Academics succeed in this challenging endeavour when their institutions have autonomy, and when they enjoy autonomy within their institutions.
As academic practices in post-totalitarian societies show, creating a university which respects academic freedom is difficult. Managerial traditions that prioritise hierarchical relations and administrative control often undermine the freedom of scholars to do research, teach or engage in public outreach. In post-totalitarian regimes, managers often ‘know better’ what professors need to do to achieve institutional success.
Neoliberal societies
This ethos is mirrored in societies dominated by neoliberal ideology which urges universities to measure success by benchmarking profitable and prestigious goods for solvent consumers.
While management in general offers necessary tools and services for maintaining good governance and efficient administrative service, neoliberal managerialism differs by creating practices where administrators neglect the freedoms of teachers and students and prioritise performative targets as ultimate indicators of academic success.
A managerial university pursues achievements by increasing the precarity of academics, often viewed as disposable human resources, while periodically accusing them of lethargy and laxity. The freedoms to think, read and discuss are not productive freedoms for a neoliberal manager, if they do not result in higher rates of research grants, publications and instruction.
By putting neoliberal administrators in charge of academic processes, the neoliberal university becomes a replica of a mono-ideological, rigid and machine-like institution, which the post-totalitarian world knows as the Soviet university model.
Doctoral students
The convergence of neoliberal and post-totalitarian university modes is encouraged by a business idea focused on catering to mass higher education, where freedom and success are competing notions.
Intellectual institutions, often derided as ‘ivory towers’, are redundant when a managerial university fortifies its powers by contributing to the growing vulnerability and volatility of labour markets. Knowledge that is packaged and sold to a mass market is not necessarily part and parcel of a quality learning experience, based on freedom of discovery and free-flowing collaborative explorations.
The managerial university often depreciates and derides the intellectual ecosystem as it contradicts the idea of power embedded in administrative control.
Teaching new generations of doctoral students about academic freedom often feels duplicitous. Telling them to disengage from neoliberal gaming increases their vulnerability as they pursue success. This success ends up being deceptive, as the quality of their work declines amidst performative multitasking and anxiety, leading to burnout and precarity.
With mass higher education multiplying the number of doctoral students and making them more vulnerable to competitive labour markets, a young scholar who is overly critical risks disadvantage and discontinuation of their professorial career. Meanwhile, the guiding managerial demand of the neoliberal era, ‘publish or perish’, has metamorphosed into a cynical feudal construct driving a punishing philosophy of servitude.
Trapped in catch-22 situations, young scholars are milled by the managerial machine, unable to turn their self-repressed frustration into a fulfilling academic success.
Managerial ethics under the microscope
What is the way out of this conundrum? Teaching students at a managerial university to be sceptical in an organised way, as suggested by the sociologist Robert Merton, can be a solution. It implies reinstating academic freedom as a strategic asset for communal, rather than private use.
Academic freedom means communal freedom, coupled with solidarity, and these are to be cultivated in mutually supportive ways, while protecting the values of intellectual work and socially significant impact.
Teaching academic freedom for good governance implies placing the ethics of the managerial university, as well as academic practices within such a university, under the microscope.
Studies in the field should be encouraged by stakeholders who care about the quality of learning and knowledge development in their societies and industries.
The future of collective success is linked with the ability of future citizens to learn without the hindrances created by self-serving managers and their nonsensical targets. Teachers of academic freedom should consolidate previous efforts in the field to remain vigilant against the adversarial effects created by managerialism.
‘Don’t be evil!’
Engaging the corporate world, rather than resisting it, is also essential for teaching to contribute to a free-thinking and creative society. The corporate mantra of the Stanford-educated Google creators – “Don’t be evil!” – is a useful message for teachers of business, governments and public policy to communicate the value of open-minded, but ethical environments.
As the frontrunners of the knowledge economy, the ‘Google guys’ knew quite well that the accelerating merger between knowledge and technology could harm humanity immensely. Evil does have its agency, as witnessed through the spread of organised violence, aggression, hate and conflicts nourished and multiplied by post-truth politicians and hybrid warfare developers.
A good university should be known for its ability to cultivate the agency of integrity. Intellectuals should find a way out of the self-defeating philosophy which interprets ‘good’ as a relative term.
This is especially important in contexts where utilitarian freedoms gain priority, and the absolution of greed and narcissism is justified. To cultivate academic freedom in such contexts, university teachers should avoid ambivalent norms, ask higher-order questions and diversify perspectives on success.
Anatoly Oleksiyenko is professor of international higher education and co-director of the Centre for Higher Education Leadership and Policy Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the challenges of globalisation in higher education and transformations of universities in the 21st century. He is a leading scholar on the challenges of organisational change in post-Soviet higher education. This article is based on his presentation at a Society for Research into Higher Education event, “Academic Freedom: Pedagogic tensions and possibilities for the higher education classroom”, held in the UK on 3 July 2024.
This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.