The Ruined Institution: The Production of ‘Excellence’ in Higher Education – Part 3

By Fenella Brandenburg

Continued from Part 2

(this is the final part of this series of posts)

Since the Enlightenment the university’s relationship with industry has grown out of a direct response to an economic need. This meant the university reacted to the demands for a certain type of knowledge requirement. In postmodernity the university has acquired the mantle of a business-oriented philosophy in its own right, meaning that attempting to demarcate commerce and HE as separate entities is far more complex. In order to compete in a globalised market the contemporary university is expected to think and operate as if it were a business: it has to take up the procedures and practices of commerce. As far back as 1990 academics were writing about the application of a commercial formula to every aspect of education. Cynthia Hardy says:

The tough choices advocated in business literature are likely to escalate the political conflict that surrounds declining resources, not resolve it. Draconian measures – terminations and program closures – can send shock waves through the university community. The more marketable individuals will leave to find less hostile surroundings; potential recruits will resort to political infighting, as they try to protect their departments. (1990: 317)

Hardy’s comments imply a potential move by many academics into other professions with those remaining having to become defensive in order to protect themselves and their future within the institution.

These illustrations are provided so as to emphasise that the current period of austerity is situated within the greater issue of how organisations operate under neoliberalism in general and their response to politico-economic events. While cuts to funding in HE are going to have an impact on those studying and working at the university, the effects of capitalist oriented processes on those at the university can be both subtle and furtive.

Mark Fisher makes direct reference to university bureaucracy, including providing an extensive list of documents a module leader is required to complete for each module they oversee (2009: 41). He says that the constant checking, monitoring and production of figures does not provide “a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output” (2009: 42). Mary Evans puts it succinctly: “Since God no longer exists, we have invented assessment” (2004: 34). Evans says of both the Jarratt Report (1985) and the Dearing Report (1997) that they imposed “upon universities a quasi-democratic ethos of collusion with the values of a market economy” (2004: 23). Consensus is all that is needed to enable bureaucracy’s seamless transition: “The ‘right’ process is established, the rules of the game set, and what is then required are cooperative and consenting players” (2004: 62).

Dissent becomes difficult in a system that sees the student as consumer, service and product of the system (Fisher 2009: 42), because the ability of students or staff to direct any grievance to a recognisable figurehead is difficult. Any challenge of/to the system simply points to another set of figures, attached to which are a set of further criteria. Or, instead, the result of the query may just appear as a re-framing and re-presentation of that data back to the enquirer: “the best performativity [...] comes rather from arranging the data in a new way” (Lyotard 2004: 51). Bureaucracy, as an instrument for measuring excellence in the corporatised university, as Fisher describes, “floats freely, independent of any external authority” (2009: 50). It produces a style of surveillance culture for academics that is rather like an invisible postmodern semblance of the time and motion study that constantly hovers over them in the form of a bureaucratic superego.

This constant checking is part of the everyday administration of the contemporary university which attempts to measure production in the same way that a factory would through the use of the nebulous term ‘excellence’. The use of the term ‘excellence’ has changed over time. For example, in the transcription of a lecture given in 1991 at The Centre for the Study of Theology at the University of Essex, David Jenkins (the Bishop of Durham), uses it quite differently. This lecture is entitled ‘Price, Cost, Excellence and Worth – Can the Idea of the University Survive the Force of the Market?’ While it offers a critique of the corporatised university, Jenkins uses the term ‘excellence’ in a similar way to how the term ‘mastery’ might be used: “everything is concerned with ‘price and cost’ and not with ‘excellence and worth’” (Jenkins 1991: 31). It is likely that the term ‘excellence’ has become appropriated by corporations (and the university) because of its convenient vagueness. The pervasive audit culture enables a form of micro-management without the manager appearing in bodily form. Richard Hill says that technology has enabled this ideology to proliferate, since administrators are often no longer needed to carry out many tasks on the behalf of academics, now measuring forms are often online and accessible by all through their desktop computer (2012: 172).

Hill highlights the common use of the word ‘excellence’ in taglines and slogans used by universities, providing examples from Australian HE institutions: “‘Integrity, Respect, Rational Enquiry, Personal Excellence’ (Edith Cowan University): ‘In the pursuit of excellence in teaching and research’ (Griffith University): and ‘Excellence, Innovation, Diversity’ (University of Wollongong)” (2012: 60). He describes this as “corporate-speak” and while he uses a flippant writing style to explain how these taglines operate on the unconscious, he nevertheless hits upon a significant point in regard to how language is linked to how we view the world: these “phrases [...] send certain images racing through the collective psyche of prospective students in the hope of instilling some sort of lasting semiotic effect” (ibid.). And this is apparent when Readings states: “the question of the University is only the question of relative value-for-money, the question posed to a student who is situated entirely as a consumer” (Readings 1999: 27).

Bibliography:

Evans, Mary. 2004. Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities (London and New York: Continuum).

Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).

Hardy, Cynthia, ‘‘Hard’ Decisions and ‘Tough’ Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline’, HE, 20, 3 (1990), 301-321.

Hill, Richard. 2012. Whackademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University (Sydney: New South Publishing).

Jenkins, David. 1991. Price, Cost, Excellence and Worth – Can the idea of the University survive the force of the Market? (Colchester: The University of Essex).

Lyotard, Jean-François. 2004. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

The Ruined Institution: The Production of ‘Excellence’ in Higher Education – Part 2

Image: Baird Point at the State University of New York

(referred to by Bill Readings in The University in Ruins)

By Fenella Brandenburg

Continued from Part 1

The idea of the student-consumer has become more significant since the public-funding cuts that followed the global recession beginning in 2008. The 2013 National Student Survey (NSS) asking students for feedback on whether their degree courses were ‘value for money’ resulted in 29% of them stating it was not (Public Finance 2013). This study coincided with the first group of British students (excluding Scotland) being subjected to the rise in course fees from approximately £3,000/year to up to £9,000/year. The study was criticised for asking the wrong question because it was placing the student solely as a consumer of a product that might be expected to be directly commensurate to some kind of financial gain (for instance, a graduate job), rather than providing a question based on knowledge gain. Hence, the question posed tends to encourage an answer in the negative. Nevertheless, one could argue that for the other 71% it was ‘value for money’, perhaps a higher result than might have been expected with such a significant course fee rise. However, the question itself reflects the trend to express the acquisition of knowledge through exchange-value rather than use-value.

Like academics, students are also subjected to university bureaucracy in the form of surveys that measure their teaching and service satisfaction at the micro and macro level. Mary Beard describes the lack of a response to the questionnaires by students as “survey-fatigue”, and in an article in the BBC news magazine looking at the pros and cons of student surveys, states that the problem with the student survey was that it was seen as an absolute measure of course quality, when actually students can mark courses down for a host of different reasons, such as extensive reading lists (Beard 2013).

However, the latest tuition fee rise and the other cuts in HE funding by the British government, appear under the popular media-generated term of ‘austerity measures’. In 1989 in an article entitled ‘The Management of Austerity in Higher Education: An International Comparison’ Manuel Crespo stated:

The management of higher education in a period of uncertainty, budgetary constraints and real or apprehended decline in enrolments has become a major issue in Western developed countries. Since the late seventies different HE systems have devised strategies to adapt themselves to shrinking resources. (1989: 373)

As the new British Prime Minister in 1997, Tony Blair hoped that 50% of young people would go to university. He stated that: “Labour has no plans to introduce tuition fees for HE” and “will not introduce ‘top-up’ fees and have legislated to prevent them” (Blair 2005). Nevertheless, later he was accused of reneging on this promise with many later media interviews hinging on the semantics of the above statements, especially the “no plans” reference (ibid.). It appeared that the structures and money were not in place in order to support Blair’s wishes. Neither were they at the point of the later 2010 coalition government in Britain, when the current, and greatest, course fee rise occurred. This response to public sector cutbacks in periods of austerity, while not a new money-saving strategy, nevertheless, in the contemporary university – which operates on the guidelines set out in the Jarratt (1985) and Dearing Reports (1997), where HE institutions are expected to operate like corporations – means that today they are evaluated primarily in economic terms.

Concluded in part 3 (upcoming).

Bibliography

Beard, Mary, ‘A Point of View: When Students Answer Back’, BBC News Magazine, (2013), [accessed 6 June 2013]

Blair, Tony, ‘Did Labour mislead over tuition fees?’, Channel 4, (2005), [accessed 7 June 2013]

Crespo, Manuel, ‘The Management of Austerity in Higher Education: An International Comparison’, Higher Education, 18, 4 (1989), 373-395.

Public Finance, ‘Degree Courses ‘Not Value For Money’ Say Third of Students’, Public Finance, (2013), [accessed 6 June 2013]

Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

The Ruined Institution: The Production of ‘Excellence’ in Higher Education – Part 1

By Fenella Brandenburg

In The University in Ruins (1996) Bill Readings says that it is ‘excellence’ in its manifest bureaucratic forms which is the driving force behind harnessing the university’s function of the past and in postmodernity placing it under the forces of the market (1999: 38): “Like the stock exchange, the University is a point of capital’s self-knowledge, of capital’s ability not just to manage risk or diversity but to extract a surplus value from the management” (1999: 40). The Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) are perfect manifestations of Reading’s critique in action.

Readings dedicates a whole chapter to the notion of ‘excellence’, which he considers to be the watchword of the contemporary corporatised university. Its effectiveness within the institutional apparatus cannot be underestimated and in order to deconstruct the university discourse it is important to understand the way excellence operates. For Readings, ‘excellence’ is a hollow term that has no absolute definition (1999: 24). He states: “An excellent boat is not excellent by the same criteria as an excellent plane” (1999: 24). A 2013 article in Times Higher Education mentioned “teaching jargon” and states: “despite repeated claims of ‘teaching excellence’ on institutions websites, there was little elaboration of what this meant in practice” (Matthews 2013: 8).

Readings also makes reference to how the consumer-orientation of the university ties in with technology, a large focus of Jean-François Lyotard’s critique. Readings says: “All that the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other than the optimal input/output ratio in matters of information” (1999: 39). Capitalism uses technology in order to circulate information and enable a pooling of resources into a “generalized market” (Readings 1999: 32). In the university it is the term ‘excellence’ that helps promote the propagation of this data and mobilise its message. Readings says ‘excellence’ becomes translatable and usable by anyone who wishes to describe it within any phenomenon, in whatever way they choose, by any criteria (1999: 24).

One of the functions of excellence is how it helps promote the processes of circulation essential to capital’s operation in regard to power. Previously, the nation-state sat in the centre of civic life and produced streams of power emanating outwards (the institution being one of the representatives of the nation-state). Readings says that today, however:

Capital no longer flows outward from the centre, rather it circulates around the circumference, behind the backs of those who keep their eyes firmly fixed on the center. Around the circumference, the global transfer of capital takes place in the hands of multi- or transnational corporations. (1999: 111)

What this means for the university is that in its corporate incarnation it is essential that it becomes part of this process and adopts the modes of operating that capitalism endorses.

Upon repeated use the language of the university of excellence becomes normalised, but it has ideological origins which are needed for it to function within the capitalist system, both within and outside the university. The language that excellence adopts, while serving the purposes of the corporatised university, also has the function of creating a type of abstraction, which removes the output of the system – the data that is promulgated – from not only the material practices that are required to deliver it, but also from the staff who work in the university and produce this data (or are party to producing the data). Thus, the term is often used without compunction, without question and without an understanding of the material effects of the process that underpins it.

Continued in Part 2

Bibliography

Matthews, David, ‘Global faculty made up of bachelor’s boys and girls’, Times HE, 19/26 December 2013, p. 8.

Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

The New Laidlaw Library at the University of Leeds - Part 2

Every Discourse is Emitted From Space – Henri Lefebvre

Please click here for part 1 of the blog on the Laidlaw Library: On Knowledge and Phalluses

Located on the periphery of the campus, on Woodhouse Lane, the building cost £27.5 million. It was designed by the architects ADP and built by Shepherd Construction (who also carried out the work on the Marjorie and Arnold Ziff Building). It is located between two church buildings in an area that was mostly made up of a university visitors’ car park. Trinity Congregational Church is now used as a nightclub called Halo (and a bar/cafe called the Quilted Lama) and the Emmanuel Church is the University of Leeds chaplaincy and is also used for seminar rooms. The library is also situated within a Conservation Area.

Described by the university as “the first city-fronting building that the University has commissioned for over 30 years” and as “a highly sustainable landmark building” (University of Leeds 2013), that it is “city-fronting” might be more an issue of a lack of space elsewhere on campus, rather than any statement to the city concerning its town and gown relationship. However, from the perspective of aesthetics, the vista when travelling from the city up to the university along Woodhouse Lane has now changed. When approaching North up Woodhouse Lane, having just crossed the flyover, the Parkinson Building fills the space straight ahead of you. The buildings leading up to it on the left has previously blended into the background, not least because the church that is the Halo nightclub has not been sandblasted for many years and is covered with the blackened veil of dirt and pollution. The bright new postmodern glass and steel surface of the new library will stands out in its setting between two churches. While the Ziff Building is not that visible from the main road, the new library can now represent the university to the extent that it is a statement of how much, financially, they are prepared to invest in student learning during the period of higher course fees.

It is here that we can see the university’s economic relationship with space (hence the Lefebvre quote above). The discourse around learning is connected directly to neoliberal policy through the use of the term ‘excellence’. Bill Readings discusses the concept of “excellence” and higher education in The University in Ruins (1996). Readings says that it is ‘excellence’ in its manifest bureaucratic forms which is the driving force behind harnessing the university’s function of the past and in postmodernity placing it under the forces of the market (1999: 38): “Like the stock exchange, the University is a point of capital’s self-knowledge, of capital’s ability not just to manage risk or diversity but to extract a surplus value from the management” (1999: 40).

Upon repeated use the language of the university of excellence becomes normalised. You can see the use of the term in the image above as it appeared on the hoardings surrounding the Laidlaw Library while it was under development. But excellence has ideological origins which are needed for it to function within the capitalist system, both within and outside the university. The language that excellence adopts, while serving the purposes of the corporatised university, also has the function of creating a type of abstraction, which removes the output of the system – the data that is promulgated – from not only the material practices that are required to deliver it, but also from the staff who work in the university and produce this data (or are party to producing the data).

This discourse, hence, has a spatial extension: the university speaks to those who operate within its campus, and also to those outside it. While it is apparent that the university has a discourse available for interpretation, I would like to suggest, along with Readings, that its historic origins – which still exist in its current posthistoric form, as ruins – enable a reading that might usually be applied to that of urban space. This opens up a space that challenges dominant modes of operating in the institution, abstractly and concretely, and shows that Readings’ motif of negotiating the ruins is already taking place in the campus.

Please click here to read my thesis which takes the term excellence and looks at how it can become material via the use of campus space:
The Unseen University: A Schizocartography of a Redbrick.

Related Links:
Performativity and Excellence in the Institution
The Corporate University

University as City

In his book The University in Ruins Bill Reading’s provides an eloquent analogy of the Italian Renaissance city by way of a suggesting how we might go about negotiating the posthistoric university we occupy today:

Like the inhabitants of some Italian city, we can seek neither to rebuild the Renaissance city-state nor to destroy its remnants and install rationally planned tower-blocks; we can seek only to put its angularities and winding passages to new uses, learning from and enjoying the cognitive dissonances that enclosed piazzas and non-signifying campanile induce. (Readings 1999: 129)

He later goes on to explain that we actually never leave the city, it is where we continually reside, even if some of its elements are from the past: “Even if the University is legible to us only as the remains of the idea of culture, that does not mean that we have left its precincts, that we view it from the outside.” (1999: 172) It is apparent from Readings’s spatial reference to the university as city, that this is potentially useful as a modus for a critique of today’s university (indeed, this is what my thesis is on).

Clark Kerr also uses the concept of the city to describe the model of the contemporary university, what he calls the “multiversity”:

The ‘Idea of the University’ was a village with its priests. The ‘Idea of a Modern University’ was a town - a one-industry town - with its intellectual oligarchy. ‘The Idea of a Multiversity’ is a city of infinite variety. Some get lost in the city; some rise to the top within it; most fashion their lives within one of its many subcultures. There is less sense of community than in the village but also less sense of confinement. There is less sense of purpose than within the town but there are more ways to excel. There are also more refugees of anonymity - both for the creative process and the drifter. (2001: 31)

Kerr’s city analogy offers the positive and negative qualities of the contemporary university, also providing the model of the drifter as an individual who can move about university space and yet also blend into the landscape (the French for drift is dérive which was a method of exploring the city employed by the group of activists the Situationist International in their urban walking projects).

Related blogs:
Organ Pipe-clad Concrete and Lost Students
Negotiating Brutalist Space at the University of Leeds

Bibliography:
Kerr, Clark. 2001. The Uses of the University (Harvard: Harvard University Press).
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

Bureaucracy in the Corporatised University

I would like to look at the activity and ethos of the corporatised university as it pertains to bureaucracy by first providing a definition of the corporatised university by Henry Steck:

the corporatized university is defined as an institution that is characterized by processes, decisional criteria, expectation, organizational culture, and operating practices that are taken from, and have their origins in, the modern business corporation. It is characterized by the entry of the university into marketplace relationships and by the use of market strategies in university decision making. (1985: 74)

Bill Readings explains that it is excellence in its manifest bureaucratic forms - for example, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) formed in 2007 - which is the driving force behind harnessing the university function of the past and in postmodernity placing it under the forces of the market (1999: 38): "Like the stock exchange, the University is a point of capital's self-knowledge, of capital's ability not just to manage risk or diversity but to extract a surplus value from the management." (1999: 40)

The decentralised movement of capital from its original position in the nation-state into what in postmodernity appears in the form of globalised flows, also recapitulates the process for the postmodern individual: what once was the centred humanist subject oriented in their singular culture, now becomes one with a capital-oriented consciousness, a worldview that is legislated to the level of a norm. Jean-François Lyotard explains that this is done through "formulat[ing] prescriptions" which appear in the form of utterances that legitimate particular statements. (2004: 31) This means that it is difficult for those who operate in the institution to not take up these narratives and continue to promulgate them. Readings explains that in capitalist society we are no longer citizen-subjects but "operatives" that take part by adopting a "corporate identity". (1999: 48) Felix Guattari says that we all have a number of different subjectivities available to us, depending on our relationships with other individuals, groups and specific social processes. However, he sees capitalist subjectivity as being the most extensive.

Mark Fisher makes direct reference to university bureaucracy, including providing an extensive list of documents a module leader has to complete for each module they oversee. (2009: 41) Fisher says that the constant checking, monitoring and production of figures does not provide "a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output". (2009: 42) We no longer have a system focused on knowledge (learning and teaching), instead we have a system that concentrates on measuring performance and output, and disseminating that data: “The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output – in other words, performativity.” (Lyotard 2004: 11) It is essential for the functioning of the bureaucratic university that this system is open, even if its process of self-defining (for example, in using terms like 'excellence') is internal and closed. The university needs to reduplicate itself internally, and also express that reduplication externally, in the form of representable data. What this means for the university is a spectacle-like appearance in the form of signs that appear as representable data, the output of the excellence process. These signs present the university in the guise of what Guy Debord would describe as "commodity as spectacle". Debord explains that the spectacle is "where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence." (2005: 36) This is problematic for the university because it means it can become removed from its original idealised functions - the pursuit of knowledge, high quality academic research, education for all - meaning that others might also see it in purely economic terms too (anyone who works in the university knows that some students see their degree only in the form of exchange value: a degree for a job)

Bureaucracy, as a measure of excellence in the corporatised university, as Fisher describes, "floats freely, independent of any external authority" (2009: 50). It produces a style of surveillance culture for academics that is rather like an invisible postmodern semblance of the time and motion study that constantly hovers over them in the form of a bureaucratic superego.

Links:
Input/Output at the University of Excellence
Schizoanalysing the University Campus
Austerity and the University of Excellence

Bibliography:
Debord, Guy. 2005. The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red).
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).
Lyotard, Jean-François. 2004. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).
Steck, Henry. 'Corporatization of the University: Seeking Conceptual Clarity', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 85 (2003), 66-83.

Austerity & the University of Excellence Part 1

The Parkinson Steps at the University of Leeds.
Image CC Tina Richardson

During modernity the university's relationship with commerce grew out of a direct response to an economic need, whereby the university reacted to demands for a certain type of knowledge requirement. In postmodernity the university has acquired the mantle of a business-oriented philosophy in its own right, this means that attempting to demarcate industry and institution as separate entities is far more complex. In order to compete in a globalised market the contemporary university is expected to think and operate as if it were a business: it has to take up the procedures and practices of commerce.

What this means for the university is that in its corporate incarnation it is essential that it becomes part of the globalised marketplace and in that move adopts the modes of operating that capitalism endorses. It needs to involve itself in the transfer of capital within society both at home and abroad. The university does this in a number of ways, from its relationship with industry in its vocational courses, to research that directly benefits business and technology.

However, even as far back as 1990 academics were writing about the negative aspects of applying a commercial formula to every aspect of education. In her essay ''Hard' Decisions and 'Tough' Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline' Cynthia Hardy says:

The tough choices advocated in business literature are likely to escalate the political conflict that surrounds declining resources, not resolve it. Draconian measures - terminations and program closures - can send shock waves through the university community. The more marketable individuals will leave to find less hostile surroundings; potential recruits will resort to political infighting, as they try to protect their departments. (1990: 317)

I provide this illustration not because I think academics do not know this already, but because I wish to emphasise that this current period of austerity is situated within the greater issue of how organisations operate under neoliberalism. And, not just organisations, but individuals also. We no longer look to the nation-state for our sense of cultural identity, nor the modernist university, but to the High Street. We are first and foremost consumers.

This is how Mark Fisher puts it: "Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems." And Félix Guattari would agree. He believes that while we have many subjectivities available to us, the prevailing consciousness is a capitalist one. He says that capitalism works in such a way as to prevent anything that is antithetical to its project from taking hold. The signs that capitalism creates discourage any singular processes of individuation and attempt to reroute subjective desires back into capitalist production: this is anti-production, and here Guattari situates it in the context of education:

It is impossible to separate the production of any consumer commodity from the institution that supports that production. The same can be said of teaching, training, research, etc. The State machine and the machine of repression produce anti-production, that is to say signifiers that exist to block and prevent the emergence of any subjective process. (1984: 34)

So what are we to do if this is less to do with the current crisis and more to do with 'the postmodern condition': the restructuring of education under neo-liberlism and the prevalence of a capitalist consciousness?

I think the clues are in the ruins of the university. Not only in those left by Bill Readings in his posthumously published book The University in Ruins but also in the material of the university which we inhabit today, the physical and abstract space of the university behind the spectacle.

Because the university needs to reduplicate itself internally, and also express that reduplication externally, what this means for the university is a spectacle-like appearance in the form of signs that appear as representable data, the output of the excellence process. These signs present the university in the guise of what Guy Debord would describe as "commodity as spectacle". Debord explains that the spectacle is "where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence." This is problematic for the university because it means it is removed from its original idealised functions - the pursuit of knowledge, high quality academic research, education for all, etc. Readings believes that the university as a concept no longer has any content: "The University of Excellence is the simulacrum of the idea of a university". And while this might sound negative, or even hopeless, herein also lies the possibility for it to be remade under a different concept; as Readings says "the wider social role of the university is now up for grabs".

In a time where grand narratives no longer hold sway, where culture and ideology is decentralised and where the once autonomous subject can even be argued to be posthuman, we need a different model of consciousness to help us negotiate the postmodern terrain and those institutions that are manifest in them. This is well-noted by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism when he calls for a new cognitive map:

It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its environment [...] can itself stand as the symbol and analogon1 of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (2009: 44)

This is echoed by Fisher when he states: "To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or 'precarity'" (2009: 34)

So, if we are to believe that a predictable future is unavailable to us in this simulacra-like university that is inseparable from these global networks, how do we find the university of tomorrow?

Related link: Austerity and the University of Excellence Part 2

Bibliography:
Debord, Guy. 2005. The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red).
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).
Hardy, Cynthia. ''Hard' Decisions and 'Tough' Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline', Higher Education, 20, 3 (1990), 301-321.
Jameson, Frederic. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

Input/Output at the University of Excellence

Yesterday I went to the BA Show at the School of Design at the University of Leeds. This poster by Daniel Bird - a final year student about to go into the world and get a job along with his peers - caught my eye for a number of reasons, not least because of the frightening amount of debt students are expected to incur.

However, what I particularly liked about it is that it is a brilliant example of the performative aspect in which the university now operates (input/output), but from the other side. I am referring to the work of Bill Readings in The University in Ruins and also Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Nevertheless, I think Mark Fisher says it very succinctly in Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? He makes direct reference to university bureaucracy, including providing an extensive list of documents a module leader has to complete for each module they oversee. (2009: 41) Fisher says that the constant checking, monitoring and production of figures does not provide "a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output" (2009: 42).

We no longer have a system focused on knowledge (learning and teaching), instead we have a system that concentrates on measuring performance and output, and disseminating that data: “The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output – in other words, performativity.” (Lyotard 2004: 11) It is essential for the functioning of the bureaucratic university that this system is open, even if its process of self-defining (for example, in using terms like 'excellence') is internal and closed. The university needs to reduplicate itself internally, and also express that reduplication externally, in the form of representable data. What this means for the university is a spectacle-like appearance in the form of signs that appear as this representable data, the output of the excellence process.

Daniel's brilliant poster lists the quantifiable data in the form of the 'cost' to himself of his degree. The university of excellence, in theory, should be happy with this particular representation of data. However, I doubt that we will see anything like this appearing on the University of Leeds website as a way to attract future students.

Links:
Student Debt from Online Schools

Bibliography:
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. 2004. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

The Scene of Teaching

This was the "Scene of Teaching" at the University of Leeds on Wednesday November 24th 2010:



I shot this video outside the Parkinson Steps. I think the students were coming up from the other institutions south of Leeds uni - Leeds Metropolitan University and also the other colleges on the edge of the city - to tie up with the University of Leeds students.

When I entered the Ziff building I overheard a security guard saying a building had been occupied. While we were in there, a lock-down started and after finishing our coffee we had to leave via the fire exit which was manned by campus security.

The "Scene of Teaching" reference above is from a chapter on Bill Readings 1996 book The University in Ruins. This is part of the opening of the chapter:

The replacement of culture by the discourse of excellence is the University's response to 1968. In the face of student critiques of the contradiction between the University's claim to be a guardian of culture and its growing commitment to bureaucracy, the University has progressively abandoned its cultural claim. Forced to describe itself as either a bureaucratic-administrative or an idealistic institution, it chose the former. And consequently there is no way back to 1968: a repetition of the radical postures of the late 1960s is not adequate to resist the discourse of excellence. This is because the discourse of excellence can incorporate campus radicalism as proof of the excellence of campus life or of student commitment...

Well, I hope Readings is wrong, but I feel he's probably right. Capitalisms skill in re-routing desires back into the main system has historically been the sign of its success.

Relates websites:
The University of Leeds
May 1968
The University in Ruins