It has become clear, as national and local disputes have developed, that universities are not happy workplaces. Judging from some communications, this seems to have come as a surprise to university senior management. What would be useful at this point – better late than never – would be for Vice Chancellors to seriously ask themselves: how it has come to this? How is it that academic and academic support staff, professionally committed to higher education and their students, are out on picket-lines in the rain, sacrificing large chunks of their pay just before Christmas? This is so even at the gates of universities that have traditionally been pretty much antitheses of militancy. So, what has changed and why did the VCs not notice?
Well the most obvious changes are reflected in demands of striking staff. Real pay has not just failed to rise. Nor has it just fallen. It has collapsed, to levels well below a decade ago. Just how long are academics expected to continue to suck up the ‘we are all in it together’ nonsense, paying the price for bankers and idiotic austerity economics? How long are we supposed to keep on keeping calm and carrying on? Another ten years? Another twenty? Of course, we were never ‘in it together’. During the hardest years of austerity, whilst our real pay was plummeting, the pay of senior managers jumped by orders of magnitude. It wasn’t as if this reflected dazzling management skills. I remember one senior manager appointed in my own university. He caused havoc and destruction everywhere he went. He earned the nickname Voldemort because even his fellow managers referred to him by his title rather than his name. After a few years he suddenly disappeared – but not because he had caused misery to the ordinary folk but because his antics had eventually upset someone higher up the scale. The question that went unasked of course was why the hell was he recruited in the first place? How had our lavishly rewarded leaders failed so badly? Another senior manager went to prison. His destructive behaviour too had been tolerated, if not encouraged, for years. Of course, if senior management had just asked staff, they might have learned something.
Over the same period, as the sector began to grasp the financially alluring but educationally and collegially catastrophic ‘opportunities’ of casualisation, workloads jumped, just as pay was declining. A mysterious scientific discovery took hold of senior managers – the infinite elasticity of academic time. Whatever the issue, whether administrative, welfare, pastoral, technological, or financial, a solution could be found by getting academics to do more. No explanation was given as to what activities could be discarded. Just do more. And more.
Of course, workloads did not jump in ways that benefited students. For example, academic staff are now inundated with bureaucracy. In large part this is about ever tightening control and micro-management. In part it is about the industrialised generation of what David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’. But more fundamentally it is about a seismic shift in the orientation of ‘education’. As Robbins and Kocalchuk (2012: 99) have put it, education has become ‘almost solely concerned not with the development of curious or engaged learners… but with measuring, cataloguing and producing ever more massive mounds of data.’ League tables, not students, not learning, and certainly not staff, have become what matters (even when management themselves acknowledge that rankings are a rigged game). This has involved a dramatic disengagement from students’ real interests and a headlong rush towards management by spreadsheet and the absolute prioritisation of numbers: numbers in league tables; numbers that purport to measure academic research and teaching; and most crucially of course the numbers that form the bottom line – numbers of paying teenage ‘customers’ who are enticed to apply, who sign up to pass over their loans and who must be ‘retained’ at all cost (even their own).
This is a workload issue, but it is more than that. It is a fundamental shift that takes staff away from what they entered higher education to do – educate and research. At the expense of teaching preparation for instance (we don’t just dream up the material we teach), staff are now required to become careers experts, market analysts, attendance officers, administrators, sales people, IT experts, learning disability specialists, mental health practitioners and suicide-preventers.
The enforcement of this radically new regime falls, of course, to management. It is a management regime that now explicitly frames our colleagues in other universities as competitors, as if we might have more commonality with our grandly remunerated CEOs than with those fellow workers down the road, struggling like us with the neoliberal hollowing out of higher education in which our bosses easily acquiesce.
Increasingly, ‘management’ is by diktat. Face-to-face management in some cases has collapsed into streams of faceless, often incoherent and contradictory instructions from computer screens. Meeting, discussing, and collegially working through issues seems to be too much trouble. In too many cases now staff experience threats, illicit and explicit. Staff surveys and complaints to UCU reflect only fractions of the distress that this causes. In some cases, even the pretence of respect has been abandoned. Lower down the hierarchy, for some it seems, being a ‘boss’ matters far, far more than being a manager.
In all of this, what is often absent is actually-giving-a damn-about what the ignoramuses who are delivering ‘outputs’ might think. Come to think of it, there are some numbers that don’t matter in the abstracted managerial universe of attractively presented quants. These are the numbers gathered in hilariously worded academic staff surveys (what are the main obstacles to fully delivering corporate priorities to our customers?). Whilst student satisfaction below 80% is a disaster requiring immediate action planning, staff dissatisfaction can be astronomic whilst management remain determinedly unstirred. At its simplest this strikes ordinary workers as grossly unfair, because it is. Whilst ‘satisfaction’ is never enough for lecturers, dissatisfaction with managers seems to be worn by some like a badge of honour.
So why did our leaderships not notice this sort of stuff? We can, of course, only guess and the answers will vary from institution to institution. Historically, peasant debates over whether to blame kings or their advisers for the injustices meted out on the underlings fatally distracted attention from coincidences of morally corruptible interests at the apexes of hierarchies. Today and more usefully, ‘organizational decoupling’ is a concept that describes the ways that senior managements of large organizations find ways to separate themselves from the consequences of their ‘strategic’ activities and leave the rest of us behind. ‘I didn’t know’, often becomes their best defence when their bad ideas have bad consequences. Theorists describe too, how it is that organizational failures almost inevitably follow the stifling of upward information flows. What is required for genuinely healthy organizations is the consistent flow of real information from ‘below’ and proper engagement with it from ‘above’. In pathological (and pathogenic) organizations by contrast, what is required is ‘positive’, confirmatory feedback – green lights only. ‘See that it is done’ is the instruction, ‘don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.’ The costs – financial and otherwise and not even well hidden – can be extraordinary.
This works for those at the top, often for long periods of time. Some others, lower down the pole but hitched to senior coat-tails might benefit too, if at some cost to dignity and respect. But any success for those benefiting from the approval of their betters comes at a high cost to others, and indeed to the health of the organization overall. Cowed or subservient, many managers responsibilized from above for squaring their leaders’ circles become unwilling to communicate realities upwards. In turn, shop-floor staff who actually see and experience the daily effects of organizational policy and culture, with their successes, flaws and (not least ethical) failures, see little point in transmitting their experience. What would be the point?
William Davies has written about how modern corporate forms now routinely ‘externalise’ unhappiness. As working conditions have deteriorated and as ‘intellectual craftsmanship’ [sic] is overwhelmed by financialization, massification, bureaucratised managerialism and the industrialised production of beautifully presented data (conferring as it does on leaders – in their own imaginations at least – the wondrous illusion of omniscience and control), it is small wonder that front-line health suffers.
And this is where it gets really serious: people regularly worked to and beyond breaking points; line managers not giving a shit; personal lives damaged; depression; anxiety; what have been termed diseases and addictions of despair. And ‘wellbeing’ initiatives just don’t come anywhere close to cutting it. A head massage every six months, or professional counselling for that matter, don’t deal with that mountain of marking or the new IT system that everything now has to be changed to. It doesn’t provide a way to shoe-horn into carefully crafted curricula whatever this month’s latest whizzbang innovation from above happens to be. It doesn’t overcome the sickening sense of betrayal at the attempts to unilaterally impose new terms and conditions, nor does it anaesthetize against their accompanying condescension. Human beings – very skilled and able human beings in fact – are not just resources to be ignored, quantified and dictated to. They get demoralised, unhappy, distressed and ill when they are treated like this. Some who fall ill go off on sick leave (returning to not even a ‘how are you?’ from their boss). Many, not reflected in sickness figures, continue to come into work whilst they are ill, delivering their lectures and attending to the social and mental health needs of their students, whilst themselves medicated. Sometimes they might do this for years. Some colleagues even harm themselves.
But of course, there is an alternative to this. We can get angry. And many of us are angry. Enough is enough. Whatever the outcome of this current dispute, the experience is already reminding us even more of our grievances and consolidating our will to take this back into work. We will expect what we are now rarely receiving: respect. Managers are on notice that they need to start justifying their remuneration by performing like managers – not bosses.. Some, of course, already work hard to do this. They are skilled, empathic human beings too – struggling to do their best in hostile conditions. But others don’t and mediocrity or worse, egoism and spitefulness, are not acceptable anymore.
So, if people sacrifice pay only very reluctantly, and if they aren’t really traditionally militant, then organizational leaders need to have a really good think about why staff are outside in the rain. Our message to the management is: Some of the reasons are on the posters we are holding as you drive past us on the picket lines. But really, there are a number of other reasons too … and some – not all, but some of them – begin with you.
UCU @ EHU 