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Literary Review
Globalisation and the gendered academia
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Gendered and the Restructured University is of immense value for understanding the male-dominated, massive, market-oriented structural and organisational changes that are now sweeping the universities in the West, says P. RADHAKRISHNAN.
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Once colleges were luxuries, designed for the male half of the leisure class; today universities are so numerous that he who runs may become a Ph.D. We have not excelled the selected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the level and average of human knowledge far beyond any age in history. Think now not of Plato and Aristotle, but of the stupid, bigoted and brutal Athenian Assembly, of the unfranchised mob and its Orphic rites, of the secluded and enslaved women who could acquire education only by becoming courtesans. None but a child would complain that the world has not yet been totally remade by these spreading schools, these teeming bisexual universities; in the perspective of history the great experiment of education is just begun.
Will Durant 1953: 255-56
WILL DURANT'S observations, in The Pleasures of Philosophy, were in the context of the West, and of the tremendous expenditure of wealth and labour in the equipment of schools and the provision of instruction for all, which he considered almost a contemporary innovation, and perhaps the most significant feature of his time. One might ask whatever happened to that innovation. The answer is complex, and confounded by the "globalisation of the knowledge economy" as a corollary to and concomitant of the globalisation monster unleashed by the Master World in its own hegemonic interest through, inter alia, the restructuring of universities.
In this context, for understanding the male-dominated, massive, market-oriented structural and organisational changes that are now sweeping the universities in the West, the book under discussion, with its focus on women, is of immense value.
Its specific concerns are: (a) how are higher education institutions repositioning themselves to meet the demands of the global knowledge economy? (b) How has the restructuring of universities impacted upon their framework, practices, academics, what has been the gendered nature of these changes? and (c) how do women managers in academia address the management of change in the context of the new corporate managerialism. Central to the understanding of these questions is understanding the nexus between the global knowledge economy and the restructured universities; and the restructured universities and the academia.
Globalising the knowledge systems in tune with imperialist agenda is a sine qua non to the creation of the global knowledge economy. As education systems are the principal conduits for this, for the effective delivery of the global knowledge economy, restructuring the universities is a functional imperative. However, such restructuring has been precipitant and pernicious to the academia. To reproduce some important observations from the book: In the process of the increasing tendency of universities to form commercial spin-off companies opening them to the charge of being part of the private sector, or "hybrid creatures"; and the threat to the continued existence of state-funded public universities; publicly funded universities may well lose their autonomy while private providers gain access to scarce public funding.
The chase for funds and the systems of promotion and reward rest on a highly competitive system. In this intensely competitive world, attempts to collaborate to gain competitive advantage are fraught with tension: the dictum is image becomes all-important in competition and image serves to establish an identity in the market place.
In the face of increasing corporatisation of universities and the growing emphasis on technology and innovation, organisational cultures of universities are experiencing massive change; the direct effects of scarcer public funding — restructuring and downsizing — continue to reverberate through the higher education systems; this alone leads to considerable insecurity, and indeed a climate of anxiety in some institutions.
The whole male-dominated agenda can very quickly forget the gender mission unless there are people there reminding them. The focus on wealth creation has implications for gender equity in universities, which are already male-dominated, and threatens the fragile commitment to equity goals.
It is the very behaviours, aggression and competitiveness, that are the language of success in today's corporate universities. They have become institutions measuring performativity in a very quantitative sense that favours the style of work of certain academics over others. Unfortunately for women, that style is markedly masculine and favours the disciplines inhabited mainly by male academics.
In the new corporate university, where the managerial imperative is all-important — being entrepreneurial, innovative, going out and getting money — often works better for men.
The gendered consequences of restructuring are that hard won gender equity goals may be at risk; women located in the humanities and social sciences, sometimes seen as distant from technological and corporate goals, are seen to be disposable by "senior management" more attentive to bottom lines than to equity goals. Those of the increased focus on techno-science for women are they are less likely to be involved in those areas.
While tertiary sector institutions have always understood their raison d'etre to be knowledge production and learning, their "repositioning" as essential to the well-being of corporate success and their driving force of economic change has been something of a rude awakening.
Research is carried out — but valued for its financial, rather than intellectual contribution against "overheads"; work is published — with the contribution of the publications noted to schema of assessment and performativity rather than to knowledge. Newly familiar terms like "knowledge industry" and "knowledge economy" are based on ideas far removed from the original conceptual foundations of universities.
The impact of restructuring on academic institutions and identities as the "ivory tower" is confronted by the reality of the "global knowledge economy" manifested in the corporatisation, privatisation, and commodification of academic life; and the impact of the "metallic new entrepreneuralism" of the "corporate academy", as the underlying concern.
On the level of personal experience, these characterisations reduce to the perception among many people working in universities that their places of work are becoming more and more like factories: staff "man" assembly lines in a tightly timetabled and controlled culture, supervised by managers and bosses whose prime concern is discrete and easily quantifiable deliverables that roll off the assembly line.
New codes of ethical practice for academics have raised expectations of academic performance, despite the intensification of work and increased administrative and performativity demands. Student-teacher relationships have been customised, packaged and individualised, to become the product of both new learning technologies and market demand, where consumability substitutes for relationships based on intellectually and emotionally challenging pedagogical work.
The remaking of the academic in the image of the corporate university is achieved by exploiting the investment of the individuals in the institution — giving them the opportunity to shape up to the new culture — with the implicit assumption that they have the option to leave if not performing. There is less discursive space for voice; only exit or silence, the limited options available in market-oriented systems of education.
The knowledge economy is not only having an impact on how knowledge is valued but also on what kind of knowledge is seen valuable. Within the framing of the new economy, science and technologies are seen as more relevant and valued areas of knowledge than humanities and social sciences. New forms of commodifying knowledge objects marginalise academics that are not identified with new discourses of knowledge work.
As technology is at once science and product, it collapses the distinction between knowledge and commodity, and knowledge becomes technology.
The forms of restructuring and the related organisational changes are shifting the epistemological framework of universities away from traditional western humanism, altering beyond compare the raison d'etre of higher education. Though academics are wont to say that the state of academia must reflect broad social processes, far from doing so because of the market-oriented nature of the restructured universities, the academia reflect only cut-throat and cold-blooded economic processes devoid of much social content.
A central message of the book is that eternal vigilance and energy is required if gender is to remain a priority.
The book is focussed on the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand with contributions on women leaders in the restructured university, managing equity, and academic management and men. It is aimed at higher education managers and scholars. It is timely and will be of great use to universities, other complex organisations, higher education managers and scholars in the developing countries as well.
Gendered and the Restructured University: Changing Management and Culture in Higher Education, edited by Ann Brooks and Alison Mackinnon, The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 2001, p.xiv + 192, £19.99 (paperback), £65 (hardback).
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