I am re-visiting the issue of universities and their governance, because it is so very important to our futures and to civilised life. What is said about British universities applies equally to Their American counterparts.

Over a year ago, in an article in the London Review of Books, Marina Warner wrote: ” A university is a place where ideas are meant to be freely explored, where independence of thought and Western ideals of democratic liberty are enshrined. Yet at the same time as we congratulate ourselves on our freedom of expression, we have a situation in which a lecturer cannot speak her mind, universities bring in the policeto deal with campus protests, and graduate students cannot write publicly about what is happening.  Gagging orders may not even be necessary.  Silence issues from different causes: from fear, insecurity,precarious social conditions and shame…..the managers count on the fact that academics are generally in their profession “for the satisfaction, not the money”.

“…university life has depended on the willingness of colleagues to undertake all manner of tasks above and beyond the ordinary job, reading one another’s work, writing recommendations, making nominations, translating, assessing and examining and sitting on councils and external bodies. etc, without every every act being quantified and calculated.  Not everything can be measured…..the new managers want to pack ’em in and pile ’em high – and then neglect their interests by maltreating their teachers”. She goes on to say that the biggest losers in all this are the students.  (adapted from an article in the LRB 19 March 2015)

I blame the business schools that preach maximum personal efficiency, columns, boxes, reports on hour-by-hour productivity and peddle the idea that administration is superior to management.  Thus, in the UK, there are more hospital administrators than nurses and doctors, all paid king’s ransoms; they have replicated this system now in universities.  Moreover, the power in universities is held by a small clique; the junior support staff are treated as expendable, and made to sign one year contracts.  When those contracts finish they make the employees “market” themselves around the institution in the hope of finding a new one-year contract.