This book goes beyond now-familiar analyses of ‘neoliberal governmentality’ which tend to characterise academics as passive subjects or as ‘strategic actors’, drawing on and cynically exploiting metrics as a form of capital exchangeable across different fields. Instead, Universities in Crisis draws on newer paradigms by drawing on processual, post-critical and phenomenological approaches that leave room for new spaces of negotiation – discursive and practical – for understanding and advancing academic professionalism in this rapidly changing context.
Contributors reflect various manifestations of the changing political and public climate, as well as the unease that surrounds contemporary debates which position the academy in troubling ways. Unifying concepts such as academic work, jurisdiction and transdisciplinarity are deployed to transcend functional divisions within and between academics, administrators, managers and students. Drawing on these theoretical and conceptual resources, contributors engage in critical consideration of whether the potential for ‘push back’ lies both in re-emphasising the specialness of academic professionalism and in defining the commonalities with other professional groups of knowledge workers.
The book offers an unflinching analysis on the conditions which frame the darker side of professionalism and which are associated with increased precarity and reduced autonomy. The contributors explore the dilemmas, challenges and possibilities of professionalism for both early career academics and senior academic leaders.
1. Academics, Professionals and The University: Pathologies and Possibilities, Eric Lybeck (University of Manchester, UK) and Catherine O’Connell (Liverpool Hope University, UK) 2. The Very Idea of Academic Professionalism: at an End or Beginning Anew With an Eco-professionalism? Ronald Barnett (UCL Institute of Education, University College London, UK) 3. Selling Academe’s Soul to the Devil?: Performativity, Pressured Professionalism and the Rationalization of Knowledge Production, Linda Evans (University of Manchester, UK) 4. Luck and Precarity: Contextualising Fixed-Term Academics’ Perceptions of Success and Failure, Vik Loveday (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) 5. Academic Professionalism in the Measured University, Cathal Ó Siochrú (Liverpool Hope University, UK), Roland Bloch (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany), Catherine O’Connell (Liverpool Hope University, UK) and Jakob Hartl (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany) 6. International Student Recruitment: Policy, Paradox and Practice, Sylvie Lomer (University of Manchester, UK) 7. University Management as Court Society: a Processual Analysis of the rise of University Management, Eric Lybeck (University of Manchester, UK) 8. Reimagining the Place of Professional Education in the University, Vivienne Baumfield (University of Exeter, UK) 9. What are Universities For, and What Should They Be For?: the Power and Beauty of the Disciplinary Infrastructure of our Culture, Julian Williams (University of Manchester, UK) 10. Epilogue, John Holmwood (University of Nottingham, UK) Index
Eric Lybeck is Presidential Fellow in the Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK. Catherine O’Connell is Director of the Centre for Education and Policy Analysis at Liverpool Hope University, UK.
