Marina Warner compares UK university managers to 'Chinese communist enforcers'

The chair of judges for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize has delivered a blistering broadside against her former university employers comparing higher education managers to unquestioningly obedient Chinese communist officials. Writing in the London Review of Books, Marina Warner said she felt “pushed” into resigning her role earlier this summer as a professor in the department of literature, film and theatre studies at the University of Essex where she had taught for the past decade.

The acclaimed author and academic accused institutions of being forced into competing against each like high street supermarkets in the search for profits.

She said changes to the higher education sector had resulted in “one-size-fits-all contracts, inflexible timetables, overflowing workloads, overcrowded classes” which were harming teachers and students whilst benefiting the growing armies of administrators.

“Among the scores of novels I am reading for the Man Booker International are many Chinese novels, and the world of Chinese communist corporatism, as ferociously depicted by their authors, keeps reminding me of higher education here, where enforcers rush to carry out the latest orders from their chiefs in an ecstasy of obedience to ideological principles which they do not seem to have examined, let alone discussed with the people they order to follow them, whom they cashier when they won’t knuckle under,” she wrote.

Ms Warner, who is also a fellow of All Souls Oxford, accused Essex of becoming a “for-profit” enterprise and betraying its radical founding principles which saw it become a hotbed of counter cultural protest in the 1960s and 70s.

She said that research was no longer a guarantor of external funding and that the emphasis had been put on increasing student numbers.

“So the tactics to bring in money are changing. Students, especially foreign students who pay higher fees, offer a glittering solution,” she wrote.

Ms Warner said she eventually decided to resign after being asked to take a year’s unpaid leave when her “workload allocation” became impossible to reconcile with her outside roles, which she said she had been encouraged to accept.

“The model for higher education mimics supermarkets’ competition on the high street; the need for external funding pits one institution against another – and even one colleague against another, and young scholars waste their best energies writing grant proposals.

“Eventually, after a protracted rigmarole, I resigned. I felt I had been pushed,” she added.

“What is happening at Essex reflects on the one hand the general distortions required to turn a university into a for-profit business – one advantageous to administrators and punitive to teachers and scholars – and on the other reveals a particular, local interpretation of the national policy. The senate and councils of a university like Essex, and most of the academics who are elected by colleagues to govern, have been caught unawares by their new masters, their methods and their assertion of power,” she wrote.

A spokesman for the university said: “At the University of Essex, students are our priority and we are committed to delivering a transformational educational experience, where students are taught by the leading thinkers in their field and have the opportunity to undertake research. Excellence in education and research are our two priorities and they enjoy equal esteem.”

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/novelist-marina-warner-compares-uk-university-managers-to-chinese-communist-enforcers-9709731.html

Bullying and academic culture

...Several aspects of academia lend themselves to the practice and discourage its reporting and mitigation. Its leadership is usually drawn from the ranks of faculty, most of whom have not received the management training that could enable an effective response to such situations. The perpetrators may possess tenure — a high-status and protected position – or the victims may belong to the increasing number of adjunct professors, who are often part-time employees.

Academic mobbing is arguably the most prominent type of bullying in academia. Academic victims of bullying may also be particularly conflict-averse.

The generally decentralized nature of academic institutions can make it difficult for victims to seek recourse, and appeals to outside authority have been described as "the kiss of death."

Therefore, academics who are subject to bullying in workplace are often cautious about notifying problems. Social media is recently used to reveal bullying in academia anonymously. Bullying research credits an organizational rift in two interdependent and adversarial systems that comprise a larger structure of nearly all colleges and universities worldwide: faculty and administration. While both systems distribute employee power across standardized bureaucracies, administrations favor an ascription-oriented business model with a standardized criteria determining employee rank.

Faculty depend on greater open-ended and improvised standards that determine rank and job retention. The leveraged intradepartmental peer reviews (although often at a later time, these three reviews are believed to be leveraged by the fact the peers determine promotions of one another at later times) of faculty for annual reappointment of tenure-track, tenure, and post-tenure review is believed to offer "unregulated gray area" that nurture the origin of bullying cases in academia.

Although tenure and post-tenure review lead to interdepartmental evaluation, and all three culminate in an administrative decision, bullying is commonly a function of administrative input before or during the early stages of departmental review...

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying_in_academia#Bullying_and_academic_culture

Attempts to 'gag and silence' academics are commonplace

There is “a tremendous atmosphere of gagging and silencing” in UK universities that prevents academics from speaking out when they feel that they have been treated unfairly.

This is according to Marina Warner, until recently professor of literature, film and theatre studies at the University of Essex. She left her post after 10 years at the university and, rather than stay quiet, publicly documented the reasons for her departure in an article for the London Review of Books.

Her criticism relates to the way in which the university is managed, which Professor Warner claims has resulted in scholars being pushed to complete an unmanageable list of activities in the pursuit of “prestige, publicity, glory, impact”; a shift of emphasis from research to teaching in order to attract lucrative overseas students; and a leadership team that enforced top-down change in a manner that, she said, often showed no regard for the opinions of academic staff.

At one point, she compares UK higher education more generally to the world of Chinese communist corporatism, “where enforcers rush to carry out the latest orders from their chiefs in an ecstasy of obedience to ideological principles which they do not seem to have examined, let alone discussed with the people they order to follow them”.

Speaking to Times Higher Education, Professor Warner said she feared that “a culture of obedience and deference” was taking hold within universities.

“People used to appreciate independent-mindedness and freedom of speech and advocacy of ideas,” she said. “People at large still value that, I think, and some parts of the world are in flames because of it.”

However, it was increasingly difficult for academics to criticise their institutions, she said, even after they leave their post, because of gagging orders put in place to prevent them from speaking openly.

“You have to decide, as I did, to break all connections [with the university],” she said – adding that this was something she was fortunately able to do because of her career outside academia.

“I was in a lucky position and I wanted to use my lucky position,” she said of the decision to go on record with her experience. “I can’t tell you how many letters I’ve had [since the LRB article was published] – an avalanche.”

One such letter asked: “If they can do this to you with your reputation, what will they do to postdocs just starting out?”

There could have been “an element of pour encourager les autres” about her treatment by Essex, she said, adding that the university’s refusal to compromise for a long-standing and prestigious academic such as her might mean that others would “come in line because they will be frightened”. She said she hoped that writing her account would help to raise awareness of the changes that are taking place in UK universities.

“In this new system…the chain of command leads to administrators,” she said. “Academics are subjugated to the managers.”

Essex’s vice-chancellor, Anthony Forster, who comes in for particular criticism in the LRB article, declined an invitation to speak to THE. But in a statement the university said: “Students are our priority and we are committed to delivering a transformational educational experience, where students are taught by the leading thinkers in their field and have the opportunity to undertake research. Excellence in education and research are our two priorities and they enjoy equal esteem.”

From: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/attempts-to-gag-and-silence-academics-are-commonplace/2015692.article