterances that engage in a specific form of positioning (situating objects and persons) in specific domains (‘worlds’) and in justification of corresponding normative implications; and as personal strategies, that is, reflections on why these speech-acts take the form that they do, what kind of role they play in participants’ lives, and how they relate to their (life)world. This chapter will bring these three ‘worlds’ together, in the sense in which it will examine the implications of their – overlapping as well as diverging – ontologies for how we think about critique and its relationship with ‘the social’. The method applied in synthesising these elements can be classified as a reinterpretation or ‘redescription’ (e.g. Rorty, 1979, 1982; Thompson, 1990, p. 22). This does not necessarily mean endorsing the view according to which – at least as far as the social world is concerned – there is no such thing as a better explanation: all we have are competing (or parallel) descriptions. This can lend itself to inference about different and hence incommensurable descriptions as amounting to different and hence incommensurable realities. While the ‘multiple worlds’ hypothesis is taken up in some variants of the ‘ontological turn’ (see discussion in Graeber, 2015) – not least because seemingly congruent with, if not necessarily deducible from, quantum physics – we need to be very careful about inferring a multiplicity of worlds from a multiplicity of descriptions. This is particularly relevant as it can be taken to be an implication of the ontological framework in On Justification. After all, the inherent assumption in most (if not all) versions of this argument is that multiple worlds can, at least under the right set of circumstances, coexist relatively comfortably. As the concluding chapter will argue, it is particularly in situations of conflict, dispute, or, as interventions frame it, ‘war’ – that the limits of this framing become visible. 205 Setting the stage As Chapter 3 demonstrated, the setting of the ‘war on universities’ should be seen in terms of historical constitution of the relationship between universities and the state. While Oxford and Cambridge initially developed as self-governing, semi- autonomous communities, frequently with clerical underpinnings, the expansion of universities in the 19th century was driven by the needs of the British Empire. The task of universities was to provide cadres capable of managing both the ‘technical’ (engineering, trade, medicine, transport), and ‘finer’, social side (philosophy, anthropology, history, economics, diplomacy) of this growing complexity. In this sense, Victorian universities were intermediary institutions between ‘the state’ and ‘the society’, or, more precisely, between the governing and the governed. Universities’ special status derived from two main factors. One was their credentialising role (Abbott, 1988; Collins, 1979; Weber, 1956): universities were essential not only to educating but also certifying the professions (it bears remembering the University of London was initially set up as an examining, rather than a teaching institution). The other was the proximity between the professoriate and the governing stratum, especially in cases of Oxford and Cambridge. Unlike in France, where Napoléon established specialized institutions (Grandes écoles) to provide cadres for the civil service, or in Prussia/Germany, where general (Universität) and technical (Fachhochschulen) higher education were institutionally separate, this gave universities in the UK virtual monopoly on production and certification of technical, higher, and complex knowledge. In this sense, British universities indeed possessed a higher degree of independence than many of their continental European counterparts. The ivory tower metaphor, however, is both revealing and misleading. Misleading because universities were not separate from society: they were both responsible to the state, and dependent – financially and infrastructurally – on support and funding from the remaining landed gentry and the burgeoning middle class, both through endowments and through tuition paid to educate their sons (and occasional daughter). However, the ivory tower provided an elevated view, which meant they could lay claim to a better, more holistic insight into the needs of the polity. The assertion of epistemic privilege, in this sense, co-developed with the solidification of the university as an 206 institution, and the institutionalization and standardization of criteria for what counts as rational knowledge. Academic authority, more specifically, was predicated on the claim of having access to knowledge ‘for its own sake’. This, however, did not mean unconnected to economic interests: commonwealth was equated with the state’s economic (and, obviously, military) well-being. All it meant was that universities were institutions specialized in the production of knowledge, where scholars and students were immersed (theoretically, at least) primarily in that pursuit, and in exchange comparatively free from other concerns. At the same time, universities were invested with the capacity to evaluate, order, rank and choose future political and social elites. In British sociology, this is often framed as the question of ‘access’ or ‘social mobility’, but both are a bit of a category error: universities were not the cause of social inequalities, and while admissions to undergraduate programmes certainly depended on class as well as cultural capital, the effect of previous education (especially difference between private and state schools) was stronger (Friedman and Laurison, 2019). However, universities provided certification of this status, not to mention a context for building social networks among members of the professional stratum. Last, but not least, universities also had the power to select those who will be doing the selection – that is, their own staff (Halsey, 1992). Institutionalised scholarship in the UK developed in a politically and infrastructurally ambiguous space that simultaneously was and was not part of the society and was and was not part of the public sphere. Political and funding arrangements at the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th century reflected this distribution of power. University Grants Committee, the first official body established to channel state funding for universities, mediated between the universities and the Treasury. Universities, in this sense, were recognized as autonomous – and powerful – political actors, on par possibly only with the Church of England. Unlike in Germany, where professors are civil servants and thus employed (and confirmed) by the state, British universities had an almost exclusive control over the production, transmission, and certification of knowledge as well as the selection of those who would be doing all three. So unquestionable was the idea that universities were overlapping while not completely coextensive with the society that they commanded separate seats in Parliament (the custom originated 207 in Scotland and was transported to the Parliament of England and then Great Britain; in addition to Scottish universities, Oxford, Cambridge and London held separate seats until 1918, and until 1950 as the constituency of Combined English Universities). While there is value in emphasising the historical distinctiveness of the British version of skhōle its relevance lies less in the concrete institutional arrangements and more in the way in which these lent legitimacy to specific forms of valuation and justification. ‘Knowledge for its own sake’, in this context, is primarily an argument for knowledge on its own terms – ‘its’, obviously, meaning judged by other academics. While the proportion of total population going into higher education was small, and while shared backgrounds and dispositions of politicians and academics enabled the UGC to keep relations between the two social groups smooth, this order was maintained without much friction. Yet, with massification in the aftermath of World War II, justifications for the ‘special status’ of universities were rapidly shrinking. As student numbers rose, universities were becoming more coextensive with the society; as technology progressed, it was clear the state was going to need ever greater numbers of educated individuals. This alone would have probably sufficed to make universities a matter of ‘public interest’, as reflected in their increasing presence in the media – and, much more importantly, the increasing drive to manage and monitor public expenditure on higher education. However, in the second half of the 20th century, another challenge to their status emerged: the economy. With the establishment of the international system of monetary exchange, the growing influence of international organisations such as the OECD or the World Bank, and the gathering of large-scale datasets comparable across national contexts, the ‘state of the nation’, and, aggregated, ‘the state of the world’ become inferable from a relatively small, standardized set of numbers. Of course, ‘ordinalisation’ (Fourcade, 2016) –development of numerical techniques and instruments, from standardisation of measures to double-entry bookkeeping – was vital to the development of capitalism as a whole (e.g. Weber, 1956; Carrothers and Espeland, 1991). Yet, with the intensification of global trade, this type of measurement became increasingly relevant (Slobodian, 2018). Rather than requiring stewardship of the ‘public sphere’, policymaking was thus able to move 208 away from deliberating on the meaning of ‘greatest good of the greatest number’ and rely on indicators: certain numbers go up – good, certain numbers go down – bad. In this sense, economy – or, more precisely, markets – no longer provided just an accurate reflection of the state of the world. Increasingly, markets were becoming a model that can simulate ‘real-world’ interaction, including in domains that were previously treated as separate from the economic – such as politics (e.g. public choice theory), or personal relationships (e.g. ‘marriage markets’). In this sense, markets are inserted as a proxy for the polity, marking the supremacy of self- interested, utility-maximising individual as the model of rational agent (Brown, 2015; Amadae, 2015). The importance of markets for the way the state ‘sees’ (Scott, 1998), ‘knows’ (e.g. Davies and McGoey, 2012) and ‘governs’ its subjects (Foucault, 2008) is, of course, a central topic in scholarship on ‘economization’ or ‘marketization’ (e.g. Çalişkan and Callon, 2010, 2009; MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu, eds., 2007). Yet, the rise of economics as a ‘language of reality’ goes beyond challenging the role of universities in the certification, reproduction, and dissemination of expert knowledge; it threatens to displace it entirely. Lave, Mirowski, and Randalls argued that (…)At an even more fundamental level, neoliberalism reifies the primary function of an ideal economy as a ‘marketplace of ideas’. The fundamental role of the market is not, according to neoliberalism, the mere exchange of things, but rather the processing and conveyance of knowledge or information. No human being (and no state) can ever measure up to the ability of the abstract marketplace to convey existing ideas and to summon forth further innovation. Hence the novelty of neoliberalism is to alter the ontology of the market, and consequently, to revise the very conception of society. By its very definition, the market processes information in ways that no human mind can encompass or predict (2010, p. 662). 209 There is an underlying ‘elective affinity’ between neoliberalism and the production of knowledge. Initially, markets were designed to solve the problem of coordination under conditions of epistemic inequality, that is, differences in access to knowledge. Hayek’s essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), for instance, is at heart a critique of epistemic monopoly produced by institutionalization of expertise. William Davies provides an account of its implications for institutionalised knowledge: The argument that the Austrian economists had made in favour of the free market was never simply that it would produce the most wealth or the best products…The more transformative and disconcerting claim was that it could reduce the need for public, centralized experts as such. One might go further still and say that they reduced the need for truth…As long as markets were relatively unimpaired by government intervention, they could become the organizing principle of an otherwise disorganized, unplanned, even ignorant society. As long as there was a way of coordinating people peacefully, in real time, why the need for experts or facts at all? (Davies, 2018, p. 166, my emphasis). Obviously, we should be wary of retrospectively overstating the influence of early philosophers of neoliberalism on the rise of economics. Epistemic authority of economics, in principle, relies on the same ontological foundations as other forms of institutionalised knowledge. Yet, as Slobodian argues, nimbleness, combined with speed and promise of neutrality, provided economic knowledge with an ‘edge’ over other forms of insight: Mises and Hayek made a case for the centrality of the economist in the conduct of the modern state. Economic knowledge was a central fixture of modernity. A state unequipped with economic research was doomed to fall behind in the race of nations. Because taking the pulse of the nation put the economist in the position of the scientist or medical doctor, on this view, the economist was entitled privileged access to the internal workings of private business (Slobodian, 2018, p. 68). 210 With the acceleration of rate of production interwoven with optic fibre transmission of information, ‘just-in-time’ knowledge became increasingly important. Markets, in this sense, are meant to function as an ‘instant truth device’; prices provide clear insight into the state of the world, unimpeded by time, power, or political influence: (…) The market is a type of mass sensory device, that exists to detect sentiment and changes in public mood. It’s like a constant opinion-polling device or survey, only with the advantage that it responds in real time and reflects things as they are now. When something happens, such as a policy announcement or natural disaster, one can immediately check how the markets have responded. Rumours of impending shortages or regulatory changes can be met with instant reactions from the markets (Davies, 2018, p. 167, original emphasis). Rather than just truth-telling devices, therefore, markets function as an evaluative mechanism, both in the literal sense – prices reflect the value of things – and in the moral sense: they signal whether developments are good or bad (Fourcade and Healy, 2007). In both senses, but particularly in the latter, markets offer an alternative to the slow process of ‘deliberation’ in the public sphere, which, at least from the point of view of Hayek and Mises, is inevitably impacted by epistemic inequalities, favouring certain groups over others. Obviously, from the standpoint of Hayek and Mises, this was meant to act as a safeguard against the ‘stacking’ of institutional control over knowledge, especially in totalitarian regimes. Yet it clearly posed challenges for the epistemic authority of institutions that had exercised historical monopoly on the certification of knowledge – universities foremost among them. Popper’s principle of falsificationism, for instance, can be seen as an attempt to justify the epistemic supremacy of scientific knowledge by making it subject to a concerted effort to undermine one’s own epistemic privilege. Yet, he had fewer good things to say about modes of inference in what he dubbed ‘historical’ sciences, including Marxism. This is why contemporary critique tends to focus on economics as a particularly important element of the ‘production’ of neoliberal order. Economists, especially of the ‘neoclassical’ bent, are taken to have committed ‘epistemic hijacking’, not only in the sense of having managed to assert their views over the nature of reality, 211 but also for managing to position themselves as possessors of privileged access to that reality. Arguably, in the past decade, ‘Big Data’ have been framed as an analogous challenge to epistemic authority of academics and, in particular, traditionally conceived social sciences (e.g. Bartlett et al., 2018), in the sense in which they offer a promise of instantaneous insight into a range of characteristics and behaviours much wider, varied, and fine-grained than those covered by the standard meaning of ‘economic’. Much like in the case of markets, this form of ‘knowledge’ is, of course, not unmediated: it just requires a different set of intermediaries. Rather than a conflict over ideologies, the critique of ‘economisation’ reveals a deep-seated rivalry over primacy of epistemic access. The ‘war’ interventions refer to, in other words, is both ontological and epistemological: what is at stake is not just a more accurate picture of the world, but also the right to exercise authority over what counts as a more valid view of ‘the whatness of what is’. This struggle is particularly demanding for disciplines who cannot claim a privileged insight into ‘numbers’ (or strings of numbers), such as most social sciences and humanities. Zygmunt Bauman might have argued that intellectuals’ change of status came with the loss of privileged claim to legislate (1987); in this context, however, ‘interpreters’ are also becoming increasingly obsolete. This is one of the reasons interventions are invested in asserting epistemic authority via ontological justification, in other words, why they engage in definitional struggles. This argument, obviously, cannot be built only on the basis of traditional, or charismatic authority; therefore, intellectuals need to claim better insight into the true nature, and, by extension, value of things. In this sense, Andrew McGettigan’s ‘admission’ in the preface of The Great University Gamble that he knew nothing about political economy of higher education should be read in two registers. One is, of course, an element of epistemic modesty (obviously tempered by the fact he will go on to develop an argument about precisely the political economy of higher education in the book), but the other serves to position him opposite groups who normally deal with economics and finance: in other words, as not one of ‘Them’. 212 This is what provided the ‘setting’ for forms of positioning analysed in this thesis. The separation between ‘worlds’ of economics/markets and knowledge/universities, therefore, is a performative redrawing of boundaries between different epistemic communities, or, perhaps more broadly, rationalities and practices. The next section will consider the strategies and forms of establishment of worth interventions use in order to ‘secure’ these borders. (B)orders of worth Forms of critique analysed here posit that there are things (goods) that cannot be measured, whose value cannot be expressed in numerical terms, and certainly not in terms of their contribution to the economy. Knowledge is one such thing. The argument that knowledge cannot be reduced to economic value has both an ontological and a political, or, differently put, diagnostic and normative side. The first concerns the nature of knowledge; the second the implications for ownership, control, and distribution. The weaker form of the argument does not necessarily dispute the existence of economic value of knowledge, but asserts that evaluating it on grounds of contribution to economic growth only fails to recognize its nature. Represented in, for instance, Campaign for the Public University’s Alternative White Paper, this argument asserts that the evaluation of knowledge based on ‘metrics’ – essentially, any form of quantification – cannot adequately capture ‘intangible’ or immaterial outcomes such as democratic culture, or social cohesion. This line of critique challenges the ‘metric’ – whether it measures what it claims to measure – without, necessarily, challenging the ‘test’ itself. This form of critique is primarily corrective (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007, p. 33): its role is to lead to the revision of the mode of evaluation15. This allows for a compromise between different ‘worlds’, or logics of evaluation, as long as there is a shared political framework where these competing justifications can be placed. 15 Lamont distinguishes between practices of valuation, that entail giving worth or value, and those of evaluation (assessing how an entity attains a certain type of worth) (2012, p. 21.5). While the two are often conflated in literature and intertwined in practice, we could take valuation to primarily apply to the realm of objects, and evaluation to standardised human practices of expressing value of those objects. 213 The stronger form of the argument asserts knowledge should not be measured at all, as it is beyond the order of value that allows it to be ‘counted’. This argument is reflected in McGettigan’s contrasting of higher education with gas or electricity, as well as in Collini’s assertion that universities are more like the BBC than like private companies. This form of justification pits quantitative forms of assessment more strongly against the qualitative; they no longer represent different forms of evaluation, but ‘coins of different realms’. All attempts to instill a ‘conversion rate’ or order of equivalence between the two – in other words, to express the value of knowledge in terms of economic utility – are framed as violent, inimical to the nature of knowledge. In this view, knowledge that is marketized gains certain qualities, but loses others. For instance, it becomes instrumental, but stops being emancipatory; or, it becomes comparable (e.g. through modularization, units, or contact hours), but stops being transformative (as, for instance, in the critique of the effects of ‘trigger warnings’). This type of knowledge also changes those who come into contact with it. So, for instance, students start behaving like consumers – or, in the case of ‘free speech’ controversies, like spoiled, coddled children. The argument, in essence, is that the increase in quantity leads to a decrease in quality, something akin to impoverishment16. This reasoning is reflected in the critique of the ‘decline of standards’ (Furedi, 2017, 2004), but also Collini’s assertion that measuring knowledge will create “a lot of Ryanairs” (Collini, 2011). Consequently, the problem with economization of knowledge is not just that it aims to subsume the evaluative logic of universities to the evaluative logic of the market. If it were, it would primarily be an issue of incommensurability between different orders of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999, p. 368 et passim). This would be equivalent to, say, judging a fish by its capacity to ride a bicycle – misplaced or ludicrous, deserving of the mocking critique of its obsolete and cumbersome language, but not in itself dangerous. However, if subsumption under the order of the market has the capacity to permanently change the nature of knowledge – to the degree to which it constitutes destruction – then it should be exempt from, or 16 While regrettably the limited space and timeframe of this thesis did not allow for the elaboration of this discussion, it would be interesting to contrast this with Boltanski’s recent work with Arnaud Esquerre on the processes of ‘enrichment’ (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2016, 2017). 214 positioned outside of, sphere of valuation. Precisely because it is so special (or valuable), it should be protected from valuing. It is not very difficult to infer from this that the process of justification engaged in critique requires an evaluative procedure that seeks to ‘protect’ the university from incursions of entities from the ‘market world’. The status of entities is derived from their position: politics and economics = bad; academia = good. Those that ‘breach’ these boundaries must be either removed or recategorised. If this is not possible, then knowledge must be summarily exempt not only from processes of valuation (economy), but also from the sphere where discussions about what gets included in it can be had (politics). This argument can be read as an assertion of academic sovereignty, not only over matters of university governance, but also over certification and credentialization. It is a way to (re)claim monopoly over principles of equivalence: universities – and this, of course, means academics, not ‘evil’ ‘fat cat’ managers – should be free to decide what counts as a degree, what counts as good research, who should be employed to teach and so on. Boltanski argued that the role of institutions, in conditions of political plurality, is to reduce uncertainty by furnishing a principle of equivalence, that is, a framework for commensuration between different forms of valuation (2011, pp. 50—83). In this sense, this argument also presents a way to re-assert the primacy of the university as the institution for the valuation of knowledge, in contrast (and against) ‘quantifying’ institutions such as funding agencies, student loan companies, and research councils. On another level, however, this argument is literally a demand for exemption from valuation. Knowledge, in this sense, is not just sui generis, irreducible or incommensurable with other ‘goods’, be they tangible/material (such as food, or shelter) or intangible/immaterial (health); it should be outside of the possibility of even being considered as such. What Bourdieu (1984) referred to as the ‘consecration’ of knowledge, in this case, takes the form of literally being rendered sacred: positioned outside of the sphere of material, mundane, measurable ‘reality’. 215 This moral economy (Thompson, 1971, 1964) thus rests on a specific political ontology (Bacevic and Muellerleile, 2018). This ontology includes not just the nature of knowledge and the university as an institution, but also the status or ‘worth’ of those who are in any sort of relation to it. However, there is only one kind of political actor can institute that level of exception: the sovereign (Agamben, 1998). It is possible to claim something akin to this existed at the time Oxford and Cambridge were established; yet, the less exclusive universities became, the less they were treated as an exception both by the Crown (the actual Sovereign) and the Parliament (who rules in the Sovereign’s name). If there is no particular political actor that can perform this operation of exemption of knowledge from the order of valuation, what is the purpose of voicing it publicly? Beyond and above differing (including incommensurable) orders of worth, critique – at least in the sense in which it is understood in the context of pragmatic sociology of critique – requires the existence of a political space where claims can be made. This brings us to the question of positioning in relation to the multiplicity of fields. Fields of sense As noted in Chapter 1, intellectual interventions can most easily be situated in the field of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993). The field of cultural production encompasses not only audiences and producers of intellectual interventions, but also art and literature (in the narrow sense of belles-lettres), and scholarship. The ‘worth’ of individual interventions in these fields, Bourdieu argued, is determined by the application of a principle that seems to be the exact inversion of economic logic; that is, indifference towards monetary awards and ‘utility’ in the economic sense. The more useless the product, the better it will fare in the field of cultural production; the more dismissive of economic rewards the author, the higher they will be positioned. This is particularly accentuated in academic knowledge production. Bourdieu summarises this ‘logic of the field’ in the following way: Entry into a scholastic universe presupposes a suspension of the presuppositions of common sense and a paradoxal commitment to a more or less radically new set of presuppositions, linked to the discovery of stakes 216 and demands neither known nor understood by ordinary experience. Each field is characterized by the pursuit of a specific goal, tending to favour no less absolute investments by all (and only) those who possess the required dispositions (for example, libido sciendi). Taking part in the illusio – scientific, literary, philosophical or other – means taking seriously (sometimes to the point of making them questions of life and death) stakes which, arising from the logic of the game itself, establish its 'seriousness', even if they may escape or appear 'disinterested' or 'gratuitous' to those who are sometimes called 'lay people' or those who are engaged in other fields (since the independence of the different fields entails a form of non-communicability between them) (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 11). On this account, interventions need not have effects beyond the academic field at all. Recognition and value are drawn from the sense of resonance interventions generate between the author and their audiences, composed primarily of other academics or a similarly disposed educated readership. In this sense, intellectual interventions can be said to resemble Randall Collins’ ‘interaction rituals’, forms of exchange that structure scholarly production (Collins, 1998). Not only do they rely on the participation of other people (conversation); it is this very interaction that represents their currency. Public events feature ‘shared consumption’ of a particular intellectual product – like book launches, panels, or public talks – offer an opportunity for the generation of emotional energy that is supposed to furnish and sustain the production of this genre. There are two problems with this assumption of the autonomy of the academic field, however. One concerns spaces between fields (Eyal, 2013). As noted in Chapters 1 and 4, most interventions are not ‘classical’ academic products. They are clearly intended for a broad educated readership, rather than a specialist audience of peer-reviewed academic journals or university presses (we will recall that David Willetts positions his product precisely as the “only” take on the transformation of higher education research that underwent peer review). Last, but not least, authors of interventions do not really talk to each other. While quite a few are mutually acquainted, and have been on panels together, there is hardly anything like a sustained ‘conversation’ developing. While the Willetts-Collini 217 ‘encounter’ can be treated like an exception, second reading suggested it had to do more with Willetts’ personal positioning than with any particular logic of the field. One way of solving this problem is to interpret interventions as travelling objects, that is, products intended to generate effects in a number of fields. So, for instance, publishing a book about universities could have effects in the general market for intellectual products, while also serving to boost the author’s academic standing. While Bourdieu’s and Collins’ respective accounts are similar in the sense of asserting the relative autonomy and isolation of fields, they disagree on the possibility of converting capitals. Bourdieu claims that conversion is possible: paradigmatic example would be a lucrative book deal an author can obtain on the basis of their engagement in the field of politics; or, in the opposite direction, being offered an advisory or even executive position in a political organization on the basis of one’s intellectual capital (Yannis Varoufakis, for instance, managed to perform both movements – using his academic capital as an economist to attain a position in the Syriza government, and then converting political capital back into book deals). Collins, importantly, insists on the incommensurability of forms of valuation between the economic and the cultural field: that is, an intellectual product has to be valued and evaluated according to the logic of ‘its own’ field. This would mean, for instance, that ‘selling well’ would not aid the recognition of an author’s high literary or diagnostic quality. While there is value in both readings, they have limited purchase when brought to bear on empirical material presented here. From Bourdieu’s perspective, we should expect to see participants financially benefiting from books, or using their articles in the ‘popular’ press as evidence of public engagement or even impact (many academics in the US, for instance, do precisely that: to be quoted or invited to comment in newspapers or television is a sign of prestige). This does not happen. Clearly, interviews and data collection provide a very limited insight into the total state of participants’ finances, but while many do get royalties from publishers, this is certainly not at the level sufficient to constitute an independent motivation. The issue of financial rewards, in fact, was almost completely circumvented: while some interviews provided openings for this kind of conversation (for instance, discussing the risks implied in ‘intervening’ for one’s career and thus long-term financial security), most participants insisted it played no role at all. Similarly, most 218 participants did not even consider ‘converting’ their interventions into evidence of public engagement (though, in some cases, it could certainly count as such). From Collins’ perspective, given the impossibility of conversion, it would make sense to expect a neater alignment between interventions and participants’ ‘day jobs’ – for instance, historians writing about the history of universities – as it would otherwise presumably be rather costly to maintain engagement in both fields. While in some cases participants did this – for instance, the participant who used their experience from working in university management to start writing interventions pertaining to higher education policy – most participants were seemingly willing to write or engage in interventions in their free time. Similarly, while their academic capital (and networks) certainly helped both their epistemic positioning and sales of their books, the only person who ever tried explicitly positioning his intervention as an ‘academic’ product is Willetts – who, despite being a ‘boundary subject’, is in many ways the least academic of all authors. Secondly and more importantly, interventions are not isolated from economic logic. Successful interventions are the outcome of the work of a network of editors, publishing houses, and the media, what Eyal and Bucholz refer to as the market for intellectual interventions. As noted in Chapter 5, quite a few interventions came as consequence of prompts from publishers, or their agents. More specifically, they were the outcome of a ‘fortuitous coupling’ between proactive content seekers, and the elements reflected on in interviews – a particular “structure of feeling” that authors experienced in relation to the institutional and political environment of higher education and research, their position in social structure, and capacity to invest time and (often ‘free’) labour into the production of interventions. As much as this confluence may seem accidental to authors, it is anything but: it is, in fact, produced through series of relations that merge logics associated with different ‘fields’. Especially when it comes to smaller presses, editors, publishers and agents are more likely to offer contracts to authors whose works they believe will generate sales. Interventions that engage with politics of higher education, while hardly Fifty Shades of Grey, are not a bad investment: ever-growing numbers of university graduates suggest the size of potential audience for this type of content is unlikely 219 to shrink. The relationships formed in this way can go on for quite a while. Publishers will contact previously successful authors to see if they are working on anything new (Thompson, 2005); magazine or journal editors will maintain a ‘favourite’ commentator from whom to solicit contributions on a particular range of topics. In the case of online newspapers, journals or blogs, they seek those that are likely to elicit reactions from audiences, including provocative or ‘controversial’ pieces. Given that most online platforms are financed through advertising revenue, hits-per-page are an important indicator of the attractiveness of the outlet to potential advertisers. This is one of the reasons why editors like to have a range of ‘favourite’ commentators or writers they can turn to. In this sense, the politics of particular platforms are sometimes less important than the capacity of a particular author (or piece) to garner reactions from the audience; the political economy of platforms does not necessarily operate on flows of economic capital alone. This, of course, does not mean publishers, editors, and other mediators are ‘naked’ profit- (or rent-) seekers. Some operate at a loss – the London Review of Books is one example. Many are motivated by an independent desire to steer, or curate, public debate: in some cases, the production costs of publications can be covered from the sales of ‘bestsellers’ in academic or trade press. Equally, ‘attention economy’ is not a new feature of intellectual life. Relative prestige and influence of intellectuals, in the sense of their capacity to draw attention to their interventions, was arguably instrumental in the ‘making of’ public intellectuals such as Foucault and Sartre (Baert, 2015). However, it is possible that the abundance of both platforms and academics looking to contribute to public discussions makes the possibility of attracting the attention of a well-positioned editor all the more important for the success of both: in the era when anyone can make their opinions known on Twitter, being able to publish in The Guardian or Times Higher Education acts as an additional indicator of prestige. At the same time, being able to secure a relatively steady input from authors whose work is likely to attract readers works towards the sustainability of the platform. In sum, what distinguishes contemporary ‘attention spaces’ from the historical generation of Collins’ analysis is that ‘attention’ and ‘monetary’ economies have fused, almost perfectly. 220 The ‘positioning chain’, in this sense, involves more than just authors and their intended audience. It includes a number of ‘mediators’ (Latour, 2005): from situated contexts where intellectuals can begin writing (or translating an idea, or a set of feelings, into a diagnosis), to public events, such as literary festivals and book launches, to online platforms (interactions on social media, blogs, reviews). Each of these elements presents ‘moments of valuation’: increasing or decreasing the visibility, attractiveness, and (current or future) economic worth of the author and product. However, contrary to both Bourdieu and Collins, this market is contiguous with, rather than separated from, other markets. The decision to invest in intellectual products is also driven by the logic of profit. As much as interventions may criticise the application of economic logic to the domain of knowledge production, they owe their existence, at least in part, to precisely the same logic. In this sense, the critique of ‘the market’ in itself relies on a market, as much as it may be the market for intellectual products. This is not to ‘reveal’, even less ‘denounce’, the economic side of intellectual production. After all, other accounts of intellectual interventions have also pointed out the vitality of the relationship between editors, publishers, and other ‘gatekeepers’ and ‘their’ authors. It is more to emphasise two points. One is that interventions cannot be situated in a single field. As Eyal observed, All of these practices, wherein money is involved, have a double meaning, or a ‘twofold truth’ as Bourdieu puts it: they can be seen as economic (i.e., interested, egoistic, calculable) or they can be seen as moral or social (i.e., altruistic, disinterested, nonquantifiable). It all depends, as Callon says, on the framing, particularly the temporal frame within which they are viewed. It follows, therefore, that there is no easy, clear-cut, self-evident criteria by which the various fields could be distinguished in terms of the content of the activity that takes place within them. Nothing is economic or scientific or artistic by itself (Eyal, 2013, p. 159) The other is to ask, if we accept this interpretation, what it means that this side never comes up – neither in interventions, nor in participants’ narratives. This is particularly interesting given that publishers, editors and agents are market träger: 221 their job is literally to repackage knowledge produced by academics into something that can be sold, or converted into another form of capital (intellectual, social). This, technically, makes them as much ‘agents of neoliberalism’ as reviled university managers. However, there is one important difference. With the (partial) exception of university presses – where, as we could see, none of the interventions critical of the market were published – publishers, presses and platforms are, on the whole, located outside of the university. In fact, we could even say that the position of publishers and agents as mediators fits within the same ‘world’, as they keep ‘economic logic’ away from intellectuals. This brings us back to the question why interventions insist on delineating the academia from other ‘worlds’ to the degree that anything associated with economy, politics, or other spheres of ‘interest’ has to be either ignored or performatively purged. Turning the question around, it is to ask why the world of interventions must be constituted as if it were the exact opposite of the worlds of economy and politics. Reflexivity, positioning and self-knowledge “How can we conceive of a knowledge which is ignorant of itself?”, asks Sartre (2003 [1958], p. 76). Are intellectual interventions an artefact of ‘bad faith’? The fact that they seem to deny (or at least to ignore) conditions of their own possibility suggests this may be a fitting diagnosis. Yet, in line with questions outlined in Chapter 1, this opens, rather than closes, the problem of reflexivity. If this is indeed the case, why is it so, and what are the effects of this systematic denial of critique’s own conditions of existence? In Pascalian Meditations Bourdieu approaches the question of particular ‘myopia’ afforded by the academic stance. He imports the Greek skhōle for this academic outlook, signalling the proximity between leisure – that is, absence of need for occupying oneself with the vagaries of daily existence – and the disposition to study, that is, learn to observe things at a distance: There is nothing that ‘pure’ thought finds it harder to think than skhōle, the first and most determinant of all the social conditions of possibility of ‘pure’ 222 thought, and also the scholastic disposition which inclines its possessors to suspend the demands of the situation, the constraints of economic and social necessity, and the urgencies it imposes or the ends it proposes. In Sense and Sensibilia J. L. Austin refers in passing to the ‘scholastic view’, giving as an example the fact of enumerating or examining all the possible senses of a word, without any reference to the immediate context, instead of simply observing or using the sense of the word which is directly compatible with the situation. Developing what is implied in Austin's example, one could say that the ‘as if’ posture – very close to the ‘let’s pretend’ mode of play which enables children to open imaginary worlds – is…what makes possible all intellectual speculations, scientific hypotheses, ‘thought experiments’ (2000, p. 12). This ‘as if’ disposition, Bourdieu claims, is a product of a specific socio-historical arrangement, one that allowed intellectuals (or thinkers as a discrete social category) to withdraw from the world. From this point of view, the positioning of ‘neoliberalism’ and its associated worlds of politics and economics as inimical to and outside of the realm of ‘the university’, allows them to deny the degree to which ‘their’ world is already intermeshed with elements – objects, persons, and relations – associated with the ‘outside’. Differently put, it allows to go on engaging in interventions while ‘forgetting’ that the position from which they can do that is itself a product of specific, historically accrued relations. Others have also recounted this story. Arendt (1989, 1981), tells it as the historical disjunction between ‘contemplation’ and ‘action’, vita contemplativa and vita activa, whose origins she also situates in the Greek polis. Sloterdijk recounts the history of philosophy through the constitution of the position of ‘pure observer’. Bios theoretikós, the reflective life, is, in his view, created through a systematic practice of ‘suspended animation’, where the thinking person has to be a “kind of dead person on holiday…not dead according to undertakers, but philosophically dead who cast of their bodies and apparently become pure intellects or impersonal thinking souls” (Sloterdijk, 2012, p. 3). Last, but not least feminist scholars and philosophers of science (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1991; Alcoff and Potter eds., 1993) have told it from the perspective of historical exclusion of the ‘feminine’, material, and bodily from the realm – and institutions – of thinking. 223 Yet, with the exception of Bourdieu, few scholars have explicitly engaged with the question of the implications and limits of the ‘scholarly gaze’. Bourdieu eventually capitulated to the supremacy of scholarly disposition, developing the concept of sociological reflexivity in hope of ‘catching out’ (though he was aware that this was an unfinished process) its epistemic pitfalls. This is particularly important because both methodological and theoretical attempts at engaging with this question have – even if unwittingly – have predominantly gone in the direction of ‘resolving’ it, in the sense in which even the ‘unruly’ or ‘impure’ parts of the observer (or the epistemic subject) could somehow be harnessed towards legitimating the scholarly enterprise (Sloterdijk, 2012, pp. 85–95). What happens when, instead of a trying to find a practical response – that is, looking for ways to identify and ‘correct’ this apparent myopia – we offer a sociological account of the very attempt? Critique, in this sense, is an example of what Sloterdijk elsewhere referred to as ‘anthropotechnics’ (2013), organised form of practice aimed at individual and collective self-transformation: We could likewise trace the development of the practices and exercises that enabled scholarship, and thus narrate a history of self-conquest that allows people who have used pretheoretical ‘normal language’ so far to enter the confederation of theoretical thought. This type of distancing characterizes the task of the historical study of asceticism (Sloterdijk, 2012, p. 9). Bringing this focus to bear on the present, we could ask what is it about the practice of distancing that makes critique incapable of thinking its own foundations? Where does this ‘inability’, if indeed inability it is, come from? Are intellectuals really like Sartre’s waiter, suspended in ‘webs’ of self-justification that compel them to forget the contingency of the social order that supposedly provides the framework for their role? Or is something else at play, and, probably most confusing of all, what is this ‘else’? As this thesis has aimed to demonstrate, this is a fundamental question for the sociology of critique. It is fundamental both in the sense in which it is already implied in its ontological postulates, and in the sense in which any attempt at 224 justification and legitimation of its products or practices will inevitably ‘bounce off’ it. Therefore, rather than noting our partial myopia and shrugging it off, or proceeding to do sociology of knowledge in a manner that makes a virtue out of necessity, we could ask how this particular stance remains implied in and reproduced through precisely the practice designed to ‘catch it out’: critique. 225 226 Conclusions Concluding summary This thesis presented a sociological account of critique through an analysis of vocabularies of justification employed in intellectual interventions and in the narratives of their authors. The ‘conflict’ that the critique of neoliberalism postulates – the ‘war’ on universities, denoting the transformation of governance and funding mechanisms, changing conditions of teaching and research, and other changes to the ‘social contract’ between universities and the society – was framed as part of the longer process of transformation of the role and status of knowledge in society. This process, in contemporary parlance usually dubbed ‘the crisis of expertise’ or the ‘post-truth’ epistemic condition, is one of the constitutive questions in late modernity: it concerns concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘reason’, and sources of social authority that question the legacy of the Enlightenment as a whole. The starting assertion of this thesis was that arguments or ‘sides’ in discussions concerning the role and status of knowledge cannot be understood outside of their social, historical and political context. This context includes (1) universities as historically and politically constituted institutions of knowledge production; (2) academics – or academic intellectuals – as socially situated individuals with a specific position from which to ‘intervene’ in societal debates; (3) the social space (‘field’) within which these interventions are possible; (4) ideas (concepts, reflections) of different actors in this field concerning the properties – form, effects, and consequences – of these interventions. In order to understand how (1), (2), (3) and (4) are related, the thesis developed a theoretical synthesis of the sociology of critique of Boltanski et al., Bourdieu’s field theory, and the theory of intellectual interventions (Baert, 2012, 2015, Eyal & Bucholz, 2010). The theoretical parts of the thesis (Chapters 1 and 2) engaged with the construction and elaboration of this synthesis and its application to the ‘war on universities’. The empirical parts of the thesis (Chapters 3, 4, 5) presented a detailed analysis of the ‘space’ of interventions: their historical and political background, their content and context, and reflections and narratives of selected authors. The interpretative synthesis in 227 Chapter 6 demonstrated how the production of critique entails a set of rarely explicit, socially and historically contingent, but, ultimately, ontological assumptions – about this space. The second assertion of this thesis is that the configuration of this space – the place where interventions are possible – cannot be explained without recourse to the ideas their authors have about the field they are intervening in, their own agency, and, not least, the relationship between the two. This reflexive component of interventions rests on the construction of what Boltanski dubbed ‘complex exteriority’: an epistemic position that enables the production of knowledge about a given context from within that context. While, of course, this position is neither unique to sociology (anthropology, for instance, has a history of grappling with it) nor to the social sciences (as reflected in the vast literature on ‘observer effects’ and ‘anthropic bias’ – e.g. Bostrom, 2010), it creates a particular form of tension when it comes to the justification and legitimation of academic authority – incidentally, exactly what is at stake in the ‘war on universities’. The third major assertion of the thesis, then, is that critique – as both a form of knowledge of the world and engagement with the world – has to be understood not only as a form of knowledge, but also as a form of ignorance. Rather than just looking at what people know, we must also ask what they do not – and, possibly, cannot – know when it comes to ‘their’ object. The study of the social production of ignorance has been steadily gaining ground in social epistemology and sociology of knowledge. Sociologists of knowledge have argued that absence of knowledge is as much a product of social processes as knowledge itself (McGoey, 2012 a,b; Croissant, 2014). What is perceived as ‘ignorance’ can be an outcome of a number of factors, from actual absence of knowledge to strategic evasion of specific lines of inquiry. While most of this research centres on scientific ‘controversies’ and other institutional forms of knowledge production, this thesis, by contrast, aimed to demonstrate how ignorance is an inevitable component of any process of production of knowledge, even when that knowledge aims to be reflexive – and, possibly, even more so. Given that critique is a social process, the conceptualization of these factors equally influences the type of knowledge or diagnosis that it can give rise to. While more 228 specific in scope, this account is consistent with those presented by major theorists of reflexivity, such as Archer, Giddens, Lash, or Beck. Reflexivity arises from the need to explain, justify, or unify different possible accounts of reality, in order to make ‘sense’ or everyday existence. In this sense, precisely because life is fluctuating, risky, and full of contradictions, actors are constantly compelled to engage in narratives, techniques and practices that smooth or ‘even out’ the meaning and value of events, persons and things. Examples such as the environmentalist who flies around the world or the critic of academic neoliberalism who nonetheless participates in the academic ‘rat race’ serve to remind us of the impossibility of ‘extracting’ oneself from the networks of interdependence forged by contemporary capitalism. Reflexivity, or, more precisely, self-reflexivity, on this account, occurs as a byproduct of negotiation or grappling with the ambivalence of everyday experience. From this perspective, positioning can be interpreted as a practice of ontological ‘fixing’ of subjects (and objects) that form participants’ social worlds. Precisely because their value is not ‘stable’ – meaning they are, or can be, multiple things at the same time – they need to be, even if temporarily, framed as monovalent: that is, reduced to a fixed, unitary meaning. Given that the general political (or moral- ontological) framework of liberal democracies (as opposed to some earlier modes of governance) forbids fixing the value/ontological status of persons ‘for all time’, the agency of human beings has to be justified through references to their position. Thus, politicians are evil, but managers are ‘perverted’, having ‘bought into’ (the language is telling) the ideology of neoliberalism. This extends not only to subjects (or persons), but to entire domains (or ‘worlds’), like politics or the economy. Anything that seems overtly associated with either is framed as foreign, polluting (‘toxic’), and dangerous to ‘the University’. In the first step, this is a gesture of ontological non-reductionism: drawing boundaries between these domains is meant to signal that ‘objects’ or values belonging to one cannot be reduced to, and thus neither measured according to, criteria developed for the other (e.g., knowledge cannot be measured by the principles of utility). In the other, it presents a veritable ontological splitting: it establishes a line of division between the two domains that serves to fracture reality into ‘worlds’ (cf. Gabriel, 2015). Assigning a moral-ontological value to these domains, in turn, serves to 229 position them as adversarial, to the point of being mutually exclusive: academia cannot coexist with either the ‘world’ of politics nor the ‘world’ of economy. The conflict, indeed, is one of mutual destruction: a war. This is how interventions proceed from a ‘war of words’ to ‘a war of worlds’. In this reframing, intellectuals position themselves as, at the same time, ‘soldiers’ in the conflict – defending the cause of The University – and as (engaged) observers: that is, someone who is capable of surveying ‘the field’ from above, positioning (or, more specifically, geolocating) the most relevant players, and pronouncing a moral and ontological stance on the present and the future of the conflict. Epistemic authority is derived from this position that is simultaneously within and above: ‘within’ gives intellectuals the authority to speak for other academics; ‘above’ affords them the capacity to ‘see’ (or, rather, situate) ‘both sides’ – that is, the world of the academia and worlds that are pitted against it. In the language of positioning, this fixing constitutes a spatial vantage point; in other words, it is the establishment of the original position from which (political) space can be constituted. In pragmatic sociology of critique, the need for this temporary fixing is the generative context of critique (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006, pp. 23–45, 127– 148). In a situation in which the legitimacy of critique as practice is itself at stake – and changes in the political economy of knowledge production certainly merit this diagnosis – it is not a surprise that the production of the position of ‘complex exteriority’ will inevitably invoke the justification of precisely the means through which the group in question ‘orders’, or relates to, reality. As Simone Weil framed it, Every professional group manufactures a morality for itself in virtue of which the exercise of the profession, so long as it conforms to the rules, is quite outside the reach of evil. This is an almost vital need, for the stress of work . . . is in itself so great that it would be unbearable if accompanied by anxious concern about good and evil (1943, p. 172). This, in the end, is why critique is fundamentally reliant on instruments of ‘sociological totalisation’: these instruments provide both a means of 230 categorisation and a ‘viewing platform’ from which an order of equivalence (commensuration) can be established. These instruments, at the same time, cannot be utilized in a way that would undermine the very possibility of interventions. In other words, given that they are predicated on the epistemic procedure of objectifying one’s own epistemic subjecthood, they have to retain both the possibility of objectivation – achieved through instruments of sociological totalization – and the claim to epistemic privilege through which the existence of subjecthood is confirmed. This can explain why participants are reluctant to reflect on the broader context that makes their own interventions possible. As Martijn Konings argued, The modern subject often employs its reflexive capacities not to transform its own relation to the iconic sign but to build up a fantasy of a corrupted other that prevents the sign from operating in the proper way and delivering on its redemptive promises. (…) In other words, idolatry critique becomes a technique of narcissism, which may be understood as the emblematic character problem of the modern subject: it denotes the logic of what Brown (1995, 52) calls “wounded attachments,” the paradoxical way in which moderns use their reflexive capacities to sustain forces that injure them (2015, p. 7). Reflecting on these conditions would require acknowledging different ‘logics’ that allow interventions to happen. It would also include recognizing, and naming, paradoxical – in Wendy Brown’s words, ‘wounded’ – attachments that sustain critique as a form of practice. Some of these include profit motives driving book publishing, and advertising revenues driving newspapers and other media outlets. Precisely because ‘the social’ is not a discrete realm, certainly not separated from ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’, the position from which interventions can be made has to be justified through ‘fixing’ the ontological status of different objects that appear in it. This is why interventions cannot but postulate a political space where an exchange of arguments, a pooling of different forms of justification, is not only possible, but also makes sense: it is the only universe in which interventions matter. 231 This hopefully clarifies why this thesis avoided postulating pre-existing ‘fields’. Despite many (including overstated) differences, what Boltanski and Bourdieu have in common is a determination to take actors seriously (Susen, 2014b). Admittedly, Bourdieu does this in order to reintroduce epistemic, and Boltanski ontological, skepticism; however, from the perspective of this thesis, it suffices to take it as a methodological caveat. In other words, the fact intellectuals feel compelled to create an ontological rupture between academia and other ‘worlds’ is something that needs to be explained, rather than taken as a pre-defined feature of the space for interventions. Contra Bourdieu, then, sociological reflexivity is ultimately limited – at least in the case of critique of neoliberalism – by precisely the same instruments that are used to construct the ‘totalising’ view Boltanski identifies as the main source of contradiction implied in the critical stance. While critique can engage with forms of oppression its own instruments have ‘uncovered’ – class, ‘race’, gender – it encounters decisive problems when it comes to turning these instruments towards constitutive categories of its own epistemic foundations. These problems are exacerbated under conditions of uncertainty: historically, social sciences and humanities were most likely to question these foundations when they seemed most secure institutionally, such in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, if anything, critique is used to totalize the sociological toolbox even further: by expanding and coopting perspectives from gender, queer, and postcolonial studies, by developing graduate programmes in critical theory, by attaching the epithet ‘critical’ to academic fields from Accounting to Zoology, including the recent field of ‘critical university studies’, which engages critically with just about anything but the concept of university itself. Presenters at academic conferences regularly cite Lorde’s dictum “master’s tools can’t dismantle the master’s house” without pausing for a moment to consider the performative contradiction implied in this act. What takes place is a kind of inverse ‘scholastic fallacy’. Rather than academics projecting onto external reality characteristics of the scholarly gaze, in this case, the assumption is that bringing elements of ‘the real world’ inside academic contexts suffices to ‘undo’ their scholasticity17. This is what makes the 17 Bourdieu’s depiction of the raison scolastique is also applicable in this context: “The social and mental separation is, paradoxically, never clearer than in the attempts – often pathetic and 232 epistemic apparatus of critique sharpest when addressed to ‘the world’; and, conversely, bluntest when applied to itself. Hannah Arendt, Pierre Bourdieu, and Peter Sloterdijk situated the genesis of this ‘knowledge ignorant of itself’ in the Ancient Greek polis and the distinction between reflection and action, this thesis focused on the way in which this particular form of epistemic relationship was constituted in and through political and social processes that shaped the institutionalisation of, first, academic knowledge, and, second, critique within it, in the British Isles. The remainder of this chapter will discuss the theoretical and epistemological implications for the role of critique in the (‘Western’) academia, its relationship with sociology and other social sciences, and, in particular, for how we will go about ‘knowing’ neoliberalism. The justification of justification In the second half of the 20th century it became increasingly obvious that many of the foundations of the modern ‘Western’ world no longer held. This extended to the ‘social contract’ between institutions of knowledge production, such as universities, and institutions of political power, like the state. World War II collapsed the assumption that the line dividing rationality from irrationality was coextensive with the line separating ‘barbarism’ and civilization; acts of unspeakable barbarity could be committed in the name of civilization, and, as Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) observed, by supremely ‘rational’ means. The decisive blow of the Holocaust to European rationality was also the funeral march for Enlightenment’s core idea: that reason alone can dispel prejudice, and incline humans towards a kinder, better life. Western thought in the rest of the 20th century, to a great degree, represents an attempt to come to terms with the impossibility of reconciling cultivated reason ephemeral – to rejoin the real world, particularly through political commitments (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.) whose irresponsible utopianism and unrealistic radicality bear witness that they are still a way of denying the realities of the social world” (2000, p. 41). 233 with mass violence. Adorno famously quipped: “the premier demand on all education is that Auschwitz not happen again” (1998 [1969]). Arendt, carrying forth the legacy of both Jaspers and (albeit in a different way) Heidegger, argued that the problem lay precisely in the absence of thinking: the problem with Eichmann, for instance, was that he was not thinking (Arendt, 1963). Any present context in which thinking is pitted against non-thinking, regardless of whether the latter is dubbed ‘nationalism’, ‘populism’, ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, or ‘neoliberalism’, has to be seen in the light of this legacy. This legacy calls for the identification and calling out of all forms of exclusion and oppression, especially those that seem like they may be inclined to repeat the political technologies of World War II. At the same time, it calls for the justification of the calling out itself; in other words, a promissory mechanism that links critique – the formulation of grievances, especially in its theoretically-infused diagnostic form – with a progressive cause and thus a better future. This puts critique, especially the kind practiced through Western institutions of knowledge production and mediated through networks of influence that build on European colonial history, in a particularly tricky spot. On the one hand, it has to rely on performative apparatuses of rationality and objectivity (Boltanski’s ‘instruments of sociological totalisation’) in order to construct an authoritative picture of reality. At the same time, it has to demonstrate either casual disregard for or constant epistemic vigilance towards the capacity of precisely these instruments to extend their ‘totalising’ potential towards forms of objectification of other beings that eventually slip from epistemic to ontological (as, for instance, in the case of eugenics). Therefore, those who practice critique have to justify their own access to and use of these instruments whilst making sure they are isolated from those who may wish to apply the same instruments – instruments that, at bottom, allow for the identification, comparison, and ordering of entities – for political technologies associated with totalitarian modes of governance. An obvious solution for this, of course, is the institutional separation between knowledge of beings and governance of beings, in most contemporary democracies enacted as the separation between universities and the state. Yet, as the political history of universities in the UK presented in this thesis demonstrates, not only is 234 this boundary difficult to maintain in political contexts where the governance of populations is almost completely overlapping with the knowledge of these populations (which, in Foucault’s terms, would be any modern society); the boundary was virtually always tenuous. One side of this has to do with forms of social stratification characteristic of industrial and post-industrial societies, where intellectuals and politicians were typically recruited from the same class; in the UK, in particular, elite institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge provided a context for the solidification of personal connections and shared interests. The other side, however, is that universities and the state co-evolved in the same political context, and thus negotiation of the boundary between the two was a vital component for the constitution of both, rather than a principle ‘fixed’ or enacted for good at any particular point in time. Institutions of knowledge production, in this sense, were always what Latour (1993) referred to as ‘hybrids’. They were hybridized not only with their physical environment, but also with domains such as ‘politics’ or ‘the economy’, both of which, of course, were also hybrids. While it is possible to claim this hybridity of universities was somewhat less evident until the 20th century, in its second half it became virtually impossible to ignore. EP Thompson’s Warwick University, Ltd. presented a stark portrayal of the degree to which universities were ‘entangled’ with ‘worlds’ of industry, capital, and by extension military and political power. This presented problems for critique: how to continue benefiting from institutions of knowledge production without, at the same time, becoming ‘complicit’ in these processes? This was a particular challenge for forms of critique deeply reliant on these institutions for its intellectual as well as political legitimation, as Chapter 4 argued was the case with British cultural studies. It was clearly part of a wider problem of foundations of social sciences: how can one continue being part of while not thinking as part of? In other words, how is it possible to produce knowledge from institutions deeply implicated in capitalism without that knowledge simultaneously being of capitalism, but not primarily (and possibly at all) in the sense of about? Sociology of knowledge presents one type of solution to this problem, in the sense in which it makes the relationship between the ‘social’ (including the elements 235 identified as most directly relevant to capitalism, be they material – as in Marx, or ideal – as in Weber) and knowledge its primary object. In Berger and Luckmann’s constructivist paradigm (1967), this takes the direction of asserting the ontological primacy of knowledge over any version of reality. Sociology of scientific knowledge of the Edinburgh school, as well as ANT and STS, take this paradigm to its logical limits. Postmodernism takes a slightly different approach by rejecting any claim to foundationalism; yet, this leads either to absolute nihilism, or, alternatively, to an ironic stance that, as some of Rorty’s critics have argued, is best (and possibly only) exercised from a tenured position in Ivy League universities (Haack, 2016). This, obviously, is the impasse Boltanski eventually reaches with the problem of ‘complex exteriority’ in On Critique. At this point, sociology of critique converges with the critique of rationality of the early Frankfurt School (Basaure, 2014). Yet it does not follow either the route of postmodernism, into anti-foundationalism, or the route of sociology of knowledge, into the focus on correlationism. Neither does it follow Bourdieu’s critical sociology into developing sociological reflexivity as a particular form of discipline (or sport) of sparring with epistemic biases. This, however, leaves it a bit stranded: it has to remain consigned to the level of anthropological epistemology, by inferring the underlying rationality of modes of justification. Boltanski goes back to ‘the people’ and their forms of judgment as the generative and reproductive mechanism of the social; in this sense, he uses justification as a justification for posing the question of justification in the first place. This allows sociology of critique to zig-zag through questions of ontology relatively unscathed. However, it also brings it dangerously close to forms of ‘epochal’ theorizing: it also uses a diagnosis of the present to justify its approach to diagnosing the present. In this sense, it is not entirely clear whether it can avoid the last-minute failure of nerve that characterised Bourdieu’s sociological reflexivity. This thesis, however, suggested to drop one level down ‘the rabbit hole’ (Muniesa, 2016) and ask: what must actors assume reality is like for critique to be possible? 236 The ‘proliferation’ of critique can be seen precisely as a reaction to an increasing realisation of the impossibility of distinguishing its constitutive conditions from what it aims to grasp as its object. In the first instance, it takes the form of performative distancing from the immediacy of ‘reality’, what Boltanski, following Sartre, frames as the ‘viscosity of the real’. This distancing has both material and discursive elements. Traditionally, the material took shape through spatial and infrastructural separation of sites for the production of knowledge and critique from their environment. This is reflected in the metaphor of Town vs. Gown and, in many campus-based universities, is still the case. Even universities that are more ‘embedded’ in their surroundings often have strong private security and controlled access to many, if not all, buildings. Similarly, ‘events’ where critique takes place – for instance, book launches, panels and debates – are clearly demarcated from the flow of ‘everyday existence’. They are usually highly ritualized, with a specific focus, order of speakers, rules of participation and interaction. As suggested in Chapter 4, such instances can be seen as ‘truth tests’, which serve to affirm both the truth of the diagnosis (critique), and the authority of the speaker (and other participants). They are also sites of economic exchange: in addition to the rituals of book sales and signing, increasingly they feature the possibility of obtaining drinks (or even snacks), related publications, and so on. Yet it is this ‘other’ side that is never picked up, never remarked on, never commented upon. In this sense, David Willetts can ostensibly ‘breach’18 by launching an open critique of Stefan Collini in his role as discussant during Collini’s book launch and still remain (though controversially so) part of the same social milieu. However, it is far less conceivable that a discussant (or anyone else) would, for instance, launch into a diatribe on the pricing of the book, the fact it’s being sold, or, say, raise the question of author’s royalties. When and if such things occur, offending individuals are either quickly removed or ignored. The discursive element includes the construction of justifications that frame these two worlds, or ‘sides’, as mutually exclusive to the point of annihilation. This takes the form of ‘ontological purification’: that is, identification of different ‘beings’, 18 ‘Breaching’ experiments were commonly used in ethnomethodological research to render observable implicit social rules and mores (see Garfinkel, 1991; Goffman, 1971). In this context it is particularly interesting to observe which forms of ‘breaching’ are admissible, and which are not. 237 establishment of their moral worth, and reassignment of those that appear ambiguous. These gestures of discursive boundary-keeping proceed through positioning different actors within ‘worlds’, and the ascription of properties in accordance with this. For instance, managers and vice-chancellors are identified as evil or ‘unthinking’, while academics are identified as good, unsuspecting victims of neoliberal ideologues. This form of positioning, obviously, has to ignore both distinctions among university managers – particularly difficult to sustain in cases when authors themselves occupied managerial positions – and those among academics. This, for instance, is why the question of precarious labour and other forms of unequal power relations among university staff, as well as between staff and students, plays a relatively minor role. Alternatively, critique takes as its object the alleged reversal of these relationships, as, for instance, in the ‘free speech’ arguments surrounding both instances of no-platforming and universities’ ‘pro- European bias’. Critique is, in this sense, a fundamentally modern practice: it seeks to circumscribe different domains, maintaining separate spheres of exchange and rules for each. This enables critique to continue as if ‘economy’ and ‘knowledge’ (or, in Bourdieu’s terms, ‘culture’) really constituted separate fields. It is this ‘double truth’ (in Eyal’s terms) of intellectual interventions – that they are neither ‘economic’ nor ‘scientific’ by themselves – that provides the conditions for critique to act as a practice of performative delineation of the two. This is also the mechanism that gives critique of neoliberalism its double meaning: the fact it is both ‘of’ neoliberalism as part, and ‘of’ neoliberalism as about – or, as framed in the Introduction, its object is simultaneously the generative condition of its epistemic subject. We were never modern…but we keep trying Latour (1993) identified the tendency to draw boundaries around objects and domains as quintessentially modern. In other words, it is precisely because the ‘world’ is deeply intertwined, links and connections are always being made (and remade), objects fashioned and refashioned, that ‘the moderns’ – meaning more- or-less inhabitants of the developed world – are busy trying to ‘disentangle’ them. 238 There is probably no institution more ‘modern’ than the university19. British universities played a pivotal role in both industrial development and colonial expansion; they were intertwined with formal and informal administrative, literary, and commercial networks, many of which spun far beyond the territory of the British Isles (Perraton, 2014). This was not so much a specificity of the institution, as a reflection of the fact universities were vital to the development of the modern nation-state. In the Westphalian world, universities were granted autonomy precisely because they were not, in any substantial sense of the term, autonomous. Their separation from ‘everyday’ affairs, including those of the political community, the separation Weber was so keen to uphold, was predicated on a sophisticated tradeoff between the technical, administrative, and other forms of expertise, and protection from overt political interference. In line with liberal concept of the duality of positive and negative rights, protection of and protection from the state were two sides of the same coin, itself reliant on the same political actor: the state. This co-determination is one of the reasons why critique of neoliberalism is so invested in the ‘defence’ of the university. ‘The University’, in this context, represents less any concrete institution or arrangement as the metaphor for knowledge protected from the incursions of the ‘outside’ world, regardless of whether it is coded in economic, political, or simply physical terms. This love/hate relationship between intellectuals as spokespersons for institutions of knowledge production and forms of political power provides ample material for critique. Simultaneously coded as the provider of protection and as conduit of harm, The State is, in this framing, itself a symbol for the impossibility of separation between different ‘spheres’. Critique, in this sense, can be seen as a practice of resolving, or dealing with, ambiguity. The more ambivalent institutions (people, objects, etc.) are, the more important it becomes to ‘fix’ them, to assign stable (ontological) value: X counts as Y in C. This is why interventions invest so much in positional struggles around the ‘nature’ of universities: ‘contributors to economy’, ‘guardians of knowledge for its own sake’, ‘essential elements in building a knowledge society’, ‘spaces for 19 Which, of course, is not to negate the pre-modern history of universities, engaged with in some detail in Chapter 3. 239 the preservation of critical thought’, ‘protectors of free speech’, ‘enemies of Brexit’ or ‘targets of frustration of nationalist elites’. This is where the full extent, or meaning, of the metaphor becomes clear. In the Westphalian order, ‘war’ usually requires at least one side to be a state actor. Wars concern questions of boundaries (and, obviously, conflicts over resources); the more coextensive the warring entities, the more effort is required to delineate them. The choice of metaphor is thus not accidental. Tropes such as war, ruin, death, or destruction in the contemporary critique of neoliberalism in higher education convey that the constitutive institution for the order of discourse is under attack. If anything, wars are the exact opposite of skholè: the erasure of leisure, at least in the common sense of the term20, and the eruption of the material, everyday, and mundane. Last, but not least, wars are exceedingly corporeal: even with the shift towards drone warfare, they still include a lot of physicality, not to mention death. What the metaphor also does, then, when employed in intellectual interventions, is provide an exit from the viscerality of this impression by furnishing an interpretative or diagnostic framework with which to comprehend it: what is this a case of. In Boltanski and Thévenot’s terms, it provides an order of generality: a diagnosis that is universal if by no other means, then by the mere fact it is framed in the language of critique. This order of generality furnishes the possibility of asserting equivalence: X counts as Y in C. Policies count as ‘gibberish’, REF counts as surveillance, university managers count as ‘fat cats’. In this sense, intellectual interventions are a kind of assembly device that translates relatively specific feelings of dissatisfaction, of being oppressed, or being under attack, into a particular product – an intellectual intervention – through the aid of networks of mediators and intermediaries, from editors and publishers, to platforms, to audiences. In this way, wars also represent instruments of ontological simplification. These forms of ontological simplification, further, serve not only to position the author as well as (real or imaginary) opponents, but also, more fundamentally, to affirm the validity of the act of positioning. Searle’s ‘institutional’ facts thus hinge on the 20 Reportedly trench warfare included periods of exceeding boredom, but it is questionable whether anyone would be likely to describe them as ‘pleasant’. 240 belief of speech to institute – literally, produce – effects. Speech-acts are, in this sense, their own justification, through which the performance of speech is, at the same time, supposed to act as the extradiscursive source of validity – and efficacy – of the act itself. How to do (no) things with words The admonition to “choose sides” in the blurb for Docherty’s Universities at War cited in Chapter 1 can thus be read in two registers. One is that two positions – ‘for’ and ‘against’ universities – are mutually exclusive, and that no middle ground is possible. The other is that the (potential) reader has already chosen sides; that is, that the act of reading itself – as well as, obviously, writing – constitutes a political choice. In this sense, the process of production and consumption of intellectual products and its attendant practices (book launches, panels, discussions on social media) become equated with political action. Engaging in interventions thus becomes the external guarantee of the effectiveness of interventions. This is consistent with Butler’s account of performativity. Foucault, however, recognised the need for discourse to be grounded in something other than itself: power, in his view, is historically prior to discourse. This is a good time to revisit the ontological foundations of Austin’s concept of speech-acts. What takes place in critique, especially the kind practiced through intellectual interventions, is a ‘forgetting’ of the hyphen; the conditions under specific forms of ‘speech’ – utterances – become effective. This goes beyond well beyond ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ consequences, as well as the question of situational conditions (perlocution): it concerns the very idea that speech has effects, or, simply put, that to speak is to act. While sociology of critique does not infer a (meta)normative order from the plurality of existing modes of justification, it implicitly draws a boundary around forms of engagement. In that account, even orders of violence, love, or familiarity are ultimately bound by the need to justify or offer causes (reasons) for action. This is predicated on the assumption that life in a society requires its members to make their action understandable or legible to others, even if this does not lead to agreement. In this sense, the existence of multiple orders of worth as well as 241 ‘worlds’, as noted in Chapter 6, nonetheless presupposes the possibility of coexistence. This, in Boltanski and Chiapello’s words, explains the inherent ambiguity of critique: (E)ven in the case of the most radical movements, it shares 'something' with what it seeks to criticize. This stems from the simple fact that the normative references on which it is based are themselves in part inscribed in the world (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007, p. 40). Power, in this sense, is ultimately constrained by the need to justify. In New Spirit of Capitalism, this is precisely what makes capitalism resilient: it is capable of appropriating forms of critique, integrating its discourse, and turning it into a form of justification. In this sense, capitalism works through the subsumption of critique and displacement of exploitation. Neoliberalism, however, is the only form of political order that does not have to conform to requests for justification. This may seem counterintuitive: after all, analyses of neoliberalism over the past 30 years have overwhelmingly focused on the constructions of neoliberal reason (Peck, 2010; Amadae, 2015), neoliberal rationality (Brown, 2015), neoliberal ideology (Harvey), to say nothing of the scholarship on Mont Pelerin ‘thought collective’ (Stedman Jones, 2012; Mirowski, 2009). Yet, as noted at the beginning, there is an inherent danger of overcognitivizing neoliberalism, seeing its appeal or successes as purely (or primarily) intellectual, while ignoring the affective (Konings, 2015; Davies, 2018). This intellectualizing tendency is nothing other than Bourdieu’s scholastic fallacy: at the end of the day, a self-affirming assumption that words and concepts – such as those used in critique – matter. Neoliberalism no longer requires justification not because it is a ‘policy orthodoxy’ (orthodoxies call for careful policing of canon and prosecution of heresy) nor because it is an ‘ideology’ in the sense in which the majority of people are ‘blind’ to it (if they were, the ‘iconoclastic’ practices of critique of the sort analysed in this thesis would have a sufficient mobilizing effect, akin to the ‘consciousness-raising’ strategies of early Marxists). One reason, which is quite obvious, is that there is a dearth of other options. Nostalgic dreams of communism and throwbacks to 242 welfare state aside, few people have a clear idea of what an alternative system would look like. More problematically, most people’s lives are so intertwined with neoliberal institutions (banks, transport systems) that imagining the level of comfort to which most affluent ‘Westerners’ are accustomed to outside these institutions seems almost impossible. The other reason is that there is nothing about critique that renders it challenging or subversive to ‘the system’ as a whole. If anything, critique channels tendencies and feelings that may be harmful – dissatisfaction, frustration, anger – into relatively safe confines of speech-acts. People who read the London Review of Books may feel that their frustrations about their son’s tuition fees are recognized and meaningful, nod, talk about it with their partner over dinner, ‘like’ and ‘share’ critical articles on Facebook, perhaps even order one of the books. But they still pay tuition fees, order their dinner through Deliveroo, generate revenue for Facebook’s ad partners, and probably get the book delivered by Amazon. Unlike in Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis, where late stages of capitalism integrate or subsume ‘artistic’ critique of the 1960s, neoliberalism – at least inasmuch as it is a diagnosis for the current order – can not only happily coexist with various sorts of discursive critical practices, but even encourage them. Like the University, its constitutive fantasy, critique can become an organised practice of ‘exiting’ the vagaries of everyday existence whilst remaining deeply, and inextricably, attached to them. Postscript: dream of detachment The possibility of detachment, of course, is a constitutive dream of Western modernity, and as such the constitutive condition for its epistemic gaze. This “view from nowhere” (Haraway, 1991) is not only characteristic of liberal, Anglophone, objectivist discourses. Theories that privilege social and cultural determination of knowledge nonetheless assume that mechanisms by which this determination occurs are, give and take all, knowable. The institution of ‘the University’, thus, becomes a stand-in for the dream of knowledge unbound from material, economic, and political spheres, and thus also from the ‘stickiness’ of the real. Critique, which exists to render one both a subject and an object of observation, cannot achieve this 243 point of view without tacitly accepting the values on which the practice of ‘detached observation’ was built. The dream (or ambition) of an exit from ‘this’ world whilst retaining observational capacities, according to Sloterdijk (2012), is a dream about life after death. The idea of the ‘pure observer’, suspended in thought and thus exempted from the vagaries of worldly existence while perfectly positioned to pronounce on it, is itself predicated on the idea of severance, of the possibility of mind, thought, or language to finally find a way out of the sticky flow of existence. This ‘stickiness’, which Sartre associated with the (human) subject’s implicit awareness of the impossibility of detaching oneself from ‘objects’ – that is, the impossibility of constructing the standpoint of the ‘pure’ observer, the fully autonomous subject – is the driving force for the constitution of ‘complex exteriority’. Exit from the ‘viscosity of the real’, in other words, presupposes there already is an outside. This outside is the constitutive condition of, and for, critique as a whole. In present circumstances, however, it is highly doubtful whether it makes any sense to pursue the “politics of the outside” (Johnson, ed., 2013). If nothing else, planetary boundaries are rapidly making even ‘moderns’ realise that the dream of infinite expansion has run its course – and it is quite possible this realisation has arrived too late (Latour, 2013). The constitutive ‘outside’ of both capitalism and critique, in this sense, is long gone. No-one is sure as yet what may (or may not) be there to replace it. As Hamlet wonders: “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil?” (Shakespeare, cca. 1602). This also means there is no vantage point from which critique – or, for that matter, any mode of knowing reality – can capture the conditions of its existence and escape them at the same time. In The Ends of the World, Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro engage with the problem of stepping out of the “narcissistic circle of correlation” (2017, p. 73), that is, the fixation on the relationship between the self and the world they argue characterizes Western modes of engaging with both space and time. They find it the words of Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami shaman. Yanomamö, of course, are paradigmatic ‘anti-Moderns’, not only in the sense of being constructed as the ‘Other’, but also because of their legendary violence: from a Western 244 perspective, the Yanomamö represent the binary opposite of discourse ethics. In a book co-authored with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, Kopenawa connects ‘Westerners’’ obsession with commodities with the desire to ignore death. In this context, he offers a good answer to Hamlet’s question, and a potent critique of its epistemic foundations: Whites only treats us as ignorant because we are different from them. But their thought is short and obscure; it cannot go far and elevate itself, because they want to ignore death (…) Whites do not dream far like we do. They sleep a lot, but they only dream about themselves (Kopenawa and Albert, 2013, p. 411–12). The future of critique will probably involve learning how to dream about something other than ourselves. 245 246 Bibliography Abend, G. (2008). The Meaning of ‘Theory’. Sociological Theory, 26 (2), 173– 199. Abbott, A. (1988). The System of Professions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Adorno, T.W. (1998 [1969]). Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Alcoff, L. & Potter, E. (eds). (1993). Feminist Epistemologies. London: Routledge. Alliez, A., Hallward, P., Osborne, P. & Stanford, S. (2010, 8 June). “Announcement: The CRMEP is moving to Kingston University”, Save Middlesex Philosophy campaign website, https://savemdxphil.com/2010/06/08/announcement-8-june-the-crmep-is-moving- to-kingston-university/ Amadae, S. (2015). Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Apel, K-O. (1984 [1979]). Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental- Pragmatic Perspective (trans. G. Warnke). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Archer, M. (1995). Realist social theory: the morphogenetic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. (2003). Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 247 Archer, M. (2007). Making Our Way Through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. (2010). Routine, reflexivity and realism. Sociological Theory 28 (3), 272–303. Archer, M. (2012). The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York, NY: Viking Press. Arendt, H. (1981). Life of the Mind: Vols. 1&2 (combined). New York, NY: Mariner Books. Arendt, H. (1989). The Human Condition (2nd edition). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (2005). The Promise of Politics. New York, NY: Shocken Books. Ash, M.G. (2006). Bachelor of What, Master of Whom? The Humboldt Myth and Historical Transformations of Higher Education in German-Speaking Europe and the US, European Journal of Education 41 (2), 245–267. Austin, J.L. (1961). Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austin, J.L. (1975). How to Do Things with Words (2nd ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Bacevic, J. (2016, 6 August). Do We Need Academic Celebrities? Sociological Review Blog, https://janabacevic.net/2016/08/31/do-we-need-academic- celebrities/ Bacevic, J. (2017). Solving the Democratic Problem: A Review of Cruickshank & Sassower’s ‘Democratic Problem-Solving’, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6 (5), 50–52. 248 Bacevic, J. (2018). With or without U? Assemblage theory and (de)territorialising the university, Globalisation, Societies and Education, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2018.1498323 Bacevic, J. & Muellerleile, C. (2018). The moral economy of open access. European Journal of Social Theory, 21(2), 169–188. Baert, P. (2012). Positioning theory and intellectual interventions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42(3), 304–324. Baert, P. (2015). The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual. Cambridge: Polity Press. Baert, P., & Morgan, M. (2018). A performative framework for the study of intellectuals. European Journal of Social Theory, 21(3), 322–339. Baert, P. & Shipman, A. (2012). Transforming the intellectual. In F. Dominguez Rubio & P. Baert (Eds.), The Politics of Knowledge, pp. 179–204. London: Routledge. Bailey, M. & Freedman, D. (eds). (2011). The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance. London: Pluto Press. Balibar, E. et al. (2016). The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report. London: Verso. Bartlett, A., Lewis, J., Reyes-Galindo, L., & Stephens, N. (2018). The locus of legitimate interpretation in Big Data sciences: Lessons for computational social science from -omic biology and high-energy physics. Big Data & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718768831 Basaure, M. (2014). Axel Honneth and Luc Boltanski at the Epicentre of Politics. In S. Susen & B. Turner (eds.), The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the 'Pragmatic Sociology of Critique', pp. 391–412. London: Anthem 249 Bathmaker, A.M. (2003). The Expansion of Higher Education: A Consideration of Control, Funding and Quality. In S. Bartlett & D. Burton (eds), Education Studies. Essential Issues, pp.169–189, London: Sage. Bauman, Z. (1987). Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity, and Intellectuals. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Becher, T. & Trowler, P. (2001). Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines (2nd ed.). London/Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Beck, U, Giddens, A., & Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Belfiore, E. (2013). The ‘Rhetoric of Gloom’ v. the discourse of impact in the humanities: Stuck in a deadlock? In E. Belfiore and A. Upchurch (eds), Humanities in the Twenty-first Century: Beyond Utility and Markets. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Beloff, M. (1968). The Plateglass Universities. Rutherford, MD: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Benda, J. (1928). The Treason of the Intellectuals. New York, NY: William Morrow. Berger, P. & Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Berliner, D. (2016). Anthropology as the Science of Contradictions. HAU journal, 6(1), 1–5. Bernstein, R. (1989). Social Theory as Critique. In D. Held and J. Thompson, 250 (eds): Social theory of modern societies: Anthony Giddens and his critics, pp. 19– 32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Birch, K., Tyfield, D. & Chiappetta, M. (2018) From neoliberalizing research to researching neoliberalism: STS, rentiership and the emergence of commons 2.0. In: SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism. London: SAGE. Blair, T. (1998). The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century. London: Fabian Society. Blokker, P. (2011). Pragmatic sociology: Theoretical evolvement and empirical application. European Journal of Social Theory, 14(3), 251–261. Bloom, A. (1987). The Closing of the American Mind. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Bloor, D. (1976). Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Boas, T.C. & Gans-Morse, J. (2009). Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan. Studies in Comparative International Development, 44 (2), 137–161. Bogdanor, V. (2010, 28 October). Can we afford not to spend more? Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/can-we- afford-not-to-spend-more/414033.article Boltanski, L. (2011 [2009]). On Critique. Trans. G. Elliott. Cambridge: Polity. Boltanski, L. & Chiapello, È. (2007 [1999]). The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. G. Elliott. London: Verso. Boltanski, L. & Esquerre, A. (2016). The Economic Life of Things, New Left Review 98, 31–56. 251 Boltanski, L. & Esquerre, A. (2017) Enrichment, Profit, Critique: A Rejoinder to Nancy Fraser, New Left Review 106, 67–76. Boltanski, L., Esquerre, A., & Muniesa, F. (2015). Grappling with the Economy of Enrichment, Valuation Studies 3(1), 75–83. Boltanski, L. & Thévenot, L. (1999) The sociology of critical capacity. European Journal of Social Theory 2(3), 359–77. Boltanski, L. & Thévenot, L. (2006) [1991]. On Justification: Economies of Worth. Trans. C. Porter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boschetti, A. (1988) The Intellectual Enterprise. Sartre and ‘Les Temps Modernes’. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Bostrom, N. (2010). Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. London/New York, NY: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1977). An Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo Academicus. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. (1990). In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). Field of cultural production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. & Boltanski , L. (2008 [1976]) La production de l’idéologie 252 dominante. Paris: Demopolis/Raisons d'agir. Bourdieu, P. &. Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brandmayr, F. (2017). How Social Scientists Make Causal Claims in Court: Evidence from the L’Aquila Trial. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 42(3), 346–380. Brock, T. & Carrigan, M. (2015). Realism and Contingency: A Relational Realist Analysis of UK Student Protests, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 45(3), 377–396. Brown, R. (2003). New Labour and Higher Education: Dilemmas and Paradoxes, Higher Education Quarterly 57 (3), 239–248. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York, NY: Zone Books. Browne, J. (2010). Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education: An Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance. London: HMSO. Burrows, R. (2012). Living with the h-index? Metric assemblages in the contemporary academy. Sociological Review, 60(2), 355–372. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY and London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2010). Performative Agency. Journal of Cultural Economy, 3 (2), 147– 161. Çalışkan, K. & Callon, M. (2009). Economization, Part 1: Shifting Attention from the Economy towards Processes of Economization. Economy and Society 38 (3), 369– 398. 253 Çalışkan, K. & Callon, M. (2010). Economization, Part 2: A Research Programme for the Study of Markets. Economy and Society 39 (1), 1–32. Callon, M. (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. Callon, M. (2007). ‘What does it mean to say that economics is performative?’ In: MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F., & Siu, L. (eds), Do economists make markets?, pp. 311–357. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Camic, C. (1992). Reputation and predecessor selection: Parsons and the institutionalists. American Sociological Review, 57 (4), 421–445. Camic, C. & Gross, N. (2001). The new sociology of ideas. In J. Blau (ed), The Blackwell Companion to Sociology, pp. 236–49. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Camic, C., Gross, N., & Lamont, M. (eds). (2011). Social knowledge in the making. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Campaign for Public Higher Education (CPU) (2011). In Defence of Public Higher Education. https://publicuniversity.org.uk/2011/09/27/higher-education- white-paper-is-provoking-a-winter-of-discontent/ Carrothers, B. & Espeland, W.N. (1991). Accounting for Rationality: Double- Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality. American Journal of Sociology, 97 (1), 31-69. Centre for Cultural Studies (Education Group). (1981). Unpopular Education: Schooling and Social Democracy in England Since 1944. Birmingham: The Education Group of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Chakraborty, A. (2017, 28 November). The Fat Cats have got their claws into our universities, and will eat them up. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/28/fat-cats-britains- universities-vice-chancellors-salaries-pay 254 Chitty, C. (2014). Education Policy in Britain (3rd ed.). London: Red Globe Press/MacMilland International. Clark, D., Conlon, G. & Galindo-Rueda, F. (2005). Post-Compulsory Education and Qualification Attainment. In S. Machin and A. Vignoles (eds.) What’s the Good of Education? The Economics of Education in the United Kingdom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clark, N. (2011). Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage. Collini, S. (2003, 6 November). ‘HiEdBiz’. London Review of Books, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n21/stefan-collini/hiedbiz Collini, S. (2006.) Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collini, S. (2012). What Are Universities For? London: Penguin. Collini, S. (2017). Speaking of Universities. London: Verso. Collins, H. (1981). Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism. Social Studies of Science 11 (1), 3–10. Collins, R. (1979). The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification. New York, NY: Academic Press. Collins, R. (1998). The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Connell, R. (2007). Southern Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Courtois, A. ed. (2018). Higher Education and Brexit: Current European Perspectives. Report by Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Institute of Education, University of London. London: CGHE. 255 Croissant, J.L. (2014.) Agnotology: Ignorance and Absence or Towards a Sociology of Things That Aren’t There, Social Epistemology, 28(1), 4–25. Crosland, A. (1965, 27 April). Speech at the opening of the Woolwich Polytechnic. Higher Education Policy Institute [HEPI] at https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2016/08/15/polytechnics-or-universities/ Crouch, C. (2004). Post-Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cruickshank, J. & Sassower, R. (2017). Democratic Problem Solving: Dialogues in Social Epistemology. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Dahlgren, P. (2012). Public Intellectuals, Online Media, and Public Spheres: Current Realignments, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 25(4), 95–110. Dahms, H. (2017). Critical theory, Brexit and the vicissitudes of political economy in the 21st century. In: W. Outhwaite (ed.), Brexit: Sociological Responses (pp. 183–192). London: Anthem Press. Danowski, D. & Viveiros de Castro, E. (2017). The Ends of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Davies, W. (2014). Limits to Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition. London: Sage. Davies, W. (2017). Enemies of Brexit? PERC blog, 27 November 2017. Davies, W. (2018). Nervous States: How feeling took over the world. London: Jonathan Cape. Davies, W. & McGoey, L. (2012). Rationalities of ignorance: on financial crisis and the ambivalence of neo-liberal epistemology, Economy and Society, 41 (1), 64–83. 256 Dearing, R. (1997). The Report of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education. London: DfEE. Deem, R., Hillyard, S. & Reed, M. (2007). Knowledge, higher education and the new managerialism: The changing management of UK universities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Department for Education and Skills (DfES). (2003). The Future of Higher Education (Cm 5735). London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO). Department for Business, Education and Skills (DBIS). (2016). Success as a knowledge economy: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice. London: HMSO. Docherty, T. (2011). For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Docherty, T. (2015). Universities at War. London: SAGE. Dunlap, R. & Brulle, R. (eds). (2015). Climate Change and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunleavy, P. & Hood, C. (1994). From Old Public Administration to New Public Management, Public Money and Management 14 (3), 9–16. Dworkin, D. (1997). Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eagleton, T. (1988). The Function of Criticism. London: Verso. Eagleton, T. (2015, 6 April). The Slow Death of the University. Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Slow-Death-of-the/228991/ 257 Eagleton-Pierce, M. (2016). Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts. Abingdon: Routledge. Edwards, R. (1989). Margaret Thatcher, Thatcherism and Education. McGill Journal of Education/Revue des sciences de l'éducation de McGill, 24(2). http://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/7866 Evans, A. (2018, 15 February). It’s scary and unfair: Why I’m striking over pensions. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education- network/2018/feb/15/its-scary-and-unfair-why-im-striking-over-university- pensions Evans, E.J. (2004). Thatcher and Thatcherism. Abingdon: Routledge. Evans, M. (2004). Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities. London: Continuum. Evans, M. (2009). Can women be intellectuals? In C. Fleck, A. Hess, S. Lyon, (eds.) Intellectuals and Their Publics, pp. 29–40. Farnham: Ashgate. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1937). Witchcraft, Magic and Oracles Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Eyal, G. (2000). Anti-Politics and the Spirit of Capitalism: Dissidents, Monetarists, and the Czech Transition to Capitalism. Theory and Society, 29(1), 49–92. Eyal, G. (2013). Spaces between fields. In Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, ed. Philip Gorski, pp. 162–177. Chapel Hill, CA: Duke University Press. Eyal, G., & Bucholz, L. (2010). From the sociology of intellectuals to the sociology of interventions. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 117–137. 258 Eyal, G., Szélenyi, I. & Townsley, E. (1998). Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe. London: Verso. Fligstein, N. & McAdam, D. (2012). A Theory of Fields. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finlayson, A. (2003). Making Sense of New Labour. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Finn, M. (2018). British Universities in the Brexit Moment: Political, Economic and Cultural Implications. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Fitzgerald, D. (2018, 6 November). Stating the Sociological: Des Fitzgerald. Sociological Review Blog, https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/state-of- sociology-des-fitzgerald.html Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (2002). Power: Collected works 1954–1984, Volume 3. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fourcade, M. (2016). Ordinalisation: Lewis A. Cozer award for theoretical agenda-setting 2014. Sociological Theory 34 (3), 175–195. Fourcade, M. & Healy, K. (2007). Moral views of market society. Annual Review of Sociology 33, 285–311. Fraser, N. (2017) 'A New Form of Capitalism? A Reply to Boltanski and Esquerre', New Left Review 106, 57–65. 259 Freedman, D. (2011). An Introduction to Education Reform and Resistance. In The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance, eds. M. Bailey & D. Freedman, pp. 1–14. London: Pluto. Friedman, S. & Laurison, D. (2019). The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged. Bristol: Policy Press. Furedi, F. (2004). Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism. London: Continuum. Furedi, F. (2017). What’s Happened to the University? A Sociological Exploration of its Infantilisation. London: Routledge. Fuller, S. (2016). Academic Caesar: University Leadership is Hard. London: Sage. Gabriel, M. (2015). Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gane, N. (2012) 'The Governmentalities of Neoliberalism: Panopticism, Post- Panopticism and Beyond', The Sociological Review 60(4), 611–634. Gane, N. (2014) 'Sociology and Neoliberalism: A Missing History', Sociology 48(6), 1092–1106. Gamble, A. (1994). The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gardner, B. (2014, 24 October). Professor suspended from top university for giving off ‘negative vibes’. The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/11187063/Professor-suspended-from-top- university-for-giving-off-negative-vibes.html Garfinkel, H. (1991). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. 260 Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geuss, R. (1981). The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas & the Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geuss, R. (2016). Reality and its Dreams. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of a theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1998). The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Gieryn, T. (1983). Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non- science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. American Sociological Review 48 (6), 781–795. Gill, R. (2009). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of the neoliberal university. In R. Flood & R. Gill (Eds.): Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections, 228–244. London: Routledge. Giroux, H. (2014). Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. London: Haymarket Books. Glynos, J. & Howarth, D. (2007). Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory. Abingdon: Routledge. Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York, NY: Basic Books. Gramsci, A., Hoare, Q. & Nowell-Smith, G. (1972). Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York, NY: International Publishers. 261 Graeber, D. (2015) Radical alterity is just another way of saying “reality”: a reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5 (2), 1–41. Green, V. (1974). British Institutions: The Universities. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gross, N. (2002). Becoming a pragmatist philosopher: Status, self-concept and intellectual choice, American Sociological Review, 67 (1), 52–76. Grove, J. (2018, 12 April). USS strikes and the winter of academics’ discontent. Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/uss- strike-and-the-winter-of-academics-discontent Haack, S. (2016). Pining Away in the Midst of Plenty: The Irony of Rorty’s Either/Or Philosophy, The Hedgehog Review 18 (6), https://iasc- culture.org/THR/THR_article_2016_Summer_Haack.php Habermas, J. (1972). Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, S. (1992). ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson & P. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, New York, NY: Routledge. Haidt, J. & Lukianoff, G. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. London and New York, NY: Penguin Press. Halpin, S. (2003, 24 November). Colleges urge no retreat on fees. Letter to The Times, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/colleges-demand-no-retreat-on-fees- 79bw6r329k8 262 Halsey, A. (1992). Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Halsey, A. (2004). A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hancock, A-M. (2016). Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamati-Ataya, I. (2018). The ‘vocation’ redux: A post-Weberian perspective from the sociology of knowledge. Current Sociology, 66(7), 995–1012. Hammersley, M. (2017). On the Role of Values in Social Research: Weber Vindicated? Sociological Research Online 22(1), 7, DOI: 10.5153/sro.4197 Haraway, D. (1991). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 183–201. London/New York: Routledge. Harding, S. (1991). Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Harré, R. (1998). When the knower is also the known. In T. May and M. Williams (eds): Knowing the social world. Buckingham: Open University Press. Harvey, W. (2011). Strategies for conducting elite interviews. Qualitative Research 11(4), 431–441. Hay, C. (1999). The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring under false pretentions? Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hay, C. (2002). Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 263 Hayek, F. (1945). The Use of Knowledge in Society. The American Economic Review, 35 (4), 519–530. Hefferman, R. (2001). New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Scottish Funding Council (SFC), Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and Department for Employment and Learning Northern Ireland (DELNI). (2011). Decisions on Assessing Research Impact’ (REF 01.2011) www.ref.ac.uk/media/ref/content/pub/decisionsonassessingresearchimpact/01_11. pdf HEFCE, SFC, HEFCW, DELNI. (2012). Assessment framework and guidance on submissions www.ref.ac.uk/media/ref/content/pub/assessmentframeworkandguidanceonsubmi ssions/GOS%20including%20addendum.pdf Hill Collins, P. (2009 [1990]). Black Feminist Thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge. Hoggart, R. (1967 [1958]). The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto & Windus. Hohendahl, P. (1982). The Institution of Criticism. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press. Holbraad, M. & Pedersen, M.A. (2017). The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmwood, J. ed. (2011). Manifesto for a Public University. London: Bloomsbury Press. Holmwood, J., Hickey, T., Cohen, R., & Wallis, S. eds. (2016). In Defence of Public Higher Education: Knowledge for A Successful Society. London: Convention for Higher Education. 264 Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T.W. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury. Jacoby, R. (1987). The Last Intellectuals. New York: Basic Books. Jarratt, A. (1985). Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities, Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, at: http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/jarratt1985/index.html James, C. (2016). Brexit: What now for study mobility between Britain and the EU? Pecs Journal of European and International Law, II, 7–20. Jaspers, K. (1959). Idea of the University. London: Owen. Jennings, J., & Kemp-Welch, A., eds. (1997). Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie. London: Routledge. Johnson, R. (1983). What is cultural studies anyway? Unpublished Stenciled Occasional Paper No. 74. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Johnson, J. (ed.). (2013). Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside. New York, NY: [NAME] publications. Karady, V. & Nagy, P.T, eds. (2012). Numerus clausus in Hungary: Studies on the First Anti-Jewish Law and Academic Anti-Semitism in Modern Central Eastern Europe. Budapest: Pasts, Inc. Centre for Historical Studies of the Central European University. Kellner, D., Lewis, T., Pierce, C. & Cho, D. (eds.) (2009). Marcuse's Challenge to Education. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. King, L.P. & Szélenyi, I. (2004). Theories of the New Class: Intellectuals and Power. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 265 Koch, R. (2002). ‘The Critical Gesture in Philosophy’. In B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds.) Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, pp. 524–536. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Kogan, M. & Kogan, D. (1983). The Attack on Higher Education. London: Kogan Page. Konings, M. (2015). The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What progressives have missed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Konrad G, & I. Szélenyi. (1979). The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Kopenawa, D. & Albert, B. (2013). The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kukla, R. (2006). Objectivity and Perspective in Empirical Knowledge. Episteme 3(1), 80–95. Lambek, M. (2016). On Contradictions. HAU Journal Debate: Anthropology and the study of contradictions, 6–8. Lamont, M. (1987). How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Derrida, American Journal of Sociology 93, 584–622. Lamont, M. (2009). How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lamont, M. (2012). Toward a comparative sociology of valuation and evaluation. Annual Review of Sociology 38 (1), 201–221. Lamont, M. & Molnár, V. (2002). The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences Annual Review of Sociology 28, 167–195. 266 Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical Inquiry 30, 225–248. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (2013). An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Lave, R., Mirowski, P., & Randall, S. (2010). Introduction: STS and Neoliberal Science. Social Studies of Science 40(5), 659–675. Law, J. & Urry, J. (2004). Enacting the social. Economy and Society 33 (3), 390– 410. Law, J. & Ruppert, E. (2013). The Social Life of Methods: Devices, Journal of Cultural Economy, 6(3), 229–240. Lawson, T. (2016). Comparing Conceptions of Social Ontology: Emergent Social Institutions or Institutional Facts?, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 46(1), 359–399. Leavis, F. R. (1948). Education & The University: A Sketch For an 'English School’. New York, NY: G.W. Stewart. Ledger, R. (2018). Neoliberal Thought and Thatcherism. Abingdon: Routledge. London Review of Books website (2017). Past Events: The future of our universities, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events/past/2017/3/the- future-of-our-universities-stefan-collini-and-marina-warner 267 Loveday, V. (2018). The neurotic academic: Anxiety, casualisation and governance in the neoliberalising university. Journal of Cultural Economy, 11(2), 154–166. Lyotard, J-F. (1997 [1984]). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F., & Siu, L. eds. (2007). Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mamdani, M. (2018, 19 July). The African University. London Review of Books, 40 (41), 29–32. Mannheim, K., Wirth, L. & Shils, E. (1936). Ideology and utopia. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Marx, K. with F. Engels. (1977 [1932]). The German Ideology. In D. McLellan (ed). Karl Marx – Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: SAGE. Mbembe, A. (2015). Decolonizing Knowledge and the Problem of the Archive. https://africaisacountry.atavist.com/decolonizing-knowledge-and-the-question-of- the-archive McDowell, L. (1998). Elites in the city of London: methodological considerations. Environment and Planning 30(12), 2133–2146. McGettigan, A. (2013). The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education. London: Pluto Press. McGoey, L. (2012a). Strategic unknowns: towards a sociology of ignorance, Economy and Society, 41 (1), 1-16. 268 McGoey, L. (2012b). The logic of strategic ignorance. The British Journal of Sociology, 63, 533–576. McKinnon, R. (2016). Epistemic Injustice. Philosophy Compass, 11 (8), 437–446. Merton, R. (1976). Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press. Mirowski, P. & Plehwe, D. (2009). The Road from Mont Pelerin. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Moberly, W. (1949). The Crisis in the University. London: SCM Press. Morgan, M. and Baert, P. (2015). Conflict in the Academy: a case study in the sociology of intellectuals. London: Palgrave. Muniesa, F. (2014). The Provoked Economy. London: Routledge. Muniesa, F. (2016) You must fall down the rabbit hole. Journal of Cultural Economy, 9 (3), 316–321. Myers, M. (2017). Student Revolt. London: Pluto Press. Nachi, M. (2014). Beyond Pragmatic Sociology: A Theoretical Compromise between ‘Critical Sociology’ and the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’. In S. Susen & B. Turner (eds.), The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the 'Pragmatic Sociology of Critique', pp. 293–312. London: Anthem Press. Nader, L. (1972). Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from ‘Studying Up’. In D. Hymes (ed).: Reinventing Anthropology, pp. 284–311. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Nehring, H. (2011). ‘Out of Apathy’: Genealogies of the British ‘New Left’ in a Transnational Context, 1956-1962. In: Klimke, M., Pekelder, J. and J. Scharloth, 269 eds.: Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980, 15–31. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Newman, J.H. [Cardinal]. 1907 [1858]. The Idea of a University, Defined and Illustrated. London, New York, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. Nichols, T. (2017). The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O'Neill, M. (2014). The Slow University: Work, Time and Well-Being. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, [S.l.], 15 (3). http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/2226/3696. Outhwaite, W. (1986 [1975]) Understanding Social Life: The Method Called Verstehen, 2nd Edition, Lewes: Jean Stroud. Outhwaite, W. (2012). Critical Theory and Contemporary Europe. London: Continuum. Outhwaite, W. (ed). (2017). Brexit: Sociological Responses. London and New York, NY: Anthem Press. Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penny, L. (2015). Unspeakable Things. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA. Perraton, H. (2014). A History of Foreign Students in Britain. London: Palgrave. Petkov M. & Kaoullas, L. (2016) Overcoming respondent resistance at elite interviews using an intermediary, Qualitative Research 16 (4), 411–429. Peirano, M.S. (1998). When Anthropology is at Home: The Different Contexts of a Single Discipline, Annual Review of Anthropology 27, 105–128. 270 Pleasants, N. (1999). Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory: A Critique of Giddens, Habermas, and Bhaskar. London: Routledge. Power, M. (1994). The Audit Explosion. London: Demos. Power, M. (1997). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. London: Verso. Rayner, S. (2012). Uncomfortable knowledge: the social construction of ignorance in science and environmental policy discourses, Economy and Society, 41 (1), 107– 125. Robbins, L. (1963). The Robbins Report, Cmnd 2154, London: HMSO. Rodgers, D. (2018, 22 January). The Uses and Abuses of Neoliberalism. Dissent, Winter 2018, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/uses-and-abuses- neoliberalism-debate Rojek, C. & Turner, B. (2000). Decorative Sociology: Towards a Critique of the Cultural Turn, Sociological Review 48 (4), 629–648. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorty, R. (1982). The Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rose, G. (1997). Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 21 (3), 305–320. Rüegg, W. (ed). (2011). History of University in Europe, Vol. IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sainsbury, D.J. (2007). The race to the top: A review of government’s science and innovation policies. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. 271 Sartre, J-P. (2003 [1958]). Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge. Savage, M. (2009). Against Epochalism: An Analysis of Conceptions of Change in British Sociology. Cultural Sociology, 3(2), 217–238. Sayer, A (2007) Moral economy as critique. New Political Economy 12(2): 261– 70. Schulmann, N. (1993). Conditions of their own making: an intellectual history of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Canadian Journal of Communication, 18 (1), doi:https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.1993v18n1a717. Scott, J. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale, NH: Yale University Press. Searle, J. (2010). Making the Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Segal, L. (2010, 9 May). Middlesex’s Philosophical Struggle. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/09/middlesex- philosophy-university Shakespeare, W. (2006 [cca 1602]). The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. London: Arden (third edition). Shinn, C.H. (1986). Paying the Piper: The Development of the University Grants Committee, 1919–1946. Lewes: Falmer Press. Shils, E. (ed.) (1974). Max Weber on Universities: The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Showalter, E. (2005). Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 272 Slobodian, Q. (2018). Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2012). The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as Practice. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2013). You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Smart, B. (2016). Military-Industrial Complexities, University Research and Neoliberal Economy, Journal of Sociology 52(3), 455–481. Smith, D. (1990). Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Solnit, R. (2014). Men Explain Things to Me. London: Haymarket Books Sparkes, A. C. (2007). Embodiment, academics, and the audit culture: A story seeking consideration. Qualitative Research, 7(4), 521–550. Spivak, G. C. (2003). Can the subaltern speak? Die Philosophin 14 (27), 42–58. Springer, S. (2015). Postneoliberalism? Review of Radical Political Economics, 47(1), 5–17. Springer, S. (2016). Fuck Neoliberalism. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 15 (2), 285–292. Stedman Jones, D. (2012). Masters of the Universe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stern, N. (2016). Building on Success and Learning from Experience: Independent Review of the Research Excellence Framework. London: HM Stationery Office. 273 Stewart, W. (1989). Higher Education in Postwar Britain. London: Macmillan. Stones, R. (2014). Strengths and Limitations of Luc Boltanski's On Critique. In S. Susen & B. Turner (Eds.), The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the 'Pragmatic Sociology of Critique' (pp. 211–234). London: Anthem. Strathern, M. ed. (2000). Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy. London: Routledge. Susen, S. (2014a). Is there such a thing as pragmatic sociology of critique? Reflections on Luc Boltanski’s On Critique. In: Susen, S. and Turner, B (eds): The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’, pp. 173– 210. London: Anthem Press. Susen, S. (2014b). Towards a Dialogue between Pierre Bourdieu's ‘Critical Sociology’ and Luc Boltanski's ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’. In S. Susen & B. Turner (Eds.), The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the 'Pragmatic Sociology of Critique', pp. 313–348. Susen, S. (2014c). Reflections on Ideology: Lessons from Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski, Thesis Eleven 124(1), 90–113. Susen, S. (2016a). Towards a Critical Sociology of Dominant Ideologies: An Unexpected Reunion between Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski, Cultural Sociology 10(2), 195–246. Susen, S. (2016b). The Sociological Challenge of Reflexivity in Bourdieusian Thought, In D. Robbins (ed.) The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu, London: Anthem Press, pp. 49–93. Susen, S. and B. Turner (eds). (2014). The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’. London: Anthem Press. 274 Swedberg, R. (2016). Before theory comes theorizing or how to make social science more interesting, British Journal of Sociology, 67 (1), 5–22. Thomas, K. (2011). Universities under attack. London Review of Books, 33(24), 9–10, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n24/keith-thomas/universities-under-attack Thompson, E. P. (1964). The making of the English working class. New York: Pantheon Books. Thompson, E.P. ed. (2014 [1970]). Warwick University, Ltd. Nottingham: Spokesman Books. Thompson, E. P. (1971) The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past & Present 50, 76–136. Thompson, E.P. (1978). Poverty of Theory: Or, an orrery of errors. London: Merlin. Online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson- ep/1978/pot/essay.htm Thompson, J. (1990). Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Thompson, J. (2005). Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tight, M. (2009). The Development of Higher Education in the United Kingdom since 1945. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Times Higher Education, (2018, 4 October). Group think: scholars assess the state of sociology. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/group-think- scholars-assess-state-sociology Towers, B. (1989). Running the Gauntlet: British Trade Unions under Thatcher, 1979–1988. ILR Review, 42(2), 163–188. 275 University and College Union (UCU). (2013) The Use of Zero Hours Contracts in Higher Education. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/5967/The-use-of-zero-hours- contracts-report-Sep- 13/pdf/Use_of_Zero_Hours_Contracts_Report_0913.pdf UCU (2015). Precarious work in higher education: a snapshot of insecure contracts and institutional attitudes. https://www.ucu.org.uk/stampout UCU (2016). Precarious work in higher education: November 2016 Update, https://www.ucu.org.uk/stampout UCU (2018). Precarious education: How much university teaching is being delivered by hourly-paid academics? https://www.ucu.org.uk/stampout Venugopal, R. (2015). Neoliberalism as concept. Economy and Society, 44 (2), 165–187. Vernon, K. (2004). Universities and the state in England, 1850–1939. London: Routledge Falmer. Vinen, R. (2018). The Long ’68: Radical Protest and its Enemies. London: Allen Lane. Walzer, M. (2002). The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books. Wagner, P. (2014). A Renewal of Social Theory That Remains Necessary: The Sociology of Critical Capacity Twenty Years After. In S. Susen & B. Turner (Eds.), The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the 'Pragmatic Sociology of Critique', pp. 235–244). London: Anthem. Warner, M. (2014, 11 September). Why I Quit. London Review of Books, 36 (17), 42–43. Weber, M. (2003 [1905]). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Mineola: Dover. 276 Weber, M. (1958 [1918]). ‘Science as a Vocation’, in H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (eds), From Max Weber, pp. 129–158. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. (1978 [1956]). Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Webster, F. (2004). Cultural studies and sociology at, and after, the closure of the Birmingham school. Cultural Studies 18 (6), 847–862. Wedel, J. (2017). From power elites to influence elites: resetting elite studies for the 21st century. Theory, Culture and Society 34(5-6): 153–178. Weil, S. (1943). Oppression and Liberty. New York, NY: Routledge. Whyte, W. (2015). Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willetts, D. (1992). Modern Conservatism. London: Penguin. Willets, D. (2010). The Pinch: How baby boomers stole their children’s future (and why they should give it back). London: Atlantic Books. Willetts, D. (2017). A University Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, P. (1981 [1977]). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Aldershot: Gower. Wilsdon, J., et al. (2015). The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. London: HEFCE. 277 Woolf, V. (1992 [1929]). A Room of One’s Own. In: A Room of One's Own & Three Guineas, edited with an introduction by Morag Shiach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woolf, V. (1992 [1938]). Three Guineas. In: A Room of One's Own & Three Guineas, edited with an introduction by Morag Shiach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 278 279 Appendix 1: Ethical approval form Ethical Approval and Risk Assessment Form for Sociological Research To be returned to Odette Rogers at the Department of Sociology Office BEFORE UNDERTAKING YOUR FIELDWORK. FIELDWORK CAN COMMENCE ONLY AFTER APPROVAL IS GRANTED. If you will be undertaking any sociological research that involves gathering information or data from human participants, or involves working away from Cambridge, you must discuss the ethical implications and risks of the research with your supervisor (psychological research has its own parallel ethical approval procedures). The first part of this form, ‘ETHICS’, should be completed for all research involving human participants, or if the research raises other ethical issues. The second part of this form, ‘RISK’, should be completed by all researchers. Page 280 of 293 PART A: ETHICS Both the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the British Sociological Association (BSA), publish guidelines for research with human participants. You may find it useful to consult these guidelines, which can be found at the following webpages (accurate as of 5 May 2016). ESRC Framework for Research Ethics http://www.esrc.ac.uk/files/funding/guidance-for-applicants/esrc-framework-for- research-ethics-2015/ British Sociological Association: Equality and Diversity http://www.britsoc.co.uk/equality/ You can check whether your research requires approval from the NHS (National Health Service) Research Ethics Committee on the following webpage (accurate as of 5 May 2016). NHS Research Ethics Committee Approval http://www.hra-decisiontools.org.uk/ethics/ Ethical approval is first of all considered by the Sociology Ethics Committee, who will either approve a proposal or refer it to a University Ethics Committee for further consideration. PLEASE FILL IN THE FOLLOWING TABLE: Your name: Jana Bacevic Title of research: War on universities? Neoliberalism, knowledge production, and intellectual positioning in the UK Date (DD/MM/YYYY): 14/11/2016 Status (please circle one or delete inapplicable): 1. Academic 2. PhD student 3. MPhil student 4. Dissertation undergraduate Supervisor (if appropriate): DoS/Faculty Advisor (if appropriate): Page 281 of 293 Patrick Baert Hazem Kandil Page 282 of 293 Summary of your research Please outline the main research questions you intend to address, the research design you propose to use, and details of all research instruments and procedures to be deployed. Please attach any relevant documents, such as questionnaires. My research is concerned with forms of intellectual positioning in relation to Governmental policies for knowledge production (higher education and research) in the UK. In particular, I will be focusing on reactions to the consequences that the referendum on leaving the European Union held on 24 June 2016 (‘Brexit’) will have for universities. My fieldwork will comprise interviews with selected intellectuals at UK universities who have publicly taken a position on these issues (through articles in newspapers, blogs, or public speeches), as well as participant observation in events and fora that engage with the implications of contemporary political and social processes for the sector. The objective of these forms of research is to gather information on how individuals position themselves, negotiate, and reflect on the boundaries between the field of politics and the field of knowledge production, as well as how they frame the relationship between their intellectual projects and their environment. Fieldwork will primarily consist of open/unstructured interviewing, combined with ethnographic observation. The total number of interviews is projected to be between 15 and 20; the duration of each should be between 45 and 90 minutes, depending on the interviewees’ availability; interviews will be recorded, pending interviewees’ consent. Participant observation will feature extensive note- taking, and, where permitted, possible photography and/or video recording. Participants will be made aware that the notes and other material will be only used in the thesis. In both cases, the identity of interviewees will be protected, including, when necessary, obscuring their institutional affiliation. Page 283 of 293 PLEASE ALSO SUBMIT A COPY OF THE INFORMED CONSENT FORM YOU MAY BE ASKING YOUR PARTICIPANTS TO COMPLETE (a sample form is included at the end of this document). Page 284 of 293 PART B: RISK THIS PART OF THE FORM MUST BE COMPLETED BEFORE YOU UNDERTAKE ANY FIELDWORK. Before undertaking fieldwork, researchers should consider carefully (1) what hazards the researcher and participants may face during the research; (2) the risks posed by these hazards; and (3) what steps can be taken to minimise these risks. Of course, research cannot be risk-free, and it is important that researchers consider what hazards might arise in the course of their fieldwork, and their likelihood (both for their own safety, and for the safety of their participants), and then consider what sensible and proportionate steps can be taken to reduce the risks posed by these hazards. An example of a risk involved in research would be increased vulnerability to attack during fieldwork. Because there are particular risks associated with doing fieldwork alone, a typical measure to minimise such risks would be to work in pairs, or to leave a travel itinerary and interviewing schedule with a colleague and to phone in at pre-arranged times. A useful discussion of fieldwork safety can be found at the website of the Social Research Association, at the following webpage (accurate as of 5 May 2016). You should read this document before completing the rest of this form. Social Research Association – Code of Safety for Social Researchers http://the-sra.org.uk/sra_resources/safety-code/ This part of the form asks you to list any hazards that you may encounter during your proposed fieldwork, and the reasonable steps that can be taken to minimise the risks posed by these hazards. You will then have to estimate both the likelihood and severity of these hazards, on scales of 1-5, to produce risk ratings for each of the identified hazards you may encounter in your fieldwork. When the risk ratings for all of the identified hazards have been calculated, the highest risk rating is taken as the overall risk rating for your fieldwork. PLEASE PROVIDE THE PROPOSED START AND END DATES OF YOUR FIELDWORK: Proposed start date of fieldwork: 1 February 2017 Proposed end date of fieldwork: 30 May 2017 Page 285 of 293 Definitions Hazard The potential for harm. Risk A function of the probability (or likelihood) of that harm actually occurring and the severity of its consequences. Risk assessment The process of deciding on actions to be taken to reduce risk to an acceptable level, preferably ‘low’ or ‘very low’, through the implementation of control measures. PART B, Section 1: Hazards PLEASE GIVE A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF WHAT YOU PERCEIVE TO BE POSSIBLE HAZARDS TO YOURSELF OR OTHERS THAT MIGHT ARISE DURING YOUR FIELDWORK. There are no to very few hazards related to my fieldwork. During fieldwork, I will be resident in London, with occasional overnight trips to other university towns in the UK (such as Nottingham, Coventry, Lincoln, etc., as well as Cambridge for supervision), and thus the only foreseeable hazards relate to possible incidents concerning residence and transport. In all cases, I will make sure to stay/reside in safe areas and use reliable means of transport, minimizing any risks related to this aspect. Page 286 of 293 Page 287 of 293 PLEASE LIST IN THE TABLE BELOW THE POTENTIAL HAZARDS AND PERSONS AT RISK IDENTIFIED ABOVE: Potential hazards: Hazard 1: Delays related to possible cancellation of transport / rerouting / changes to travelling schedule Hazard 2: Hazard 3: Hazard 4: Hazard 5: Add as appropriate... Persons at risk: Myself Page 288 of 293 PART B, Section 2: Risk Assessment FOR EACH OF THE HAZARDS IDENTIFIED, PLEASE ASSESS ITS LIKELIHOOD, AND ITS SEVERITY WERE IT TO OCCUR, ON SCALES OF 1-5, IN ACCORDANCE WITH TABLES A AND B: Table A: Likelihood of hazard (chance of hazard occurring during fieldwork) Likelihood category Description (% probabilities are guiding estimates) Score Highly unlikely Event highly improbable, though possible (<0.1% chance of occurring) 1 Unlikely Event improbable, but can reasonably be expected to occur (≥0.1% – 5% chance of occurring) 2 Moderately likely Event moderately likely to occur (>5% – 25% chance of occurring) 3 Likely Event probable (>25% – 75% chance of occurring) 4 Highly likely Event has high potential, or is certain, to occur (>75% – 100%) 5 Table B: Severity of hazard (estimated harm of hazard if it occurs) Severity category Description Score Very low For example: lost time or effort, boredom, mental fatigue, minor embarrassment or frustration or the expectation of these, minor property damage, minor or moderate physical discomfort, or the anticipation of suffering these, minor invasion of privacy, etc. 1 Low For example: minor physical pain or the expectation of minor physical pain, moderate psychological distress (embarrassment, shame, etc.), minor reputational damage, cause of offence, moderate property damage, moderate invasion of privacy, increased exposure to everyday risks (traffic, air pollution, etc.), etc. 2 Moderate For example: moderate physical pain or anticipation of suffering moderate physical pain, recalling of traumatic events, unhappy rumination, moderate to high intensity stress or anxiety, etc. 3 High For example: severe physical or psychological pain or damage 4 Very high For example: substantial destruction, serious injury, medium to long-term disability, death, etc. 5 Page 289 of 293 PLEASE PROVIDE IN THE BOX BELOW THE RISK RATING OF EACH HAZARD: Risk rating of hazards (likelihood x severity) The risk rating of each hazard is given by its likelihood score multiplied by its severity score and will be between 1 and 25. Risk rating of hazard 1 = 1 Risk rating of hazard 2 = Risk rating of hazard 3 = Risk rating of hazard 4 = Risk rating of hazard 5 = Add as appropriate... Risk of each hazard: guiding categories Risk rating range Risk category of hazard 1-6 Low risk 8-10 Medium risk 12-25 High risk Page 290 of 293 PART B, Section 3: Control Measures PLEASE INDICATE IN THIS BOX WHAT PRECAUTIONS YOU WILL TAKE TO MINIMISE THE IDENTIFIED RISKS. You must provide a written 'Safe System of Work' (SSW) for activities which carry a risk rating of medium or high according to the risk categories above. Advice on writing an SSW is available from the Health, Safety and Environmental Office (continue on a separate sheet if necessary). PLEASE FILL IN THE FOLLOWING TABLE: Signature of student: Date (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/11/2016 (if appropriate) Signature of staff member/supervisor: Date (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/11/2016 Date for review (DD/MM/YYYY): (If a review will not be required please explain why, e.g., short duration of project, one-off nature, etc.) SIGNATURES ARE TO INDICATE WHO CARRIED OUT, AND/OR WHO APPROVED, THE ASSESSMENT ON BEHALF OF THE DEPARTMENT. SIGNING THIS FORM CANNOT TRANSFER RESPONSIBILITY FROM THE UNIVERSITY TO THE SIGNATORY. HOWEVER, REASONABLE CARE MUST BE USED BY ALL INVOLVED IN COMPLETING THIS ASSESSMENT. Page 291 of 293 THE ORIGINAL OF THIS FORM MUST BE PASSED TO MS ODETTE ROGERS IN THE SOCIOLOGY OFFICE. Department of Sociology SAMPLE INFORMED CONSENT FORM Title of Project: War on universities? Neoliberalism, knowledge production, and intellectual positioning in the UK Name of Researcher: Jana Bacevic The interview you are about to take part in is part of my PhD research at the University of Cambridge, on intellectual positioning in relation to transformations of higher education and research in the UK. You will be asked questions about your opinion on the relationship between intellectuals, universities, and their social and political environment. The interview may involve questions concerning your public engagement, and the way it relates to your professional and personal biography. You are free not to answer specific questions or withdraw from the interview at any point. Your identity will remain concealed, and your answers anonymous and used only for the purposes of academic research. The interview will take between 45 and 90 minutes. If you are interested in receiving further information about this project, please write your e-mail address on the extra sheet. Please tick box 1. I confirm that I have understood these instructions and have had the opportunity to ask questions. 2. I understand that my participation is voluntary and that I am free to withdraw at any time without giving any reason. 3. I understand that my responses will be anonymised and only used for academic research. 4. I understand that my interview may be recorded. 5. I agree to take part in the above project. ____________________ _____________________ Name of Participant Date Signature ____________________ ____________________ Name of Researcher Date Signature 293